An even more Inconvenient Truth: The Myth of Man-Made Global Warming

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by Phillip Ellis Jackson | July 31st, 2006

The people who bring you the news of the day about nonexistent wiretaps and hypothetical invasions of privacy disguised as actual events are the same ones reporting on the “scientific evidence” that man is slowly turning Earth into the planet Venus.  Unfortunately for the NRDC, Al Gore, and other radical environmentalists, since man didn’t cause global warming, man can’t cure it.

Al Gore tells us that the world is getting hotter, and that man is responsible for making it that way.  Unless we take drastic steps now to correct this problem the ice caps will melt, our cities will flood, farmland will dry up and the rainforests will die. 

Before we get caught up in the same hysteria that thirty years earlier predicted the arrival of a new Ice Age, we might pause for a moment and ask: is any of this true?  And if it is, what role did man really play in altering the climate, and if it is getting hotter, what (if anything) can he actually do about it?

1. We begin with a simple question

Nineteen thousand years ago the Earth’s climate suddenly and dramatically changed.  Temperatures grew increasingly warmer, and with it the polar ice caps began to melt. This trend continued for almost 300 years, and did not end until ten percent of the polar ice cap had vanished.¹

How was this possible? 

19,000 years ago there were no cars driving down the highway poisoning the environment.  There were no aerosol cans depleting the ozone layer, or coal-burning factories belching heat and pollutants into the atmosphere. Instead of cutting down the rainforests or destroying fragile wetlands to build another Wal-Mart, the average man was living in a cave, gathering nuts and berries to feed his family while trying hard not to become someone else’s dinner.  How could his actions — and the actions of a limited number of other hunter-gatherers scattered around the world — have so dramatically changed the climate of this planet?

The answer, of course, is: they didn’t.  This mini-episode of global warming was part of a natural cycle that has characterized the Earth since its inception.  The ebb and flow of a wide variety of climactic factors constantly heats or cools the planet, making it naturally warmer or colder at any given moment in time.  Add to this the wobble of the Earth (which over thousands of years affects the amount of heat reaching its surface), and the fact that the sun burns hotter or cooler over extended periods of time, and you have all the elements of a fact-based explanation to account for major climate changes.

Despite building thousands of factories that spew massive volumes of heat and countless tons of noxious elements into the atmosphere, or man’s penchant for paving over wetlands and clear-cutting forests, human beings are merely spectators in the process of global climate change. Interested spectators yes, and spectators who can certainly affect isolated, highly focused environmental changes by building a dam here or setting off a nuclear bomb there, but a spectator nevertheless. One medium-sized volcanic eruption has more impact on the Earth’s climate than a few million SUVs or a thousand or two rust-belt factories operating at full capacity, despite what little Johnny’s teacher told him during last year’s Earth-Day celebration.²  Only his hubris allows man to think that his actions are determinate in shaping the natural process of the planet — with the Earth itself, and the sun that heats it, only incidental factors in this explanation.

2. The new mathematics of global warming: 2+2=5

So, if nature is the real culprit when it comes to global warming (or for that matter, any other cyclical environmental change), why is little Johnny’s teacher, Al Gore, the New York Times, and every tree-hugging environmentalist on this planet so hell-bent on banishing my SUV and every other modern convenience they claim is even remotely associated with global warming?  In other words, to quote the great anchorman and philosopher Dan Rather during one of his court appearances, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it can’t be a turkey. 

If the wit and wisdom of Dan Rather fails to convince, then we might turn to Ockham’s Razor for some additional insight, which says that the simplest, most straightforward explanation is usually the correct one.³  In other words, if there’s a big ball of vibrating, pulsating, fiery gas up in the sky that routinely heats the Earth, shouldn’t we eliminate it first as the cause of this warming before making me trade in my Escalade for a Mini-Cooper?

But somehow, what is obvious to me has escaped the notice of my Left-leaning friends. At first I was confused by their confusion, but I think I’ve finally figured out the reason for their self-reinforcing myopia. It’s a rather simple, straightforward explanation; one that William Ockham himself would undoubtedly approve. But in order to make it understandable, I need to take a few moments to reflect on how we, a supposedly intelligent race that can figure out how to put a man on the moon, could come to such a sorry state of affairs that many people actually believe Hurricane Katrina would have bypassed New Orleans if only George Bush had signed the Kyoto treaty.

It’s a commentary not only about where we are today, but who we supposedly are: rational thinking people, or idiot savants who are particularly strong on the idiot side, while sadly lacking in the savant category.⁴  It begins with a simple question that few people — even rational thinkers — bother to ask when presented with a statement of ‘fact’: “How do you know that?”

3. Sometimes the obvious is just that — and sometimes it isn’t

I had a conversation with an acquaintance of mine not too long ago about the legacy of Pope John Paul II.  This man was not Catholic, but he admired the pope (as did I) for the positive role he played in human affairs.  Religion aside, he said that John Paul II was a great man who was universally admired, and as evidence he cited the fact that “at his funeral, most people in St. Peter’s Square weren’t even Catholic. They simply came to pay their respects to a truly great man.”

I could see that his sentiments were genuine, and I wasn’t trying to pick a fight about an inconsequential matter, but I was very intrigued about his statement regarding the crowds in St. Peter’s Square.  So I asked him, “How do you know that?”

“What?” came the puzzled reply.

“How do you know that most people in St. Peter’s Square weren’t Catholic?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “Well, that’s what the commentator on TV said.”

So I asked, “How did he know that?”

My friend was a little taken aback.  He’s an intelligent, highly educated person — not some bible-thumping fundamentalist who speaks in tongues, has a gun rack bolted to the back of his pickup truck, and votes Republican. He isn’t given to making wild pronouncements about politics or culture, and may even be a Democrat for all I know, though he seemed a little too sincere and consistent in his beliefs to tar him with that accusation.  No, by all accounts he’s the kind of guy you’d take at his word and not think any more about it, so it caught him off guard when I continued to challenge the credibility of his information. 

He thought for a moment longer and replied, “I suppose he, or someone on his staff, spoke to some of the people in the square.” 

“How many people?” I persisted.  “There were over 100,000 people in St. Peter’s Square, not to mention the crowd spilling out into the adjoining streets.  Do you think he interviewed 10, 20, 200, a thousand?  Was it a scientific study with random samples, or just the people along the edge he could get closest to?”

My friend thought again, this time long and hard, and finally said “I don’t know.  I doubt if it was more than a handful of people, and I don’t think it was a scientific study.”

“So why did you believe him?”

His answer, in essence, consisted of two parts.  The TV commentator was a respected figure.  There was no reason to believe that he didn’t have a solid foundation upon which to base his conclusions — whatever they might be.  And, the notion of John Paul II as a universal figure rather than simply a Catholic religious leader was perfectly consistent with his own preconception of the pope.  Therefore the statement made sense. It seemed reasonable, at least on the surface, and it came from an authoritative source, so there was no reason to doubt it. 

The truth is, there was no way short of a scientific study based on a randomly selected, statistically-valid sample of the crowd that this statement could be proven.  It may have been true, or it may not have been.  There was simply no way of knowing. 

But there were no disclaimers accompanying the commentator’s statement to indicate that it was merely an opinion. In the words of the famous Greek philosopher Anonymous, opinions are like the exit point of the human body’s alimentary canal; everyone has one.  Instead of a learned judgment based on all the relevant pieces of information, it should be characterized for what it really was: complete conjecture disguised as fact.

4. When a duck isn’t a duck

It’s my belief that honest people with good intentions fall into this same intellectual trap when buying-into the hyperbole of the Left on man’s supposed responsibility for global warming. Unlike the alarmists who advocate this theory — and who, I contend, deliberately manipulate or misinterpret data to promote their positions — these people have a sincere desire to protect the environment.  They are willing to change any personal “destructive” behavior that is said to harm the environment, and will support policies that will supposedly repair this damage. They don’t question the underlying assumptions that the activists use to draw their conclusions, and they accept at face value the often draconian solutions these activists maintain are the minimum requirement for sound environmental policy.

Why is this?  Why would otherwise rational, intelligent people accept the notion that a car’s exhaust is heating the Earth to a dangerous level, but never once ask how this conclusion was derived, whether there are other factors that better account for this phenomenon, or whether the Earth is really warming at a rapid rate — or getting hotter at all?

The answer, I believe, can be traced to our shared value system, which provides a common frame of reference to address these and other issues. It is the shorthand, connect-the-dot reasoning we all engage in to navigate through daily life.  Critical thought is only needed when the matter at hand is something unique, and we’ve been talking about – and worrying about — global climate change for at least 40 years. 

These values and reference points are not bestowed upon us at birth, like Moses receiving the Holy Tablets.  Rather, they are taught to, absorbed by, and reinforced within each individual through a life-long process that begins with our earliest years and extends throughout the remainder of our life.  For example, we’re all taught from an early age that the environment is fragile.  As children we write school papers on this subject and participate in community projects to “save the environment.”  When we get older, we get our news from journalism school graduates who show us pictures of melting ice caps or drought-stricken farmland and talk about the importance of driving hybrid cars, practicing resource conservation, and signing the Kyoto Treaty. 

As adults we happily segment our garbage to cut-down on environmental pollution, and set our thermometers at uncomfortably high or low levels to “save energy” — thereby reducing the nasty, dirty fossil fuel emissions needed to produce our electricity.  The world, and our role in it, is put clearly in focus, as are the notions of “good” or “bad” behavior regarding our treatment of the environment. 

This common frame of reference allows us, as a group, to make certain judgments that are universally accepted. Windmills are good.  Solar energy is better.  Conservation is best.  The internal combustion engine, to quote Al Gore, is an example of man seeking to “artificially enhance our capacity to acquire what we need from the earth . . . at the direct expense of the earth’s ability to provide naturally what we are seeking.”  By manufacturing “millions of internal combustion engines [that] automate the conversion of oxygen to CO2, we interfere with the earth’s ability to cleanse itself of the impurities that are normally removed from the atmosphere.”⁵

No one laughs at the main theme of this passage which presumes to know intrinsically — just like the idiot savant — what man “needs” from the Earth, and what is an “artificial enhance[ment of his] capability” to acquire natural resources “at the direct expense of the earth’s ability to provide naturally what we are seeking.”  No further justification is required to support these value-laden judgments, because they’re not seen as expressing anything controversial.  They’re just obvious statements about obvious matters that are plainly obvious to any thoughtful, thinking individual.  

From this basis it’s a logical conclusion that cars are “interfering” with the natural state of affairs of Mother Earth, which leads to an equally obvious policy objective to deal with this cancer.  As for the finite-supply of fossil fuels that are mined, drilled, and otherwise gouged from the Earth to feed these poison-producing internal combustion engines, they serve only one purpose: to make Dick Cheney richer, and help George Bush justify an illegal, immoral war against Saddam Hussein whom we’re all glad is out of power, even though Bush lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction and ought to be impeached.

Because our schools, celebrities, TV anchorpersons and other opinion leaders accept these observations as fact, who are we to disagree?  Since 1975 (my earliest memory on this subject) I’ve been told repeatedly that the world is running out of oil.  There’s only so much dead-dinosaur juice in the ground, and it will all be gone in 20 years or less.  Thirty years later, the same 20 year prediction is still being made.  If we don’t switch to hybrid cars, solar powered electricity, or wind-driven generators, we’ll use up all the world’s oil by 2030, or 2040, or 2050, or [pick a date] sometime in the near future. 

And when all the oil is gone, and coal is too dirty to burn, and nuclear power is too unsafe to produce, where will we be?  Ergo, we need to start changing our lifestyles NOW!  

5. But what about that thing over there?

At no point in this conventional-wisdom analysis does anyone stop and say, “but wouldn’t there be plenty of oil if we’re willing to pay $100 a barrel to recover it?” 

The Earth isn’t running out of oil.  It’s running out of easily-acquired $20 dollar a barrel oil.  There’s plenty of oil off the shores of California and Florida, in Alaska, Mexico, the Middle East, the North Sea, Russia, and a whole bunch of other places in the world, including oil locked in shale.  It’s harder to get, and therefore more expensive to acquire.  But it’s there.

This doesn’t argue against practicing conservation or pursuing alternative means of energy production.  A solar power car would be great — if there’s a strong enough market demand to justify the billions of dollars of research and development needed to expedite its arrival.  Windmills are a fantastic source of cheap, clean energy, unless they happen to spoil Ted Kennedy’s oceanfront view, at which point good old fashioned gas guzzling cars will do just fine. 

If Al Gore’s prescription for responsible environmental management makes sense, he should be able to propose it without the intellectual legerdemain of over-hyped, value-laden judgments disguised as impartial analysis.  It’s one thing to illustrate a point with a dramatic example.  It’s quite another to have the example itself stand as a substitute for any further thinking about the matter.  If the issue is real, the evidence will support it.

But to get the evidence, one first has to collect all the relevant data.  When dealing with an issue as monumental as global climate change, 10, 20, 50, even a 100 year “trend” is nothing more than the blink of an eye in geological terms.  If global warming actually exists, and further, if man is the principle cause of its existence, there should be clear, convincing evidence of this before we begin substantially rearranging important chunks of our current way of life.  Why spend thousands of dollars to place your house on stilts so it won’t be flooded if you’re living in the middle of a desert?  Such an expenditure may be perfectly reasonable for those homes along Gulf Coast beaches.  But before I dip into my life savings to retrofit my house, I’d like to see a little evidence that central Utah is about to get inundated with water. 

When confronted with this question, the typical answer we get from the Protectors of the Planet is that we can’t afford to wait until all the data is in.  By then it will be too late, so we must act now!  That’s why it was so important in the 1970s to take strong measures against a fast-approaching ice age — that is, until global warming became the problem.  So, now we’re told that we need to work just as quickly in 2006 to stop the warming of the earth, except recent studies have indicated that we may be in for a mini-ice age after all.⁶

However, the possibility that Britain and France might freeze doesn’t automatically mean that we’re off the hook for global warming.  Concerned scientists have assured us that the Earth is going to simultaneously heat and cool because of global warming, which will produce glaciers and deserts at the same time.  So if a drought doesn’t get you, frostbite will. 

At least we don’t have to pick and choose our environmental disasters any more!  Instead of having to decide between rising temperatures or ice-age conditions, the new improved global warming theory can accommodate both.  And as an added bonus, there’s no need to look any farther than ourselves to both identify the problem and find the solution.  Man is the reason that all of this happening; not the sun, the Earth’s rotation, or any naturally-occurring cyclical phenomenon. 

And man — if he’s willing to take Al Gore’s advice, follow the prescriptions of the New York Times, and listen to the informed pleadings of Ted Danson and other Hollywood celebrities — can fix his mistakes.  That is, if he’s willing to make dramatic changes in his current lifestyle, and pay the proper amount of taxes to the right elected officials who will tell him what to do and how to do it for all the right reasons.

6. Replacing ignorance with truth . . . well, sort of

Therefore, if we believe what the media, special interest environmental groups (and the scientists who support them), and certain deeply-caring politicians tell us, accepting responsibility for our actions and taking the appropriate (albeit draconian) steps to correct our misbehavior will mark a significant step in our evolutionary development as caring, eco-friendly people. Not only will it pay dividends by giving everyone on the planet a superior quality of life [note to file: “superior” does not necessarily mean technologically advanced, and may in fact require us to adopt a more nature-friendly (i.e. primitive) lifestyle], it will help shed a lot of our social problems as well.  It isn’t the normal forces of nature that dried up your lake, made it snow in July, got you fired from your job or persuaded your wife to run off with the milkman.  It’s all due to global warming. 

Right about now someone is shaking their head and is about to accuse me of deliberately distorting this argument to make a cheap point.  Sure man is responsible for global warming, and with it comes both dried up lakes and snow in July. But let’s get serious! We don’t blame global warming for everything that goes wrong in our life.  We’re not that silly or superficial. Unless someone is mentally unbalanced, suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, high on drugs or alcohol, eating too much sugar or too many Twinkies, or suffering from some other heretofore unrecognized mental-stress disability brought about by the Bush tax plan or the war in Iraq, man is still responsible for his own actions.  Global warming has nothing to do with it.

Oh really?  According to an article by Craig Anderson, Ph.D. and Brad Bushman, Ph.D. in the February 1998 issue of the American Psychological Association Monitor⁷, “A largely ignored negative consequence of global warming is the expected changes in violent crime. Over the last 10 years, research has shown that uncomfortably hot temperatures directly cause increases in aggressive and violent behavior, including violent crime. Thus, recent improvements in the violent crime rate in the United States may well be lost as global warming occurs.”

And how do they know this?  According to the authors, “We now know that most violent crimes result from hostile thoughts and angry feelings. People get mad at each other, argue, fight and sometimes kill. Any factor that increases anger or hostility will tend to increase violence.”

So the good news is, you’re not to blame for cracking your wife’s head open with a baseball bat when she nags you about taking out the garbage.  Dick Cheney and his evil oil-producing buddies are, for keeping us hooked on global-warming fossil fuels.  As the authors continue, “If global warming progresses as now seems likely, we can expect . . . a steadily climbing rate of violence, along with all the grief, anguish, costs and waste associated with it. Personally, we’d prefer to use less fossil fuel and pay a bit more for cleaner energy and more efficient transportation. How about you?”

There’s certainly no political agenda here coloring this analysis.

With logic like this, I’m giving serious thought to removing the Ph.D. from the end of my own name to avoid being confused with such ‘progressive’ thinking.  I’m reminded at this point of the old joke about little Johnny who was asked by his teacher, “Why did you tell your classmates that your father is an axe-murder on death row?”  Little Johnny looked at her sheepishly and replied, “I was embarrassed to tell them that he’s really a lawyer.”  Suddenly, the lawyer jokes don’t seem all that funny — or unique — anymore. 

Unfortunately, as shallow as some of the educated class are when speaking about this issue, the ‘average guy’ can take us to depths we’ve never imagined.  If they think about the subject of global warming at all, it’s at such a superficial level that one wonders if they have any real grasp of the world.  These are the people who care deeply about the environment, and prove it by purchasing Animal-Friendly license plates or by turning off the living room light to save electricity while watching The West Wing on their 92-inch energy-sucking plasma TV, complete with a Dolby stereo digital surround-sound theater-quality audio system that has more petro-chemicals in its plastic molding than the average ten gallon recycling container.

Consider this write-in question to Chaiyah’s Chronicle by M. Emily Cragg⁸ as an example of the above. She couldn’t comprehend the thought that global warming might be due to the sun getting hotter, rather than be the result of human activity.  “I don't see any MEANS for the sun's heat to INCREASE, offhand. I mean, usually, the car engine doesn't just SIT THERE and start itself up and get hot. So, what's the deal?” 

For kindness sake, and to sleep better at night thinking that the next generation isn’t completely brain-dead, I’m going to assume that Ms. Cragg is an inquisitive nine year old child and not an education major six credits short of graduation.  This way, when I point out that she’s comparing a man-made device to the nuclear furnace of a burning star, I won’t feel so bad when I get a blank stare in return — as if there’s some confusing point I’m trying to convey while deliberately not answering her question. 

Which again brings us back to the underlying theme of this article.  Those who challenge conventional wisdom (such as the belief that man’s actions are the determining factor in global warming) start the debate with a significant disadvantage.  The evidence to the contrary may be on my side, but if it’s rejected out of hand by the person I’m speaking to, I’m not going to make much headway.  Even worse, when they’re not even capable of framing the question, let alone comprehending the answer, there’s no point in going to battle. 

When the microscope first revealed that tiny, single-celled organisms gave rise to the bugs that magically appeared from the ground — not through some mysterious “spontaneous generation” of life as was commonly believed — it took years for people to accept this new truth.  Tiny microscopic organisms developing into large, multi-celled creatures was as ridiculous to believe as the claim that the world was actually round, not flat; or that the continents were drifting apart.  No one asks you to prove that eating healthy food is better than eating cheeseburgers and fries every day; that caring about others is a better way to live one’s life than caring only about yourself; or that it’s better to have a college degree than to be a high school dropout.  These are intrinsically-accepted, commonly shared “facts” every bit as real as the fact that the ocean is deep, the sky is blue, and the ice caps are melting. 

Only the ice caps aren’t melting.  And therein lies the problem.

7. When a fact is a fact, and when it isn’t

Not only is man-made global warming not responsible for melting the polar ice caps, they’re not really melting.  They may be shifting around a little, but they’re still very much intact — and staying that way well into the foreseeable future. 

Consider this October 21, 2005 report from Reuters:⁹  “Greenland’s icecap has thickened slightly in recent years despite concerns that it is thawing out due to global warming, says an international team of scientists.” The report continues.  “Glaciers at sea level have been retreating fast because of a warming climate, making many other scientists believe the entire icecap is thinning.  But satellite measurements showed that more snowfall is falling and thickening the icecap, especially at high altitudes.”  Which means we have just as much ice and snow this year as we did last year.  It’s just distributed in different places.  

And why shouldn’t it be that way?  Just because it was 27 degrees in Minneapolis on January 3, 1963, it doesn’t mean that the same exact conditions need to apply every January 3rd thereafter.¹⁰  The Earth isn’t a stagnant, never-changing planet. It’s a dynamic, constantly changing world. This dynamism was a key feature of the environment long before mankind started walking on two legs, and it will be that way long after humanity goes the way of the dinosaurs.  Factories, urban sprawl, or the internal combustion engine have absolutely nothing to do with the fundamentals of this process.

Maybe I’m belaboring the point a little by continuing to press this issue, but I’m sure there are still people out there who, having read this far, remain convinced that the actions of humanity are responsible for the melting ice caps, regardless of what the satellite measurements actually tell us.  If not completely 100% responsible, than 95% — or some other overwhelming percentage. They heard it on the news, or saw it in the paper, or read Al Gore’s book, and they all say the ice caps are melting.  What’s more, little Johnny’s teachers, their friends and neighbors, and the guy sitting next to them on the bus all say it is too.  They seem like reasonable people, and aren’t mean or rich like Dick Cheney who looked a lot like the Vice President in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, and you saw what happened to the world there when he didn’t believe there was any global warming. And as if that isn’t evidence enough, they distinctly remember it being hotter or cooler when they were a kid.  Things are not the same way today, so it’s got to be global warming!

It’s a funny thing about memory.  As vivid as the images may be, they’re not always the most reliable source of information.  When I was 5 years old I lived in Kansas City on a monstrously steep hill that propelled my wintertime sled down its slopes at breakneck speeds.  In the summer I’d climb a huge oak tree in the front of my house that was so tall, I swear it was part of an old growth forest.  These were fond memories I shared with my daughter, and when the opportunity arose one summer vacation, I took her back to see the old street where I grew up.

I don’t remember the exact date when Kansas City was hit by a nuclear missile, but it must have been quite an explosion since it sheered off the top of that mountain I lived on and left only 10 degree slope in its wake.  It also shrunk the houses along the block that somehow survived the blast, and lopped off at least thirty yards of the old growth tree in front of my former house.  Maybe 10 feet tall at its peak, the tree was now just a shriveled up image of its former glory. “How,” I asked myself, “could the world have changed so dramatically in less than half a century?”

Then it hit me.  It hadn’t really changed at all.  The hill didn’t lose any height, and the house I grew up in hadn’t magically shrunk.  If anything, the tree I used to climb had grown bigger, not smaller.  Only my memory, my unique point of reference, had changed.  Which is why it is absolutely worthless to evaluate current trends based on one’s memory of previous events. To produce accurate evaluations we need to rely on instruments that independently measure the phenomenon we are observing; instruments whose readings produce an unbiased look at the world we are living in.¹¹   

Which returns us again to the ‘vanishing ice caps’ that move around in size and shape, but don’t lose their volume.  As Dennis Behreandt wrote in the November 14, 2005 edition of The New American¹² in his article “Getting Burned by Bad Science,”

In September, a team of scientists from NASA and the University of Colorado announced that the Arctic ice cap measured only 200 million square miles, or about 500,000 square miles less than its average extent during the period from 1979 to 2000. Alarmists quickly used this study for an "I told you so" moment.

The trouble with this study, however, is that it makes the mistake of assuming that the period from 1979 to 2000 accurately depicts the norm for the Arctic. It almost certainly does not. What is "normal" for an area over millennia can't be accurately determined from a slice of time spanning only two decades. This is akin to saying that a 65-year-old person cannot possibly be "normal" because he doesn't look, act, or think like he did between the ages of 0 and 21.

Other scientists have recognized this fact. According to Oregon State University climatologist George Taylor, "Arctic sea ice has undergone significant changes in the last 1,000 years, even before the mid-20th century 'greenhouse enhancement.' Current conditions appear to be well within historical variability."

Lying with statistics isn’t the sole providence of glacier-melting enthusiasts. As Andrew Kenny wrote in The Sunday Mail on July 14, 2002,¹³  “Environmentalists claim that world temperatures have risen one degree Fahrenheit in the past century, but [Piers Corbyn, Director of Weather Action] points out that the period they take as their starting point — around 1880 — was colder than average. What's more, the timing of temperature changes does not appear to support the theory of global warming. Most of the rise came before 1940 — before human-caused emissions of 'greenhouse' gases became significant.”

So what you end up in large part with can depend upon where you started.  If one is intellectually honest, they frame the debate in such a way as to draw out the truth, not merely reinforce a pre-conceived conclusion.  In politics, they call this kind of dishonest research push polling.  Consider a recent event in the news.  “Reports indicate that the U.S. Government is monitoring the telephone activity of millions of unsuspecting Americans much like yourself.  Do you think the government should be wiretapping your phone lines and invading personal privacy without first securing a warrant under the rights bestowed upon all U.S. citizens by the Fourth Amendment?”  Who’s going to say “yes” to that kind of question?

Okay, so it’s never quite as blatant as this exaggerated example, but one is still hard pressed to find a survey question by CNN, CBS, or the New York Times that says, “In the early 1990s, President Clinton signed into law a bill that gave law enforcement officials the right to access records of the telephone calls you placed or received without first securing a probable-cause warrant from a sitting judge — just the numbers called and duration of each call, not any of the actual content of the call.  George Bush has continued this practice in an effort to stop future terrorist attacks on the country.  Do you have any objection to this?”  Somehow I think the data acquired from this line of questioning won’t match up well with the earlier line of inquiry, even though they both purport to examine the same phenomenon.

8. “I see,” said the blind man

What does all this have to do with global warming?  The people who bring you the news of the day about nonexistent wiretaps and hypothetical invasions of privacy disguised as actual events are the same ones reporting on the “scientific evidence” that man is slowly turning Earth into the planet Venus. 

Assuming, for the moment, that a legitimate debate on the subject of global warming could take place without the agenda-driven apologists on the Left branding every doubter a racist bigoted homophobe hell-bent on destroying the Earth in the name of Big Oil, I would begin with a simple question. “You say that man is responsible for global warming, which could be anywhere between 2 and 6 degrees over the next one hundred years.¹⁴  You base this judgment on the claim that global warming has in fact already started — that the Earth has gotten at least one degree warmer over the last 100 years. Putting aside for the moment the question of whether man or nature is primarily responsible for this change, just how do we know that the Earth has actually gotten warmer since the late 1800s?”

This isn’t merely an idle question. If the foundation of global warming theory for the 21st century is actual evidence of global warming in the 20th century, then what happens if this evidence is found to be flawed, inaccurate, or not as severe as it is otherwise purported to be?  Just how do we know what “the temperature of the Earth was” in 1901, 1902, and each year beyond?” What instruments were used to measure it?  How many were there, and exactly where were they located?

We can answer this question fairly accurately in the last 20 years by pointing to a global network of satellites and ground stations, all operating with sophisticated electronic devices capable of measuring a hundredth of a degree or more.  But what about 1900?  There were no satellites. There were no highly sophisticated digital measuring devices.  A fair portion of the United States was still unexplored, uninhabited country, not to mention the depths of the Amazon, parts of Asia, most of Australia, or any number of South Seas Islands to name just a few?  Exactly what was the temperature of Latitude -1.2500 Longitude -78.6167 on February 1, 1903?  I can tell you what it is today for that location (Ambato, Ecuador), and a few million other places around the globe.  But what exactly was it 100 years ago?

The truth is, we don’t know.  At best, we may have a general number for central Ecuador, taken at a monitoring station in Guayaquil a few hundred miles away, and extrapolated from another reading in neighboring Peru. But just how accurate is it for a broad swath of the planet? Maybe Guayaquil and Lima were having a particularly sweltering heat wave that day, but it was nice and cool in the mountainous terrain surrounding Ambato.  Wouldn’t that tend to distort the so-called “average” temperature for that day?  And what about the other, even more remote areas of the planet?  Don’t their actual temperature levels matter too? 

The paucity of weather recording stations around the world in 1900 would give us, at best, a rough estimate of the world’s actual temperature, even if we assume that all their measurements are as accurate then as they are today.  We know that number more precisely today thanks to the vast network of recording stations around the world, but that doesn’t help us much a hundred years ago.  Comparing a digitally produced 87.25 degrees to an eyeballed estimate of 87 degrees doesn’t give us a difference of .25 degrees.  It gives us absolutely nothing of precise, scientific value. That rough estimate (recorded for posterity as a firm number) could be off by any number of degrees due to limited coverage, imprecise equipment, and/or rounding errors.  To say that the world has “gotten warmer by one degree over the last 100 years” is to pretend that the figures of 1906 are just as accurate as those collected in 2006.

Lest anyone think that this little problem was rendered moot by the 1920s, 1930’s, or even the 1940’s, Eisenhower couldn’t get his chief meteorologist to say whether it was going to rain or be dry on Normandy beach just across the English Channel on June 6, 1944, let alone tell him what the temperature was that day in the middle of the Amazon jungle. It wasn’t until the advent of the space age that mankind truly began to get a handle on predicting the weather — and was finally able to come up with a “global average temperature” accurate to a hundredth of a degree as it is today. 

And yet, we “know” that the world has gotten one degree warmer over the last 100 years because we can compare a digital readout taken today to the number we find in the back of some dusty old book?  If you really believe this, I have a time-share condo you need to see, and a certain bridge for sale that I’m willing to give you the deal of a life-time on.

9. Can good intentions equal good results?

In the spirit of trying to make the old temperature data work so we can support a claim of a one degree increase in the Earth’s temperature during the last century, let’s make a heroic assumption and pretend that data collected in 1900 was just as geographically reliable then as it is today in the 21st century. 

In other words, while there might be 2,000 monitoring sites in Ecuador at the present time, supplemented by overhead satellites monitoring the entire continent, we’re going to arbitrarily conclude that they have no intrinsic advantage over the 20 or so sites (another generous assumption) scattered in and around Ecuador in the year 1900.  All other things being equal, the leap-of-faith assumption we're making here is that these 20 locations in 1900 will provide data that is as complete and accurate as the data provided by the 2,000 or so sites in operation in that country a hundred years later.¹⁵

But all things aren’t equal. Even if somehow, some way, these hypothetical 20 sites were strategically placed so as to do the work of 2,000 monitoring stations today (plus satellite observation), it’s not the same equipment!  My cell phone in 2006 has more computing power than the Apollo 11 command module, and it’s only been 37 years since man first landed on the moon.  Imagine the difference in temperature gathering technology in 1906 compared to 2006. 

Actually, you don’t have to imagine. A typical solar radiation thermometer in use in the early 1900s consisted of a stick set in the ground with vacuum tube mercury thermometer-type device set on top of it.  Little niches were carved into the sides of the clear glass tube so an observer could see how far the mercury rose inside the tube.¹⁶

Using this equipment, how one would recognize the difference between 87, 87.13, 87.25, and 87.39 degrees (or anything in between) is somewhat of a mystery.  If the actual temperature was, say, 87.46 degrees, but the observer mistakenly recorded it (or simply rounded it off to) 87 degrees, and if that happened consistently at multiple stations over multiple years, then the historic record would suggest a half a percent increase in global warming over the last 100 years, not a full percent. What would that do to computer model predictions for the years 2000-2099?  Would we still be looking at a 2-6 degree increase in global temperatures?  Would it be half that amount?  Or would the .5 degree difference in the 20th century be statistically insignificant, and we’d simply abandon the whole global warming debate?

Again, as Andrew Kenny wrote in July 14, 2002 edition of The Sunday Mail, “There are two facts in the [global warming] scare. First, it is true that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, one which traps heat on Earth.  Without it, the Earth would be too cold for life. Second, it is true that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is rising. The rest is guesswork. The global warmers said the most accurate measure of climate change would be air temperatures. For the past 20 years or more, air temperatures have been measured with extreme accuracy. They show no warming whatsoever.” [emphasis added]

10. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

We’ve raised questions about the accuracy of the 20th century temperature data.  And, we’ve challenged the notion that the Earth is growing steadily warmer with each passing decade.  Since the previous “warming” of the planet provides the foundation for predicting additional, catastrophic temperature increases in the 21st century, there’s no longer any solid foundation to make that claim.  So the debate is over.  Right?

Wrong.  When confronted with inconvenient facts, advocates of the man-made global warming theory turn to an alternative method of proving their claims.  If air temperature data isn’t working out the way you wanted, there’s always the sea.  Do you know why hurricanes have been so frequent and so powerful the last few years?  The temperature of the sea is warming. All that melting polar ice is lowering the water’s temperature . . . no wait a minute, wouldn’t that make it colder, and doesn’t cold water inhibit hurricanes? No, the cold water is getting colder, and the warm water is getting warmer, because the oceans don’t mix.  No, that can’t be right either. 

Maybe it’s got something to do with water layers, or ocean currents, or things like that, because everyone knows there’s never any natural change in the ocean.  If I dropped a measuring device twelve miles off the coast of Bermuda in 1927 at Latitude X and Longitude Y, then whatever reading there was in 1927 should be the same in 1942, 1961, 1988, and every other year up to and including today.  No, that’s not believable either.  So let’s just take an average measurement combining all these sites and all these factors without thinking about what those factors really are, or how they actually got that way, then come up with a single number and compare it to today.  Sounds like a plan.   

While I’m obviously making fun of a much more involved and methodical evaluation than I just described, I don’t think my conclusion is that far off. If you start with flawed assumptions — no matter how passionately they’re expressed — at the end of the day the best data in the world will still give you a big pile of crap. And if both the assumptions themselves and the data that’s collected are seriously flawed, then we start to give a real meaning to the phrase George H.W. Bush is said to have coined: “deep-doodo.”

So how do we approach this issue, and evaluate it for what it really is?  Whenever I’m looking for a quick read to take my mind off the troubles of the day, I turn to the History of the Exploration of the Norwegian Sea,¹⁷ and by an astonishing coincidence, that seems to be a great place to start. 

It’s amazing what you can learn when you peruse the exploits of early 20th century scientists who tried to take the “deep sea’s” temperature in 1900.  For example, 

For the determination of deep-sea temperature . . . we regret to say that the first attempt was to some extent a failure, as a great part of the deep-sea temperatures determined during the first cruise (1900) can hardly claim such a degree of accuracy, the reasons being that our Reversing Thermometers were not sufficiently well made, and that the Insulated Water-Bottle, in which we placed most confidence at that time, is incapable of giving accurate temperature determinations for great depths, owing to the disturbing effect upon the indications of the thermometer produced by the dilatation of the solid parts of the water-bottle . . . when being hauled up [emphasis added].

Later efforts proved equally unsuccessful, despite a variety of different methods and materials.  I’ll spare you the details (which go on for several pages) citing failure after failure to secure a reliable measurement.  The equipment either malfunctioned, failed to register properly, or never worked in the first place.  One telling remark indicative of the primitive manufacturing process of this time is worth repeating however, since it goes to the point of an earlier observation.

The best instruments of this type, selected from a stock of 26 thermometers, which had been used for several years, proved to register very well. One of these thermometers was used in 1900; and when read off with a specially constructed Reading-Microscope (see later), it actually gave an accuracy which might have approached the limit of ± 0.01° C., if it had not been for the rough graduation of the scale [emphasis added].

To put this in layman’s terms, we finally got the damn thing to work, but we couldn’t figure out what the temperature was.  Eventually, the Norwegians got their thermometers to perform with sufficient accuracy, and if they followed precise, carefully detailed procedures to dispatch and recover the instruments, they believed they had a fair degree of success in assessing the water’s temperature. 

Okay, so taking them at their word, they got the system to work accurately enough in later years to provide reliable data on the sea’s temperature. Unfortunately, the world is a bit larger than the Norwegian Sea, and I’m still searching for similar studies of Boston Harbor, the Gulf of Mexico, the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean, anywhere near Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, the Arctic Sea, the Straits of Hormuz, or any one of a thousand other areas around the world so I can be assured that the temperatures we observe, and highly accurately record in 2006, will have a true basis of comparison with experiments conducted 40 years ago, let alone 100.

I think I’m going to be looking for a long time.  Taking the temperature of water anywhere below the surface is infinitely more difficult than sticking a thermometer in one’s back yard and checking to see how hot it’s getting from time to time. And if we couldn’t even do that accurately and comprehensively enough in the early to mid-1900s, what makes anyone think that taking the temperature of the sea is a better indicator?

11. So what’s the big deal about 100 years — give or take a few decades (or more)?

When my five-year old daughter turned six, she spoke about the time when she was “just a little baby a few years ago.”  I remember laughing at the innocence of her logic.  She had, in fact, added another 20 percent or so to her time in this world, but I knew that extra year was the blink of a moment and represented no real change at all.  “Wait until you turn forty,” I thought to myself.  “Then you can reflect back on your youth, and all the years that have passed in between.”

I remember my elderly father smiling at me when I told him that story. “Wait till you’re seventy,” he told me. “Then you can really look back on the life you lived, and see it in its full perspective.”  I told that story the other day to a neighbor’s father who was celebrating his ninety-fifth birthday.  He looked at me and smiled . . .

So what is the point of this story, other than to tell you there’s always someone older and more experienced than you waiting to put you in your place?  No, the real lesson is that we make a very serious mistake when we think of the passage of our time on Earth, and confuse it with the passage of time on the Earth itself.

One hundred years of highly accurate, impeccably recorded temperature data — even if they were to exist — would be absolutely meaningless in discerning true knowledge about the “larger trend” in our planet’s climatology.  One hundred, three hundred, a thousand years or more could be nothing more than a geological hiccup, not a true change in direction. At one time Africa and South America were joined together. India was a floating island and the Himalaya Mountains didn’t exist until it crashed into another land mass.  Even then it took millions of years to create that mountain range. Eons from now, those mountains will become grassy plains again, and the shape — as well as location — of the seven continents will be completely unrecognizable.

But knowing this, we can still somehow tell that the world’s temperature will be significantly warmer in 2100 than it is today (even though we can’t predict the weather for Chicago more than a few hours in advance)?¹⁸  And we somehow know that despite the historic record of numerous Ice Ages and greenhouse-type warmings millions of years into the past, and our present-day understanding of the physics behind the expanding and contracting cycles of the sun, that somehow man, and man alone, is uniquely responsible for an impending environmental disaster?

If you think I’m being facetious by over-emphasizing man’s impact on the environment in light of all the contrasting evidence just to make the radical environmentalist position seem foolish, think again.  It isn’t that these people acknowledge a range of factors from human and natural, and place slightly more emphasis on human actions than I do.  It isn’t that we both see the same picture, just focus on a different element of it.  No, these people are completely, totally, and unmitigatedly dishonest in their approach to the subject.  Either that, or they are just plain stupid.  And I can back that claim up.

12 What color is the sky on your world?

I’ve already dealt with the subject of ignorance in the previous pages, so I won’t belabor the point any longer. The sun is not anything like a car engine, and just because there’s a number in a book written 100 years ago doesn’t mean that the figure is anywhere close to being compatible with the results produced by modern day technology.

Though I’ve touched here and there on the duplicity of environmental activists as they promote their theory about global warming, this matter bears further exploration because it provides the missing piece of the puzzle to understand why opinion leaders on the Left act the way they do; denying the obvious and/or ignoring contradictory evidence to promote the fiction that man, and man alone, is primarily responsible for global warming. 

Three interrelated reasons explain why they do this:  power, prestige, and money.

Power:  As Defenders of the Environment, these individuals occupy a unique position of power and importance.  Their words shape the public debate, and through that debate they try to influence public policy.  The more their policies are put into practice, the more power they garner.  They don’t need to be an elected official, because if they are successful, elected officials will look to them for their policy direction. 

But the quest for power doesn’t automatically mean that an individual must lie (or to be more generous, refuse to put forward a completely honest view) in order to occupy this position of influence.  I will argue, however, that the unique nature of the global warming debate requires them to promote a singular world view regardless of the evidence to support it, and in spite of the growing evidence against it.  The decision tree looks something like this:

If global warming is only a theoretical concern, and not a concrete, existing problem, then there is no reason to make new policy and/or divert current resources to this crisis.  Thus, it must be an existing problem that is significant, and growing, or other competing problems will take center stage.

Moreover, the solution to this existing, significant, and growing problem must involve a restructuring or redirection of society’s resources.  If existing policies, processes and/or institutions can take care of the problem, there is no need for an outside entity to lead the effort or participate in any meaningful way.  Thus, the solution must, by definition, demand a “new way” of doing business, led by individuals who are closely attuned to the unique new dynamics surrounding that issue.  In short, their view must be that the very nature of the problem, as well as the unique features of its solution, requires individuals like them to play strong central roles.

If the facts at hand don’t conform to this scenario, then they must be massaged, distorted, or disregarded all together in order to preserve, protect, or expand their power.¹⁹

Prestige:  Closely related to the quest for power is the importance of prestige.  It is certainly possible to define a problem and/or manufacture a solution that is entirely within the political mainstream.  Rather than supplant existing processes and institutions, a group or individual could seek to “reinvent” them in a more efficient form.  The goals and objectives might remain the same, but the manner in which they are pursued would be altered.  Or, the process and/or institution could remain unchanged, but the goals could be tweaked so that resources are divided differently among its constituent parts.  In either case the effort is designed to strengthen the existing system, not replace it.

For radical environmentalists, however, such an option would never be seriously considered.  In addition to seeking power, they are also part of a social fabric that views itself as separate and distinct from the individuals managing current institutions and processes.  Gaining the respect, approval, or admiration of these current leaders would alienate them from their peers and call their own motives into question.  If Big Oil, supported by mainstream Republicans and other ROWG’s (rich old white guys) embrace their ideas, then there is either something intrinsically wrong with their proposals — or worse, their peers will conclude that they’ve compromised their principles and joined the enemy.²⁰  Big Oil, Republicans, and ROWG are the problem.  Bringing them down as they save the environment will not only enhance these activists’ power, it will elevate their personal prestige within the only group that matters; their fellow Left-wing radicals, and the Hollywood groupies who hang on their every word.

Money:  Last, but certainly not least, is the issue of money.  Those without power don’t get the funding. That is the ultimate, self-reinforcing goal. 

It takes money to run a think tank, operate a website, travel around the country or pay one’s own personal bills.  Those with power can persuade (read: extort) elected officials to help subsidize their activities with federal funds, either in an attempt to buy off more aggressive opposition that could threaten these officials’ own power base, or as a way of stoking the flames if the party in power is sympathetic to their cause and wants to create political mischief for their opponents. 

Also, the more perceived power and prestige an organization has, the more likely it is to attract private donations from like-minded individuals or sympathetic foundations.  Either way, money is the fuel that keeps things going, and raising more money is always a primary concern of every social activist on either side of the political spectrum.

For those who seek power and prestige but have not yet attained it, money becomes the driving force in shaping their message.  To illustrate this point by borrowing from the political arena, if a group arises in opposition to the policies of President Bush, it will not serve its own best interests by conceding major points in that debate even if the evidence is overwhelming.  The Bush tax cut policy has swelled the public coffers beyond even the most optimistic projections, just as the Administration said it would.  Organizations formed in opposition to Bush cannot concede this point, or they will alienate the red meat radicals who viscerally hate the president and will tolerate no praise for him whatsoever. Their funds will then go to another competing group that remains true to the message that everything Bush does is corrupt, incompetent, or stupid,²¹ and they’ll be left panhandling for dollars to pay the light bill.

Which brings us back to the issue of global warming.  To illustrate my point about the inherent dishonesty of the Left-wing activists who address this subject, I have to look no further than a document from the Natural Resources Defense Council that was last revised on January 9, 2006.²²  As Defenders of the Environment, they had access to the same NASA, U.S. government, and other material I previously cited — and more. The information they convey on their website is, in their opinion, the most accurate and balanced view of the global warming issue presently available. 

Below is a sample of their work in the form of questions and answers they posed, accompanied by my observations.  The questions and answers are direct quotes from the NRDC; the observations and occasional “translations” are entirely mine.

Q: What causes global warming?

A: Carbon dioxide and other air pollution that is collecting in the atmosphere like a thickening blanket, trapping the sun's heat and causing the planet to warm up. Coal-burning power plants are the largest U.S. source of carbon dioxide pollution — they produce 2.5 billion tons every year. Automobiles, the second largest source, create nearly 1.5 billion tons of CO2 annually.

Here's the good news: technologies exist today to make cars that run cleaner and burn less gas, modernize power plants and generate electricity from nonpolluting sources, and cut our electricity use through energy efficiency. The challenge is to be sure these solutions are put to use.

Observation: What causes global warming, according to the NRDC?  Not the sun.  Not the Earth as it moves through its natural cycles.  The only factor worth mentioning is coal burning power plants and cars.  But not just any power plants or cars — only those operated in the good old U.S. of A.  China, India, Western Europe, Latin America, Russia and the remainder of the world don’t rate a mention. One can only conclude that their power plants and cars must be cleaner and more efficient than the smokestack belching, gas guzzling monsters blighting our country, making them the model technology the NDRC challenges us to adopt.

Q: Is the earth really getting hotter?

A: Yes. Although local temperatures fluctuate naturally, over the past 50 years the average global temperature has increased at the fastest rate in recorded history. And experts think the trend is accelerating: the 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1990. Scientists say that unless we curb global warming emissions, average U.S. temperatures could be 3 to 9 degrees higher by the end of the century.

Observation: Not only is the data ignored showing that average temperatures have actually stabilized over the past few decades rather than increased, we are now threatened with the possibility of a 3 to 9 degree temperature increase by 2100.  If a one degree increase doesn’t get the public’s attention, make it 3-4 degrees.²³  If 3-4 degrees isn’t scary enough to foster the desired policy changes to curb global warming, suggest that 6.5 degrees is a real possibility.²⁴  If a 6.5 degree temperature increase doesn’t do the job, toss out 9 degrees to get your point across. 

And, when you make this claim, don’t tell anybody where you got that number.  You’re the Natural Resources Defense Council.  Like the anchorman in Rome commenting on the crowds at Pope John Paul II’s funeral, if you say it’s 9 degrees, then I’m sure you must have a real good reason for making that statement.  Otherwise, you’d just be pulling a number out of the air.

This might be a good point to resurrect a July 18, 2004 article from Telegraph.co.uk²⁵ that points out a tiny little fact that somehow has continued to elude the NDRC in the months and years that followed.  According to the article, “Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.”  The article continues by making note of the following:

A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes. Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures. The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years."

. . .

The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sun-spots signalled a cold period – which could last up to 50 years – but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer . . . The research adds weight to the views of David Bellamy, the conservationist. "Global warming – at least the modern nightmare version – is a myth," he said. "I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policymakers are not. "Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement: humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide – the principal so-called greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up. They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock."

Continuing with the Q&A from the Natural Resources Defense Council, another question is asked and answered.

Q. Are warmer temperatures causing bad things to happen?

A: Global warming is already causing damage in many parts of the United States. In 2002, Colorado, Arizona and Oregon endured their worst wildfire seasons ever. The same year, drought created severe dust storms in Montana, Colorado and Kansas, and floods caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in Texas, Montana and North Dakota. Since the early 1950s, snow accumulation has declined 60 percent and winter seasons have shortened in some areas of the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington.

Of course, the impacts of global warming are not limited to the United States. In 2003, extreme heat waves caused more than 20,000 deaths in Europe and more than 1,500 deaths in India. And in what scientists regard as an alarming sign of events to come, the area of the Arctic's perennial polar ice cap is declining at the rate of 9 percent per decade. 

Observation:  It might come as a bit of a shock to the “Dust Bowl” survivors of the 1930s that droughts are a unique phenomenon associated with early 21st century global warming.  Traveling a little farther back in time, there are a number of Central and South American civilizations that completely collapsed in the face of prolonged, severe drought. I guess the Mayans brought it on themselves by building all those coal-burning factories to help build the SUVs they drove that put so much CO2 into the atmosphere it killed all the rainforests.

As for the non-melting melting ice caps, I’m reminded of Ted Danson’s predictions in the mid-1980s that the oceans would die within 10 years if we didn’t do something drastic — and do it now — to clean them up.  Well, we didn’t undertake a deep-water Manhattan Project, and 10 years later the ocean was still alive.  Just as it is today.

So what do you do, as a good liberal environmentalist concerned about man’s incessant ravaging of the planet when your ludicrous prediction is exposed for the fraud it really is?  Reevaluate your data?  (No. Who needs data when you speak from the heart?)  Rethink your position?  (What’s to re-think?  It’s how I feel, who I am, and I need to be true to myself.)  No, you simply make another one that’s virtually identical to the first, but just leave off the date-certain for the apocalyptic event so your enemies can’t pin you down.

Q: Is global warming making hurricanes worse?

A: Global warming doesn't create hurricanes, but it does make them stronger and more dangerous. Because the ocean is getting warmer, tropical storms can pick up more energy and become more powerful. So global warming could turn, say, a category 3 storm into a much more dangerous category 4 storm. In fact, scientists have found that the destructive potential of hurricanes has greatly increased along with ocean temperature over the past 35 years.

Observation: What scientists have also found is that a lot more people live along the coasts in 2006 than they did in 1971.  So when a hurricane struck the Gulf coast in 1971, there were fewer people and less property to kill or destroy.  ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN aren’t in the habit of sending reporters to a deserted beach to lament the toppling of a half-dozen trees, unless George Bush personally cut them down to make way for another Wal-Mart.  But put 20,000 people there 35 years later, and someone is likely to get killed, just as a lot of buildings will lose their roofs. Ergo, the storms of 2006 are “more destructive.”

Furthermore, the claim that the ocean is getting warmer (an affirmative statement) is based on the assumption that we have a thorough, multi-decade database²⁷ upon which to make this comparison.  There is no such database detailed, accurate, and comprehensive enough to make this claim.  Nevertheless, having stated emphatically that the ocean is “getting warmer,” the NRDC dutifully lists the possibilities that maybe, might, and could perhaps happen because of this rock solid foundation upon which they base their judgment — all of which are dire and extreme.²⁸

There’s never been a hurricane as destructive as Katrina in 2006, except for the one that wiped out Galveston Texas in 1900, killing 6000 people, and a few dozen others here and there over the past several centuries. These freakish, abnormally powerful storms couldn’t be part of the natural cycle of sunspot and wind current activity.  No, that wouldn’t make any sense.  Global warming is responsible for it all, even the ones that happened before the Industrial Revolution. 

Q: What country is the largest source of global warming pollution?

A:  The United States. Though Americans make up just 4 percent of the world's population, we produce 25 percent of the carbon dioxide pollution from fossil-fuel burning — by far the largest share of any country. In fact, the United States emits more carbon dioxide than China, India and Japan, combined. Clearly America ought to take a leadership role in solving the problem. And as the world's top developer of new technologies, we are well positioned to do so — we already have the know-how.

Translation:  In case you missed the point in our opening question, the U.S. is to blame for all the bad things that are maybe going to possibly happen. We could solve the problem tomorrow if we wanted to, but Dick Cheney and his oil buddies don’t want you to drive cleaner cars.²⁹  And, as far as our assertion that “the United States emits more carbon dioxide than China, India and Japan, combined,” please don’t look too closely at our methodology in making this statement.  China has been a backwards, largely agrarian society for the past 60 years.  A few years ago it began to undertake a massive industrialization effort that has already driven up the worldwide price of oil to feed its voracious energy appetite, and this trend is going to continue — and accelerate — in the decades to come.  They aren’t building state-of-the-art, emission-reducing factories, so their growth will be accompanied by significant increases in the same nasty pollution that U.S. factories routinely clean through sophisticated scrubber technology. 

Since China’s industrialization will add significantly to worldwide, global-warming pollution, let’s force the U.S. to cut back on their use of these same natural resources, since our 25% gluttony is only benefiting 4% of the world’s population. (We’ll conveniently ignore the fact that not everything produced in the U.S. stays in the U.S., and is in fact sent as aid or trade to the rest of the world).  Besides, it isn’t fair for the U.S. and the greedy capitalists who run it to be so powerful. 

Even though Marxism has failed every time it’s been tried, China deserves a chance to make its Marxist government work. And it would work just fine if the U.S. didn’t hog all the world’s resources. (Again, we’ll ignore the other possible explanation that its inherently-repressive, socialist centralized government stifles their ability to compete with the American capitalist system).  So, in keeping with the spirit of the Kyoto Treaty that exempts China and other third world countries from the same restrictions it seeks to impose on the U.S., we’ll reinforce, once again, the belief that the U.S. is to blame for global warming, so the draconian prescriptions we offer to solve the “problem” will seem reasonable and fair.

I think that about sums it up, except to reiterate that George Bush wants you all to die, and you would too if it wasn’t for Bill Clinton and the NRDC.  While noting that the Bush Administration has supported some environmental initiatives, in the eyes of the NRDC they continue to fall short in a number of key areas.  As one illustration, the NRDC says that, “Stricter efficiency requirements for electric appliances will also help reduce pollution. One example is the 30 percent tighter standard now in place for home central air conditioners and heat pumps, a Clinton-era achievement that will prevent the emission of 51 million metric tons of carbon — the equivalent of taking 34 million cars off the road for one year. The new rule survived a Bush administration effort to weaken it when, in January 2004, a federal court sided with an NRDC-led coalition and reversed the administration's rollback.”³⁰

Which brings the NRDC to the main thrust of its public education efforts.  Having established that man is the principal agent of global warming, and that the U.S. in particular is the principal culprit, and that the Bush Administration and Big Business are the chief obstacles to sensible environmental policy, the NRDC tackles the ultimate question:  

Q: What can I do to help fight global warming?

A: There are many simple steps you can take right now to cut global warming pollution. Make conserving energy a part of your daily routine. Each time you choose a compact fluorescent light bulb over an incandescent bulb, for example, you'll lower your energy bill and keep nearly 700 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air over the bulb's lifetime. By opting for a refrigerator with the Energy Star label — indicating it uses at least 15 percent less energy than the federal requirement — over a less energy-efficient model, you can reduce carbon dioxide pollution by nearly a ton in total.

But most of all, the Natural Resources Defense Council pointed out that you can “join NRDC in our campaign against global warming.”

Translation: give us money, and add to our numbers to enhance our power, and we’ll keep fighting the fight for responsible environmental policy that ignores a solid, scientific basis for believing that anything other than U.S. citizens are chiefly to blame for warming the planet anywhere from 1 to 9 degrees.

It’s easy to conclude that the only reason the NRDC — and other equally myopic self-proclaimed environmentalist groups — hold tight to their apocalyptic vision that global warming essentially arises from coal burning factories and automobile emissions, is that without these scares, they’d have to leave their think tank and go find a real job.

After all, who’s going to give them money to fight a problem that may not exist, and if it does, is the result of natural processes beyond our control?

13. And now for the rest of the story

But there’s another important element at work here, one that I understand all too well from my past university life.  It applies to Ph.D. candidates, deep thinkers, and genuine (or pseudo) intellectuals of all standing.  It fits the archetypical tree-hugging, world-saving environmentalist to a “T”, particularly those in leadership positions within the movement.  I don’t know if anyone has ever given it an official name, but I like to call it the Clap Trap (“Can’t Lose Any Power”).  It goes something like this.

Once you’re admitted into the Ph.D. program, you need to choose a subject for your dissertation.  Your thesis must be an “original contribution to knowledge,” not just an extended research paper.

You think, worry, study, worry, think, study, and worry for a long time about your topic.  Suddenly one day it hits you.  I’m going to do my dissertation on the mating habits of the South American fruit fly.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to identify the subject matter.  You need to have a unique, distinctly original explanation for that event or phenomenon.  You decide after much thinking, worrying, studying, thinking and worrying again, aided perhaps by a few beers or other more powerful stimulants now and then, that you’ll explain their mating habits by pointing out the unique relationship between three legged dwarves who inhabit a neighboring island, and semi-annual sunspot activity.  Sex, basic instinct, and the need for procreation are relegated to secondary factors, or dismissed all together. That’s the traditional explanation, and to be a unique contribution to knowledge, you have to come up with something outside the box.

So, you collect some data, run a few regression analyses, and massage the findings until viola! — you’ve supported your thesis. You write it up and successfully defend it, and you’re given your Ph.D. (which you now learn stands for “Piled High and Deeper”). You interview for a teaching job or apply for a position at some prestigious think tank, and get hired.  You’re now successfully employed in your profession.

At least 4 years have passed from the time you entered the Ph.D. program until the time you received your degree.  Once you finished your classes, the bulk of that remaining time was spent conceiving, researching, writing and defending your dissertation.  You’d like to relax but you’ve just gotten a new job, and even though it’s not in some private sector hell-hole where you’ll slave away to make Dick Cheney richer while barely making your own ends meet, they still expect to see results.  And fast!  And this pressure will stay on you until you get tenure, or are firmly ensconced in your position.  And that might take years.

Fortunately, unlike the private sector where success is measured by how much you contribute to the bottom line, in the university/think tank world it’s a function of how much you publish.  You just started your new job Tuesday and already they’re asking you when your first book is coming out. Do you start on some new, innovative research project that may take you 18 months to finish?  No.  You take your dissertation, restructure it a little, and get it published. Instant book, instant recognition, instant results.

But there’s one small problem.  You had to push and pull and massage your data to come up with those “unique findings.”  And you had to do it as a wet-behind-the-ears kid still learning his craft, so it was a little weak on analysis and sloppy at points. It was good enough to demonstrate your scholarship and indicate your future potential, so you know you legitimately earned your Ph.D.  But was it really tight enough and adequately supported to publish for all the world to see? 

The answer is “No,” but you’d need another 9-12 months of data collection to really get it in shape.  And with this new data some of your conclusions are bound to change (if not entirely, then placed in a much broader perspective).  But you don’t have 9-12 months, so you go ahead and rush your decent, but flawed dissertation into publication.

To your pleasant surprise, the new book is well received by other intellectuals who marvel at how you were able to make your data sing and stand conventional wisdom on its head.  The deep flaws in your work you have come to recognize after months and months of reflection remain well hidden from most readers, who aren’t going to go back and independently re-work your numbers.  After all, you have a Ph.D. from a great university, and there’s no reason to suspect that you’re deliberately manipulating your findings, so the same professional courtesy is extended to you that they expect others to extend to themselves.  Besides, everyone knows that a true intellectual will grow over time, so any current deficiencies in your methodology or conclusions will be worked out in the years to come.

It’s now a couple of years down the road.  You’ve long abandoned any notion of “fixing” the shortcomings (or outright errors) in your dissertation/book.  Not only are you knee-deep in other projects that consume all of your time, you’ve made a national reputation for yourself arguing the fruit fly/sunspot/three legged dwarf hypothesis.  Your fellow intellectuals have embraced you as a “deep thinker,” and maybe, just maybe, you were being too hard on yourself in micro-analyzing your own work.  On reflection, it wasn’t such a bad piece of work after all.  Any lingering doubts about the accuracy of your data or the wisdom of your finding are buried once and for all.

That is, until some snot-nosed Ph.D. candidate releases a book challenging your data and attacking your assumptions. That’s his own original contribution to knowledge, and because of it you’re about to have your world come crashing down upon you.

Unless you fight back. 

Instead of admitting to any of the flaws he identified in your original work, you attack him and his scholarship.  You do everything you can to belittle his work and, in so doing, support your original thesis.  There’s no debate, no search for common understanding.  There’s only all out pseudo-intellectual combat. If you lose and he wins, he’ll be the new golden boy.  He’ll get the job, and the funding, and the public recognition while you’ll be washed up before you hit 40.  Too old to start over in the private sector, and too deficient to hold onto that Ivy League job or cushy think tank position, you have visions of wasting away the next 25 years as a senior lecturer at East Podunk Community College.

I could go on and on for a few more pages, but I think you get the point. The dissertation process isn’t the first step in a person’s life-long intellectual development.  It’s the process by which his professional conclusions will become etched in stone for the remainder of his life. If he actually puts a well-reasoned, well-researched, intellectually honest dissertation together that fudges nothing, and presents a genuinely credible set of conclusions, the experience is a good one.  Or if the flaws are minor — and can be conceded publicly without calling the entire book into question — he can survive and prosper in the years ahead.  But if the defects are more serious, and he’s now produced several books and articles based on that shaky foundation, his professional life is over if he concedes anything.  He will go to his proverbial grave insisting that sunspots and three legged dwarves are the controlling factor, not sex-drive and instinct — that explain fruit fly reproduction.

Which is another reason why the pseudo-intellectuals at the Natural Resources Defense Council refuse to concede that the sun, or Earth, have anything to do with global warming, other than maybe make it hotter here and there for a day or two somewhere along the continuum.  If they acknowledged even half the evidence I’ve been able to access through a cursory search of the Internet, they couldn’t keep making their outrageous claims.  So they just ignore any counter-veiling data and stick to their original story.  Man creates global warming, which can be measured precisely from 1900-1999, and based on these assumptions we can control the Earth’s temperature through the correct social, political and economic actions.  Oh, and as a nice little side-benefit, we get to keep our cushy jobs, and expand our power and prestige by convincing concerned citizens to join our cause.

The last notch in this sorted tale, and one that finally brings the discussion full circle, is the added component that I’ve alluded to throughout this article and discussed in a bit more detail above. Not only is it a matter of money, personal prestige and personal power, but modern day pseudo-environmentalists (as contrasted with a genuine environmentalist like Teddy Roosevelt) are equally concerned about one over-arching consideration.  They are True Believers.  And like all True Believers, ultimately it’s not about data, but faith.  Only those with extra baggage like scientists and academicians need to justify their positions– or at least, match data and analysis with counter-data and counter-analysis. Not everyone in the movement has been burdened with a set of professional credentials they must defend. Many are simply blessed with the greatest gift of all; the certainty of their position because they know, in their hearts, that it’s the right thing to believe.

Even if these people were to recognize a serious flaw in their reasoning, it wouldn’t be cause enough to change their conclusions.  Like the idiot savants I wrote about earlier, they know intuitively that global warming is caused by man, particularly those living in the United States.  That research hasn’t actually proven this to be true is beside the point. We can’t afford to wait another 100 years to validate the “obvious.” We need to take action now or the oceans will die, farmland will dry up, and depending upon your decade and personal preference, another ice age will overtake the planet too. There’s nothing to prove, nothing to debate. The only issue is how to persuade (or force) policy makers to implement their programs. 

You do this in any number of ways.  Keep raising the global warming increase from 2 to 9 degrees — or higher if necessary — until it hits the appropriate public nerve and the people demand change.  Pretend that temperature readings taken in 1900 have the same degree of specificity and reliability as those captured with 21st century technology.  Talk about the weather today as if nothing like this has happened in the history of the planet, let alone the last hundred or so years. 

And when all else fails, forget about the fact that Al Gore thought $4 a gallon gasoline was a wonderful way to force conservation and thus help achieve some of his environmental objectives, and suggest instead that U.S. companies already have the technology to make the environment cleaner, but Big Oil wants to gouge the little people by forcing them to buy their filthy, polluting fuel at $4 a gallon.³¹

14. To sum it all up

So what can we reasonably conclude, based on this review of actual facts regarding the claim of man-made global warming?  Let me pose my own set of questions and answers:

Q.  Does “global warming” exist?

A.  The collection of annual worldwide temperatures from 1900-1999 doesn't prove its existence, unless we’re willing to say the data gathered in 1900 is just as detailed, and credible, as the data gathered in 1999 (i.e. that a reading of 87.25 degrees in 1900 is as accurate a reflection of reality as a similar reading in 1999).

To be fair, I need to precisely define my own terms here, so as not to prove my point with the same tortured logic I’ve criticized throughout this article. Technology improves every year.  Unless we’re still using 100-year old measuring devices, by definition there can be no “identical comparisons.”  

But this isn’t what I mean when I talk about compatible data.  Can we say, instead, with any assurance that the technology of 1900 is at least minimally acceptable?  That is, while the instruments we design and manufacture today could carry out a reading accurately to, say, the .0001 mark, we only need to make comparisons to the .01 level.  We know 1900 equipment cannot reach the .0001 level, but was it capable of accurately measuring temperatures to the .01 level if that is all that is being used to construct the global warming computer models? 

From everything I’ve read on the subject, the answer is doubtful, at best.  In the pre-digital era, one relied on eyesight to take a reading.  Anytime you require a human being to produce a number instead of having that number generated independently, mistakes will occur. So I don’t think that one could really make the claim that all the data from 1900-1999 is equally reliable.  And further, I don’t believe there is anything to suggest that this minimal level of accuracy was achieved until well into the latter half of the 20th century.  At best there might be 30-40 years of accurate temperature figures, not 100.

Of course, even if someone was to argue that this minimal level of technological proficiency existed from 1900 forward, they would still have to argue that the average of say, 20 readings for a given area in 1900 is as statistically significant as the average of 2,000 or so readings a century later. The lack of a genuine, in-depth, worldwide data collection system would invalidate any 1-1 comparison simply on that basis.

Q.  If 20th century global warming could be shown to exist, would man be the cause of it? 

A.  Man can influence weather patterns by building cities that retain heat and divert wind patterns, damming rivers that create lakes or dry up other land, clearing forests, and building highways.  These influences can last for long periods of time, and may make local conditions wetter or dryer, and somewhat hotter or cooler, than they otherwise might be in their pristine condition. 

But unless we pave over the entire world (literally, not figuratively), we’re not really altering Earth’s climate.  Heating one spot isn’t the same thing as heating the entire planet, and before we measure the influence of that one variable, we need to understand whether it produces offsetting effects someplace else.  We can’t just pick out one variable, take its temperature, and forget about everything else.  It’s all related and all interconnected, and to make an honest assessment we have to take a large number of additional variables into account — just like the Energy Information Administration counseled.  And when we think we have an answer about man’s collective impact on the environment, someone needs to factor in a dynamic, changing Earth and sun to see what they contribute.  And when we do this, we need to look at more than 30, or a 130, or even a 1,300 year period of time, because the Earth and sun have their own timetables that don’t always correspond to the length of one human’s lifespan. 

With this caution in mind, current studies appear to indicate that the sun is presently going through a phase where it is burning hotter.  Whether this phase started in 1900, 1940, 1980, or just last week, there seems to be some evidence that it does exist now³², and therefore the Earth will continue to get hotter well into the foreseeable future.  In this case, we can say that it seems that global warming does indeed exist.

Unfortunately for the NRDC, Al Gore, and other radical environmentalists, since man didn’t cause it, man can’t cure it.  And if man can’t cure it, there’s no reason to put in place the draconian policies they insist will remedy it.  So they ignore the facts, and press on with their agenda of more money, more power, and more prestige to solve a problem they can’t control, but will keep them financially solvent, socially “relevant”, and politically powerful as they spend your money and dictate your lives.  

That’s all that was needed.  Two questions, not fifty.  Answer these clearly and objectively, and every other question about what to do, and how to do it, will magically fall in place.

Endnotes

1. “Ice Cubes and Ice Ages”, The New York Times August 22, 2000. Although the earth began to warm 19,000 years ago, it took longer than 300 years to reach the point of glacial retreat we are in today.  Most scientists mark this date around 12,000 years ago.  Much of the Midwest United States was still under ice 16,000 years ago, for example, and it wasn’t until 10,000 BC (12,000 years ago) that the interglacial period is officially recognized.  Even with that, a “little ice age” occurred from roughly 1300 to 1850. In fact, the Thames River in London froze over so solidly in the 1600s that there were ice fairs during the winter time.  All of which goes to illustrate the impact nature itself has on the Earth’s climate apart from man’s intervention.

2. “[N]ature produces far more greenhouse gases than we do.  For example, when the Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted, within just a few hours it had thrown into the atmosphere 30 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide—almost twice as much as all the factories, power plants and cars in the United States do in a whole year. Oceans emit 90 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, every year. Decaying plants throw up another 90 billion tonnes, compared to just six billion tonnes a year from humans.” Against Nature—Part I of III (Broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK, 1997) http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/prog1.htm#suspend

3. “Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham [that] advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity in scientific theories. Occam's razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates to entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Furthermore, when multiple competing theories have equal predictive powers, the principle recommends selecting those that introduce the fewest assumptions and postulate the fewest hypothetical entities.” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

4. The term ”Idiot savant” is not an insensitive slur, but is actually a technical term used to describe a particular subgroup of people with an IQ of about 25.  “The word idiot usually refers to a simpleton, in contrast to the word ‘savant’ in French that means ‘learned one.’  Idiot savants … do not acquire knowledge by learning as the average human does. They mysteriously 'know' explicit, exact, correct information. One may wonder: ‘How do idiots savants know certain information or possess certain skills?’ … Modern science cannot explain this phenomenon.”  Dr . Lee E. Warren, B.A., D.D. November/December 1996 PLIM REPORT 

5. Earth in the Balance, by Al Gore.  Houghton Mifflin Books, p. 207

6. According to November 30, 2005 report on NewScientist.com (http://www.new scientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8398); Journal reference Nature (vol 438, p 655), “The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age [emphasis added]. This slow-down is seen as “a possible consequence of global warming, [and] will give renewed urgency to intergovernmental talks in Montreal, Canada, this week on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.  Harry Bryden of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, whose group carried out the analysis, speculated that the phenomena was part of a global temperature increase brought about by ‘man-made greenhouse warming’”.

7. Volume 29, Number 2; http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb98/global.html

8. http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v108/show_article/_a000108-000011.htm  July 1, 2002

9. http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1485573.htm.   

10. “Now who would really think this way?” you might ask.  My guess is that most people do.  When a record temperature is reached, particularly at an inappropriate time of the year, the first tendency is to say “I wonder what’s going on?  It’s supposed to be 40 degrees in February in Dallas, not 70.  Must be global warming.”  Or, it’s summertime and supposed to be hot—but not that hot!  “Another 100 degree day in Dallas, breaking a record set back in 1936.  Must be global warming.”  We’ve been trained by conventional wisdom to expect that temperatures in mid-July are always X, give or take a degree or two.  Not noticeably cooler, or significantly hotter.  The same thing applies for every other day of the year.  When our expectations are not met, something must have gone wrong.  And since nothing ever happens by itself, something (or someone) must have interfered with the natural order of things.  Since we’re taught in our schools that global warming is real, and furthermore, that man is responsible for making it happen—and this notion is constantly reinforced by the talking heads on television, liberal political activists, and The New York Times—then cause, effect, and consequence all meld together.  The fact that a high pressure area in Northern Canada may have temporarily diverted or accelerated some cold artic wind, thus accounting for the temporary temperature flux, isn’t an explanation.  It’s just the mechanism by which man screwed up the environment.  If we only drove less in the 1950s, or used two cans of hairspray a month instead of three in the 1960s, we wouldn’t have punched a hole in the ozone layer that I’m sure somehow, some way, caused that abnormal high pressure system to appear in 2006.

11. One caution here, though. While it’s always better to measure temperature change with a thermometer than to rely on our memories of the past 50 to 75 years, the measurements that these instruments produce are not completely free of human bias.  Data is just data until it is analyzed, and this requires the analyst to make certain basic assumptions about a whole range of issues associated with the activity.  If the analysis is honest, as I’ve tried to do with this effort, one’s methodology will be clearly laid out, and all sources of information accurately documented.  The truth is the truth only if it’s subject to testing and verification.  Otherwise, it’s simply one man’s conjecture disguised as an objective assessment.

12. http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/ article_2496.shtm

13. “The Ice Age Cometh” http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/iceage.htm  and http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/prog1.htm#suspend

14. “… climatologists estimate a range of global warming possibilities … from 2 degrees Fahrenheit to 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100 …” (Craig Ander-son, PhD and Brad Bushman, PhD, February 1998 issue of the American Psychological Association); “… most researchers expect greenhouse gases to warm the planet by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 100 years.” (Associated Press as reported in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal 9/27/97 http://www.lubbock online.com/news/092897/study.htm); “A hundred years from now, we may have caused a three- or four-degree Fahrenheit rise in average temperatures.” (Environ-Minute Climate Script, produced in cooperation with the National Safety Council and made possible by the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation, broadcast 11/28/97  http://www.nsc.org/ehc/MINUTE/em971128.htm)

15. Since I’m relegated to La-La-land in attempting to build a scenario where the science of the 1900s is somehow compatible to the science of the 21^st century, it would be distracting at this time to introduce yet another variable that global warming proponents would have to explain away, so I’ll mention it in a footnote as another obstacle that must be overcome to produce reliable temperature data.  Specifically, even under the best of conditions today, weather monitoring stations are not spread out evenly across the planet.  Instead, “weather stations where temperatures are monitored are typically located in and around cities. The growing concrete and asphalt jungles of today's big cities warm faster, hold the heat of the day, and release it in the evening, raising temperatures. Moreover, ‘Cities tend to grow up around their weather stations,’ notes climate scientist Patrick J. Michaels in his recent book Meltdown. ‘Bricks and concrete retain the heat of the day and are especially adept at warding off late spring and early fall chills.’ This accounts for the perceived lengthening of the growing season in metropolitan areas. According to Michaels, this urban heat effect ‘means that an urban growing season will increase its length whether or not the 'globe' is warming.’”  “Getting Burned by Bad Science,” Dennis Behreandt, November 12, 2005 The New American http://www.thenew american.com/artman/publish/article_2496.shtml   

16. Science and Society Picture Library scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?image =10311907&wwwflag=2&imagepos=10  Compare this to present day methods where a pyranometer is used to make the same measurement.  It consists of “a blackened disk containing temperature measuring sensors. The disk is protected from the environment by two domes of glass. When exposed to the sun, the disk heats up. The glass domes prevent cooling by the wind. The temperature of the disk is a function of the amount of solar radiation hitting it. Calibration against more sophisticated radiation measuring devices gives a repeatable multiplier to convert the pyrano-meter's output to units of solar radiation.” http://www.logger.fsec.ucf.edu/ met/About _Met.htm

17. http://web.gfi.uib.no/The%20Norwegian%20Sea/TNS-0320.htm

18. No, I’m not mixing apples and oranges by talking about tomorrow’s weather and global warming predictions.  Nor am I taking a cheap shot at the global-warmers as a substitute for addressing objective facts. Have a glance at a question submitted to  NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Center “Ask an Astrophysicist” on February 18,   1998 (http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980218c.html)

Question: “I was wondering what would happen to our solar system when the sun goes into the next phase in its life cycle.”

Answer:  “[As the sun begins to burn out, it will lose some of its gravitational cohesion and expand in size, becoming a Red Giant.  The larger sun will fully engulf the planet Mercury, and make Venus and Earth uninhabitable.  But a larger sun, going through its death throws, will actually begin to heat Mars.  Instead of an unbearably cold, inhospitable planet,] Mars will definitely become more comfortable. (Of course that is a relative term, for me comfortable is about 20 degrees F, with snow falling at a rate of 12 inches per hour) but it will be warmer. To actually guess actual conditions is pretty tough since predicting the exact weather 1 week in advance is still pretty hard here on earth where we have a lot of information [emphasis added].”

19. To give a related example, several days after a USA Today article appeared in May 2006 concerning an alleged U.S. government program to secure the telephone transaction records of phone calls made to and from the United States, Democratic Senator Patrick Lahey was still waving the newspaper around in a public hearing condemning the Bush administration for illegally wiretapping the phones of innocent American citizens.  There is nothing particularly insidious about this, since members of opposing parties routinely criticize one another’s actions.  In this case, though, Lahey’s actions followed several days of public discussion where the newspaper itself insisted that it never alleged any illegal government wiretapping, either directly or indirectly, and where at least two of the carriers named in the article denied the story with one demanding a printed retraction from USA Today.  Not one to let the facts get in the way of a good smear, Lahey pressed forward with the original charges, practicing the same kind of selective analysis I referenced above.

20. To draw again from contemporary American politics to illustrate this matter, Hillary Clinton has refused to repudiate her vote to support the 2003 U.S. attack on Iraq.  This is part of a deliberate calculation to soften her Left wing image and make her more acceptable to middle American voters should she run for president in 2008.  While understandable as a strategic move, it has alienated her more radical supporters. Susan Sarandon, a Hollywood actress and out-spoken critic of the Iraq war, has become so incensed at Hillary Clinton’s refusal to repudiate her vote that she is actively supporting an opposing candidate in Ms. Clinton’s 2006 Senate re-election bid.  Hillary had left the ‘progressive’ side in Sarandon’s opinion, and joined the enemy.  It’s now important for Sarandon to distance herself from her previous laudatory support for Hillary to preserve her (Sarandon’s) progressive image, and remain in good standing with her anti-war peers.

21. The same calculation applies to the political officials who in turn depend on these organizations for financial and GOTV (Get Out The Vote) support.  For example, if forced into a corner where they cannot deny the obvious that the Bush tax cut has worked, they will do exactly what the Democrat minority leader Nancy Pelosi did.  Paraphrasing her remarks, she said something to the effect that ‘Yeah, sure, the government took in more money.  But it all came from the poor, and will only benefit rich old white guys.’

22. http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/f101.asp#1

23. See the 1997 EnvironMinute Climate Script that was, produced in cooperation with the National Safety Council and made possible by the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation.

24. See the February 1998 issue of the American Psychological Association report by Craig Anderson, PhD and Brad Bushman PhD.

25. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/18/ixnewstop.html Telegraph.co.uk “The truth about global warm-ing – it's the Sun that's to blame” By Michael Leidig and Roya Nikkhah  Filed: 18/07/2004

26. Source: http://www.ecop.info/english/e-call-oth-orgs.htm#Our%20oceans 
Subject: Our oceans are at risk
From: "Ted Danson @ Oceana" Ted.Danson
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002
As you know, the threat to our oceans affects EVERYONE. Our oceans are at risk, and with them our food supplies, our coastal economies, and even ourselves. I need your help to get the word out. With enough public support, we can protect our oceans and preserve the earth's web of life for future generations. 
Thank you again.
Ted Danson

27. Which should actually be “multi-century” to discern any real trends, but since we don’t have any real data that precedes the latter half of the 19^th century, man will simply announce by fiat that history begins in the late 1800s and use that as the basis for reaching definite conclusions.  One final note.  Don’t let anyone tell you that we can drill core samples in polar ice and get an accurate record going back thousands of years.  Core samples can tell us a lot of extremely useful information about the environment, but they can’t tell us that the average worldwide temperature in the year 907 was 78.2 instead of 77.65 degrees.

28. From this same NRDC Q&A:  “Recently, researchers — and even the U.S. Defense Department — have investigated the possibility of abrupt climate change, in which gradual global warming triggers a sudden shift in the earth's climate, causing parts of the world to dramatically heat up or cool down in the span of a few years. In February 2004, consultants to the Pentagon released a report laying out the possible impacts of abrupt climate change on national security. In a worst-case scenario, the study concluded, global warming could make large areas of the world uninhabitable and cause massive food and water shortages, sparking widespread migrations and war. While this prospect remains highly speculative, many of global warming's effects are already being observed — and felt. And the idea that such extreme change is possible underscores the urgent need to start cutting global warming pollution.”  Translation: while we’re not stupid enough to predict the date these things will happen like Ted Danson did, consultants to the U.S. Government know it’s true, and so do we. You should have voted for Al Gore in 2000. George Bush didn’t sign the Kyoto Treaty, and now we’re all going to die.

29. From the same NRDC Q&A: “Q: Why aren't these technologies more commonplace now?  A: Because, while the technologies exist, the corporate and political will to put them into widespread use does not. Many companies in the automobile and energy industries put pressure on the White House and Congress to halt or delay new laws or regulations — or even to stop enforcing existing rules — that would drive such changes. From requiring catalytic converters to improving gas mileage, car companies have fought even the smallest measure to protect public health and the environment. If progress is to be made, the American people will have to demand it.”

30. The reasoning behind the Bush Administration’s “effort to weaken” the law was a bit more complicated than the NRDC’s facile analysis suggests, as reported by the Energy Information Administration: Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government (http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/eff/aircond.html). Rather than a cut-and-dry battle between big business profits and the little guy’s welfare, they state “In evaluating the effectiveness of any energy policy on future energy market trends, there exist uncertainties that can greatly impact the conclusions derived from the analysis. Future macroeconomic growth, energy crises, and rate of technological advances can significantly alter the conclusions of any analysis of energy policy. Other energy policies can also have a big impact on the results presented from this analysis. If, for example, a policy aimed at incorporating the social costs of energy and the impacts on the environment were introduced simultaneously to those presented here, the results could change dramatically. When comparing the analyses provided in this report with other analyses performed on the same subject matter, it is important to keep in mind that different input assumptions and future growth patterns can significantly affect the projected results of the policy in question. In evaluating the air conditioner and heat pump standards, for example, input assumptions, economic growth forecasts, and modeling techniques all contribute to the variability in estimates of policy effectiveness across different analyses. In the NEMS residential energy demand module, factors such as increasing square footage in new construction and increasing saturation of central air conditioning over the forecast horizon both contribute to increasing demand for electricity for space heating and cooling. Variations in these factors, as well as changes in energy prices, can have a significant impact on the amount of energy demanded in the future.”

But of course, little details like ‘does the policy actually make sense?’, or ‘will these regulations actually produce the desired outcome?’, shouldn’t interfere with one’s good intention to save the environment.  Besides, the Supreme Court agreed with the NRDC, and this shows that the Bush Administration was wrong.  Everyone knows that the Supreme Court is the final, unbiased, arbiter of the truth—except when they acted in a highly partisan way to steal the 2000 election from its rightful winner, Al Gore. 

31. To put it more clearly, $4 a gallon gasoline is a good thing when the government collects 90% of that money to help fund environmentally-correct organizations and agencies, but $4 a gallon gasoline is bad for the country when the companies that search for, drill for, transport, refine, and distribute the product get to keep most of the money. 

32. http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002242.html Future Pundit July 18, 2004.  According to the article “Sun Energy Output At Over 1,000 Year Peak” by Randall Parker, “Sami Solanki, Professor at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich Switzerland, says the Sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years than over the previous 1090 years. ‘We have to acknowledge that the Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago, and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years. We expect it to have an impact on global warming.’ The sun's brightness hasn't changed much over the last 20 years. But it has been brighter for the last 60 years than it has been at any time in the last 1,150 years.

Labels: Environment, Animal Rights, Health Issues, & Drugs

Responses to "An even more Inconvenient Truth: The Myth of Man-Made Global Warming"

1. I'd like to have a Mini Cooper. Maybe drive it through sewers after pulling a big bank job. That would be cool!

   Anyway, I turn on my weatherman each night, and he tells me stuff like there is going to be a fifty percent chance of rain tonight. If he can't tell me with 100% certainty whether or not it will rain in the next twelve hours, how is it that global warming is a certainty, and that it is our fault to boot?

   Comment by Rich Sherlock | July 31, 2006

2. Much thanks to Dr. Jackson and Intellectual Conservative for the finest piece I've ever read here. All you who still believe the Gore=Bore please call Crisis Services in your area. You may be a danger to yourself or others..

   Comment by Joseph | July 31, 2006

3. It certainly seems easier to throw insults than it is to accept the fact that the "I-ME-MINE" attitude is draining future generations of the AIR that is needed to BREATHE. It is certainly easier to lay on the couch and stare blankly at the weatherman than it is to read an article (heaven forbid an entire book) about environmental science. What so many people are not willing to hear is the fact that their self-absorbed, narcissistic life of gluttony is part of the problem, because then they will have to start changing their lives and start thinking about the other billions of lives on this planet. It's so much easier to simply say "it's not true" and get back to the way of life that will deny people of their very lives. Keep right on doing what you are doing to kill millions in the future, and keep on displaying those "pro-life" stickers and magnets. The hypocrisy rolls on…

   Comment by Zara | July 31, 2006

4. I enjoyed reading this immensely! Though it took me quite a while to do so (it was good lunch hour reading) Now what I would ask the writer of this. You take all of the real evidence in account for global warming, but (and I may be incorrect in my assumption) but you don’t seem to have taken an honest look at evolution? now I’m no bible thumbing tongue speaking Christian either, but after I had looked at the evidence against evolution, I honestly cannot believe, that as you said "Tiny microscopic organisms developing into large, multi-celled creatures was as ridiculous to believe". I know this is completely off the subject of your wonderful piece, but your theme to me, seems to be you want everyone to look at evidence presented and make an intellectually honest conclusion. Is this possible in the case for evolution?
   Again I thought this was an excellent look at the other side of the global warming saga that now clucthes to us all

   Comment by Hoosherdaddy | July 31, 2006

5. This article is full of factual and conceptual errors. Here's one: the author asks "…if there’s a big ball of vibrating, pulsating, fiery gas up in the sky that routinely heats the Earth, shouldn’t we eliminate it first as the cause of this warming before making me trade in my Escalade for a Mini-Cooper?" It's already been done. See http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/04/its-sun-stupid.html

   It ain't the Sun, wingnuts.

   Comment by Bill Provost | July 31, 2006

6. "He’s an intelligent, highly educated person — not some bible-thumping fundamentalist who speaks in tongues, has a gun rack bolted to the back of his pickup truck, and votes Republican."

   Silly statement for someone who is so 'highly eductaed'… So very unnecessary in an otherwise wonderful article.

   It presupposes certian fundamentalists would not (could not?) be intelligent or well educated, and the same for those who might be gunowners, truck drivers or registered Republicans.

   While certain 'blue-collar' professions may indeed require much less educational training, and, while most true hunters and outdoorsmen (those who presumably have gun racks and pick-up trucks) probably do NOT have doctorate degrees-
   does this necessarily affect acualy intelligence? Are we not truly talking about critical thinking & problem solving skill more than anything?

   I know a Painting Contractor (who never finished school at Arizona State University) that regularly scores over 135 on Intelligence Quotient tests, does have a pick-up, and is a gunowner (no gun rack though), believes in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour (no speaking in tongues though) and is EXACTLY the sort of person who would agree with most all of what this essay has to say, and would also be a strong advocate for NOT thinking like most of the sheep who follow the likes of Sore Al- so why risk pissing him off, or rubbing so many others like him the wrong way?

   Being able to think straight and write such an excellent artcile (even though you've spent such large portion of your
   lifetime in school), and desiring it to be read in public suggests the possibility that you may want to compel the plebian masses to an awarness about the deluge of propaganda regularly steaming their way, that they might then share it with some of the simpleton friends, and so on and so forth so as to effect change, no?

   Last time I checked more people voted Republican than not, and the NRA has no shortage of members- does it not make sense then to avoide ridculing those 'good intentioned people' who'd likely accept and support more sensible & logical
   thinking versus the reactinary and more emotionally driven that we presently oppose? That they would in turn facilitate other, more logical, powerful riposte amongst their friends and family THEREBY helping them [all]
   avoid "…this same intellectual trap when buying-into the hyperbole of the Left on man’s supposed responsibility for global warming" that you so cleverly refer to above?

   Is that not the most worthy reason to craft such a piece in the first place?

   Comment by Paul Joseph | July 31, 2006

7. Get rid of that rather considerable chip on your shoulder, Zara.

   The author wrote dozens of pages of thoughtful commentary without a hint of narcissm. But you have absolutely nothing to say about the substance of his article, yet are quick to hurl judgments and sterotypes around like candy at a parade. And you're an example of a thinking person?

   How did you become such a hater that the simple act of disagreeing with you produces all sorts of venom? Just to question the orthodoxy of global warming. Your reaction is on par with the pronouncements of the most rabid of religionists.

   But what I really want to know is how big your carbon footprint is. Do you drive a car, ride a bus, or even, ride a bike? Live in a house, or maybe an apartment? Do you use heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer? Do you buy groceries? What are the clothes made of that you wear?

   I would submit that your contribution to the polluting of this planet does not stop with your rhetoric. If you pollute AT ALL, you are self-condemned.

   Self righteousness is an unpleasant bigotry, one that is not restricted to theists.

   Comment by Rich Sherlock | July 31, 2006

8. FROM THE AUTHOR

   Hey folks — this was my first post, and I hope to have some others in coming weeks on different topics. I wrote it to provoke thought and debate, so I welcome comments from all sides, particulary those who disagree. But to keep from getting distracted by side points, let me share a couple of things about me and the way I look at the world that that might help focus the conversation.

   For my fellow conservatives: Science is not, in itself, incompatible with a belief in God or the tenets of a particular religion. Just because an individual scientist might be an athiest or can't see the world beyond what his statistical analysis tells him doesn't make all scientists, or science itself, fundamentally at odds with the bible thumpers. Which, by the way, leads me to my second point. We have to have a sense of humor about things, so when you see a phrase that seems oddly out of character, don't overlook the fact that it may be a satire about what the other guys think of us, instead of what I think about religious gun toting Republicans. If you're still in doubt about where I stand, go to my website and look at the last book I wrote, and who I wrote it with (Roy Abraham Varghese). Which leads me to my third point. Just because I believe in God and promote Christian values, doesn't mean that I don't lead a very secular life. I think a common mistake we all make is to assume that the guy who thinks like us is exactly like us. He may be, or he may have a few other ideas of his own. That's what makes life interesting.

   To those Libs who take great offense at anyone who raises questions about global warming, I don't feel the love in your comments. At least do me the courtesy of putting together a compelling counter argument supported by facts, not feelings. That's the whole purpose of an intellectual exchange. If I cite NASA, you can't counter it with Billy Bob's eco-blog. Well, you can, actually, as Al Gore showed. But the problem is, no one will take you seriously except little Emily, who still can't figure out why the sun doesn't work like a car engine does.

   One final confusion to clear up from a reader comment. I spent the vast majority of my life in the non-profit and for-profit sectors, not the university. Which is why I normally begin every inquiry with an open mind, instead of a rigid, pre-conceived notion.

   Best regards, Phil

   Comment by Phil Jackson | July 31, 2006

9. "But you have absolutely nothing to say about the substance of his article…"

   I agree with you. Before one judges someone else, they'd better prove that nothing in their life
   style contributes to "global warming".

   Maybe they could site "street people". But only if they don't accept handouts from the filthy environmental polluters! How about someone who lives in a tent or an igloo and survives on the fish he/she catches?
   Would cooking the fish over an open fire damage the environment?

   Comment by Joanne | August 1, 2006

10. This article extends and confirms the postion that global warming to the extent that it may or may not be occuring is not significantly related to human activities and that the high tension hype that humans are causing climate change is basically a politically motivated movement. Jackson's discussion of early 1900's temperature readings is compelling. The whole article is interesting and informative. Many thanks.

    Comment by Bill White | August 1, 2006

11. Dr. Phil writes:

    "If I cite NASA, you can’t counter it with Billy Bob’s eco-blog."

    As this site is essentially Billy Bob's right-wing blog, I didn't anticipate your contempt for your own medium. Anyway, NASA does not support your claims. For example (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/shindell_03/):

    "The pattern of modeled surface temperature changes induced by solar variability is well correlated with observed global warming over the first half of the 20th century, but not with the more rapid warming seen over the past three decades. The latter more closely resembles modeled warming induced by increasing greenhouse gas emissions. This suggests that although solar variability does impact surface climate indirectly, it was probably not responsible for most of the rapid global warming seen over the past three decades."

    If you had followed the links from the referenced blog, you would have found the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany (http://www.mps.mpg.de/en/projekte/sun-climate/). If you look at this graph (http://www.mps.mpg.de/images/projekte/sun-climate/climate.gif), you'll see what NASA was talking about. Changes in solar irradiance over the last 30 years don't correlate well with temperature increases over that same time frame. This is because the warming today is primarily driven by man-made greenhouse gases, not solar changes.

    Perhaps when you wrote "…if there’s a big ball of vibrating, pulsating, fiery gas up in the sky that routinely heats the Earth, shouldn’t we eliminate it first as the cause of this warming before making me trade in my Escalade for a Mini-Cooper?” you were unaware of these research results. Rather than assume that hundreds of professional climate scientists around the globe had NEVER even THOUGHT to ask about solar irradiance changes, you should have done a little more research. Global warming deniers have an annoying habit of assuming that if they don't know something, it's because nobody has bothered to investigate it. That's rarely the case. Instead of assuming you know more about global warming than professional climate scientists, do a little fact-checking first.

    Also, why frame the issue as a false choice between an Escalade and a Mini-Cooper? Why not reduce emissions by requiring hybrid engines in Escalades or making them run on alternative fuels?

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 1, 2006

12. Bill White writes:

    "This article extends and confirms the postion that global warming to the extent that it may or may not be occuring is not significantly related to human activities and that the high tension hype that humans are causing climate change is basically a politically motivated movement."

    Baloney. This article gets the facts wrong and only extends and confirms the position that conseratives fundamentally don't understand the science.

    "Jackson’s discussion of early 1900’s temperature readings is compelling."

    It's also irrelevant. Few scientists doubt that solar irradiance changes were responsible for much of the warming in the early 1900s. That says NOTHING about what's happening TODAY.

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 1, 2006

13. Joanne writes:

    "I agree with you. Before one judges someone else, they’d better prove that nothing in their life
    style contributes to 'global warming.' "

    Why? Who made that rule? Just because someone drives a car or uses electricity doesn't mean one must embrace and defend all of the pollution required to use those things.

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 1, 2006

14. Here's more from the Max Planck Institute detailing why Dr. Phil's suggestion that the Sun is responsible for modern warming is wrong.

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 1, 2006

15. Is global warming occurring, and are WE the cause? I don't know with any certainty. But I do know that an awful lot of repudable people who actually understand the science are sounding the alarm. Should we ignore their warnings ? Phil Jackson may hold a PhD and be the author of several books, but is he an environmental scientist? It seems to me there are also a lot of people, especially writers (Perhaps Mr. Jackson is among them?), who are highly skilled at presenting a convincing argument. So then WHAT is the truth? Who stands to lose the most if it were to be proven beyond any doubt that man-made global warming is IN FACT occurring … and we can do something about it? I know what I think.

    Comment by John Ross | August 1, 2006

16. Bill,

    It is the smug superiority with which environmentalist-type people make judgments about, stereotype, and criticize those who disagree with them that is the problem. Zara was extremely harsh, and it is perfectly justifiable to point out her hypocrisy by noting that she too is a polluter. It's simply a matter of degree.

    Comment by Rich Sherlock | August 1, 2006

17. Rich Sherlock writes:
    

    It is the smug superiority with which environmentalist-type people make judgments about, stereotype, and criticize those who disagree with them that is the problem.

    Global warming isn't a question of agreeing or disagreeing. This isn't a philosophy debate. In science, there are right answers and wrong answers, there are things that can be supported by evidence and things that cannot. In this article, Dr. Phil floats the idea that modern global warming is caused by the Sun. Even worse, he writes as though nobody before him had even thought to investigate this. Both of those claims are demonstrably false. How charitable must one be when confronted by such nonsense?

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 1, 2006

18. Let's just say we are/ were responsible for a portion of the suggested 'warming trends'… How to determine the extent first of all, and secondly what exactly to do about it?

    Because there has never been this exact number of people on the planet at any other given time, nor has there been such a vast array of 'man-made stuff'… and because we do not know and will NEVER know EXACTLY what the surface/ atmospheric condition of our Earth was like before mankind so proliferated, even the most die-hard chicken littles out there in TV land must acquiescence; even the best scientific data that does dignify the notion of 'how us nasty capitalist/ breeders'
    are or have produced/ induced such insufferable warming of the globe is fragmentary (gratuitious) and incomplete
    at best, and fallacious & unacceptable at worst.

    That's not a lot to stand on…

    But not to stray from the opening query too far; let's suppose it WAS absolutely irrefutable. Then what? Should we expect that all of modern society be dismantled? That all of the medical/ mechanical/ scientific achievements that have allowed us ot enjoy a standard of living and general good health like no other in most all of recorded history be done away with? That manking revert back to hunter/gatherer mode (would Sore Al then mandate 'hunting' as no longer acceptable and that in addition to steeping backward 100 years to a make-believe agrarian/ rural Utopia only vegetarianism
    would be allowed?)?

    What to do with all the farm equipment that makes the organic vegetables possible on a mass scale? What about the tractor-trailers that deliver pallets of hemp-woven shoes to the marketplace? What about the sewage treatment plants in mtroplitan areas that handle the sewage of millions upon millions of people, will they mysteriously become operable with solar
    power?

    What about the recycling facilities- what sort of fuel will they run on as we transition ot organic/ biodegradable products and materials only?

    What sort of power supply will run the refrigeration equipment keeping all that soybean curd unspoiled?

    However will we prepare enough Henna dyestuff from the dried and ground leaves of the plant found primarily in the Middle East to properly mark all accepted members of The Sore Al Commune? How will we get it from there to here having
    outlawed all airplanes, shipping, and train transport of any kind?

    What about the process of manufacturing all of the mandatory Village/ Commune attire…? The clothing/ fabric from ONLY natural sources; the Ramie and Jute? The requisite 100% Bamboo Towel Sets?How to process all those twigs and stems? How to dissolve the gum or pectin and separate the fibers which are then processed again and woven into yarns and fabric?

    How to convert all the poor and downtrodden in China and India (+ all other 'developing countries'), how to wean them from their 'addiction' to coal? How to keep them warm in the winter months? Fire-fly farming aside, how to keep
    any of us caught up in the Green Revolution warm during the winter months?

    The compulsory production of methane as the only allowable, non-fossil fuel and the facilites uitilizing chicken
    and cattle manure to make it require electricity, so aside from the 12-on 12-off scheduling of the SoreAl Youth Corps on their vigorously pumping on their electricity-generating-retrofitted-stationary-bicycles
    (as predetermined by Premier Gore himself), how to run them? Where to get the juice?

    Speaking of juice, how to provide the High Priests and Priestesses of the Malibu and Manhattan sectors of the newly formed United States of Green with sufficient quantities of Tanqueray? With the obligatory decommissioning of all
    commercial distilleries (they produce too much pollution) there will be now way to safely distinguish
    between concentrations! Widescale, epidemic blindness of the newly annointed High Councils of Green will occur!

    Oh Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!

    Come on.

    The whole idea of going green, completly green, completely 'sustainable and renewable' is a farce. It is preposterous; nothing but enviro-Mental horseplay of monstrous proportions.

    And when China foregoes the invitation sent byPremier Gore and Prime Minister Kerry to 'join along in the peaches and cream movement of getting back the way nature intended', and then launches a massive military attack by air land and sea to TAKE OVER and subjugate the erstwhile Superpower….

    How ironic it will be when they enslave the municipal corporation of LovingTreeHugging and force them to work
    in the booming boiler rooms and churning coal chambers of Industrialization…

    What? You gonna throw edamame at them, make em stop? Poke the treads of their tanks with cattail's? Pepper them with carraway seeds?

    When the Islamic jihadees come to dominate you in your weakened state of Green, you'll want to smoke the
    peace pipe and they'll put your head on stake. Really. What REALLY to do about all the dreaded war that will inevitably come
    whence you truly do bend/ beat ALL of your swords (modern military infrastructure) into plow shears and the
    spears (modern industrial/ technological complex) into pruning hooks?

    Comment by Paul Joseph | August 1, 2006

19. Bill,

    I wasn't referring to the author's positions, I was referring to Zara's diatribe.

    Global warming is an interpretation of available data. As such, it is limited by the quality of data. The author does make a good point about the suspect quality of temperature measurements in terms of accuracy, consistency , and location. You did read ALL of the article, didn't you?

    Global warming proponents have taken on many of the qualities of religious fundamentalism. As such, those who question even the most minor part of the orthodoxy are subjected to the kind of rhetoric we see in Zara's post.

    As far as whether we're debating philosphy, we are debating philosophy when we dogmatically hold to an interpretation of data and denigrate those who critically examine its veracity. Let's evaluate the argument, rather than calling detractors wingnuts, narcissists, and gluttons.

    The author does a fine job of poking holes in the conclusions reached by global warming advocates. Maybe he's not right on every point, but he doesn't have to be. He wrote an extensive article.
    Are all his points wrong? If so, tell how. But quoting another global warming apologist is not a refutation, sir.

    Comment by Rich Sherlock | August 1, 2006

20. Rich writes:
    

    I wasn’t referring to the author’s positions, I was referring to Zara’s diatribe.

    OK. One still need not live naked in a dark cave to be concerned about global warming.

    Rich continues:
    

    The author does make a good point about the suspect quality of temperature measurements in terms of accuracy, consistency , and location.

    Not really. All of these issues have been hashed out in the literature and appropriate error bars assigned. I take this criticism as further evidence that Dr. Phil is not very familiar with the professional literature.
    

    Global warming proponents have taken on many of the qualities of religious fundamentalism.

    I think you've got that backwards. Global warming deniers are behaving like religious fundamentalists. No matter how compelling the evidence, they will never admit that man-made global warming is real. They engage in all kinds of shameless sophistry and sloppy thinking to avoid the undeniable conclusion. Confronting reality and embracing empiricism would mean risking government regulation and, even worse, admitting that those environmentalists they despise so much are right and they are wrong. As time goes on and the evidence builds, this just makes them look ever more ridiculous–like the creationists.
    

    As far as whether we’re debating philosphy, we are debating philosophy when we dogmatically hold to an interpretation of data and denigrate those who critically examine its veracity.

    Science demands that we dogmatically embrace empricism. Those who "critically examine its veracity" with unsupportable claims and cling to their foolishness when proven wrong deserve no respect.
    

    The author does a fine job of poking holes in the conclusions reached by global warming advocates.

    As his criticisms are based on both factual and conceptual errors, he doesn't do a "fine" job at all. He simply reiterates a series of standard denier misconceptions that are rightly rejected by the scientific community.
    

    Are all his points wrong? If so, tell how.

    That would take an article of equal or greater length. I've already pointed out his error regarding solar irradiance changes. Feel free to pick another for further discussion.
    

    But quoting another global warming apologist is not a refutation, sir.

    I quoted work from the Max Planck Institute that has been published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. I'm not an officer so you don't have to call me "sir."

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 1, 2006

21. Paul Joseph writes:
    

    …let’s suppose it WAS absolutely irrefutable. Then what? Should we expect that all of modern society be dismantled?

    Who says we have to dismantle all of modern society? Why not adopt new, cleaner technologies or improve efficiency? There are more options than the status quo or the Stone Age. Why don't conservatives understand this?

    The rest of that post is just a ridiculous rant.

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 1, 2006

22. FROM THE AUTHOR

    I'm still not feeling the love, guys. You can't take part of a paragraph, and ignore the rest of the presentation (including footnotes), to make a point. I know it's a lot to read, but it's a complicated issue.

    As counter-intuitive as it may seem to some of you for the sun to play any significant role in heating the earth, or to pretend that volcanoes and other natural processes don't contribute infinitely more "global-warming" material to the planet than man, or that taking a couple of years of ice flow data is all you need to announce by fiat that this is the norm by which every other measurement will be judged, or ignore that the earth had cooled and heated dramatically before man even walked its surface … even putting all this aside as a possible avenue to explore before announcing that man is predominately responsible for global warming, I still have a simple question.

    Just how do you know that the Earth is getting warmer? Tell me why the basepoint measurements for the Earth's temperature in 1900, 1910, 1920, etc. should be considered accurate enough to measure "change" today? My illustration of Ambato Ecuador isn't a coincidence. I lived there for a while. Do you have any idea how remote this area is, let alone other parts of the world? Just how was that temperature taken in 1900 — what instruments were used, how widely were they disbursed, how accurate were the readings? Argue all you want about current temperatures and what does or doesn't account for it, but until you tell us why we should accept the dubious baseline numbers I took care to point out, the rest of the discussion is pointless. If the baseline is inaccurate, the conclusions about warming, or cooling, are equally bogus. That is the "temperature issue" I raised, not what the thermometer read last Tuesday. Challenge me on the methodology I used to arrive at my conclusions. I supported it with historical documents, cited other studies that looked at it in detail, and supplemented it with other related information. I didn't even get into the whole other issue of the flawed computer analyses that predict the world's temperature in 2152, but can't tell us what it will be in 2009. But with a margin of error of 1-9 degrees, who needs accurate models?

    This may come as a bit of a shock, but I worked under Jody Powell and Bob Beckel in Washington for 3 years. I know how these things work, both academically and from a real-world perspective. I tried to give you a little insight into how these special interest agencies manipulate data to promote their own agendas. You've got to address that too. The Global Warming Crisis industry is intimately connected to a whole bunch of other agendas, as you can see from my review of the NRDC.

    I love a good debate, which is why Dr. Phil making another housecall. But give me something to react to. I know you just know that Global Warming is real. I'd just like a couple of my questions answered that challenge the alleged foundation for making this claim. And it's got to start with the question I raised — not what does XYZ say, but "how do they know that?" And it wouldn't hurt to end with explaining why 100 years of meterological data (even if accurate) constitutes a definite "trend" in the lifespan of a 4 billion year old planet.

    If global warming is indeed real, it's a serious threat and we should do something about it — if we are the cause, or if we can really impact world temperatures at all. Doing something just to do something and feel good about doing it, isn't a policy. As the name of this website implies, "Intellectual Conservative" starts with the intellect, not feelings. Debate methodology, then the conduct of studies, then the outside forces influencing its conclusions, and THEN, when we have a firm grasp on what is real, vs. possibly real, vs. an educated guess, vs. pure conjecture, vs. agenda driven conclusions, THEN and only then can we really debate an issue. That's what this paper was all about.

    If you just have a question or two that you'd like cleared up, I listed my email address. I can't promise how quickly I'll respond, but I will get to you unless I'm flooded with emails. Otherwise, I'm enjoying the public debate. But I won't spend a lot of time reacting to a discussion about dueling websites when the real issue is whether the baseline data is real, and the competing explanations have been properly factored in or dismissed all together. That's the purpose of the paper — to focus on how we got here, so we can better evaluate what each side is claiming to be "irrefutable" evidence. I've given you the argument that people are leading the data; not that accurate, complete, and impartial data is leading our conclusions as it should be. Show how this is wrong; but don't do it by saying Billy Bob thinks your wrong. Show me why Billy Bob's methodology and data collection & analysis is correct.

    Oh, and as for my environmental background and credentials, I have at least as much as Al Gore does. (Okay, so maybe that isn't the best way to prove a point).

    Regards, Phil

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 1, 2006

23. You rock Phil.

    It's all about the baseline.

    How can any henna-soaked, bamboo-shoed, linen-skirted seed-lover of any tree hugging, whale-saving repute
    argue with:

    " Tell me why the basepoint measurements for the Earth’s temperature in 1900, 1910, 1920, etc. should be considered accurate enough to measure “change” today… Just how was that temperature taken in 1900 — what instruments were used, how widely were they disbursed, how accurate were the readings? Argue all you want about current temperatures and what does or doesn’t account for it, but until you tell us why we should accept the dubious baseline numbers I took care to point out, the rest of the discussion is pointless. If the baseline is inaccurate, the conclusions about warming, or cooling, are equally bogus."

    As if -like with virtually any/ all technology- temperature gathering apparatuses have not improved in their
    efficiency and accuracy…!

    Plus or minus 9 degrees!?

    Perhaps liberal professors have a predilection for grading equally liberal (and sufficiently investigated) pupils with a
    similar [range of acceptability] or allow a similar margin of error…(?)

    Hey- where'd Gal Sore attend University anyway?

    Comment by Paul Joseph | August 1, 2006

24. A lot of people hate the USA and want to see it wounded, weak defeated if not militarily at least economicaly.

    They all have their reasons, Islamic terrorists have their medieval reasons,
    for the Europeans it is because they cannot compete,
    the United Nations have their own obscure reasons,

    Americans on the left hate it
    – among other reasons – because they feel guilty to be living in such abundance while other people have so little…and they believe Democrats have solutions to help them feel better by bringing justice to the world… but Democrats don't actually hate the USA, it is just that any hate happening while the Republicans are in charge is useful to them, it helps them win the next election.

    Anyway blaming the USA for Global Warming is the one thing that all those anti-American (or anti-Republicans) accross the world can agree on…

    Because if the world can force the USA to make its own economy weak,
    all those USA haters would have what they want;
    The Europeans could now compete,
    The United Nations could kick around the USA,
    The Terrosists would not fear a rich and powerful USA,

    and the American left would not feel guilty not only because of the reason stated above but because they would be able to pretend they did not want that out of hate for the USA but out of love for little turtles in the Amazon forrest, they wanted the USA to be wounded out of love for planet Earth…

    Almost eveyone – except the USA obviously – benefits in one way or another from blaming Global Warming on the USA.

    PS; English is a second language to me, I wish I had a better vocabulary, I wish I could write like the author of this very interesting piece…but sorry I don't.

    Comment by Friend of USA | August 1, 2006

25. Thank you Friend of USA.

    'Kyoto' (others) is like so much hemlock… They [would] have no other way to compete.

    Comment by Paul Joseph | August 1, 2006

26. FROM THE AUTHOR

    To Paul and Friend of USA (and everyone else)

    I appreciate your kind words, and the sentiments behind them. As for Friend of USA, I wish my Spanish was even half as good as your English!

    As fun as this exchange as been, I would ask a favor of everyone though, including the folks who think my analysis is a bit off. The one thing I disliked most about university life was the tendency for everyone to get caught up in the emotions of an intellectual exchange, and get sidetracked about the real issues. I'm guilty of a gratuitous jab or two here and there, but it's more a product of my sense of humor than (hopefully) any deep-seeded character flaw.

    There's room enough in Conservative politics for any challenge by the Left to be addressed on its merits. I'd like those who find flaws in my reasoning to at least meet us half way and drop the insults, just like I'm asking those of you who feel passionately the other way to tone it down a bit too. I make a lot of fun of the Left in my paper, so I'll continue to take the personal hits if anyone feels the need to get even and take a shot at me, but let's use this forum for the purpose I hoped it would be.

    Let's start a real dialogue on global warming, and invite those who strongly disagree to submit their own arguments in the form of a position paper to support the idea that man is predominately responsible for global warming, that the earth's temperature can be measured accurately going back to the 19th century, and that doing X will slow down or reverse the alleged trend. I know from my own research in this area that there are studies piled upon studies that support every conceivable position. So we've either got to go back to the basics and show that the assumptions upon which global warming preditions are based are real, and that man is the major reason for the change, or we've got to agree that certain evidence is more credible than other evidence.

    Someone cited a Max Plank Policy Analysis conclusion that the sun is an irrelevant variable. If all we're going to do now is swap anecdotes, I can counter that with a recent NASA study that says "Of the many trends that appear to cause fluctuations in the Sun’s energy, those that last decades to centuries are the most likely to have a measurable impact on the Earth’s climate in the foreseeable future. Many researchers believe the steady rise in sunspots and faculae since the late seventeenth century may be responsible for as much as half of the 0.6 degrees of global warming over the last 110 years (IPCC, 2001). Since pre-industrial times, it’s thought that the Sun has given rise to a global heating similar to that caused by the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If the past is any indication of things to come, solar cycles may play a role in future global warming."

    Those who disagree can go to the NRDC or some other forum, and those who agree with me can search for a supporting quote from some other source. This is fun, but ultimately demonstrates nothing. We can keep produce dueling websites, or we can go back to the basics like I suggested and look at how the data was constructed to arrive at today's conclusions. Someone said all the variables I pointed to in questioning the data were easily accounted for. If so, that would make a great paper to submit to IC (not just a response and a web link) that shows how 1900 data is comporable to 2000 data.

    As for other assumed flaws in my world view, it isn't that no one has ever thought about the sun as an agent of global warming before, as someone suggested. NASA certainly has, as have a number of others who raised this as another variable to be explained back in the late 1990s. It's just that as you'll note from the source of many of my footnotes, there's not a lot of interest by American Global Warming analysts to study this factor. That doesn't automatically mean the data is flawed. [NASA think's it might provide a clue]. It's that research money in America isn't normally given to Global Warming advocates who focus on factors that are beyond man's control.

    Re-read the last several pages of my article. This is how it really works in Washington. This is why certain lines of inquiry receive funding for Global Warming or a myriad of other issues, and other lines of inquiry don't. It isn't always based on the merits of an argument. There's a great book by Thomas Kuhn on "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (or something like that—I'm doing this from memory), that really brings this point home. Scientists don't huddle together and share data and seek "truth". They protect their turf (their "paradigm"), and fight like hell to keep competing theories out. It has nothing to do with the merits of the data. It has a lot to do with whether you keep your job and funding, or are washed up at 35 because someone came up with a better idea.

    Anyway, I thought I'd just throw my two cents in, and see if anyone has an interest in exploring the issues I raised. If you really want a good food fight, I suggest that you wait until my next submission. Assuming that the editors find it worthy of including, it's on the moral Relativism and intellectual bankruptcy of the Left. If you think this article provoked a reaction from the Left, wait until you see that one!

    Regards,

    Phil

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 1, 2006

27. Dr. Phil writes:
    

    As counter-intuitive as it may seem to some of you for the sun to play any significant role in heating the earth, or to pretend that volcanoes and other natural processes don't contribute infinitely more "global-warming" material to the planet than man…

    If you think that volcanoes contribute more carbon dioxide to the planet than man, then you'd better rush down to the US Geological Survey and set them straight:
    

    Human activities release more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes–the equivalent of nearly 17,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 13.2 million tonnes/year)! (source)

    I'll take the USGS's word over yours any day.

    More nonsense from Dr. Phil:
    

    Someone cited a Max Plank Policy Analysis conclusion that the sun is an irrelevant variable. If all were going to do now is swap anecdotes, I can counter that with a recent NASA study that says "Of the many trends that appear to cause fluctuations in the Sun's energy, those that last decades to centuries are the most likely to have a measurable impact on the Earth's climate in the foreseeable future. Many researchers believe the steady rise in sunspots and faculae since the late seventeenth century may be responsible for as much as half of the 0.6 degrees of global warming over the last 110 years (IPCC, 2001). Since pre-industrial times, it's thought that the Sun has given rise to a global heating similar to that caused by the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If the past is any indication of things to come, solar cycles may play a role in future global warming."

    That doesn't come from a study. It comes from an explanatory NASA webpage. Here's the link. Anyway, it doesn't support your thesis. First, even if you take it at face value, you still have "as much as half" of the warming attributable to non-solar causes (i.e. man-made greenhouse gas emissions). Second, the Max Planck research and the NASA quote cover two different time spans. Here's the relevant bit from the Max Planck Institute:
    

    However, researchers at the MPS have shown that the Sun can be responsible for, at most, only a small part of the warming over the last 20-30 years.

    NASA's talking about 110 years; the Max Planck Institute is talking about the last 20-30 years. Both of them are correct. In the early years of the 20th century when carbon dioxide levels were lower than they are today, solar changes dominated. In the latter years of the 20th century, greenhouse gas forcings dominate. You're trying to take an explanation that works for the first half of the 20th century and apply it to the entire 20th century even though atmospheric composition changed over that time span. You're wrong again, Dr. Phil. With so many errors of fact and comprehension, it's no wonder you find global warming so baffling.

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 1, 2006

28. Thanks Paul and Phil,

    And if I may, I understand why you
    ( Phil ) might think my first language was Spanish, with the millions and millions of Spanish speaking people in the USA,
    but actually I am a French speaking Canadian living near Montreal who learned english mostly by watching American TV and reading American magazines with a dictionnary by my side…
    and still learning and improving now by reading a lot of American blogs.

    I don't feel my English reflects the thoughts I have in my mind, but I guess it is ok.

    American Conservative sites are fascinating to me because they tell the whole story, they look at both sides of every issue, they provide a lot of information the MSM is hiding from us.
    I learned a lot from right wing sites.

    And from my experience most sites on the left only try to do the same as the MSM, only with more passion or more anger, they carefully select what information they will provide, just enough to convince us, but not enough to let us decide on our own.
    I did not learn much from them but I learned much about the poeple who write them…if you know what I mean.

    I also find more politeness and respect on right wing sites.

    And to think that before 9/11
    I considered myself somewhere near center and liberal !

    I don't like using my name or providing my email because last year after an argument in the comment section of a blog with a far left "peace-activist", my computer suffered a denial of service attack…but I can say I am part of the only group no one will defend;
    a straight white male…I can also say that I am a Catholic and an atheist at the same time ( I could explain but this is already too long ) and that I'm not against religion as long as it is moderate.

    That is probably too much information…enough about me, back to Global Warming,

    Wasn't there a study a few months ago that concluded air pollution was making the skies darker and that was keeping the sun's heat from reaching the ground?
    In other words more air pollution means cooler temperatures…

    I'm mentioning this just to show there are a lot of contradictory facts out there, so obviously it is impossible to be 100% sure of what is causing what…

    Another thing, the more trees are exposed to carbon emissions as those from cars, the faster trees grow, that is a verified and documented fact…and the bigger trees are, the more carbon they can absorb…

    so a lot of contradictory facts out there…and most of what we know and understand we did not 50 years ago…
    So who can really tell what is going on with global temperature ?

    Anyway if the doom sayers are right, the USA will probably be the first country to find solutions and make changes while countries like China will just keep on damaging the planet for years and years…
    Because Americans are… what is the word?
    resilient ?
    and that is one of the reason I like you Americans so much, you have a fascinating history of resilience…from fighting the British for taxing your tea to fighting and winning against the Nazis even though before WWII you were not even in the top military powers of the world, you have shown resilience…well… until the 60s when "progressivism" changed everything…but that is another chapter in itself !

    …

    The piece above is the longest I've ever read on a site, but it was very informative and entertaining at the same time, I did not want to stop reading.

    I'm looking forward to reading your next piece Phil.

    Comment by Friend of USA | August 1, 2006

29. FROM THE AUTHOR

    Okay, I tried.

    Mr. Provost still finds it necessary to express his opinions as a tantrum rather than accept the challenge of producing a simple, straightforward rebuttal that he submits for all of us to consider, a task that should be particularly easy since there's so much out there to show that temperature readings in 1900 provide an accurate basepoint for determining precise levels of global warming 100 years later, as well as addressing my other points.

    As I cautioned in my paper, it's difficult to have a real exchange with a True Believer who doesn't actually read the paper he objects to. That includes the footnotes (like footnote #2 to just pick one at random). We can argue all we want about what the temperature really was last Tuesday, or ten years from last Tuesday, or ten years before that. But before Yuri took his little trip into outer space and satellites soon followed, the average temperature of the earth was only an extrapolation (which is a fancy way of saying an estimate), not a relatively-precise number. I'm still waiting to see how using a base point that was actually from the 1880s, and that reflected an uncharacteristalically colder than normal period of time (the trend being in measured in years, not millenia), in a world that was still largely unexplored, gives us a ROCK SOLID BASE from which to make the precise claim that the world's temperature rose by X degrees over the next 120 years.

    So I'll trade you NASA for two Max Planks and a Natural Resources Defense Council screed thrown in for good measure. Anybody who's ever crunched a number knows the phrase garbage in-garbage out. You can't accept the challenge of this paper, which is to look at the foundation for believing what you do, because you know it's not defensible. There is no precise figure for global temperature change from 1880 to around the early 1970s. What you have are estimates. Stop telling us what the temperature was in the last 30 years, and tell us what the 1880/1900 baseline really was.

    And stop ducking the question by selectively responding to the issues I raise. I said "global warming materials", you respond with CO2 figures for one volcano, but omit the paragraph above it from your own source that says "Comparison of CO2 emissions from volcanoes vs. human activities: Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1992). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 22 billion tonnes per year (24 billion tons)". You further ignore the 90 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide that comes from the ocean every year, and the fact that decaying plants throw up another 90 billion tones of CO2 annually.

    You challenge my scholarship, which I lay out clearly for everyone to see, with bogus half-truths that never address the core of any issue I raise. You challenge my credentials, which I lay out clearly for everyone to see, but you never tell us what your claim to expertise is. Hmmm. Makes one kind of curious.

    It's a relatively simple proposition Sir, one that your professional paper should easily address given your bluster. If you don't want to look at all volcanos instead of one volcano, or allow any other factor other than human activity to account for global warming, could you at least tell us why the measurement problems I raised are not problems at all? If I can just gain true insight into that one, small, personally perplexing issue that gnaws at the back of my mind — if the baseline figure is not accurate, then how can we know that the Earth has warmed by X degrees over the last hundred years?

    I now await your reply that will isolate 3-4 sentence fragments from things I've written that do not address this issue, and dishonestly attempt to refute them. The reason is perfectly clear for your refusal. If you look too closely at the basis for your conviction that the temperature of the earth has warmed by X degrees (I can't even quote a single figure here, since there isn't even common agreement on that — or the 1-9 percent increase that's certain by 2100 because of this supposed X degree rise in the 20th century), you won't find a solid figure. You'll find an estimate, an opinion. And you know what old Anonymous said about opinions …

    Everybody has to believe in something, Sir. I used to believe that honest dialogue was possible with someone on the Left. You've succeeded in changing my mind on that account at least. But because of this there's a void in my life.

    Having struggled unsuccessfully to get you to put your money where your mouth is and address the core issues of this debate in a paper of your own, I need to fill that void. A man has still got to believe in something. After trying, and failing, to communicate with you as an adult, I believe I'll have another beer.

    Regards to all,

    Phil

    PS: Still curious to know your credentials, and to see if you will answer the question of whether you are prepared to address the core issues of my paper in a submission of your own (complete with footnotes and methodology statements). I'm betting that you'll ignore the substance of what I've said and pop off another couple of eco-grams about the sun's temperature in July 2004.

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 1, 2006

30. To Bill Provost,

    Selective quotes. There is one source that tries to find a balance amongst the various scientific studies at there. It is often mentioned by name, but I doubt that many people have ever taken the time to read it (especially scare mongering journalists).

    The short summary is, "Reconstructions of climate forcing in the 20th century indicate that the net natural climate forcing probably increased during the first half of the 20th century, due to a period of low volcanism coinciding with a small increase in solar forcing. Recent decades show negative natural forcing due to increasing volcanism, which overwhelms the direct effect, if real, of a small increase in solar radiation."

    The detailed conclusion (which is very detailed) essentially comes down to the fact that their is insufficient information. Detailed information has only been accessable within the last 20-30 years due to satellites. Prior information is regarded as unreliable.

    The original article "aims" at the weaknesses that are generally admitted in the theory on "global warming".

    You can see the full details here: http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm

    The IPCC provides very good coverage of all the research – and is not afraid of mentioning the gaps that exist. The gaps are huge. The information available can not discount the effects of natural forcing. Volcanoes and the solar irradiance.

    Comment by Lee | August 2, 2006

31. FROM THE AUTHOR

    To Mr. Provost

    Forgive me if this is a duplicate message. I'm not sure my original message posted.

    1. The first rule is, you've got to read an entire article, including the footnotes, before you react. That way you don't pick a sentence out of context here and there, and respond to that as if nothing else has been written. Have a brief glance at footnote 2, particularly the reference to the 90 billion tons of carbon dioxide that comes from the ocean each year, as well as another 90 billion tons of CO2 from decaying plants, compared to just six billion tons a year from humans.

    2. The second rule is, please don't insult my, or anyone else's intelligence, by citing the CO2 output from ONE volcano, and pretend that nothing else exists. It's bad enough that you ignored the additional naturally-occurring CO2 emissions I noted in footnote 2, but you also ignored the sentences directly above your own quote in the source you cited: "Comparison of CO2 emissions from volcanoes vs. human activities: Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1992). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 22 billion tonnes per year (24 billion tons)". You are entitled to your own opinion, Sir, but not your own facts.

    3. My paper challenged the underlying assumptions of Global Warming theory, namely that we know precisely how much the Earth's temperature has risen in the last 100 years, which allows us to "know" how much it will rise in the next 100 years. You continue to ignore the evidence I put forward that prior to the space age we have, at best, a rough "estimate" of the Earth's temperature. If the baseline data is flawed, then the conclusions that flow from it are flawed. This is why we get anywhere from a 1-9 percent estimate of increased Global Warming by 2100. You've stated that this baseline number is accurate, and that the proof of this is simple. If so, let's see it. Not another grand observation by you followed by the link to yet another website, but a clear, simple, straightforward position paper submitted by you addressing the questions I've detailed.

    4. I will not hold my breath waiting for your paper. Not only will you never accept the challenge, if you respond at all it will be to cherry-pick a statement here or there that has nothing to do with the main points I raised, link it to a fragment of another website, and announce that you've refuted yet another partisan attack on Global Warming. I'm not sure what time Air America comes on where you live, but I think you're confusing what passes there for supposed analysis with the way adults typically engage in legitimate debate. I've got no problem with you injecting humor into your replies; God knows I make enough fun of Liberals and Democrats. But at some point I kind of expect you to actually talk about the article I wrote, instead of the page you glanced at a time or two before focusing on yet another side-issue while avoiding the main thrust of the article.

    5. Unless you are prepared to actually deal with the core issues of my paper, the foremost of which involves answering a simple question about the baseline Global Warming number: "how do we know that?", there's not a lot of reason to keep writing. We all know that you really, really, really know that Global Warming is real. I'm just asking you demonstrate the correct scholarship to prove this, since you've raised serious doubts about mine. I laid out my methodology, documented my analysis, and gave you my credentials. It would be interesting to see what yours are as well.

    6. Once again, I will not hold my breath waiting for you to respond to the substance of anything I've written here, or above. Instead, I look forward to another selective quote about a study or weblink that proves other volcanos don't exist, or somehow shows that my SUV is melting the Martian ice caps too because the Sun is a completely irrelevant factor, and only man's activities are warming the Earth.

    7. I do want to thank you, though, for giving us all a practical illustration of two passages from the article I wrote that some day you really should read:

    "Which again brings us back to the underlying theme of this article. Those who challenge conventional wisdom (such as the belief that man’s actions are the determining factor in global warming) start the debate with a significant disadvantage. The evidence to the contrary may be on my side, but if it’s rejected out of hand by the person I’m speaking to, I’m not going to make much headway. Even worse, when they’re not even capable of framing the question, let alone comprehending the answer, there’s no point in going to battle."

    And,

    "The last notch in this sorted tale, and one that finally brings the discussion full circle, is the added component that I’ve alluded to throughout this article and discussed in a bit more detail above. Not only is it a matter of money, personal prestige and personal power, but modern day pseudo-environmentalists (as contrasted with a genuine environmentalist like Teddy Roosevelt) are equally concerned about one over-arching consideration. They are True Believers. And like all True Believers, ultimately it’s not about data, but faith. Only those with extra baggage like scientists and academicians need to justify their positions– or at least, match data and analysis with counter-data and counter-analysis. Not everyone in the movement has been burdened with a set of professional credentials they must defend. Many are simply blessed with the greatest gift of all; the certainty of their position because they know, in their hearts, that it’s the right thing to believe. Even if these people were to recognize a serious flaw in their reasoning, it wouldn’t be cause enough to change their conclusions. Like the idiot savants I wrote about earlier, they know intuitively that global warming is caused by man, particularly those living in the United States. That research hasn’t actually proven this to be true is beside the point. We can’t afford to wait another 100 years to validate the 'obvious.' We need to take action now or the oceans will die, farmland will dry up, and depending upon your decade and personal preference, another ice age will overtake the planet too. There’s nothing to prove, nothing to debate. The only issue is how to persuade (or force) policy makers to implement their programs."

    Please don't take offense at the idiot-savant remark. You'll find a footnote early on in the paper that places this comment in perspective.

    Bill, talking to you has been a hoot, but I do have a real life. So unless you want to engage in real debate, with research and analysis that speaks to the core issues of my paper instead of how hot the sun was in 1997, I'm afraid this will be my last post to you. The only advice I have as you slam-dunk another of my peripheral points with your biting analysis is that you read the entire paragraph of the data source you cite instead of just the sentence fragment that seems to support your position, but really doesn't. I don't mind a good debate that goes on for a long time, but I can only say "read the paper", and "respond to the core issues it raised about methodology", so many times. If you really have a position worthy of support, there's no reason to play games with your evidence.

    Best regards,

    Phil

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 2, 2006

32. Lee writes:
    

    Selective quotes.

    They were selected for their concise summaries of their authors' intent. If you think I've misrepresented the Max Planck Institute's conclusions please show me how.
    

    The detailed conclusion (which is very detailed) essentially comes down to the fact that their is insufficient information. Detailed information has only been accessable within the last 20-30 years due to satellites. Prior information is regarded as unreliable.

    By whom? Certainly not the IPCC.
    

    The original article “aims” at the weaknesses that are generally admitted in the theory on “global warming”.

    These "weaknesses" are more often "weaknesses" of conservative understanding than "weaknesses" of the science.
    

    The IPCC provides very good coverage of all the research – and is not afraid of mentioning the gaps that exist.

    True, but those gaps aren't what you think they are.
    

    The information available can not discount the effects of natural forcing. Volcanoes and the solar irradiance.

    The IPCC says otherwise:
    

    The temporal evolution estimates indicate that the net natural forcing (solar plus stratospheric aerosols from volcanic eruptions) has been negative over the past two and possibly even the past four decades. In contrast, the positive forcing by well-mixed greenhouse gases has increased rapidly over the past four decades.

    In other words, recent warming is due to greenhouse gases, not the Sun or volcanoes.

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 2, 2006

33. I am no scientist, but I like to think I can reason. While I agree that we all could lead a more environmentally friendly life style, I do not think there is enough valid information to say we are causing global warming. I agree with the author's conclusions that the earth and our solar system has it's own set of operating rules that are far more causal than anything we do.
    I also agree that the real reasons for this apparent concern for the planet is driven by power, prestige and MONEY! The Democrats can't get the common man to vote for them, so they try to scare everyone into thinking they have answers to this and every other fear issue. We just aren't that dumb! Thank God!

    Comment by bruce | August 2, 2006

34. I'd like to revisit a few points from Dr. Phil:
    

    …pretend that volcanoes and other natural processes don’t contribute infinitely more “global-warming” material to the planet than man…

    Ignoring the error about volcanoes, it is certainly true that total greenhouse gas emissions from all natural sources combined are larger than man-made emissions. However, it's irrelevant. Before the industrial revolution, natural greenhouse sources and syncs were largely in equilibrium. Today, human emissions and land-use changes have disrupted that equilibrium and caused the rise in carbon dioxide concentration.

    Next:
    

    …ignore that the earth had cooled and heated dramatically before man even walked its surface…

    True, but also irrelevant. Conditions were different in those earlier epochs. Back then, there were not six billion people digging up old carbon and pumping it into the atmosphere. You cannot ham-handedly draw parallels between then and now. Different circumstances demand different explanations.
    

    Just how was that temperature taken in 1900 — what instruments were used, how widely were they disbursed, how accurate were the readings?

    If you're really interested, check out NOAA's Global Historical Climatology Network. The references at the bottom should answer many of your questions.
    

    If the baseline is inaccurate, the conclusions about warming, or cooling, are equally bogus.

    Global warming deniers tend to think that any margin of error cuts their way. If there's doubt, it must mean there's no warming. In fact, it could mean that the warming has been even greater than reported.
    

    I didn’t even get into the whole other issue of the flawed computer analyses that predict the world’s temperature in 2152, but can’t tell us what it will be in 2009. But with a margin of error of 1-9 degrees, who needs accurate models?

    That margin of error isn't really a margin of error. It's a range of possibilities. If we cut our emissions drastically, we might be on the low end of the range. If China digs up and burns every chunk of coal it can find, we could be on the high side. Human activities are the biggest unknown and the major reason for that large range.

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 2, 2006

35. bruce writes:
    

    I also agree that the real reasons for this apparent concern for the planet is driven by power, prestige and MONEY!

    I'm concerned for the planet and I have none of those things.

    The Democrats can’t get the common man to vote for them, so they try to scare everyone into thinking they have answers to this and every other fear issue. We just aren’t that dumb! Thank God!

    Yeah, instead you abandon science and carry water for the oil industry. Genius!

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 2, 2006

36. Here's one more link I'd like to highlight for Dr. Phil: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ghcn/ghcnqc.html

    This briefly explains the GHCN's quality control process.

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 2, 2006

37. FROM THE AUTHOR: A CLARIFICATION

    A friend of mine called who was following this exchange and suggested that I clarify a point I made in my last post. Since the purpose of this exercise is to produce clarity about an issue even if we cannot agree about a specific set of conclusions, please indulge me for a moment as I address my friend's point.

    I had originally combined my first and second points in my last post. But when I separated them to shorten the paragraphs and took out a key sentence, they lost a little of their meaning. So let me restate and expand upon what I was trying to convey.

    I originally spoke about "volcanoes and other natural processes" that contribute global-warming material to the planet. Mr. Provost replied with a sentence fragment that talked about one volcano, and acknowledged no other factors contributing to CO2. I wanted both to point him to Footnote 2, which identifies additional sources of naturally-occurring CO2 emissions, and challenge the fact that he downplayed the amount of volcanic activity across the planet (above ground and undersea). I thought his selective use of data was a bit disingenous.

    You'll note that the footnote I quoted shows a different figure for human CO2 generation. The reason we all have to be clear about what we're saying, and define the basepoints from which we draw our conclusions, is that depending upon what you measure — and when you measure it — the "data" can be quite different.

    We live on a dynamic, changing planet. 2005 was a year of exceptionally high hurricane activity. By contrast, the 2006 hurricane season is already underway, and there has been relatively little storm activity. A "trend" in hurricane activity would be different if we start our analysis in 2005 instead of 2006, so where one begins an analysis can often influence the conclusions we draw from it. [As a side note, the difference between 2005 and 2006 hurricane activity points to another caution in looking at only a short period of time to draw a conclusion. If global warming "caused" the rise in hurricane activity as some contend, then it should still be fairly significant today. It isn't, because the measure of time to look at changes in the Earth isn't 1 year, or 10, or 100, or even 1000. Maybe, after 10 centuries, the "trend" will be clear --- but don't tell that to the people of Middle Ages England who went through a mini-ice age long after the glaciers had supposedly retreated].

    The same caution is true when examining volcanic activity, as well as human CO2 generation. These aren't fixed" numbers — they fluctuate (sometime dramatically) over years, decades, centuries, and eons. We need to be careful about making long term projections from short term data. And when we do make predictions, we need to account for all possible variables, not just the politically expedient ones. And when we honestly account for these variables, we need to ask similar, honest questions about how accurate the data is.

    There was no worldwide system of data collection in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Instead, there were places here and there where weather records were kept. And where these records were kept, the equipment used to collect the data was not always state-of-the-art, and relied on human interpretations of notches on a glass tube instead of digital readouts. This isn't a condemnation of the scientific process; its just a simple statement of fact. It means that we need to understand the data for what it was, and not assign it levels of accuracy or comprehensiveness that didn't exist.

    I tried to show in my paper that many global warming conclusions are based on starting points that examine slices of a picture and extrapolate global figures from that data. Again, there is nothing intrinsically nefarious about this. If the only continuous data you have is for 1842-2006 is from Arizona, then the people who live in Maine might detect a slightly different trend in the average rainfall predictions derived from this data.

    These temperature recordings which give us extrapolated (not actual) global temperature figures do not give us a firm number to "know" just "how much" the Earth's temperature has supposedly warmed over the last 100 years. They represent an educated guess based on the best available data of the time.

    Leaving the important issue of accuracy aside, if these numbers are honestly gathered and utilized, we have a theoretical starting point from which to begin making some cautious judgments. But we should never lose sight of the fact that they are "best guesses" based on available data, not rock solid fixed numbers like we can get closer to today.

    When global warming alarmists cherry pick the 10 or so coldest years from the century-old data to use as their starting point, the baseline number they give us is still a "guess," but it is no longer a "best guess", since the data was deliberately manipulated to help prove a pre-conceived point or support an outside, hidden agenda.

    This is what I object to most strongly, whether I see it in the historic record, or watch an honestly-posed question get twisted so that only half of the subject matter is addressed, while other information is suppressed about underwater and above surface volcanoes. Volcanoes spew more than CO2 and sulfer dioxide. They also emit heat. If there are a sufficient number of undersea volcanos in a given year, how does their heat affect the average ocean temperature, if at all? I don't know for sure, but it's another variable that I think should be taken into consideration if we're talking about the "warming ocean" as well as the warming air.

    In a search for truth, questions like the ones I posed should not be automatically dismissed out of hand, or distorted to make an extraneous side-point while avoiding the central issue. I don't want my criticisms of Mr. Provost to be misconstrued as a personal attack. I know nothing of his character, his motives, or his intentions. I can only judge the quality of his response, and it's this issue I am speaking to.

    Regards,

    Phil

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 2, 2006

38. Bill Provost,

    Oh, NOW I get it. People are the problem. 4-5 billion people and their activities are causing global warming. If it weren't for people, the earth would be in relative equilibrium.

    So the regular activities of spurting volcanos, flatuating cows, decomposing forests, and forest fires are natural, and the natural activities of humans are not natural. Human beings are outside the equation? Human beings are not part of nature, they are separate? How might that be?

    The inescapable conclusion is that humankind needs to be wiped off the face of the planet so that nature can return to its natural equilibrium. So when the earth heats and cools due to "natural" causes, and species die off or overpopulate, well, at least it will be natural.

    What a bizarre world view you have.

    Comment by Rich Sherlock | August 2, 2006

39. FROM THE AUTHOR — For Mr. Provost

    Bill, in all honesty, I know it's eating at you to have the notion of Global Warming challenged, but throwing links up without addressing the methodological issues I've raised is just going to chew up a lot of bandwidth. No one is saying that NOAA isn't a fine organization, or that modern data collection efforts aren't first-rate. But there's only so many ways we can tell you that that's not the central issue. Painting a termite-infested wall with $100/gallon Latex doesn't give you the best paint job in town. It gives you a shakey foundation covered over with $100 latex.

    But to a more important point. No one is calling you names, so it isn't necessary for you to insult other people. We are challenging the substance of what you say, however. That's what an intellectual debate is all about. I'm sorry if you think a challenge to your hypothesis requires a gratuitous personal insult, but I don't intend to rise to the occasion, which is why I continue to address you respectfully even though you will not accord me the same professional courtesy, and give others gratuitous nicknames or insult their intelligence.

    A little humor is good now and then, but there's a difference between making fun of liberal ideas and/or Liberal icons (like Ted Kennedy and Dan Rather), or scewering phony-environmantalist organizations like the NRDC to expose them for what they are, and the need to insult someone participating in this discussion because you don't agree with them by calling them a derisive term. We're not ten years old, and this is supposed to be a discussion forum, not an Air America program.

    I'm going to ask the moderator to block any future submission from individuals who cannot express their thoughts in a professional manner. It's okay to drive a point home solidly. And it's okay to point out duplicity or hypocrisy if you find it, like I did in reviewing the NRDC. But unless you know for a fact that Bruce is an apologist for Big Oil who is only making his statements to please his bosses, I suggest that you exercise a little more professional restraint and treat him with the same respect you expect us to show others who disagree with our points.

    Don't take the easy path of demonizing your opponents. If you have a valid point, people will come around to your position. Just try to let the point stand on its own merits without insulting the people who don't automatically agree with you.

    Regards,

    Phil

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 2, 2006

40. Easy Bill, Easy. You seem confident (if not just convinced) that your sources and your science is superior, and that you are 'right' that it's all about greenhouse gasses and evil wicked dirty man. By the way- if you're not aware at how much of that sentiment oozes out of your writing (yes, even without using that many words) perhaps you should know.

    I don't think any sensible Conservative (Republican or otherwise) would disagree with using 'alternate/ alternative fuels' if indeed they can be produced in a fairly efficient manner, and IF they produce comparable power when used [primarily in internal combustion engines]. Problem is few fuels are as economical to produce WHILE providing as much energy per part as GASOLINE, other problem; most all liquid fuels have some 'problem':

    Diesel: Sulfur in the fuel. Sulfur causes corrosion in vehicles, acid rain and higher emissions of soot from [the vehicle/ machine's] exhaust pipe.

    Biodiesel: Only becomes economically-feasible when regular oil prices exceed $80 per barrel. Also, it gives about 10% less energy (that means its less powerful!) than ordinary diesel.

    Butanol: Energy content 10% lower than gasoline. Better than either of it's cousins, but still far less potent than GASOLINE
    Gasoline has a low flash point and a high ignition temperature. Butanol is the opposite- not good. It's production causes extremely FOUL ODORs (that's polluiton too right?) and would cost consumers about 8 bucks a gallon and that's PRE-EPA driven taxes!!!

    Methanol: High toxicity. Low energy density (a 'weak' fuel).

    Ethanol: Can be made by ethylene hydration (ethylene is/ still a fossil derivitive), sort of defeats the Green Movement's purpose to eliminate them ALL… And fermentation. Relative production costs of fermented ethanol (E85) versus straight up GASOLINE, along with the rather high amounts of energy used/ REQUIRED to facilitate the fermentation (and purification) in the first place tend to make it's potential benefit vanish. IT's a WASH. Yeah? Also; LOW energy density (means you'd need to use more to get the same job done- how's that for enviro-Mental?)

    Hydrogen: Serious production problems that AGAIN involve [evil wicked] fossil fuels, FINDING/ INVENTING and then coupling a durable, cost effective [fuel] Cell that can be used safely with common road conditions (bumps/ fender benders), conversion of older vehicles is impractical, and storage and handling are difficdult and dangerous. Liquid hydrogen; DECADES away.

    Nucular (that's right Webster's includes just like that [too]*): Passively Safe reactors and MASSIVE improvements technology since'79's 3 M I, as well as Chernobyl make it an excellent way to go (well at least for the prodcution of electricity anyway), even the liberal/ socialist French approve getting more than 70% of the electrical power this way- they've had not 'incidents'… BUT ALAS, enviro-Mentalist oppose the use of this NON FOSSIL FUEL TOO.
    *Heroes of the left Carter Clinton and yes (gasp) evn JFK all preferred this version, just like ol' W! How'bout them apples!?

    Fireflies and Windmills all the way baby (oops, PETA will preclude the harvesting/farming of the former though…I guess we could rub two sticks together…),

    In the mean time-

    Mr. 'the-rest-is-just-a-political-rant-but-i-don't-want-to-scale-the-HARD-WALL-of-fuel-production-in-modern-day-1st-world-society-REALITY':

    Going green, completly green, completely ’sustainable and renewable’… that's a farce isn't it? Yes. A farce. It is preposterous; nothing but enviro-Mental horseplay of monstrous proportions.

    When China foregoes the invitation sent by Premier Gore and Prime Minister Kerry (don't forget Secretary of Green Hillary) to ‘join along in the peaches & cream movement of getting back to the way nature intended’,
    and then launches a massive military attack by air, land, and sea to TAKE OVER and subjugate the erstwhile Superpower….

    How ironic it will be when they enslave the municipal corporation of LovingTreeHugging and force them to work
    in the booming boiler rooms and churning coal chambers of Industrialization…

    You gonna throw edamame at them, make em stop? Poke the treads of their tanks with cattail’s? Pepper them with carraway seeds?

    When the Islamic jihadees come to dominate you, slaughter you in your WEAKENED state of Green, you’ll want to smoke the
    peace pipe and they’ll put your head on stake. Really.

    What REALLY to do about all the dreaded war that will inevitably come whence you truly do bEAT ALL of your swords (modern military infrastructure) into plow shears and your spears (modern industrial/ technological complex) into pruning hooks?

    Hey- can we think in terms of a 'Redneck' here for a minute?

    What if we think of a similar sort of name/ term for all those who want to go Green, just get silly in the night and
    go absolutely crazy-Green… How about we call'em Greenbacks?

    But wait-that term already refers to something else (DOLLAR bills baby) that most- er, umm- Greenbacks despise as an accoutrement of Capitalism (gasp)! What WILL we do?

    Comment by Paul Joseph | August 2, 2006

41. Dr. Phil writes:

    I originally spoke about “volcanoes and other natural processes” that contribute global-warming material to the planet. Mr. Provost replied with a sentence fragment that talked about one volcano, and acknowledged no other factors contributing to CO2.

    If you refer to post #33, you'll see that I've already addressed that point.

    I thought his selective use of data was a bit disingenous.

    I had the exact same thought about you. The total amount of greenhouse gases cycled through the system matters less than the balance between sources and sinks. Human activities have upset that balance resulting in a steady rise in greenhouse gases. If you're going to argue that volcanoes are erupting more today than they did 150 years ago, that is a testable hypothesis. I don't believe it will turn out well for your argument.

    I specifically called out the error on volcanic contributions because it is a frequent global-warming denier claim. I believe Rush Limbaugh said it years ago and every conservative seems to believe it even though the USGS says it is flat wrong.

    There was no worldwide system of data collection in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Instead, there were places here and there where weather records were kept. And where these records were kept, the equipment used to collect the data was not always state-of-the-art, and relied on human interpretations of notches on a glass tube instead of digital readouts. This isn’t a condemnation of the scientific process; its just a simple statement of fact. It means that we need to understand the data for what it was, and not assign it levels of accuracy or comprehensiveness that didn’t exist.

    I've already provided you with a link to NOAA's GHCN project that explains their quality control process. If you think you know better than NOAA how to properly analyze that data, I'm sure they would love to hear about it.

    These temperature recordings which give us extrapolated (not actual) global temperature figures do not give us a firm number to “know” just “how much” the Earth’s temperature has supposedly warmed over the last 100 years. They represent an educated guess based on the best available data of the time.

    Those estimates have error bars associated with them. The IPCC says global average surface temperature has risen 0.6C +/-0.15C. If you think the error bars should be greater than +/-0.15C, you're free to explain to professional climatologists why you think they're wrong but you'll need to show your work and publish it in the peer-reviewed literature. "Intellectual Conservative" doesn't count.

    When global warming alarmists cherry pick the 10 or so coldest years from the century-old data to use as their starting point…

    You should provide some evidence to substantiate that charge.

    Volcanoes spew more than CO2 and sulfer dioxide. They also emit heat. If there are a sufficient number of undersea volcanos in a given year, how does their heat affect the average ocean temperature, if at all? I don’t know for sure, but it’s another variable that I think should be taken into consideration if we’re talking about the “warming ocean” as well as the warming air.

    Perhaps it already has been considered. Why do you assume that it hasn't and then further assume that this is evidence of "alarmists" pushing "an outside, hidden agenda?" Basically, you present me with two options: 1) Climate scientists are incompetent hacks; or 2) You need to hit the books a little harder. Of the two, the latter seems more likely.

    In a search for truth, questions like the ones I posed should not be automatically dismissed out of hand…

    I agree.

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 2, 2006

42. Rich Sherlock writes:

    Oh, NOW I get it. People are the problem. 4-5 billion people and their activities are causing global warming. If it weren’t for people, the earth would be in relative equilibrium.

    You've almost got it. Those 4-5 billion people could return the carbon cycle to relative equilibrium if they (we) adopted new, less carbon-intensive technologies. But, basically, if it weren't for 4-5 billion people digging up old carbon and pumping it into the atmosphere, the natural sources and sinks would be in relative equilibrium.

    So the regular activities of spurting volcanos, flatuating cows, decomposing forests, and forest fires are natural, and the natural activities of humans are not natural.

    I have little patience for this argument. Humans can foresee the consequences of their actions and make moral decisions about them in ways volcanoes and flatulating cows cannot. We are not blind forces of nature and should be held to higher standards of behavior.

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 2, 2006

43. Dr. Phil writes:

    Bill, in all honesty, I know it’s eating at you to have the notion of Global Warming challenged…

    No, I'm having fun. This isn't really a challenge to global warming. The scientific community is not quaking in its boots over your article.

    but throwing links up without addressing the methodological issues I’ve raised is just going to chew up a lot of bandwidth.

    It would chew up even more bandwidth for me to read the professional literature in this forum.

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 2, 2006

44. I missed post #30. I've already addressed some of its points but here are a few I missed:

    Dr. Phil writes:

    The second rule is, please don’t insult my, or anyone else’s intelligence, by citing the CO2 output from ONE volcano, and pretend that nothing else exists.

    I didn't. If you reread the USGS quote, it talks about ALL volcanoes. It uses Kilauea merely as a yardstick. Here it is again for your reading convenience:

    Human activities release more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes–the equivalent of nearly 17,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 13.2 million tonnes/year)!

    Next point:

    …you also ignored the sentences directly above your own quote in the source you cited: “Comparison of CO2 emissions from volcanoes vs. human activities: Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1992). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 22 billion tonnes per year (24 billion tons)”. You are entitled to your own opinion, Sir, but not your own facts.

    Umm… I don't see how that helps your argument. Twenty-two billion tonnes of man-made greenhouse gases are still much greater than 130-230 million tonnes from volcanoes. "Billion" is more than "million."

    Comment by Bill Provost | August 2, 2006

45. FROM THE AUTHOR

    Friend of USA

    Sorry it took me a while to respond to your last post.

    Drop me an email if you get a chance so I can share a couple of thoughts with you off line. Concidentally, my Mom was born in Alberta.

    Take care,

    Phil

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 2, 2006

46. Sounds like Paul Joseph is singing the tune, "(If) it ain't long before it's gone, might as well have a good time!" Conservation and balance SHOULD be desirable goals in any culture. WE create the vast majority of of our own problems because we have no sense of balance and no real will to conserve. I agree with Zara's comments. I think we're all living in comfort zones (material, emotional, psychological, religious) that we'll do ANYTHING to defend. We're addicted to ever increasing standards of living, and behave as if those "standards" are exclusively material in nature. They are not. (If you actually "THINK" about this you'll know what I'm talking about!) Greater wealth such as that generated by the fossil fuel industry doesn't mean a higher standard of living. The reality of human caused global warming is rejected by the narrow-minded and the short-sighted (with a lot of greed thrown in) precisely because it is "An Inconvenient Truth."

    As far as what to do about it? It has to begin with honesty, acknowledgment and GENUINE leadership.

    Comment by John Ross | August 3, 2006

47. Using Bill Provost's logic, ANY contribution by humans to global warming is unnatural. It isn't an issue of lowering our footprint by making moral choices (whatever moral means). We all pollute, it's just a matter of degree, isn't it? So it is incumbent on Mr. Provost to tell us where he draws the line between moral pollution at acceptable levels, and immoral pollution.

    You know, it is refreshing actually to hear leftists talk about self control and morality. But I wonder, could we apply these same precepts to human sexual behavior, or we still animals at the mercy of our passions in this realm?

    Comment by mountain man | August 3, 2006

48. Regarding climate change, Bill Provost says: “conservatives fundamentally don’t understand the science.” Is there a overgeneralization here?

    Surely some scientists (do they need to be politically conservative?) exist who understand climatology and who are willing to offer salient criticisms of those who claim that global warming is occurring right now, that it is alarming, and that the CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels is a significant contributing cause of the alleged global warming. Provost’s argument is false if only one “conservative climate scientist” can be found. But if a “conservative” one cannot be found (highly unlikely), would a skeptical one do as well, if the upshot is to refute the claims of PC global warming believers? Probably so.

    First, the community of scientists who study the causes and extent of global climate change is rather small and among them there is apparently no consensus. In fact there is more than a tiny cadre who are skeptical. Among them is Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia. “Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change” (Harris, June 12, 2006 ).

    Second, Professor Tim Patterson claims, ‘There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. . . .’ “‘On the basis of this evidence [Patterson asks], how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming’" (Harris)?

    If we are to believe Bill Provost, neither Cook nor Patterson “understands the science.” And by extension, any conservative who accords them credibility also fails to understand the science. Why does this position seem arrogant? (Or should I say seem like “baloney,” to use Provost’s dismissive term?)

    Phillip Jackson asks two basic questions in his substantive article:

    1. Q. Does “global warming” exist?

    2. Q. If 20th century global warming could be shown to exist, would man be the cause of it?

    Jackson provides data and analysis to show why it is reasonable to be skeptical of the answers given by proponents of the current global warming enthusiasts. The disagreement about data collection and interpretation among climate scientists is reflected in discussions in forums such as this, where, removed from the vitriol of personal attacks or political gamesmanship, sweet reason can prevail.

    I am looking forward to Phillip Jackson’s next article.

    Comment by Bill White | August 3, 2006

49. It's great to see the cockroaches of enviro-fanaticism scatter when the good Doctor shines some light on the putrid argument they were feasting on. Great job, Doc!

    Comment by Joseph | August 4, 2006

50. FROM THE AUTHOR — NOTE TO EVERYONE REGARDING BILL PROVOST

    Mr. Provost alerted me to a posting he will be placing on [Yahoo! global warming group] about this subject which he believes will give him a better opportunity to express his views. I'm not sure when this will happen, but I told him as a courtesy I have no problem letting you folks know so he can outline his position in a way that he feels will best communicate the substance of his ideas. I'd hoped that he would post his reply in this forum as I earlier suggested, but I respect the fact that he feels more comfortable using a different venue.

    I'm not quite sure if he's going critique my paper, go in new directions of his own, or do a combination of both. If he does refer to my essay, I'm certain he's an honorable enough guy to tell his audience where to find the original article and suggest they read it in its entirety, including the footnotes and maybe this exchange that followed, so they'll better understand any points made about it. The free exchange of ideas demands no less.

    As for me, I won't be participating in any discussion. This isn't to diminish or disregard Mr. Provost's opinions. I'm working now on another posting for IC that addresses a different subject matter. I hope to have it ready to submit soon, so I'll be concentrating my efforts there (as well as trying to pay a few bills in between postings).

    If you decide to take a look at Mr. Provost's paper, I encourage you to treat him with the same kind of dignity and respect we all ask of those participating in this forum. No personal attacks, but making fun of Liberals or Conservatives in general, or public figures on either side, is always fair game depending upon your sense of humor.

    Since I posted an article on IC I'm no different than any other public figure, so that same prohibition doesn't extend to anything anyone wants to say about me there, or here. I'm happy to let the quality of the challenge stand or fall on its own merits, both in its content and delivery. Every one has a different idea about the use of humor against public figures. Mine is very sharp, as you can tell. But I always try to tailor my satire to fit the circumstances of that case, rather than simply call Ted Kennedy a murderer every time I mention his name. The Mary Jo reference will be there when it fits the topic. Otherwise I'll just refer to his drinking, hypocrisy about windmills, and other things appropriate to that point. Forgive me if I'm belaboring this point too much, but my next paper is about the moral relativism of the Left, so surface similarities disguised as core issues just to make a point is at the forefront of my mind.

    One note for everyone though. The sum total of all I've written for public distribution on this subject is found here in my original piece and follow up remarks. A number of you have communicated with me off line to clarify a point or two. Since these were instant one-on-one messages, should anyone ever feel the need to reference them to further clarify a point they need to make here or elsewhere, my only request is that you release every word of every exchange, so as to give an accurate picture of everything that was said. Sometimes, when I think a person has a legitimate question but can't understand the way I've tried several times to communicate it, I try to put it in a simpler, less complicated way than I might otherwise. I don't say anything different in private than I do in public, but I do write very conversationally in my private messages. I know it's a little cumbersome to do it that way, but when both sides of the conversation are reported, it puts everything in its full context. And besides, it's just the decent thing to do.

    As for me, I don't release private emails with people unless I have their permission, so anyone can write me in complete confidence. I do have a manuscript I'm working on that reflects a debate with some of my Liberal friends over several years. If I ever publish or post it, I've already decided to disguise their identity (unless for some reason they don't mind and give me premission). The purpose is to show the debate and exchange of ideas, which and get very pointed at times between friends, not to focus on or ridicule a particular non-public individual.

    Just spelling out the methodology again so you can always judge the quality of my work without wondering about hidden agendas.

    By the way, I really enjoy reading some of the thoughtful pieces several of you folks have posted. I'm sure you've got ideas for a 500-1000 word posting of your own on this or other subjects. Why not give it a shot? The quality of the postings and caliber of many of the respondants is what attracted me to this site in the first place.

    Regards,

    Phil

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 4, 2006

51. Mr. Jackson,

    I agree with your conclusions but I disagree with some of your reasoning. The data I have seen indicate that solar output is fairly constant. Only recently have we been able to measure it's small energy output variations. And I see no reason why the Earth's "wobble" will affect temperature.

    Earth's albedo does affect it's temperature. And it is a far larger variable than the tiny changes due to variations in carbon dioxide levels. Also, the principle greenhouse gas is water vapor. It's affect can easily be seen by the large drop in temperature at night in dry climates compared with humid climates. But man does not control albedo or water vapor. So "global warming" activitists ignore these huge inconvenient truths and focus only ideas that support their agenda.

    Some other factors: temperatures are collected mostly in or near cities. And we know cities cause localized warming due to buildings, roads, etc. So what do we find? It's getting warmer. Duh! The Earth's surface is only 30% land and 70% water. How many temperature readings do we take over the majority of the Earth's surface? Not many compared to the reading in cities. As you point out, satellites are now capable of accurately measuring the Earth's temperature over large areas. The only problem with this data is that it does not show the same warming trend claimed by the "global warming" theorists. Another inconvenient truth to be ignored.

    Comment by Ron Brooks | August 4, 2006

52. FROM THE AUTHOR — EARTH'S WOBBLE

    Ron: Regarding your question about the Earth's wobble, I've cut and pasted below a brief synopsis below from the Center for Educational Technologies.

    Your comment gives me a chance to reiterate again what my essay is, and what is isn't. I have a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, so I'm not a natural scientist. My website gives a bit more detail on my background, but essentially I've been involved in fairly high level activities in the public and private sectors. I've never held public office, but I have been part of the inner circle for a successful congressional candidate, worked in the area of international treaties, been involved in Capitol Hill and White House policy making sessions, started non-profit and for profit companies, and as a hobby I write science fiction and lately a novel dealing with theology.

    I'm not an economist either, but one of my first jobs was to help create a political and economic support base for the construction of a new mass transit system. The campaign involved questions of ridership projections, long term debt, sales and advertising revenue, etc. Several high powered outside consulting firms with impecible credentials created the numbers. Everyone (the mayor, local press, community groups, etc.) took them as solid numbers and began to debate which type of mass system to build — light rail, heavy rail, bus, monorail.

    My job was to carry water for one of the options. So I took the supporting document home one weekend and read it thoroughly; not just the executive summary, or the tables, or the whole document. I read all of these, but I also got hold of the raw data document used to create the final numbers. The data they had appeared solid, but since the city had never had a mass transit system before they had to make certain assumptions about where to start in projecting trends from the data, what other variables might impact those projections (i.e. would car ridership increase or decrease, etc.).

    Even with a pretty solid data base, I could see that a change in assumption here, or a trend starting there instead of here, could dramatically shape the conclusions. So I began to ask "how do they know that?" I found the assumptions upon which the assumptions were based, and even saw some of the data runs that were represented as solid, but in fact had a couple of voids in key areas where data was extrapolated. So with the help of my staff I wrote a 30 page analysis of my findings, and cautioned my boss not to go too far out on a limb talking about exact costs and revenues.

    The first call I got the next day was from the Chairman of the Board who said (or rather screamed) "What the $@#!! do you think you're doing? I've got a press conference in two hours to pledge our full support to Plan A. The proponents spent two years and X million dollars collecting and crunching the numbers, and those figures were verified by another national firm! Who the hell are you to tell them they don't know what they're doing?"

    I said, basically, "the people preparing the report have used impecable methodology. They have checked and recheked their numbers, and everything fits together perfectly. But when I went and looked at the original data in key areas and saw exactly how it was collected and compiled, I found it was a solid estimate, not a solid number. Every ridership estimate, cost figure, construction timetable projection has both actual numbers, and interpolated data. This interpolation is based on some assumptions that in certain cases are tied to supposedly similar data bases (other comparable cities, for example), and in other cases require some assumptions about assumptions. I'm just cautioning you that before you state that you're behind Plan A because it will cost $X, bring in $Y, and take Z length of time, you need to know that in a couple of years some of these projections could be very far off. You, and this organization, have a reputation, and I'm just trying to give you the full picture so you can know how far out on the limb you might be going if you take the numbers as 'fairly solid', instead of as 'good estimates'."

    I just about got fired that day, but the Chairman of the Board did what I suggested. He still supported plan A, but within a reasonable framework. This pissed off a lot of other people who wanted his unqualified endorsement, and I wasn't the most popular person for a while, but a couple of years of years later the man thanked me for keeping him out of the public food fight others were tarred with when the numbers didn't work out as projected.

    I built a very successful career asking the same question over and over. It's gotten me in trouble and kept me out of trouble. But most of all it's allowed me to make informed choices about important policy matters that impact more than just me and my family.

    I've asked the same questions about Global Warming, and it's my judgment that the numbers being used to justify policy decisions are weak. Some are due to incomplete data (through no fault of their own), others are due to deliberate manipulations for political purposes. I've addressed a lot of this in my essay. Rather than debate the specifics of every single study, and every computer projection, my intent was to give all of you a way to look at issues and ask core questions (like, "how solid really is the data overall from 1900-2000?" , "Can we really know what part man contributes to assumed-global warming vs. other natural forces?", and "Why do the most vocal advocates keep saying we need such drastic policy changes"?).

    I don't want my kids to die in an overheating world. Who in their right mind would? If it's real, let's fix it. If it assumed to be real, let's try to understand just how solid that assumption is before we sign a document like the Kyoto treaty. [For those of you who have never read this document, google a few stories about what it actually says, not what advocates say it will do. Those are two entirely different questions.]

    I debated whether to use the first part of my essay to lay out the logic by which anyone should approach a subject like this, or focus on disecting the assumptions of a particular study. I didn't give you the dissection for two reasons. First, would you really want to read 50 pages of analytical analysis, or be given the "framework" to start your own search for the truth? And second, if I took study A and completely exposed its flaws (good intended flaws perhaps, but still flaws), who would that convince? The True Believers would say I simply picked a flawed study, and point me to the hundreds of others that purport to do the same thing. It would never end, and it wouldn't convince them anyway.

    I wrote this for people who have a sincere interest in trying to understand why the Left is so shrill about this issue, and why good, concerned people are so confused. I said I had a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. You have no reason to doubt me. The degree, and the school, lend authority to my comments even though I'm not a scientist. But what if I lied about this, or didn't really "lie", but left school 6 months or a year before actually receiving my degree? Say I wrote my dissertation, but never defended my candidacy? Any one of those characterizations about me would make you automatically treat my words with more or less caution, since you assume that my education is a key factor in my ability to think an issue through.

    That's all I'm asking of you, the reader. Don't automatically assume the data is solid, semi-solid, rough, distorted, etc. Ask the right question of each link in the argument that Global Warming is real, provable, growing, and can be affected by man. I've tried to give you the framework/methodology to ask the right questions yourself as you educate yourself further in this matter. I don't insist, like the True Believers, that you must accept MY interpretation.

    By the way, I received my degree in December 1981 if anyone needs to check! Now here's the Earth wobble synopsis:

    Many people tried to figure out why these "Ice Ages" happened. In the 1920's, a meteorologist named Milutin Milankovich found a possible explanation: changes in the orbit of the Earth. The basic idea is fairly simple. As you probably already know, average temperatures on the Earth depend on the Earth's distance from the Sun. If the Earth were closer to the Sun, the climate would be hotter (like Venus), and if the Earth were farther from the Sun, the Earth would be colder (like Mars). Now if the Earth were the only planet going around the Sun, then its orbit would never change and its climate would remain constant. But the Moon and other planets are also part of the Sun's family, and the gravity of each tugs slightly on the Earth as they pass nearby, causing the Earth's orbit, and also its climate, to change by tiny amounts.
    The three main orbital changes Milankovich studied are:
    1. changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit,
    2. changes in the tilt of the Earth, and
    3. the wobble of the Earth's axis.
    Each of these changes are cyclical, that is, they repeat over and over. During the cycle of any one of these three changes, the Earth tends to grow a little warmer, and then a little bit cooler. The three orbital changes are actually all happening at the same time, but the length of the cycle of each change is different. Most of the time, the heating and cooling segment of each cycle cancel each other out, giving the Earth a lukewarm climate. But sometimes they combine together to make the Earth's climate either very warm or very cold.

    http://paleoquest.cet.edu/PQorbital.html

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 4, 2006

53. Democrats/Liberals hate this country and attack on all fronts. They use the same sound bites as terrorists, helped create and defend the Soviet Bloc. If Gore and his allied kooks believed this crap, you would think that they would be the first to change their behavior, private jets, SUV's etc… Check out an Earth day event, (it takes alot of volenteers to clean up after this political sham) its' the greatest collection of Democrat kooks, they look like they need to be shaved, wiped and showered. I am one of many that left the Democratic Party, remember in the 1970' s
    when many of the same people were talking about global cooling, running out of oil by 1980, the complete deforestation of the brazilian rain forest by the year 2000, Reagan the war monger, nuclear war before 1990 etc. etc. Don' t be fooled by the Democrat Party, their aim is the destruction of the American economy.

    Comment by WILDWEST | August 4, 2006

54. Bill:

    Congratulations on getting your article up on Yahoo Groups. I’ve posted the message below at The Intellectual Conservative notifying the group. I’d appreciate if you would post the identical message from me with your group. Regards, Phil

    NOTICE TO GROUP RE: BILL PROVOST

    I wanted to let you all know that Mr. Provost has posted a critique of my essay at the link below, and I encourage you to read it.

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/globalwarming/message/11837

    I’ve asked Mr. Provost to post this entire message at his discussion site giving his readers the link to my article, since I am not a member of that group, and don’t feel that it would be appropriate for me to join:

    http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/an-even-more-inconvenient-truth-the-myth-of-man-made-global-warming/

    I welcome the honest exchange of ideas on this important subject. I don’t want to personalize this exchange by intruding into Mr. Provost’s group, but I encourage any of you who still have questions about my essay to read his analysis. I’ve stated my central thesis as succinctly as I can, and it has been supplemented with a lively exchange of comments on the Conservative Intellectual website. My original paper, combined with the additional posts I’ve made on methodology and data collection in answer to your questions, represent my points as well as I can make them.

    If Mr. Provost can refute my central themes that:

    (1) data on global warming prior to the space age consisted of incomplete worldwide information that had to be massaged and extrapolated to produce estimates of varying degrees of accuracy, as compared to the relatively precise measurements we have gotten after the 1960s,

    (2) that even 100 years of highly accurate information is not enough time to precisely gauge climate trends on Earth, and use this data to build highly reliable computer models to predict global average temperatures in the 21st century and beyond, and

    (3) that Global Warning advocates like the National Resource Defense Counsel used agenda-driven arguments to distort what accurate information we have to address the hypothesis of man-made Global Warming, and cannot show how man’s influence can be separated out from all naturally occurring climate change factors to account for any accurately measured temperature increases

    — then Mr. Provost will have done a service to advancing the search for knowledge on this issue.

    Regards,

    Phil Jackson

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 5, 2006

55. Dr. Jackson,

    I agree with your fundamental point. Due to a historical lack of reliable data, there is no way to "prove" global warming is caused by humans. There is also no way to disprove it for the exact same reason.

    In your arguments against global warming, you cite the cyclical heating and cooling of the earth over the millenia. You also aruge (correctly) that precise, reliable, climatalogical data has only existed for a few decades. You conclude that since the earth has warmed and cooled over eons and there isn't enough reliable data to prove that burning fossil fuels causes (or exacerbates) global warming, human induced global warming does not exist. That is illogical.

    The use of fossil fuels came of age in the mid to late 19th century. In relation to the age of the earth, the fossil fuel age is a blip in time. Still, fossil fuels are variable, climatelogically speaking. They didn't exist (in large measure) prior to the 19th century, they do exist in large measure now.

    To suggest that fossil fuel emissions have nothing to do with global warming is a fallacy. Again, there isn't enough reliable, time tested data to prove that.

    The question is this. We can't prove or disprove that the 150 year old variable makes an impact on the climate. The answer will come in time.

    In the meantime, I don't know if global warming is accelerated by human activity and neither do you.

    Respectfully,

    Greg in NY

    Comment by Greg in NY | August 5, 2006

56. It’s not too far off to suspect that the globe is warming because Al Gore has gotten bigger on the scale and in his bank account. Ordinarily, this is not bad for any other person, but for Gore, this is bad. This logically indicates only that he is eating more and packing up more, accumulating more to his garbage dump, hence breathing out more gas (way more), running up higher blood pressure, occupying more space, wasting more with his SUV and air travels… The best but most inconvenient truth is he really needs to quit all that to give the globe a chance to recuperate from its latest high temperatures, before it decides to fall off the cliff eventually when the four horsemen charging in…

    Comment by L.L.M. | August 5, 2006

57. FROM THE AUTHOR

    Greg: You are correct in one of your conclusions — I don't know exact part man has, or has not played in creating "global warming". I also don't know if the earth has really warmed in any significant way the last 100 years. I don't know this because the data really doesn't tell us anything conclusive. Even if we had 100, 200, 300 years of precise data, climate change happens over hundreds and thousands of years. The mini-Ice age in England in the 1300-1600s didn't show a trend toward another ice age, despite 300 years of much colder weather. There are cooling variations within heating cycles, and vice versa — all of which are caused by nature.

    Clearly man has an impact on the planet. But just how much, really? That's the principle question I posed because GW advocates start with the assumption that man's activities are making the planet warmer, and go from there. I start by asking the questions I raised again in post #53. Since we know GW occurs naturally, and dramatically, over long periods with lots of mini-fluctuations during each cycle, the only logical thing to do is understand what all the possible natural variables really are, and how they have been/are now operating, and account for them first before introducing man. See posts 50 and 51. The Earth's wobble is even a factor sometimes, but not always.

    Understanding nature and all its variables, including the sun which goes through cycles and expansions/contractions as well, is extremely difficult. Gaining this knowledge is even more difficult if scientists decide up front to focus on what man does and devote significant efforts there without similar efforts toward understanding the full complexity of nature. Knowing there are X total possible natural factors isn't the same thing as analyzing and evaluating them thoroughly. And you can't do that unless scientists really focus on understanding this complexity and then give us all good data to evaluate.

    Politics and funding drive a lot of the research direction. If you think there's a problem, you give $20 million to a study to come up with a fix. But if your problem is that God or Mother Earth or the deity of your choosing set off too many volcanos in the last 10 last years that, combined with other natural forces, are dwarfing man's contribution, you can't fix a volcano or stop vegitation from rotting. So you force industry to spend money to cut certain emissions. But if you are the National Resource Defense Council, you focus only on US factories, and exempt China. Why does only US emission matter? I discuss this in detail in my paper.

    Whether man's "corrective" actions work or not, people feel like they're "doing" something. That's nice, and good PR for someone. But good policy isn't based on feelings, it's based on evidence. But a scientist won't really focus on all the facts that might cause GW if his research grant requires him to find solutions. If the main causes are natural not man-made, you can't turn off a volcano. But you can retrofit or shut down a factory. This could be a good strategy — if it actually can have an impact, and doesn't have a significant offsetting negative elsewhere.

    Please don't take this as a criticism, but I believe you are new to the discussion, so I'm not sure if you've just dropped in or read the essay in it's entirety, since I address a lot of this there and in additional posts.

    Read my essay as a way to think when you search for the truth, not as a study that will tell you CO2 levels rose by .43 percent since 1900.

    As you lead off your comment, Humanity (because of all the politicization of the data) can't say if Global Warming is real or not. But I can say that Al Gore and others are not being honest in their approach or conclusions. They could be right, or wrong. But they aren't right just because they say they are. If both answers are equally plausible, why not just err on the side of Al Gore's argument? The answer is easy. We know he and the other activists have misrepresented their beliefs as solid facts. If you have to lie or distort to get to option A, then I want someone to take a closer look at option B to see what's being deliberately downplayed or hidden from me.

    I say man that made global warming is a "Myth" because it is stated as a fact, but it is not objectively proven. Until it is proven, or the GW advocates attach major qualifiers to that allegedly-factual claim, I stand by that characterization.

    Regards,

    Phil

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 6, 2006

58. I am a mathematician. I was in a conference at the end of June and spoke
    with several mathematicians who work on problems related to global warming.
    I would like to say the following:

    1) Do not confuse weather prediction and global warming studies. Global
    warming is about energy balance equations, they are hard to analyse, but
    are far easier to manage than weather prediction. In particular do not
    confuse local temperature change with average global temperatures.

    2) The greenhouse effect of the atmosphere is real and IS NOT DISPUTED BY
    ANY QUALIFIED SCIENTIST. Without the atmosphere the average earth
    temperature would be -18 degrees C (-4 degrees Fahrenheit) rather than 14
    degrees C (57 degrees Fahrenheit).

    3) Combustion of fossil fuels is changing the composition of the atmosphere,
    notably adding CO2 which is a greenhouse gas. No serious scientist
    disputes this either. It is very naive to think that changing the
    composition of the atmosphere will have no effect on the earth's energy
    balance.

    4) The consensus among my colleagues is that human activities ARE warming
    the earth. In fact one flatly stated that all qualified remaining global
    warming skeptics were being paid by the fossil fuel industries to obtain
    their results.

    Some people argue against making any economic sacrifice to avert global
    warming. To them I would like to make 2 points:

    1) Currently the cheapest form of energy is the negawatt. At current energy
    prices there are many many energy conserving investments with a return
    of at least 5% per year. For example I am 50 years old and my primary
    form of transportation is a bicycle (I ride at least 3,000 miles/year).
    If more people rode bicycles not only would we save energy, but we could
    substantially reduce health care costs. I know an architect (with an
    engineering degree) who can design buildings which consume 30% to 50%
    less energy than standard buildings. The extra building cost is usually
    amortized in less than 5 years. I could go on, there are many sites on
    the web dedicated to energy efficiency those interested will find lots of
    ideas. Economic hardship from policies encouraging building efficiency and
    cycling would be incurred almost exclusively by the automobile and fossil
    fuel industries, the overall economy would benifit.

    2) When spending money to reduce a threat there are 2 key things one must
    estimate: the probability of the threat occurring and the hardship that
    the threat will inflict. For example before invading Iraq the Bush
    administration estimated that there was a high probability that Saddam
    Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction in the Gulf region causing
    much hardship on the US economy. To avert this threat we have spent over
    $300 billion (to secure a country with a population of 25 million, $12,000 per
    capita). If the author of the above piece is wrong, what are the risks?
    If you talk to climatologists and biologists, you will discover that the
    risks could be far more serious than anything Saddam Hussein could have
    accomplished. Not having a contingency plan for global warming is a very
    serious security lapse.

    Comment by Ian | August 9, 2006

59. This is a good read: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-09-gore-green_x.htm

    Comment by L.L.M. | August 10, 2006

60. Ian, here are two sites where you can find that some serious climate scientists are skeptical about man-made global warming as a serious threat to the environment.

    1. Article discussing the science and the politics

    http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCommentary.asp?Page=\Commentary\archive\200412\COM20041202d.html

    2. Charts on CO2 and water vapor

    http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

    Comment by Bill White | August 10, 2006

61. Ian

    I appreciate your comments. I'm in my 50's myself too. I can see that this is an issue of importance to you, but as I read your comments, it wasn't at all apparent to me that you actually even read my article, other than a paragraph here and there. Otherwise I don't think you would have raised certain issues I fully addressed, or would have made some of the statements you did.

    I'm a political scientist, not a natural scientist. Unlike your colleagues who think that people like me are just apologists for big oil, I've actually been involved in policy making at the national and international level. And before you jump to conclusions, Clinton was in office and my firm was Democratic. Some of the other posts I've made explain about that.

    Please have a look at my section on the National Resource Defense Council. This is how Global Warming activists use the data you referred to to make the policy that, if I question, I am automatically assumed to be ignorant about science, or on the take, or want to see the world destroyed.

    I do know the difference between predicting the weather and global climate change. The illustration I quoted was from NASA to make a point about predictions. You'll see that I spent 90% of the article talking about the dishonest way extrapolated or interpreted data is being treated as precise, and questioning how long a time we need to establish a "trend" before making drastic policy changes to "correct" this trend. (again, read the entire section on Money, Power and Prestige) These are legitimate questions, and should be easy for you to knock down in another reply.

    1A. If the climate change data gathered before the 1970s is as useful and solid as the data collected after advent of the space age, then why are we spending so much money on a worldwide network of ground and space-based collection systems to gather current data? Why not just go back to the collection system in say, 1905?

    1B. Could it be that the data isn't as ACCURATE as it is today? And as a mathematician, if I give you about 40 years of precise data, and a couple of hundred years of anicdotal data, can you tell me why I should assume that the global warming baseline figures you use today are accurate enough to KNOW with any degree of CERTAINTY just how much warming actually occurred, or will occur over the next 100 years?

    You can't say the data is just fine in 1B, and then argue that we need better equipent and coverage than we had prior to the 70s. They are not logically consistent. Holding the two positions simultaneously ARE understandable, however, if you start with the assumption that the data is good (see my post #51), and that conclusions are honestly drawn from it.

    You talk about probabilities and contingency plans and riding bycycles and alternative energy sources. Before I dramatically (or even slightly) change the US economic system to cure man-made global warming, do you think it's a rude question to ask someone to tell me how man (vs. other natural forces) caused it? I don't want the theory that our factories and cars, etc. do it. I want to know precisely (or even within 1 standard deviation) what nature contributed collectively for all years 1850-200, and what man contributed each year, and then factor in such things as the natural changes that occur in the sun. Then I'll know two things. Exactly (or within, say, the same level of predictability as a statistically significant poll) (1) how warm the earth really got. And (2) What part man played.

    You can't answer these questions because we don't know. But you want me to accept the fact that man is responsible anyway. You have started with a conclusion rather than a hypothesis.

    I started with a question: Just how do we know that? I showed that there is no way the data can be accurate enough to make any solid claim. And I showed you in the essay you haven't read why these claims are being portrayed anyway as facts upon which to make policy.

    If you really believe that man has caused global warming, then why aren't you outraged that China and the rest of the third world are exempt from stopping their greenhouse gas emissions? Before you answer, look at China's economic development from 1995-2005, not 1950-1994. It's not the same picture — and one of the reasons gas is over $3.00/gallon. It's in my discussion about the NRDC.

    Which brings up another small point about your predictive ability. What were climactic conditions from, say, 1300-1600? If you had 300 years of rock solid data during this period, what you have predicted the global temperature to be in 1700? Do you even have a clue why I'm asking you this question?

    Why is it that a political scientists has to keep pointing out the fact to natural scientists that the Earth is 4 billion years old, and even if I have exact data on climate changes for 200 years, it's a fart in a windstorm.

    And why do non-scientists like me have to keep asking scientists to at least give me a small hint how you know with any degree of certainty that MAN is absolutely, positively unmistakably causing whatever climate changes you detect from a century or so of estimated data that uses a deliberately colder than normal starting point as it's baseline?

    I'm assuming you can knock down these issues 1-2-3, so I am prepared to concede the point if you can. But don't tell me something is X because that's the last number that came out of the computer, and your methodology was flawless, but you had to use incomplete data taken over a geologically minescule period of time to arrive at it. And If I don't accept your colleague's consensus as as fact about how policy is actually made because someone saw it done that way once on The West Wing, then we've got to do something NOW before it's all too late. I've still got my parka from the 1970s to guard against the coming ice age.

    Inject a little honesty into your own thought process first by actually reading the article you dispute instead of the last line. Start talking to a few other "qualified scientists" who actually look for an answer to a question first, before assuming the conclusion is real that man has created current global warming, which can be measured accurrately enough over a long enough time period to state with the certainty you have. And by the way, we can make up for some of waste in Iraq you point outby scrapping the current data gathering system we have in place and go back to vacuum tubes filled with mercury in my neighbor's back yard, because that's the data base you think gives you a solid enough number to state your claims without reservation.

    I'm happy to reply to any of the substance of my paper, but unless you're prepared to read it first, and the posts that follow, and respond to the real issues I've raised, I'm going to have another typical exchange with an outraged True Believer who knows man is the cause of global warming because man was the cause of it.

    I apologize if any of this was more direct than it should have been, but almost nothing in your post had anything to do at all with my essay.

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 10, 2006

62. I recently heard that NASA announced that the polar ice caps on Mars are shrinking.
    Are our SUV's to blame for this?

    Comment by Kedd Burmeister | August 11, 2006

63. "…I recently heard that NASA announced that the polar ice caps on Mars are shrinking.
    Are our SUV’s to blame for this?…"

    yes SUVs are to blame for Mars' melting ice caps but ONLY those driven by Americans.

    Studying the wear patterns of wooden wagon wheels from 1791 to 1807 confirms this.

    Comment by Friend of USA | August 15, 2006

64. Conservative, if not Republican Americans SUV's primarily too, don't forget…

    Wagon wheels…1791-1805… That's awesome. Bloggin' with a sense of humor, nice. Love that.

    Comment by Paul Joseph | August 16, 2006

65. Ian, Greg and others on the side of global warming

    Please read the following links; then, continue below.

    > http://www.cei.org/pdf/5331.pdf
    > http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/ (greenhouse gases logarithmic – misconception regarding amount of warming)
    > http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba378/ba378.pdf (badly flawed IPCC assessment)
    > http://www.ncpa.org/studies/s157/s157.html (GW may actually improve the climate)
    > http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba494/ (Kyoto will do nothing to avert climate change)

    No one disputes the earth is currently warming up, that climate change is taking place, or that man-made gases have played any role in it. What is disputed is:

    a) that mankind's role is significant
    b) that changing our energy habits will influence climate
    c) that there is any real consensus among "scientist"
    d) that any substantial evidence exists supporting anthropomorphic GW
    e) that the consequences of doing nothing make action vital or prudent
    f) that GW is other than a political ploy for advancing objectives having no bearing on climate and having everything to do with power (who has it)

    Why might GW "experts", government scientists & policymakers, politicians, industry, the media, advocacy groups, and others (who ought to know) insist GW is real, is substantially proven, or too important to ignore if it weren’t really so?

    Experts: Ask yourself what would be the up-side to an environmental-expert declaring GW is a fraud. An environmental expert is someone who has labored in the field of environmental protection for a decade or more on the presumption the environment is in deep trouble. He has spent half his life defending anthropomorphic atmospheric warming, even before there was any evidence to support it. Twenty-years ago, we all signed onto this idea on the basis we couldn’t afford to be wrong. We agreed to let them start the ball rolling on the understanding, if the proof failed to materialize, we’d drop it. Things never work out that way though because, regardless of intention, something new is created that makes policy reversal impossible. Specifically, careers are begun in anticipation of a need. Initiatives have been undertaken in every country, with many ‘experts’ finding the best place for them to stake a claim was in government. Others found lucrative and prestigious positions in lobbying, universities, industry and venues tailor made to promote the GW agenda. There are few (if any) ‘experts’ in any of these venues who were recruited or encouraged to take the opposite stance; and most of those who were have been edged out or sidelined. Therefore, the only people with the competence and motivation to refute GW’s claims either have expertise considered “irrelevant” or are merely amateurs with sufficient intellect and fortitude to sift the literature and make up our own minds. That there are a lot of these who have found better reason to dispute than support GW speaks volumes more than the defense made by experts who have a vested interest in it. That people acquiesce to ‘expertise’ over proof speaks even louder. We have been conditioned to accept that expertise trumps our own good sense and any evidence we are able to gather.

    An expert is no more than someone who has spent most of his life working in a narrow field. In some fields, there is sufficient information and understanding of how things work that we can call their knowledge truly expert. An electrician is far more ‘expert’ in what he does than a climatologist in his profession, despite it taking far more specialized knowledge to do the latter than the former. The knowledge an expert climatologist has is insufficient to make predictions that are only ‘better informed’ than the rest of us can make in his specialty. The interpretation of expertise is about the same from electrician to electrician, but differs widely from climatologist to climatologist because of the relative immaturity of this field.

    EPA and the Department of Energy are two examples of government agencies tailored crafted to support catastrophe-theory as a given. The EPA, in particular, has recruited almost exclusively from among ‘scientists’ committed to the GW proposition. Concomitantly, it is GW advocating scientists who are most attracted to seek employment with EPA as a laboratory and pulpit supporting their conviction. These are people who’d be out of a job if man-made climate change were irrefutably and effectively discredited. But, it can only be discredited when those in ‘authority’ choose to grant it is. Instead, when the evidence failed to materialize or was inconclusive, the experts and scientists broadened their search for proof to include anecdotal evidence. They can be counted on to hold out until every argument is exhausted and are forced to concede. When doubters cry foul, these experts fall back on the tired and trite “dire consequences of inaction”, which the public will always concede.

    Scientists: ditto, with the proviso they are charged with finding the proof. Failing to find it, they obscure the debate in terms that leave us with the impression the evidence does indeed exist, but is elusive and impossible for mere laymen to follow. A scientist, having made a career of seeking proof only to declare the evidence isn’t there, puts himself at risk of loosing his job or rendering himself irrelevant. From a brilliant (and lucrative) career of lecturing to heads of state, media, policy think-tanks, and the like, he can look forward to life in the slow lane and at low wages.

    Policymakers (i.e., bureaucrats): these are the original “go along to get along” folks. Can you really see them bucking the trend of mainstream mythology?

    Industry: Twenty-five years ago, DuPont discovered it could make a whole lot more money supporting the ozone depletion theory than fighting it. By promoting replacement products, it has reaped far more than it ever made defending CFC’s. The lesson hasn’t been lost on other businesses, who find all kinds of profit in exploiting public anxieties. Radon, species extinction, organic foods, China syndrome, ALAR, toxic wastes, product safety, cell-phone emissions, fuel emissions, &c; some are legitimate though all are hyped. Regardless of legitimacy, we rarely hear from industry anymore in defense of products. If one product gets a bad name, companies abandon it and find something else to peddle at a higher cost justified by the need to satisfy the anxiety. The profits from selling “safeguarded” products are invariably greater than those from the original “unguarded” products.

    The Media: The media needs anxiety like no other business to sell its product. Good news does not sell. Disaster, calamity, death, injustice, crime, complaint, and slander sell. The public wants to be stimulated, even frightened; and tunes out when the news becomes too bland.

    Advocacy groups: Supposedly ‘non-profit’ advocacies are, in reality, big business. Many start out as grass-roots organizations, but quickly become vested in perpetuating the causes on which they are founded. The worst thing that can happen to them (or at least to their paid workers and executives) is that the originating problem goes away. Even if it is solved or becomes irrelevant, means must be found to keep it alive for as long as possible. Thus, we have seen an ever growing list of advocacies, few of whom fade away or fall silent. If anything, the more irrelevant the issue becomes, the shriller they become insisting it’s a matter of life and death.

    Politicians: Politicians and advocacy groups have much in common. Politicians need crises, turmoil, and rancor to get elected. Both Republicans and Democrats support environmentalism, and neither is about to upset this particular cornucopia. As money (in the form of both contributions and pork) is the lifeblood of politics, both parties can be counted on to defend GW. They may posture over the ‘right’ way of dealing with it, but neither is about to admit GW is hype.

    Time and again, we see a tendency to believe PC nonsense, to embrace it as self-evident. I have no doubt a great many people take GW as gospel. Having taken a stance, we are loath to admit having jumped the gun. The expert and intellectual are no more immune than the amateur and befuddled; and the expert is both more nimble and dedicated in its defense. Pride and greed are, therefore, conjoined the more powerfully. This is less than a conspiracy, yet more than innocent. Anyone who looks deep enough into GW understands it is among the most specious of theories, and one easily confuted as shown by the links above. Its advocates’ protestations of certainty are genuine enough, yet that same certainty would translate into skepticism were the incentives of earnings, power, and prestige reversed. If there was no easy living to be had, no enlargement of regulatory power, no voter incentive, no electrified response to opinion shaped news, no windfall profits; none of these ‘experts’ would give a fig about GW because they know in their hearts it’s a sham. A lie told long enough, loud enough, and by well positioned people becomes truth … at least until the next big lie.

    Consider, were some doctoral candidate of today, desperately seeking a dissertation topic upon which to expound, to mention atmospheric water as the largest component of green-house gases is a greater threat than fossil emissions, we can count on hundreds of ‘experts’ readily agreeing. The media will next interview the candidate, who will explain to a camera that water vapor is 50 to 200 times more abundant than CO2. The media will trigger a new hysteria citing this ‘expert’, who will gain instant stature and feel compelled to defend the media’s interpretation of his statements. Lunatics will come out of the woodwork demanding government do something to reduce atmospheric moisture. Government will create a task force to look into it and declare a consensus of scientist exists supporting the proposition (which they will). Legislation will be drafted to install gigantic floating pool-covers with which to cap the oceans to stop all evaporation. It will all make perfect sense, and be perfect nonsense.

    The only thing we do know is, if the protocols are carried out, we will spend trillions combating a trend over which we have little influence. We will squander energy, third-world countries will be delayed in development, poverty and mortality will remain higher than without, the cost of fossil fuels will be driven artificially high, and the economic impacts will fall disproportionately on those who can least afford them. Experts and policy wonks appear more concerned with padding their résumés, posturing to the hype-driven public, and scoring PC points than in taking a responsible stance on global warming.

    Comment by Bob Stapler | August 18, 2006

66. Dr Jackson,

    First I would like to thank you for reading and responding to my
    previous comment. You are right, I did not read your article in full,
    I'm sorry I couldn't make it through, and undoubtedly there are many
    important ideas addressed by the article that I missed. Your article
    had an extremely wide scope and I prefer reading more focused
    articles. If I were to comment extensively on your article I could go
    on for quite some time, for example you refer to a mini-warming period
    as a "natural cycle". What is a "natural cycle"? If you are talking
    about periodic behaviour, there are reasons for periodic behaviour which
    should be elucidated. If you are talking about a random change of state,
    there can be reasons for that as well, for example some equations have
    multiple solutions and the state can jump between either 2 stable
    solutions or a stable and unstable solution. Explaining a warming
    period as a "natural cycle" simply doesn't hold much water for me.

    I do not pretend to be a climate expert, nor do I intend to get into a
    discussion with you on the scientific evidence for or against global
    warming. I will say the following however: usually the best ideas are
    simple. I am not a fanatical believer that human activities are
    warming the planet. I DO think there is a high probability that they
    are, and so I am making a contingency plan. My belief is based on the
    following:

    1) The fact that the atmosphere effects the temperature on earth
    is evident, one needs merely check moon temperatures (-150 degrees C
    at night, 107 degrees C during the day).

    2) The nature of atmospheres effects average temperatures of planets.
    This is easily checked by comparing the average measured
    temperatures of planets, their distance from the sun, and the
    composition of their atmospheres.

    3) I talk to mathematicians who talk to experts in climatology and the
    consensus which has been building since the early 90's is that
    human activities are warming the planet. The experts do not have
    all the answers, there are phenomena which are not understood, but
    among people who study the climate for a living, the consensus is
    that the simple idea is the right one: if you add green house gases
    to the atmosphere, the planet will become warmer.

    It is quite possible that human activities are not warming the planet.
    So what should I do? What are the risks if human activity IS changing
    the planet? Well the risks are quite serious. I do not like to play
    Russian roulette so I have a contingency plan. Personally I put 4
    square meters of solar captors on my roof to heat water, I continue to
    insulate our house to reduce heating costs, I buy energy efficient
    appliances, and I continue to ride my bicycle everywhere. I am not a
    crowd follower. I grew up in the smog of Los Angeles riding my bike.
    I've never liked cars, I find them ugly, polluting, space consuming,
    and expensive. Besides which I enjoy being in good physical
    condition, and hell, I love riding my bike. All of my investments in
    energy efficiency have a return of over 5% per year at current energy
    prices (I get my money back in less than 15 years).

    You may be right, energy prices may remain at 20'th century levels and
    global temperatures may remain stable despite the change in
    composition of the atmosphere. In that case I will have made
    investments with a return of 5% when I could have done better on the
    stock market, not a major risk. But, if you are wrong, the return on
    my investments will be much higher, and my kids won't be able to come
    to me in 20 years and ask "What the hell were you thinking?"

    Cheers,

    Ian

    Comment by Ian | August 21, 2006

67. Ian:

    Thank you for the thoughtful analysis. Let me respond to some of your major points, although Bob Stapler did a really fine job addressing these details too.

    While I don't doubt your sincerity in wanting to "do something" to address a perceived problem, I ask you to step back for a moment and consider the following:

    1. The data that shows that the earth "warming" is based on incomplete, and at times deliberately manipulated information. There is a political agenda at work here that plays on the good intentions and fears of ordinary people. Mr. Stapler outlined this above, and I go into it in detail in my essay. Step back and ask a question about the experts you cited who believe that man is causing global warming. Where do they get their funding for their work? Then ask how likey they are to receive funding to help "solve" a problem if man is not the cause of it?

    As I point out above, there is a built-in vested interest to start with the conclusion that man is the cause of climate change today, because if he is not, there's no need to fund research to solve the problem. They simply took the "pollution paradigm", where man can cause an environmental problem, and tagged it onto climate study. At best, they have fallen into the same data analysis trap I indicated in post 51 above. They don't question the underlying accuracy of their data. They simply crunch the numbers. Which leads to point #2:

    2. Even if the last 300 years of climate change data was 100% accurate, it still doesn't establish a "trend". There was a mini-ice age from around 1300-1600. Yet, 400 years later we're talking about "global warming". Assuming we had the technology then that we have today, if man tried to "fix" the global cooling problem 400 years ago, he would have added to the planet's temperature — thus exacerbating a perceived problem in the 21st century. His "cure" would have made things worse.

    Moreover, the Earth is not static, so an "average" temperature measured in years or decades is meaningless. Last year we had a record number of violent hurricanes due to "global warming". This year we are way below last year's statistics in both frequency and the strength of the storms. So I ask you, which year (2005 or 2006) is "normal"? And if Global Warming caused the hurricanes last year as many media and Hollywood figures insisted, why isn't it as bad (or worse) this year? Again, we tend to look at trends in nature over the span of a single human's lifetime. This is like checking the weather on Monday from 10:02 am to 10:03 am, and projecting the weekend forecast. It's just not scientifically valid, no matter how well intended. Which leads to point #3:

    3. The impulse to "fix" a problem that is neither understood, nor even established to be a "problem", isn't helpful. It may make a person feel good because they are "doing something", but what they are doing can be harmful to the environment they are trying to save, or to the economy of the country they live in.

    The individual action you have taken is laudatory and I applaud you for it, since I am not arguing against pursuing other forms of energy or practicing conservation. But this should be an individual's choice, not a mandate. You don't want to risk making things worse by doing nothing, and I don't want to risk making things worse by doing "something" just to feel good doing it. Again, I direct you to the section on the NRDC. Why is Chinese industry exempted from the Kyoto Treaty? Are their greenhous gas emmissions magically benign? No, there is pure politics at work here, and the concern for the environment has been used to justify a political agenda.

    The "natural cycle" of the Earth I spoke about is just that — the Earth warming and cooling without any contribution from man. Different things in nature trigger these periods, and they last for differing amounts of time. This is pretty standard stuff that any climatologist would agree with, since the earth has had frequent periods of global climate change throughout its 4 billion year history.

    My point is that since climate change is "natural" (i.e. the earth's climate is not static), before man begins to try to cool down the earth (or, as we were supposed to do in the 70's when we faced a new ice age, heat it up), I think it's wise to stop and ask two questions.

    (1) What is actually causing the current "trend"? [This presumes we can actually identify the trend, and not just focus on a normal fluctuation like the mini-ice age that began 700 years ago]. And

    (2) What can man really do about it, assuming that a trend is identified? A lot of statistics get thrown around by all sides, but if you look at the assumptions and starting points of the data used to justify global warming, you'll see that they tend to overemphasize what man does, and downplay what nature contributes.

    Your impulse is to do something now, even if it is ultimately inconsequential, because you don't want to risk standing by while the climate is changed by man. I have no complaint about this, and personally congratulate you for doing what you feel best as an individual. But we need more than personal feelings to force a public policy change, and this is where I object to GW advocates who use the concern people like you have for the environment to push through their private, political agenda. Again, you need to read the section on the Natural Resources Defense Council to understand what I am saying here.

    Their political manipulations also carry unintended consequences. Because of the deliberate manipulation of "man-made" Global Warming data to serve a political agenda, many people now intuitively distrust warnings about the impact of man-made pollution on the environment. This, unlike GW, has a direct relationship to man's activities. Yet, by politicizing GW, and deceiving honest people into supporting their hidden agendas, these same advocates are causing harm to other environmental initiatives.

    Continue to do the things that you feel make life better for yourself and others, and no one will criticize you — and in fact may even emulate you. But when Al Gore says I have to support Kyoto and re-arrange my lifestyle to serve his political interests, then I do object. And, unfortunately, it makes any legitimate points they raise immediately suspect.

    I realize that you'd rather not dig through a long article on the subject, but I think a lot of your questions will be answered if you spend an hour or so going over what I've said about these issues in greater detail.

    Great talking with you.

    Regards,

    Phil

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 21, 2006

68. Note: This is a continuation of a discussion John Ross and I have had in another venue. We will continue the discussion here.

    [John Ross] Phil – I can’t prove that we are the primary cause of global warming. But you can’t prove we’re not. You’re certainly right that the hot yellow ball in the sky is heating things up and has been since the earth began. But it seems to me that most climate scientists, including many from NASA, have expressed legitimate concerns about the contribution to global warming by anthropogenic greenhouse gases. There appears to be growing consensus within the scientific community that humans CAN do something about it if we act now. Many of those who disagree work in the fossil fuel industry. Conflict of interest? I respect your opinion, but I think the wiser course is to err on the side of caution. You see, if YOU’RE right about global warming and we act anyway – all it will cost is a practical lesson in conservation, a cleaner environment and perhaps a refreshing return to simplicity. If the global warming “hysterics” are right, our failure to act will be catastrophic at a cost immeasureable.

    [Phil Jackson] John: I appreciate the honest conversation on this issue. With all due respect, though, I've got to question your reasoning on a couple of grounds.

    You base your call to action on the following logic. You say that since I can’t prove a negative (i.e. I can’t prove that man is “not not” the cause of GW), we must act as if he is, even though those who assert that man is the cause of GW can’t prove their case either. We need to do this, you contend, because if we’re wrong, the consequences would be catastrophic.

    This completely ignores the issue that global climate trends are measured in millennia, not decades. Even if we had accurate data for the last 300 years (let alone the last 100), we still wouldn’t know anything of value [there was a mini-ice age from 1300-1600]. So once again I challenge your assertion that we must “do something now” or face potentially catastrophic consequences.

    However, leaving this issue aside for the moment, I want to know if the need to act that you described is a general principle of yours.

    Substitute “abortion” for Global Warming. The courts have defined human life, in essence, as beginning at week 20. This is not a scientific judgment about “humanity”, but about “viability”. [A brain dead adult is no more capable of independent survival than a 19 week old fetus, yet we still recognize it as “human”.] An equally strong, and even more scientific case can be made for identifying “humanity” at the point of conception, as I make in my latest post "What kind of car would Jesus drive …".

    So I ask you, are you in favor of putting an immediate end to abortion based solely on this reasoning? You must admit that it is an equally urgent issue. There have been almost 50 million elective abortions in the US, so a clear “danger” to human life is manifest.

    I’m not asking for your personal opinion about abortion. [I am strongly against elective abortion, but I expressly rejected this course of action as a way to end abortion in America.]

    What I want to understand is whether the foundation of your reasoning is that potentially “catastrophic consequences” demand action in every situation even if we don’t really know whether our actions will make a difference, or whether your reasoning is limited only to GW. If it is, I’ll point to the potential acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran as well in light of their president’s statements about ridding the Middle East of Jews. There are many other policy options I could also identify that have potentially catastrophic consequences.

    My point is, that if you apply your standard to GW, then you need to apply it for other potentially catastrophic events (50 million aborted babies and counting, the possibility of nuclear war, etc.). If you wouldn’t apply it to abortion or nuclear weapons, then I must conclude that you use one standard to support decisions you want to take, and reject that same standard to oppose decisions you don’t want to take.

    Again, the purpose of this isn’t to argue whether we should or shouldn’t have elective abortion, or should or shouldn’t fight Iran. I want to understand why action is demanded for GW, and to know why it wouldn’t be demanded for abortion and Iran as well.

    It is a very slippery slope when we begin to make national policy on the basis of not proving a negative, and an even more slippery slope when we pick and choose our justifications for policy based on personal preference instead of a clearly-expressed, commonly executed standard.

    If the standard for action is arbitrary, then there is no standard — and my wishes are as equally valid as yours. This does not mean that we need to see our house engulfed in flames before we call the fire department. But we can’t wake up and dial 911 because there’s a possibility the wiring may be faulty or the crock pot might overheat, and even though we can’t see any conclusive evidence of a fire, we need to take action now (given the dire consequences of a fire) before it’s too late.

    This does not mean that you, as an individual, can’t practice eco-friendly behaviors. What I’m talking about is a collective national policy. This leads to the second issue I have with your reasoning.

    If you take personal actions that prove, ultimately, to be inconsequential, you’ve only restricted yourself. But the major changes needed to “check” man-made CO2 emissions, for example, have tremendous consequences for the economy as a whole. Again, I’ve asked you and others a number of times to explain to me why Chinese and third world CO2 emissions don’t harm the environment, but US CO2 emissions do. This is at the heart of the Kyoto Treaty, which is the world-wide blueprint for your recommended course of action. You need to re-read the analysis I did of the NRDC and tell me why that’s wrong before you reply, because the two are linked inexorably together.

    I also strongly disagree with your comment about a “growing consensus” that man is the primary cause of GW. My essay (footnotes and all) and the follow up posts show that, if anything, the consensus is moving in the other direction. For example:

    “The world's oceans cooled suddenly between 2003 and 2005, losing more than 20 percent of the global-warming heat they'd absorbed over the previous 50 years. That's a vast amount of heat, since the oceans hold 1,000 times as heat as the atmosphere. The ocean-cooling researchers say the heat was likely vented into space, since it hasn't been found stored anywhere on Earth.

    ”John Lyman, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, says the startling news of ocean cooling comes courtesy of the new ARGO ocean temperature floats being distributed worldwide. ARGOs are filling in former blank spots on the world's ocean monitoring system – and vastly narrowing our past uncertainty about sparsely measured ocean temperatures.

    ”Lyman says the discovery of the sudden ocean coolings undercuts faith in global-warming forecasts because coolings randomly interrupt the trends laid out by the global circulation models. As Lyman puts it, "’The cooling reflects interannual variability that is not well represented by a linear trend’."

    http://cheatseekingmissiles.blogspot.com/2006/08/ocean-cooling-foils-warmies-theories.html

    I’m assuming in all of this that you’re looking for answers to the question of “what to do” about Global Warming, which first requires one to understand what exactly is causing it, which first requires one to understand whether it is indeed happening. If at the end of the day the question of “what to do” is the only one that interests you, then there’s not a lot more to say. I don’t start with a conclusion and work backwards when advocating policy. If I did, my latest post would have been one line: “Abortion is wrong; end it now.”

    If I’m willing to accept the fact that we have to go through a logical proof of concept before we can implement my new policy options in an area that has already killed 50 million human beings, why is it so hard for GW advocates to at least examine the basis for their claim before insisting on a specific course of action?

    Regards,

    Phil

    Comment by Phil Jackson | August 26, 2006

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