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jack3566She Lost to Al Gore
Posted on May 16, 2008 by Mike O
He shot a movie and flew around in private jets promoting a scientific viewpoint. She saved 2,500 children, was tortured by Nazis for it, then continued the work. He was considered more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than she was. The result was Mother Nature continued the record of Peace Prize winner futility via the coldest winter in decades for much of the world.
May Irena Sendler be fondly remembered much longer than Al Gore.
Filed under: Politics
The most irresponsibly deceptive comments about the potential for global climate change are those which confuse the concepts of weather & climate. (In some cases, they merely represent confusion on the part of the commetator regarding those two concepts.)
Weather refers to short term atmospheric conditions. Climate refers to long term atmospheric patterns. It is analogous to confusing a given meal with a person’s diet. Just as last night’s pepperoni pizza is not my diet, the conditions of a single season are not the climate.
And where was this “coldest winter in decades”? I need to see data. While the Northern Tier of the Unites States got hit pretty hard, most of the US was much warmer than recent averages. Last winter was the first since I moved back to Joisey that I was unable to ice skate on my pond.
One of the aspects of global climate change will be more extreme local weather in both directions. So, while the deniers use a cold spell in a limited area as data refuting global climate change, it may in fact be data that supports the idea.
Of course, some people have already made up their minds on the issue due to political ideology (in both directions), which requires them to cherry-pick data (frequently anecdotal) to support their ideology, and to Hell with science.
As a guy who has worked in the science biz for over 3 decades, that’s a luxury I don’t enjoy. I’d get fired for the selective use of data. I’m not allowed to toss out data unless I have something called “assignable cause”. I.e., that squirrely number, I just found out the instrument was out of calibration for that run. OK, I can throw it out. Otherwise, I’m required to consider all data when making a conclusion. That often requires me to look at a data set and say “I don’t know”, the 3 scariest words in the English language to many people. To me, the are the key to knowledge, since once I’ve formed those 3 words in my mind, the 3 that typically follow are “lets find out”.
And why should the Nobel committee be castigated for failing to give your preferred candidate the prize in Gore’s year? If her claim is saving 2500 children from the Nazis, maybe she should have won it a bit sooner? I know the scientific prizes tend to lag the accomplishment, sometimes by decades, but that’s because it often takes that long for a theoretical breakthrough to be confirmed, or to see the impact of it. The Peace prizes tend to much more real time. But it’s just so much more, shall we say “convenient”, to use her as a stick to whack Al Gore.
Boy, the Gore-haters are going to be really upset when Al wins his next one, probably in biology, for alerting us to the dangers of Manbearpig.
Lamont, you might want to click on the second link above as a starting point.
They are now talking about a decade or more of cooling. The Antarctic deep sea is also growing colder and sun spot activity (lack of it) is indicating a cooling trend as well. Start there; I normally don’t go for linkstorms myself.
I worked in the sciences for 19 years myself, during which one of the first lessons I learned was to be sure of the consistancy of your measurements. And serious questions have arisen about the measurements themselves and recent instrumentality changes (during which many of the stations were relocated into ‘less natural’ environments). Only after seeing these studies did I truly start to wonder about the basis of the Global Warming argument.
In the long run, I just don’t see how people can keep arguing against environmentalism. Even if global warming isn’t going to plunge the world into doom in a decade or two, we can’t keep relying on fossil fuels, dumping garbage wherever we want, releasing chemicals into the atmosphere, and deforesting the planet without consequences. Finite resources don’t last forever.
That’s science, plain and simple.
Not arguing against environmentalism as a personal policy; it only makes sense as I’ve noted before. But doing so by massive government intervention is something entirely different; chains painted green are still chains.
I do argue against the religion that Global Warming has become. The main advocates accept no counter-evidence, always assuming evil intent. They’re acting like many of the Creationists I know.
I’d like to point out that I respond to counter evidence reasonably, with arguments and links of my own, but usually those discussions end with the repeating of the same statistics. Then, I end up reading glaringly generalized statements about how believers in Global Warming refuse counter evidence and believe purely on faith.
Alright, let me pause here give an example to illustrate:
The first link you posted clearly states that the cooling is part of the Earth’s natural cycle, but that is does “NOT” contradict the climate change panel’s findings. El Nino and La Nina, etc. will cause warming and cooling of their own, but that doesn’t have to do with global warming.
Also, your second article agrees. The trends being discussed in the article are natural trends. The Earth will cool as part of a natural process, although the general, long-term warming trend will still continue. Is this getting through? Imagine a sine wave representing the normal warming and cooling periods. Then, apply a linear, upward trend to it. The sine-wave if moving up. So, even though there will be low dips due to normal trends, the low will be ‘not as low’ and the highs will be higher.
Sorry for the comment spam. I’d just like to point out that you’ve only read the title of the articles. Sure, article 2 says “Global warming? Next decade could be cooler, says study”
Then it’s followed by
“Global warming could take a break in the next decade thanks to a natural shift in ocean circulations, although Earth’s temperature will rise as previously expected over the longer term, according to a study published on Thursday in the British journal Nature.”
How now?
Because none of that takes into account the primary factor of ‘global warming’; the solar cycles. We are entering either a minor one (normally in the 11 year range) or a major one (50-60 years). It hasn’t been determined yet. If it’s a major one; we’re looking at cooling that will massively dwarf the fractional centigrades our CO2 would be responsible (which can easily be accommodated by the biosphere, which the global warming advocates always seem to ignore).
Bottom line: Mother Nature is far smarter and more powerful that Al Gore and his minions. All they can do is screw up the laws of free economy and do more damage elsewhere. For example the wonderfully stupid concept of carbon credits, ethanol from corn, and pumping CO2 underground (yeah, let’s carbonate the aquifer!).
Ryan: I’m hardly the lone voice in opposition; here are about 31,000 more(and they hever got around to asking for my name). And trust me: a whole bunch of these have not been bought off by oil companies.
A couple questions for you, Mike:
1) Is the climate warming? Will it warm over the next century? If so how much?
2) Are increased levels of Co2 from the burning of fossil fuels contributing to the rise in temperature? To what degree?
3) How should the government treat Climate Change, if at all?
Is the earth really warming? Maybe not.
jslef, the answer to your first two questions is WE DON’T KNOW. And only the truly arrogant think they do.
The last is: not at all! If for no other reason is the historical fact that governments nearly always fail to accomplish what they set out to do. I’d like you to cite examples of things of similar scale governments have suceeded at.
Ok, it still stands that you’re accusing Global Warming ‘believers’ of believing on faith alone, while I’ve just pointed out that two of your anti-global warming ’sources’ actually claim that global warming is still continuing.
Pointing out that 30,000 people agree with you is not a strong argument either. Besides, 30,000 is far smaller than the majority of scientists who do support the theory.
“Most people claim Scientology is a sham, you know… oh wait! There are at least 55,000 scientists. I guess that means they might be correct about Psychology being a scam after all!”
As for the sunspots - sunspot activity doesn’t contradict global warming and it doesn’t mean that the Earth is “smart” and fixing itself, especially since you’re talking about the sun.
Even if we enter a 50 to 60 year cooling period but continue dumping chemicals into the atmosphere at increasingly growing rate, what happens afterwards?
Last, pointing to a book review on LewRockwell.com is hardly ‘hard evidence.’ I’m having difficultly telling if he’s using the book out of context or not, since the reviewer seems to be mostly making Libertarian arguments, not scientific ones.