the great global warming swindle

[AlexM]

Bah, I deleted that post before you responded. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[m_the0ry]

One of their main arguments is that there is an industry based on climate control and research and there are economic forces trying to make people believe in global warming because of their vested interest.

This seems reasonable. ...until you realize that 9 of the top 10 fortune 500 companies and a far greater number of lobbyists have a vested interest in denying global warming.

The $2trillion/year motor/oil industry makes the few billion invested in climate watch and control look like chump change.

Actually the more I consider it the more ridiculous that video seems.

[hmkpoker]

Question for Wacki:

How are the leading environmental scientists in this field predicting the negative effects of global warming will occur? Are we to anticipate a slow, gradual rise in the ocean levels, or is it supposed to happen all at once, like a big terrifying "The Day After Tomorrow" deal?

[arahant]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_...on_director%29

This is the director of the film. He also made a documentary claiming that silcone breast implants are GOOD for a woman's health.

LOL. The guy has a history of ignoring large bodies of contrary evidence, and manipulating and editing informations and interviews unfairly. He is no doubt getting paid handsomely by corporate interests. You should take everything he says with a grain of salt.

Hopefully wacki will come in and address the points raised.

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Are you aware that silicone breast implants have been approved again for use? And, that the bulk of the "science" and medical positions as to the dangers of silicone breast implants were found to be unsupportable?

It is interesting that you would use silicone breast implants to mailgn this person's character when silicone breast implants and man-caused global warming appear to have a lot in common. Could it be that he is now out in front of a second "Chicken Little" scenario and will be found right again?

NCAces

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There's a big difference between the two cases. Silicon breast implants were never deemed dangerous in any sort of scientific consensus.

But I agree that the analogy certainly doesn't help the global warming case [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img].

[Silent A]

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One of their main arguments is that there is an industry based on climate control and research and there are economic forces trying to make people believe in global warming because of their vested interest.

This seems reasonable. ...until you realize that 9 of the top 10 fortune 500 companies and a far greater number of lobbyists have a vested interest in denying global warming.

The $2trillion/year motor/oil industry makes the few billion invested in climate watch and control look like chump change.

Actually the more I consider it the more ridiculous that video seems.

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Another problem with this argument is that general scientific opinion is so one sided that you'd have to believe in a major conspiracy theory.

Researchers at major universities don't need to make up horror stories to secure funding, they'll get it anyway. It's not like climate and weather are marginal fields without obvious practical application.

I realize that being able to put a scare spin on a subject certyinly helps an individual researcher's grant application but this is just as true of other fields as well.

If there's a natural tendency for research in general to focus on artificial doomsday scenarios because of vested interests in maintinaing or increasing funding then we should see this happening in many fields. But having a massively one-sided scientific consensus on a supposedly debatable topic (never mind the claims by some deniers that climate change is a total non-issue) never happens. At least I can't think of a single example.

If these deniers want to claim a funding bias to explain the consensus they need to do a lot more than simply say that it's theoretically possible. They need to at least explain why it's happening in the climate research community but not in other fields.

[ianlippert]

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Another problem with this argument is that general scientific opinion is so one sided that you'd have to believe in a major conspiracy theory.


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There is no need to invoke some sort of conspiracy theory. I'm sure if all you read was scientific journals you would have a fairly moderate view of climate change. Sure its happening probably not going to be the disaster everyone thinks its going to be. IMO its the sensationalists that make the most money out of this. How much would Al Gores movie have grossed if he claimed "moderate temperature rise, we can probably adapt to it". How many news papers will sell on the headline "Temperatures to rise 1 degree in 100 years!!!!", its always 2-5 and they write about the consequences of the worst case scenario.

I also think that there are other mechanisms that might kick and be beneficial

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. . . a warmer planet has beneficial effects on food production. It results in longer growing seasons-more sunshine and rainfall-while summertime high temperatures change little. And a warmer planet means milder winters and fewer crop-killing frosts. . . . Infrared satellite readings show that the Earth has been getting greener since 1982, thanks apparently to increased rainfall and CO2. Worldwide, vegetative activity generally increased by 6.17 percent between 1982 and 1999-despite extended cloudiness due to the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo and other well-publicized environmental stresses. . . . When dinosaurs walked the earth (about 70 to 130 million years ago), there was from five to ten times more CO2 in the atmosphere than today. The resulting abundant plant life allowed the huge creatures to thrive. . . . Based on nearly 800 scientific observations around the world, a doubling of CO2 from present levels would improve plant productivity on average by 32 percent across species.


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There is also massive amounts of money to be made in global warming 'solutions'

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A joint British government and business statement listed on Tuesday steps needed to improve the European carbon market, but avoided the most contentious issue of how to curb utility windfall profits.

British parliamentarians last week cited research estimating that UK power companies, the highest polluting business sector, would earn 800 million pounds ($1.54 billion) a year as a result of participation in the first phase of the scheme from 2005-07.



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Just some things to think about

[The once and future king]

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I'm sure if all you read was scientific journals you would have a fairly moderate view of climate change. Sure its happening probably not going to be the disaster everyone thinks its going to be.

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Total conjecture. How can you be "sure" that "if" you read the journals the outcome would be x or y. You can only know by reading the journals.

According to the Lord Stark report (He read all the journals) the cost of Global warming will probably be at least 5% of global GDP with a worst case scenario of at least 20% if we do nothing.

[ianlippert]

I dont know if wacki just hasnt had any time to respond to the CO2 lag, but I've been reading some www.logicalscience.com and I found it on their site which led me to the link http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13 which had this to say:

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From studying all the available data (not just ice cores), the probable sequence of events at a termination goes something like this. Some (currently unknown) process causes Antarctica and the surrounding ocean to warm. This process also causes CO2 to start rising, about 800 years later. Then CO2 further warms the whole planet, because of its heat-trapping properties. This leads to even further CO2 release. So CO2 during ice ages should be thought of as a "feedback", much like the feedback that results from putting a microphone too near to a loudspeaker.



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So basically there is some probably unknown cause that starts the warming and CO2 increases it. This explanation leaves me very unsatisfied to say the least. How do we know that this unknown cause isnt whats causing both temperature and CO2 to increase? Wouldnt the CO2 compund with this cause and increase temperatures exponentially? What mechanisms stop runaway greenhouse effect? Isnt it safe to assume that this will stop our current increase in temperature too? Isnt it just a simpler explanation that the temperature increase causes CO2 increase? There is nothing in their rebuttal that refutes the temperature theory. It really seems like they are invoking an unknown cause because the data isnt fitting with their theory.

But it gets better:



If you look at the downswing of every spike, the temperature sharply decreases and the CO2 lags in decreasing by about 100K years. Which would once again imply that the decrease in temperature eases the mechanism that increase CO2, and that it takes a long time for the CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere. If CO2 causes temperature increases we would see CO2 decrease first even if there was some other initiater of the CO2 warming.

[wacki]

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Question for Wacki:

How are the leading environmental scientists in this field predicting the negative effects of global warming will occur? Are we to anticipate a slow, gradual rise in the ocean levels, or is it supposed to happen all at once, like a big terrifying "The Day After Tomorrow" deal?

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hmkpoker,

Look at this graph

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar...arge/01.17.jpg

Nice how the CO2 emissions go to zero yet the sea level keeps rising for over a 1,000 years. It's a lot like putting a block of ice in a room that's at a constant temp and waiting a few days for it to melt. When the ice sheets are several miles thick it takes a long time for them to melt. What sucks even more is that melting ice reflects exposes rock, rock absorbs more light, permafrost melts, permafrost releases methane which is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas, and the cycle continues.....

[wacki]

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I dont know if wacki just hasnt had any time to respond ....

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I am extremely short on time and simply don't have time to respond to everyone. Plus all of this stuff has been discussed countless times before.

Glad you found the link. You are reading up on the topic which is highly commendable.

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So basically there is some probably unknown cause that starts the warming and CO2 increases it. This explanation leaves me very unsatisfied to say the least.

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It WAS unknown. It's no longer unknown:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...limate-shifts/

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If CO2 causes temperature increases we would see CO2 decrease first even if there was some other initiater of the CO2 warming.

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This would assume that CO2 is the only factor. It's not. If the earth wobbles in it's orbit and the new orbit causes the earth to receive less sunlight then all the CO2 in the world isn't going to help. And that is precisely what is going on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

There are other factors as well but Milankovitch cycles and Dansgaard-Oeschger events (discussed in the realclimate link above) are the two biggest ones. I've been meaning to create a web page explaining this stuff. So pressed for time right now so I dunno when I'll get to it. You are thinking critically which is excellent. Keep up the good work.