the great global warming swindle

[wacki]

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Here is a 5 page rebuttal to the program:

http://www.jri.org.uk/news/Critique_...ng_Swindle.pdf

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i hope people read this, cause it sucks.

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Well I haven't watched the movie yet so I can't comment too much on the movie. There are a lot of rebuttals on the web. Goto realclimat.org and read the two entries titled "swindled". I see that the movie includes Tim Ball and anyone that references Tim Ball as a credible source needs therapy. I'll get around to watching the movie eventually. I'm just extremely pressed for time. I'm told the movie claims volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans. Is this true? If so then the movie should be put in the same category as creationism "documentaries".

[FreakDaddy]

Sponsored by Mobile and Texaco.

I haven't even looked at this yet, but I'm wondering if this is part of the supposed $35 million dis-information campaign put out by various oil and gas companies to try and discredit Gore's global warming rants.

I'd bet a nickle it is.

[Silent A]

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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.

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I don't know where you guys get the idea that "everyone thinks it's going to be a disaster". It's going to be very expensive, but no one knows how expensive.

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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.

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My conspiracy theory comment was about the fact that the vast majority of climate scientists believe climate change is happening, will continue to happen, and it's due in large part to human activities. I'm saying that any claim that this consensus represents a desire for research funds over our pest approximation of what's actually happening requires some kind of massive conspiracy theory among climate scientists. Research scientists, as a whole - not individually, are too intellectually honest for this to happen.

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

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Of course some will benefit. But everything mentioned in that quote can be either beneficial or harmful depending on where it's happening. For example, take "milder winters". True, this will produce fewer killer frosts, but it will also reduce the spring snowpacks that supply a large fraction of spring soil moisture and river streamflows. And then there's this quote:

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It results in longer growing seasons-more sunshine and rainfall-while summertime high temperatures change little.

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More sunshine and more rainfall? How can anyone argue this will generally be the case when the two typically require opposite cloud conditions? The simple fact is that changes in precipitation will be highly variable from region to region. Some will get wetter and some will get drier for sure, and the studies I've seen tend to predict that it's the regions that are currently wet that will get wetter and vice versa. And from my own research in my own part of teh world, I've found that increased evaporation due to warmer temperatures more than offsets any predicted increases in precipitation.

As for all this talk about "increased plant activity", fair enough. But the problem isn't so much that plant life will fail, it's that some species will thrive and others will falter, and we have little idea which is which. I hope you realize that there's a big difference between more dandilions and less wheat than the other way around.

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

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The problem with this argument is that this kind of thing only happens after the scientific data comes in. Again, the comment I was responding to was claiming that the scientific consensus is an artificial by-product of a desire to secure research funds. But this consensus was being reached at least a decade before anyone could hope to make a dime off schemes like this.

[CORed]

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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.


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Well, there has never been any evidence that silicone breast implants are harmful to health.

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Which isn't quite the same thing as saying that they are good for health.

My understanding is that, although there were lots of women with health problems that they blamed on their implants, no scientific studies ever showed a higher incidence of any of these health problems in women with breast implants than in women without them.

But again, not harmful != beneficial.

[Exsubmariner]

I'm very impressed with the BBC. You can't really say anymore that they have a pro-globabl-warming spin any longer.

IMHO, Al Gore just got PWNED.

I'm not going to discuss the science. It seems to me though that there was someone who did a lot of reading about clouds and climate and CO2 concentrations and the snowball earth theory. If I remember correctly there was a particular person and a cadre of fanboys who just dismissed it all because they were quite sure "there is something going on."

What I think this documentary does establish without question is the political history of the Global Warming movement. I would be interested in anyone taking and proving the position that the Global Warming theory is not web to a political motivation. To me that is the alpha and omega of the scientific validity of the theory.

[Silent A]

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It seems to me though that there was someone who did a lot of reading about clouds and climate and CO2 concentrations and the snowball earth theory. If I remember correctly there was a particular person and a cadre of fanboys who just dismissed it all because they were quite sure "there is something going on."

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What are you talking about here? Is this your impression of the substance behind the "pro" side of the global warming debate?

[The once and future king]

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I'm very impressed with the BBC. You can't really say anymore that they have a pro-globabl-warming spin any longer.

IMHO, Al Gore just got PWNED.

I'm not going to discuss the science. It seems to me though that there was someone who did a lot of reading about clouds and climate and CO2 concentrations and the snowball earth theory. If I remember correctly there was a particular person and a cadre of fanboys who just dismissed it all because they were quite sure "there is something going on."

What I think this documentary does establish without question is the political history of the Global Warming movement. I would be interested in anyone taking and proving the position that the Global Warming theory is not web to a political motivation. To me that is the alpha and omega of the scientific validity of the theory.

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Great commentary from someone who cant even get the channel the show was on right.

Im sure the politicians are laughing with joy at having to tell the electorate that growth may have to suffer in order to cut global emissions.

[Silent A]

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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.

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What are you talking about? There is no lag. I copied and pasted this image to check and the peaks are exactly at the same location, to the pixel. The same goes for the minimums just before the big peaks.

Each pixel on that graph is about 500-800 years, so we can't say anything about causality (based on this graph alone anyway) here other than that the two are closely linked.

However, we know from basic physics that increasing CO2 concentrations, all else equal, will cause atmospheric temperatures to rise. The physics behind this is almost as simple as the physics behind the fact that increasing solar radiation will cause temperatures to rise.

In order to argue increasing temperatures are causing CO2 to rise you need to come up with a physical process that would cause this. However, any process you could think of will be more indirect and probably considerably weaker than the process that causes temperatures to rise when CO2 increases.

[PantsOnFire]

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It seems to me though that there was someone who did a lot of reading about clouds and climate and CO2 concentrations and the snowball earth theory. If I remember correctly there was a particular person and a cadre of fanboys who just dismissed it all because they were quite sure "there is something going on."

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What are you talking about here? Is this your impression of the substance behind the "pro" side of the global warming debate?

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I have read articles where Global Warming "deniers" are being compared to Holocaust deniers.

In general, I would say one of my concerns regarding the politicizing of this issue is the manner in which contrary views are regarded and summarily dismissed. This is also sometimes an indication "of something going on".

Edit: As a matter of fact, as I read more of this thread I'm seeing a lot of stuff like "sponsored by oil companies", etc. So one doesn't have to go far to experience this phenomenon.

[djames]

Why do people care if the scientists who assert global warming will ruin us are correct or not? Why is it so hard to limit CO2 emissions because there is a possibility they are right? Is it really that onerous to improve emissions? I'm betting that for all of the naysayers in this thread (and others), the answer is no.

If any of you own multi-million dollar corporations with incomes feeble enough to suffer by switching to "green" plants, then you may wish to restructure now in case these scientists actually are right, or are able to convince the majority of corporations that they are right sometime in the near future.