Some folks just can't get past insulting remarks.rjj04 wrote: if the deniers go on as they are, using anything but science to get there way ... the critical reasoning skills of most people have not improved one iota ... critical reasoning takes a back-seat to shenanigans ... aggressive Neanderthals ... political race ... irrational argumentation methods ... joke.
Barrasso Calls for U.N. Climate Chief’s ResignationRecent news reports have highlighted Dr. Rajendra Pachauri’s and the United Nation’s involvement in covering up flawed science:
* February 2, 2010, Investor’s Business Daily article, Walter Russell Read, Project Director for Religion and Foreign Policy at the Pew Forum, said “After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all.”
* On January 30, 2010, the Times of London reported, “Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it.”
* On January 24, 2010, the Times of London reported the UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters. Reporter Jonathan Leake wrote, “The United Nations climate panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods,” and the report “had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny.”
U.N. Climate Chief: Critics Should Rub Their Faces With AsbestosThe U.N.'s climate chief dismissed "nefarious" global warming skeptics this week by insinuating that they are deep in the pockets of big business -- and suggested that they go rub their faces in cancer-causing asbestos.
As a geologist - as I have no interest in geology, nothing.ronan01 wrote:Simple question Jack - what works of Prof Plimer have you read. Just shows your style - answer a question with a question - especially when you dont have an intelligent response
There is no point in my reading Plimers works, even if I was so inclined. I am not, and have never claimed to be a scientist. However, I have read enough of what others (who are qualified) have said to stand by my opinion that he has no credibility on the subject of climate change.ronan01 wrote:Jack - 2 simple questions
- have you read any of his works?
- precisely what did he lie about? provide 1 example
Your qualifications are impressive, and I respect that.ronan01 wrote: You are enttled to an opinion on the subject - but you seem sensitive to being patronised and have others cast doubts on your viewpoint - but that is what you do to others.
Your fallback position is "peer review and the majority of scientists agree" arguemet. Not an arguement really111
In short, they've ruined their own argument.By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe.
I respect your thoughts on this, rick, but I prefer to look at it as cautious and thoughtful, not selfish and foolish. No one wants the earth and its population to suffer, but everyone does want truth and openness.rick wrote:IF THE PREDICTIONS OF GLOBAL WARMING ARE CORRECT - we have about 30 years or so before some predicted feedback mechanisms kick in (may already be happening) and temperatures could go up considerably - no-one really knows how much, but 8 degrees centigrade is one figure suggested. This might sound like a lot, but remember that global warming already provides us with 30 degrees centigrade of warming from the current levels of grreenhouse gases - without it life on this planet would hardly exist. Eight degrees warmer would make half the planet practically uninhabitable, ignoring any other affects like droughts, floods, hurricanes wars etc. Ok, we will not be around to worry about it, but our grandchildren will be.
That is why it would be selfish and foolish to dismiss it. There are also other benefits - oil and gas will not last for ever, we do need alternatives.
Margaret Wente
Published on Friday, Feb. 05, 2010 6:45PM EST
Last updated on Saturday, Feb. 06, 2010 4:15AM EST
In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.
These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia's nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country's plight, Nepal's top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.
But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.
“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.
The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do – a global deal was never in the cards. As Mr. Mead writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end.
And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.
Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian – among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.
Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.
For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article “a mess.”
Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri's own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money. Even so, the IPCC chief is hanging tough. He insists the attacks on him are being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits.
Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was labelled as a climate skeptic, or worse. But many climate scientists now sense a sinking ship, and they're bailing out. Among them is Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even Britain's Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri's resignation. India says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the IPCC.
None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.
By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As Mr. Mead succinctly puts it: “Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead.” That also goes for Canada, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States.
“I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper skepticism,” says John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He is a staunch believer in man-made climate change, but he also points out the complexity of climate science. “Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can't be changed.” In his view, it's time to stop circling the wagons and throw open the doors. How much the public will keep caring is another matter.
Everything I've read and heard says that the last 11 years have been cooler than previous years.rick wrote:4. We know that temperatures are rising.
I do what I can do as well -- same as you and more. I don't have a total disregard for responsible behavior.rick wrote:In answer to WBU about alternative fuels, yes, i am not going to give up my air travel or stop having a car, but i do look at what i can do - e.g. in the home, it will be possible by improving insulation to cut out 90% of the need for heating in our cooler climates (e.g. Europe, USA); also i have just started using LED lights at home - 1 watt - 10 times better than even the fluroescents we have started using in the last 15 years, 50 times better than the old tungsten filaments. i will consider getting an electric car when they are good enough and cheap enough as well.
The Telegraph also reports that the IPCC deliberately ignored a peer-reviewed paper by Dr. Roger Pielke, an AGW believer who considers much of the alarmist rhetoric as fantasy. The IPCC says that they believed Pielke “changed his mind” based on nothing at all, certainly not on any contact with Pielke, whose complaints led to the disclosure.It can also be revealed that claims made by the IPCC about the effects of global warming, and suggestions about ways it could be avoided, were partly based on information from ten dissertations by Masters students.
One unpublished dissertation was used to support the claim that sea-level rise could impact on people living in the Nile delta and other African coastal areas, although the main focus of the thesis, by a student at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, appears to have been the impact of computer software on environmental development.
The IPCC also made use of a report by US conservation group Defenders of Wildlife to state that salmon in US streams have been affected by rising temperatures. The panel has already come under fire for using information in reports by conservation charity the WWF.
Estimates of carbon-dioxide emissions from nuclear power stations and claims that suggested they were cheaper than coal or gas power stations were also taken from the website of the World Nuclear Association, rather than using independent scientific calculations.
