Global warming proved to be a scam?

[Goat Whisperer]

I'm done, I don't like debating, I like conversating, which this is not.

 

[All Else Failed]

well this is a debate forum

 

[nova]

well this is a debate forum

24::24:

 

[All Else Failed]

I'm not saying it to be a smart ass, but you should expect debate from a debate forum.

 

[nova]

Regardless of how you intended it, it turned out mighty funny :clap

 

[Accountable]

My bookmark says it's a chat forum. :shrug:

 

[sharpies]

I don't think that there is anyone ouy there who completely understands Global Warming & until they do, I'm not sure that we should be panicking about it - to me, it sounds a bit like an end-of-days cult - some believe it & some don't. There is not enough evidence to argue either side soundly & rationally.

On the other hand, what we actually do need to worry about is pollution - as we continue to grow, we will need more power & there will be more consumerism & industrialisation - therefore more pollution. I think that it is important to focus on what can be done to reduce all forms of pollution & not get carried away by one particular item.

 

[Accountable]

Some people think there might be a polar shift that will kill all the vegetation on earth, thus everyone on it. Scientists checked and discovered that, indeed, a polar shift happened once before here on earth so it could happen again. The catch: the shift took about 1 million years. I think that might give us enough time to adjust.

 

[All Else Failed]

My bookmark says it's a chat forum. :shrug:

Philosophy & Debate

 

[edgray]

A good article about this email leak:

Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away | George Monbiot | Environment | guardian.co.uk

It's pointed out that the climate change denial industry has been caught lying and cheating many times before and that was just dismissed. This shouldn't affect people's attitude towards keeping our planet in a good shape.

 

[Peter Parka]

Personally I see global warming is happening but the name is misleading. It dosen't mean everywhere is going to get hotter all the time, it means there are going to be more extremes in weather. We had that in England the other week when a freak flood that only comes every 300 years flooded the shit out of the lake district. What global warming will mean for the UK is the warm current of the sargaso sea being pushed away and we'll have seriously cold winters and seriously hot summers.
It may or may not be a natural cause but our pollution certainly isn't helping. I just dont like the way it's being dealt with. Britain is turning into more and more of a big brother state over this, supermarkets stingy with carrier bags and strict rules about putting your plastic and glass in the correct bins. It would be better if we could cut down more by supermarkets not putting loads of unnecesary packaging on everything and the council not wasting tons of paper sending out leaflets telling us how to use our recycling bins.
At the end of the day, it's still not much good globally what we do when the likes of huge polluters like China and the USA refuse to do anything about it, despite being the main polluters.

 

[edgray]

Totally agree Peter. GW is a rubbish name as it is technically false. Climate Change is a far more suitable name. In Spain, we're seeing the same as the UK - much colder winters (it got down to 2ºC last xmas here, which I'd never seen down here before) and blisteringly hot summers (this July it barely dropped below 40º!) plus we're seeing more flooding and stuff.

The focus of most of the GW movement is totally misdirected. The carrier bag thing is nonsense, what should be focused on are the big polluters - power stations, air travel and cars. There are solutions to these problems, they just need to be applied sensibly and in a manner that's not going to disrupt life too much.

In Spain most of the green movement is being applied at a governmental level which brings in some quite cool things. For example - my apartment block, like all built in the last 5 years, has to produce 25% of it's electricity via solar panels. What this means for me is that I don't pay for hot water, which is great! To me, that's sensible and beneficial.

 

[Goat Whisperer]

So the servers at the University of East Anglia were illegally hacked. Emails dating back to 1996 were stolen and leaked onto the web. Phil Jones, the director of the Climate Research Unit, has confirmed the emails are not forgeries although there is over 60Mb worth of material - they can't guarantee all of it is genuine. What does it all mean? Michelle Malkin labels it the global warming scandal of the century (of course the century is only 9 years old but even 'scandal of the decade' would be no mean feat). James Delingpole at the UK Telegraph claims the emails are the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'? So just what do these emails tell us?


Some of the emails must be embarrassing for the authors. One email responds in poor taste to the death of a well known skeptic. There's scathing discussion of skeptics such as Steve McIntyre and Roger Pielke, including imaginings of violence--but I'm sure if you hacked the same skeptics emails you would find similar emails--in reverse. However, the crucial question is whether these emails reveal that climate data has been falsified. The most quoted email is from Phil Jones discussing paleo-data used to reconstruct past temperatures (emphasis mine):

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

What do the suggestive "tricks" and "hiding the decline" mean? Is this evidence of a nefarious climate conspiracy? "Mike's Nature trick" refers to the paper Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries (Mann 1998), published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann. The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.


The "decline" refers to the "divergence problem". This is where tree ring proxies diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. The divergence problem is discussed as early as 1998, suggesting a change in the sensitivity of tree growth to temperature in recent decades (Briffa 1998). It is also examined more recently in Wilmking 2008 which explores techniques in eliminating the divergence problem. So when you look at Phil Jone's email in the context of the science discussed, it is not the schemings of a climate conspiracy but technical discussions of data handling techniques available in the peer reviewed literature.


In the skeptic blogosphere, there is a disproportionate preoccupation with one small aspect of climate science - proxy record reconstructions of past climate (or even worse, ad hominem attacks on the scientists who perform these proxy reconstructions). This serves to distract from the physical realities currently being observed. Humans are raising CO2 levels. We're observing an enhanced greenhouse effect. The planet is still accumulating heat. What are the consequences of our climate's energy imbalance? Sea levels rise is accelerating. Greenland ice loss is accelerating. Arctic ice loss is accelerating. Globally, glacier ice loss is accelerating. Antarctic ice loss is accelerating.



When you read through the many global warming skeptic arguments, a pattern emerges. Each skeptic argument misleads by focusing on one small piece of the puzzle while ignoring the broader picture. To focus on a few suggestive emails while ignoring the wealth of empirical evidence for manmade global warming is yet another repeat of this tactic.

 

[edgray]

What do the suggestive "tricks" and "hiding the decline" mean? Is this evidence of a nefarious climate conspiracy? "Mike's Nature trick" refers to the paper Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries (Mann 1998), published in Nature by lead author Michael Mann. The "trick" is the technique of plotting recent instrumental data along with the reconstructed data. This places recent global warming trends in the context of temperature changes over longer time scales.

Great post. It's often a misinterpretation of scientific terminology that causes such outrage against science. I've lost count of the times people have told me "evolution is just a theory" without actually understanding what a theory is in scientific terms and how important they are. Case in point here with the use of the word "trick" - in common use, that word would mean something deceitful, whereas here it's referring to a technique.

 

[dt3]

Climate Change Scientists Admit Dumping Data - Biology | Astronomy | Chemistry | Physics - FOXNews.com

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit CRU was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenized) data."
The CRU is the world’s leading center for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

 

[nova]

Just trust us. Despite the fact we basically have no data provenance, integrity or quality control, just trust us and our conclusions...

JFC I'd be fired if I played that fast and loose with data....

 

[Peter Parka]

Climate Change Scientists Admit Dumping Data - Biology | Astronomy | Chemistry | Physics - FOXNews.com

I hope they were bio- degradable

 

[Goat Whisperer]

What a fun tactic this is. Instead of finding the scientific explanation needed to debunk the green house theory or debunk the data--skeptics are just going to start saying all AGW scientists are liers and all of the data supporting our claims are 'lies.'

At least I have a scientific explanation for debunking your so called data and charts, instead of just calling them lies. Real mature.

I'm not saying that all of our data is 100% true, but these few cases of 'hiding' or manipulating data, are few and far between; and there is still no explanation as to why the data is wrong. you can't just say something is wrong--it doesn't work.

 

[nova]

What a fun tactic this is. Instead of finding the scientific explanation needed to debunk the green house theory or debunk the data--skeptics are just going to start saying all AGW scientists are liers and all of the data supporting our claims are 'lies.'

At least I have a scientific explanation for debunking your so called data and charts, instead of just calling them lies. Real mature.

I'm not saying that all of our data is 100% true, but these few cases of 'hiding' or manipulating data, are few and far between; and there is still no explanation as to why the data is wrong. you can't just say something is wrong--it doesn't work.

Let me ask you, how many of the underlying papers have you read?

I've read more than a few going back more than a few years and while I don't have the statistical background to understand everything, but I do have some background in data reduction and analysis and I can understand the citation connections.

The whole reason this really is such a big deal is the amount of academic inbreeding that has gone on in climate science in the last 20 years. Mann cites Hansen who cites Jones who cites Briffa who cites Mann lather rinse repeat amongst about 25 guys. It means that anything that has been done wrong has propagated.

Keith Briffa had a tree ring reconstruction series called the polar urals about 10 years ago. Had data up through about 1990 or so. Showed the now ubiquitous hockey stick shape. Fast forward a few years and the data was updated to about 1999. A funny thing happened, with updated data, the hockey stick disappeared and Briffa stopped using the series in an updated paper.

Analysis based on the data quality criteria Briffa had outlined in both papers showed that the quality of the data had not changed with the update. The only thing that had changed was the result. That in and of itself is a problem because you don't just stop using good data that doesn't fit your hypothesis, its bad science.

What makes it worse is still to this day, nearly 6 years after the update, papers still cite the original Briffa paper with its original data, ignoring the updated data, and nearly every composite reconstruction in the last 10 years has used that Briffa reconstruction as a component. A series with updated data that does no reflect the outcome they're showing.

Thats a huge problem and its not an isolated one.

If we're going to completely rework the entire economy of the world, this is something we need to be damn sure of and make sure that everything is on the up and up...

 

[Goat Whisperer]

Let me ask you, how many of the underlying papers have you read?

I've read more than a few going back more than a few years and while I don't have the statistical background to understand everything, but I do have some background in data reduction and analysis and I can understand the citation connections.

The whole reason this really is such a big deal is the amount of academic inbreeding that has gone on in climate science in the last 20 years. Mann cites Hansen who cites Jones who cites Briffa who cites Mann lather rinse repeat amongst about 25 guys. It means that anything that has been done wrong has propagated.

Keith Briffa had a tree ring reconstruction series called the polar urals about 10 years ago. Had data up through about 1990 or so. Showed the now ubiquitous hockey stick shape. Fast forward a few years and the data was updated to about 1999. A funny thing happened, with updated data, the hockey stick disappeared and Briffa stopped using the series in an updated paper.

Analysis based on the data quality criteria Briffa had outlined in both papers showed that the quality of the data had not changed with the update. The only thing that had changed was the result. That in and of itself is a problem because you don't just stop using good data that doesn't fit your hypothesis, its bad science.

What makes it worse is still to this day, nearly 6 years after the update, papers still cite the original Briffa paper with its original data, ignoring the updated data, and nearly every composite reconstruction in the last 10 years has used that Briffa reconstruction as a component. A series with updated data that does no reflect the outcome they're showing.

Thats a huge problem and its not an isolated one.

If we're going to completely rework the entire economy of the world, this is something we need to be damn sure of and make sure that everything is on the up and up...

I'm about 85% positive that you just got almost all that you have said from 1-3 sources from people who actually have been reading stuff back 15-20 years. And I am also about 85% certain that these sources have misconstrued and left plenty of shit out of what they told you.


Going past 'reading stuff' I have actually gone places, collected date, met scientists, etc. I have also done suffecient reading, on both sides and so far, I have never come upon a skeptics argument, even backed up with, what I call reliable data, that can't be explained by the anthropogenic climate change theory. I've read the most popular books, seen the most popular movies, and I can always point out stretches of the truth, o both sides, which I now find amusing, and also incredibly frustrating, because people believe everything they say, instead of doing the research themself and getting evidece on both sides, before deciding their opinions.

See this picture? This is the Easton glacier on Mount Baker. I have lived on it explored it, and mapped it's terminus (the end of the glacier), taken ice cores from, tree cores from the areas around it, and I have done plant surveys on it.




This glacier is an excellent example, because, along with any other glaciers, it was expanding in the 1970's. Then it suddenly started making a gradual decline. This satellite picture was taken in 1994, this is how far it has receded since then. I used to have a photo from the 1970's or 1950's but I can't seem to locate it. I can say there was a lot more glacier on it.

You can see where we camped in this photo, it's bare rock. But about 30-40 years ago, there was a glacier covering it. This I know, because we found heather during a plant survey, and after rock is exposed, from a glacier receding, it generally takes 30-40 years for heather to begin to grow. And heather was just barely appearing.

The glacier has thinned incredibly, about 100 feet. I know this, because our camp was 100 feet above where the glacier is now. 40 years ago, it was covered I glacier, now it is not only exposed, but the glacier is a hike down, 100 feet.

This has greatly reinforced my ideology that glaciers are disappearing. Like I said, this is a great example, because many glaciers were increasig in size in the 1970's, and then suddenly shifted to recession uptil the present. I know it's true about this glacier, so in all reality, it's probably true about glaciers other people have studied and collected data for.

I also visited churchill, canada, the polar bear capitol of the world. And I met a few of the scientists there, dedicating their lives to the polar bear. I know, from meeting these people, from the investments that they have put into saving the polar bear, they wouldn't be lying about it. Once you have actually talked to the scientists yourself, then you can say that they are liars, but until then, I'm not goig to take your 5th person perspective, passed through 4 other conspiracy theorist/skeptics, who have never even met the people they are calling total liars.

I hate it when people think that just because they have read a lot they know everything about the world. It's true, you can't trust anyone's data, except your own, so go collect it, or stop complaining.

I didn't collect this data to prove to you or anyone else that glaciers are dissapearing, just reinforce it for myself, and give myself that extra push I need to fight carbon dioxide and climate change. So the polar bear, me, my friends, my neice, and my future children have a future.