Friday, August 17, 2007
WARMENING HUNTED, CAPTURED
Latest column right here.
UPDATE. Sydney Alternative Media fires in a mighty riposte.
UPDATE II. Heretical thoughts from physics professor Freeman Dyson:
Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
UPDATE III. Consensus trouble:
A major ocean-circulation pattern that plays a crucial role in global warming might not have been slowing down over the past few decades as scientists believed, according to a study released this week.
In a single year of measurements, scientists found enough normal variation in the pattern’s flow to suggest that previous studies were premature in asserting a long-term trend.
UPDATE IV. Robert J. Samuelson:
The global-warming debate’s great unmentionable is this: We lack the technology to get from here to there. Just because Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to cut emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 doesn’t mean it can happen. At best, we might curb growth of emissions ...
We simply don’t have a solution for this problem. As we debate it, journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale - as Newsweek did - in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society.
UPDATE V. NASA warmenaut James Hansen on that 1934/1998 record change:
The change does nothing to our understanding of how the global climate is changing and is being used by critics to muddy the debate.
To which Carter Wood replies:
Bosh. The original figures were used to hype the threat. The critics are now bringing a little clarity.
UPDATE VI. The National Post’s Lorne Gunter:
In his enviro-propaganda flick, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore claims nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade. That’s been a common refrain for environmentalists, too, and one of the centrepieces of global warming hysteria: It’s been really hot lately—abnormally hot—so we all need to be afraid, very afraid. The trouble is, it’s no longer true.
Some claims in Al’s film never were.
UPDATE VII. Hold your sides, lest they be split by laughter.
UPDATE VIII. Further consensus trouble:
New research from Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes ...
If Schwartz’s results are correct, that alone would be enough to overturn in one fell swoop the IPCC’s scientific “consensus”, the environmentalists’ climate hysteria, and the political pretext for the energy-restriction policies that have become so popular with the world’s environmental regulators, elected officials, and corporations. The question is, will anyone in the mainstream media notice?
(Via Forbes T.)