jim inhofe and his cherrypicked band of ex-2nd-handsmoke denialist, ex-asbestos denialist, now global warming denialist “scientists” will have to answer this.
hey, denialists, i’d much rather that you were right. when you’re blissfully ignorantly dead in a hundred years, you’ll have been wrong and your great grandchildren will be permanently ankle deep in water (if they’re south floridians or a bangladeshis). what satisfaction can we who were right take in that? maybe your approach is better. maybe i’ll choose to believe that smoking doesn’t cause cancer, screwing doesn’t spread AIDS, and there is no man made global warming.
So looking at the article they say that GHGs are higher than predicted. Okay fine. But they have no numbers to back it up to say that it causes warming. We still have been cooling since 1998, yet GHGs continue to go up…how is that if GHG = warming?
As I understand it, the Earth has cooled one degree over the last 10 years, and there is a pattern of cooling and heating that goes in cycles which is tied directly to activities on the Sun. These Sun cycles have been going on long before man began any activities and will continue after you and I and our grand children have passed on. Yes, we can reduce our pollution levels. But I fail to see any proof that we can change the temperature by choice. The cited article is full of conjecture.
But, for the sake of argument, assuming that there is man-made global warming, who is to say that it is bad? Who can say it is not as God intends?
I’m not a global warming denier, I fully accept that the global temperature has and will in the future not remain constant. But, the article you sight is a little mis-leading, don’t you think? Start with the title:
"Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates"But that’s not what the article is about, the article states: "The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday. "
Given the amount of CO2 we put out now compared to 50 years ago, shouldn’t the global temperature already be significantly higher than it already is based on this same logic?
scholar.google.com if you want the data. It’s a vulgarization article written for a newspaper. It’s not meant to provide with numbers you don’t know what to make of.
The ‘likely’ is simply a consequence of intellectual honesty. These are statistical results. Can we be off? Yes. Maybe nothing bad will happen. But if there is 95% chance that GW is going to accelerate and 95% chance that it really fucks up the environment for good, and makes it hard on us, do you think we should do something about it?
If you’re sitting in a plane just before take off and they tell you there is 95% chance that it crashes, do you stay in the plane?
the article was sited in the washington post. if you mean cited, well, i don’t think they usually do that in wapo. i think you’d find those citations in the source publications.
I agree. That said, it’s a link to a general newspaper, not a journal publishing environmental science research.
Last september, the National Science Foundation gave me money (well, not personally, but for my research). I gave a short interview (no, it’s not in the NY Times or cnn) to describe the project and saw the article, and made corrections. It appeared without the corrections I had made and there were lots of mistakes…so you need to take a lot of stuff in newspapers with a grain of salt. If you dig out the lit. on environmental changes, you’ll see that there is consensus on GW. The issues that remain are on how much impact we have on it, and how quickly it will take before it’s too late.
hey, denialists, i’d much rather that you were right. when you’re blissfully ignorantly dead in a hundred years, you’ll have been wrong and your great grandchildren will be permanently ankle deep in water (if they’re south floridians or a bangladeshis). what satisfaction can we who were right take in that? maybe your approach is better. maybe i’ll choose to believe that smoking doesn’t cause cancer, screwing doesn’t spread AIDS, and there is no man made global warming.
Your scaremongering is cute, Dan, I’ll give you that. Kind of like what’s been going on over the stimulus package (I love hearing things like “catastrophe” and “greatest (pick-your-tragedy) since the…(insert “Great Depression,” or “planet-hit-by-asterioid,” etc. here)” when it comes to folks trying to sell their agendas).
And who’s to say the folks in Florida or Bangladesh won’t be “ankle-deep in water,” regardless of what we do or don’t do? We don’t know, and we can’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s a fact; all the hyperbole and hystericism to the contrary. Besides, all I can say is that from where I sit (a bit south of the Mogadishu-on-the-river known as “Detroit”), we’ve been neck-deep in the white stuff since at least late November, with no end in sight. And what’s been the average global temperature over the last decade or so? Any great rise in planetary temps that vary wildly from the norm over the last few hundred thousand years? Any possible way we can say they’ll spike dramatically upwards in the next few hundred, even? I think you know the answer, mon frere.
Who’s the scientist that’s backed off a bit from his dead-cert pronouncements over AGW and how it’s going to wreck us all? Oh, yeah…Kerry Emanuel. Pretty smart guy, and I like the quality of his research. But AGW enthusiasts amuse me, somewhat, for the sheer tenacity they demonstrate in hanging on to their ideology. Kind of luck Dubya and the Iraq War, wouldn’t you say?
Given the amount of CO2 we put out now compared to 50 years ago, shouldn’t the global temperature already be significantly higher than it already is based on this same logic?
I’m sorry, but this post kills me. You dismiss everything that highly intelligent and educated scientists say about a field that they spend every day studying, yet want to extend your own logical conclusions based on complete ignorance of the subject.
When you don’t understand a subject, logic can lead you to many conclusions…like the sun revolving around the Earth and the element “flogiston” created by fire.
“And who’s to say the folks in Florida or Bangladesh won’t be “ankle-deep in water,” regardless of what we do or don’t do?”
98% of the world’s scientists. but who’s counting?
“We don’t know, and we can’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s a fact”
you’re absolutely right. the weather channel says there is a 90% chance of rain today on the tour of california guys. but there’s a 10% chance it won’t rain, and the weather experts may be wrong. nobody knows if it’s going to rain on the ToC today, and that’s a fact.
Besides, all I can say is that from where I sit (a bit south of the Mogadishu-on-the-river known as “Detroit”), we’ve been neck-deep in the white stuff since at least late November, with no end in sight.
Everything else you say is negated by this statement. Anyone who sites current weather as evidence one way or another in the argument about global warming is either ignorant or deceitful.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t miss Art: despite countless attempts to educate him on the concept of “climate is what you predict; weather is what you get,” he continually cited current weather as evidence against global warming. Don’t you make the same mistake.
As for Emanuel: he says that global warming might not contribute to intensified hurricane activity as much as previously thought. To cast that as “backing off…it’s going to wreck us all” is misleading at best. Especially so when Emanuel himself is the source of the idea (in 2005) that global warming will lead to increased hurricane activity; his and others’ subsequent research has indicated that such intensification is likely in some areas and less likely in others.
98% of the world’s scientists. but who’s counting?
I’d say it’s significantly less than that, truth be told. Enough, in fact, to inject a goodly amount of reasonable doubt into the whole charade. Precautionary principles are no way to formulate public policy that may well doom many emerging economies (and hamstring our own in a time of supposedly catastrophic economic activity) to permanent impotency, thus keeping millions of people living in chronic poverty and illness. See? I can scarmonger with the best coming out of Washington these days, wouldn’t you say?
you’re absolutely right. the weather channel says there is a 90% chance of rain today on the tour of california guys. but there’s a 10% chance it won’t rain, and the weather experts may be wrong. nobody knows if it’s going to rain on the ToC today, and that’s a fact.
Again, not as rock-solid as you would lead us to believe, and the answer is far more complicated than we’re able to pen here in the LR. Back in 94, when I was living up in Poway (I was over at a military command near the old NAS Miramar air station), I happened to take a few graduate classes in statistics and chaos theory. Other than making me realize I had zero-pip-zero chance of ever understanding more than 0.000001 percent of what was presented in that theory class (and what the hell are fractals? anybody?), it mainly led me to the realization that the interplay in the forces acting within, on, and around our planet was something we have almost no chance of consistently predicting at present time, if ever.
Bottom line, your tame scientists are making a series of guesses (possibly reasonable, and with a good degree of confidence, and possibly not-reasonable and with little degree of confidence) just as the opposing viewpoint’s tame scientists are doing the same for their sponsors and keepers and feeders.
Honestly I do not know if the issue is global warning.
But there is no doubt, in my mind, we (humans) are turning earth into a giant trash and destroying it @ multiple levels.
Form that perspective, this global recession is not such a bad thing and maybe we will think twice.