Playing to the ignorant or actually that ignorant?

[The Painter]

No doubt but the rightwingers made the big deal of it with one after the other of them going on and on about this proves Al Gore wrong.

Puffery. Pure puffery.

 

[leftysergeant]

I take your point, of course, but the disputes over AGW are not really comparable to the controversies wrt evolution. And that's chump change compared to inserting Scientology and moon conspiracies in there. In short, you seem to be hard at work trying to make the opposition [/B]look like basket cases.[/B]

Given that most of the deniers are from Faux News,the administrations of the last three Republican presidents and from industry lobbying groups, displaying their inanities is not "making them look like basket cases," but rather pointing out what they are.

Beck, Hannity , Wiener, and the fat deaf eunuch are all several bricks short of an arch. Quite that simple.

 

[Sporanox]

Given that most of the deniers are from Faux News,the administrations of the last three Republican presidents and from industry lobbying groups, displaying their inanities is not "making them look like basket cases," but rather pointing out what they are.

Beck, Hannity , Wiener, and the fat deaf eunuch are all several bricks short of an arch. Quite that simple.

Please, stop.

 

[GreyICE]

This. And think about it -- an average rise of, say, 1 degree? You would never even notice it, and only long-term statistical measurements of things would even be able to discern it.

Even when I hear studies about this or that plant coming back to life a month earlier than normal, I have to wonder, as a few degrees should only shift that a few days or a week maybe. Winter-to-summer is what, 80 degrees F swing over, say, 4 months? That's 2 degrees every 3 days, so yeah, a few days to a week sounds about right. So what percent of that is cyclic and what percent is not? One month, if truly global warming (AGW or not) thus represents a 20 degree swing. And that's why this must be averaged over long periods of time.

HAHAHAHAHAHA.

The atmosphere of the earth ways 5.1*10^18 kg. The specific heat capacity is 1.0035 J/g*C.

Raising it 1 degree is the energy of one thousand megatons - a gigaton of TNT.

There's HUGE effects from injecting that much energy into the system.

Oh and the major difference between creationists and climate change deniers is that climate change deniers have better PR, which is logical given how well funded they are until even Exxon realized that there was no fighting science because the science was correct.

 

[Sporanox]

Oh and the major difference between creationists and climate change deniers is that climate change deniers have better PR, which is logical given how well funded they are until even Exxon realized that there was no fighting science because the science was correct.

Creationists have representation at MIT?

 

[GreyICE]

Creationists have representation at MIT?

http://www.creationinfo.com/list.htm

They give out things like this all the time.

 

[Sporanox]

http://www.creationinfo.com/list.htm

They give out things like this all the time.

So, not really (especially considering Lindzen is in a prestigious meteorology position). I take your point, though.

 

[leftysergeant]

Please, stop.

Okay, I'll be more specific, then. On one rant the pig man was going on about how the melting of polar ice could not raise the sea level. He pointed out that even though ice floats above the surface of a drink, the cup does not over-flow when the ice melts. He is, of course, too stupid to realize that the floating sea ice is only one part of the ice within the Arctic or Antarctic circles. He discounts all the surging glaciers and melting glaciers in Greenland, Alsaka and the various islands in the Canadian Arctic. This is a tremendous volumn of water and it is all aobve sea level. Mostof the ice in Antarctica is above sea level.

There is less snow staying on the mountain tops world-wide.

The idiot uses only one source of water to draw his conclusions. The last place to get an opinion on actual science is on conservative squawk radio.

 

[GreyICE]

So, not really (especially considering Lindzen is in a prestigious meteorology position). I take your point, though.

I don't think its fair to characterize Lindzen as a denier. The IRIS hypothesis is not that the effects of CO2 are negligible/nonexistent, it's that a feedback effect from the tropics would generate cloud cover that would mostly remove the warming effect of CO2. Contrast that with AA, Beerina, or MHaze who think that human emitted CO2 has no effect on the climate, and you can see the difference.

Anyway, the Iris hypothesis is that sea surface warming would reduce Cirrus cloud formation, thus reducing trapped infrared radiation. Consensus is, at the moment, nonexistent on that subject.

http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/1/221/2001/acpd-1-221-2001-print.pdf

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL029698.shtml

You will note in all cases that the hypothesis requires warming to even get off the ground (no warming = no IRIS feedback).

(By the way, it's ironic to contrast the "persecution and marginalization of people who don't agree with the 'orthodoxy of the warming description'" as described by AA, Mhaze, et al, with Lindzen, who authored Chapter 7 of the IPCC Third Assessment, and who has received numerous awards despite predicting an extreme low end of sensitivity from his Iris hypothesis - least effective persecution ever, amright? )

 

[Sporanox]

I don't think its fair to characterize Lindzen as a denier. The IRIS hypothesis is not that the effects of CO2 are negligible/nonexistent, it's that a feedback effect from the tropics would generate cloud cover that would mostly remove the warming effect of CO2. Contrast that with AA, Beerina, or MHaze who think that human emitted CO2 has no effect on the climate, and you can see the difference.

Anyway, the Iris hypothesis is that sea surface warming would reduce Cirrus cloud formation, thus reducing trapped infrared radiation. Consensus is, at the moment, nonexistent on that subject.

http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/1/221/2001/acpd-1-221-2001-print.pdf

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL029698.shtml

You will note in all cases that the hypothesis requires warming to even get off the ground (no warming = no IRIS feedback).

This is in some ways a game of semantics. The Iris hypothesis was proposed in conjunction with Lindzen's observation that there is no cause for concern from CO2.

That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth's atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let's refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called "climate forcing."

There is general agreement on the above findings. At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html

I'm not sure if you call that "denying" or not (too bad people still use that label; it's pretty much an appeal to ridicule at this point).

(By the way, it's ironic to contrast the "persecution and marginalization of people who don't agree with the 'orthodoxy of the warming description'" as described by AA, Mhaze, et al, with Lindzen, who authored Chapter 7 of the IPCC Third Assessment, and who has received numerous awards despite predicting an extreme low end of sensitivity from his Iris hypothesis - least effective persecution ever, amright? )

It is indeed fortunate for Lindzen that he has largely escaped censure. Other subjects named in the hacked emails were not as fortunate.

 

[leftysergeant]

It is indeed fortunate for Lindzen that he has largely escaped censure. Other subjects named in the hacked emails were not as fortunate.

Which of them do you feel are being persecuted?

 

[Sporanox]

Which of them do you feel are being persecuted?

Were - nobody's in much of a position to persecute now.

 

[fuelair]

The right wing talking points have been echoing the stupidity that because it is snowing more than usual in DC and the surrounding areas, that proves global warming is not occurring.

I don't want to argue with the agw deniers in this thread. Please go away if you want to argue against the overwhelming science. I want instead to gloat over the ignorance of the current barrage of stupid comments in the media coming from all the right wing talking heads.

Do these guys know how dumb they sound? Even if you wanted to argue the science against agw, the fact it is snowing in DC is not supporting evidence. Are they really that dumb or are they just faking it for their target market audience?


And I only did a cursory look for duplicate threads so Mods should feel free to merge this one if I missed a similar thread already started.

T try to pop this point into each thread on this - because whether or not (and I am pretty certain it is true) AGW is true, GW is true. Climate (the Global Warming thing) IS NOT THE SAME AS WEATHER. A local or bigger area may well have a winter of record cold - or two or three - while the Earth as a whole system has an average annual rise of, say 0.020 degrees C. In a few years, Glaciers, ice fields and such will still be getting smaller, croplands will be getting, on average, a little dryer and growing seasons will be getting a bit shorter where they used to be "normal", but longer as you move away from the 30/40 degre latitudes. Eventually they will be shorter period and the winters won't have those really cold times and moderate areas of the past will be dry, but not immediately because (everybody join in!!) Weather and Climate are NOT the same thing!!!

 

[leftysergeant]

Were ...

Okay, who were being persecuted.

...- nobody's in much of a position to persecute now.

So what changed?

 

[INRM]

Paul Hoff,

Really, I have heard about that stuff. But to think that 6 billion people don't change anything is, well, nuts.

I never said I didn't think 6,000,000,000+ people didn't have any effect on anything. What I'm saying is that they exaggerated the degree of warming produced by human beings, and downplayed the degree of circumstances where the temperature of the Earth in the past went up via manipulation of data.

INRM

 

[leftysergeant]

What I'm saying is that they exaggerated the degree of warming produced by human beings, and downplayed the degree of circumstances where the temperature of the Earth in the past went up via manipulation of data.

I still have not seen the evidence to suport the claim that the scientists distorted or manipulated the data.

Bean counters, such as the Shrub liked to put in charge of scientific, projects are another matter.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

My bolding:

I never said I didn't think 6,000,000,000+ people didn't have any effect on anything. What I'm saying is that they exaggerated the degree of warming produced by human beings, and downplayed the degree of circumstances where the temperature of the Earth in the past went up via manipulation of data.

Even if something about your conspiracy theory were true, it would be irrelevant.

Let's say there was worse global warming some millions of years ago. There was also a time when the Earth's atmosphere contained very little oxygen. Would you be cool if that happened too?

At any rate, Ginger said this thread is not for debating AGW. And I agree there are plenty of threads on that debate already. This is for the very narrow topic of people who claim that the recent large snow storms somehow disproves global warming (of any cause).

And of course the people who say that are either ignorant or playing to the ignorant. I think it's the former, except maybe for a few of them (like Rush Limbaugh).

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

... Yes, we have real scientists too.

Maybe we should start a list of scientists named Richard.


In any science field you can find the odd man out. Look at Michael Behe and his concept of trying to disprove evolution science by finding Irreducible Complexity. Over time such hypotheses either result in paradigm shifts in science like the theory of Plate Tectonics, or they fall by the wayside like Irreducible Complexity.


Lindzen's hypotheses have not panned out and the IPCC has had a decade since Lindzen began speaking out against their "concensus". In that decade, Lindzen's hypotheses have failed to pan out and the climate change science has strengthened.

Lindzen's Discarded Global Warming Arguments

An internal document (pdf) of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) -- an industry front group that disbanded in 2002 -- reviewed some of the "contrarian" arguments used by Lindzen and other climate change skeptics that they later discarded. The document, which was obtained as part of a court action against the automobile industry[13].
In a section on the "Role of Water Vapor", the GCC's Science and Technical Advisory Committee wrote that "In 1990, Prof Richard Lindzen of MIT argued that the models which were being used to predict greenhouse warming were incorrect because they predicted an increase in water vapor at all levels of the troposphere. Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, the models predict warming at all levels of the troposphere. However, warming should create convective turbulence, which would lead to more condensation of water vapor (i.e. more rain) and both drying and cooling of the troposphere above 5 km. This negative feedback would act as, a "thermostat" keeping temperatures from rising significantly."
However, the GCC's science advisers noted that this argument had been disproven to the point that Lindzen himself had ceased to use it. "Lindzen's 1990 theory predicted that warmer conditions at.the surface would lead to cooler, drier conditions at the top ofthe troposphere. Studies of the behavior of the troposphere in the tropics fail to find the cooling and drying Lindzen predicted. More recent publications have indicated the possibility that Lindzen's hypothesis may be correct, but the evidence is still weak. While Lindzen remains a critic of climate modeling efforts, his latest publications do not include the convective turbulence argument."[14]
In conclusion the GCC's science advisers was that "Lindzen's hypothesis that any warming would create more rain which would cool and dry the upper troposphere did offer a mechanism for balancing the effect of increased greenhouse gases. However, the data supporting this hypothesis is weak, and even Lindzen has stopped presenting it as an alternative to the conventional model of climate change."[15]

Now can we get back to the thread topic please and move this another of the dozen threads on the subject?



So on that note, Lindzen has at least one relevant point to the thread.

Testimony of Richard S. Lindzen before the Senate Commerce Committee on 1 May 2001.

Those who insist that the science is settled should be required to state exactly what science they feel is settled. In all likelihood, it will turn out to be something trivial and without policy implications except to those who bizarrely subscribe to the so-called precautionary principle – a matter I will return to later. (Ian Bowles, former senior science advisor on environmental issues at the NSC, published such a remark on 22 April in the Boston Globe: “the basic link between carbon emissions, accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the phenomenon of climate change is not seriously disputed in the scientific community.” I think it is fair to say that statements concerning matters of such complexity that are not disputed are also likely to be lacking in policy relevant content. However, some policymakers apparently think otherwise in a cultural split that may be worthy of the late C.P. Snow’s attention.)

(emphasis mine)(note the last bolded section quotes the Boston Globe, not Lindzen)


If only we could get rid of the filters. God believers could actually see the evolution science without the fear of science challenging those god beliefs and the public who should be concerned about the environment might be able to see the science of climate change without all the political filters currently distorting that actual science.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Puffery. Pure puffery.

Who, them or me?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

....
Oh and the major difference between creationists and climate change deniers is that climate change deniers have better PR, which is logical given how well funded they are until even Exxon realized that there was no fighting science because the science was correct.

Actually, they are both very well funded, though big oil probably does have a tad more than Christian fundies.