Charismatic

Well in my case, like most on the internet I suspect, I don't care much about climate or the consequences of its change. Even if the hypothesis had air tight data that supported it it wouldn't make even the slightest bit of difference to my lifestyle. I'd still get in my car and drive home, have a nice hot shower, turn on my electric oven to cook dinner and sit down with my laptop to reply to e-mails.

What is the point then? "Feel good" taxation? We're addicted to oil and that can't and won't change any time soon .

Cape Blue

I don't know - perhaps you should send your research through to NASA and point out the error of their ways.

Cape Blue

No, its not as futile to discuss as religion - religion is made up stuff and CC is measurement, facts & analysis.

I don't know why you brought up religion in the first place.

Many people seem to think its either down to their God to sort it and its all a natural part of his world (or end of days and that sort of stuff), or that it is some sort of conspiracy that the many 10's of thousands of scientists and governments worldwide have cooked up to tax the citizens more - as you do not believe in MMCC in the face of all the scientists and NGOs and governments, I assumed you had to be one of those two camps.

If 10,000 of the world's most eminent doctors told you that smoking causes cancer and a dozen quacks who are in the pay of the tobacco ind say it doesn't, which one do you believe? This is where we are currently at with MMCC.

Cape Blue

But the jury isn't out for the thousands of scientists from differing countries and disciplines all around the world.

I guess that when spending the past 20+ years examining this issue they might have taken into account that there has been normal climate variation over the millennia and that what they are actually talking about is a far more rapid and significant climate change than has ever occurred before - just at the time the human population is huge and will have trouble adapting to sizeable migrations and changes in water flows etc.

Cape Blue

That's the issue isn't it - how do you effect behavior to de-fossil fuel the economy and life as we know it.

Perhaps you could still use all the electric you currently do, but instead of coal or gas it could be renewable wind, wave, tidal, hydro, solar. Perhaps your next car will be electric and recharged by renewables.

One way to help these sectors compete is not for governments to pick and choose technologies, but for governments to create the right economic framework for renewables (& other low carbon technologies) to compete and by internalizing the full costs of fossil fuel usage - the guys running the fossil fuel power stations are not paying for the sea walls to be erected.

The best way by far is a carbon tax - it will drive individuals & businesses to search out economic microgeneration at their houses/workplaces, minimise wasteful usage, buy more fuel efficient vehicles next time around, insulate their homes and so on. It will also spur industry to develop new technologies and will make renewables cheaper than fossil-fuel options and increase their uptake.

I don't see the actual revenue raised as being the issue nor any feel-good factor, the real issue is pulling-in the externalities of fossil fuel that are not currently priced into it and sending market signals for economic actors to work upon.

Kooky.

Well obviously I'm not most as I do care. I'm not a scientist, I don't discount the theory that there is a normal cycle to blame, but I think if we can all do our bit to stop the situation worsening, why wouldn't we?

It does affect my lifestyle - we choose not to have 2 cars here (we need one - husband works out of town and visits customer sites a lot), the car we do have is not a gas guzzler, I take the train and walk, I use water wisely, I choose my appliances carefully (e.g., don't need an American style fridge), I switch them off when they're not in use...it's just common sense, isn't it, and it might stop the people of Kiribati and the Maldives disappearing under water quite so quickly.

TeamEmbo

[QUOTE In your opinion, religion is made up stuff, regardless of the facts available and without regard to the (as you seem to like saying) 10's of thousands of people that believe in religion. In my opinion, I believe global warming as being man-made is made up stuff, regardless of facts and the, as you claim, 10's of thousands of scientists' opinions. See what I mean? futile argument.

As an EXAMPLE of another pointless argument not worth having as no-one can win such an argument based on the fact we each have freewill, freedom of choice and personal beliefs.

Nice of you to limit my choices to one of two camps and decide which one I'm in. Thank you. I was not aware I only had those choices. Oh, and BTW, I was equally unaware we had 10's of thousands of Governments worldwide

I don't feel limited to choosing either. As an adult I take responsibility for my own actions.

Cape Blue

I am not sure there are any scientific facts as to whatever flavor of majic ju-ju God you beleive in, whereas there are many scientific facts when it comes to climate change.

But let's take religion out of it - CO2, its increase over time, its prodution via the combustion of fossil fuels and its propensity to act as a greenhouse gas are facts. The vast majority of scientists and governments and NGOs are telling us that these facts could cause humanity significant problems - what is it you don't beleive? What makes you want to ignore the facts and decide that they are made up? What is driving these scientists, governments and NGOs to say this over the past 20+ years if it is all made up?

OK (grammar nazi alert) - the 10's of thousands of scientists, plus the various governments around the world. What is your reason for doubting all the scientists (etc) involved then?

That's just it though - you are not taking responsibility for your actions, some poor sod in a low-lying developing country will likely take the responsibility for your actions in ignoring what the current scientific evidence is. Current scientific evidence in the medical sector says that smoking causes cancer - would you just arbitrarily decide that you don't believe this fact?

TeamEmbo

Your taking my last comment completely out of context

Like I said at the outset, this is a lot of futile posting. Why can't you just simply accept I DO NOT AGREE with you. What difference does it make what my reasons are? The fact remains, I don't agree, I don't feel bad for not agreeing and I don't feel a less worthy human being.

I accept your point of view, I really do. I don't need to know your reasons; likewise I don't feel I have to justify mine. Enough already!

Cape Blue

Partly because it's not me you are disagreeing with - it's science and fact you are disagreeing with, not my opinion.

But also it's because we are on a forum discussing MMCC and it is interesting to see and try and understand what drives people to not believe in MMCC - is it lack of understanding, is it a political stance, it is a contrarian personality, a belief in conspiracies, a distrust of science, or whatever else.

I go back to the doctors and smoking analogy - if you are a smoker and a thousand eminent doctors tell you smoking causes cancer what do you do?
(1). You agree and give up smoking
(2). you agree but don't give up smoking
(3). you disagree and believe they are all wrong because a cigarette industry doctor says it doesn't.

(1) seems the most logical answer and even (2) is logical in that you understand that the specialists are right but don't want to give up your addiction to fags (read oil and coal), but (3) just seems to defy logic.

Of course the doctors may be wrong about it, but as the biology might be beyond ones understanding, the logical move would be to go with the vast majority of doctors who do understand the mechanisms.

For most of us lay people, the same goes with MMCC - it's complexity and feedbacks are beyond most people and we have to rely on the specialists who have qualifications in their fields and have spent years researching, measuring and understanding the issue.

kporte

If it were science and fact I would agree. Facts are indisputable and the very fact that this is debated at all means that the things you claim as facts are only the current best guess by people paid to theorise. Research years in the gathering, on a plethora of issues, is debunked every day.
The smoking analogy is a bad one, the whole world knows smoking is unhealthy, none more so than the smokers themselves.

TeamEmbo

Ok. You win. You want some facts for my reasoning.

I do not believe CO2 creates global warming. I do not believe this as 10's of thousands of scientist also do not believe this. Rather that decreasing CO2 in the atmosphere will have a more damaging effect.

For example, I'll cite just one petition on the subject, a US petition signed so far by over 31,000 US scientist:

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

Below, experts from sources which, hopefully, will give you the reasoning you want to hear:

There is no scientifically valid mechanism for carbon dioxide creating global warming, because CO2 absorbs the limited radiation available to it in about ten meters (Heinz Hug). An increase in CO2 only shortens the distance, which is not an increase in temperature. Since scientists know this, a fake mechanism is contrived for the top of the troposphere based on thin spectrum shoulders. But again, an increase in CO2 only shortens the distance radiation travels, which does nothing significant to increase the temperature. And there is no explanation of how the supposed temperature increase at the top of the troposphere, which is very cold, can produce heat at ground level.

Do you think doubling CO2 in the air is supposed to double global warming? Only a miniscule fraction of the CO2 is in question to the increase in heat. And it is up high in the atmosphere, not at ground level. No one has suggested a mechanism for getting heat at the top of the troposphere to ground level.

If the atmosphere were entirely nitrogen and oxygen with no so-called greenhouse gasses, the top of the troposphere would be about 5°C colder and near-surface would be almost the same temperature, because radiation goes around the greenhouse gasses. There is no "standard science" which improves upon this guess; but it's irrelevant, because the first 1-10% of the greenhouse gasses did most of what they do before human influences.

Nature shows that greenhouse gasses do nothing, because precipitation has been increasing, and any heating of the atmosphere due to greenhouse gasses would have decreased precipitation. Increased snow and ice over the centers of Antarctica and Greenland have caused oceans to stop rising over the past few years.

There was 5 times as much CO2 in the air during the dinosaur years, and 20 times as much before that, because oceans absorb CO2 and tie it up as calcium carbonate in coral reefs gradually forming limestone. There is now 1/3 as much CO2 in the air as plants need to grow on.

Climate is controlled by the oceans, not the atmosphere.
The oceans have 1,000 times more heat capacity than the atmosphere. It means oceans can heat the air far more than air can heat the oceans. And it means carbon dioxide is not heating the oceans. Solar and geothermal energy heat the oceans.

Arctic ice melt has been going back and forth from fast melt to recovery, while CO2 is as constant as the clock. Ocean currents melt arctic ice, not CO2 effects.

Hansen and the modelers forgot to take into account oceans, which control about 98% of climate variation.

The essence of the error is in claiming some radiation goes around the center of absorption peaks for CO2 but gets picked up on the shoulders of the peaks. Even the shoulders absorb in such a short distance that increasing the CO2 only shortens a short distance. Cooling of the planet is caused by long wave infrared radiation which goes around the shoulders as well as the peaks.

A massive cool-down in the north may have triggered the next ice age in 2008

What's been happening is that warm Pacific ocean water has been flowing into the Arctic and melting ice, which cools the whole planet a little. This caused a recent temperature decrease over the past two years. Then it stops, and Arctic ice reforms, while the Pacific Ocean heats back up, which is happening now (August, 2009).

Greenhouse gasses do what they do in such a short distance, at such a low concentration, that the first 1-10% does almost all that they do, and adding more such gasses cannot create more heat in any significant way. 10% Math

A major reason why greenhouse gasses do not create significant global warming is because the relevant radiation only interacts with the earth within the first few meters (10 meters for CO2). Above that, the radiation is doing everything it does in all directions equally, which does not change the amount of heat in the atmosphere. At the top, another zone of interaction exists creating two narrow zones of relevance.

Radiation is the limiting factor. That means it all gets used up. You can't get more heat without more radiation. Greenhouse gasses do not increase the radiation.

Water vapor shows that greenhouse gasses are nothing. It is 100 times more of a greenhouse gas than CO2, and it varies immensely due to changes in ocean surface temperatures. The warm ocean water of an El Nino causes floods; the cold of an El Nina causes droughts. The opposite of greenhouse effect occurs: The increased water vapor cools by evaporation instead of heats by greenhouse effect.

The planet cools through low frequency infrared radiation (below the wavelength absorbed by "greenhouse gasses"); and therefore greenhouse gasses do not reduce the rate of cool-down. An erroneous Stephan-Boltzmann constant and its misapplication to gasses allows fakes to pretend that significant radiation goes through greenhouse gasses.

And another:

Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission.

Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN's IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.

One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.

The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure, and a vote of confidence in Japan's native marine and astronomical research. Publicly-funded science in the West uniformly backs the hypothesis that industrial influence is primarily responsible for climate change, although fissures have appeared recently. Only one of the five top Japanese scientists commissioned here concurs with the man-made global warming hypothesis.

JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields, and acts as a government advisory panel. The report appeared last month but has received curiously little attention. So The Register commissioned a translation of the document - the first to appear in the West in any form. Below you'll find some of the key findings - but first, a summary.

Summary
Three of the five leading scientists contend that recent climate change is driven by natural cycles, not human industrial activity, as political activists argue.

Kanya Kusano is Program Director and Group Leader for the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology (JAMSTEC). He focuses on the immaturity of simulation work cited in support of the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Using undiplomatic language, Kusano compares them to ancient astrology. After listing many faults, and the IPCC's own conclusion that natural causes of climate are poorly understood, Kusano concludes:

"[The IPCC's] conclusion that from now on atmospheric temperatures are likely to show a continuous, monotonic increase, should be perceived as an unprovable hypothesis," he writes.

Shunichi Akasofu, head of the International Arctic Research Center in Alaska, has expressed criticism of the theory before. Akasofu uses historical data to challenge the claim that very recent temperatures represent an anomaly:

"We should be cautious, IPCC's theory that atmospheric temperature has risen since 2000 in correspondence with CO2 is nothing but a hypothesis. "

Akasofu calls the post-2000 warming trend hypothetical. His harshest words are reserved for advocates who give conjecture the authority of fact.

"Before anyone noticed, this hypothesis has been substituted for truth... The opinion that great disaster will really happen must be broken."

And before you start on wanting to go into intricate detail on debating specifics, I won't. You asked for my reasons. I've provided some. End of.

Cape Blue

CO2 has been increasing, CO2 is caused by burning fossil fuels, CO2 is an insulator for re-radiated infra-red (it acts as a greenhouse). These are the facts. No scientist is arguing against those facts.

Scientists (of any repute), governments and other agencies are not debating whether MMCC is real, the debate has moved on to what and how significant the impacts will be and what we can do to minimize them - this is where theories, predictions and debates are involved, not on whether MMCC is real.

5 years ago on a ski gondola in California I heard one lady say to another "you know it hasn't been proven, my doctor says it hasn't been proven that smoking causes cancer" (in a southern, Virginia drawl) - there will be millions of people in the world today that either don't know or don't believe that smoking causes cancer (think of the developing world), it took 50+ years to educate people on this issue, we are only 20 years into educating people on MMCC and its potential impacts.

TeamEmbo

And if you object to the Japanese reference due to their vested interest in car manufacturing, read this one:

German scientists reject man-made global warming
Growing body of evidence shows anthropogenic CO2 plays no measurable role

More than 60 prominent German scientists have publicly declared their dissent from man-made global warming fears in an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The more than 60 signers of the letter include several United Nations IPCC scientists.

The scientists declared that global warming has become a “pseudo religion” and they noted that rising CO2 has “had no measurable effect” on temperatures. The German scientists, also wrote that the “UN IPCC has lost its scientific credibility.”

This latest development comes on the heels of a series of inconvenient developments for the promoters of man-made global warming fears, including new peer-reviewed studies, real world data, a growing chorus of scientists dissenting (including more UN IPCC scientists), open revolts in scientific societies and the Earth's failure to warm. In addition, public opinion continues to turn against climate fear promotion.

The July 26, 2009 German scientist letter urged Chancellor Merkel to “strongly reconsider” her position on global warming and requested a “convening of an impartial panel” that is “free of ideology” to counter the UN IPCC and review the latest climate science developments.

The scientists, from many disciplines, including physicists, meteorology, chemistry, and geology, explain that “humans have had no measurable effect on global warming through CO2 emissions. Instead the temperature fluctuations have been within normal ranges and are due to natural cycles.”

“More importantly, there's a growing body of evidence showing anthropogenic CO2 plays no measurable role,” the scientists wrote. “Indeed CO2's capability to absorb radiation is almost exhausted by today's atmospheric concentrations. If CO2 did indeed have an effect and all fossil fuels were burned, then additional warming over the long term would in fact remain limited to only a few tenths of a degree,” they added.

“The IPCC had to have been aware of this fact, but completely ignored it during its studies of 160 years of temperature measurements and 150 years of determined CO2 levels. As a result the IPCC has lost its scientific credibility,” the scientists wrote.

“Indeed the atmosphere has not warmed since 1998 – more than 10 years, and the global temperature has even dropped significantly since 2003. Not one of the many extremely expensive climate models predicted this. According to the IPCC, it was supposed to have gotten steadily warmer, but just the opposite has occurred,” the scientists wrote.

“The belief of climate change, and that it is manmade, has become a pseudo-religion,” the scientists wrote. “The German media has sadly taken a leading position in refusing to publicize views that are critical of anthropogenic global warming,” they added.

“Do you not believe, Madam Chancellor, that science entails more than just confirming a hypothesis, but also involves testing to see if the opposite better explains reality? We strongly urge you to reconsider your position on this subject and to convene an impartial panel for the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, one that is free of ideology, and where controversial arguments can be openly debated. We the undersigned would very much like to offer support in this regard.

Cape Blue

Sorry but that is pretty lame - you have cut and pasted most of it from a website of a guy called Gary Novak who has a mushroom specialism - http://moonflake.wordpress.com/2006/...koogary-novak/ - this isn't some peer-reviewed climatologist, just some guy posting on his own website.

The 31,000 scientists is also weak as most (99.9% apparently) do not have backgrounds in climatology:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-..._b_243092.html
http://www.sierraclub.ca/national/pr...myths.html#cc2

I am sure that smoking causes cancer deniers could quote pages from this sort of website http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread26670/pg1 but it wouldn't make it any more valid.

If you wanted to check on what valid medical opinions were on smoking you would go to the NHS or American medical association etc, if you want to check on valid CC opinion go to the IPCC.

Cutting and pasting technical arguments, that I have already said are beyond the understanding of most people on this sort of forum, doesn't add anything to the debate - its just an obscurification technique.