This is a straw man and a false choice. It's a false choice that we must choose between a pristine world and world where we incur huge costs on future generations. It's a straw man to say anyone is aiming for a pristine world or to purposely push huge costs on future generations.

Try some of the less inflammatory links off the Lessons Page links to Global Warming off my web site. Starting with http://www.plusaf.com/global-warming/glo...


Here's one from an email thread on the second MMGW page... http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesd...

which is the first link at http://www.plusaf.com/global-warming/glo...

Dear Khalling, I know that you read State of Fear. Part of your answer is in that book. The key professor in this entire controversy at least was at East Anglia in the UK. As manager of the repository, he was the one who was caught with e-mails regarding the manipulation of the data. I wish I remembered that charlatan's name.

Plusaf, you are right we are past the sunspot minimum, but we are still historically on the low side when it comes to sunspots. You are also right that the IPCC models overpredict any temperature change. An excellent discussion of this is on about p. 500 of Michael Crichton's State of Fear, as I said slightly above this in the thread.

I do teach them plotting and curve fitting, but in the follow-up course (Intro to ChE 2). The hockey stick is part of the environmental component of Intro to ChE 1, which focuses mostly on how to design a process to make a product (i.e. process flowsheeting) minus the math. The math starts to come in the 2nd course, and comes in hot and heavy ever after that. It gives me great joy to make Al Gore look like an idiot. Al Gore had as much to do with inventing the Internet as his father did in passing the Civil Rights Amendment. Oh, that's right. His father voted against that bill.

plusaf, you have said this many times. Do you have a particular model or example that illustrates how they are setting up the models? or maybe a post on this?

Um, J... http://spaceweather.com/ ... sunspot minimum passed already and they're on the increase over the past few years of the normal cycle.

And the 'average temperatures' still aren't close to what the IPCC's models predicted.

K, it's not only the data that are fudged; the models themselves are repeatedly tweaked in efforts to make them predict the PAST observations, let alone current ones, and they still don't work.

But so long as enough people are illiterate and innumerate, those flatulent statements will be believed and spread without limit over the web.

Hell, I took one look at the Vostok ice core data and realized that, until or unless someone can explain EXACTLY what caused ALL of the prior major Ice Ages, the core data imply that we're heading for another Ice Age in the 'relatively near future'!

If we're warming the planet with CO2, we may be postponing the next Ice Age for the first time in history! And an Ice Age just might kill more humans and other species than warming! How many billion humans can survive in the 'Tropics', which will become the earth's "Temperate Zone"?

Heard a theory some years back that, as the detritus on the oceans' floors get subsumed as the continental plates push under each other, the carbon compounds are heated and compressed and POSSIBLY 'recycled' into crude oil!

I don't think anyone's proven that it's impossible.
Ultimate recycling, eh?

Teach 'em about graphing, too... plot 2^n versus n on the right (wrong) scale and you get a wonderful hockey stick. Use the right scales (semilog) and you get a beautiful straight line.

When I saw Inconvenient Truth for the first time, I looked at that graph and said, "Bullshit: wrong ordinate scale! Designed to mislead!"

So much for Gore's math ability or lack of it.

Heat is a "sign post" of increased activity, higher intelligence, increased technology, industrial activity, social development - in short, life. If the Earth first crowd want a pristine world, untouched by human hand, I'd offer them a one way trip to Uranus.

I think there is denialism on the issue not b/c people can't understand but because there's no good solution. The scientific case for anthropogenic climate change is solid, but I haven't seen a solid solution.

Sorry, no. We skeptics dismiss what the AGW Gestapo can't explain and claim it is too "complex" for our little brains. AGW hypothesis: Rising CO2 causes warming. Fact: CO2 is higher than in human history (400ppm); therefore, the earth is warming.

Problem for us small brained creatures: Despite continually rising CO2 levels, the earth has not warmed for nearly two decades.

"But, but...." say the AGW Gestapo, "it's because the heat decided to hide in the deep oceans."
But when we point out record cold, the Polar Vortex (!), the AGW Gestapo says, "That extreme cold is not what global warming is. YOU must take into consideration decadal changes." "But, but," we say, "the last two decades show no warming."

And the AGW Gestapo say, "But the extreme cold is what proves global warming. " Now, we are supposed to take into consideration extremes??

First law of economics: Who controls supply controls price. Find something to control with zero value (CO2), create an artificial value (it warms the earth and warming is bad), control it via carbon credits and taxation and bingo, set the price and AlGore gets richer with the Carbon Exchange and thousands of professors of atmospheric science continue to suck at the nipple of government grants.

My conclusion: The earth is warming, has been for 10,000 years. FACT: Warming causes CO2 to rise, generally, 800 years after the fact. The anthropogenic connection is coincidental, not causative. And, by the way, the greatest advances in improving the quality of human life on earth happened during warming periods.

I read until he started talking about the "alarmist global warming establishment". This is just wishful thinking. Maybe one day we'll get surprising new evidence. Until then this reminds me of a smoker I once knew who said "maybe there's an anti-smoking conspiracy tainting the evidence, and smoking really isn't that harmful." As rational people we should know better than come up with thees notions, esp when almost everyone on earth would love them to be true. I evaluate it the same way I evaluate the claim that there are benevolent gods taking care of my friends and relatives who have died. My desire for it to be true makes me want to make up twisted narratives, but as a skeptic I know that and resist the urge.

When I was growing up I anticipated each issue and looked forward to going to our local planetarium where old issues were sold to help support the museum. I always spent my months allowance buying issues I didn't own.

Back then the pages were full of the great works by men and women who had or were soon to be awarded Nobel Prizes for great works of intellect and science.

A couple years ago as I was traveling I purchased a copy to read in the hotel room. Gone were the pages of great graphics of new inventions, gone were the interstellar photographs taken by patient astronomers on far away mountain tops and gone forever were the great mathematical constructs that inspired my youth. All replaced with hockey stick insanity and propaganda. Very Sad.

This entire climate thing is a global government control thing!

If you look at the geological record from each of the previous interglacial periods, the present one mirrors closely the temperature patterns of the previous periods, except that each of the previous interglacial periods had a sharp rise in temperatures towards the end of the interglacial period before temperatures plummeted to produce the next glacial period. The spike in temperatures has been preceded typically by increasing instability (extremes of cold and heat). The present interglacial period has lasted longer than most of the previous interglacial periods, and has not had the spike of temperature that is the precursor to the end of the interglacial period. The gulf stream changing course is also a typical precursor to the onset of the next ice age, along with increased melting of the ice in the north polar sea. The only significant differences between the present interglacial period and previous interglacial periods are that it has remained cooler, on the average, than previous interglacial periods, and has lasted longer.

Nice analogy with the Mandelbrot set. I haven't looked at fractals and chaos theory in a while, but you can get chaotic behavior with only two couple ordinary differential equations (ODE's). Climate has many coupled PDE's.

I get the joy of debunking the hockey stick plot every fall in my freshman Introduction to Chemical Engineering class. That is one day I particularly look forward to.

Somehow, I don't have a hard time believing that you would get into many arguments about global warming. I've had a couple with other university's meteorologist myself.

I got you a good one, khalling, and honestly I wasn't even trying to be humorous, although looking back on it now, I am getting a good belly laugh.

I also enjoyed that book. whew. you got me a good one the april fools. You do NOT want to know how many arguments I get into global warming BS with scientists in academia. The power to believe is very strong...

We can only wish. Until we get a serious change-up in Washington (and I include Republicans), we're going to see more and not less internationalism. I don't have a problem with trade. I do have a problem with adopting foreign laws over the Constitution.