"I am not sure about any anti-GW theories.
However, I am freezing in North Carolina and some
of my colleagues in Florida are as well. Does
experimental data count for anti-GW? Happy New
Year and God's blessings always" ~ Moorad Thu, 3
Jan 2008 11:04:36 RE: [asa] Teaching ID and
teaching that Gobal Warming is not real.
@ Here's some experimental data for ya: We have
"witnessed the frost line" steadily moving
further and further south. When I moved to
Florida in 1980 from Pennsylvania, there were
orange groves everywhere in Central
Florida. They have since been frozen off and
most of the commercial groves are now 100 + miles
south of Orlando. It is touch and go with the
Plant City (Tampa area) strawberry crop after
last night's freeze 29 degrees. Tonight is
supposed to be even colder. Of course, this does
not count for anti-GW. Don't forget - "climate
change" in either direction is all because of man
causing "global warming", don'tchaknow. (Yes, you
do - if you're looking for tenure, funding, or
getting published in a "prestigious" publication.)
Here are three items below for those interested
in staying up to speed on what the
outside-the-cocoon world thinks about the
eco-theocrats attempt to impose their "religious
conscience" on the rest of us. ~ Janice
[1] Bali's little secret
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1943130/posts
[snip]
The current eco-theocracy started as a reaction
against industrial globalization. It was pushed
by the left. But a funny thing happened on the
way to Greenpeace. Kyoto happened.
The dirty little secret behind Kyoto is that it
created a new industry. Carbon emissions trading.
That market is so big now that the left has been
joined by a new constituency in the global business community it opposed.
Both exerted pressure on governments to meet a
Kyoto agenda that could not possibly help the
planet’s environment. Kyoto was on the one hand a
façade behind which emissions traders hid and on
the other a pacifier for the eco-theocrats to
claim some victory. In the end politicians got to
harness some votes. Sadly the public was very badly done by.
Here’s another inconvenient truth. As a result of
Kyoto, Canadians had to fork over $1.3 billion
just two years ago to buy emissions credits from
Russia which had met its much lowered standards
because its economy had slowed. Canada’s
emissions had actually risen much higher since
Kyoto, though this country is a signatory, than
the United States which did not sign.
Bali may have actually signaled the end of this
two-tier system. By eliminating precise targets,
the door is left open for negotiations over the
next two years to bring all nations into
agreement on achievable targets. And it was not
just Canada and the United States that demanded
this. Australia’s newly-elected Labour Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd declared that his government
would not support 25 to 40 percent targeted cuts
in emissions by 2020. Trade Minister Simon Crean
announced that developing countries like China
and India would have to accept tough binding
targets too before Australia would ever agree to
any post-Kyoto agreement beyond 2012.
Even more surprising was the statement from
Britain’s Trade and Development Minister Gareth
Thomas, who told the BBC that developing
countries would also be required to accept
targets for CO2 emissions. And U.S. S enator
JohnK*rry said at Bali that he had notified the
international community that a rejection by China
and other emerging economies to cut their own
greenhouse gases would make it almost impossible
for any U.S. administration to get a new global
climate treaty through the U.S. S enate “even under a [D-rat] p resident.”
The little secret from Bali is that the “road
map” that was adopted without emissions targets
may have signaled that the U.S. and Canada have
galvanized key allies who may finally be saying
enough is enough to the eco-theocrats. And
signaling a tough new stance against the world’s
biggest polluters like India and China. The times may be a changin’.
*
[2] French physicist calls Al Gore a 'crook' over global warming issues
m&c ^ | 12/28/07 | M&C US
News http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1945330/posts
Related: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1945387/posts?page=34#34
[snip]
Comments:
"Biased, left-wing scientists in academia had
better come to grips with their bias or they are
going to start making creationists look
good." <http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1945306/posts?page=25#25>25
"Enviro-Weenies have been consistent, throughout,
that mankind needs to reduce the consumption of
energy and the standard of living of the
Industrialized West, and the United States in
particular, must decline precipitously. They may
have a new “scientific basis” these days, but the
goal has never changed."
<http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1944346/posts?page=16#16>16
''The analogy I use is like my car's not running
very well, so I'm going to ignore the engine
which is the sun and I'm going to ignore the
transmission which is the water vapour and I'm
going to look at one nut on the right rear wheel
which is the human produced CO2. The science is
that bad.'' - Dr Roy Spencer, former NASA senior
climatologist
<http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1945306/posts?page=94#94>94
.."The world has warmed up until recently, and
that warming trend doesn't fit with the CO2
record at all; it fits with the sunspot data. Of
course, they are ignoring the sun because they want to focus on CO2."
"They" are the high priests of global warming,
who have indeed had a chilling effect, so to
speak, on free scientific inquiry. Nigel Calder,
a former editor of New Scientist, said:
"Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by
stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein
could not have got funding under the current
system." ..."Scientists who dissent from the
alarmism....have seen their funds disappear,
their work derided and themselves labeled as
industry
stooges."
<http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1945306/posts?page=92#92>92
"..within the past 15,000 years there have been
shifts up to "20 times greater than the warming
in the past century." Speaking of glaciers, Swiss
climatologists believe that glaciers in the Alps
have melted away at least 10 times in the past 10,000 years.
As we've noted many times, perhaps the biggest
impact on Earth's climate over time has been the
sun. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for
Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been
burning more brightly over the past 60 years,
accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in
Earth's temperature over the past 100
years."" <http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1945306/posts?page=93#93>93
*
[3]
$cience Mag Jumps on Global Moneywagon
Scientists like money. (It's true --- be still,
my heart.) Big Science is a Big Business,
supporting nearly half the budgets of our major universities.
Science professors are only hired if they can
swing enough Federal grant money to pay for their
labs, hire a gaggle of graduate assistants, and
let the universities skim up to forty percent
off the top for overhead. And besides, it's nice to get fat salaries.
So the professional scientist union, the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, has
ads headed AAA$. They aren't shy about it.
The trouble is that money means politics, and
politics means shading the truth.
As a result, we get politicized science, which corrupts real science.
Any kind of Politically Incorrect science
therefore becomes very hard to publish.
So the cult of PC has invaded the pristine halls of science.
The past week's Science magazine is a study in
the way science can be ruined. The scare cover
shouts Reef TROUBLE, to support the idea that our coral reefs are dying.
It's like the National Enquirer.
Donald A.Kennedy is the editor of Science, with a
dubious
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Kennedy>reputation
from his years as p resident of Stanford
University. Turns out that PresidentKennedy
spent millions of Stanford research funds to
rebuild his personal residence; "feathering your
own nest" is more than a metaphor at Stanford.
The scandal led to his resignation. Fortunately
Kennedy did not end up on the bread line. He was
able to jump to become editor-in-chief of the
flagship journal of the AAAS, Science magazine.
Naturally, Science magazine has weekly updates on
the grant wars in W ashingtonDC.
In the last issue of Science DonaldKennedy has an
editorial endorsing the D-rat candidate for p
resident. Not exactly in so many words, but it's unmistakable.
"The United States could ... mitigate carbon
dioxide emissions: The root cause of global
warming and the reef problem. Experience suggests
that for this, we might have to await an election." (1695)
This is like the union boss telling his members
how to vote in a generalelection if they want to get more money.
But global warming is a popular hypothesis, Dr.
Kennedy. It's not established. You remember the difference.
No doubt Kennedy is a fire-breathing l*beral. But
he's also hoping for lots of global warming money from HillaryorObama.
(For a good cause, of course. Perhaps his roof needs repairs).
What new discoveries does Science magazine
present to support that scare cover? The answer is: None.
This week's Science has one article by Australian
reef researchers, but it presents no new data.
They make the claims that if the acidity of the
oceans increases slightly over the next 50 to 100
years, coral reefs will be in trouble. The
source? The highly politicized United Nations
IPCC report, which has now been roundly
criticized by many of the scientists who were involved with it.
So if disaster strikes, disaster will strike.
It's a perfect circular argument.
This scientific article is "supported" by a truly
sloppy coral reef article by a professional
writer --- not a trained scientist --- repeating
the panic slogan of the moment, with a few
second-hand quotes from scare mongers. This one
is really embarrassing. It contradicts itself and
makes no sense at all. (1712)
The whole sham is based on the notion that carbon
in the air has never increased before, slightly
changing the acidity of the surface layers of the
oceans. So this is a unique world-historic doom
caused by evil human beings. But that is absurd.
In 1911 a comet crashed in the Kamchatka
Peninsula in Siberia, leading to massive
wildfires. Forest fires like that increase carbon
in the air and the water. At other times in the
last billion years, animal species have exploded
in variety and biomass. Animals breathe out
carbon dioxide. CO2 grows plants, which emit
oxygen, which increases animal life, and so on.
It's a stable symbiotic system, not a self-destroying system.
The other farcical assumption is that global
temperatures are bound to increase by two degrees
Celsius in the next hundred years, and that has
never happened before either. That assumption is
based on the 22 grossly oversimplified computer
models that are constantly revised to take in new
evidence to come to the same convenient
conclusion. The idea that world temperatures have
never increased by a mere two degrees C over a
century is bizarre. Every time the world comes
out of an ice age, temperatures increase by a lot more than 2 degrees.
Living things adapt to changing conditions. That
is why they are still here. Coral reefs are
living biosystems that emerged half a billion
years ago in the Cambrian explosion of
single-celled life. Single celled creatures can
adapt with amazing speed --- which is why we get
"superbugs" in hospitals, remember? Superbugs are
bacteria that have evolved to survive
antibiotics, so they are hard to wipe out.
Hospitals therefore easily become centers of
infection. Find a new antibiotic, pretty soon you get a new superbug.
In fact, we now know about
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophiles>extremophiles,
organisms that thrive in extremely harsh
environments, like volcanic vents at the bottom
of the ocean. Life is hardy, not fragile.
You can't have it both ways. Either
microorganisms evolve and adapt to slightly
changing temperatures, or they can't.
If they can adapt rapidly, the coral reefs can adjust to minor changes.
Since coral organisms have been around for
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion>500,000,000
years, it's pretty clear that they have been able
to adapt quite nicely, thank you.
Experiments on the adaptability of e coli (yes,
that one), show that over a decade or two, some
20,000 generations of bugs evolve to deal with a
wide variety of conditions. Fruit flies have been
bred continuously over fifty years under adaptive
pressures, and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolution>evolve to cope.
What scientists have actually observed is changes in coral reefs.
That's why they are running around like religious
maniacs on street corners with signs that The End of the World is At Hand!
But change is a constant in biological history. Nothing stays the same.
Nobody has a complete "census" of the coral reefs
in the world, so percent changes in the estimated
size of coral reefs are a wild guess. (The denominator is missing).
Our current
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_reef>guess is
that world reefs constitute about six times the
area of West Virginia. There's no way we know
what's happening in a vast ecosystem like that.
But basic biology says that those populations of
coral creatures are constantly adapting, adapting, adapting.
As science fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke loves to
point out, famous physicists predicted about 1900
that man would never fly. In the 1950s they
confidently said that a moon landing was
impossible. "Clarke's Law"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws>states
that whenever a famous scientist tells you that
something is impossible, don't believe him. Chances are he's just wrong.
Humans are the fastest-learning creatures ever
known. In the last hundred years we have gone
from choo-choo trains to scramjets. Give us
another century, and who knows what we will do?
Colonize Mars? Solarize energy? Double our life
span? Human history gives lots of grounds for hope, and much less for despair.
It's easy to imagine ways to fix coral reefs. For
one thing, we could strip mine them if the ocean
level drops, so that the top of the reefs will
stay immersed in seawater. Or we can take blocks
of the dead part of a reef (which is most of it),
and spread them on top of the coral layer cake if
the water level rises. We do that kind of thing
all the time in dredging rivers and harbors. So
we can keep adjust coral reefs to the heigh to sea water if that ever changes.
My real worry is --- will we ever fix politicized science?
Because if we allow the search for truth to be so
easily twisted by political fads, we may be in really deep doo-doo.
Now there's a scary prediction." ~ James Lewis
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1944589/posts
Comment: "Nothing new. I gave up my subscription
to Astronomy magazine in 1996 when they published
an article about two astronomers. One decried
that there wasn't enough federal funding for
astronomers, and the other described his love for
thrash metal, which he believed Bob Dole would
ban when he became p resident. Geez
louise! <http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1944589/posts?page=5#5>5
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Received on Thu Jan 3 12:32:26 2008
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