Climate Change

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Uncwilly,

Since I don't watch ER, same question to you.

Michael Crichton is the series creator for ER. He was the lead producer etc. Dr. Green (Anthony Edwards) is slated to re-appear, after being dead for years. They are trying to do grand laps in the final season, bringing back old characters.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

A couple of months later, Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, similarly wrote a column ("Checking Crichton's footnotes", http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ide...ons_footnotes/) that described State of Fear's misleading and distorted references to real climate science statements in the book's footnotes, which were intended to lend credibility to the novel's thesis.

Next you'll be telling us that Eaters of the Dead wasn't based on a true story, either.

[jrk]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

jrk,

To what do you refer? (Or was that intended for a different thread?)

One of my favorite authors as a kid is dead. Hence, "Shit."

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Next you'll be telling us that Eaters of the Dead wasn't based on a true story, either.

I'm even less familiar with Eaters of the Dead than with ER, but AFAIK the reality of necrophagia has been established almost as well as that of anthropogenic global warming.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

I'm even less familiar with Eaters of the Dead than with ER, but AFAIK the reality of necrophagia has been established almost as well as that of anthropogenic global warming.

You perhaps have seen the movie version of EOTD without being aware of the connection, as the movie was titled The 13th Warrior.

[Xyzzy]

"Where did you learn our language?"

"I listened!"

[cheesehead]

"Conclusive Proof That Polar Warming Is Being Caused By Humans"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1030144618.htm

New research by the University of East Anglia (UEA) has demonstrated for the first time that human activity is responsible for significant warming in both polar regions.

The findings by a team of scientists led by UEA's Climatic Research Unit was recently published online by the Nature Geoscience.

Previous studies have observed rises in both Arctic and Antarctic temperatures over recent decades but have not formally attributed the changes to human influence due to poor observation data and large natural variability. Moreover, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had concluded that Antarctica was the only continent where human-induced temperature changes had yet to be detected.

Now, a newly updated data-set of land surface temperatures and simulations from four new climate models show that temperature rises in both polar regions are not consistent with natural climate variability alone and are directly attributable to human influence.

The results demonstrate that human activity has already caused significant warming, with impacts on polar biology, indigenous communities, ice-sheet mass balance and global sea level.

"This is an important work indeed," said Dr Alexey Karpechko of UEA's Climatic Research Unit.

"Arctic warming has previously been emphasized in several publications, although not formally attributed to human activity. However in Antarctica, such detection was so far precluded by insufficient data available. Moreover circulation changes caused by stratospheric ozone depletion opposed warming over most of Antarctica and made the detection even more difficult.

"Since the ozone layer is expected to recover in the future we may expect amplifying Antarctic warming in the coming years."

[cheesehead]

An example of the misleading-by-petition tactic:

"Misleading by Petition: Just What is the Concensus on Global Warming"

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-11-12.html#feature

(boldface is my emphasis, not the article's - RBW)

Originally Posted by Gary J. Whittenberger Ph.D

Is global warming a real phenomenon, and if so, are humans causing or contributing to it by burning fossil fuels and will it lead to an increased frequency and/or severity of natural disasters? The American public looks to science or scientists to help answer these questions. A petition circulated by a small group of scientists is creating quite a stir, arousing considerable praise and disdain from groups on different sides of the global warming issue.

... According to the website which reports the details of the petition and is presumably authored by Arthur Robinson, “the purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of humancaused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong.”1 Robinson asserts not just that his collection of 31,072 signatures on a petition has refuted the claim of “settled science” and “overwhelming consensus” among scientists with regard to global warming, but that “The very large number of petition signers demonstrates that, if there is a consensus among American scientists, it is in opposition to the humancaused global warming hypothesis rather than in favor of it.”2 Not only has Robinson failed to substantiate either of his assertions, he is misleading the American public by implying that his petition fairly represents relevant expert opinion.

To understand the problems with Robinson’s “Global Warming Petition Project”, we must first examine how the petition itself was distributed and how signatures were collected. To a sample of persons on the mailing list of American Men and Women of Science,3 Robinson sent a petition packet consisting of a petition card, a return envelope, a cover letter from Seitz, and a 12-page review of the literature on the human-caused global warming hypothesis authored by the two Robinsons and Willie Soon.4 The two main assertions stated on the petition card were that there is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide and other gases is causing harmful atmospheric heating and climate change and that the U.S. government should reject the Kyoto Agreement and any other similar proposals. Arthur Robinson not only requested that recipients return the signed petition card, if they agreed with its assertions, but also arranged for the recipients to distribute petition packets to their colleagues. He also enabled other persons to obtain petition packets by simply requesting them through his website, and this procedure ultimately produced five percent of the returned petition cards. Thus, signed petitions were solicited in three different ways.

Although the website for the petition indicates that checks of credentials and identity were performed for signatories of the returned petitions, and invalid petitions were excluded, how the checks were performed is not described. Signed petition cards were accepted only if they came from persons who had “obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher in appropriate scientific fields”.5 ...

Although in one interview Robinson called his petition project a “survey”6, it is definitely not a survey, and because it is not a well-designed scientific survey of the views of a group of relevant experts, its results cannot be used to reach the conclusions about “consensus” that are asserted and hoped for by Robinson. In the first place, Robinson presents neither a dictionary nor an operational definition of “consensus”. He wants to reach conclusions about a consensus, but he spends no time telling us what he thinks a consensus is. According to Merriam-Webster’s Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary, a “consensus” may refer to general agreement, unanimity, judgment by most of those concerned, or group solidarity. Of course if we use the “unanimity” definition of “consensus”, then Robinson’s Global Warming Petition Project shows that a consensus of persons with science degrees, even those with relevant degrees, does not support the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. But this is a trivial conclusion; we knew this before the petition drive! The “unanimity” definition of “consensus”, however, is not the one in which the American public is interested.

If Robinson had been conducting a true survey, he would have offered an operational definition of “consensus” before he started his inquiry. Robinson misleads the public to think that a consensus is defined by some large absolute number of persons. It is not. It is determined by a large percentage of persons in a relevant sample. Does Robinson, or the general public, think of a consensus as agreement within a given group at a level of 75%, 90%, or some other percentage? He does not tell us. He reports only the number of persons who sent back signed petition cards, but he reports neither the total number of persons to whom he sent petition cards in the first place nor the number of persons to whom he sent petition cards who subsequently returned only messages of disagreement. Since Robinson chose to conduct a petition project rather than a well-designed scientific survey, he cannot reach valid conclusions about any consensus, and he should not have attempted to do so.

Had Robinson been interested in finding out the truth about the views of relevant scientists rather than pursuing his own political agenda, he would have given a great deal more consideration to sample selection. ...

. . .

... I think that the American public would be interested in knowing the views of a more restricted sample than the one used by Robinson. For the main hypothesis concerning human-caused global warming, it would be desirable to know the opinions of scientists with doctoral degrees in climatology or Earth science who had spent most of their lives studying the relevant phenomena. A survey of a large random sample of these scientists would be illuminating and helpful.

There are other flaws in Robinson’s project. If Robinson had been conducting a real survey rather than a petition drive, he would not have allowed three different ways for persons to participate in his project. Instead he would have arranged for persons to participate in only one way; he would have randomly selected participants from a well-defined, qualified and relevant population of scientific experts. Furthermore, in his petition project Robinson simply asked persons with science degrees to sign the petition if they agreed with its content. But did they agree with all 20 overlapping propositions embedded in the four sentences of the petition? Did they agree with most of them? Did they agree with at least 50% of them? We don’t know. In a real survey, Robinson would have constructed a questionnaire in which his respondents could have addressed each of the 20 propositions in which he was interested or possibly each of the main propositions actually stated in Al Gore’s popular book, An Inconvenient Truth, for which Robinson expresses great disdain.9 At the least, in a survey Robinson would have provided five response options for each proposition, something like “strongly disagree, moderately disagree, neither disagree nor agree, moderately agree, and strongly agree”. Or he might have provided a similar scale using anchors such as: “definitely false, probably false, uncertain if false or true, probably true, definitely true”. These response options would have allowed participants the opportunity to more fully express the subtlety and variety of their positions. ...

Finally, the petition drive can be viewed as an “attempt to persuade” since it included the article reviewing the literature on global warming written by Robinson himself and two others, and it included the cover letter of endorsement from Seitz. The article and cover letter are bound to be biased towards Robinson’s point of view. If Robinson had been interested in finding the truth about expert opinion instead of manipulating that opinion, he would have done one of the following: 1) Sent a questionnaire with no accompanying review article or endorsement letter. (Probably the best option.) 2) Sent a review article not written by himself but by an independent expert representative of qualified climatologists. Or 3) Sent two review articles by two qualified climatologists from different perspectives, reaching different conclusions about humancaused global warming.

In conclusion, through his Global Warming Petition Project, Arthur Robinson has solicited the opinions of the wrong group of people in the wrong way and drawn the wrong conclusions about any possible consensus among relevant and qualified scientists regarding the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. His petition is unqualified to deliver answers about a consensus in which the public is interested. He has a right to conduct any kind of petition drive he wishes, but he is not ethically entitled to misrepresent his petition as a fair reflection of relevant scientific opinion. He has confused his political with his scientific aims and misled the public in the process.

The Author, Gary Whittenberger, is a free-lance writer and psychologist, living in Tallahassee, Florida. He received his doctoral degree from Florida State University after which he worked for 23 years as a psychologist in prisons. He has published many articles on science, philosophy, psychology, and religion, and their intersection.

[ewmayer]

Europe, Japan Face $46 Billion Penalty for Missing Kyoto Climate Targets: Twenty nations including Japan, Italy and Australia may be releasing more greenhouse-gas pollution than they agreed to under the Kyoto treaty to curb global warming.

Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Twenty nations including Japan, Italy and Australia may be releasing more greenhouse-gas pollution than they agreed to under the Kyoto treaty to curb global warming.

They're failing to rein in carbon-dioxide output enough to meet their pledges signed in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, according to reports by individual countries. As a penalty for missing their goals under the treaty, the nations are required to buy permits for every excess ton of the heat-trapping gas released through 2012. That will total 2.3 billion permits for 20 nations, New Carbon Finance, a research firm in London, has estimated.

The potential penalty, 36 billion euros ($46 billion) for the group based on current permit prices, and the fact that only a minority of 37 Kyoto signatory nations may meet their pledges bodes poorly for international efforts to limit global warming.

``This shows there's a lot more interest in promising stuff than actually keeping those promises,'' Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book ``The Skeptical Environmentalist,'' said in a telephone interview from Copenhagen. ``What you should be doing is investing in research and development to make much more dramatic emissions cuts much cheaper in the future.''

In three days the UN will publish a report on emissions data for 2006, compiling figures from national reports already released. Analysts have been using that data to estimate emissions for Kyoto's 2008-2012 measurement period because a nation's CO2 output from factories, power plants and vehicles varies little year to year. It takes about 10 years, for example, to build a low-emissions nuclear plant to replace several dirtier coal-fired power stations.

My Comment: Does anyone here think - especially given the global economic climate - that any of the worst offenders among the signatory nations would actually pay up, were such a fine levied? I think not. Which begs the question: Was Kyoto anything more than a giant international feel-good photo op?

[wblipp]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Which begs the question: Was Kyoto anything more than a giant international feel-good photo op?

Are you asking if Bush was right?

[10metreh]

For how long has the title of this thread been 'Global warring: Hoax or real threat to mankind?'

Warming, warning, warring. I challenge you to find another example like that where all three are (loosely) related!