Global Warming Is Not A Crisis

[cmotherofpirl]

Global Warming Is Not a Crisis
Debate: Time to Sound the Alarm Bells?
OPINION By PHILIP STOTT
March 9, 2007 — - From the Babylon of Gilgamesh to the post-Eden of Noah, every age has viewed climate change cataclysmically, as retribution for human greed and sinfulness.

In the 1970s, the fear was "global cooling." The Christian Science Monitor then declaimed, "Warning: Earth's climate is changing faster than even experts expect," while The New York Times announced, "A major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable." Sound familiar? Global warming represents the latest doom-laden "crisis," one demanding sacrifice to Gaia for our wicked fossil-fuel-driven ways.

But neither history nor science bolsters such an apocalyptic faith.

History and Science

Extreme weather events are ever present, and there is no evidence of systematic increases. Outside the tropics, variability should decrease in a warmer world. If this is a "crisis," then the world is in permanent "crisis," but will be less prone to "crisis" with warming.


Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age, most rapidly about 12,000 years ago. In recent centuries, the average rate has been relatively uniform. The rate was higher during the first half of the 20th century than during the second. At around a couple of millimeters per year, it is a residual of much larger positive and negative changes locally. The risk from global warming is less than that from other factors (primarily geological).

The impact on agriculture is equivocal. India warmed during the second half of the 20th century, yet agricultural output increased markedly. The impact on disease is dubious. Infectious diseases, like malaria, are not so much a matter of temperature as of poverty and public health. Malaria remains endemic in Siberia, and was once so in Michigan and Europe. Exposure to cold is generally more dangerous.

So, does the claim that humans are the primary cause of recent warming imply "crisis"? The impact on temperature per unit CO2 goes down, not up, with increasing CO2. The role of human-induced greenhouse gases does not relate directly to emission rate, nor even to CO2 levels, but rather to the radiative (or greenhouse) impact. Doubling CO2 is a convenient benchmark. It is claimed, on the basis of computer models, that this should lead to 1.1 - 6.4 C warming.

Philip Stott is an Emeritus Professor from the University of London, UK. For the last 18 years he was the editor of the Journal of Biogeography. For more information about the debate series, go to www.iq2us.org


What is rarely noted is that we are already three-quarters of the way into this in terms of radiative forcing, but we have only witnessed a 0.6 (+/-0.2) C rise, and there is no reason to suppose that all of this is due to humans.


Indeed the system requires no external driver to fluctuate by a fraction of a degree because of ocean disequilibrium with the atmosphere. There are also alternative drivers relating to cosmic rays, the sun, water vapor and clouds. Moreover, it is worth remembering that modelers even find it difficult to account for the medieval warm period.

The Real Crisis

Our so-called "crisis" is thus neither a product of current observations nor of projections.

But does it matter if global warming is a "crisis" or not? Aren't we threatened by a serious temperature rise? Shouldn't we act anyway, because we are stewards of the environment?

Herein lies the moral danger behind global warming hysteria. Each day, 20,000 people in the world die of waterborne diseases. Half a billion people go hungry. A child is orphaned by AIDS every seven seconds. This does not have to happen. We allow it while fretting about "saving the planet." What is wrong with us that we downplay this human misery before our eyes and focus on events that will probably not happen even a hundred years hence? We know that the greatest cause of environmental degradation is poverty; on this, we can and must act.

The global warming "crisis" is misguided. In hubristically seeking to "control" climate, we foolishly abandon age-old adaptations to inexorable change. There is no way we can predictably manage this most complex of coupled, nonlinear chaotic systems. The inconvenient truth is that "doing something" (emitting gases) at the margins and "not doing something" (not emitting gases) are equally unpredictable.

Climate change is a norm, not an exception. It is both an opportunity and a challenge. The real crises for 4 billion people in the world remain poverty, dirty water and the lack of a modern energy supply. By contrast, global warming represents an ecochondria of the pampered rich.

Philip Stott is an Emeritus Professor from the University of London, UK. For the last 18 years he was the editor of the Journal of Biogeography. For more information about the debate series, go to www.iq2us.org

We can no longer afford to cling to the anti-human doctrines of outdated environmentalist thinking. The "crisis" is the global warming political agenda, not climate change.

Philip Stott is an Emeritus Professor from the University of London, UK. For the last 18 years he was the editor of the Journal of Biogeography. For more information about the debate series, go to www.iq2us.org

ABCnews

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[Urib2007]

[size=3][color="#000000"]Scientists threatened for 'climate denial'
[/color][/size]

[b]London Telegraph |March 11, 2007
Tom Harper[/b]

Scientists who questioned mankind's impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community.

They say the debate on global warming has been "hijacked" by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

advertisementOne of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.

"Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened," said the professor.

"I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be sceptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal."

Last week, Professor Ball appeared in The Great Global Warming Swindle, a Channel 4 documentary in which several scientists claimed the theory of man-made global warming had become a "religion", forcing alternative explanations to be ignored.

Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology - who also appeared on the documentary - recently claimed: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges.

"Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science."

Dr Myles Allen, from Oxford University, agreed. He said: "The Green movement has hijacked the issue of climate change. It is ludicrous to suggest the only way to deal with the problem is to start micro managing everyone, which is what environmentalists seem to want to do."

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 present system."

[cmotherofpirl]

lol you posted it before I could

[Urib2007]

[img]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2007/02/02/nclim02.jpg[/img]

[b]Powerful Documentary Trounces Man-Made Warming Hoax
Climate change is natural and has been happening since the Earth began[/b]

Prison Planet | March 9, 2007
Paul Joseph Watson

[color="#000000"]An astounding documentary that was broadcast in the UK last night completely trounced the man-made explanation for global warming, not with emotionally-laden propaganda or by attacking the messenger as its adherants resort to, but by presenting carefully considered and rational science.

The [b]Great Global Warming Swindle [/b]brought together a plethora of scientists, professors, climatologists and weather experts to expose the myths about climate change that have been promulgated in order to hoodwink the world into accepting the man-made theory of global warming.


- Earth's 4.5 billion year history is one long story of climate change. There were several periods in history, notably the Medieval Warm Period and the Holocene Maximum, which were much warmer than today. In the 17th century, Europe experienced the Little Ice Age, where temperatures were so consistently chilly that ice skaters revelled on the completely frozen London Thames.

- From the 1940's until the 1980's, the Earth experienced a significant cooling period, despite the fact that industrial production and release of CO2 vastly accelerated during this time. This led to political and media scaremongering about global cooling , the threat that the earth was in the midst of a new ice age. The documentary featured telling clips from alarmist documentaries at the time that implored us to try and reverse the trend of worldwide temparature decrease or face meterological apocalypse.

- Antarctic ice core samples show that the rise in carbon dioxide levels lags behind temperature rise by 800 years, therefore cannot be the cause of it. The documentary exposes how Al Gore, in his film Inconvenient Truth , deliberately reverses these figures to claim CO2 causes temperature change, when in fact the opposite is the case.

- If the Earth was laboring under an accelerated greenhouse effect caused by human produced CO2, the troposphere (the layer of the earth's atmosphere roughly 10-15km above us) should heat up faster than the surface of the planet, but data collected from satellites and weather balloons doesn't support this fundamental presumption.

- [b]The human contribution to carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is minimal in comparison to other natural means, including volcanic emmission and CO2 produced by animals, bacteria, decaying vegetation and the ocean. The human "carbon footprint" is vastly outweighed by all of these factors.[/b]

- Sun spot and solar radiation activity almost exactly parralel temperature change on the Earth. "Solar activity very precisely matches the plot of temperature change over the last 100 years. It correlates well with the anomalous post-war temperature dip, when global carbon dioxide levels were rising." The increase of cosmic rays produced by the Sun prevents the formation of clouds, which have a cooling effect on the planet, therefore the temperature rises.

- The UN's much vaunted IPCC report was heralded as closing the case on the argument of man-made global warming. But as the show explains, the IPCC's conclusion was politically driven and they deliberately censored any dissenting scientists while still listing them as participants, leading many to threaten legal action against the IPCC to have their names removed from the report. Scientists who were invited to participate in the IPCC report expose the fundamental flaws contained throughout the document.

- In the 1980's a strange alliance between Margaret Thatcher's right wing government and the environmental left was formed to promote the idea of man-made global warming. Thatcher's agenda was to force the country to adopt nuclear power because she trusted neither the oil-rich Middle Eastern powers nor her own country's rebellious coal mining unions, therefore a propaganda war against fossil fuels was initiated.

-[b] The documentary also highlights how elements of the scientific community exploit global warming hysteria in order to receive fast-track funding by simply tagging on a global warming aspect to their area of study. Scientists who attempt to obtain grants for research that could contradict the man-made explanation are shunned by the political establishment and further villified as akin to Holocaust deniers by the radical environmental left and elements of the media.
[/b]

The hypocrisy of the environmental left in framing the global warming issue as big business against the people and their romanticisation of poverty was supremely exposed in making the case that the man-made global warming bandwagon has devastated Africa's development and is directly contributing to third world famine, illness and disease.

"There is somebody keen to kill the African dream, and the African dream is to develop. We are being told don't touch your resources, don't touch your oil, don't touch your coal; that is suicide," says a Kenyan development expert who is featured in the program.

Another segment shows an African hospital struggling to cope with such stringent restrictions, being forced to choose between running one refrigerator or turning the lights on because their only power source comes from solar panels that are unable to provide anywhere near the required energy.

The establishment left has already attempted to savage the documentary, but the Guardian's Zoe Williams cannot address the evidence, instead attacking the messenger by discrediting one participant from Winnipeg University, and selectively ignroing the roster of other experts which included MIT and Princeton professors.

We expect the full documentary to be posted to Google Video in the next day or so and will make it widely available to our readers so that they can enjoy the opportunity to view this powerful presentation which provides a breath of fresh air in a world driven mad by belliose and flawed global warming hysteria.
[/color]

WATCH THE LINK BELOW:
[url="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9005566792811497638"]THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE[/url]

[Farsight one]

I don't know if mankind is the cause, but you cannot watch as the polar ice caps melt and continue to think that there isn't a problem.

[cmotherofpirl]

[quote name='Farsight one' post='1212676' date='Mar 12 2007, 06:55 PM']I don't know if mankind is the cause, but you cannot watch as the polar ice caps melt and continue to think that there isn't a problem.[/quote]
The climate continues to change and we should pay more attention in figuring out how to deal then pointing fingers.
The error is mankind assuming that the earth is a static entity, and the truth is the sun-earth-solar system is a dynamic enterprise. The sun is in charge, not us.
Yes the earth is changing, but the extent of our real effect on it is what is debatable.

[Azriel]

Which is not to say we should not be good stewards of the Earth God Gave us, either.

[cmotherofpirl]

Absolutely. We have no right to pollute the earth with garbage, toxic waste, or smog that kills.

[Mercy me]

[quote name='cmotherofpirl' post='1212679' date='Mar 12 2007, 06:02 PM']The climate continues to change and we should pay more attention in figuring out how to deal then pointing fingers.
The error is mankind assuming that the earth is a static entity, and the truth is the sun-earth-solar system is a dynamic enterprise. The sun is in charge, not us.
Yes the earth is changing, but the extent of our real effect on it is what is debatable.[/quote]

Very well put Cmom. I love your posts.

[Fixxxer]

Well its not a crisis yet. It could become one in the future if people keep going on like we are now.

[Anomaly]

[quote name='Fixxxer' post='1212822' date='Mar 12 2007, 09:05 PM']Well its not a crisis yet. It could become one in the future if people keep going on like we are now.[/quote]
There is no real scientific evidence of it becoming a crisis based on human actions which is the entire point of the article. I guess you didn't read it. People lie or choose their 'truth' according to their particular bias. Unless you personally gathered the data and did the scientific analysis yourself as an expert, there is no way you can say something like that.

[Fixxxer]

I kinda trust my environmental science teacher a bit more. He was almost a priest and now teaches.

[Anomaly]

[quote name='Fixxxer' post='1213104' date='Mar 13 2007, 01:54 PM']I kinda trust my environmental science teacher a bit more. He was almost a priest and now teaches.[/quote]A bit more than who? Did you read the article? Did you ask the teacher to site a specific study? Or is the teacher just repeating what he's heard.
Oh wait. He was 'almost' a priest so he's 'alomost' infallible, or at least get's e-mails from God.
Please read the article and maybe discuss it with your teacher. I'm not sayihg he's lying, but is mistaken.

[Sojourner]

[quote name='cmotherofpirl' post='1212715' date='Mar 12 2007, 06:49 PM']Absolutely. We have no right to pollute the earth with ... smog that kills.[/quote]
What about the smog that doesn't kill? Is it OK?

[Budge]

Global warming is a lie meant to get people joining up with global elites who simply want control of the world's resources.

I am old enough to remember when they warned of the next ice age.

[img]http://i14.tinypic.com/437wydh.jpg[/img]