The Great Global Warming Swindle

[darmah]

A human takes 15 days to produce a tonne of Co2 just by breathing so global warming nazis had better stop those Chinese breathing eh?

 

Read the thread. That's already been talked about.

 

I know the Uk government consistently lies to us as their natural reaction - Iraq war WMDs why suddenly start believing them now just as they conveniently find a new way to tax and control us

Control us? It's a pretty lame conspiracy that seeks to assert control over which lightbulbs we use and whether or not we leave the tv when we're not watching it. Apart from that, an excellent point raised.

 

As for the example:

 

Iraq war - Expert opinion was unsure whether or not Iraq held substantial quantities of WMD or, if so, what quantity or state of readiness they were in. Government contradicted them.

 

Global Warming - Expert opinion has reached a broad concensus that global warming is real and needs to be tackled. Government agrees.

 

 

As such there's a good chance that those fiendish scoundrels who want to take your pennies away and make you use the bus now and again are telling the truth.

 

If a politician is speaking he is lying. They think only of how a situation can be turned to their advantage they dont care about global warming as its time span of cause and effect is well beyond their event horizon of the next election, finding a new tax that we wont vote them out for is a gift falling into their lap.

[Chinahand]

Thank you for your informed and helpful contribution to the debate. Of course all polititians are liars, have no desire to improve the lot of humanity, and are only interested in the electoral cycle.

 

Gosh why hadn't I thought about this before - definitely convinced its all a swindle.

[ans]

[Albert Tatlock]

My hope is that this is satirical. My belief, as it is an American letter, is that it is not.

[Chinahand]

Found this very detailed and pessimistic assessment on the International Panel on Climate Change web site - it sums things up pretty well for me!

 

Albert Tatlock will say its pseudoscience, but the fact is its the consensus opinion of the delegated climate scientists for every country in the United Nations.

 

There is a huge amount of science refining, debating and challenging the information outlined in the presentation, but this is data they are happy to put out - is it so easy to knock it Albert?

[Grumble]

Have just read it and analysed the data.

 

Right load of old bobbins, but to be safe I'm mostly buying T-shirts rather than woollens this year.

[Lonan3]

Okay, guys, please explain to me.....

 

Times Article

 

Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.

Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

 

The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.

Fenton’s team unearthed heat maps of the Martian surface from Nasa’s Viking mission in the 1970s and compared them with maps gathered more than two decades later by Mars Global Surveyor. They found there had been widespread changes, with some areas becoming darker

 

...why is this so different from what is happening here and is it possible that that the Earth's warming is being caused by natural phenomena - at least to a substantial extent?

[Charles Flynn]

But we are speeding up our own and other species extinction!

 

We are rather good at it.

[Karellen]

So when do humans become extinct? 500 years? 1000 years? If so then I can't really get too worked up.

 

The world is full of scare stories perpetuated by governments whose only purpose is to keep the population in line.

 

In the 1960s and 1970s we were all going to die from Nuclear War

In the 1980s we were all going to die from Aids

In the 2000s we were all going to die from bird flu / terrorism / global warming.

 

No wonder people are sceptical.

[Charles Flynn]

It is estimated by the World Health Organisation that some 150,000 people die each year from global warming, a hundred or so from bird flu, and a few thousand from terrorism. In 2006 2.9 million died from AIDS.

 

Of course these are just statistics to some! It doesn't matter if it doesn't affect us personally. This is a wide spread opinion of millions of people.

 

I do not know when the human race will become extinct but if we do not change our attitudes it will happen sooner rather than later.

[Slim]

...why is this so different from what is happening here and is it possible that that the Earth's warming is being caused by natural phenomena - at least to a substantial extent?

 

If you read the article, it says why. Because we dont have planet wide dust storms and Mars does. Thats the whole point of the article and depressingly the comments section is full of people, who clearly haven't read the article, juumping on it as proof that global warming isn't man made. Very depressing.

[Slim]

So when do humans become extinct? 500 years? 1000 years? If so then I can't really get too worked up.

 

Would you be so dissasociated if it was your friends and family who are dying? Even if you dont believe the reasons for climate change, there's no denying it's happening and that people are dying as a result. Why does it have to kill everyone before you care? Dont you give a shit that people are dying, as long as you don't know them?

 

The world is full of scare stories perpetuated by governments whose only purpose is to keep the population in line.

 

Sigh.

 

In the 1960s and 1970s we were all going to die from Nuclear War

 

A very real threat, that nearly happened. If the governments had kept this threat secret, you'd be hopping up and down about that. We're still at risk of this, the threat doesn't go away, or are you suggesting that nuclear warheads don't actually exist?

 

In the 1980s we were all going to die from Aids

 

Aids is a government populated lie? 50 million people have aids. 50 fucking million. 3 Million die of it every year. Half a million of those are children. Your calling this bullshit?

 

In the 2000s we were all going to die from bird flu / terrorism / global warming.

 

I dont think anyones ever suggested the world will end because of terrorism, but a flu epedemic has happened before, why couldn't it happen again? Again if the risks existed and the government did nothing, that would have the conspiracy nutters jumping around like fucking fleas.

 

No wonder people are sceptical.

 

I'm calling idiocy personally.

[Chinahand]

Okay, guys, please explain to me.....

 

Times Article

 

...why is this so different from what is happening here and is it possible that that the Earth's warming is being caused by natural phenomena - at least to a substantial extent?

 

This has come up a couple of times before in the various climate change threads and is very disengenuous.

 

The key part of the article is:

 

Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.

 

The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth.

 

The first statement is a real divert and switch - rather obviously climate change can be a natural phenomena - but the idea that a natural phenomena on Mars discounts a man made phenomena on earth is just wrong. The second part is more honest - but leaves the impression that the mechanism on earth is natural - which PREDOMINANTLY its not.

 

Now, I can hear the reply - yes but can you be so sure that the natural phenomena on Mars isn't also occuring on Earth - I've seen a very interesting documentary on Channel 4 which said Global Warming was all a conspiracy created by Margaret Thatcher.

 

Lets first break the connection with the documentary - which was based on a theory by a Danish scientist that the sun is getting weaker - producing fewer cosmic rays which means there are fewer nucleation particles in the atmosphere to form clouds. With fewer white clouds, less light is reflected out of the atmosphere so the earth gets hotter. Problems with this theory - there is no evidence that cosmic rays are getting any weaker (in fact there are very detailed results showing no trend what so ever since the 1960s); the theory that cosmic rays seed clouds is very controversial and not mainstream; and the size of the effect compared to other albedo and cloud forming effect is unclear, but is thought to be too small to account for the changes noted.

 

Now back to Mars - Mars does have very thin difuse clouds, but these are simply not a significant part of its climate unlike on earth. So climate change on Mars is nothing to do with the ideas we've recently been debating.

 

So what is the cause of climate change on Mars - and could a similar thing be happening on earth.

 

Well if you read this you'll find that the causes of the changes on Mars are down to its orbit around the sun - its eccentricity and obliquity - these are changing as Mars orbits the sun and driving climate cycles. The earth's orbit is totally different - these factors are catagorically NOT changing or influencing the earth's climate - NASA can measure them to within arc seconds!

 

The Times article is refering to detailed research trying to understand how these large scale orbital changes are actually influencing global wind circulations, dust storms etc on Mars. This is great research and will add to our understanding, and so help improve the earth's climate models, so it should increase your faith in the work of the IPCC not reduce it.

 

The fact that these two phenonema are happening at a similar period is great for those who want to dispute climate change - but as the article says - the mechanisms on Mars are different than the mechanisms on earth - I'll bet you an awful lot of money if you asked the researchers who did this Mars research what they believe is the causes of climate change on earth they'd say CO2 emissions - but the article (deliberately?) didn't ask them, and (deliberately?) made a false allusion in the sentences I quoted. Is it a coincidence that such a disengenous article gets published in a newspaper which is proudly sceptical on climate change?

 

As ever good science, bad journalism.

[Dr_Dave]

The fact that these two phenonema are happening at a similar period is great for those who want to dispute climate change - but as the article says - the mechanisms on Mars are different than the mechanisms on earth - I'll bet you an awful lot of money if you asked the researchers who did this Mars research what they believe is the causes of climate change on earth they'd say CO2 emissions - but the article (deliberately?) didn't ask them, and (deliberately?) made a false allusion in the sentences I quoted. Is it a coincidence that such a disengenous article gets published in a newspaper which is proudly sceptical on climate change?

 

This is true.

 

A lot of the problems here stem from the fact that people just plain don't understand planetary atmospheric physics. Hell, even the planetary atmospheric physicists don't understand them all that well, so what chance is Joe Public going to have? For example, a lot is being made of the fact that Mars appears to have heated up by the same amount as the Earth since the 70s, which is a massive over simplification of things.

 

Mars' atmosphere is subject to very different driving forces then the Earth's and even if climate change was caused by changes in the Sun's output, as opponents of anthropogenic climate change suggest, the chances of us seeing the exact same effect on two radically different planets are remote in the extreme. What is happening here is that bad scientists and untrained pundits have identified one single point of correlation and are conflating the two effects into a trend. Bad scientists, to your rooms!

 

Mars is subject to extremely intense, global dust storms. These dust storms start small, but create positive feedback effects and tend to be self-perpetuating. In other words, a small storm starts, which exposes darker ground beneath lose dust. The albedo of the planet lowers, more heat is absorbed and the wind speed increases. This in turn creates more dust storms and so on. This continues until orbital motion lowers the temperature sufficiently to break the cycle (or some other effect raises the albedo again - such as the entire planet being covered in dust clouds).

 

In fact, we've known about this cyclical dust storm activity on Mars for as long as we've been looking at it with any degree of clarity, which is considerably longer that 30 years. It just so happens that we've only been measuring the temperature for the last 30 years. We know, for example, that these dust storms tend to follow a 26 month period (the Martian year) and that some years are more active than others with seemingly no reliable predictor for activity.

 

In fact, what articles like the one in The Times don't tend to emphasise is that the period following the Viking landings was a period of relatively light dust storm activity, and that a corresponding period of cooling was observed. And that a corresponding temperature spike was observed during major dust storm activity in the 80s.

 

Furthermore, a lot is made of the observed shrinkage of the Southern Martian polar cap. This is interesting, because if you're trying to tie this effect into changes in solar radiation then you're going to have a hard time. The polar cap was observed to be shrinking over a period of six years. This six year period (from 1999) coincided with the downswing in the solar 11 year luminosity variation period. An increase in solar luminosity simply can't explain the Southern polar shrinkage, because solar luminosity simply wasn't increasing. It is far more likely that the coverage of the Southern polar cap is the result of a local variations, rather than global effects - in fact, models suggest that the Southern polar cap is extremely unstable and very sensitive to small changes.

 

The upshot of it all is that Mars, predictably, can tell us very little about the atmospheric mechanics of the Earth. Any evidence that suggests a correlation between Terran and Martian temperature variations over short timescales is selective at best, misleading at worst.

 

Dave

[Gladys]

A lot of the problems here stem from the fact that people just plain don't understand planetary atmospheric physics.

 

Forgive me if I smile a little!