http://www.heatisonline.org/main.cfm

The 5% Project

While all these groups are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.

It seems I've read 100 things today where America is basically destroying the world. Canada, anyone?  :(

Al is quite explicit on how the tobacco industry's campaign to create doubt regarding the harmful effects of smoking is precisely the same sort of thing as what the global-warming deniers are up to.  And it is clear that his anger over how his sister died has motivated him to throw himself into the "Inconvenient Truth" phenomenon.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

 Answer,,much more than anyone cares to imagine!

 In order to substitute bio fuel for petro,etc energy sources we would probably have to burn down most of our forests each year,,turn most of our wild lands into farms,,in short make the whole earth into an agro-industrial enterprise.
And still that would not  be enough.

 I think that few people realize how much energy is contained in a barrel of oil and how many trees it takes to make said barrel.

Commen sense answer--there is a reason that so much farmland is now at use and why the forests that exist are only there but by the fact that that land is not necessary for food production.

I realize that we need a change,,but turning thousands of acres of rainforest into factory fields ,in order to drive vehicles while we get fat,is not what most people envision as the answer.

I could not hear the Today show link, unfortunately - it always amazes me that these people actually appear on TV/radio.

Nuremberg huh?  I thought you people were all about free speech and open thinking.  No wonder some refer to you as neo-nazis.

If global warming is soley caused by man...then what (pray tell) caused the end of the Great Ice Age almost 20,000 years ago before man could have possibly impacted the earth?  What phenomenon of global warming caused the glaciers to recede from Texas to northern Canada?  Was it Cro-Magnon and his gas fired turbines to supply electicity to his cave?

And what caused the warming of the earth to such an extreme that there would be a swamp 700 miles from the north pole (80 degrees north latitude) during the Tertiary Eocene?  They even found the remains of a champosaurus (ancient aligator) in the stratum of this fossil forest on Axel Hieberg Island.  Proven beyond any doubt that this was truly a sub tropical decidous-coniferous forest.  Likely to have been so warm 45 million years ago that there was NO POLAR ICE CAP?

Hmmm...what caused that warming then...was it caveman riding around in his SUV?  According to you people it must have been some sort of man because only man can cause warming of the earth...hehehehe.  Except there is yet another problem.  THERE WAS NO MAN 45 MILLION YBP!

But don't take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.  Just google for the Fossil Forest of Axel Heiberg Island in far northern Canada.

There are NUMEROUS times in earths well recorded past (recorded in the rock record) where the earth was far and away warmer than today...as well as far and away colder.  These temperature variations are very very very OLD NEWS.  Geologists have been teaching us about them in the university for at least 50 years that I know of.  

Unless you KOOKS are somehow able to burn all the text books of geology then the truth of earth's long history will be there for any free man to read.  What I fear is you want no free men to be able to read about it.  What is really fear is ...you simply want NO FREE MEN period.

Seriously

AvMac

All of the arguments you offered above have been circulating around for a while. If you click around a bit, all of them are answered on this site:

http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-to-talk-to-...

All of his answers are in layman's terms but are also up to date with the latest, best science (see his references).

These scientific facts are utterly irrefutable.  Facts like during the Carbiniferous Age (350 mybp) the CO2 levels in the earth's atmosphere were 5 to 10 times higher than they are today.  The earth REALLY WAS a green house then.  What caused that?  It could in no way been man.

The irrefutable geologic fact that the earth began warming roughly 20,000 years ago (for the umpteenth time).  The increase in temperature caused the eustatic sea level to rise in excess 130 meters!!!  

The rise in the past several thousand years is  mere inches...at best.  I have never heard anyone on the kook fringe of environmentalISM (and believe me it is an "ISM") ever address any of these scientific facts in a logical manner.  They simply disregard them or bend them to fit their agenda.  Most of them claim to be scientists and yet they are utterly ignorant to the term paleoclimatology.

They have NEVER acknowledged the overwhelming body of evidence that the earth has for at least 600 million years demonstrated cyclic swings in global temperature that are damn near an order of magnitude.  And when we compare these data to the miniscual .7 degree rise we've observed in the past 100 years ...to put it bluntly...it's laughable.  

The only reason it is not "laughable" is the Sd fact that there are people (highly uneducated people)out there in "lah lah" land that truly believe the wraming we experience to day is somehow xenogenic in nature. And I'm guessing...just guessing those same individuals believe that humans are "xeno" beings as well.

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.

Those pesky scientists with their scientific method and peer review. What have those scientific institutions ever done for us lately, eh?

So your Carbiniferous [sic] Age was about 300 million years ago. The reason why it was so hot back then? Umm, it could have to do with the fact that the plants hadn't taken in the CO2 yet. And they also hadn't died to create fossil fuels, whose CO2 we're presently re-liberating into atmosphere. This is some pretty basic stuff.

As for the swings in past climate, they track to the CO2 levels. See this graph:

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig2-22.htm

Logically, if we introduce more CO2, we'll get more warming, as that's what's happened in the past. The heat-trapping properties of CO2 is an observable property. And CO2 has been experimentally detected as an agent of atmospheric warming.

As for the temperatures and CO2 levels hundreds of millions of years ago, you might really dig and argue that temperatures don't track to CO2 as reliably as they do over the past 400,000 years (the period covered by the graph above). An energy-funded think tank recently tried to float that argument. But as Tim Lambert put it:

Well yes, over hundreds of millions of years, things like continental drift and long term changes in the sun are more important to climate than CO2. I'd keep that in mind if I was try to predict what the climate would be like in 100 million years.

But we're not thinking about life in 100 million years, we're thinking about lives that are a bit closer to home, I would think. Which is why the denial industry should get a clue.

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says the debate whether humans are changing the climate is over. Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, says the science linking human activity to global warming is overwhelming."

"President Bush recently called global warming "a serious problem." He said there is still uncertainty over how much of the warming is natural and how much man-made, but he added that it was time to "get beyond the debate" and deploy new technologies to curb greenhouse gases."

""The evidence, in my view, is more compelling than ever," McCain said in an interview, professing a "respectful disagreement" with his GOP colleague on the issue.

"The scientists have become more and more definitive. ... Sooner or later we will recognize that climate change is taking place and it's serious and it's generated by human activity causing greenhouse gas emissions," McCain said.

"Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, R-Md., who has joined McCain in sponsoring legislation to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, said he was aghast at Inhofe's latest comments.

"How do you say, ridiculous? How do you say, failing future generations?" Gilchrest said.

"I don't mean to defame anybody, but the state of the science on global warming is top-notch, and it says we are nearing a critical tipping point in devastation, in creating a world that will be hard to live in," he said. "This is not Chicken Little, this is not 'The sky is falling.' The fundamental physics of the atmosphere as it has been degraded by human activity and the burning of fossil fuels is clear.""

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/...

It's not only envirofascists that hate America - Republicans do too, starting from the very top!!!

http://semperfidelisrus.blogspot.com/2006/10/global-warmi...

Gnarly Erik

Oceans and land emit 210 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. Total atmospheric concentration is 750-830 GT. The uncertainty in the measurement is 80 GT. Annual human emissions are maybe 3 GT. Earth is continually emitting and reabsorbing carbon dioxide in amounts that make the human emissions insignificant. It is a dynamic equlibrium, and we cannot know what part of that equilibrium is contributed by humans. But 3-6 gigatons per year? With an uncertainty of 80 gigatons, the effect of human emissions cannot even be measured.

It is absurd to suggest that carbon dioxide is the principal cause of climate change. The main cause is variations in the Sun's brightness. As to the greenhouse gas effect, 95% of that effect is from water vapor.

40 years ago the geniuses at the National Academy of Science, as well as NASA's notorious James Hansen, were warning us in apocalyptic tones about global cooling.

Those idiots cannot even define scientific method. In a brief to the Supreme Court, the NAS argued that scientific method assumes everything has a scientific explanation. Bull*it! Or, if you prefer, bullsh*! Scientic method assumes nothing. It subjects every hypothesis to the rigorous test of empirical verification.

Computer Climate models are worthless. They are not empirically verified. They do not accurately predict measured weather patterns. They have so many adjustable parameters they can be arbitrarily tweaked to produce any result.

http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics

The most reliable indicator of global temperature is satellite measurements in the troposphere, the lowest level of atmosphere nearest to Earth. Those readings are not affected by local factors, and the satellites circle the Earth rapidly enough to give a meaningful global average. These measurement indicate a slight cooling in recent decades. That reading agrees with the weather balloons, which are a completely independent measurement of the same tropospheric temperature.

No advocate of the global warming theory is even attempting to refute this evidence. Some  have argued that temperatures in the stratosphere are rising. That may or may not be the case, but the computer models cited by the United Nations IPCC predict warming in the troposhere. That prediction did not happen, so the hypothesis is disproved.

Some scientists are manipulating the satellite data, trying to show warming in the troposphere. The arguments are so technical that they are difficult to evaluate, but it is clear that these scientists have lost their objectivity. The original satellite calculations agreed with the weather balloons, and therefore are almost certainly correct. Even with their manipulated figures, they cannot produce the high warming rate shown on the NASA/GISS study. The best that they can massage into the statistics is a warming rate similar to the National Climate Data Center.

These guys are not honest. Any climate scientist worth a fraction of his salary knows about the Urban Heat Island Effect, for example, and knows that the NASA/GISS study deliberately ignores that effect.

I am quoting from "Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide". A link to that paper can be found at

 www.oism.org/pproject.

Every statement is that paper is foot-noted to research which was peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals. Over 17,000 scientists have signed the petition agreeing with the conclusions of that paper. The advocates of global warming have had eight years to produce a rebuttal, but they have not even tried. Everywhere we find outrageous slanders against these fine scientists, nowhere a scientific rebuttal. I am beginning to suspect that the advocates of the global warming theory are simply incompetent to understand the arguments and issues.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/10/26/224634/48...

As for the Petition Project, that's an old one:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institu...

The "fine scientists" who signed that petition include Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls, Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce. Yup, I always go to these guys when I want advice on climate science...

Cheers!

The graph of warming rates versus geographical areas for the NASA study deserves a scientific response which I am not qualified to give at this point. I would first want a scientist that I trust to verify that the graph is an accurate representation. It is very clear that the advocates of the global warming theory have abandoned all objectivity, and they sometimes publish studies which are fabricated our of whole cloth. With my present state of knowledge, I will simply note that the best temperature monitoring systems in the world are in Europe and the United States, and these do not show the high warming rate found on the NASA/GISS study. Any objective analyst would conclude that the best temperature records give the most accurate measurements. Apparently NASA/GISS finds the greatest warming rates in areas which have very poor temperature records, and therefore allow the scientist to use his creativity in estimating the warming rate.

The best surface records are in agreement with the satellite measurements (troposphere) and with the weather balloons. In other words, our three best independent measurements do not show the high warming rate. Rather than accept this straightforward result, advocates of global warming are manipulating the data in every way that they can. There is no reason to doubt the original satellite calculations. They are very complex, but they agree with the weather balloons, which are direct temperature measurements. The only reason to manipulate the satellite results is because these scientists will not be satisfied until they have found some way to fabricate evidence for their theory.

40 years ago the alleged crisis was global cooling. I have seen the articles from that period in Time and Newsweek. It does not really matter which it is. The important thing is that we need a strong international government to enact strict socialistic regulations.

 To regulate energy is to regulate all human activity. The draconian energy policy these people have in mind will cause tens of millions of deaths around the world.

We need inexpensive, abundant energy to respond to unpredictable climate change.

Yes, a few global warming zealots inserted phony signatures into the petition. But it is only a few, and the science stands on its own merits. Every statement is footnoted to research which was peer-reviewed and published.

What is your response to this? "Oceans and land emit 210 GT of carbon dioxide per year. Total atmospheric concentration is 750-830 GT. The uncertainty in the measurement is 80 GT. Annual human emissions are 3-6 GT." The uncertainties are so great, and human emissions are so small relative to natural sources, that we cannot even measure the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide. So every argument after that builds on a foundation of quicksand.

This sounds a bit shrill, doesn't it? If you are charging people with fraud and conspiracy, you should at least give some substantial examples. You know, it's not only markets that thrive on competition. Science does as well, maybe even more so, because scientists are very exacting consumers. If someone can publish a paper that refutes and accepted body of evidence and theory, it makes a scientist's whole career. Do you think all scientists are foregoing their careers to be members of a world socialist Illuminati? A bit paranoid, no?

There is no reason to doubt the original satellite calculations.

Even if the revised satellite calculations were dead wrong, this is far from the only line of evidence for anthropogenic warming:

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/...

Every statement is footnoted to research which was peer-reviewed and published.

But the paper itself was not. I could write Alice in Wonderland with footnotes to peer reviewed journal articles. Read the Sourcewatch article:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institu...

It does not really matter which it is. The important thing is that we need a strong international government to enact strict socialistic regulations.

What evidence do you have of all these scientists' "socialistic" intentions? Again, don't you think this comes off as a bit conspiracy-minded? Politics is a separate issue from the empirical facts, except for people who can't see anything but politics everywhere.

As far as I'm concerned, what to do about the problem is completely up for discussion. If the solution is 100% market based, then so be it, if that works. My thinking is that the solution will be mostly market based, because that's in accord with human nature. But we can't solve problems if policymakers won't even admit they exist.

40 years ago the alleged crisis was global cooling.

Coby Beck covers that one:

http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/they-predicted-...

The uncertainties are so great

Coby covers that:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/10/26/232046/03...

(Two of the above haven't been migrated to Grist's website yet, so they're still linked to here on illconsidered.)

So every argument after that builds on a foundation of quicksand.

Again, this assumes there's only one line of evidence. There are many lines, all corroborating each other, e.g., the studies I linked to above(and they're only a sample):

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/...

http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/03/natural-emissio...

With the current primitive state of climate science, it is absurd to make emphatic predictions 100 years into the future, much less to make radical policy recommendations based on those predictions. Climate scientists are going to predict what the weather WILL BE in the NEXT century? They cannot agree about what the weather WAS in the PREVIOUS century. Whether or not our best temperature records are in fact the true measurement, it is a fact that our best temperature records show that during 20th century there was very little warming or cooling. That in itself is unusual. For most of its history, the Earth has been warming or cooling, causing by turns hardship or better conditions for its biological inhabitants.

1000 years ago the Earth was much warmer than today, and the warmer temperatures were beneficial for biological life. The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) is documented by hundreds of studies. The evidence is all over the place, both in the natural record and in written human history. There is no question in the scientific literature that the MWP existed- no question until modern scientists realized that to prove the global warming theory, they would have to get rid of the MWP. Studies which purport to do that fall into two classes. Some demonstrate mathematical virtuosity, introducing methodology which produces the desired result from any raw data, even random numbers. Others simply lie about their results, and refuse to make their raw data available. In any scientific community characterized by competence and integrity, it would not be so easy to dispose of an event which is so well established in  history.

1000 years ago,fig trees grew in France and wine grapes grew in England. When the Vikings landed in Greenland, the land was green. They planted farms and grew crops. Then the Earth began cooling, and those colonies had to be abandoned.

How do you know when to abandon those colonies? Modern science knows no better than the Vikings. It seems to be getting colder, year by year; but the variation is so great that we cannot be sure. And suppose it is cooling. Is it a five year, ten year, or 20 year cycle? Or is it a 100 year or 1000 year cycle? Science does not know. Maybe you stay a year too long and die. Maybe you leave a year too soon, and lose a valuable outpost unnecessarily. Science cannot relieve this burden of the human condition. Science does not know the answer.

What science can do is to help you stay warm in an inhospitable climate. You will not help yourself by restricting your fuel supply. That is religious superstition, not science. We have sinned by burning fossil fuels. We have angered the gods of weather, whom we do not understand and cannot predict, much less control. But perhaps if we stop burning fossil fuels, the weather gods will have mercy. I guarantee you it will make no difference. The weather will do whatever it is going to do. Man can freeze to death or build a fire, as it suits him.

This discussion has been a bit like that. I'm not going to go through every part of the above comment and list every single fallacy and match it up with a Coby article.

But suffice it to say that all of the above talking points are addressed in Coby's Skeptic's Guide:

http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics

Sinning has nothing to do with the fact that certain processes produce CO2. And CO2 traps heat. And that study after study has shown CO2 to be an agent of warming.

Certain lawyerly arguers like to trot out as many arguments as possible, no matter how specious they all are. In a court of law, no doubt a judge would warn the jury that this is merely a rhetorical tactic and has nothing to do with the merits of the case.

And all reputable climate scientists have been agreeing with the White House-commissioned National Academy of Sciences:

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.

OK, that ends my game of Wack-a-Mole this holiday weekend...

Scientific method begins with a hypothesis which makes testable predictions. Experiments are performed to test those predictions. One failed experiment is sufficient to disprove a hypothesis, while no amount of successful experiments can ever conclusively prove it. If a hypothesis survives several tests, it becomes a theory; if it survives many tests, it becomes a law; but even a law, like the law of gravity, might be disproved on the next experiment.

There is no such thing as climate science. There is no body of theoretical knowledge which has been painstakingly verified by scientific method. There is no body of hypothetical predictions which have been proved by experiment. The branch of human knowledge which will one day be known as climate science is still struggling to develop adequate methods for measuring basic parameters.

Climate science is not ready for prime time. Policy makers should pay no attention to it. Your job is to warn us that a hurricane is coming whenever you actually see a hurricane coming. I engage this debate not from an interest in urgent policy matters, but from an interest in the advancement of an infant science. I urge Coby Beck and his members to do the same. Abandon your political agenda to enact international laws for controlling climate change. Listen to my arguments with an open mind, and see if you do not agree that I am presenting the best methodology for evaluating a body of data that is full of uncertainties and inaccuracies in measurements.

It is possible to cite peer-reviewed articles,  piecemeal and out-of-context, to support an erroneous point. But the OISM paper does not do that. Each article is cited with sufficient completenes that the context is preserved. An example is my post earlier in this thread, when I  mentioned the graph of weather stations in California. That graph makes two points: 1) when you look at the California stations, the Urban Heat Island Effect is very evident and is quite significant; and 2) when you look at the station-values which NASA/GISS selected for their study, it is clear that they ignored this well-documented effect, and have produced a study biased towards  high warming rates. Coby Beck does not allege that the data is wrong, or that we have interpreted it wrong. He simply says that the highest warming rates are found in non-urbanized parts of the world, where the Urban Heat Island Effect is not operative. But the OISM paper says plainly that the Urban Heat Island Effect cannot account for all the warming in the NASA/GISS study. Our point is that the study uses a flawed methodology that is biased towards high warming rates. Remember, in this infant science, we are still struggling to develop adequate methods to conduct basic measurements.

Different studies need to measure different things. The global warming hypothesis has two parts: 1) human activity is causing an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide; and 2) that increase is causing an increase in global temperature. In this particular study, we are interested in the effect which global atmospheric carbon dioxide has on global temperature. Therefore we want to eliminate all local factors. It would not be sufficient to average rural and urban temperatures. The NASA/GISS study does not even do that; but for this particular type of analysis, the rural stations give the most accurate measurements, period.

Most of the Earth's surface is ocean, and those temperatures are especially problematic. Some studies use sea water inlet temperatures, but different ships have their inlets at different depths. Some have seamen put buckets over the side, but some use wooden buckets and some use leather. Measurements from buoys have similar problems. Sea water temperatures are an important part of climate science, but for this particular study they are neither interesting nor relevant. We are interested in the temperature of the atmosphere above the ocean.

I once saw the data from a weather station on a coral atoll in the Pacific, just barely above sea level, for from any human habitation. It showed a flat profile for temperature during the 20th century. The source which produced that can show a large number of stations with similar results. That agrees with the rural stations in California. It agrees with the data from the National Climate Data Center for annual mean temperature of the contiguous United States. It agrees with the satellites and weather balloons. Any objective, unbiased analyst would surely conclude that this is our best measurement of global temperature trends: during the 20th century, there was very little warming or cooling.

Soon the Earth will begin warming or cooling again, as it  has always done throughout its history. When the temperature does begin to change significantly, the primitive condition of climate science today is nowhere near being able to determine the cause of that change. You can theorize about it, but you cannot conduct measurements to test your theories.

Modern scientists do not really understand scientific method. Their methodology is based not on empirical verification, but on consensus. The leaders in climate science have agreed on a consensus among themselves, and they peer-review each other's publications. For a scientific paper which challenges this consensus, it is almost impossible to pass peer review.

Two examples are the hockey stick graph, and the article by Naomi Oreskes in Science  magazine. Everyone in this thread is certainly armed with the consensus argument on those two cases, but I will not get into that. These debates have raged on the internet until even the ultra-liberal National Academy of Science has been forced to admit that the hockey stick is wrong; but through all that heated debate, Science magazine serenely refused to give its readers the slightest indication that there was anywhere any challenge to the peer-reviewed consensus.

Yeah. Modern science hasn't done anything for us. We need to go back to pre-modern science. Show us the way, Duke!

Remember the law of gravity is only a guideline, not a rule.  Float around if you feel like it!

I think this last election created some desperation in the nut wing.  Maybe try campaigning next time, like we did?  Just a suggestion.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

I thought the old "global warming is a myth..and BTW ciggarettes don't cause cancer" line  was just a joke?!  I pulled it on deniers a few times.

Who knew it was really being pushed on us by the "drug" limbaugh crowd?  Monbiot evidently!! Good heads up.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

But please understand that acknowledging that climate change is occurring does not dictate any particular policies.  Even if you change your mind, you`re still free to pick and choose what policy alternatives make the most sense, if any.

Understand any environmental economics by the way?  Particularly the concept of the "tragedy of the commons", when no one owns or controls the resources they are using?

It seems to me I remember badgering Ron on that and a lot of other points there a year ago or so.

Still supporting genetically modified farming I bet though, right?   And of course "free" market solutions to climate change.  Like (heavily subsidized)nuclear power!

Libertarian now = corporatarian, at reason anyway.

Liberal libertarians are ridiculed off the site with dirty tricks.  Corporatarians are the neoconman wing of libertarians.  And just like the neoconman wing of the GOP, they staged a takeover.

All hail corporate rule, long live  corporate rule, and death to all who oppose it.  Give US liberty for corporations or death (in as many oil wars as we can afford)!

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Since the beginning of official record-keeping in the late 19th century, climate scientists have made dire predictions with emphatic certainty. None of those predictions has happened. That is merely fortuitous, of course. There are only two possible outcomes, so you have a 50% chance of being right. Either the current trend reverses itself, or it continues to catastrophe. Someday one of these dire predictions will come true. It happens periodically throughout history. We do not know why.

Maybe the ultimate cause is pure chance. But if, within the framework of an integrated philosophical vision, you understand the full implications of everything that exists, then sin makes more sense than anything else. That is Al Gore's position. Climate catastrophe happens because man has sinned against the environment. That is consistent with biblical teaching. But the proper response to sin is repentance before God and prayer to God. Modern man has arbitrarily defined science to include everything, so he no longer has any language to contemplate God. For Al Gore, the environment is God; but big as the environment is, it is not THAT big. There is not much point in praying to the Impersonal Everything. It makes more sense to pray to yourself or to your neighbor. At least you would be praying to a personal being. (That is the end result of Gore's agenda, incidentally. One man will be worshipped as God. But I am getting off the topic.)

Science is trying to explain things which are beyond the ability of science to explain. But the philosophical presuppositions of modern science do not permit the existence of such a category. So scientists publish their explanations anyway. At this point we have moved beyond science into philosophy. In the debate about global warming, none of the general conclusions has any foundation in empirical verification. Nor do modern climate scientists see any need for such a foundation.

No one disputes the physics of the greenhouse effect, although it is misnamed. A greenhouse works by blocking convective air flow, not by trapping radiation. This can be proved by experiment. It is possible to construct a greenhouse which allows convective air flow, but which would still trap radiation. There is no greenhouse effect in a greenhouse. But there is a greenhouse effect in the Earth's atmosphere.

The greenhouse effect is logarithmic, which is the inverse of exponential. There is a saturation level. As the concentration of a greenhouse gas increases from zero, the greenhouse effect increases rapidly, then quickly levels off at the saturation level. Any further increase in concentration has no further effect. Furthermore, each greenhouse gas absorbs energy only within a certain spectrum. 95% of the greenhouse effect is from water vapor, which absorbs energy in the same spectrum as carbon dioxide; so that spectrum is already near saturation. However large the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide might become, its total greenhouse effect is forever limited to a small value; and most of that effect is already present in the atmosphere.

The statements in the preceding paragraph are not controversial. But this is one of those points in this bizarre debate where climate scientist abandon all pretense of objectivity. They compete with each other to see who can devise the most outrageous imaginary mechanism to amplify that small effect into a large effect more suitable to their political purposes. It is nonsense. The amplification factor would apply with equal force to any increase in temperature from any other cause. In previous centuries the Earth has been much warmer than today, and the amplification factor did not happen.

This is one of several facts, each one of which taken alone is sufficient to disprove the global warming theory. That is why it was so imperative for the hockey stick graph to dispose of the Medieval Warm Period. But that period is so firmly established in history, and the hockey stick was such an egregious scientific fraud, that in the end it could not be defended, despite the fact that until the very end it enjoyed the full and unwavering support of the entire monolithic peer-review establishment.

As a matter of science, the global warming theory is disproved. But nothing is ever disproved in philosophy. God can do whatever He chooses to do. So climate scientists continue confidently on their course, undismayed by any amount of contrary scientific evidence.

In all likelihood the climate is a chaotic system which cannot be represented by a mathematical model. Probably we will never know for sure. There are so many variables that we cannot devise competent experiments to test our hypotheses. Suppose that you could accurately measure atmospheric carbon dioxide. You cannot, but suppose you could. Suppose that you could accurately measure the effect of human emissions on atmospheric carbon dioxide. You cannot, but  suppose you could. Suppose that you could accurately measure the change in global temperature. You cannot, but suppose you could. You still could not know whether any particular change in temperature was caused by a corresponding change in atmospheric carbon dioxide, because you cannot know what the change in temperature would have been if there were no change in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Climate scientists do not understand this fundamental principle of high school physics. They need remedial work before beginning to study science at the college freshman level. This is a professional scandal of the first magnitude. I used to think that these scientists were simply lying to further their political agenda. I did not think it possible for anyone with a Batchelor's Degree in science to be so incompetent. But as I read more of their arguments, I am beginning to suspect that I might have been wrong.
 

Nope. No hypothesis is ever definitively proven in science. Read this:

http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/there-is-no-pro...

For more, read Professor Naomi Oreskes in this article that appeared in the LA Times (especially where she discusses Newton): http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/072406EA.shtml

This is a pretty basic mistake on your part.

And with this, I will bow out of this discussion.

My point is that the global warming theory does not fall within the class of hypotheses which can be proved or disproved by empirical experiment. Let me repeat the argument from my previous post:

"In all likelihood the climate is a chaotic system which cannot be represented by a mathematical model. Probably we will never know for sure. There are so many variables that we cannot devise competent experiments to test our hypotheses. Suppose that you could accurately measure atmospheric carbon dioxide. You cannot, but suppose you could. Suppose that you could accurately measure the effect of human emissions on atmospheric carbon dioxide. You cannot, but  suppose you could. Suppose that you could accurately measure the change in global temperature. You cannot, but suppose you could. You still could not know whether any particular change in temperature was caused by a corresponding change in atmospheric carbon dioxide, because you cannot know what the change in temperature would have been if there were no change in atmospheric carbon dioxide."

http://www.tbo.com/news/metro/MGBHKNBE0VE.html

It is a short article, so I will post the whole thing here. It demonstrates my point that the behavior of the climate involves so many variables that it is impossible to devise meaningful experiments or to make reliable predictions.

Begin quote from Tampa Tribune:

It was not the hurricane season we expected, thank you.

With cataclysmic predictions that hurricanes would swarm from the tropics like termites, no one thought 2006 would be the most tranquil season in a decade.

Barring a last-second surprise from the tropics, the season will end Thursday with nine named storms, and only five of those hurricanes. This year is the first season since 1997 that only one storm nudged its way into the Gulf of Mexico.

Still, Florida was hit by two tropical storms, Alberto and Ernesto. But after the pummeling of the previous two years, the storms barely registered on the public's radar.

So what happened? Lots.

Storms were starved for fuel after ingesting masses of dry Saharan dust and air over the Atlantic Ocean. Scientists say the storm-snuffing dust was more abundant than usual this year.

In the season's peak, storms were curving right like errant field goals. High pressure that normally hunkers near Bermuda shifted far eastward, and five storms rode the clockwise winds away from Florida.

Finally, a rapidly growing El Nino, a warming of water over the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifted winds high in the atmosphere southward. The winds left developing storms disheveled and unable to become organized.

As they say about the stock market: Past results are no indication of future performance.

This year's uneventful season provides no assurance that next year will be as calm:

*The Atlantic remains in a 20- to 30-year cycle of high hurricane activity that started in 1995. Water temperatures are above normal.

*El Nino probably won't be around to decapitate storms.

*There's no promise that the Saharan dust will be as abundant.

End quote from Tampa Tribune

A hypothesis which passes several tests becomes a theory, like The Theory of Relativity. A hypothesis which passes many tests becomes a law, like The Law of Gravity. A law of science is properly regarded as established truth. We put men on rockets and launch them into space, confident that our calculations can place them in the correct orbit. That confidence is justified. We have tested those calculations in many, many experiments; and they have always proved true, without one single exception.

Isaac Newton would be the first to tell you that even today, one single negative experimental outcome would be sufficient to disprove The Law of Gravity. But that is not my principal point. My point is that scientific method is based on empirical experiments. A properly constructed scientific experiment is the most powerful evidence in the world. It puts to silence all dispute, being incontrovertible. No matter how many times the experiment is performed, it always produces the same result. Any scientist who performs it will obtain the same measurements.

Dr. Naomi Oreskes is trying to persuade us that The Global Warming Theory is established with an authority equal to The Law of Gravity. But she does not cite a large number of experiments without one single negative outcome. She cites a large number of peer-reviewed papers without one single disagreement against the consensus.

When The Theory of Relativity was new and controversial, some of the most prominent scientists in the world wrote a book entitled, "Fifty Scientists Against Einstein". The author of Relativity Theory replied, "Why fifty? If I were wrong, one would be enough to prove it."

Isaac Newton would certainly agree that one good experiment is worth more than all the consensus in the world. But The Global Warming Theory is not even a real theory. It is merely a hypothesis. There  has never been one experiment to provide that first tentative confirmation. It is not possible to perform such an experiment. In the first place, the uncertainties are so great that scientists disagree vigorously about the measurements. In the second place, there are many other variables involved, any one of which has sufficient force to completely change the magnitude and direction of any experimental outcome. You will rarely get the same result twice from any experiment.

Climate catastrophe happens, sometimes catastrophically. We recover more quickly than our ancestors because of our wealth and technology, both of which are critically dependent upon an inexpensive and abundant supply of energy.

At different times New York City has been buried under glaciers. At other times Canada's Nunavut and Northwest Territories have had a tropical climate.

I am quite sure that emissions had anything to do with the ability of the Vikings to inhabit Greenland. Global warming is now a religion. To dispute it is heresy. At least the penalties aren't as bad as those in Iran.