[ExI] Is Global Warming Junk Science?

Brent Allsop brent.allsop at comcast.net
Tue Apr 21 01:26:37 UTC 2009


John,

Yes, absolutely.  The constant claims that there is some kind of 
"scientific consensus" are so obviosly mistaken.  There are laughable 
attempts to measure such, such as the Manhattan Declaration Petition:

http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/22866/New_York_Global_Warming_Conference_Considers_Manhattan_Declaration.html

And the Oregon Petition Project::

http://petitionproject.org/

where tens of thousands of researchers have formally their objection to 
claims of 'scientific consensus'.

And check this wikipedia list of skeptics article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_global_warming_theory_skeptics

where they use the fact that someone has successfully published a paper 
declaring their beliefs in a pear reviewed journal as the gating factor 
for who can be counted as a 'scientist'.  But what makes this worthless 
is it is completely biased.  Where is a competing article to stand in 
comparison so you can know if the number of  people in this article is 
more or less than something for the other side of the story.

I just get so sick of the eternal over and over again claims on both 
sides of the story: Yes there is a consensus, no there isn't, yes there 
is, no there isn't, a gazillion times all over the internet, everywhere 
you look.  Yet nobody is doing any kind of rigorous attempt to back 
their claims up so we can know for sure.

And of course, so  many other fields suffer from just the reverse.  Take 
the study of the mind for example.  Nobody thinks there is any kind of 
scientific consensus at all in this field on anything at all.  But I 
believe, and am betting that just the opposite is the case.  There is a 
huge amount of scientific consensus on some very well accepted theories 
of consciousness.  The open survey topics at canonizer.com on these 
topics are still just getting started and far from comprehensive, but 
already there are some clearly leading camps supporting theories and 
ideas of consciousness for which there is an astounding amount of 
scientific consensus amongst leading thinkers in the field.

Brent Allsop








John K Clark wrote:
> It's passionately believed by many very intelligent people and studies
> confirming it are reported in respected Science journals, and the
> popular press is numinous, so Global Warming couldn't be junk science.
> Or could it?
>
> I decided to look a little more closely at some of this and was 
> appalled at
> how obscenely shoddy much of it is. For example, everyone agrees that 
> cities
> produce a localized "heat island" effects due to all that black 
> asphalt and
> the larger the city the larger the effect. So if you're going to 
> compare the
> temperature of New York City as it is now with 8 million people with 
> what it
> was in the early 19'th century when it had 100 thousand people you're 
> going
> to need a fudge factor, I'm sorry I should have said "correction 
> factor", to
> compensate for this localized heating.
>
> This correcting factor is the product of two numbers, the population
> increase of the city times a constant. You may wonder how that 
> constant was
> derived, well I'll tell you, it's a guess, a guess dreamed up by the
> experimenters, it's as simple as that. And surprise suprise  it proves
> exactly what  the experimenter want to prove, global warming is real.
>
> The scientific community wouldn't put with this sort of crap in any other
> area, but even it is not immune from political correctness. Imagine if a
> drug company submitted data on the safety and effectiveness of their
> new drug to the FDA  and said "don't worry about the high rate of death;
> it's greatly reduced with a fudge factor of our own design". They'd be
> laughed out of town.
>
> There is another reason to suspect that this "correction factor" is not
> sufficient to correct for this heat island effect. Even after the 
> correction
> New Your City still shows a very pronounced 5 degree F increase from 
> 1822 to
> 2000, but Albany New York, a city that has grown much much more slowly 
> and
> is only 140 miles away has actually COOLED by .5 degrees F during that 
> same
> time. Don't you find that odd?
>
> For a global phenomena it's also odd that Alice Springs Australia has
> noticed no change of temperature from 1879 to now, or Christchurch New
> Zealand from 1864, or Rome Italy from 1811, or Kamenskue Siberia from 
> 1949,
> or Death Valley California from 1930, or Paris France from 1757. The 
> average
> temperature of West Point New York was 51 degrees F in 1826 and it's 51
> degrees F now. Stuttgart Germany registered a temperature DECREASE from
> 1792.
>
> To be fair I should say that I cherry picked those numbers and that many
> paces do indeed claim that the temperature has increased; but this is
> supposed to be GLOBAL so the numbers I cite can't just be shrugged 
> away with
> a wave of the hand. To be even fairer I should include Tokyo. Like New 
> York
> City it records a HUGE temperature increase in the last century. Hmm, 
> what
> do Tokyo and New York City have in common?
>
> I think it would be rather hard to dispute that the best maintained 
> weather
> records over a large area come from the USA and yet they show the 
> smallest
> increase in temperature. According to records in the USA from 1880 to 
> today
> the temperature has increased by only a .6 degree Fahrenheit; it also 
> shows
> that the hottest year of the 20's century was 1934. Does anybody think 
> these
> numbers are consistent with the popular panic over global Warming?
>
> It is true and well reported that the glacier on Kilimanjaro is 
> retreating,
> but it has been doing so since the early 19'th century. It is less well
> reported that glaciers in Iceland and Norway are advancing. The status of
> most of the other glaciers in the world is unknown as we only have 
> good data
> on 79 of the worlds 160,000 glaciers.
>
> Well what about sea levels, you can't fake that. If temperatures are
> increasing then ice will melt and that water has to go someplace. The 
> best
> evidence is that sea levels have increased about an inch and a half 
> over the
> last 30 years; not very surprising as the sea has been rising about 6 
> inches
> a century for the last 6 thousand years, and MUCH faster than that in the
> previous 14000 years, the sea has risen 410 feet in the last 20 thousand
> years, a blink of an eye geologically. Face it folks, we're in a
> interglacial period and in all 4 of the previous interglacial periods 
> during
> the last 420,000 years temperatures were warmer than they are now.
>
> And it's not just the data, theory sucks too. The IPCC predicted in 2007
> that the sea will rise between 15 and 59 cm by 2100; so they admit their
> models are uncertain by 400% but I think they still grossly 
> overestimate the
> accuracy of them. Clouds are absolutely critical to climate because they
> reflect solar radiation back out into space and solar energy is what 
> drives
> the entire show.
>
> The thing is that the IPCC models don't know what to do with clouds, 
> no idea
> at all, zero, not a clue. Will global warming make more clouds or fewer
> clouds? Nobody and I do mean NOBODY knows, not even approximately.
> Higher temperatures might (see below) put more water in the atmosphere,
> but higher temperatures also means the air can support more water before
> it is forced to form clouds. I have no idea who wins that tug of war, I
> don't have even a ghost of a clue, and neither does anybody else.
>
> And then there is the question of global dimming, nobody knows the 
> cause but
> the evidence is clear that at any given air temperature it takes 
> longer for
> water to evaporate now than it did 50 years ago. The IPCC Bozos 
> tackled this
> further complication by simply ignoring it, just as they did for clouds.
>
> And so on the basis of this junk science we're supposed to spend 
> hundreds of
> trillions of dollars and tell hundreds of millions of Chinese that they
> should repent from being prosperous due to that evil drug called coal and
> the only moral thing for them to do now is to now slip back into abject
> poverty.
>
> I've got to tell you, that doesn't sound like a very good idea to me.
>
> Oh and by the way, you could make a stronger case that Mars has warmed 
> since
> 1977 than that the Earth has.
>
> John K Clark
>
>
>
>
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