I may be mistaken (I frequently am) but we may be about to hit high tide (pun intended) in global warming nonsense. There is more and more evidence that has more and more of scientific community scratching their heads, wondering how anyone can defend what is becoming an increasingly shaky “body of evidence” to support AGW claims.
One of the problems scientists have, of course, is that this is inherently a technical issue, one that tends to put people to sleep after the first five minutes. Average Joe hears that ice caps are melting, polar bears are dying and we’re running out of room on graph paper to chart the temperature rise and that’s about all the evidence Average Joe needs. I’m not criticizing AJ mind you. He’s got better things to do than study up on something like this, particularly when he has come to believe in the unbiased truthfulness of scientists and the scientific method.
However…
We have reached the point in time where the maximum number of people need to understand this issue to the maximum amount possible. AGW is a hoax, one designed to provide social engineers with an excuse to regulate our lives to an unprecedented degree and redistribute wealth on a scale that would have made Marx weep tears of joy. We need to stop the bastards. Now.
Now I know that a great many of Threedonians are conversant with the arguments on our side (which exist in a little place that I like to call “reality”). Still, not all of you are. So what I’m going to do, over a series of days, is to present the arguments on our side in digestible bits – one graph at a time, if you will. By the time we’re done, you too will be an expert on the AGW swindle and you can tell your friends, who will tell their friends, and, in a day or two, we’ll have this issue licked.
We’ll begin with the above chart. It comes from The Heritage Foundation, and was used by Burt Rutan (yes, THAT Burt Rutan) in a presentation he gave this summer. Rutan is a strong voice on the skeptic side, not that the Goraphiles pay much attention to a guy who knows how to actually analyze data or anything.
The chart is fairly self-explanatory. The atmosphere contains two greenhouse gases of primary import, water vapor and carbon dioxide. (Methane, nitrous oxide and some refrigerants also play a role, but they are less important than Joe Biden’s role in the current administration). As you can see, water vapor makes up the vast majority of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a relatively minor player and man-made carbon dioxide (that little red blip) is such a little bit of a little bit that you’d take no more notice of it than you would take notice of Hillary Clinton in a room full of Playmates.
It’s also important to note that this is simply a representation of the relative amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. When you consider that the warming potential of water vapor is about 40 times that of carbon dioxide, the actual effect of carbon dioxide in affecting the climate is even more diminished.
Does that mean the “pimple on a gnat’s ass” amount of carbon dioxide produced by man absolutely, positively can not influence the climate in some way? In a world where Roman Polanski elicits sympathetic outcries of sympathy anything is possible I suppose, but it seems pretty damn unlikely, doesn’t it? We’ll examine that proposition in the days to come and see why it’s not possible at all.
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I’m glad to see we’re discussing this topic. My concern lately has been that everyone is so concerned about how the government plans to screw up healthcare that they might sneak this legislation through. Honestly we’re blocking punches from all sides at this point.
Clearly global warming is a joke based off of either non-existent evidence or dramatically inaccurate evidence like the completely ignored story a few months ago where their sensors had broken on a glacier and it turned out that they had underestimated how much ice cover we had by a 500,000 square miles. Whoops. My bad. It’s all based off computer models that are processing bad data and as we say in programming “garbage in, garbage out”.
Veruckt – spot on my friend. The examples of data manipulation and just plain ignorance are mind boggling. One of my favorites is this: each time a piece of the Antarctic ice shelf breaks off (an entirely natural phenomenon) the media goes nuts – speculating how much water will be released when it melts. Two things here:
1) Since the ice was floating on the water in the first place, its volume is already “counted” in the total volume of water in the world. It’s a little principle that we scientists refer to as “displacement”. And, even more amusingly:
2) Since ice is less dense than liquid water, as the iceberg melts it would actually REDUCE the volume of water in the oceans.
I would call the AGW-heads idiots, but that would be unkind to idiots.
Today’s culture is a cult of simplemindedness. If info can’t be processed in less than 10 seconds it’s probably not worth knowing. Plus, it makes people feel socially conscious to “go green” whatever the f— that means.
I admit I’m not much of a science person but even I can understand the stuff that trzupr posts here. I wish a few more scientists would start talking about this.
A lot of scientist are talking about it but the media is no longer a microscope made to examine details it’s an echo-chamber where they are only willing to have their personal opinions reinforced.
For the record every time I see a Prius with a pretentious licences plate (like GOGREEN or NOWARM) I feel like spraying 50 bottles of Aquanet on a drowning polar bear while I’m idling in my Ford Excursion with the air cranked and the windows down.
Not sure if you’ve seen this information. But here are some good skeptic links:
http://www.heartland.org/ – Who organized the ICCC (international conference on climate change)
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html – A nice summary resource
http://wattsupwiththat.com/ – another good site
When I see a Prius and I am driving my 2006 Civic I feel like I could run that piece of crap off the road with my two door Honda Civic….They look like crappy four wheeled egg cars. What sh*t boxes.
Only thing more pathetic are those “Smart Cars,” AKA street legal clown cars.
Skip – Thanks for the links, and everyone should check them out. I am a member of the Heartland Institute by the by (you can even see one of my slideshows there!). A great organization. Watt has been a stalwart on the front lines for a long time now. His study of how screwed up temperature monitoring stations are is absolutely priceless.
Stef – One of my neighbors drive one of those eggmobiles (nice description). If he’s out, I push in the clutch and punch the accelerator on the Mustang, to get those 8 cylinders roaring. Pisses him off every time.
I love it Rich! Thats awesome. Me likey the sound of 8 cylinders. Should ask your neighbor, hey can you tell when your care is actually on? Eric the day we moved to McDill before we left Tampa I was finally leaving our house and driving the blue bomber and on the Leroy Selmon Expressway I was passed by one of the sh*t box Smart Cars. As it “blew” past me I swear I could hear the frame rattling.
Rich, why do you hate the polar bears?
You and all your facts, and your charty-graph thingies. All that fancy book-learnin’ makes my head hurt.
The debate is over, okay? I know because a really smart politician named Al Gore told me so. And everybody knows that politicians never lie.
I LOVE polar bears Jimmy! Particularly with a nice Bearnaise sauce, and accompanied by a nice Cabernet.
Remember, the people now all hot and bothered about Global Waming Climate Change are the same people who brought you the Coming Ice Age, Acid Rain, and Ozone Holes.
Looking forward to these, Rich. It’ll be good to have an easily-understood, readily-accessible resource here.
I remember reading a long paper online a couple of years ago about temperature monitoring stations that included many pictures of them black with dirt, positioned under exhaust vents, next to recently built asphalt parking lots, etc. I wonder if that was by Watt.
I like polar bears very much, and am glad they are excellent swimmers. What’s their latin name again? Ursus marinus, or something? Glad their population is growing, too.
Dude! I didn’t know you were member of the Heartland Institute, nice.
Also, I think I’ve found a car far more pretentious then the Prius and even more tempting to just flip over when you see it, the Smart Car.
http://www.smartusa.com/ “Open your mind to the car that challenges the status quo.”
What would Jesus drive? Hopefully his fist through your weak ass car.
my 2 cents.
I’ve spent the last 20 years building predictive models for the electromagnetic noise generated by computer printed circuit boards. Those boards would be 4-10 layers of circuitry, occupying a volume of, say, 12 inches square and about 1/8 inch thick, max. There are several hundred components, maybe a few thousand voltage nodes , a small set of clock frequencies and IO. You’d think this should be easy. Well, no one has ever found a good closed form approach, nor are numerical approaches available that can completely solve the problem; and no one has even proved that the problem could be solved in polynomial time. Many simplifications are performed. Oh, and by the way, all approaches treat the complex chipsets and processors as black boxes, because they are nowhere near amenable to solution.
There’s a ton of money to be made for the person who solves this problem.
So, how does that problem compare with predicting climate change over a hundred years? When I lived in Alabama we would get some huge thunderstorms that would come up from southwest. We lived just north of the Tennessee River. Those storms would barrel up with ferocious winds and rain….when the cells hit the river they had a tendency to break up a bit…some energy always goes through a discontinuity and some is reflected…climate models don’t even try to model such behavior. I believe, most climate models are linear because they’re tractable, but the real world is non-linear (and that’s also one of the problems with EM models of printed circuit boards, but non-linear analysis is messy…)
Oh goody, goody, goody! I’ve been hoping Rich would do something like this for months! This is very cool. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Don’t miss the series. This is important and nobody can explain the facts better than Rich! I’m popping some corn right now…