Gooch's dad

Regarding the 'petition project'....

I ran across that page a couple of years ago, and it had me convinced for awhile. They even present a 'peer reviewed' paper that appears to debunk many of the global warming claims.

But as someone has said, it is very much like the 'science' done by creationists.

I have a good friend from college who does atmospheric modeling at Los Alamos, and asked him about this paper. His response was pretty much a belly laugh. The papers used by the petition project are carefully selected and misrepresented. They also use data from 20 years ago in many cases, and in those cases, the data has been by and large been corrected recently by newer studies.

The field of atmospheric science is so different from what most people have studied, that you can't just sign a petition as a 'PhD chemist' and have it make any difference to the science. I have a BS in physics and an MS in lasers/quantum mechanics, and I was completely snowed by the Petition Project paper.

S2Focus

The petition is a joke. You have DVM's and MD's amongst the signers. Next time you take your dog in for a rabies shot, ask your veterinarian about the latest climatology research. He/she will probably reply with something along the lines of "say, what?".

Just for fun, though, go through the petition list and try to identify the signers who are legitimate experts in climatology. All you have are names like "John Smith, PhD", with no other information that would enable you to determine what "John Smith's" qualifications are.

I'll wager that my MS in engineering makes me at least as qaulified as most of the petition signers are. And I have precious little more than a layman's knowledge of climatology.

If the petition were meaningful in any way (except as an exercise in creationism-style political propaganda), the petition entries would look something like this:

John Smith, Associate Professor in the Meteorology Dept. of the University of California, Berkeley. PhD in Meteorology from MIT, 1986.

With information like that, you can verify that this "Dr. Smith" genuinely has the qualifications necessary to evaluate the current state of GW research. (For example, you could track down his publications, and even more importantly, find out how often his publications are cited by other researchers in the field).

To understand what the scientific consensus is wrt global warming, you need to ignore propagandists on both sides of the issue and go straight to the scientific literatore. A good place to find a comprehensive survey of the current research is <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch." target="_blank">www.ipcc.ch.</a>

That being said, it is my view that the anti-global-warming propagandists are what creationists would be if they had the financial backing of the big oil, gas, and coal companies. They use the exact same misleading propaganda techniques that creationists do, only on a larger scale thanks to their financial resources.

MadMordigan

It's too damn hot out here in the wastelands already.

Its too damned cold here in the artic.

Alonzo Fyfe

Since this is a science forum, I would simply like to note that a petition is a poor way to do science.

You cannot overturn the law of gravity (for example) by getting a bunch of people to petition for its removal.

If anybody has a serious scientific objection to global warming, the proper way to approach the issue is to get that objection published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

elwoodblues

Plenty of them there. Anyway, the popular idea of global warming is largely inaccurate, over-hyped, and amplified. When the media translates the scientific findings, they often overblow the issue to sell more copy, especially if it's a slow news cycle.

Very, very few scientists are willing to say much definite about global climate, because they know damned well how incomplete our models are, how little we really understand about the subject. But that doesn't make a very good story, does it?

Proxima Centauri

Here's another link to show you what your Government thinks is happening to the world climate.

<a href="http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/climate/" target="_blank">http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/climate/</a>

You can have a long read if you like.

What's happening to our planet?
With our future we play dice.
We burn fossil fuel,
Will our children pay the price?

I think we should do what we can to cut human emmissions of greenhouse gasses. Future generations will have better computers and better computer models than we have. They will be able to decide better than we can whether or not to warm up the planet.

Sojourner553

For a SCIENTIFIC explanation: Please see the following article: Researchers Discover That Volcanic Eruptions Masked Global Warming During The Past 20 Years

<a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/11/011128035329.htm" target="_blank">http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/11/011128035329.htm</a>


Sojourner

LeftCoast

Alonzo,

No offense intended. However, based on my experience at least, you are a minority among those holding conservative/libertarian beliefs. In one important respect, I do agree with you - any solution will have to be structured so as to encourage free-market forces to address solutions to Global Climate Change instead of working against them. Be that by tax breaks, C02 credits, whatever - I certainly don't claim to be knowledgeable enough to be able to provide a workable solution.

LeftCoast

Elwood,

Do you have any references for peer reviewed papers that cast doubt on Global Climate Change? The news media might over-hype, but does that make the underlying story wrong? Have you read any of the ipcc documents that summarize the latest peer-reviews scientific findings or are you relying on Faux News to do your analysis for you again?

"Very Very few scientists" might not be willing because "very very few" relatively speaking are Climatologists. As Alonzo Fyfe pointed out with regards to that so called petition, having a BS or even a PhD in a scientific field does not necessarily mean that one is qualified to pass judgement or to critically evaluate the claims made in another field -especially one so technically demanding as climatology.

To be honest, Elwood, you were exactly the person I had in mind when I opined earlier about the reason that Anti-GW apologists look and act like creationists, and you’ve provided a perfect example above. You start with a broad indictment of the entire subject based not on evidence but on the assertion that "the popular idea" is wrong and then pretend to back it up with a general "very very few scientists…". Have you surveyed all scientists, do you know this to be a fact? Do you know of anyone who has surveyed all scientists (or at least done a statistically valid sampling) to establish what you present as unsupported assertion? If this is not a classic straw man argument I really don't know what is.

In any event, even if most people generally identified as "scientist" were not willing to make any definitive statements - as noted above, so what. The question is what are those people most qualified to pass judgement on the current state of scientific knowledge saying. As far as I can tell, they are saying with near unanimity that Global Climate Change is real and that the best evidence to date indicates that human beings are largely if not solely responsible for the current trends seen.

LeftCoast

Late_C,

First, could you please edit the URL you provided for the link to the picture of Mt. kilimanjaro. It is playing havoc with the screen widths in my and I'm sure other peoples browsers. You can hid the actual URL behind descriptive text like this:
{URL=the_url}the text you want to appear{/URL}

Note, to keep UBB from parsing the example, I've substituted "{" for "["

I've taken the liberty of doing that here:
<a href="http://www.summitpost.com/mountains/photo_link.pl/p/photo_id__7902__object_id__17__type__mountain__mou ntain_id__17__route_id____user_id____order_by____l imit__" target="_blank">Mt. Kilimanjaro</a>

Actually if you edit your post you'll see that UBB has already done what I've suggested, except that it just repeated the URL in the position where you can enter descriptive text.

Now on to your comments:

Depends upon how one defines "control" the climate. Currently we are in no better position to "control" the climate than a paramecium in a petri-dish is in a position to "control" it's environment. We can however recognize that our actions are effecting the climate and takes steps to minimize that effect.

Did you intentionally edit out the URL for the course?

In any event, as I recall it was for a course that could best be described as a "Survey" course. While these types of courses are interesting, they are not rigorous and certainly do not pretend to present the latest scientific knowledge in any but the most superficial terms.

Edited to add Kilimanjaro URL

Edited to note that Coragyps apparently has taken care of this as I was posting

[ May 19, 2002: Message edited by: LeftCoast ]</p>