Editor-- off topic post deleted.

Great job of changing the subject (prop up the strawman) gotta love irony. When lacking true arguments and discussion techniques change the subject.

A true discussion of causes of global warming (and you'd have to be clueless to consider that it isn't happening) must consider man-made additions to it. Man probably cannot stop all activities that add to it but to not even try would be indicative of man's inability to perceive his influence on the planet. Man must prove whether he is a complement to the planet or an infestation.

Please spare us the cheerleading.

The globe is either cooling or warming at any given time in geologic history. The Pacific Northwest was covered in glaciers a few tens of thousands of years ago. They melted, and a huge ice dam broke that that moved titanic sized boulders from northern Washington to the Willamette Valley as if they were grains of sand.

Was that warming caused by human behavior? Was the cooling that happened between 1100 AD and 1800 AD caused by humans? Nope.

Did you know the global temp was higher in 1100 AD than it is today? Does Al Gore know this? If not, why? Could it be because he is a propagandist like Michael Moore rather than a truthteller?

Charlie, you are either the most gullible son of a gun I've ever run into or you are a propagandist yourself.

Is the glove warming? Sure. At least I hope so. Because if it is cooling we are in freaking trouble.

Charlie, lets assume the earth is warming due to natural earth temp. cycling. Can it be solidly proven that it isn't due to natural causes? Then if one can prove that the "contended warming" is due to both natural and manmade causes, can it be proven to what percentage is mankind caused? Then can it be proven how much mankind can affect the assumed warming if we are in a natural earth warming cycle and we are contributing to it? I wonder how much we can help when we can't control the sun's variable energy output, the earth's tilt angle, earth's variable distances from the sun, etc. I'm not quite ready to try using atomic bombs to maybe slightly affecting the above.

I notice there's an unusually conservative ratio (for Blue Oregon) in these first three posts. A more cynical-minder blogger might draw some conclusions about the type of person likely to sitting at their computer on a Friday night... Of course, I fall in that category as well so moving on: Sasha, Please spare us the psuedo-science. Companies have spent millions to find these minor, unrelated temperature stats and they throw them up against the findings of basically the entire global scientific community. Everybody knows that there's always been climate change - what's unprecedented is the mechanism that human activity is causing it. As you pointed out, natural climate change takes many centuries or millenia, not a couple of decades as we are experiencing now. Stats like the ones you mention gain traction because they're simple to understand and easy to rattle off, whereas people who spend their lives studying glaciers and polar magnetism don't tend to speak in sound bites.
What it comes down to is that I'd rather get my information on global warming from a geoclimatologist than from some guy at a conservative think tank with a farmer's almanac.

It seems to me there are four ways that biological populations are controlled:

1) Predation, whether territorial within the species or external;

2) The food supply is consumed leading to a collapse in the population;

3) Overcrowding leads to transmittals of disease;

4) The toxcity of its own waste (think yeast cultures);

The real question seems to be whether human beings are going to be able to figure out how to avoid biological destiny.

Anyone who is convinced by science has long since made up their minds and those that haven't are going to need more than the authority of the scientific community to convince them. A movie with Al Gore as the central figure is almost by definition preaching to the choir. If it mobilizes people to action, great. But it is not going to bring many new converts.

Questions a frog asks as the water slowly boils.

Can it be solidly proven that it isn't due to natural causes? Then if one can prove that the "contended warming" is due to both natural and manmade causes, can it be proven to what percentage is mankind caused? Then can it be proven how much mankind can affect the assumed warming if we are in a natural earth warming cycle and we are contributing to it? I wonder how much we can help when we can't control the sun's variable energy output, the earth's tilt angle, earth's variable distances from the sun, etc. I'm not quite ready to try using atomic bombs to maybe slightly affecting the above.

Sasha and LW:

Thank you for a reasoned defense of sanity.

Of course the Earth is warming: it has been warming since the LAST ICE AGE ended! Are we contributing to this process? Possibly. Can we hope to slow global warming by living in the dark, without heat, and banning the devil automobile? Probably not: not unless you start capping volcanoes first.

Until then, good progressives should quit feeling SO REMORSEFUL every time they turn on the furnace, drive a car, or fly in a jet. Take solace in the fact it's those other people (the carbon HOGS) who don't CARE as much as you do...they're the ones making the planet a warmer place. Don't blame yourselves; blame Exxon!

From the Department of Critical Thinking:

As the saying goes,”consider the source.”

Al Gore is a potential Democratic Presidential candidate (remember, it’s not his choice!) who needs to keep his name before the public in order to generate the $$ it will take to challenge Hillary.

This movie, a perfect example of Docu-ganda, does exactly that. It presents Gore as the wise sage, the leader who was robbed of the presidency he so rightly deserved, now returned to enlighten the masses to a problem that could doom humanity. How could we not want such a man as president?

This film is less a balanced argument about climate change and more an extended campaign commercial presented on the big screen.

Charlie:

You don't really believe the Earth First crowd are looking for incremental reductions in Co2? They would prefer to ban human procreation together with the automobile, but they're trying not to get too far in front of their liberal stooges. They know that if they didn't have their Democratic apologists ("it will be good for the economy"), then the whole house of cards will collapse.

Explain to me again why the Kyoto Treaty would have exempted China from the same regulations placed on the U.S.?

Do Co2 emissions respect national borders? Are they less harmful if they come from developing nations?

If you're going to argue the "global calamity" rationale, then shouldn't every nation be subject to the same rules?

shouldn't every nation be subject to the same rules?

Perhaps, but it ought to be clear that the United States will not agree to that since it would destroy our economy to have the same standards of emissions per capita as the rest of the world. Kyota recognizes the reality that we are not all equal and any standard that tried to take us there immediately is a non-starter.

The truth is that the argument that there isn't a problem is largely based on opposition to all the likely solutions. i.e we don't want to do anything about the problem so we will claim it doesn't exist. If there isn't a global warming problem, as you seemed to argue above, then no standards are needed whether equal or not.

As James Schlesinger noted in a Washington Post article (see “Climate Change: The Science Isn’t Settled,” reprinted in the August 2003 issue of Environment & Climate News), “Despite the certainty many seem to feel about the causes, effects, and extent of climate change, we are in fact making only slow progress in our understanding of the underlying science.”

A petition (referenced here) compiled by a past president of the National Academy of Sciences has attracted the signatures of more than 17,000 scientists. All agree the science of climate change, and man’s role in it, is uncertain. Fully 89 percent of respondents to a survey of state climatologists agreed that “current science is unable to isolate and measure variations in global temperatures caused only by man-made factors.”

Same rules doesn't mean "per capita". Any limitation based on population is going to favor China/India/Indonesia because they have huge populations relative to their GDP.

Instead, any reasonable limit would be based on a Co2 output per currency weighted basket of GDP.

Clearly, those countries with greater industrial output will consume more resources (all else being equal). The most productive countries shouldn't be punished for growing more of the world's commodities, goods, etc.

So, if we radically change our lifestyles to help prevent the increase in global warming and Earth still continues to get hotter, then what do we do?

Also, has anyone bothered to think what the overpopulation of this planet has contributed to global warming during the past century? How many children have YOU created?

So global warming is caused by humans burning fossil fuel. We're running out of fossil fuels and won't have any more to burn in a couple of centuries or so. So what's the problem? Open me a beer, Edith.

My esteemed Dr. Burr:

17,000 Scientists signed this anti-Kyoto petition, which reads:

,i>We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

You may believe the carbon fuel lobby simply bribed 17,000 shills to publicly humiliate themselves and endanger their reputations. That said, I am willing to submit that a few of them know more about the topic than you and Citizen Gore, and they don't accept "as established science" that humans are responsible for global warming.

IF I'M WRONG (have you ever heard a liberal say that?), and the world is going to steamy hell in petroleum basket, the biofuel/hybrid/ethanol charade is simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They all produce sizable quantities of Co2.

If you really want to reduce carbon and particulate emissions, you ought to all become HUGE NUCLEAR POWER ADVOCATES, and start pushing Congress to actually implement the long term radiocative waste storage protocols.

Here's an M.I.T. Professor who thinks Global Warming is a joke.

Professor Richard S. Lindzen (a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability) asserts:

To show why I assert that there is no substantive basis for predictions of sizeable global warming due to observed increases in minor greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons, I shall briefly review the science associated with those predictions.

Here's his most recent article in the forked tongue paper of record, The Wall Street Journal

Hey Kari: your wait is over!

That's 17,001 scientists who think Global Warming is junk science.

I can give you four more Professors (all tenured!) that are still speaking out, despite the crank calls, harassment, and tauntings from the "tolerance crowd".

Let me know if you would like to set up a debate with one of them: I would pay money to watch you and a PhD in Physics, Mathematics, or Meteorology go mano a mano.

Same rules doesn't mean "per capita".

Of course it does. You just don't like the idea of the same rules for everybody because it isn't to your advantage. Which was my point.

Here's an M.I.T. Professor who thinks Global Warming is a joke.

Lindzen makes his living as a paid consultant to various industry groups opposed to restraining the production of greenhouse gases. Far from considering it a joke, he makes his living being the contrarian.

JK: Answer this: What caused the global warming that brought us out of the last ice age? It sure wasn’t automobile exhaust and man ,made CO2?

Why do Greenland ice core samples show that it was up to 5 degrees warmer long ago?

Why do may tree ring records indicate wide variations in climate over the last 5000 years?

What was the last major climate event: AN ICE AGE. What does the earth’s weather do after an ice age? Answer: warm up!

Want to se some other climate change scare stories: http://www.portlanddocs.com/Misc/1950_Ice_Age.pdf

You might want to check out the debate at: http://www.climateaudit.org/

Thanks JK

[Editor-- profane, inappropriate comment about this being a UN plot removed.]

Unbelievable.

Can we possible deny the the increasing effects of our global population, growing exponentially in the last few decades? There are simple laws of physics you can't deny... whether you call it 'global warming', 'climate change', or 'drastic environmental changes'. More people need more space, they need more things, things get bigger, and on and on. This is going to have an increasing effect on our world, and if you can't wrap your mind around it, you might refrain from opening your mouth. Or voting. Or having babies.

Your selfish fantasy world only prolongs the delay in humanity's response. You can choose to buy into the lobbyists' talking points or just accept the right thing to do isn't always the easiest.

Mao,

Your "petition" is the bastard child of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and is a hoax.

From the SourceWatch wiki:

When questioned in 1998, OISM's Arthur Robinson admitted that only 2,100 signers of the Oregon Petition had identified themselves as physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, or meteorologists, "and of those the greatest number are physicists." This grouping of fields concealed the fact that only a few dozen, at most, of the signatories were drawn from the core disciplines of climate science - such as meteorology, oceanography, and glaciology - and almost none were climate specialists. The names of the signers are available on the OISM's website, but without listing any institutional affiliations or even city of residence, making it very difficult to determine their credentials or even whether they exist at all. When the Oregon Petition first circulated, in fact, environmental activists successfully added the names of several fictional characters and celebrities to the list, including John Grisham, Michael J. Fox, Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce (from the TV show MAS*H), an individual by the name of "Dr. Red Wine," and Geraldine Halliwell, formerly known as pop singer Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls. Halliwell's field of scientific specialization was listed as "biology." Even in 2003, the list was loaded with misspellings, duplications, name and title fragments, and names of non-persons, such as company names.

Kari:

OK I took out the swear word.... but why do you characterize what I said as a "UN Plot?" The Kyoto treaty was negotiated at a UN climate conference, and the IPCC is a UN organization, and the Kyoto treaty is precisely what I stated: A global protocol to ration energy consumption.

I know you want to make it appear as if what I wrote was some kind of black helicopter conspiracy. It conveniently allows you to delete what I wrote as if it had no merit. Well, I'll ask you to let the post stand - I've pasted it below - and see what the others think. Sans the swear word.

Post below:

Kari:

So did you get your one single solitary non-energy company scientist?

Now, can you give us a few examples of non-government-funded scientists who believe global warming is happening????

Guess what would happen if a researcher got a government grant to do a study and found that global warming was not a problem or was due to variable solar output? Probably couldn't stay on the government cash wagon.... they ain't gunna keep funding those studies.

So if you think that a scientist funded by an energy company destroys his or her credibility, I say the same about any government funded scientist.

Charlie: yes the globe WAS warmer in 1100 AD than now. There were vineyards in Scotland back then, and Greenland got its name not because it was covered in ice.

Global warming is simply a strategy to create a global rationing protocol for the use of energy, which is precisely what Kyoto treaty puts in place. So we get the UN determining who can consume energy and how much they can consume.

If all you global warming advocates really cared about the environment and not just about controlling productive capacity, you would support CO2 consumption strategies such as planting vegetation rather than solely looking to impose limits on CO2 emmissions. Guess what the delegates said about that at the last UN climate get-together?

They said no way! That wouldn't meet our desired social goals!

Which put the lie to what they are doing. Simply planting enough trees could easily consume as much CO2 as the Kyoto treaty wants the U.S. to limit, but they would not so much as consider that solution.

This is a global scam, and all you dummies are the stooges.

Actually Ross, Dr. Lindzen makes his living as a Professor at M.I.T.

Like many academics, he also earns consulting fees for work he does in addition to teaching, and publishes articles in professional journals, magazines and newspapers.

He won the LEO Prize for Independent Thinking in 2006

This link is worth reading if you would like to learn how the ALARMISTS are manipulating their data

Chuckie:

Your displaced Katrina relatives are in possession of "anecdotal evidence" and nothing more. A personal tragedy, certainly, but not incontrovertible proof of global warming. The region has experienced deadlier hurricanes both at the turn of the century and in the 30's.

Did you read the story about some portions of the levee system having sunk as much as 3 feet more than the US Army Corps of Engineers had estimated. That made some of the levee "walls" as much as 3 feet shorter than they were engineered in order to function as an effective barrier.

Must have been those Carter political appointees trying to screw up the 2005 Republican Administration that were sure to follow him. Cause we all know natural disasters don't happen without failure at the Presidential level.

Kari:

Why would you edit/delete Sasha without doing the same to that drone named Joeb from Maine?

Actually Ross, Dr. Lindzen makes his living as a Professor at M.I.T.

And, like many professors, he gets his real money from elsewhere. I don't know what MIT professors get paid, but its probably not very much just for being a professor.

[Editor-- more off topic conversation about a commenter -- not from this post -- named Joeb.]

Mr. Burr,

No, I haven’t seen the movie. My prior comments were directed at the politics involved with the movie’s release, not the premise of the movie. I’ll wait till it comes to the Bagdad where I’ll only have to spend $3 and I can dull Gore’s personality with a couple pints of Terminator (the only way I can take him after the way he helped turn the country over to Bush).

Mr. Dover and TKrueg both bring up the fundamental issue here: too damn many humans on the planet, who all demand energy and the subsequent burning of fossil fuels. I’ll be interested to see if Gore has the courage to touch on this sensitive subject.

The bitterness and recrimination in which "buckman res" is indulging himself, while understandable is overblown and no excuse for branding former VP Gore's public service to be a self-serving campaign for political rejuvenation. Shame on them, whoever the poster is!

What do you want from Gore? He'd won the election, though by the time the investigation of the Florida debacle was complete we were in the throes of the "War (not) on Terror". Is your problem that he was not a slimy enough lawyer to defeat the Bush crime-syndicate's end-around on the Constitution with the collusion of the Supreme Court? Five and a half years is too long to sit around crying in your beer.

Ed:

Gore would have won if he had registered another 300 voters and driven them to the polls on election day. He didn't. Get over it.

The fact that it was even close enough for Bush to "steal" it is proof that Gore was a weak candidate (he'd been the Vice-President for the preceeding 8 years...talk about plenty of free time!). Gore was practically an incumbent (the economy was still booming), and he still got spanked by a Daddy's Boy with barely enough political resume to fill a 3x5 note card.

Gore was wooden, he ran a lousy campaign, and he didn't even win several of the gimme states (like Tennessee!). But go back to crying in your beer, and spinning conspiracy theories about Jeb Bush and the Supremes, and Fascism. I know I'm wasting my time with all these facts and logic and stuff.

I happen to be an earth scientist. Not a specialist in climate and paleoclimate, but I have a general acquaintance with the literature. The refereed scientific literature is virtually unanimous about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. The alleged scientific controversy about the reality of anthropogenic climate change is BOGUS. Whatever controversy exists has been knowingly manufactured by people with political/economic agendas and unwittingly advanced by mass media that blindly operate on the "let's report both sides" principle. What's next? How about a controversy about whether or not the Earth is flat? I mean, there are people out there who actually believe that, so how can the media NOT report about this "controversy"?

The American Geophysical Union (www.agu.org), the umbrella organization for geophysical science in the United States, has brief position statement on the topic of anthropogenic climate change, written for a general audience, that I post next, and which can be found at

http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/policy/positions/climate_change.shtml

Human Impacts on Climate

Adopted by Council December, 2003

Human activities are increasingly altering the Earth's climate. These effects add to natural influences that have been present over Earth's history. Scientific evidence strongly indicates that natural influences cannot explain the rapid increase in global near-surface temperatures observed during the second half of the 20th century.

Human impacts on the climate system include increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases (e.g., carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons and their substitutes, methane, nitrous oxide, etc.), air pollution, increasing concentrations of airborne particles, and land alteration. A particular concern is that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide may be rising faster than at any time in Earth's history, except possibly following rare events like impacts from large extraterrestrial objects.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have increased since the mid-1700s through fossil fuel burning and changes in land use, with more than 80% of this increase occurring since 1900. Moreover, research indicates that increased levels of carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. It is virtually certain that increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will cause global surface climate to be warmer.

The complexity of the climate system makes it difficult to predict some aspects of human-induced climate change: exactly how fast it will occur, exactly how much it will change, and exactly where those changes will take place. In contrast, scientists are confident in other predictions. Mid-continent warming will be greater than over the oceans, and there will be greater warming at higher latitudes. Some polar and glacial ice will melt, and the oceans will warm; both effects will contribute to higher sea levels. The hydrologic cycle will change and intensify, leading to changes in water supply as well as flood and drought patterns. There will be considerable regional variations in the resulting impacts.

Scientists' understanding of the fundamental processes responsible for global climate change has greatly improved during the last decade, including better representation of carbon, water, and other biogeochemical cycles in climate models. Yet, model projections of future global warming vary, because of differing estimates of population growth, economic activity, greenhouse gas emission rates, changes in atmospheric particulate concentrations and their effects, and also because of uncertainties in climate models. Actions that decrease emissions of some air pollutants will reduce their climate effects in the short term. Even so, the impacts of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations would remain.

The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change states as an objective the "...stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." AGU believes that no single threshold level of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere exists at which the beginning of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system can be defined. Some impacts have already occurred, and for increasing concentrations there will be increasing impacts. The unprecedented increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, together with other human influences on climate over the past century and those anticipated for the future, constitute a real basis for concern.

Enhanced national and international research and other efforts are needed to support climate related policy decisions. These include fundamental climate research, improved observations and modeling, increased computational capability, and very importantly, education of the next generation of climate scientists. AGU encourages scientists worldwide to participate in climate research, education, scientific assessments, and policy discussions. AGU also urges that the scientific basis for policy discussions and decision-making be based upon objective assessment of peer-reviewed research results.

Science provides society with information useful in dealing with natural hazards such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and drought, which improves our ability to predict and prepare for their adverse effects. While human-induced climate change is unique in its global scale and long lifetime, AGU believes that science should play the same role in dealing with climate change. AGU is committed to improving the communication of scientific information to governments and private organizations so that their decisions on climate issues will be based on the best science.

The global climate is changing and human activities are contributing to that change. Scientific research is required to improve our ability to predict climate change and its impacts on countries and regions around the globe. Scientific research provides a basis for mitigating the harmful effects of global climate change through decreased human influences (e.g., slowing greenhouse gas emissions, improving land management practices), technological advancement (e.g., removing carbon from the atmosphere), and finding ways for communities to adapt and become resilient to extreme events.

It doesn't sound anything like the dire predictions of the Earth First crowd (or Al Gore).

It also makes no effort to put the impact of human activities into the broader context of sequential cooling and heating trends that have been occuring for tens of thousands of years.

"LMAO" is indeed wasting his time with his "facts" and stuff, and more to the point wasting OUR time and suppressing thoughtful debate on this blog. It is a common tactic of enemies of democracy, as when they run nasty, divisive campaigns with the express intent of depressing voter turnout by making the democratic process itself repugnant.

It is no conspiracy theory that GWB stole the election, and it is still irrelevent to the topic of discussion. Do you even remember the topic, [Editor -- comment deleted]?

[Editor-- ad hominem attacks deleted.]

The warming of earth's atmosphere is a natural progression, human caused or not. Human alteration of their environment is natural (unless all the greenies out there think we're some sort alien life form). The planet has been through much worse than the burning of fossil fuels.

What's the big deal? 20 volcanoes could blow tomorrow and waste 80% of the population. Or, a comet could tater the planet. It's happened before and it's pure hubris to think humans can do anything about it.

Sure, in a hundred years there probably will be a massive, planetary correction due to human development. Or Yellowstone will melt down and cover the planet in ash. Billions will die and the planet will go back into stasis.

It's natural. Get over it.

Charlie: Would you accept our own states climate scientist George Taylor to meet the requirement to name just "one" non-affiliated industry shill? Or is he an industralist too? I am a democrate not associated with any industry. Gosh, I feel foolish for posting this.

Charlie Burr:No, again, 2005 was warmer than 1100 AD. Also, as most of us learned in grade school, Greenland was named Greenland in order to attract people to move there, not because it was green.

JKL from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Release No.: 03-10; March 31, 2003; 20th Century Climate Not So Hot. From the Harvard University web site: www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/pr0310.html

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: The worldwide range of climate records confirmed two significant climate periods in the last thousand years, the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. The climatic notion of a Little Ice Age interval from 1300 to1900 A.D. and a Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300 A.D. appears to be rather well-confirmed and wide-spread, despite some differences from one region to another as measured by other climatic variables like precipitation, drought cycles, or glacier advances and retreats. (Bold added)

"For a long time, researchers have possessed anecdotal evidence supporting the existence of these climate extremes," Baliunas says. "For example, the Vikings established colonies in Greenland at the beginning of the second millennium that died out several hundred years later when the climate turned colder. And in England, vineyards had flourished during the medieval warmth. Now, we have an accumulation of objective data to back up these cultural indicators." (Bold added)

Thanks JK

The Medieval Warm Period partially coincided in time with the peak in solar activity named the Medieval Maximum (AD 1100–1250). The Little Ice Age was likely the follow-on climactic swing back. There is no such natural explanation for the 20th century climate swing. JK offers nothing to refute anthropogenic climate change.

My apologies for letting my last post end with name-calling, which was rightly edited out. It makes me angry when so much of a thread is spent having to rebuff specious arguments from commenters whose only aim is to be contrarian so as to deflect serious discussion.

Kari only asked for a "single solitary scientist" that refutes the Global Warming PARANOIA. Charlie didn't like my list of 17,000 (not verfiable!). Here's more than FIFTY of them, including contact information, C.V., etc.

Please don't spam/harass the scientists who rain on your liberal belief system. In a free society, even scientists are entitled to form minority opinions. The libs are usually such champions of the rights of minorities, I'm surprised that dissenting scientists are given such short shrift.

In other news (actually it was news back in 2003, but the greenies tried to squash it), a noted Canadian Paleoclimatogoist has explained why the infamous hockey stick chart (which shows a spike in global temperatures) is wrong. In a nutshell, Dr. Tim Patterson writes :

The temperature data before 1900 were not directly measured, as they were after 1900 when land-based thermometer readings were used. Instead, pre-1900 temperatures were calculated based on the measurement of "proxies," natural phenomena such as the growth of tree rings or coral that indicate what temperature was at certain times in the past. Consequently, grafting the two very different types of data sets together without significant overlap to come to dramatic conclusions was unwarranted and should have been seriously contested by the paper's reviewers.

Good news though: Dr Patterson also observed: Tide gauges record rates of sea-level rise during the 20th century that are 0.7-1.9 mm/yr higher than late Holocene trends,Gehrels, W.R., Milne, G.A., Jason R. Kirby, J.R., Patterson, R.T., Belknap, D.F. in Quaternary International, v. 120, p. 79-89.

Ed Bickford: The Medieval Warm Period partially coincided in time with the peak in solar activity named the Medieval Maximum (AD 1100–1250). The Little Ice Age was likely the follow-on climactic swing back. There is no such natural explanation for the 20th century climate swing. JK offers nothing to refute anthropogenic climate change. JK: A key argument of today’s climate being unusual is that it has never been this warm before. That claim is likely falsified by the Medieval Maximum.

You have three things to prove: 1. It is getting warmer beyond the normal ups and downs. The existence of the Medieval Maximum suggests that this has not occurred. (Other data suggests that it was even warmer before that time.)

1. The cause is man (anthropogenic, but lets avoid jargon). You have a big task here: First man’s CO2 output is a small fraction of the total CO2 put into the atmosphere. AND CO2 is a fraction of the important “warming” gases. H2O is the most important, mostly FROM OCEAN EVAPORATION. This is tough sell.

2. You have to discount other non-man caused influences. This is proving a negative - very difficult. How can we know the historical solar output? Changes in the earths orbit? Passing galactic clouds to shield the sun? In order to create a computer model you have to get ALL influences right, or you end up assigning wrong weights to the ones that you know and the whole model is “ca-ca”. That has happened a couple times already in the current cycle of climate panic.

Ed Bickford: It makes me angry when so much of a thread is spent having to rebuff specious arguments from commenters whose only aim is to be contrarian so as to deflect serious discussion. JK: Here is sone serious discussion: I have been looking at some of Mann’s graphs from his 1998 article. Am I to take it that the “hockey stick” curve is the result of data processing of five proxies RPC #1 - 5? (I’ll study the article at some point. I just ask because I assume that you have read and understand this foundation of the rapidly accelerating, man caused global warming hypotheses.)

Just for fun: Are you aware of the coming ice age scare of the 1960s-1970s? Or the global warming scare before that?

Thanks JK

JK's cynical attempt at "serious discussion" just shows his 'troll' status as clearly as could be demonstrated.

I've been wanting to see this movie. Where is it playing in Portland?

I can't believe we're arguing about the topic and not organizing around it. It seems the site has been infiltrated by oil lobby supporters. Probably being paid to troll the websites featuring this movie.

So, what are we gonna do about global warming locally? I live in Hillsboro, has anyone approached the city council about going green?

How many of you have heard of the Astronomical Theory of Climate Change? Also known as the Milankovitch Theory, it was named for Serbian astronomer Milutin Milankovitch who determined that the earth "wobbles" in its orbit. Milankovitch surmised that changes in the tilt of the earth change the strength of the seasons and the climate. Similar interpretations suggest the earth will be warming for the next 50,000 years, with or without greenhouse gases.

What does The Milankovitch Theory say about future climate change? Orbital changes occur over thousands of years, and the climate system may also take thousands of years to respond to orbital forcing. Theory suggests that the primary driver of ice ages is the total summer radiation received in northern latitude zones where major ice sheets have formed in the past, near 65 degrees north. Past ice ages correlate well to 65N summer insolation (Imbrie 1982). Astronomical calculations show that 65N summer insolation should increase gradually over the next 25,000 years, and that no 65N summer insolation declines sufficient to cause an ice age are expected in the next 50,000 - 100,000 years

Here's a great chart based on Antartic Ice Cores which suggests three massive warming periods have occured over the last 250,000 years, with the most recent rise beginning roughly 14,000 years ago. Perhaps the end of the Pleistocene can be attributed to this more hospitable climate, or they were all driving around in ancient Escalades and we just haven't found the fossil remains?

I don't know what happened 135,000 years ago, but it was a more volatile rise than modern experience. That was followed by a 24,000 year cooling trend. Perhaps a reversion to the mean (about 5 degrees centigrade COOLER than the present) will eventually occur, following the trend of the past 250,000 years?

AIT premiers in PDX Friday June 9th at Regal Fox Tower Stadium 10 downtown. The website for "An Inconvenient Truth" has a list of theaters by state in .pdf format.

[Editor-- comment deleted.]

It's either warming or cooling.

http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/FireandIce.pdf

What's funny is this play that only "industry" funded disagreement exists.

How about an "inconvenient untruth"?

Such as the local bogus report on emissions by the Portland Office of Sustainable Development? Which was proudly lauded here on BlueOregon.

I suppose it's only "industry funded" opposition to that pack of fabrications?

How much more disingenuous can a case be when they don't even actually measure something but claim a level favorable to their "agenda"?

I would say that emissions report was also "industry funded". The industry of tax funded government charlatans and their activist collaborators.

Of course that's in total contrast to what we are continually told. That these follks on the left are fact based. That these government agencies and friends are all good and everyone who criticizes them are bad.

I wanted to share this email with you didn't know where to post.

[Editor-- not here.]

How about an Inconvenient "Theory." 30 years ago, the big issue was either a nuclear winter or the coming Ice Age. We may be entering a global warming phase.

However, the most troubling thing is when we have celebrities (Gore, George Clooney, Julia Roberts) pushing a cause instead of some sort of fact-based proof construction.

What's funny is that Richard thinks that a post on a website "devoted solely to analyzing and exposing the anti-free enterprise culture of the media" is going to credibly refute the observation that only "industry" funded disagreement exists.

Charlie:

Your theory is flawed: CO2 is simply one of many variables in terrestrial climatology. Nobody has demonstrated it is the single most important variable, DESPITE what the Earth First crowd tells you. SO WHAT if C02 has never been higher in the past 650,000 years (assuming it's true)?

Much of the planet was covered in glaciers during most of the past 650,000 years and WAS QUITE INHOSPITABLE to human habitation. You can't toss out some nirvana like level of "low CO2" from a half million years ago and suggest the planet was somehow better off. It wasn't.

It is ironic that anybody who disagrees with the B/O consensus is a troll. With the exception of Lin (the self identified earth scientist), I wonder if any of the above commenters have an advanced degree in science, let alone Paleo-Climatology or Dynamic Meteorology or Physics?

Many of you haven't studied science since your Sophomore year of high school, but you're quite certain that anybody with a PhD who disagrees with you must be a "Rush Limbaugh junk" scientist. Irony.

Grow UP! Try to learn when you read divergent opinions, rather than simply dismiss them in support of your own thesis. Take a look at this chart of the past 250,000 years and tell me that humans are driving global warming.

Notice the earth has been in a cooling trend for much of the previous 124,000 years (print it out and draw a straight line over the tops of each peak: that's a declining trend line). Lo and behold: temperatures began to dramatically increase 14,000 years ago.

Do you really believe that stone-age humans are the reason things started to heat up? If so, then please provide a link to some scientist that shares your opinion. I have looked, and can't find one.

If humans were not the primary input of climate change 13,000 years ago, (and despite our massive population increases), humankind may NOT BE the primary input today. If you overlay human population estimates over the last 13,000 years, you'll find that global temperatures began to well in advance of human populations going parabolic). If a mere several million stone/copper/bronze age humans were "destroying the planet" how can you possibly explain the relatively similar footprint of several billion more (at least in terms of global warming)? I simply can't connect the dots, except to begin to explore who benefits from the EARTH IS MELTING fear mongering.

Critical thinking: it more than just criticizing what other people think.

Here's a brief summary from those who offer a contrary viewpoint.

I'm done with this thread, unless somebody has an intelligent refutation of something that I or the "flat-earthers" have submitted above.

Funny how Charlie minimizes the opinions of those who don't buy into the left's gloom and doom by calling them "trolls" and "industry shills." I guess resorting to ad hominems means he doesn't have much faith in his side of the argument.

An earthquake-caused tsunami killed 300,000 in 2004, was that somehow the work of "industry shills" and "trolls?" Natural disasters happen and people die. Nature is cruel and unforgiving.

Maybe Al Gore should concentrate on reducing third-world birth rates instead of attacking the oil industry. Then we might not see so many die when a disaster happens.

And just like his Hollywood elitist friends, Al Gore [Editor-- ad hominem attacks deleted. See previous comment.]

I think it's obvious that a commenter is just being a troll when he intimates that anyone who does not hold a PhD himself is unqualified to debate a scientific topic, and that his antagonists have learned nothing cogent since they were 16.

There is more at issue here than the details of the scientific theory, which I feel assured is an indictment of our headlong greed. We have seen time and time again this kind of PR blitz unleashed when some mega-corporate industry feels threatened. Alas, the poor oil industry! They might have take responsibility for the pollution they unleash upon all the people who don't have the scientific training to understand what's being done. Big Oil has no intention of going the way of Big Tobacco...

Ed: if you're going to put words into my mouth, I must respond.

I never said you aren't entitled to debate science without a PhD. Neither did I suggest you are incapable of learning (you may prove me wrong). To the contrary, I don't have a PhD, but I'm here debating you. I hope we both learn something.

I did observe the irony in many non-scientists who conclude that "anybody with a PhD who disagrees with you must be a 'Rush Limbaugh junk' scientist."

There are plenty of very well educated scientists with high ethics who believe non-human factors have greater impact on global warming than "greenhouse gases". They don't deny that temperatures are rising, they simply disagree as to causality, magnitude, or consequences.

That's very different from (for example) denying the holocaust occurred or suggesting the earth is flat. How is it different? There is no objective historical authority on what happened over the last 500,000 years. Rather, there are many competing and several complimentary theories. It is much easier to prove the Holocaust occurred (photos, records, testimony) or that the earth is a sphere.

To listen to some of you drone on and on, I would expect you own geologic videotape of homo-sapiens lighting fires under glaciers and then high fiving each other while they run up to the next glacier, torches in hand. You can keep repeating your mantra over and over again "humans cause global warming, humans cause global warming", but it simply doesn't make it so, project the magnitude of the warming, the likely consequences, or provide a framework to prevent it from happening EVEN IF WE ALL AGREED ON CAUSALITY, MAGNITUDE, CONSEQUENCES, AND THE BEST WAY TO ENSURE THE CONTINUED VIABILITY OF HUMANKIND.

Please stop SHOUTING, Lmao; be mindful of your blood pressure.

It is you who drones the mantra, wishing the specter of the consequences of our heedless consumerism would pass harmlessly by. Time to stick your head back in the sand...

Ed Bickford: There is more at issue here than the details of the scientific theory, which I feel assured is an indictment of our headlong greed. JK: There is indeed very much more at issue here. That is whether the U.S will be damaged by bad science like Russia was when they changed their farm policy due to the nutty ideas of Lysenko (sp). Millions starved. Some proposed cures to climate change will put more people in poverty and hurt the standard of living of every American. That is the danger here.

Thanks JK

Kari et al, why do you want to censor information regarding the giant amount of carbon used and pollution caused by Mr. Gore?

WIth all due respect to both sides, it seems to me the question is whether we should act on the current scientific consensus on global warming.

There are always dissenters from any scientific consensus. But that continuing debate takes place at scientific conferences and in scientific journals where people attemp to convince their peers. I am not sure that many of the dissenters in this case are interested in such a debate. They seem to be more interested in the political debate of what actions should be taken based on the current science than on convincing their colleagues that their own theories are correct.

So the question is whether we should act on the current consensus, not whether it is correct. Of course the certainty that it is correct is part of that question. But it seems to me the consequences of failing to act if the critics of the current consensus are wrong are quite catastrophic. The consequences of acting to reduce emissions if they are right is not catastrophic at all.

In December 2004, Science published an opinion essay [8] by History professor Naomi Oreskes [9] that summarized a study of the scientific literature on climate change. The essay concluded that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. The author analyzed 928 abstracts of papers from refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, listed with the keywords "global climate change". The abstracts were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. 75% of the abstracts were placed in the first three categories, thus either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, thus taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change; none of the abstracts disagreed with the consensus position, which the author found to be "remarkable". It was also pointed out that "authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point."

Here's the article. The author has a PhD from Stanford Earth Sciences and is now a historian of science. Again, the point is what gets published in REFEREED SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS, not what gets posted on the Internet.

BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change Naomi Oreskes*

Science 3 December 2004: Vol. 306. no. 5702, p. 1686 DOI: 10.1126/science.1103618

Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, "As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change" (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case.

The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)].

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8).

The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9).

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.

This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.

References and Notes

1. A. C. Revkin, K. Q. Seelye, New York Times, 19 June 2003, A1.
2. S. van den Hove, M. Le Menestrel, H.-C. de Bettignies, Climate Policy 2 (1), 3 (2003).
3. See www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm.
4. J. J. McCarthy et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001).
5. National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Science of Climate Change, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 2001).
6. American Meteorological Society, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 508 (2003).
7. American Geophysical Union, Eos 84 (51), 574 (2003).
8. See www.ourplanet.com/aaas/pages/atmos02.html.
9. The first year for which the database consistently published abstracts was 1993. Some abstracts were deleted from our analysis because, although the authors had put "climate change" in their key words, the paper was not about climate change.

10. This essay is excerpted from the 2004 George Sarton Memorial Lecture, "Consensus in science: How do we know we're not wrong," presented at the AAAS meeting on 13 February 2004. I am grateful to AAAS and the History of Science Society for their support of this lectureship; to my research assistants S. Luis and G. Law; and to D. C. Agnew, K. Belitz, J. R. Fleming, M. T. Greene, H. Leifert, and R. C. J. Somerville for helpful discussions.

    10.1126/science.1103618

The author is in the Department of History and Science Studies Program, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Dr. BILL GRAY, Professor Emeritus at Colorado State University was recently quoted in an provocative piece in the Washington Post Magazine:

"I am of the opinion that global warming is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people."

And a quote from Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach (on page 5 of the above linked article):

LET US BE HONEST about the intellectual culture of America in general: It has become almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion about anything.

Everything is a war now. This is the age of lethal verbal combat, where even scientific issues involving measurements and molecules are somehow supernaturally polarizing. The controversy about global warming resides all too perfectly at the collision point of environmentalism and free market capitalism. It's bound to be not only politicized but twisted, mangled and beaten senseless in the process. The divisive nature of global warming isn't helped by the fact that the most powerful global-warming skeptic (at least by reputation) is President Bush, and the loudest warnings come from Al Gore.

On the Value of Consensus, by Roger Pielke Jr.

The notion of a scientific consensus on climate change has become a common fixture in discussions of climate science and policy. What once may have been a useful concept has now become little more than a political touchstone used more often to advance political agendas than to support policy development. Even to discuss this issue, as I am here, is to risk being labeled a “climate skeptic” by the denizens of politically correct discourse on climate. Lest there be any confusion, as I’ve written many times, I accept the IPCC consensus on climate science, and base my readily available peer-reviewed climate policy research on the IPCC scientific consensus.

There is of course a scientific consensus on climate change. But this is where things get tricky. Consider for example this statement:

In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

How might one interpret this statement? Fortunately, the IPCC has standardized its terminology on uncertainty. So an equivalent phrase would be:

Relevant IPCC Lead Authors judge that over the past 50 years that the majority of observed warming has been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations with between 64% and 90% certainty.

lin: In December 2004, Science published an opinion essay [8] by History professor Naomi Oreskes [9] that summarized a study of the scientific literature on climate change. The essay concluded that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. JK: That may say more about Science’s acceptance policy than anything else. Some Harvard people looked at actual climate records, instead of other people’s papers and concluded: "Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium."

ABSTRACT: The 1000 yr climatic and environmental history of the Earth contained in various proxy records is reviewed. As indicators, the proxies duly represent local climate. Because each is of a different nature, the results from the proxy indicators cannot be combined into a hemispheric or global quantitative composite. However, considered as an ensemble of individual expert opinions, the assemblage of local representations of climate establishes both the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period as climatic anomalies with worldwide imprints, extending earlier results by Bryson et al. (1963), Lamb (1965), and numerous intervening research efforts. Furthermore, the individual proxies can be used to address the question of whether the 20th century is the warmest of the 2nd millennium locally. Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.

From: Climate Research, Jan 31, 2003 Vol 23:89-110 by some people at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (http://w3g.gkss.de/staff/storch/pdf/soon+baliunas.cr.2003.pdf):

By the way, what is your opinion of the five temperature curves, in Fig.5a of Mann’s 1998 paper, four of which don’t show recent global warming?

Thanks JK

So politcal agendas can lead people to spin scientific results to their own ends; not news. I don't believe we have yet descended into fascism so far that the outcome of scientific research can dictated by political correctness.

It's not the outcome of scientific research, but the narrow depth and breadth of the research itself, that is politically correct.

There are research funding concerns, not to mention personal reputations. If your Department Head is a big believer in Anthropogenic Climate Change (not that it simply exists, but that it WE ONLY HAVE 8 YEARS LEFT BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE), then designing a research proposal designed to poke holes in the bosses theory may be a career limiting move. You've seen what a bunch of lay people do to global warming skeptics in this venue: it's worse in academia. The chilling effect is profoundly biased in favor of consensus, which has never been the hallmark of great science.

If indeed it's worse in academia for the poor skeptics than you fare here, I have to believe it is because they have theories poorly grounded in science rather than politics.

A word to the wise, namely lin: As noted before, rather than dropping a whole, possibly copyrighted article into the blog as you did the article from "Science", you could have quoted briefly from it and given a link thus: See the 'Science' essay "BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" in .pdf format.

Ed Bickford: If indeed it's worse in academia for the poor skeptics than you fare here, I have to believe it is because they have theories poorly grounded in science rather than politics. JK: Hey Ed, you seem to be pretty up on the subject, please give us you opinion of the five temperature curves, in Fig.5a of the Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998 paper, four of which don’t show recent global warming and how does that relate to the conclusions in that paper.

Thanks JK

"the narrow depth and breadth of the research itself, that is politically correct."

There is plenty of money available from various industry groups for research on alternative explanations to climate change. The problem is that research has not made a dent in the overall scientific consensus.

The argument that we can simply ignore the scientific consensus on a theory that it is entirely driven by politics is pretty scary.

Hey Ed, Did you read right by my mention of the BAD science by the Portland Office of Sustainable Development. It wasn't just bad science though.

They knew they were lying, misrepresenting, and defrauding the public.

It's amazing how your camp can use tax dollars and multiple public agencies to concoct a bogus report and defraud the public then have your "activists" not bat an eye over it when they get caught. What? It doesn't matter when your side blatantly lies? The truth is the campaign to propagate that man is causing global warming is being perpetrated the same way as the Portland report was.

And all while claiming the science high ground. The truth just doesn't matter does it?

Off shore drilling for nat gas and oil, ANWR and our vast coal reserves could go along way to reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Here in Oregon the hypocrites claim light rail reduces pollution yet it uses old technology Boardman Coal fired power which pollutes the area. Sewage dumps regularly in our major river yet all we here is rhetoric about how we do things right. There is no climate crisis and your take on the effects on our economy are as valid as that Portland report. A report which along with concocted successes claimed there was no down side effect on our economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The wasted billions on light rail led to increased congestion which cost billions along with more pollution from the idling traffic and Boardman. Put everything the table istead of selective subjective speculation and you fail miserably to make any case.

To the skeptics: thank your stars that you don't live on an island nation. We will be judged by our descendents. Good luck explaining to them your why-not-believe the 1% of folks approach to one of the defining issues of our times... I'm saddened by it all.

I'm reminded of the bumpersticker: Live Simply, So Others Can Simply Live.

I would be extremely pleased if my geoscience colleagues had arrived at a consensus that anthropogenic CO2 has nothing to do with climate change. Unfortunately I do not have this luxury.

The Washington Post article (link above in a posting by Jennifer) is a rather nice example of the phenomenon I mentioned in a posting: 99% of refereed articles in the scientific literature conclude X, %1% conclude not-X, and the mass media conclude from this (or at least portray the situation as) that there is a deeply divided scientific community without consensus.

I publish in the refereed scientific literature. I am an associate editor of a geophysical journal. (I review grant proposals as well.) No, of course peer review is not a perfect system, but it is, in my experience as author, reviewer, and editor, a HIGHLY EFFECTIVE quality control system. COnsiderably more effective than the pages of the Washington Post, certainly.

If the folks quoted in the Post article as being so outraged were to present a compelling case in articles submitted to peer-reviewed journals, their work would get published. (As an associate editor, I routinely recommend for publication papers that I consider to be of overall good quality, whether or not I agree with everything the authors have to say. I think that my level of ethics in this regard is nothing special.) Other people would write critiques, and the authors would get a chance to reply. Standard procedure.

Before I am criticized as naive and deluded, I would like to note that people whom I regard as exceptionally talented geoscientists are lucky to get 10-15% of their grant proposals funded. I refer to people who have won awards, who serve as journal editors, and so on. For reasons perhaps better analyzed by a sociologist, there are far too many people chasing far too few available grant dollars. Yet I have never heard any of these folks alleging persecution. Oh, lots of frustration, certainly. But nothing about persecution for their beliefs. Nothing about being forced by department head to change their conclusions.

Apropos JK's comment about the Oreskes article, it has nothing to do with the journal Science's acceptance policy. Oreskes looked at close to 1000 articles on the topic of climate change in a variety of scientific journals. BTW Science is well known among those of us who actually write for refereed journals to have exceptionally stringent acceptance standards.

Someone else in this thread commented that the entire concept of scientific consensus is bogus and just a way to compel conformity. Interesting thought. Nothing I have seen in action, however. (But then the critic who considers me deluded is going to say I'm in denial anyway.) My coworkers and I work every day on geological-hazards issues. We have long meetings to discuss data and, yes, sometimes, try to reach consensus when we are called upon to make scientifically based recommendations to public officials.

There are still a few folks out there claiming that AIDS has nothing to do with HIV and is instead due to IV drug abuse and "lifestyle choices". For example, see www.duesberg.com, a Web site maintained by a poor unfortunate laboring in obscurity at a backwater called the University of California at Berkeley. Perhaps the Washington Post needs to do another 5 page article on this "controversy", too.

"""I'm reminded of the bumpersticker: Live Simply, So Others Can Simply Live."""

I think it goes "Live simply so others may simply live"

Not to be offensive or anything but, I first saw that years ago and immediatley thought what load of crap.

I must have misunderstood. And still do.

What's it supposed to mean beyond the "Make love not War" surface? My guess is that it is a measuring device. If one get's it they "care about humanity & the planet, and if not they don't?

In this context, it reminds us our daily decisions will have life-and-death decisions for others. If we continue to drive 12-MPG trucks when we don't need to, we'll continue to exacerbate climate change, and people who live in certain countries will have their crops fail, and they'll starve to death. Or, clearer yet: we'll cause more things like Katrina.

Lower your consumption. Live more simply. It really, truly matters, whether or not the slogan works for you.

One other thing. I was curious about the publication record of William Gray, the meteorologist featured in the Washington Post article linked above. I used the search engine at scholar.google.com, which I use in my professional life routinely. I found a few items (abstracts of papers) with Gray’s professional judgment about whether the frequency and intensity of hurricanes can be related to climate change. He has, of course, conclude otherwise. I did not find other papers of his touching on long-term climate trends.

I quote below from the Washington Post article about Gray at some length because it points to…shoddy journalism? A truculent scientific investigator? Neither? Readers can judge.

Bill Gray has a favorite diagram, taken from a 1985 climate model, showing little nodules in the center with such labels as "thermal inertia" and "net energy balance" and "latent heat flux" and "subsurface heat storage" and "absorbed heat radiation" and so on, and they are emitting arrows that curve and loop in all directions, bumping into yet more jargon, like "soil moisture" and "surface roughness" and "vertical wind" and "meltwater" and "volcanoes."

"It's a big can of worms!" Gray says. It's his favorite line. The models can't even predict the weather in two weeks, much less 100 years, he says.

"They sit in this ivory tower, playing around, and they don't tell us if this is going to be a hot summer coming up. Why not? Because the models are no damn good!"

A few comments. First of all, regarding that diagram that the Post writer portrays Gray as ridiculing: The quoted terms are rather transparent to me, and I’m no meteorologist. They have to do with what is called the energy budget and various modes of energy transfer. Unfamiliar to a layman, but so what? Medical terminology is unfamiliar to most laymen, too, but are journalists, or readers of this page, going around ridiculing physicians for using terms like, say, tibia or menisectomy or myocardial infarction?

According to the Post article, Gray also criticizes models that “can’t even predict the weather in two weeks, much less 100 years.” A couple of things about this. Most obviously, nobody can make detailed predictions more than a few days ahead, because the atmosphere is a turbulent fluid. Climatology is all about long-term trends. Gray knows this, of course, because he himself issues hurricane forecasts months in advance (http://typhoon.atmos.colostate.edu/). So...if he acknowledges that the weather two weeks ahead cannot be predicted, then what exactly is he forecasting in his annual forecast? Well, broad trends. No mystery there. Why he thinks this is OK for him and not for other people is an issue that I’ll leave for meteorologists to sort out.

The Post journalist also has this to say:

“Gray believes in the obs. The observations. Direct measurements. Numerical models can't be trusted. Equation pushers with fancy computers aren't the equals of scientists who fly into hurricanes.”

I suppose the implication is that climate modelers are uninterested in data. But of course they are, and the more the better, because the data are used for calibration.

Charlie has the audacity to state: "...ads slamming Gore for his own carbon impact,...it's a truly lame argument."

Just how is Gore 'offsetting' his massive consumption of energy and output of pollution? What about his connections with mega-polluter Occidental? His massive addition to the vice president's mansion constructed of old-growth timber? Does he really haver to take a jetliner everywhere he goes? Does he really have to travel that much, especially with the proliferation of web conferencing?

Resorting to ad hominem attacks and justifying massive waste does nothing to bolster your argument Charlie.

One thing I did was switch my PGE power to the "Clean" option...it's easy to do, even online, and it only cost me a couple bucks a month. I believe there's three options...one that's partly clean, and one that's 100% clean.

lin: I would be extremely pleased if my geoscience colleagues had arrived at a consensus that anthropogenic CO2 has nothing to do with climate change. Unfortunately I do not have this luxury. JK: Please give us you opinion of the five temperature curves, in Fig.5a of the Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998 paper, four of which don’t show recent global warming and how does that relate to the conclusions in that paper.

lin: Apropos JK's comment about the Oreskes article, it has nothing to do with the journal Science's acceptance policy. Oreskes looked at close to 1000 articles on the topic of climate change in a variety of scientific journals. JK: I thought it was Soon & Ballunas. Any comment about their conclusion: Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.

Thanks JK

Glad you asked about how Gore was offsetting his emissions.

Here's how you can offset emissions from travelling.

And in a time when we're talking about the fate of the planet, trying to distract us from the huge question at hand through character assassination is sickening.

Jesse O: Here's how you can offset emissions from travelling. JK: I spent about two minutes looking at that site and found NO SPECIFICS, only a lot of text that reads like an invitation to a special presentation that will make you financially independent. Yeah, right!

So just how does good ol Al offset his CO2?

Thanks JK

He offsets by not running for the Presidency again.

Think of all the savings in jet fuel, paper, and pressed taupe dress-shirts!

Got to find a library to read the journal article mentioned by JK and address his question. As I am not at a university, this will take awhile. As noted before, although a geoscientist, I do not specialize in climate studies. Perhaps JK would be so kind as to provide a hint as to his professional background as well.

On the lighter side but related, a fine item in The Onion this week:

Rogue Scientist Has Own Scientific Method

Here's one paragraph:

"If you're looking for some button-down traditionalist who relies on so-called induction, conventional logic, and verification to arrive at what the scientific community calls 'proof,' then I'm afraid you've got the wrong guy," said the intrepid 44-year-old rebel, who last month unveiled a revolutionary new model of atomic structure that contradicted 300 years of precedent. "But if you want your results fast and with some flair, then come with me and I'll prove that the boiling point of water is actually 547 degrees Fahrenheit."

JK: Please provide the complete journal citation for Soon and Ballunas. Thanx.

lin

JK: I doubled checked, for her review, Naomi Oreskes did indeed examine close to 1000 articles in the refereed literature.

lin

lin: JK: Please provide the complete journal citation for Soon and Ballunas. Thanx. JK: http://w3g.gkss.de/staff/storch/pdf/soon+baliunas.cr.2003.pdf (As I posted earlier in this thread)

JK: The Mann et al paper can be found at: http://holocene.meteo.psu.edu/shared/articles/mbh98.pdf I’ll be looking forward to your opinion of the five temperature curves, in Fig.5a, four of which don’t show recent global warming, and how that relates to the conclusions in that paper.

JK: Was that the complete Naomi Oreskes article that you posted and do you have a link to the complete Naomi Oreskes article?

Thanks JK

Mr. Torrid wrote "A mighty bold statement. Perhaps you should try to back that up in some way?"

That's exactly the same question asked of the Portland Office of Sustainable Development who fabricated the emissions measurements and reports.

Their methodology of using gasoline sales in the CoP to concoct the emissions result they wanted was as dishonest science as it gets.

The "Hockey Stick" theory is from the same brand of science and also has never been "backed up".

If many of you chose to rely on such bankrupt advocacy science have at it.

But you shouldn't expect anything more than that sloppy science deserves.

JK:

For whatever it may be worth, a blurb here about Sallie Baliunas, co-author of the Soon and Bailunas paper you mentioned (which I am going to get hold of). Bailunas is an astrophysicist who got interested in climate-change issues. Evidently another paper that they published in 2003 precipitated a huge controversy. A short article in Eos (weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union) provides a technical critique that I think pertains directly to your query. Other commentary of a non-technical nature can be found, say, here, and you can follow other links youself. Seems there has been a lot of nastiness and finger-pointing about funding sources and the peer-review process, among other things.

lin: For whatever it may be worth... JK: I’m still waiting for your opinion of the five temperature curves, in Fig.5a of the Mann, Bradley & Hughes 1998 paper, four of which don’t show recent global warming and how does that relate to the conclusions in that paper.

Thanks JK

Yo JK, I've got a day job and a family to attend to when I get home, give me some time! I haven't yet read the paper you're referring to (not my specialty at all). But in any case I recommend caution about fixating on a particular figure in a particular paper. Not trying to be a weasel, actually. Forest-for-the-trees sort of concern here.

I appreciate the general level of civility in this thread and on this website. Sure beats a lot of what exists in the blogosphere.

lin

lin: Yo JK, I've got a day job and a family to attend to when I get home, give me some time! I haven't yet read the paper you're referring to (not my specialty at all). But in any case I recommend caution about fixating on a particular figure in a particular paper. JK: Sorry for being pushy. Its just that, since you are so certain about the global warming issue, I assumed that you were familiar with the Mann et al 1998 paper.

lin: Not trying to be a weasel, actually. Forest-for-the-trees sort of concern here. JK: Mann et al 1998 is the probably the single most influential paper on the subject, that is why I assumed that you had studied and understood at least Fig 5.

Thanks JK

JK: I am getting back to you regarding your concerns about the figure in the Mann et al. article (the so-called “Mann hockey stick” showing global warming in the last two centuries). I knew about the idea in general, but again, my research is in other areas, so rather than shoot from the hip, and not having the time to dig through dozens of journal articles, I contacted a professional acquaintance with true expertise. He is a glaciologist who does a lot of ice-core analysis, among other things, and is a walking encyclopedia of paleoclimatology. He sent me a detailed message that he agreed I could use in replying to you. Here goes. Probably much more than you bargained for, but then finicky details do matter. The last few paragraphs are most directly related to the “hockey stick”, but everything preceding leads up to the hockey-stick discussion and should not be slighted.

First things first. Over the last 150 years or so (since about 1860, about as old as one can generate an instrumentally based global mean surface temperature), the temperature has gone up. For the last few decades, the data are quite good. The warming is observed far from cities (it isn’t just urban heat islands), it is observed in the ground, in the ocean, in the free atmosphere, by balloons and by satellites (and yes, there are scads of skeptic sites claiming that one or more of those statements is wrong, but the data are clear—it is warming). For quite a while, we have good records of volcanism, and we can say with confidence that volcanism contributed to the Little Ice Age cold in the earlier part of the good instrumental record, that the end of the LIA had something to do with volcanoes, and that volcanoes don’t have a big signal now. We have good satellite data for a couple of decades plus on the solar output, and it isn’t doing much, but it varies a bit with the sunspots; older than that, we know sunspots (and 10Be-14C proxies for something linked to sunspots), and using that relation, the sun brightened a bit at the end of the LIA but isn’t doing much now (and there are lots of skeptic sites claiming it is all sun, but that doesn’t hold up with the data). So the warming at the start of the 20th century was largely more-sun/less-volcanoes, and that signal petered out in a few decades and the natural forcing isn’t doing much. Notice that we don’t know of any other big natural forcings—we have good confidence that magnetic field and cosmic rays do little (there is the huge Laschamp anomaly in cosmic-ray-produced isotopes linked with near-zeroing of the magnetic field about 40, 000 years ago, but the climate histories look nothing like the cosmogenic-isotope histories, so the people who keep claiming that it is all cosmic rays are on very very shaky ground), there haven’t been any big impacts or big changes in space dust that anyone has detected, the oceans are warming so you can’t be mining heat from the oceans to warm the atmosphere, same for the land (which can’t trade heat fast enough anyway). A climate model (many have been used for this experiment) forced with known natural forcings matches the 1860-1920 or so fairly well but stinks more recently, one forced with natural and human (including the sulfate-aerosols-from-smokestacks-doing-the-volcanic-sun-blocking-job, as well as the greenhouse gases) does a really good job of matching what happened (including such things as regional increase in oceanic heat content and temperature, height to the tropopause, general spatial pattern of changes, etc.). There is very little cheating in this; most of the models tune the indirect effect of aerosols (how much aerosols affect cloud brightness) because that isn’t understood very well, but otherwise the model is built to simulate modern climate, run to simulate paleoclimate, and it works.

Now, what about adding paleoclimate? The northern high latitudes were warmer than recently in mid-Holocene, for orbital reasons (about 10% more summer sun, shifted there from equator and south). Even a millennium ago, there was a bit more sun at high latitudes than recently, although the change over a millennium is small. A millennium ago, the high northern latitudes were warmed by a bright sun and reduced volcanic dust in the atmosphere, based on available and slightly sketchy data esp. for the sun. There may have been an ocean-heat-transport term as well; several of us have at least suggested this. Global reconstructions are largely lacking; some people claim to have hemispheric ones, others focus on higher latitudes.

It does look as if recent temperatures have moved out of the band of variability for the last millennium, but there is some uncertainty there. (In particular, if you really delve into the tree-ring game, some of the high-latitude trees don’t show the full warming since the 1980s, perhaps because of pollution, but perhaps because of drying or because of reduced sensitivity to temperature at higher temperatures; some of us are a tad skeptical of the ability of the trees to accurately track the full warming...). Certainly, for the last few centuries, temperatures now are anomalous (glaciers, ground temperatures, etc. show this).

Now, suppose for a moment that the reconstructions for the past are in error, and the past changes were larger. That has no bearing on the interpretation over the instrumental record, because we know the forcings recently—it isn’t just a fluctuation in ocean heat content or sun or volcanoes, because we have them. Nor does a larger change in the past affect our estimates of past forcings—those estimates remain uncertain, but they are estimated. What larger reconstructions of past fluctuations in temperature would do is increase our estimate of climate sensitivity to forcings—unchanged estimate of forcings, increased response estimate. Now, direct response depends on the forcing, but all responses tend to load on the same feedbacks, so if past changes were larger than previously estimated, then we would expect future changes to be larger than previously estimated—maybe, in tuning the indirect aerosol effect, the models have been made under-responsive.

In turn, if a natural forcing were to suddenly occur, a more-sensitive system would respond more to the natural forcing than previously estimated. Thus, if Mann is wrong and the past changes were larger than reconstructed, we might expect the future to involve more warming on average, but with larger and faster fluctuations, than in current models.

For what it’s worth, I expect that the Mann curve is close but that changes have been slightly larger than estimated, but not by enough to really get excited about. All the noise about the Mann curve statistics is fairly uninteresting; the pattern is more-or-less evident in the raw data, so whatever massaging is done gets more-or-less the same answer.

I’m adding a few more links here.

If you really want to see archived data sets, go here.

A nice overview of the scientific issues that arise in trying to untangle paleoclimate, written for a non-specialist audience, is here.

A discussion for nonspecialists of the “Mann hockey stick”, criticisms thereof, and work done since that 1998 paper, is here.

A commentary on the Gore film by a paleoclimatologist (another ice-core analyst) is here.

Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are here.

Finally, a really nice, recent review paper on how climate reconstructions are done is

Jones, P. D., and M. E. Mann (2004), Climate over past millennia, Reviews of Geophysics, volume 42, RG2002, doi:10.1029/2003RG000143

The "hockey stick" is revisited in this paper. Reviews of Geophysics is a publication of the American Geophysical Union. It is accessible on-line but only if you are an AGU member and pay for access. Alternately, it ought to be available in the library at any university with an earth-science program; or I can send the Jones and Mann article as a PDF.

In closing, I want to comment about a remark made near the beginning of this discussion thread about there being too many "conservatives" commenting here. I find this highly ironic, because I consider scientific practice to be distinctly conservative in one sense of the term as given in Webster's: "marked by moderation or caution". I suppose what really frosts me is when researchers like Mann spend their careers doing nit-picking work and then get attacked by powerful members of Congress who would prefer the conclusions of the research be different. In the present case, those attacks are coming from so-called conservatives. In other instances (not climatology), research conclusions have been attacked by so-called liberals.

One thing I did was switch my PGE power to the "Clean" option...it's easy to do, even online, and it only cost me a couple bucks a month. I believe there's three options...one that's partly clean, and one that's 100% clean.

Does this result in any change in the amount of pollutants that go into the air? Or does it simply shift responsibility for them from you to someone who doesn't pay extra for "clean" electricity?

That is not a rhetorical question. As I understand it, once the electricity is on the grid no one knows where it came from. So if you are buying more clean energy, someone else is getting less clean energy.

Can a climatologist please explain the difference between paleoclimatology and weather extremes? Tallahassee is setting new record low temperatures: perhaps an early warning sign of the NEXT ICE AGE? From the National Weather Service (Tallahassee, FL):

RECORD EVENT REPORT

....AR 6:51 am EDT this morning... the temperature at the Tallahassee
....Regional Airport dropped to 54 degrees. This obliterates the old ....record low of 57 degrees set in 1991.

What if I take the warming weather over the past 30 years and extrapolate that trend for the next 500 years? Perhaps 30 years is too limited a data set when dealing with the geological time scale (just as a few days of unusually cold weather is not indicative of climate change)?

lin: JK: I am getting back to you regarding your concerns about the figure in the Mann et al. article (the so-called “Mann hockey stick” showing global warming in the last two centuries). I knew about the idea in general, but again, my research is in other areas, so rather than shoot from the hip, and not having the time to dig through dozens of journal articles, I contacted a professional acquaintance with true expertise JK: Thanks. I am asking you to look at a few graphs and form your own conclusions ABOUT THOSE GRAPHS AND ONLY THOSE GRAPHS - how do figs 5a and 5b look to you? Explain how one can get 5b. That is all that I ask. In just a sentence or two. Please look for yourself.

Thanks JK

Dear JK--I'm starting to think this comes under the category of no good deed goes unpunished. I sent a short note from work today to my friend, who's actually an expert in this field, and got on with what I get paid to do. I then posted into this thread my friend's reply. Was it of any interest to you? Did you glean anything from it?

The Jones and Mann 2004 Reviews of Geophysics article would be worth your time. I'll scrutinize the Mann et al. 1998 Nature article when time permits. The 2004 review covers the 1998 material and more.

Dear Mr. Toons--Folks who do climate models do not (emphatically do not) "take the warming weather over the past 30 years and extrapolate that trend for the next 500 years." The way that climate model (both retrospective and forward-looking) is actually done is touched on in the first paragraph of my friend's blurb, and in some of the sources I cited. And of course 30 years WOULD BE too limited a data set for saying anything useful about long term climate trends, but nobody is relying upon a 30 year record. Again, please read in detail what I posted from my friend and stuff in the items I listed as sources.

This is complicated stuff, folks. People spend decades studying it. One or two sentences can't be an explanation of anything. And this ain't a legal proceeding either.

Although I feel pretty strongly that this issue ought not to be turned into a political football, I realize that's an utterly naive wish.

LIN:

Thank you for your very detailed and careful reply. It confirms much of what I suspected, and provided a much broader understanding than I would have possibly gained reading source materials.

Again, thank you to you and your colleagues.

In the present case, those attacks are coming from so-called conservatives. In other instances (not climatology), research conclusions have been attacked by so-called liberals.

That is a very balanced statement, but is it true? What generally accepted scientific conclusions have been "attacked by so-called liberals?" Certainly there is a tendency to accept the scientific conclusions that support someons preconceived ideas and liberals are as guilty of this as anyone else. But that is a far cry from attacking the researcher.

JK: Apropos Fig. 5 in the Mann et al. 1998 Nature article, a 1-2 sentence explanation is not possible unless you and I both know the ins and outs of principal component analysis. Don’t know about you, but I have no experience with PCA, which is the statistical method Mann et al applied. So bear with me as I try to muddle through what I hope is an explanation.

PCA is a technique used for identifying patterns in complicated data sets and is used in a wide variety of applications. I guess I would think of it as more or less analogous to the idea of representing a mathematical function as a Fourier series, if that means anything to you. The instrumental and proxy climate data are data sets distributed in both time and space, and these data are “fitted” by a series of so-called principal components, each of which is a complicated spatial function. The five most important components are illustrated in Figure 2 of Mann et al. The idea is then that one can represent the actual temperature distribution on the globe by an appropriate weighted sum of these functions. As with any statistical measure, there is always some mismatch between data and the functions used to represent the data, and one seeks to minimize this misfit in an appropriately defined way.

Mann et al. state on p. 781 that the first five principal components account for 93% of global mean temperature variations, and so on for other climatic indices. (They provide a lengthy discussion of the statistical validity in an appendix.) They judge those five to be so much more important than the remaining principal components that they focus on them. That’s what they portray in Fig. 5a. The first component “describes much of the variability in the global…and hemispheric…means”, and the other four components “describe much of the spatial variability relative to the large-scale means” (Mann et al., p. 781). The “strengths” of those five principal components through time are shown in Fig. 5a. If I understand correctly, in Fig. 5b, Mann et al. use the appropriately weighted principal components (which were derived from an analysis of GLOBAL data) to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere mean annual temperature, and then compare the data with the reconstruction (discussion on pp. 783-784). That fig. 5b is quite “busy”. So there’s your “one or two sentence explanation”. Para mas informacion, consult a statistician, because first of all, I have a job that needs my attention, and second, I regret to say that I suspect I am being strung along here.

Charlie: Do you have any statistical evidence that supports your "95% of all world's scientists"?

I hope PGE is an honorable corp, but could it be possible that their claim that part of their energy is from renewable sources does not match the revenue they receive under that designation? Who safeguards the public for potential misuse of this interesting concept-pay different rates from the same energy spigot? PUC? CUB?

lin: JK: Apropos Fig. 5 in the Mann et al. 1998 Nature article, a 1-2 sentence explanation is not possible unless you and I both know the ins and outs of principal component analysis. JK: Thanks for you response. I have had to do a number of other tasks today and didn’t have time to get to this today. I will post something tomorrow. However my impression is that Fig 5a is a series of composite temperature records that are combined to make Fig 5b. If that impression is wrong, let me know.

I am going to throw in a little background here so that people might better understand where I am coming from.

Over the years I have come across a few long term temperature reconstructions that showed nothing unusual happening. When global warming got into the news a few years back I looked again and found nothing alarming. I also superficially looked at the hole in the ozone layer hysteria and found that the hole wasn’t a hole and that the ozone layer was not a layer of ozone. And they found the hole the first time that they looked, so they do not know if it has always been there. (but the whole issued did originate at a NASA budget heating on funding NASA) This provided a basis for a little skepticism about this sort of thing, especially when Al Gore is involved.

I happened on a claim that there was a “hockey stick” curve and that it was easily debunked by feeding random noise through the algorithm that produced it - supposedly you get a similar curve most of the time. So I didn’t think much of it until recently when this hysteria took off. A little looking found an article listing a series of old news and journal articles. First about the coming ice age circa 1895 - 1923 then global warming articles from around 1932 - 1969 then the reappearance of coming ice age articles around 1973 which lasted until the current global warming stuff. In view of that history I hope you can understand my reluctance to jump on this cyclic bandwagon.

In this thread, one side brings up an article that analyzed at a large number of articles and categorized them as to their position on global warming. But that is subject to the author’s opinion. My side brings up the article that looked at a large number of temperature reconstructions and concluded that they do not support anything unusual about the current climate.

Frankly I think it is time to look at all of these reconstructions and see what they show, instead of relying of various peoples statements about what they show. Of course Mann et al is just one of the people analyzing the historic records and apparently a very small subset of them.

In the meantime. I will address your latest response tomorrow.

Thanks JK Who posts with his real name and real email address (that isn’t working right now-sorry)

Charlie Burr: I appreciate your thankless work of trying to answer JK. I have tried to debunk misstatements here as well, JK: I too am trying to debunk statements here. It’s just that we have a different view of bunk. And I don’t seem to get many thanks for my tireless efforts .

Charlie Burr: ...many of the "skeptics" commenting on this thread are not interested in data at odds with the notion that global warming isn't real or man-made. JK: Of course the converse it true - global warming believers are not interested in anything that challenges their belief.

What truly amazes me is the number of GW supporters/opponents that cannot even recite a factual argument for one side or another in this crucial debate (IE: “what are two arguments that support your belief”.)

Thanks JK

Charlie: I wonder who the "specialists" are in assessing who the scientists are and that it is 95% of all, all world scientists.

We'll never persuade the "Hate Amerika" crowd to believe that humankind (with Americans in the vanguard) are actually improving their standard of living and making the earth a better place.

Whether you are talking about the War on Terrorism, energy, healthcare, personal freedom, or the pursuit of happiness, Charlie and his ilk are always going to look admirably to Europe as the model we should emulate.

Amerika is BAD; Europe is GOOD. Conversely, Liberal bias is GOOD, conservative bias is BAD. City Council GOOD, FBI BAD. Abortions GOOD, pre-conception health focus BAD. Do you detect a trend here?

Ross said: "Does [buying clean energy] result in any change in the amount of pollutants that go into the air? Or does it simply shift responsibility for them from you to someone who doesn't pay extra for "clean" electricity? That is not a rhetorical question. As I understand it, once the electricity is on the grid no one knows where it came from. So if you are buying more clean energy, someone else is getting less clean energy."

It is true, as Charlie said, that the particular electrons turning on your light may not have originated at a wind farm, just because you are paying a little more for renewables. However, it is also true that for every household spending a few extra dollars a month for renewables, PGE or PacifiCorp has to purchase a matching amount of their power from a renewable source. This effectively displaces "brown" power (fossil fuel-generated power) with "green." This investment in renewables actually grows the clean energy industry, making it more available and less expensive across the board. So it is not that someone else is getting less clean energy, but rather that there is more clean energy being produced (the market at work, folks!), taking carbon dioxide emissions out of the air.

Of course, the reason this matters is because approximately 40% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions comes from electricity production.

lw said: "I hope PGE is an honorable corp, but could it be possible that their claim that part of their energy is from renewable sources does not match the revenue they receive under that designation? Who safeguards the public for potential misuse of this interesting concept-pay different rates from the same energy spigot? PUC? CUB?"

You can read more about the renewables programs and the accountability systems that oversee them in our blog here.

Shannon Floyd Citizens' Utility Board

JK, first thing: I don’t feel as though I can sign my name here because I happen to be a public employee. The fact is, if I sign my name, someone is going to identify my agency and wrongly decide that I am speaking on behalf of that agency.

For a little more perspective on this see:

http://www.saveportland.com/Climate/

Thanks JK

I find it amazing that no one has researched this subject to any great depth pro or con. In my research I see more true evidence from a historical and scietific perspective to support the notion that the theory of Global Warming is alarmist and unsubstantiated. Most of the scientist in the Al Gore movie that he cites study the effects of global warming not the causes (Biologist etc). One scientist a Dr. Patterson Phd. a Paleo-Climatologist says that this is a cylical event more likey caused by solar activity. The current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are lower than recorded levels in the past which when higher resulted in a cool spell. If any one would look at history you would remember that just 10 or 20 years ago these same Al Gore scientists where screaming tht the Earth was going to go through another ice age if we didnt change our dirty habits. The truth in this is probably found in green the green of money and that money that funds grants and power. Enviromentalism is another way to control and have power over society. Lets wake up !