Its refreshing to see some saner minds jump into this debate. With NBC News continually hammering “Global Warming and what we can do about it” into our minds every week, its no wonder that people are all too willing to throw science out the window and take anthrogenic (man-made) global warming as a given.
The IPCC, International Panel for Climate Change, part of UN, came up with a report that was largely written by 20 scientists. The other thousands are basically of hand-picked scientists, chosen apriori for their beliefs about Global Warming. Dissenters were not allowed to join. So much for healthy skepticism, critical thinking, and weighing multiple theories.
The IPCC was behind the deliberate manipulation of data to acheive what they wanted to show, an exponential rise in temperature in the last century (popularly known as the “hockey stick.”) Tree ring records that favored global warming were factored in the data, but magnified 370 times, while data that included the medieval warming period–which contradicted the agenda–was censored out. A later review found that with the tree ring data along with completely made-up (random) data still resulted in the hockey stick, hence proving nothing. So this graph was used to get nations on board to sign the Kyoto Treaty, a trillion dollar proposal to solve a non-existant problem. Scary stuff.
The UN tries to pull a snowjob to get the masses to believe that man-made CO2 is causing global warming, despite ice-core readings showing that CO2 rise happens after temperature rise (sometimes as much as 800 years), and despite there is no physical proof that CO2 reflects infrared back to the surface.
Climate scientists tend to be poor physicists. I could not find any material that shows laboratory demonstrations of CO2 reflection. In fact, electromagnetic radiation of all kinds reflect through colorless materials when there is a phase transition, i.e. gas-to-solid. That’s why clouds (water vapor) act as a green house gas.
95% of green house gases is water vapor. CO2 is second, and only a tiny fraction of it is man-made. In fact, .28% of all green house gases is man-made.
Greenland. It’s called that because it once *was* green. In the 1400’s, the Vikings colonized the area and became farmers. But global cooling set in and farmland became frozen over with permafrost. This cooling is called the Maunder Minimum.
We are coming out of a mini-ice age. The rate of temperature rise over the last century is relatively dramatic (0.8 degrees C), but this sort of temperature rise has been seen in geological records.
The medieval warming period brought temperatures that were even warmer than we see at the present. Either the horses upon which the Knights rode emitted lots of CO2, or the temperature change was natural.
As a previous poster said, we are just beginning to understand climate and we only recently really paid attention to temperature.
Someone once noticed that when sunspots become numerous the price of wheat fell (due to surplus). While that was a casual observation, it later suggests a link between sunspots and temperature. Scientists, the honest ones who aren’t paid by politicians, are still in the process of understanding it, and thankfully using the scientific method to validate their hypotheses.
Personally, I have always believed in the Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation tends to be the correct one. Applying that here, the simplest explanation for global warming is that the sun is getting warmer. After doing some research, I found that the increase in solar radiance hasn’t increased that much to account for temperature change, but what is striking is the sunspot record. Using Beryllium-10 measurements, they have determined that sunspots actually completely disappeared for a long stretch of time, right smack during the Maunder Minimum! (Enjoy a video on this: http://capnbob.us/blog/?p=610). The actual link isn’t clear (to me at least), but there is evidence that the increase in cosmic rays resulting from sunspots give rise to low-level clouds on earth, which does warm the surface.
This kind of real science is coming out of the woodworks, folks. Some scientists even predict a return to colder temperatures by 2025. I don’t know exactly will happen and I’m not trying to put my weight against any particular theory (I’m only a curious person in search of truths). But what I do know is that the current antrogenic global warming is based on junk science and the amount of counter-evidence against it is quite abundant.
LostCat, who seems lost in more ways than one, said that as a population we can’t [typo correction mine] afford to ignore it.
Whether we ignore it, can afford to ignore it, or can’t afford to ignore it, it doesn’t matter when global warming is natural.
