It isn't ... except it is
That 'global warming isn't real' hearing the Georgia House GOP threw a day or so ago?
Grift tells us the experts don't actually agree with Jeff Lewis and Clay Cox, who instead cherry-picked answers to justify their preconceived beliefs.
Grift tells us the experts don't actually agree with Jeff Lewis and Clay Cox, who instead cherry-picked answers to justify their preconceived beliefs.
posted by Jmac at 3:23 PM
10 Comments:
Why is it warmer on Mars?
SUVs driven by Republicans who oppose Kyoto?
"...who instead cherry-picked answers to justify their preconceived beliefs."
You don't think Al Gore does that?
Well, to an extent Gore, like most folks, pull facts to support his ultimate aims. So, yeah, somewhat.
However, I also believe there is a distinct difference between someone like Gore 'cherry-picking' 92 percent of the data presented to him from scientists who believe in man-made global warming and someone like Clay Cox 'cherry-picking' .01 percent of the data presenting to him from scientists who believe in man-made global warming ... and then using that to reach an entirely different conclusion from said scientists.
Not sure where you got those numbers, but the "consensus" is not nearly as much of a consensus as Mr. Gore, or any other climate change 'expert' would have anybody believe.
And the religion of man-made global warming seems to be losing converts by the day, including scientists.
(Go Dawgs! See, we can agree on something.)
So exactly what is the consensus Josh?
It certainly includes the three scientists on the panel.
And interesting you would use the term "man made religion" and the phrase losing converts everyday. They are very familiar terms to me. Can you guess where I've heard it before?
Where have you heard those phrases before?
I don't know.
Maybe in the Here Comes Another Ice Age reportage of the 1970s?
Ahhhh and now comes the selective sourcing to prop up an argument. This is like watching your favorite movie over and over until you are sick of it.
What exactly was the source of the claim we were entering an ice age?
Hmmmmmmmm.
Why wait for the answers that may never come. Let's go ahead and provide them.
Where have I heard these arguments before?
Evolution is a man made religion and even now many scientists are choosing to leave it. ~paraphrased from countless creationists over the past thirty years
What is the source of the global cooling story in the 70s?
A rather histrionic 1975 article in Newsweek written because there was some discussion in the scientific world about a small trough in the global mean temp from 1945 to 1970. Scientists quickly clarified they in no way were predicting an ice age.
Got any more? This is fun.
From Wikipedia (maybe or maybe not edited by Morton Brilliant...)
1970 SCEP report
The 1970 "Study of Critical Environmental Problems"[11] reported the possibility of warming from increased carbon dioxide, but no concerns about cooling, setting a lower bound on the beginning of interest in "global cooling".
[edit] 1971 Paper on Warming and Cooling Factors
There was a paper by S. Ichtiaque Rasool and Stephen H. Schneider, published in the journal Science in July 1971. Titled "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate," the paper examined the possible future effects of two types of human environmental emissions:
greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide;
particulate pollution such as smog, some of which remains suspended in the atmosphere in aerosol form for years.
Greenhouse gases were regarded as likely factors that could promote global warming, while particulate pollution blocks sunlight and contributes to cooling. In their paper, Rasool and Schneider theorized that aerosols were more likely to contribute to climate change in the foreseeable future than greenhouse gases, stating that quadrupling aerosols "could decrease the mean surface temperature (of Earth) by as much as 3.5 C. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!" As this passage demonstrates, however, Rasool and Schneider considered global cooling a possible future scenario, but they did not predict it.
[edit] 1974 and 1972 National Science Board
The Washington Post reports that in 1974 the National Science Board, the governing body of the National Science Foundation, stated:[12]
During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade.
This statement is correct (see Historical temperature record) although the Washington Post quotes it with disapproval. The Post says the Board had observed two years earlier:
Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end . . . leading into the next glacial age.
This quote is taken quite out of context, however, and is misleading as it stands. A more complete quote is:
Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end ... leading into the next glacial age. However, it is possible, or even likely, than human interference has already altered the environment so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path. . .
[edit] 1975 National Academy of Sciences report
There also was a study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences about issues that needed more research.[13] This heightened interest in the fact that climate can change. The 1975 NAS report titled "Understanding Climate Change: A Program for Action" did not make predictions, stating in fact that "we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate." Its "program for action" consisted simply of a call for further research, because "it is only through the use of adequately calibrated numerical models that we can hope to acquire the information necessary for a quantitative assessment of the climatic impacts."
The report further stated:
The climates of the earth have always been changing, and they will doubtless continue to do so in the future. How large these future changes will be, and where and how rapidly they will occur, we do not know..
This is not consistent with the claims like the SEPP's (Science & Environmental Policy Project) that "the NAS "experts" exhibited ... hysterical fears" in the 1975 report[14].
[edit] 1975 Newsweek article
While these discussions were ongoing in scientific circles, more dramatic accounts appeared in the popular media, notably an April 28, 1975 article in Newsweek magazine. [15] Titled "The Cooling World", it pointed to "ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change" and pointed to "a drop of half a degree [Fahrenheit] in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968." The article claimed "The evidence in support of these predictions [of global cooling] has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it." The Newsweek article did not state the cause of cooling; it stated that "what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery" and cited the NAS conclusion that "not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."
The article mentioned the alternative solutions of "melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers" but conceded these were not feasible. The Newsweek article concluded by criticizing government leaders: "But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies...The longer the planners (politicians) delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality." The article emphasized sensational and largely unsourced consequences - "resulting famines could be catastrophic", "drought and desolation," "the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded", "droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons," "impossible for starving peoples to migrate," "the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age."
On October 23, 2006, Newsweek issued a correction, over 31 years after the original article, stating that it had been "so spectacularly wrong about the near-term future" (though editor Jerry Adler claimed that the article was not "inaccurate" in a journalistic sense).[16]
[edit] Other 1970s Sources
In the late 1970s there were several popular (and melodramatic) books on the topic, including The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age.[17]
[edit] 1979 WMO conference
Later in the decade, at a WMO conference in 1979, F K Hare reported that:
"Fig 8 shows [...] 1938 the warmest year. They [temperatures] have since fallen by about 0.4 °C. At the end there is a suggestion that the fall ceased in about 1964, and may even have reversed.
Figure 9 challenges the view that the fall of temperature has ceased [...] the weight of evidence clearly favours cooling to the present date [...] The striking point, however, is that interannual variability of world temperatures is much larger than the trend [...] it is difficult to detect a genuine trend [...]
It is questionable, moreover, whether the trend is truly global. Calculated variations in the 5-year mean air temperature over the southern hemisphere chiefly with respect to land areas show that temperatures generally rose between 1943 and 1975. Since the 1960-64 period this rise has been strong [...] the scattered SH data fail to support a hypothesis of continued global cooling since 1938. [p 65]"[18]
Ummm exactly what part of all that disagrees with what I said?
By the way, the next part of the Wikipedia article which you conveniently left out states the following:
"Thirty years later, the concern that the cooler temperatures would continue, and perhaps at a faster rate, can now be observed to have been incorrect. More has to be learned about climate, but the growing records have shown the cooling concerns of 1975 to have been simplistic and not borne out."
And further on:
"As the NAS report indicates, scientific knowledge regarding climate change was more uncertain than it is today. At the time that Rasool and Schneider wrote their 1971 paper, climatologists had not yet recognized the significance of greenhouse gases other than water vapor and carbon dioxide, such as methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons.[24] Early in that decade, carbon dioxide was the only widely studied human-influenced greenhouse gas. The attention drawn to atmospheric gases in the 1970s stimulated many discoveries in future decades. As the temperature pattern changed, global cooling was of waning interest by 1979"
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