The politics of global warming

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ^ | February 10, 2007 | Bill Steigerwald

[neverdem]

The politics of global warming By Bill Steigerwald TRIBUNE-REVIEW Saturday, February 10, 2007 Timothy Ball is no wishy-washy skeptic of global warming. The Canadian climatologist, who has a Ph.D. in climatology from the University of London and taught at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years, says that the widely propagated “fact” that humans are contributing to global warming is the “greatest deception in the history of science.” Ball has made no friends among global warming alarmists by saying that global warming is caused by the sun, that global warming will be good for us and that the Kyoto Protocol “is a political solution to a nonexistent problem without scientific justification." Needless to say, Ball strongly disagrees with the findings of the latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which on Feb. 2 concluded that it is “very likely” that global warming is the result of human activity. I talked to Ball by phone on Feb. 6 from his home on in Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, which the good-humored scientist likes to point out was connected to the mainland 8,000 years ago when the sea level was 500 feet lower...

[samm1148]

Of course this guy's funding or the fact that he ever put gas in a car will be used against him. The church of global warming ideologues and their charlatanry is never called into question.

[neverdem]

"The politics of global warming" had a fair amount of science.

Inconvenient Truths - Novel science fiction on global warming.

NOT THAT SIMPLE - GLOBAL WARMING: WHAT WE DON'T KNOW

FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

ping.

[xcamel]

I'm sure this one was posted under a different title...

[xcamel]

FReepmail me to get on or off

Click pn POGW graphic for full GW rundown

Ping me if you find one I've missed.

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[BIGLOOK]

Been following Tim Ball for a while now. There are others, researching climate, ice pack movements, ocean currents and temps for data pertinent to navigation and commerce. Problem is that they don't have the funding or media exposure of the Global Warming zealots and their indentured scientific community.

[TASMANIANRED]

AlGores utility bill at his Tnn Mansion was $30k last year.

[AZLiberty]

The other thing that you are seeing going on is that they have switched from talking about global warming to talking about climate change. The reason for that is since 1998 the global temperature has gone down -- only marginally, but it has gone down. In the meantime, of course, CO2 has increased in the atmosphere and human production has increased. So you’ve got what Huxley called the great bane of science -- “a lovely hypothesis destroyed by an ugly fact.” So by switching to climate change, it allows them to point at any weather event -- whether it’s warming, cooling, hotter, dryer, wetter, windier, whatever -- and say it is due to humans. Of course, it’s absolutely rubbish.

Next thing you know they'll be blaming Bush for global cooling.

[WOSG]

The theorized global warming is deemed a serious threat because of estimates assumptions that humans will create ever more CO2 emissions, eg, almost doubling our emissions in 40 years. The majority of those emissions come from power generation. If power generation emissions were to end, global warming as a serious threat would end.

A simple solution to stop global warming dead in its tracks is to make all new power generation off of nuclear power, and gradually replace all fossil-fuel-based generation of electricity with nuclear power. Nuclear power is safe, environmentally sound, economical and 100% emissions free.
If we did it in the US, we could save money, improve our balance of trade, and cut our emissions in half.

It's an obvious solution that costs the western world little (since nulcear power is no more expensive than fossil-fuel based power) except a commitment to pursue nuclear power.

The fact that global warming alarmists don't bring up this obvious solution is a good tipoff they have some other agenda.

[AFPhys]

This is a tremendous interview. The answers that Ball gives here cover almost all the ground that is important for someone who is interested in non-technical reading.

I'm happy that he gave the web sites he respects:

"A: There are three Web sites I have some respect for. One is the one I helped set up by a group of very frustrated professional scientists who are retired. That’s called Friendsofscience.org. It has deliberately tried to focus on the science only. The second site that I think provides the science side of it very, very well is CO2Science.org, and that’s run by Sherwood Idso, who is the world expert on the relationship between plant growth and CO2. The third, which is a little more irreverent and maybe still slightly on the technical side for the general public, is JunkScience.com."

I haven't heard of friendsofscience.org --- that alone made it worth reading this article.

I also love other items he says, like, "Yeah, the world has been warming since 1680 and the cause is changes in the sun. But in their computer models they hardly talk about the sun at all and in the IPCC summary for policy-makers they don’t talk about the sun at all. And of course, if they put the sun into their formula in their computer models, it swamps out the human portion of CO2, so they can’t possibly do that."

and, "The whole world is preparing for warming, but I mentioned that we have been cooling since 1998 and the climate scientists that I respected -- particularly the Russians and Chinese -- are predicting that we’re going to be much, much cooler by 2030. So we’ve got completely the wrong adaptive strategy."

and something I'd never thought about before, "The answer is because the whole of our view of the world -- in the Western world at least -- is something called “uniformitarianism.” This is the idea that change is gradual over long periods of time. It was basically established out of Darwin’s view, which had to overcome the church and accommodate his evolutionary theory. So what it means is that we are all educated to see change as gradual over long periods of time. So any sudden or dramatic change is seen as either wrong or unnatural. Of course, that plays into the hands of the environmentalists, because it means all of this is not natural, it is something humans are doing, when in fact nature varies tremendously all the time."

This interview was well worth reading ... and saving.