Posted on 12/08/2009 5:48:10 AM PST by Kaslin
Though professional hysterics may seek to "hide the decline," there has been a noticeable drop in the number of Americans who believe that global warming is a man-made phenomenon. Pause on that for a moment. Though Americans have been harangued about global warming for more than a decade, only 35 percent told a recent Pew survey that global warming is a serious problem, compared with 44 percent the previous year.
This skepticism predated the exposure of the East Anglia e-mails -- those playful missives that reveal some of the most prominent climate researchers to be, if not outright charlatans, at least partisans.
Why don't people buy global warming? Doubtless the poor economy has pushed less immediate worries to the background. But even before the e-mails revealed that supposedly neutral truth seekers were prepared to "redefine peer review" and engage in statistical sleight of hand "to hide" inconvenient truths, there were ample reasons for skepticism.
It's chilly: There is the pesky fact that, contrary to the dire predictions of climate alarmists, there has been no measurable increase in world temperatures since 1998. Yet the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere has continued to rise. The computer models immortalized by Al Gore did not anticipate this; in fact, they predicted that temperatures would continue to rise steeply more or less forever, except that human beings would all die in 50 years or so with unknown (though presumably salutary) effects on the by-then Venus-like surface of planet Earth.
Bullying: Every time a scientist or policymaker slammed his hand on a desk and growled "The science is settled!" he demonstrated how remote he was from the scientific method. In true science, nothing is ever settled.
It's Freudian: The Viennese analyst taught that if you say you hate your mother, you hate your mother. And if you say you love your mother, you are in denial about hating your mother. Climate change believers are like Freudians. If the weather is warm, it's proof of global warming. But if the weather is cool, this, too, is evidence of the sinister tricks global warming can play.
Sunspots: Look at the graphs comparing sunspot activity since 1860 with global sea surface temperatures. They look like matching S curves (unlike the graphs comparing temperatures with CO2 output). Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon notes that 2008 may have been a cold year because sunspot activity was low. The sun has been quiet in 2009, too. "If this deep solar minimum continues," Dr. Soon explains, "and our planet cools while CO2 levels continue to rise, thinking needs to change. This will be a very telling time and it's very, very useful in terms of science and society in my opinion."
Nuclear energy: Global warming priests, while sermonizing about the need to spend trillions on new energy sources, almost never have a kind word for nuclear power -- casting doubt on their motives. If the goal were really to reduce our carbon output (and not to recast our way of life), clean, efficient, affordable nuclear power would be the obvious choice.
Fool me once: The same people whose hair is on fire now about climate change have dressed up in fright masks before. Thirty years ago, they were (no joke) enormously agitated about the coming new ice age. From these same precincts (the Club of Rome, 1972) we were warned that the world was rapidly running out of oil, gas, aluminum, lead, zinc, copper, tin, and uranium. (We didn't.) At the same time, all of the smart people were absolutely convinced that overpopulation was the greatest threat to the globe and to humanity itself. Paul Ehrlich, author of "The Population Bomb," offered in 1980 that "If I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." That same year, the Carter administration issued a global forecast predicting that "the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically ... and the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today." Um, no.
The scaremongers' track record is poor. For people who seem to worship Mother Earth, they are oddly arrogant about their ability to understand complex systems like climate. Every day brings new discoveries about the incredibly complicated interplay of oceans, atmospheric gases, algae, wind, plants, animal excretions, solar radiation, and so forth.
The East Anglia e-mails reveal a priesthood becoming more and more hysterical as their certainty evaporates. Like all orthodoxies under duress, they are making war on heresy.
It's not illegal. But it's not science.
Don’t forget acid rain and ozone depletion. Haven’t heard much about them lately.
Good one!!
I think this may be the graph he's talking about:
From climate4you.com
The sun continues to be very quiet as the sun is blank of sunspots. This is day number 15 in a row with no sunspot activity.From same site, here's what the model from noaa.gov says the sunspot activity should be:
Note the gap between the black actual data points, and the red prediction curve. As the months go by, the model is looking increasingly broken. They have not updated it yet to reflect the December figures, which would show it to be really broken.
But then again, the graph you show doesn't match the figures posted by the NOAA, so maybe I didn't find the right data.
Without “hysterics” Mommy Professor’s little shtick is DOA. But the left they should thank god for the sidekick respectable conservatives who love to play big momma to the crazies of the left.
The SECS Sunspot Number column is defined as:
The Space Environment Services Center (SESC) sunspot number for the indicated date is from the daily Solar Region Summary issued by SESC. The SESC sunspot number is computed according to the Wolf Sunspot Number R=k (10g+s), where g is the number of sunspot groups (regions), s is the total number of individual spots in all the groups, and k is a variable scaling factor (usually <1) that indicates the combined effects of observing conditions, telescope, and bias of the solar observers. A sunspot number of zero indicates there were no visible sunspots on that date; a blank indicates that no observations were taken.The data points on the graph are monthly averages of number of sunspots.
Giving it a second look, the sunspot-number column from your link seems like it would match up with the graph, when averaged for the month.
Sure seems to be a lot better correlation with the solar cycle than with CO2 levels.
A little after I posted, they switched in the graph with the November solar activity data. The gap between predicted and actual is now bigger.
They had to update it after their model prediction from 2007 turned out to be completely broken:
Any bets as to when they will have to adjust their model again?
Contrary to the official UN line that 2009 may rank as the fifth-warmest year on record, the actuality is that, at least in the US, 2009 was so cool that it adversely affected cop yields:
Cooler than normal temperatures during the growing season has resulted in slower than normal crop development. What that means to fall harvest is the possibility of some crop losses as normal freeze days occur.My concern is that IF (and I repeat, this is just an IF):In addition, many areas experienced delayed planting and replanting issues during the wet spring, resulting in later than normal crop maturity, according to Dr. Mary Knapp, associate professor of agronomy and state climatologist, at Kansas State University.
"The final factor in this slower growing season was an increased number of double cropped acres all over the region, which also resulted in later maturing crops," Knapp said.
"The potential for losses here, with a crop that's behind and a normal freeze date, is pretty great," Knapp said. "There are a lot of acres that are vulnerable. Even northwest Kansas, which had a lot of trouble getting their corn crop in the ground, with early rains and hail, has problems now because it wasn't late enough for them to try another crop because of crop insurance regulations."
As this story went to press, the nation's corn crop was anywhere from one to four weeks behind five-year averages, according to Dr. Al Dutcher, associate professor of geosciences and Extension state climatologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
(1) The new solar cycle is delayed and stunted, and
(2) This does produce cooler than normal temps,
then we may see serious crop failures in the 2010 growing season, leading to famine in parts of the world.
Conversely, cooling would make it harder to farm, and restrict the areas where farming is viable.
Speaking of graphs ,...we were working some over last night on this thread:
The Evolution of the Global Temperature Record ( Skullduggery with Darwin, Australia records)
Cool, I sent the link for the article to some friends I was discussing the data-tampering with.
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