Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Canadians are Gullible

Here is a graphic that shows that Canadians are more likely to believe the story of "global warming" than Americans or Britons:

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I'm shocked. I would have thought that Canadians were more rational and critical. Everybody knows that the US educational system teaches credulous Americans that "creationism" is a science on an equal footing with evolution and that the Bible is literal truth. I would have never thought that Canadians would uncritically accept the codswallop of "overwhelming man-made global warming".

Everybody knows that the late 20th century was an era of globally warmer temperatures. The real argument is over whether that is mostly man-made (greenhouse gases) or mostly normal climate variation.

I'm skeptical. I've done computer modeling, I know how difficult it is to get models correct especially for complex dynamic phenomena. And climate is no only complex, it isn't a "complete science". There are lots of aspects of climate that simply aren't known well enough to model. So putting the numbers in and "running the model" to get "the results" is a bit of a joke. You get what you want by tweaking your model. Nobody's model can be validated by running it over past data to replicate past climate. So why would you accept that it can predict the 21st century climate?

Worse, I'm very suspicious of "the science is settled" crowd. They fiddled the data at the Hadley CRU. They have a very bad habit of reading into the data what they please. Right now they are declaring "global warming is proved because Arctic ice is at the lowest point ever!". Only it isn't. Read this post on the Watt's Up With That? blog.

Oh... and this "lowest ice extent ever" crowd conveniently ignores that Antarctic ice. I sure don't see any disastrous "all the ice is melting" trend in this data from the University of Illinois:

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If you want the cleanest data on global temperatues, go look at the global UAH satellite data maintained
by Roy Spencer and read his blog
.

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Sure there is a rise in temps in the 1990s, but there has also been a flattening out in the 2000s. My best guess is that this variation is a natural trend, not an inexorable exponentially rising heat wave driven by greenhouse gases. I agree that the concentration of greenhouse gases right now are on an exponentially rising trend, but I don't see the equivalent in the actual measured temperatures.

I don't see greenhouse gasses exponentially rising forever. Instead I expect a sigmoid curve, equivalent to a logistic function, used in biological modelling for an invasion of a species into virgin territory with an early explosive growth but as resources are exhausted the growth dies off. I fully expect technology to continue advancing and we will move away from fossil fuels as they get more expensive. The "greenhouse gas" worry will die a death just like the hysteria in the late 1960s of the ZPG people about coming mass famines as humankind hit resource limits in the late 1970s. It didn't happen. Technology redefined the avaiable resources. The "global warming" crowd has the same blinders as the Club of Rome and the ZPG people.

By the way, the Roy Spencer mentioned above is the author of a paper who just underwent the unusual process of being contested, the editor who published the paper was forced to resign, and an "official global warming" response paper was published within a matter of just a few weeks to contest Spencer's paper. See this and this and this. Such unprecedentedly swift response is pretty clear evidence of collusion by the "global warming" crowd to suppress alternative viewpoints.

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