Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Two Centuries of Runaway Global "Warming"

Here is a talk from the horse's mouth, Michael Mann a "global warming" climatologist, giving a talk on the "science is settled" global warming...



I find it humourous that he claims:
  • We are two centuries into "runaway" global warming and the result is less an 1oC of temperature rise. But he assures us that in the next 90 years we will get another 4oC of temperature rise.

  • He proudly claims the authorship of the "hockey stick" presentation of global temperatures. This is funny because there is good evidence

  • He complains about "criminals" broke into the a university server and "stole" e-mails and "cherry-picked" these to distort the honest science into a conspiracy to "fudge" the data. Well, in fact, the scientists did fudge their data. The release of e-mails was most likely done by an insider who rebelled against the "researchers" who refused to share the data, something that is contrary to real science. (More details at Wikipedia.)

  • He closes by doing science by "testimonial". He names lists of people who have signed up to support the global warming crowd as if popularity is a measure of scientific truth. In the end the real science will come out despite the popularity of current support for "warming" that has been bought and sold by big government grants. He confuses his "ethics" with science. That he is a fanatic doomsday pessimist has coloured his science and sadly he can't distinguish real fact from his desired "outcome" of his research.
In short, the above is the propaganda position of the "global warming" crowd. You can understand how it distorts fact only if you know more than what is being said by Mann. The above is a self-serving presentation of "facts". This is what passes for "science" among the global warming crowd.

Mann's presentation is as "scientific" as those infamous slideshow talks by Al Gore that won him a "Nobel Peace Prize" for his activism for "global warming". If you want to understand how politics trumps science you don't have to go any further than meditate on giving a politician a prize for world "peace" for going around scaring people about a supposed "runaway global warming".

If you want to get a sense of how desperately "hot" our world has become, take a look at this graph showing the global sea ice extent (with the anomaly in red). I don't see any "runaway" warming. According to the doomsters, global warming effects are magnified at the polar extremes, but I don't see any critical warming that has melted the polar ice.

Click to Enlarge

There has been a slight melting of arctic ice but none in antarctica. And here is a graph showing a global measure of "warming" from the UAH satellite temperature dataset:

Click to Enlarge

Nothing to panic about in these temperatures. This is just normal variability in global temperatures.

I don't disagree that greenhouse gases can warm the climate, but I don't accept the climate models as accurate (I have a background in computer modeling and know how difficult it is to model something especially if you don't have a thorough understanding of the dynamics). My disagreement with the "global warming" crowd is their politicization of the science and their doomsday cult-like drive for "solutions" that are worse than the problem. They would disrupt the economy on the basis of their bad science. I'm willing to condemn people to an impoverished life, but only if the facts are ironclad without any workaround. But the global warming crowd is like the "overpopulation" crowd of the 1960s or the "limits to growth" crowd of the 1970s. They are fanatics who are over-selling their "science" and pushing a political agenda, an agenda which would be disastrous for most people since it is anti-growth.

If you want an antidote to the global warming malarky, I can recommend this blog by Anthony Watts. It is good on the science. But I should warn you that he is a right wing nut (as are most of the people who are anti "global warming"). I don't buy the right wing politics, but I do agree on the assessment of their attacks on the phony "science" of global warming. Here is a nice bit from a post. This summarizes the failed scares promulgated by the doomsday global warming crowd:
The Antarctic sea ice extent has been at or near record extent in the past few summers and the ice is expanding, the Arctic has rebounded in recent years since the low point in 2007, polar bears are thriving, sea level is not showing acceleration and is actually dropping, Cholera and Malaria are failing to follow global warming predictions, Mount Kilimanjaro melt fears are being made a mockery by gains in snow cover, global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade or more and many scientists are predicting global cooling is ahead, deaths due to extreme weather are radically declining, global tropical cyclone activity is near historic lows, the frequency of major U.S. hurricanes has declined, the oceans are missing their predicted heat content, big tornados have dramatically declined since the 1970s, droughts are not historically unusual nor caused by mankind, there is no evidence we are currently having unusual weather, scandals continue to rock the climate fear movement, the UN IPCC has been exposed as being a hotbed of environmental activists, former Vice President Al Gore is now under siege by his fellow global warming activists for attempting to link every bad weather event to man-made global warming and scientists from around the world continue to dissent from man-made climate fears at a rapid pace.
Go read the original post to get the embedded links that substantiate each of the above.

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