Jaz Coleman said something rather interesting about protecting the environment.
Instead of doing Live 8 shows and pat-on-the-back self-beneficial concerts, these millionaires should spend some money buying huge chunks of rainforest and making them reserves, maintaining them so that they can't be destroyed.
Apparantly they don't think.
-AC
Originally posted by UshgarakYeah, I bet Bush got sick of being lectured too then, didn't he?
You tell that to naitons trying to make sure that vast amounts of their populace don't live in poverty any more. They get rather tired of being lectured by those who already have the money.
Either way, it should be a far bigger priority than I suspect it to be now.
Bush would actually have to do something. Right now, none of these poorer nations do- that's the difference.
As I say, we'll see China sing a different tune once they are actually affacted. And what they will say is- piss off, you sure as hell aren't slowing our growth just so the West can maintain its economic supremacy.
1) reason to be sceptical
A surprising mini-dispute remains about whether the atmosphere is really warming at all. John Christy, of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, says trends in the lower atmosphere, when measured from satellites, show no warming over the past 20 years, exactly when global warming has seemed most acute. In the lower five miles of the atmosphere, the temperature trend was "zero" from 1979 to 1997, Christy and fellow NASA researchers concluded. And for the stratosphere (9 to 12 miles up), the cooling was 0.6 degrees per decade. We e-mailed Christy to ask how the climate could be warming if the atmosphere isn't? "Good question, no one really knows," he responded.
Originally posted by UshgarakPure speculation!
Bush would actually have to do something. Right now, none of these poorer nations do- that's the difference.As I say, we'll see China sing a different tune once they are actually affacted. And what they will say is- piss off, you sure as hell aren't slowing our growth just so the West can maintain its economic supremacy.
A few more
THE FAD, THE MYTH AND THE FUDGE OF 'GLOBAL WARMING'
1. The pseudoscientific fads of Official Climatology and Environmental Sciences
There is perhaps no clearer example of the arbitrary vagaries of mainstream peer-review and its promotion of non-scientific fads, driven by political and economic interests, than the recent promotion of the pseudoscientific myth of 'global warming', systematically accompanied by the recurrent fits of public hysteria it engenders amongst scientists, politicians, environmentalists (another type of politico), mainstream science journals and mass-media.
Fads of this type - the fear-mongering alarmist type - have become the mainstay of official mass-media and the object of sensationalistic 'science-journalism'. There's been a whole series of such fads associated with pseudo-scientific meteorology and climatology, that are cyclically promoted by syndicated news media and official or mainstream science publications.
In the 70's, in the wake of the atmospheric cooling experienced between 1945-1947 and 1972, there was a passing fad of 'global' cooling, supposedly buttressed by study of the fossil record and ice samples, which had 'established' the existence of cycles of minor ice-ages (see reference to the Milankovich model below). At that time, the fear was that the earth was just turning the corner into a new ice-age. Any notion of global warming was strictly anathema. Instead, it was argued that man-made contributions would aggravate this cooling by the production of carbon and sulphur aerosols. As Richard Lindzen points out [1], some of the best-selling authors of this rubbish, like Stephen Schneider and Crispin Tickell, have now, not so surprisingly, moved on to become apologists of the 'global warming' hysteria. Lindzen may argue that, amongst scientists, the fad was shortlived; yet, it is worth mentioning that, besides an ambiguous report by the NRC of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the two reports that initiated the 'global cooling' fad - on the natural prediction of an ice age as the trend of future climate [2], and on the effects of CO2 and aerosols on cooling global climate [3] - were both published in the journal Science, the very same peer-reviewed journal that now promotes the 'reality' of 'global warming'.
Next came the fad of acid-rain, then one heard about cows and termites being a significant source of atmosphere-polluting methane (that one was dear to Reaganism in the early 80's), then about the hole in the stratospheric ozone layer over Antarctica (back in 1985, by the British Antarctic Survey, BAS), and finally 'global warming' came of age. Each fad came with smidgens of truth scattered about in a tissue of lies, unverifiable axioms and perverse falsification of facts. And, of course, each also came with an ever growing number of climate modellers, now armed with supercomputers...
Pseudoscientific fads do not have, nor do they need, any reason to come about, being set in motion solely by the political and social forces that promote them, and the vested interests they serve. Climatology and other environmental sciences are particularly vulnerable to this sort of manipulation because, as Lindzen puts it, "rigor is generally impossible" in these disciplines. But since these fads are supposed to be 'scientific', they are compelled to search for pseudo-evidence which may serve as the excuse (the 'scientific reason'😉 for their promotion in mainstream journals and the media. Typically there is a little truth in this pseudo-evidence, but its generalization or interpretation falsifies the facts and the data, undermining both the value and the quality of the latter.
3. The real story of CO2
The notion of GHGs functioning as the cause of global warming is entirely tied in to the idea that the heat reflected from the Earth's surface and the heat radiated by it during nighttime are trapped by the increasing concentration of CO2 near the ground, instead of being released into space, thus interfering with the Earth's radiative balance and causing 'excess heat'. However, reality is far too complex to be amenable to such reductionism. Many other factors come into play. If one considers CO2 alone, as the prototypical GHG, one must realize that the problem goes far beyond the lack of an adequate science of the variations of its concentration across different epochs, or even of definitive data correlating its increase in concentration with warming and its decrease with cooling.
Even at the level of an account of the atmospheric processes involving CO2, much too much remains to be understood, and this is rarely said. How is CO2 trapped in the ground on hazy anti-cyclonic days? How is it transported to the stratosphere? If little is known about the transport of CO2 into the stratosphere, even less is known about the stratospheric pathways for its decomposition, including those pathways that result from diurnal interactions with solar radiation and changing ozone concentrations. Even though water is the main source ('parent'😉 of (1S) and (1D) metastables of oxygen, CO2 is a more efficient producer of (1S)O than is water [40]. CO2 is considered to be a "linear symmetric molecule" incapable of absorbing visible or near-UV photons [41]. However, it absorbs photons at the far to vacuum UV transition, in a range from 199 to 216 nm, to produce the so-called Cameron bands of CO [42]. Such photons are generated high in the stratosphere and mostly in the E-layer by decelerating electrons and positrons, and they will generate (1S)O and CO which, with vacuum-UV absorption, becomes another potential parent of oxygen metastables. In particular, in aqueous phase at very acid pH, or in the gas phase, capture of free or decelerating electrons by protons to generate atomic hydrogen (free radical), produces photon emission in the range of the Cameron bands. How these metastables of oxygen figure in subsequent conversions affecting the allotropic cycle of oxygen-ozone, becomes one of the key questions. Likewise, what happens to carbon free-radicals.
Of even greater concern is what happens in the lower troposphere, in particular close to the ground over the urban environment, when an acidified atmosphere traps sufficient energy to generate hydrogen free-radicals. This will produce Cameron photons, which will in turn decompose CO2, without the latter having to be transported to the stratosphere. This high energy cycle has nothing to do with the IR or thermal transitions of CO2 that are foundational to the myth of global warming. Furthermore, this high energy cycle traps far more energy at ground level in other chemical species, the allotropes of oxygen in particular, than is trapped by CO2.
1.4. Effects of carbon and sulphur pollutants upon cloud composition and cloud cover
Let us move on from CO2-fuelled atmospheric processes to take a cursory look at other processes which are affected by human activity, and which are also poorly understood, if at all, by GCM's (Global Climate Models) and 'global warming/greenhouse' interpretations. When considering carbon and sulphur aerosols, it is not sufficient to just consider how a dusty atmosphere impedes penetration of solar radiation, or how the amount of cloud cover acts as a variable absorber of IR radiation; it is also a question of the size and thickness of cloud systems, of the molecular density of a cloud and its chemical composition, of the physical action of the cloud, its type, and the meteorological system it is associated with. A doubling of CO2-induced warming can be cancelled by as little as just 1% variation in cloud cover [43-44].
Some clouds acts as cut-off filters of solar radiation, others as absorbers or 'wideband' filters. Volcanic eruptions have been linked to supradecadal cooling, because they contribute dust to cloud formation. So do man-made aerosol particulates. Clouds laden with volcanic aerosols, soot, sulphur and carbon aerosols are not mere 'sunshields'. They also absorb high quantities of solar radiation. The solar radiation that reaches the ground is attenuated substantially, but the energy remains in the atmosphere, trapped in the cloud system. In turn, the latter, because of its high density of carbon, permits much greater densities of water vapour and greater electrical potentials. Less heat reaches the ground during cloud formation, but more latent heat is trapped in the cloud system. Intense electric storms, capable of holding more water per unit volume and developing greater wind speeds, are now possible. They release more heat, present weaker cold front components (less 'relief' following rain), and leave ambient air after precipitation, particularly in urban environments, prone to saturation with water vapour (fog and smog). Carbonaceous and sulphurous clouds may cool the ground atmosphere while forming, but in turn contribute to its 'anomalous' (ie man-made) heating during precipitation. However, during nighttime, they radiate heat outward into space, just as during daytime they are fed from below, by man-made pollution and, from above, by solar radiation.
1.5. A variety of possible chemical atmospheric pathways
Stratospheric ozone is attacked by N2O (nitrous oxide) and CO2, and if the interaction is 'humidified' (hydroxylated), it results in the production of acids (HNO3 and HCO3) that fall down to the troposphere, and are released in acid rain. But in the case of CO2 it also releases oxygen, and in the case of N2O, it may engage, instead, in alternative pathways that release oxygen (only at altitudes above 20 km), while consuming atomic oxygen or ozone. Hence, production of N2O in ground atmospheres, given the 'right' energy input (see below) and in the presence of ground ozone, will regenerate nitrogen gas (N2) and oxygen (O2), while releasing IR photons. Here is an example of another pathway that releases radiative heat and, at the same time, counteracts ground ozone and restores normal chemical composition of the atmosphere.
Pathways are not simple static distributions ascertained by statistics. They are complex, dynamic energy shunts involved in system self-regulation.
1.6. Nitrogen oxides and ground ozone
Perhaps the most important effect of man-made atmospheric pollution is the generation and accumulation of the highly toxic ozone at ground level and, in particular, over urban environments. The effect presents a seasonal variation that intensifies in the Spring, and has a variety of sources. The main ones are emissions of NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) and NO (nitric oxide). Photolysis of nitrogen dioxide by the absorption of ultraviolet photons produced by solar radiation or, more pertinently still, associated with spontaneous photon emission from the free-radical processes involved in what we perceive as the 'haziness' of smog, results in production of ground ozone and still more nitric oxide. The latter, in turn, interacts with oxygen to generate more ground ozone and near-UV photons. Hence, the haziness of those anti-cyclonic days which are unmistakably polluted is, in very large measure, due to the chemical action of these oxides of nitrogen. Carbon monoxide (CO) has a pathway analogous to NO that generates ground-level ozone.
Such processes of ground ozone production and accumulation are, furthermore, driven by injections of solar energy, with ozone production declining after sunset, and the pollution residuals precipitating with condensing water vapour, after transferring most of their energy to it.
Instead of focusing on the complexity of the problems, the acolytes of the myth of 'global warming' focus on CO2 and the greenhouse mechanism, as if it were the end point for thermal or energetic release. This gross oversimplification is performed at the expense of a full account of the altered chemistry of the atmosphere, in particular, of pollutant free-radical reactions that release far more energetic photons than do GHGs.
The rationale for 'global warming': manufacture of a global consensus.
One may ask, why was the global warming myth chosen to promote the new doctrine of globalization? The answer is simple: because climate is changing on a planetarian scale, and there are good reasons to believe that this is a man-made (anthropogenic) factor, not part of a natural variation. Few scientists would dispute the fact of a climatic change. Just what it is and what causes it, is the problem.
What every good scientist will dispute is whether the implicated change is that which promoters of the global warming myth dogmatically assert: an upward change in the atmosphere's mean global temperature. Furthermore, most good scientists will also dispute whether the mechanism proposed for 'global warming' (ie CO2 emission from fossil fuel combustion) is really the mechanism responsible for the observed and ongoing climactic change, or even the main factor.
In his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field", Nobel laureate Kary Mullis (molecular biologist, biochemist and inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction) summarizes - in Chapter 11, appropriately entitled "What happened to the Scientific Method?" - the negative consequences of the pseudoscientific fads which Official Science regularly promotes, and the widespread stupidity that this engenders:
"Very little experimental verification has been done to support important societal issues in the closing years of this century. Nor does it have to be done before public policy decisions are made. It only needs to be convincing to the misinformed voter. Some of the big truths voters have accepted have little or no scientific basis. And these include the belief that AIDS is caused by human immunodeficiency virus, the belief that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming, and the belief that the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere has created a hole in the ozone layer. The illusions go even deeper into our everyday lives when they follow us to the grocery store."
Let's take a look at the science behind this pseudo-scientific ideology of 'global warming'. The zealotry displayed by the promoters of this hysteria, their belligerently militant pose of altruistic motivation, can best be exposed - for all the revulsion they evoke - by debunking the pseudoscience and the main tenets of the myth of global warming. The new party line, as defined by one such pseudoscientific zealot [6], is founded upon a bureaucratic notion of a consensus with 4 tenets (the sacred pillars of the myth):
1.That the earth is getting warmer (0.6 deg C over the last 100 years, and at a rate of 0.1 deg C per decade in the last 30 years). [Some claim 0.2 deg C per decade...]
2. That the effect is man-made.
3. That the effect is attributed to the increase in carbon dioxide over the last 100 or 200 years (depending on whom one reads) caused by burning fossil fuel (in cars, power plants, etc), and as the burning will increase because it is the main source of energy, so will the global warming.
4. That something must be done about this, which means the use of political power to bring the burning of fossil fuels to a stop.
More likely, we should add, to permit substantial increases in the cost of those fuels...
The main objections to this faddist consensus can be easily summarized: the atmosphere is far too complex a system, and too dependent on the oceans, on geothermal energy and solar radiation, to be arbitrarily reduced to processes driven by single causes, such as the emission of carbon dioxide, or even the production of 'greenhouse gases' (GHGs). Moreover, climatology is not a real science, not yet a discipline that has succeeded in understanding the core of its subject the way other sciences have, nor one that is able to effectively adhere to the principles of the scientific method and thereby become rigorous. In fact, until the present authors published their proposed enthalpy balance for the most fundamental atmospheric cycle, the allotropic cycle of water, oxygen and ozone [7], no physicist nor chemist, let alone a climatologist or modeller, had been able to resolve this simple but most immediate problem. Without such a solution, one cannot even hope to establish a science of climate and weather. Similarly, chemo-atmospheric cycles, as regards pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide, remain poorly understood to this day.
Furthermore, even though meteorologists are taught that most of the atmospheric energy budget exists only in the form of latent heat, there is no adequate physics or physical understanding of the circulation and key role of this latent form of energy in the atmosphere, nor a real understanding of the energy conversions into and from it. All arguments are reduced to radiative treatments of electromagnetic energy, plus the mechanics of the movements of cold and hot air masses. In the past 20 years, the vulnerability of the field of climatology was more poignantly put into evidence by its take-over by climate modellers, bent on improving forecast ability. 1980 and 1990 models predicted temperature rises on the order of 1.5 to 2.0 deg C by the year 2000, more than 5 times what the promoters of global warming now accept 'was found' to be the case (rates of 0.1 to 0.2 deg C per decade). Modellers cannot predict even the path of a hurricane (when Katrina was 200 miles offshore, all models predicted a path towards northern Florida, not towards New Orleans), nor even local weather on the same day - and yet, they are trusted to tell tall tales about the past and spread alarmist fears about the future. It is, therefore, hardly astonishing that climatology has become a preferred field for pseudo-scientific faddists.
So, let's address the four false tenets of the 'global warming' ideology. In summary, we can counter them and their dogma, as follows:
1. First of all, there is no real scientific evidence that demonstrates that the Earth has been warming over the past 100 years - neither for seawater, the atmosphere, nor the land mass. There is evidence that shows that there are complex interwoven cycles of intradecadal and supradecadal warming and cooling, but no data that can even be formulated as a warming rate of X deg C per decade with any legitimacy.
2. The main effect of man-made pollution is not 'global warming' but a complex alteration of atmospheric chemistry and energy conversion processes, little of which is being investigated.
3. The role of carbon dioxide in warming the atmosphere has been overestimated, partly because so little is known about that atmospheric chemistry.
4. Instead of asking for more political and policial powers for national and supranational State structures, for more 'daddies' or 'dons' to protect us, society should be fostering and encouraging real scientific research in alternative energy systems and non-mainstream basic physics.
Finally, the pretense of 'a consensus of scientists' about the 'reality' of 'global warming' is the very underpinning of the myth, a commodity manufactured by mediocre scientists most often associated with State or UN 'services', and marketed by globalized media-chains and unethical mainstream peer-reviewed magazines such as Science. A poll of the American Meteorological Society in
1999 found that 49% did not believe that there was an association between man-made CO2 emission and climate change, 33% were not sure about the connection, and only 18% were sure that there was such a connection. But in aspiring populist organizations [8], where 'majorities' can be enforced by techno-bureaucratic power plays, the consensus is declared to be 'virtually unanimous'...
Yes, the consensus, too, is part of the hoax, a complete fabrication. As to what "popular consensus" really means - that too, is nothing other than an exercise in mediocracy for consumption by zombies, as performed by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and 'eco-sensitive' Hollywood stars.
A short sample of high-caliber scientists who have criticized the hoax of 'global warming', demonstrates by itself how media-engendered is the myth of consensus on 'global warming':
Robert White (former head of the US Weather Bureau)
Richard Lindzen (Prof. of Meteorology at the MIT)
Willie Soon (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Sallie Baliunas (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Robert Balling Jr. (Director of the Office of Climatology, Prof. of Geography at Arizona State University)
Fred Singer (President of The Science & Environmental Policy Project)
Zbigniew Jaworowski (Chair of the Scientific council of the Warsaw Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, CLOR)
Eric S. Posmentier (Department of Physics and Mathematics at Long Island University, Brooklyn)
Michael Jorgensen (Paleoclimatologist)
Theodor Landscheidt (Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity, Nova Scotia)
Frederick Seitz (Former president of the National Academy of Sciences)
Robert E. Stevenson (Oceanographer, previously with the ONR and Secretary General of The International Association for the Physical Science of the Oceans)
Craig Idso (Center for the Study of carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Arizona)
Sherwood Idso (Center for the Study of carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Arizona)
David Legates (Center for Climactic Research, Delaware)
Chauncey Starr (Former Dean of Engineering at UCLA and founder of EPRI)
Kary Mullis (Nobel Prize, Molecular Biologist)
Add to this scientists who have reversed their originally pro-'global-warming' views, such as:
Roger Revelle (Prof. of Ocean Science at Scripps Institute of Oceanography)
Michael McElroy (Head of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard)
But for those who have any doubts about the dissenting views of a majority of scientists with respect to the fad of 'global warming' just consult the Petition Project of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (19,000 signatures, of which 2,500 by scientists in Earth Sciences), at www.oism.org/pproject/s33p403.htm
If there is a scientific consensus about 'global warming', it is that it is junk science, pseudo-science, humbug.
When the entire myth eventually collapses, scientists and the public will do well to wonder how so much of the public purse was abusively wasted by scientists and politicians on an issue and a field of investigation where most of the basic science is still missing, while virtually nothing was done to investigate basic physics (including atmospheric physics) and to develop alternative energy sources. To call this widespread abuse and overt mismanagement of funds 'a scandal' will hardly begin to describe the free-for-all gravy-train circus it has been.