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Science Forum Index » Environment Forum » Debunking The Warming Crapola
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| Obama Rama Lama Ding Dong |
 Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 6:39 am |
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Oreskes claims to have analysed 928 abstracts she found listed on the
ISI database using the keywords "climate change". However, a search on
the ISI database using the keywords "climate change" for the years
1993 - 2003 reveals that almost 12,000 papers were published during
the decade in question. [...] ...she admitted that there was indeed a
serious mistake in her Science essay. According to Oreskes, her study
was not based on the keywords "climate change," but on "global climate
change" [yet her paper is clearly titled: The scientific consensus on
"climate change" not "global climate change"] Her use of three
keywords instead of two reduced the list of peer reviewed publications
by one order of magnitude (on the UK's ISI databank the keyword search
"global climate change" comes up with 1247 documents) [...] The
results of my analysis contradict Oreskes' findings and essentially
falsify her study: Of all 1117 abstracts, only 13 (1%) explicitly
endorse the 'consensus view'. [...] 34 abstracts reject or doubt the
view that human activities are the main drivers of the "the observed
warming over the last 50 years". 44 abstracts focus on natural factors
of global climate change."
http://z4.invisionfree.com/Popular_Technology/index.php?showtopic=2050 |
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| Frank Arthur |
| Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 7:52 am |
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"Obama Rama Lama Ding Dong" <not@work>
The Greenland ice sheet shrank by 50 cubic miles last year. Were it to
melt completely, sea levels would rise 20 feet-which would leave large
areas of Washington, D.C., including the Mall, between the Lincoln
Memorial and the Washington Monument, underwater.
While Washington Slept
The Queen of England is afraid. International C.E.O.'s are nervous.
And the scientific establishment is loud and clear. If global warming
isn't halted, devastating sea-level rises will be inevitable by 2100.
So how did this virtual certainty get labeled a "liberal hoax" in the
U.S.? Try the same tactics Big Tobacco used to deny the dangers of
smoking.
by Mark Hertsgaard May 2006
Ten months before Hurricane Katrina left much of New Orleans
underwater, Queen Elizabeth II had a private conversation with Prime
Minister Tony Blair about George W. Bush. The Queen's tradition of
meeting once a week with Britain's elected head of government to
discuss matters of state-usually on Tuesday evenings in Buckingham
Palace and always alone, to ensure maximum confidentiality-goes back
to 1952, the year she ascended the throne. In all that time, the
contents of those chats rarely if ever leaked.
So it was extraordinary when London's Observer reported, on October
31, 2004, that the Queen had "made a rare intervention in world
politics" by telling Blair of "her grave concerns over the White
House's stance on global warming." The Observer did not name its
sources, but one of them subsequently spoke to Vanity Fair.
"The Queen first of all made it clear that Buckingham Palace would be
happy to help raise awareness about the climate problem," says the
source, a high-level environmental expert who was briefed about the
conversation. "[She was] definitely concerned about the American
position and hoped the prime minister could help change [it]."
Press aides for both the Queen and the prime minister declined to
comment on the meeting, as is their habit. But days after the Observer
story appeared, the Queen indeed raised awareness by presiding over
the opening of a British-German conference on climate change, in
Berlin. "I might just point out, that's a pretty unusual thing for her
to do," says Sir David King, Britain's chief scientific adviser. "She
doesn't take part in anything that would be overtly political." King,
who has briefed the Queen on climate change, would not comment on the
Observer report except to say, "If it were true, it wouldn't surprise
me."
With spring arriving in England three weeks earlier than it did 50
years ago, the Queen could now see signs of climate change with her
own eyes. Sandringham, her country estate north of London, overlooks
Britain's premier bird-watching spot: the vast North Sea wetlands
known as the Wash. A lifelong outdoorswoman, the Queen had doubtless
observed the V-shaped flocks of pink-footed geese that descend on the
Wash every winter. But in recent years, says Mark Avery, conservation
director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, she also
would have seen a species new to the area: little egrets. These shiny
white birds are native to Southern Europe, Avery says, "but in the
last 5 to 10 years they have spread very rapidly to Northern Europe.
We can't prove this is because of rising temperatures, but it sure
looks like it."
Temperatures are rising, the Queen learned from King and other
scientists, because greenhouse gases are trapping heat in the
atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of such gases, is
released whenever fossil fuels are burned or forests catch fire.
Global warming, the scientists explained, threatens to raise sea
levels as much as three feet by the end of the 21st century, thanks to
melting glaciers and swollen oceans. (Water expands when heated.)
Unless greenhouse-gas emissions are curbed, warns James Hansen of
NASA, global temperatures could climb 2 to 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Such a rise would leave little of Manhattan but the skyscrapers.
This would leave much of eastern England, including areas near
Sandringham, underwater. Global warming would also bring more heat
waves like the one in the summer of 2003 that killed 31,000 people
across Europe. It might even shut down the Gulf Stream, the flow of
warm water from the Gulf of Mexico that gives Europe its mild climate.
If the Gulf Stream were to halt-and it has already slowed 30 percent
since 1992-Europe's temperatures would plunge, agriculture would
collapse, London would no longer feel like New York but like
Anchorage.
The Queen, says King, "got it" on climate change, and she wasn't
alone. "Everyone in this country, from the political parties to the
scientific establishment, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to our oil
companies and the larger business community, has come to a popular
consensus about climate change-a sense of alarm and a conviction that
action is needed now, not in the future," says Tony Juniper, executive
director of the British arm of the environmental group Friends of the
Earth.
At the time of his meeting with the Queen, Blair was being attacked on
climate change from all ideological sides, with even the Conservatives
charging that he was not doing enough. Yet Blair's statements on the
issue went far beyond those of most world leaders. He had called the
Kyoto Protocol, which has been ratified by 162 countries and requires
industrial nations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 5 percent below
1990 levels, "not radical enough." The world's climate scientists,
Blair pointed out, had estimated that 60 percent cuts in emissions
were needed, and he committed Britain to reaching that goal by 2050.
But it wouldn't matter how much Britain cut its greenhouse-gas
emissions if other nations didn't do the same. The U.S. was key, not
only because it was the world's largest emitter but because its
refusal to reduce emissions led China, India, Brazil, and other large
developing countries to ask why they should do so. All this Blair had
also said publicly. In 2001 he criticized the Bush administration for
withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol. In 2004 he said it was essential
to bring the U.S. into the global effort against climate change,
despite its opposition to Kyoto. |
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| Lloyd |
| Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 8:03 am |
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On May 1, 7:39 am, not@work (Obama Rama Lama Ding Dong) wrote:
Quote: Oreskes claims to have analysed 928 abstracts she found listed on the
ISI database using the keywords "climate change". However, a search on
the ISI database using the keywords "climate change" for the years
1993 - 2003 reveals that almost 12,000 papers were published during
the decade in question. [...] ...she admitted that there was indeed a
serious mistake in her Science essay. According to Oreskes, her study
was not based on the keywords "climate change," but on "global climate
change" [yet her paper is clearly titled: The scientific consensus on
"climate change" not "global climate change"] Her use of three
keywords instead of two reduced the list of peer reviewed publications
by one order of magnitude (on the UK's ISI databank the keyword search
"global climate change" comes up with 1247 documents) [...] The
results of my analysis contradict Oreskes' findings and essentially
falsify her study: Of all 1117 abstracts, only 13 (1%) explicitly
endorse the 'consensus view'. [...] 34 abstracts reject or doubt the
view that human activities are the main drivers of the "the observed
warming over the last 50 years". 44 abstracts focus on natural factors
of global climate change."
http://z4.invisionfree.com/Popular_Technology/index.php?showtopic=2050
You are lying.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/naomi-oreskes-consensus-on-global-warming.htm |
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| V-for-Vendicar |
| Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 11:13 pm |
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"Obama Rama Lama Ding Dong" <not@work> wrote
Quote: http://z4.invisionfree.com/Popular_Technology/index.php?showtopic=2050
The very first line is a misrepresentation.
"The global average surface temperature has increased over the 20th century
by about 0.6°C"
IPCC (2001). The current date is 2008, and the surface temperature is now
..74'C higher.
MMMMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNN |
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| V-for-Vendicar |
| Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 11:15 pm |
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BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER:
The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
Naomi Oreskes*
Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently
assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an
argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA
administrator Christine Whitman argued, "As [the report] went through
review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate
change" (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by
controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties
in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive
disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic
climate change. This is not the case.
The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the
World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental
Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a
basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed
and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC
states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that
Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ...
are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb
or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last
50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas
concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)].
IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific
bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the
matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of
Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions,
begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result
of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean
temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the
IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and
answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the
last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas
concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific
community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].
Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American
Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that
the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling ( .
The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for
comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would
diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless,
they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was
tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals
between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords
"climate change" (9).
The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the
consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods,
paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the
papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or
implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or
paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change.
Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.
Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying
paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural.
However, none of these papers argued that point.
This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed
literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public
statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists,
journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement,
or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.
The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of
science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for
failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame
us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate
change and failed to do anything about it.
Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there
are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for
understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate
change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the
reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly
tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.
References and Notes
1.. A. C. Revkin, K. Q. Seelye, New York Times, 19 June 2003, A1.
2.. S. van den Hove, M. Le Menestrel, H.-C. de Bettignies, Climate Policy
2 (1), 3 (2003).
3.. See www.ipcc.ch/about/about.htm.
4.. J. J. McCarthy et al., Eds., Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation,
and Vulnerability (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2001).
5.. National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Science of Climate
Change, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (National
Academy Press, Washington, DC, 2001).
6.. American Meteorological Society, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 84, 508
(2003).
7.. American Geophysical Union, Eos 84 (51), 574 (2003).
8.. See www.ourplanet.com/aaas/pages/atmos02.html.
9.. The first year for which the database consistently published abstracts
was 1993. Some abstracts were deleted from our analysis because, although
the authors had put "climate change" in their key words, the paper was not
about climate change.
10.. This essay is excerpted from the 2004 George Sarton Memorial Lecture,
"Consensus in science: How do we know we're not wrong," presented at the
AAAS meeting on 13 February 2004. I am grateful to AAAS and the History of
Science Society for their support of this lectureship; to my research
assistants S. Luis and G. Law; and to D. C. Agnew, K. Belitz, J. R. Fleming,
M. T. Greene, H. Leifert, and R. C. J. Somerville for helpful discussions.
10.1126/science.1103618 |
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