Breaking the Ice
There is a comprehensive overview of the studies that brought scientists to re-jig their glacial ice sheet models that show that by the end of this century sea levels won’t rise 3 inches as predicted, but by about 20 feet.
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March 24th, 2006 at 1:07 am
I’d guess that the glacial ice sheet models are flawed, just as the climate models are.
http://www.fathersforlife.org/REA/warming2.htm
MP
March 24th, 2006 at 8:19 am
First he disses D. Suzuki and the volumes of government funded research that he has used to come to his conclusions with no counter argument or facts of his own. On the next page he then purports the work of another person that Suzuki disagrees with as Suzuki’s own argument. Further on, he takes his own ignorance of how to read a graph and purports that misunderstanding of his to prove everyone else wrong.
I went through some more of his web site, there are lots of examples of his disingenous way of writing. Here’s just one where he says:
“Many surface temperatures that are being tracked and reported are being taken and recorded in or near large urban centres.”
and then he compares that to taking the temperature from his kitchen. What he doesn’t acknowledge to the reader is that although temperatures are indeed taken from near some cities, they are taken many other places too for comparison. This Walter fellow has a lot of axes to grind from the looks of it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he has a stake in global warming not being true and he is advancing his own agenda and is not thinking about the other people in the world at all.
March 24th, 2006 at 9:02 am
LOL! Dig a little deeper and you will find W.S. is obsessed with the energy industry, no wonder he doesn’t like the news yesterday. He’s also totally obsessed with the feeling that he has been persecuted and that women are out to take over the world or something.
March 24th, 2006 at 11:06 am
The point of my comment was not to say that this guy is correct. The point is that the models that have been constructed are probably flawed. If you look at the results of some of the climate models, you’ll find that they generally have trouble actually predicting weather from a holistic perspective, for example. That is, take data collected for the past hundred years, run the model, and see what comes out: while one part of the model might be correct (e.g. air temperature changes), another part is usually completely off (e.g. ocean temperatures).
It’s pretty typical of human beings to believe that, at any point in time, we either (a) influence everything that’s going on in the world, or (b) can explain pretty flawlessly the behaviour of a natural phenomenon. This is flawed thinking. We simply don’t know all the factors associate with climate, and we don’t actually know (since records don’t go back that far) what has been going on with climate hundreds or thousands of years ago. To take the last 150 years’ worth of data and build a model and then say “this is correct” is bad science.
The link was just to show you that there are other points of view: I am not saying this guy is corrrect, but he certainly does have some company (some of which is actually quite elevated in the scientific community).
March 24th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Your first post makes much more sense now, my reply should have been your much more succinctly put: “It’s pretty typical of human beings to believe that, at any point in time, we either (a) influence everything that’s going on in the world, or (b) can explain pretty flawlessly the behaviour of a natural phenomenon. This is flawed thinking.”
Seems the two of us at least agree that both sides of the debate are promoting their own agenda, Suzuki is well known for that and your example link is a good ‘un too
IMHO, we would be better off with a cleaner environment regardless if the factors cited such as hydrocarbons etc. contribute to global warming, or even if global warming exists. The side of the debate that cites global warming as influenced by human intervention, has in a large part for the fix to be a green one so that would make me willing to compromise my reasoning to suit my own agenda too. The tangled web we weave isn’t it?
March 24th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Exactly. We need to reduce our environmental impact footprint regardless of what we think about the causes of climate change.
Unfortunately I don’t see this happening any time soon, given our hydrocarbon economy and population growth