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There is nothing more dangerous than a man who claims to understands nature.

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

Can you explain, in laymans terms (I am a layman), how they've achieved this?

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It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

Oceans Cooling - so much for the supposedly hyper accurate climate models predicting the apocalypse.

and, as far as apocalypses go, one of these suckers (apparently there's at least 7 of them) is far more likely to do us in:

We should take everything the doom-mongers say with a very large pinch of salt. I recently bought a rather fascinating book in a second-hand bookshop. It was published in 1970 and purported to predict the state of Britain in 2000 (7 years ago!). Apparently, we should nearly all be dead; the fossil fuels have run out; global population is about twice what it actually is; western societies have collapsed owing to nuclear war and Africa is a wasteland. As you can see, none of it has happened.

This is no new phenomenon. In the 18th century Malthus predicted that we would all die of starvation as population increased; he failed to foresee huge advances in agricultural techniques and the use of pesticides. In the mid-19th century it was predicted that in 100 years' time London would be knee-deep in horse droppings. They were nearly right – an immense amount of horse shit emanates from the Palace of Westminster – but of course someone went and invented the internal combustion engine. In the 1960s and 70s we were warned that oil would soon run out - but technology gave us ways firstly to find and then to extract oil where this was previously impossible.

As for carbon emissions, from the mid-19th to late 20th centuries we had several million houses all heated by coal fires; an extensive railway network worked by tens of thousands of coal-burning steam locomotives; and a great deal of coal-fired heavy industry. As a child of the 50s I well remember reports of the horrendous smogs which used to afflict London, and on our train journeys to the Lake District or Scotland (engine belching smoke all the way!) as we passed through industrial towns or cities I was struck by the fact that all the buildings were stained absolutely black with soot. Air quality today is incomparably better.

The doom merchants have, of course, their reasons for trying to frighten us. The Greens have their own weird “back to the past” agenda; the scientists see in it a good source of limitless funding and jobs for life; and of course a certain Scot rubs his hands with glee at the thought of “ethical” robbery (sorry – 'taxation').

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Save a cow - eat a vegetarian

Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers. The reason that those articles ever got published was first because we'd just about worked out the glacial/interglacial cycle at that point - and we would enter a new ice age over the next 10,000 years everything else being equal, coupled with a couple of cold winters and a huge dose of journalistic exaggeration; there was no scientific consensus of immediate doom.

you mean like the current doom-mongering?



and what was the reason for the doom mongering earlier in the century going on about global warming? And the doom mongering before that going on about an imminent ice age? The fear seems to come in cycles as well.



there isn't one at the moment either, so what's the difference?

Well, if you want a basic introduction..

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/summary.htm

If that's too much, then..

(a) Earth is warmed by the sun. This means that it radiates infrared back out into space.

(b) Various gases in the atmosphere (Carbon Dioxide, Water, and Methane) absorb this infrared, which was travelling upwards, and re-emit it in a random direction half of which will be back downwards.

(c) So the more of these gases, the more the atmosphere radiates heat back to the surface. If this didn't happen, you'd be scraping frozen nitrogen off of your car in the morning.

(d) Water vapour has the biggest effect, but it always acts to amplify any changes in the others - the warmer the atmosphere, the more water vapour. So the 1 degree warming direct from carbon dioxide becomes about 3 degrees including feedback.

For those of us in the UK, the consequences shouldn't be too drastic, apart from very low-lying areas, for the next 100 years. A fairly big chunk of the third world stands to get it in the shorts, though; India and China will have big water supply problems, and most of Bangladesh will probably cease to exist. But bear in mind that this is a 100 year projection, and I suspect that things may change a bit in the meantime.

But if there is one prediction I'll bet my hat on, it's that no oil well, anywhere, will ever be shut because of global warming concerns.

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try this

JunkScience.com has been panned by just about every other skeptical source that/science that I read/listen to. It seems more like a political movement than a science one.

I basically agree with Andy that there is a strong concensus on man made global warming.

The people who worry me are the extremists who think we need to stop emitting CO2 at any cost. They're extremists, and extremists are usually dangerous. They're also not usually honest about the real effects. For example, it's true that the sea level may rise so many feet and flood what is currently people's homes. What isn't true is the constant implication that it will happen overnight one day and drown people in their sleep. We're talking change over hundreds of years. That's time for people to adapt; for new generations to live elsewhere.

And what the hell is this about:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6367515.stm ?

A concert in antarctica to stop climate change? I despair at our fatuous society. Also I'd like to know exactly how they are making it carbon neutral. Maybe if they shared the secret, we could do something more constructive than guilt tripping our OAPs into turning off their heating.

Even if you want to accept this, remember that there have been "strong consensus(es)(i)(?)" about lots of things that we now know to be completely wrong.




So there are numerous other skeptical sources... hmm, what consensus was that again?
Can you post some links please? (the ones that dispute what he is saying not those that attack him personally, I've seen plenty of those)

Just like the WMDs in Iraq.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Is that the coal fired power stations in China then?

I believe they are opening one a week for the next decade or something equally astronomical.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Agreed. Accepting that it is happening does not mean accepting that an immediate return to the human powered archimedes screw and the horse and dray is the way forward.

500 in total I believe Paul, ....

The only thing I can come up with is: That "our" government is quietly selling off our "carbon rights" to these nations and THAT is the reason for their attack on our consumption......Grrrrrr!

Oh dear. HALF?? If it is "re-emit[ed] it in a random direction" why would HALF of it head down? Some would be sent sideways, up wards and at angles that would miss the planet totally. Maybe 2-5% but not 50%.

And what's to say those particles won't then hit another gas molecule and head out to space again?

Or have i totally mis-understood the situation?

Perhaps they are thinking of the amosphere as 2D (ie a drawing) rather than 3D. I hope that makes sense.

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Oct 11 Birmingham Half Marathon. I am running for the British Heart Foundation.
http://www.justgiving.com/Rob-Taylor

Yes that's what i thought. But even then a 5 year old could see that it's not 50% that head straight back down.

I think that if then particle starts heading down then might it not then hit another gas molecule and maybe start heading up again? If these gases that cause the IR to come back down also make then go up again doesn't that cancel things out a bit?

And just to show i really don't understand the Global Warming argument, is it the back and forth motion of the IR that causes nicer summers / Global Warming?

Is there a model of what happens i can look at / read?

At first i started to understand the arguments but now feel there is so much bluff and Bullshit i can't see the wood for the trees....

<cough> that's

If these gases that cause the IR to come back down also make IT then go up again doesn't that cancel things out a bit?

I remember reading that the growth is so fast that every two years the Chinese CO2 production will increase by an amount equal to the entire output from UK transport. If we take the UK transport system back to the stone age, whatever is going to happen will happen two years later. Perhaps rather less than two years actually since there are other countries that are also expanding very quickly.

CO2 production is IMO irrelevent, what is shortly going to become critical is availability of energy. We are not in a good position to compete economically for energy. Once we lose the benefits of the OPEC cartel I think we will find ourselves priced out of the energy market. Let's see how keen people are on protecting the environment when they can't afford to heat their homes or drive to work. Suddenly those wood burning stoves will start to look very attractive, regardless of the environmental damage they do. But we'd quickly run out of trees to burn. What's the environmental impact of cutting them all down? At that point, frankly, who cares? Environmentalism is a luxury that we may not be able to afford for much longer.

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Peter Humphries (and a green V8S)

Nope. Not 'transport'. The two-year growth in China is approximately equal to the entire UK output.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety