Thread: Global Warming - the Final Word

Double post.

Originally Posted by kingwilly

here go - check this

Andrew Bolt

Thursday, September 13, 2007 at 08:51am




The Hudson Institute’s Dennis Avery and prominent climate physicist S. Fred Singer have combed through the global warming science:

A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares. More than 300 of the scientists found evidence that
1) a natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age and/or that
2) our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun’s irradiance…
3) sea levels are failing to rise importantly;
4) that our storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with this warming as they did during previous global warmings;
5) that human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills twice as many people as heat; and 6) that corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate.

Not that you’ve seen much of this research reported in the media, addicted as it is to catastrophe and the new faith.

Bullshit, the media is full of Singers and Avery's work. While the media does love disasters it also like to make it's readers/viewers feel smart by pointing out that the doom-mongering poindexters aren't as clever as they think.

There are thousands of scientists who agree on the problem of global warming yet the people who don't want to believe ignore all of them and fall back on the very few, almost invariably corporate supported scientists who do. Asking these "scientists" for their opinion is akin to asking Keruk his opinion on increasing the number of synagogues in the world. Every time I see an article like this I check any references I can find to the quoted authorities, I suggest you do too and stop believing things just because they say what you want to hear. I doubt it will happen, people are just too damn ignorant - in a world where the majority of people believe the universe is controlled by malignant sky demons it's just too much to hope that they'll actually make an attempt to understand anything outside their preconceived notions.

Singer is a corporate shill for the oil companies

S. Fred Singer
Affiliations

• 1989- Director and President, Science and Environmental Policy Project, a foundation-funded, independent research group, incorporated in 1992, to advance environment and health policies through sound science. SEPP is a non-profit, education organization.
• 1993- Member of the board of the International Center for a Scientific Ecology.
• 1994- Distinguished Research Professor, Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.
• 2002 Advisory Board Member, American Council on Science and Health
• Editorial Advisory Board, The Cato Institute
• Adjunct Scholar, National Center for Policy Analysis
• Adjunct Fellow, Frontiers of Freedom
• 2006- Member of the Science Advisory Committee for the Natural Resources Stewardship Project.

It should be noted that, according to Environmental Defense, October 26, 2005: [3]

• The Cato Institute received $55,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
• The National Center for Policy Analysis received $105,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
• The Frontiers of Freedom organizations received $282,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.
• The American Council on Science and Health received $35,000 from ExxonMobil in 2002-2003.

Avery is primarily a food scientist, before he jumped on the Global warming bandwagon (strangely, it's the global-warming deniers who make lots of money from it rather than the oft-repeated myth about scientists who believe in global warming making the whole thing up so they can get huge wads of free research cash) he was most famous for saying that organic food was more dangerous than food treated with pesticides. He's part of the Hudson institute, where do they get their funding?

The Hudson Institute's IRS Form 990 for the financial year ending on September 30, 2003 showed total revenue of $9.34 million, including over $146,000 in government grants. Other known funders listed in the institute's 2002 annual report include:

• Ag Processing Inc
• American Crop Protection Association
• American Cyanamid
• Archer Daniels Midland
• Cargill
• Ciba-Geigy
• ConAgra Foods
• Conrad Black
• CropLife International
• DowElanco
• DuPont
• Eli Lilly and Company
• Exxon Mobil
• Fannie Mae
• General Electric Fund
• Heinz
• IBM
• Lilly Endowment
• McDonald's
• Merck
• Microsoft
• Monsanto
• National Agricultural Chemical Association
• Nichols-Dezenhall Communications Management Group
• Novartis
• PayPal
• PhRMA
• PriceWaterhouseCoopers
• Procter & Gamble
• Sunkist Growers
• Syngenta Crop Protection
• United Agri Products
• Westfield Corporation

Follow the money.

Avery and Singer: Unstoppable hot air
RealClimate » Avery and Singer: Unstoppable hot air

— david @ 4:28 PM
Filed under:

• Reviews
• Extras
• Greenhouse gases
• Paleoclimate
• Climate Science

Last week I attended a talk by Dennis Avery, author with Fred Singer of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years (there is a summary here). The talk (and tasty lunch) was sponsored by the Heartland Institute, and was apparently enthusiastically received by its audience. Still whoozy from a bit of contention during the question period, a perplexed member of the audience told me privately that he thought a Point/CounterPoint discussion might be useful (he didn't know I wrote for realclimate; it was just a hypothetical thought). But here’s my attempt to accommodate.
Note: The Points are paraphrases from the slides and my notes from Avery’s talk.

Point. The existence of the medieval warm and the Little Ice Age climate intervals, and the 1500 year D-O cycles in glacial climate, proves that the warming in the past decades is a natural phenomenon, not caused by human industry at all.

CounterPoint. The existence of climate changes in the past is not news to the climate change scientific community; there is a whole chapter about it in the upcoming IPCC Scientific Assessment. Nor do past, natural variations in climate negate the global warming forecast. Most past climate changes, like the glacial interglacial cycle, can be explained based on changes in solar heating and greenhouse gases, but the warming in the last few decades cannot be explained without the impact of human-released greenhouse gases. Avery was very careful to crop his temperature plots at 1985, rather than show the data to 2005.

Point. Hundreds of researchers have published on the Little Ice Age and Medieval warm climates, proving that there is no scientific consensus on global warming.

CounterPoint. Natural and human-induced climate changes both exist. Studying one does not imply disbelief in the other.

Point. Human populations of Europe and India thrived during the medieval warm time, so clearly warming is good for us.

CounterPoint. No one asserts that the present-day warmth is a calamity, although perhaps some residents of Tuvalu or New Orleans might feel differently, and the Mayans may have been less than enthusiastic about the medieval climate. The projected temperature for 2100 under business-as-usual is another matter entirely, warmer than the Earth has been in millions of years.

Point. NASA identified a huge energy hole over the tropical Pacific, which sucked out as much heat as doubling CO2. NASA scientists asked modelers to replicate this, and they failed, by 200-400%, even when they knew the answer in advance!

CounterPoint. This appears to be a reference to Chen et al., 2002. Satellite data from the equatorial Pacific showed an increase in IR heat flux to space of about 5 W/m2 from 1985 to 2005, and a decrease in reflected visible light of about 2 W/m2, leaving a 3 W/m2 change in net heat flux.
Avery’s implicit promise would seem to be that with rising CO2, the heavens will part and let the excess energy out, a Lindzenesque mechanism to nullify global warming. The measured change in heat fluxes in the equatorial Pacific is indeed comparable to the radiative effect of doubling CO2 but the CO2 number is a global average, while the equatorial Pacific is just one region. The measurements probably reflect a regional rearrangement of cloud cover or ocean temperature, a decadal variation with no clear implication at all for the global mean heat budget of the Earth. The global heat imbalance has been inferred (Hansen et al, Science, 2005), and it is consistent with rising greenhouse gas concentrations and transient heating of the ocean.
A word about models in science (as opposed to in think-tank economics, Mr. Avery’s home turf). Models would have little use if they were so easy to bend into any answer we thought we knew about in advance. One can always be critical of models, but there is no model that avoids global warming by parting the heavens, or that is exquisitely sensitive to solar variability but insensitive to CO2, the worlds that Mr. Avery wishes for.
Avery’s talk also dusted off many of the good old good ones, like the cosmic-ray / cloud connection, the temperature lead of CO2 through the deglaciation, the Antarctic warming, the cooling during the period 1940-1970, the now-resolved satellite temperature discrepancy from ground temperatures, and even the ancient CO2 band saturation myth.
In addition to Chen, Avery offered to us the work of Maureen Raymo and Gerard Bond. Bond didn't think his work cast any doubt on the possibility of anthropogenic warming, neither do Raymo or Chen. Hint: if you want to sound like you know what you're talking about, the accent on the fourth syllable of foraminifera, not foraminifera.

Point. Environmentalists do what they do because they miss having their mommies reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales to them. They like getting all scared.

CounterPoint. To hybrid-phrase Thomas Jefferson and Richard Feynman, I tremble for humanity when I reflect that nature cannot be fooled. You're damn right I’m scared.