the great global warming swindle

[MrJay]

Just to add to the choir. The idea that the oceans act as a sink for CO2 and release more of their store when they are warmer is nothing new. There aren't hordes of climatologists thinking 'gosh, did you see channel 4 last night, perhaps we were wrong all along'. Of course the the CO2 record lags. That's how positive feedback works. It has no connotations at all what so ever to contradict the theory that increasing the quantity of green house gasses increases temperature. If anything it just makes it worse, which is sort of the point.

And the troposphere thing was simply wrong. The tempreature in the lower atmosphere is increasing as it should. The data is readily available if you care to check.

And the thing with cosmic rays.... To quote David Bellamy, "poppycock." We haven't recently learned that cosmic rays make clouds. It's recently been put forward as a yet to be tested theory and the peer review so far hasn't exactly been favorable. (unlike the workings of green house gases which has survived for 180 years.)

And there was the bit where warming didn't happen during peak industrial periods so there nerr nerr nerr as though other forces affecting the climate (such as sulphur aerosols and solar activity) should suddenly stop so we can have a nice graph to look at. The charge of global warming doom-mongers is that a human activity will force the overall trend in temperature record up, not that other shot term climate forcings will cease to happen.

And apparently Environmentalists are making babies in Africa die, despite the Kyoto agreement specifically excluding developing nations and despite the fact that installing a hit tech hole in the roof, or "chimney" will stop you from dying from smoke inhilation if you decide to light a fire in your house.

And with all these charges, why wasn't an argument for man made climate change represented in the entire show, or why wasn't a 'for' scientist invited to respond to the claims? I think you know why.

Broadly speaking, if you bought into the swindle programme you're as guilty of being played like a fiddle as the next person.

 

[engineer one]

this gets more and more interesting. when i started the thread, i was kind of expecting some grown up comments and some real discussion.

what we appear to have is a polarisation.

those who believe the global warming theory seem to think that they have the right to slag off those who don't agree with them. we who are thinking that it is not ALL correct, and ask for more information get castigated and told we are stupid for not believing, yet the evidence is still thin.

nick has earlier suggested the analogy of adding sugar to the tea or coffee, but what he forgot to mention is that you can go too far. i checked all my chemistry books and am reminded that there is something called
saturation and super saturation. basically it goes you can mix in various substances into various liquids, but eventually these liquids can take no more, so they have become saturated. to get them to accept more of a substance, you have to agitate continuously, or you need add heat.

now if that is true of tea, why not co2????

oh yes i also checked about steam, saturated, superheated and expansive. same thing applies only by heating things can you get the same substance into a the space. but this is where the 1/2% worry comes in.

i noticed on the news tonight in the conversations with arnie they talked about greenhouse gases, not just carbon, but no mention of what they all are.

so whether i am so blind that my eyes cannot see, or it really is more complex than is being explained, and we are not the whole picture, is still not clear and the name calling will not change that.

again i say we should all save what we can, but we are not the primary producers of CO2, it is big industry, so we as individuals in the west will have little impact on anything.

but what this discussion has brought to my mind is that maybe airplanes are doing something, but that is as much to do with the height at which they are operating, as the fact that coming in to land often they spray unused fuel into the atmosphere, and as far as i know or can find, no one has studied that at all. and i would venture that until one government is brave enough to look at the flights of its forces planes we will never know.

however it is difficult to consider that the jets have done this since the 60's when jumbos, and DC10's and Tristars made cheap flights eminently affordable. maybe it is cumulative, but it does seem to stretch the point to think it happens that quickly. :roll: :?

so having upset even more people i shall go back to finding out more. :twisted:

paul :wink:

 

[Travis Byrne]

About the hole in the sky----Don't worry about it!!!!

Bill Gates is comming out with a patch for it, :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:

Travis

 

[Anonymous]

Just to add to the choir. The idea that the oceans act as a sink for CO2 and release more of their store when they are warmer is nothing new. There aren't hordes of climatologists thinking 'gosh, did you see channel 4 last night, perhaps we were wrong all along'.
snip

Opposite in fact. There is at least one major contributor to the programme (Wunsch) who is complaining that the prog seriously misrepresented and distorted his views.
You can see his letter here in "comments" after the Monbiot article.

cheers
Jacob

 

[MrJay]

this gets more and more interesting. when i started the thread, i was kind of expecting some grown up comments and some real discussion.

what we appear to have is a polarisation.

True enough. On the one hand we have Al Gore with an agenda to make the current White House administration look bad, presenting a one sided view and skimping over the facts and figures and a body of people who want to believe it, on the other hand we have the swindle programme with the opposite political agenda presenting a one sided view, skimping over the facts and figures and with a body of people who want to believe it; believe that those are the REAL facts and ACTUAL causes and probably more importantly that the other side can be called wrong.

The fact remains however that the swindle programme was a sham of strawman arguments, misrepresentation and downright falsehoods; which isn't the best of starts for a grown up debate. What we are left with, as you say, is a polarised debate with two groups caught up in an utterly irrelevant catfight, desperate to prove the other wrong by fair means or foul.

 

[Nick W]

Did anyone hear the slot about this on the Today programme this morning? I missed the beginning, so will be llistening-again later, but I wonder why Radio4 doesn't try to find articulate scientists to come on the show.

 

[Gill]

Anyone who's interested in the heretical approach to climate change might be interested in the links on this site. I must confess, I haven't read them all yet!

I'm still looking for the science that supports the assertion that CO2 is driving global warming . Bearing in mind that we're constantly being told how critical it is, it's surprisingly hard to find.

Gill

 

[Jake]

Interesting article in the Independent this morning - the programme maker seems to be heading into some very deep water...
I'd be surprised if the company emerges with its reputation intact:

http://news.independent.co.uk/environme ... 355956.ece

 

[Anonymous]

Did anyone hear the slot about this on the Today programme this morning? I missed the beginning, so will be llistening-again later, but I wonder why Radio4 doesn't try to find articulate scientists to come on the show.

Yes heard it. Didn't think he was too bad Prof John Hutton (or whoever it was).
The swindle programme is getting thoroughly slated. Actually I don't think it was "propaganda" as such - just scaremongering **** poor Daily Mail type journalism.
If anything it has reenforced the GW lobby by showing just how dishonest and inadequate are the deniers. Shot in the foot.

cheers
Jacob

Modedit: Newbie_Neil

 

[Jake]

nick has earlier suggested the analogy of adding sugar to the tea or coffee, but what he forgot to mention is that you can go too far. i checked all my chemistry books and am reminded that there is something called
saturation and super saturation. basically it goes you can mix in various substances into various liquids, but eventually these liquids can take no more, so they have become saturated. to get them to accept more of a substance, you have to agitate continuously, or you need add heat.

now if that is true of tea, why not co2????

Because you are not dissolving something into something else. A better analogy would be adding milk to tea, not sugar. In an infinite-sized cup.

oh yes i also checked about steam, saturated, superheated and expansive. same thing applies only by heating things can you get the same substance into a the space. but this is where the 1/2% worry comes in.

The atmosphere isn't held on by a rigid vessel - there is no fixed space in which you have to cram the extra gas into. It can just get thicker - that doesn't mean there isn't more CO2 between earth surface and space.

 

[Gill]

That article in the Indie is indeed an interesting criticism, especially:

The programme failed to point out that scientists had now explained the period of "global cooling" between 1940 and 1970. It was caused by industrial emissions of sulphate pollutants, which tend to reflect sunlight. Subsequent clean-air laws have cleared up some of this pollution, revealing the true scale of global warming - a point that the film failed to mention.

There's no doubt that the programme had its flaws, but only a fool would accept the assertions of a television programme at face value without making further enquiries. Nevertheless, it has made us look more closely at what appear to be questionable assumptions that are guiding policy makers. I'd like to know more about the science that's underlying these assumptions to reassure me that our taxes are being wisely spent and our lifestyles are being safely directed. So far, I've been surprised by how little solid science there is. Perhaps there are other actions that mankind could be taking to stabilize our environment apart from reducing CO2 production. Yet this seems to be the only approach being investigated.

Gill

 

[engineer one]

jake i accept your comments about the infinite sized cup, but wonder about the further one about the envelope in which we are supposed to live.

if you accept the gw theory then the envelope must be finite, and encompassing which you now suggest it is not

and we wonder why people get confused. :?
paul :wink:

all tv, and media is biased either for or against what it should do is provoke proper discussion, somehow in the last 10 years we seem to have become more and more accepting of everything. seems to question is much to difficult. :-k

 

[Jake]

jake i accept your comments about the infinite sized cup, but wonder about the further one about the envelope in which we are supposed to live.

if you accept the gw theory then the envelope must be finite, and encompassing which you now suggest it is not

and we wonder why people get confused. :?

I don't understand that, I'm afraid. The greenhouse gas theory doesn't depend on the atmosphere being a fixed volume. Think of the atmosphere like a duvet. CO2 is a very efficient filling for your duvet, and nitrogen (etc) is a rubbish one, but we have to have it in our duvet. So if we want to make the duvet more effective, we have to add more CO2. We can't get rid of the nitrogen, so the volume of the duvet increases. The proportion of CO2 in the duvet also increases because the bit we added was 100% CO2, which is much higher than the proportion intnhe pre-existing filling. The fact that the proportion of CO2 in the duvet has increased doesn't suggest that the duvet has to have the same volume as before.

all tv, and media is biased either for or against what it should do is provoke proper discussion, somehow in the last 10 years we seem to have become more and more accepting of everything. seems to question is much to difficult. :-k

I think the questioning is on the other side of the debate, not on the side of the deniers - who are after all largely funded by right-wing, reactionary conservative US oil barons, who probably think that they will be lifted up to heaven by the hand of god if there is any difficulty down the line.

 

[Anonymous]

That article in the Indie is indeed an interesting criticism, especially:

The programme failed to point out that scientists had now explained the period of "global cooling" between 1940 and 1970. It was caused by industrial emissions of sulphate pollutants, which tend to reflect sunlight. Subsequent clean-air laws have cleared up some of this pollution, revealing the true scale of global warming - a point that the film failed to mention.

There's no doubt that the programme had its flaws, but only a fool would accept the assertions of a television programme at face value without making further enquiries. Nevertheless, it has made us look more closely at what appear to be questionable assumptions that are guiding policy makers. I'd like to know more about the science that's underlying these assumptions to reassure me that our taxes are being wisely spent and our lifestyles are being safely directed. So far, I've been surprised by how little solid science there is.

Rather too much science I thought! Enough to keep you busy for months if you want to follow it in detail. I guess you are slowly finding this out for yourself. Keep up the good work!

Perhaps there are other actions that mankind could be taking to stabilize our environment apart from reducing CO2 production. Yet this seems to be the only approach being investigated.

Gill

Well in many ways it's a one issue problem i.e. the carbon balance being altered by the accelerating rate of burning of millions of tons of fossil fuels.
There are plenty of other environmental issues of course - but CO2 is central and critical.

cheers
Jacob

 

[innesm]

I'm still looking for the science that supports the assertion that CO2 is driving global warming .

CO2 is a 'greenhouse gas'. There is info on it on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse ... ouse_gases
The theory is that more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere result in higher temperatures.

Having watched it, the GGWS documentary made a very convincing argument against the traditional theory of CO2-driven global warming. Those sunspot graphs seemed to make an open-and-shut case against CO2. But subsequently it transpires that the documentary was full of inaccuracies and doesnt stand up to examination. This was annoying for two reasons: it would be nice if the bulk of the recent global warming wasnt our fault. And it would be very nice to shut up the deep-green enviro-nutters. However, there you go.

 

[innesm]

Perhaps there are other actions that mankind could be taking to stabilize our environment apart from reducing CO2 production. Yet this seems to be the only approach being investigated.

Gill

Well in many ways it's a one issue problem i.e. the carbon balance being altered by the accelerating rate of burning of millions of tons of fossil fuels.
There are plenty of other environmental issues of course - but CO2 is central and critical.

Since the cooling 'blip' between the 40s and 70s (or whatever it was) was anthropogenic and counteracted the greenhouse effect, that means there ought to be alternatives to simply cutting CO2 when it comes to mitigating global warming. We need a combined strategy of building nuclear power stations while simultaneously boosting pollution levels

 

[Nick W]

Because you are not dissolving something into something else. A better analogy would be adding milk to tea, not sugar. In an infinite-sized cup.

Thanks Jake, your analogy is much better.

 

[Gill]

Thank you, innesm. That link is very useful and led me to some more interesting reading material:

http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf

At last I'm beginning to feel better informed - I've just got to digest it all now .

Gill

 

[engineer one]

ok jake i can kind of accept your duvet theory and it makes an interesting analogy.

however i then ask the question "if the world rotates, then by definition, it must agitate the air round it. how then can the "duvet" be oddly shaped?"
if the aerodynamics of ground based vehicles are anything to go by, then surely the whole will rotate in a manner to cause it to be "out of balance"

as for the milk, or sugar, you can only add milk up to the brim of the cup, and with sugar, eventually it separates from the water, which is then supersaturated, and thus causes the cup to overflow also.

finally i have read the Independent article, and understand its raising concerns. however i do not regularly get the paper, but feel i would have noticed if its research into de-bunking the GW theory was quite as quick and as sensational.

had the sunday times still got the effective investigative INSIGHT team it used to have, and they had done an article on the whole issue, not just the programme and its flaws, i would be more impressed. and just because you dislike the daily mail does not make them wrong either, the present alzheimers cause is a very real problem , and having only within the last two years stopped being a pretty full time carer for my now deceased elderly parents, i understand the difficulties experienced by carers, which are easily dismissed by outsiders.

all problems need viewing from both sides, and whilst sensationalising one side or the other is wrong, oftimes it is the only way to get the point into the public gaze.

paul :wink:

 

[innesm]

as for the milk, or sugar, you can only add milk up to the brim of the cup, and with sugar, eventually it separates from the water, which is then supersaturated, and thus causes the cup to overflow also.

Imagine an analogy was a piece of rubber sheet. Now, if you stretch the sheet too far it might tear - the analogy breaks down.

(but what is the elasticity of the analogy? If it's warmer, perhaps the sheet will stretch further. And is the analogy being stretched evenly around its border? If not the analogy will break down at a lower amount of stretching. If the analogy is exposed to UV radiation this might reduce its stretchyness - depends on what the analogy is made of. etc etc)

I hope this flawed analogy about abusing analogies is helpful.