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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Wharf Rat who wrote (191507)7/12/2006 5:51:57 PM
From: Brumar89  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 281500
 
I was talking about all the posting and traffic.



To: Wharf Rat who wrote (191507)7/12/2006 5:56:51 PM
From: Brumar89  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 281500
 
Apocalypse soon -- the Gospel according to the First Church of the Boiling Globe
By Aussiegirl

There is nothing that is guaranteed to whip the hapless masses into a hysterical frenzy of repentance and breast-beating (and SUV eschewing) like fire and brimstone rhetoric complete with doomsday apocalyptic prophecies.

The Rev. Al is making use of that seminary degree he almost got by preaching hellfire and damnation RIGHT HERE ON EARTH!!

That's right -- you heard it here -- the liberal faith does not admit of an afterlife, therefore it must have all the attributes of an old time religion here on earth, complete with apocalypse soon.


First of course, Marxists, socialists and others of the sinister persuasion assured us that they had a secret plan to ensure a HEAVEN ON EARTH. You heard me -- right here in River City!

That's right ladies and gentlemen, step right up, the Church of Heaven on Earth is calling you. Simply swallow the pablum and salvation shall be yours!

Now when the acolytes misbehave and worship at the door of the golden calf -- a swift and terrible punishment must be meted out -- "YE SHALL BURN IN FIRES OF HELL AND BE DROWNED IN THE TIDES OF YOUR GREED, UNLESS YE REPENT!", bellows Rev. Al -- and the masses tear their hair and rend their (environmentally sound clothing made from natural fibers without artificial dyes or dangerous chemicals).

Repent Now! The end is at hand!

A panel of eminent scientists testified yesterday at a congressional hearing on global warming, showing up just short of wearing sandwich boards splashed with warnings of the wrath to come.

They presented a report by the National Academy of Sciences, 155 pages of hysteria and hyperbole, suggesting that the Earth is running a fever and "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming."

The worthies confided that Earth hasn't been this hot in 400 years, and maybe longer, but gave no hint that they understood how they had undermined their practiced hysteria. If the Earth was this hot 400 years ago, or even 4,000 years ago, then the recent warming could not have been caused by the madness of man's machines, the flatulence of cows, or even hot air from professors hot to get their names in the paper.

Their presentation was studded with "likely," "maybe," "could be," and "very close to being right," with assurances that their findings were gleaned from tree rings, coral, glaciers, cave deposits (from bulls?), ocean and lake sediments, bore holes and ice cores.

[...] Recycling and regurgitation was yesterday's order of the day. The panel looked at how other scientists reconstructed temperatures over hundreds and thousands of years. Some of it was educated guessing, since there were few scientific instruments back in that day, and a lot of it was to be taken on faith. Scientists are generally not very hot on faith, but they embrace the global-warming doctrine with the enthusiasm of a backwoods snake handler in the Tennessee mountains. The panelists said the warming over the past 50 years was something no one had seen in a millennium, but conceded that well, umm, OK, it is true that the Earth suffered a "Little Ice Age" for about 350 years after 1500. But hey, who's counting?

Between the year A.D. 1 and the year 1850, volcanos and fluctuations in the heat from the sun were responsible for temperature changes, but these changes were much less pronounced than the warming caused by man-made pollution in the years since the mid-19th century.

This gets to the point of the hysteria. Scientific Man in all his manufactured glory can't bear the thought that he might not, after all, be as powerful as a volcano or a solar flare. How many learned degrees does a volcano have, after all? The idea that forces of the universe greater even than Scientific Man may be responsible for the cyclical changes is unbearable.

Hence "global warming" has become the religion -- the opiate, you might say -- of Scientific Man, a doctrine supported by quackery, supposition and speculation, and as closely held and as ferociously defended as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection at a gathering of devout Christians. You could ask the Rt. Rev. Al Gore, the presiding archbishop of the First Church of the Boiling Globe.

The bishops and monsignors of the church treat dissent harshly, though not yet at the stake. Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writes in the Wall Street Journal of the fate of academic dissenters to orthodox doctrine.
"[T]here is a sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis."
He recalls how Mr. Gore, as a senator in 1992, tried to bullyrag dissenting scientists. Indeed, it was about this time that Mr. Gore, at a luncheon interview with editors and reporters at The Washington Times, suggested that we join the fun, too, and even if we printed stuff that wasn't exactly true it would be OK because the cause was just. This is Mr. Gore's "inconvenient truth."

From aussiethule.blogspot.com



To: Wharf Rat who wrote (191507)7/12/2006 6:01:55 PM
From: Brumar89  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 281500
 
The Real News About Mann-Made Global Warming -- Debunking the "hockey stick" of global doom

By Aussiegirl

So much for the hockey stick of doom! It turns out it's nothing more than the hockey puck of hucksterism!

Another fond myth bites the dust of reality. Read the report, you so-called reporters! Of course the earth is warmer now than it has been in 400 years -- we are emerging from the Little Ice Age, and good thing too! Believing the hockey stick of doom is like taking one month's Dow Jones Industrial average and extrapolating it out to some sort of meaningful trend based on one small snapshot of a dynamic process. If you looked at a chart of the Dow Jones just prior to a big crash, you'd swear the darn thing was going to keep rising in perpetuity. Good way to lose a fortune and end up splatted on the pavement below. The climate is dynamic. It changes. Better warmer than colder.

TCS Daily - The Real News About Mann-Made Global Warming

Last week's release of a National Academies of Science (NAS) report entitled "Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years" was the result of a congressional request to look into the controversy surrounding the now-famous "hockey stick" temperature curve. The media portrayed the findings of the NAS review panel as some sort of new statement about how warm the Earth is at present, and totally missed the real news: that the original claim of Mann et al. of unprecedented warmth in the last 1,000 years -- based mostly upon tree ring data, especially from the southwest U.S. -- was dubious at best.

For the last several years, the hockey stick has been a poster prop for manmade global warming. For instance, it figures prominently in Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." But the statistical and data analysis methods that Mann et al. used to arrive at their 1,000 year temperature reconstruction were strongly criticized by some. The hockey stick played down the warmth of the "Medieval Warm Period" of 1,000 years ago, as well as the later coolness of the "Little Ice Age."

Also, the uncritical acceptance of the hockey stick for inclusion in the U.N.'s Third Assessment Report on global climate in 2001 gave many scientists the impression that the editors of that report wanted to believe the hockey stick more than they were convinced of its validity.

In their attempt to not publicly scold Mann and his coauthors for questionable data analysis methods, the authors of the new report instead chose to restate the evidence for how warm the Earth has gotten recently. What the media didn't notice, however, is that the 1,000 year figure that was central to the whole hockey stick debate had now been replaced in the report by a figure of 400 years. Since most of the last 400 years was dominated by the "Little Ice Age," the warming during the 20th century should be welcomed by humanity.

The report says that surface temperature reconstructions before this period (about 1600) have "less confidence" and that "uncertainties...increase substantially backward in time..." for any of these proxy estimates of ancient temperatures. One review panel member told me that the statisticians on the panel were amazed when it was revealed that the method underlying the hockey stick had essentially no statistical skill when validated.

This is pretty harsh language for an NAS report written by review panel members, several of whom are equivalent to foxes guarding the hen house. Researchers who have bought into the validity of using proxy measures for ancient climate reconstructions aren't about to throw away the "best" method the paleoclimate research community has, even if it can not be validated with real temperature measurements (the thermometer was not even invented until the 1600's).

One rather amazing characteristic of the hockey stick is the so-called "divergence problem": the strong warming in the late 20th century is not even indicated in the tree ring data that were used to reconstruct the last 1,000 years of supposed temperature variations. Much of the 20th century warming (the blade of the hockey stick) represents real temperature measurements, not tree ring reconstructions, since they don't show the warming. This raises a natural question, which the panel shrugged off: If tree rings do not show the strong warming of the late 20th century, how do we know there wasn't a similar temperature spike 1,000 years ago?

Keeping the door open to the possibility that Mann might be right anyway, the new report says that it is at least "plausible" that we are warmer now than anytime in the last 1,000 years. But this is a much lower level of certainty than has been associated with the hockey stick by the media, bureaucrats, and movie stars (like Al Gore).

But what was the biggest news in the media coverage of the NAS report last week? The biased nature of the media coverage. It almost seems like the media covering the report looked for familiar phrases that fit their global warming paradigm (e.g., "...warmer than the previous 400 years..."), without noting the important conclusions that addressed why the report was written in the first place.

Indeed, much of the press coverage managed to connect the words "warmer than" with a report reference to "2,000 years" to come up with widespread statements (not supported by the report) that the Earth is warmer now than when Jesus Christ walked the Earth. Apparently, sound bites are still preferred over truth.

The NAS review panel report admits that it is difficult to conclude that we are warmer now than 1,000 years ago, but that we are very likely warmer than anytime in the last 400 years. Since what this really means is that we are warmer now than any time during the "Little Ice Age" (and thank goodness for that), one wonders whether we really know anything about past climate reconstructions from tree ring data.

Dr. Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite.

aussiethule.blogspot.com