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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (16708)	10/7/2007 4:40:22 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 36917

Am I the only one who thinks the Sun will Nova any second ?

To: average joe who wrote (16708)	10/7/2007 5:25:10 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

No phenomenon in recent memory has been more over-hyped than global warming.... Many other scientists agree, as The New American noted in an online special report not too long ago. This is just amazing to me. The consensus in the scientific community at large is that GW is real and is happening. It is the skeptics who are in the minority. But if one only read the article you've posted, the opposite conclusion would be warranted. I guess even Businessweek has "drunk the GW Kool Aid": businessweek.com businessweek.com ----------------- I just went back and read the "special report" on GW referred to in the post. After consider the evidence of melting glaciers and giving some counter explanations for why glaciers in Africa and Greenland are melting, the author says, Does all of this mean that global warming has nothing to do with melting glaciers? In all truth, no. But it does serve to point out that opinions vary considerably and that it is inadvisable to base global-warming claims on the status of glaciers alone. The author doesn't even touch the other melting glaciers around the world. The fact that the skeptics have to resort to different "explanations" for glaciers melting in different parts of the world suggests that they have a problem. Occam's Razor would lead more people to be accept the GW hypothesis. The author also brings up the Antarctica example that has been brought up on this thread many times already. "It's hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now," professor David Bromwich told the AAAS meeting according to the online science news site PhysOrg.com. "Part of the reason is that there is a lot of variability there. It's very hard in these polar latitudes to demonstrate a global warming signal. This is in marked contrast to the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula that is one of the most rapidly warming parts of the Earth." Even so, Bromwich emphasized it was hard to find evidence of man-made global warming in Antarctica as a whole. "The best we can say right now is that the climate models are somewhat inconsistent with the evidence that we have for the last 50 years from continental Antarctica," Bromwich said. "We're looking for a small signal that represents the impact of human activity and it is hard to find it at the moment."17 [0] This does not invalidate the standard theory of global warming, as Bromwich made clear to the AAAS audience. But, once again, it clearly illustrates that the science of global warming is anything but settled. Well, since there is exactly a whole lot of human activity--and still less industrial activity--in Antarctica, I'm not sure it's surprising that the evidence is there is "inconsistent." They then give two "alternative theories" for the earth is warming (never mind that earlier in the piece they were denying that the warming took place). They are both pretty familiar theories--the solar activity hypothesis and the cosmic ray hypothesis. It is true, as they say, that many theories that are accepted today were ridiculed when they were first proposed. Just to take one example that I am familiar with, back in the mid-19th century, the idea that surgeons should wash their hands before doing surgery was ridiculed for years before finally being accepted. It is probably unnecessary to point out that this doesn't mean that every theory that is ridiculed must be true.