Reason Over Emotion

[neonlyte]

Have you ever watched an accident in slow motion. Film makers do this rather well, the scene shot from different angles, the inevitability of the collision, the stark rendering of a face just before the moment of impact. In a film it's make-believe. No one actually gets hurt. A real accident is different. Someone dies and you watch powerless to stop the motion set in train. So what has this to do with rhetorical expressionism? It's about selling the message. Polarising opinion, dividing to rule. And the winner tales the spoils.

We're locked, as mab says, in a world spun on good and evil - in all its guises - a masquerade designed to pit against emotion to sway the undecided. All of the effort of politicians, of advertisers, newspaper moguls, marketeers of any creed, goes into winning the mind of the undecided. Logic plays a tiny part. Even the worlds experts can't agree on the magnitude of the calamity facing the globe from global warning, what chance does the individual have? How can a single soul apply logic to the data the greatest minds and greatest computers develop and decide what is right and what is wrong? Is anyone surprised that politicians and experts polarise opinion of the subject? Rightly or wrongly emotion is the tool used to persuade because there simply isn't any other tool to use. What the majority now agree on is there is going to be an accident, we're getting different scenes of it and few have lingering hopes there won't be a calamity. Like any accident it might be superficial repairable damage, or it might just be a destructive head on collision. If it's the latter, we might not get to see the slow motion replay.

 

[gauchecritic]

And fear is in the eye of the beholder.

...and so is beauty. Does this mean we should fear beauty?

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Hello Pot? this is Roxanne. I think you're prolly black.
Do you even know what the difference is between the (presumably) catastrophic effects of a 20 foot rise in sea level vs. a rise of a foot? Do you know what consequences the UN study predicts based on a foot of sea-level rise?

Here's the Exec summary. Sea level rise takes up about a page out of seventeen in the report.

Ah, the notorious "executive summary." Written not by scientists, but by UN bureacrats who understand the issue perfectly - "How can we shift more power to ourselves and our member governments."

'demonize' isn't quite right; maybe 'infantilize' or 'depict as mush' would be more accurate.

They're calling individuals who haven't bought in, "Global Warming denyers."

 

[cantdog]

And fear is in the eye of the beholder.

Laughing my ass off here, man. Fear of expense!

Like the Amityville Horror or The Money Pit! People watching the flix in horror--the expense! Oh my Jesus, the fuckin expense!

Wow.

 

[cantdog]

I agree that most of those who look to lead the masses in this world have NO idea what it is like to be one of us... Are they evil? Personally, I don't think so much...initially well-intentioned most likely! But such world they wander in looks to corrupt to protect it's greed...and the rewards for such far outweigh the potential negative consequences if you are able/willing to choose your "friends" wisely by their standards...lol.

STILL though...we seem here to have the most success at providing for the poorest among us...that can't be denied. So what's to complain about? What a conundrum, huh? A messy thing really. Mud puddle...unclear waters.

Once you rise to the level of the big boys, there are no rules. Everyone complains that these people act like they are above the law. But they are, in the main, just that. And the greater part of these people are pretty ruthless already by the time they get to where they run with the big dogs.

No one can do everything. I don't foresee taking up violin. Too much time is being used up by sleeping, eating, shitting and such, plus various acts of service to friends and family I get involved in, and then there's a bit of time which I can reasonably direct. I have to figure the big boys suffer from the same sort of time limitations.

I bet they are going to use that time in big dog kinds of games, moving and acting in that milieu of powerful jackals carving each other bloody. Given that, I bet "providing for the poorest among us" is not going to receive a lot of attention.

Not until the poorest and others make themselves a big pain in the ass to these big dogs. The Dust Bowl and depression years, things got fuckin BAD. The big dogs had to give a certain amount of attention to the poorest, for a minute. But barring some such condition of generalized riot and disruption they don't give a fuck and they aren't going to.

Now as to your last paragraph, who is it who is 'having the best success,' again? Have you checked out Africa? Iraq? Haiti?

 

[cantdog]

On the topic, here, I have to agree with Liar's assessment, and Neon's, taken together. Rox has a feeling Gore is acting like a demagogue. Well? Maybe he is. He has positioned himself as a champion of this effort. He will, consequently, rise to the extent that the movement lifts him.

But people, not the big dogs but people at large, are not going to sit around, all the same, and let fear of expense prevent implementation of some of these things. Hell, people at large don't have any money, anyhow. These expenses are going to have to be fronted by people with fuckin money.

We will not have big amounts of cheap energy out of fossil fuels, not any more. The orgy of burning of them which we have done is already having noticeable consequences, none of which are good. You can stand in the way or you can help out, but it's coming. Whether or not Gore is worthy as a champion is not really the central fact. We are going to become a pain in the big dogs' collective ass until some subset of this is addressed in a convincing manner.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Not until the poorest and others make themselves a big pain in the ass to these big dogs.

I'd rather they make themselves well off, productive and satisfied. I don't mind arranging things to make that easier and more likely.

That may sound like a snark, but it's not. It's a different way of looking at the world, one that is more hopeful and effective in ultimately seeing the values we share reflected in the world we live in.

Look at the other way of looking at things as expressed in your post. You're actually hoping that things will get really bad so that desperate people will force the "big dogs" to "give a fuck." Bad model, my friend.

Human civilization has never been where it is today, rapidly growing in wealth, knowledge and potential sufficient to bring every human being up to a standard that offers comfort, security and the satisfactions that only come from being a productive, contributing member of society to the extent one's abilities permit.

That won't happen as a result of self-serving politicians seeking greater power to arrange people's lives and redistribute their property. Indeed, putting your hope in anything like this is a guarantee that it will be broken. In contrast, the alternative model expressed in everything I say here has a realistic chance of getting us out of that box.

 

[cantdog]

I'd rather they make themselves well off, productive and satisfied. I don't mind arranging things to make that easier and more likely.

That may sound like a snark, but it's not. It's a different way of looking at the world, one that is more hopeful and effective in ultimately seeing the values we share reflected in the world we live in.

Look at the other way of looking at things as expressed in your post. You're actually hoping that things will get really bad so that desperate people will force the "big dogs" to "give a fuck." Bad model, my friend.

Human civilization has never been where it is today, rapidly growing in wealth, knowledge and potential sufficient to bring every human being up to a standard that offers comfort, security and the satisfactions that only come from being a productive, contributing member of society to the extent one's abilities permit.

That won't happen as a result of self-serving politicians seeking greater power to arrange people's lives and redistribute their property. Indeed, putting your hope in anything like is a guarantee that it will be broken. In contrast, the alternative model expressed in everything I say here has a realistic chance of getting us out of that box.

Well, here are two models. The New Deal and the French Revolution. The New Deal, the big dogs acted to make it easier for people to live, on the lower rungs. Since they did that, they remained on top. The Revolution? They did not act except to launch the army at the populace, and they did not remain on top. Another model? Haiti. They acted to remove hope and kill people off with disease and starvation, and the people starved and died.

I'm afraid the Haiti model is the usual way it goes. You may wish to make it easier for prosperity to become general, Rox, but you ain't a big dog. It's the money that determines what most people do with their day. You get up in the morning, and your actions are conditioned by parameters set by the money. Those guys have more influence than your model. You do have to get their attention.

 

[cantdog]

Huck? I liked your deconstruction of the rhetoric, dude. Cogent and well written.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Well, here are two models. The New Deal and the French Revolution. The New Deal, the big dogs acted to make it easier for people to live, on the lower rungs. Since they did that, they remained on top. The Revolution? They did not act except to launch the army at the populace, and they did not remain on top. Another model? Haiti. They acted to remove hope and kill people off with disease and starvation, and the people starved and died.

I'm afraid the Haiti model is the usual way it goes. You may wish to make it easier for prosperity to become general, Rox, but you ain't a big dog. It's the money that determines what most people do with their day. You get up in the morning, and your actions are conditioned by parameters set by the money. Those guys have more influence than your model. You do have to get their attention.

Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, India, Ireland, the increasingly economically vibrant southern states - there's your model. Look at where these places were 50 years ago, and today. The French Revolution and Haiti? Expand your horizons - as a species we've never been where we are now. Let's stop pretending that we're still living in the 18th C, or the 5th C for that matter. Let's look around and realistically take stock of possibilities and potentialities that never existed before. The "pie" is growing much faster than it ever has before, and a greater proportion of the world's population have a seat at the table than every before.

That means something, Cant. It's not the 1930s, or the 1790s, and the world is not Haiti. It's Hong Kong - another island with zero resources that has gone in a polar opposite direction, and shown what's possible.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

When the Suypremes handed Bush the White House an Gore just rolled over and accepted it, I thought, "What a fucking wimp!" I thought he should have kicked and screamed and fought for it.

Then, just a few months ago, I read an interview where he said that he considered that and a lot of people urged him to do just that, but that refusing to accept a decision of the Supreme Court is tantamount to a declaration of anarchy, and he refused to put the nation through that. I realized he was right.

That's a pretty ballsy decision.

Since then he's been out playing Jeremiah in the wilderness, being laughed at and rediculed, warning everyone about these climate issues, something we now know is incontrovertibly true and is of immense and devastating consequence. He put his ass on the line there, something no other politician I can think of would have done.

We may not know exactly how much of the effect is due to human intervention but we definitely know enough to know that action is needed and it's needed now. There is no fucking doubt on that point, despite these lame-ass theories of climate scientists trying to take over the world. We wouldn't know it if it weren't for Al Gore.

I'm reading a book called Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq. It's by a reporter named T. Christian Miller of the LA Times. You want to be sick to your stomach about what goes in Washington? You want to see what kind of ethics and honesty and concern for the common weal and welfare we have? And these are the people we have to trust? They're pigs at a fucking trough.

The time for fucking around is over.

I want someone in Washington who knows what's going on and has the courage of his convictions. WHo's spent the last 4 years standing up for an issue and not kissing political ass and making promises. ALl these other presidential candidates - they're falling all over themselves trying to find out what they have to say to get elected. Gore's the only one who already has a message, which puts him miles ahead of the others as far as I'm concerend.

The old game is already over, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. How well we make it through the transition depends on how soon we start doing something about it, and so far we've been doing nothing but wasting time.

 

[Huckleman2000]

Jaysys and the disciples in a champgne jacuzzi.
[snip]
Do I make myself clear now?

Yes. Sorry I snapped.

You may be right about the rhetorical techniques in Gore's film, but I think your next post is more to the point -

In fact, I'm not sure more logic and reason is a good thing in the climate case. Logic and science is what climatologists have been trying that for decades, with minimal impact on the public opinion. It's only until now, when Al Gore steps in, guns blazing, with a slick media package and the mother of all Powerpoint presentations, a loud and boisterous show where accuracy has been rationalized away to make way for emotional effect, that people are starting to get the point.

Propaganda? Yes. But maybe the ends justify the means.

Taken in isolation, Gore's film is meant to stir action, to convince viewers. Of course it will use the techniques of persuasion and emotional appeal. That's what film does. You may as well criticize a drill for making holes in things.

I don't think that the fact that he made a convincing film takes away from his point that there is too much emotion and not enough reason in political discourse. As someone else pointed out, Gore was a bit of a cold fish in most election speeches. Even now, when he speaks with some passion, he still takes pains to construct a reasonably coherent argument. He's no wild-eyed populist.

 

[cantdog]

Funny, I thought slightly over 70% of the world had incomes of two dollars a day or less? I thought several studies showed increasing concentrations of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer?

See, it's the one- and two- dollar incomes, and less, where your story breaks down. It is of course not possible to live, in the streets of Milwaukee, as an example, with a total income of five cents a day. And if you got sick!

Those people do live, though. It's because they are engaged in activities best characterized as subsistence. To farm or herd, trap or fish well enough to live and reproduce, there has to be water, land, or habitat enough. If an oil exploiting setup goes in, suddenly 'jobs' exist where none did before, and vast amounts of 'pie' get made. That's because subsistence is not a job, and it shows up in the stats as a paradoxical population somehow living on zero income. The subsistence folks are displaced, the tailings and crap from the oil outfit poisons the land and water, life gets more and more tenuous for the displaced ones, who have no money, no clout, and never did have a job.

It used to be the land they were subsisting on that the oil outfit is sitting on.

This is a vibrant picture of an expanding pie, but it is at the same time a story of a corporate invasion of an area, causing large numbers of people to die of disease and starvation. Does the oil consortium give a fuck about those people? It is to laugh. Are they going to? Um, not until they are forced to.

 

[neonlyte]

When the Suypremes handed Bush the White House an Gore just rolled over and accepted it, I thought, "What a fucking wimp!" I thought he should have kicked and screamed and fought for it.

Then, just a few months ago, I read an interview where he said that he considered that and a lot of people urged him to do just that, but that refusing to accept a decision of the Supreme Court is tantamount to a declaration of anarchy, and he refused to put the nation through that. I realized he was right.

That's a pretty ballsy decision.

Yep... the structure is in place to protect each of us, he'd have bounced off that wall and gained nothing. This way, he gets to fight the battle again and he's shifted the platform to one he's comfortable with. The question is, how many can he pull along with him and what can he do (if he wins) to change the US status on Global Warming? Too soon for the latter discussion, on my first point, I would think he has a better than even chance of winning as long as he can stay off the second point because no one is going to like the medicine.

The old game is already over, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. How well we make it through the transition depends on how soon we start doing something about it, and so far we've been doing nothing but wasting time.

I'm not so sure the time has been wasted Mab. Slowing Global Warming to something approaching manageable proportions (what ever they are) requires a global consensus. We don't have that yet (China and India) and even those nations convinced something needs to be done cannot agree upon what. Japan proposed new Kyoto levels only this morning, significantly below the levels Europe wishes to set. At this stage, a couple of years doesn't make a huge difference and all the while more individuals are beginning to take measures to reduce their own family energy footprint. Gore's and the US's impact, delivered at the right moment, could help bring China and India on board and that's why I wouldn't want to see him engaged in policy/action detail ahead of the election. Firing too soon might misfire.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Funny, I thought slightly over 70% of the world had incomes of two dollars a day or less? I thought several studies showed increasing concentrations of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer?

See, it's the one- and two- dollar incomes, and less, where your story breaks down. It is of course not possible to live, in the streets of Milwaukee, as an example, with a total income of five cents a day. And if you got sick!

Those people do live, though. It's because they are engaged in activities best characterized as subsistence. To farm or herd, trap or fish well enough to live and reproduce, there has to be water, land, or habitat enough. If an oil exploiting setup goes in, suddenly 'jobs' exist where none did before, and vast amounts of 'pie' get made. That's because subsistence is not a job, and it shows up in the stats as a paradoxical population somehow living on zero income. The subsistence folks are displaced, the tailings and crap from the oil outfit poisons the land and water, life gets more and more tenuous for the displaced ones, who have no money, no clout, and never did have a job.

It used to be the land they were subsisting on that the oil outfit is sitting on.

This is a vibrant picture of an expanding pie, but it is at the same time a story of a corporate invasion of an area, causing large numbers of people to die of disease and starvation. Does the oil consortium give a fuck about those people? It is to laugh. Are they going to? Um, not until they are forced to.

Nuh-uh. I don't mean that to your statistics - I don't know about that, though 70 percent sounds high, because that describes third world hellholes containing an increasingly shrinking percentage of the worlds population - Africa and the parts of Latin America and south- and central-Asia that are characterized by gross governmental malfeasance.

What I mean is look at the record in places like Korea and vast portions of China and India, where a generation ago everybody lived in that marginal subsistence manner, and today hundreds of millions have or are rapidly moving into the bourgeoisie. Or Ireland, which lost population for 140 years after the famine, turning around only when they adopted new models and policies. Or even Turkey, I think, compared to where it was one or two generations ago. Take your focus off whether the rich are getting richer - of course they are - and look at what's happening to the broad mass of the population.

(I addressed this more fully in a slow-motion discussion with Gauche, here: http://forum.literotica.com/showpost.php?p=22788129&postcount=96)

 

[R. Richard]

Dr_M:
You are obviously an intelligent man. You are, I believe a college graduate, perhaps even the holder of an advanced degree(s). You have wide ranging interests, including music and the environment. You now want to use sound, scientific, rational thinking.

OK, let's set up a chess match between you, using sound, scientific, rational thinking and a high school dropout [since he is a high school dropout, he must use unsound, emotional thinking.] Chess is a difficult intellectual exercise, requiring both tactical and strategic thinking. Clearly, using sound, scientific, rational thinking you would be able to easily defeat Bobby Fisher, right?

OK, you can't even begin to match up with a specialist in his area of specialty.

Now, Al Gore has decided that we must cut carbon emissions in order to save the world. If Al Gore has a theme song, it is the Kyoto Protocols. [Ol' Al couldn't even get Blowjob Bill to submit the Kyoto Protocols to Congress. However, ol' Al, in a beau geste, signed to Kyoto Protocols himself. Wow!]

Now, why don't you use sound, scientific, rational thinking to anlyze the economic impact of the Kyoto Protocols on the economy of the United States? [Remember, the Chinese economy is exempt from the restrictions of the Kyoto Protocols. Also remember that the Canadians, after deliberation, have abandoned their committment to the Kyoto Protocols. Hint: The effects would be devastating.]

Now then, using sound, scientific, rational thinking, you will also need to analyze the probable effects of the Kyoto Protocols on global warming. In order to analyze the effects of the Kyoto Protocols on global warming, you will need to analyze the theories that global warming is a cyclical phenomena, tied to solar heating/cooling cycles. You will also need to analyze the impact of allowing the Chinese to disregard the Kyoto Protocols.

Let me give you some background. Around the year 1000AD, the northmen were able to colonize Greenland, due to a global warming trend. They arrived in Greenland and set up a typical northman economy, based upon fishing, grain farming and livestock raising. By around the year 1300AD, the northmen were driven out of Greenland because of a global cooling trend that made it impossible to survive using their traditional economy. [The Inuit stayed and did well, using another economy.] Was the global cooling due to an early version of the Kyoto Protocols? Use sound, scientific, rational thinking here.

During the American Revolutionary War, it is well documented that cavalry units were able to ride across frozen streams in the middle of winter. I have seen some of the streams in the middle of winter just a few years ago. Think swimming, not riding.

In the 1980s there were books written that predicted that if we didn't do something about global warming, we could moor boats to the Washington Monument within 20 years. It has been 20 years. The conditions around the Washington Monument are currently not good for the establishment of a marina.

Having stood up many times in this forum on the side of stark, raving illogical lunacy as opposed to sound, scientific, rational thinking, I just wanted to go on record to show that I know the difference between the two and know when it's time to stop screwing around and get serious about things.

The problems we face as a nation demand solid dispassionate scientific answers, and its looking to me more and more like Al Gore is really the guy who might have them.

Someone's going to have to clean up this mess.

Direct quote from Steven G Brant article on an Al Gore radio interview. My highlighting:
===========

Here are two things I took away from what Al said last night:

(1) The vast majority of the American people are being hugely misdirected away from the subject matter that counts by the demands of our modern communications system to make money and the knowledge by that system that emotion-driven stories lock people into a mindset that allows them to be "sold to" better than stories that force people to think (my way of summing up this point), and

(2) The America people have it within their power to redirect this system so that it gives them the information they need, once enough of them wake up to the danger posed by the continuation of the current system's emphasis on "emotion" rather than "reason" (again, my way of summing up Al's point).

In writing The Assault on Reason, [Gore] hopes to wake us all up to the danger of continuing the anti-fact and anti-truth, emotion-driven thinking habits we have slipped into since television became a dominant part of our culture. (Last night he mentioned the Nixon -- Kennedy debate of 1960 as one of the early markers of this journey, when image began to be as important to the public as substance.) He realizes that unless we regain the ability to focus on facts and truth (I would call it science instead of pseudo-science), we will fail to address the challenge of global climate change, something we are rapidly running out of time to deal with.

...

If we start to think differently... if a critical mass of Americans starts asking questions like "What do we really, scientifically know how to do?", "How much better could things be if our political and business leaders did what's possible rather than what's easy?", and "Is it true that one of the root causes of war is scarcity of food, water, shelter, and education... and that mankind now has the ability to provide all of those basic needs to everyone on Earth?"... we can get to that better world that - great "wonk" that he is -- Al Gore knows is possible. There are scientifically-proven methods -- many of which have enormous money-making potential as detailed here , by Amory Lovins, and here , by Bill McDonough - for getting us not just out of this mess but to a much, much better future. It's possible. We have the technology!

"Thinking differently" is a critical part of the solution. Using reason and logic -- rather than emotional manipulation and "vote for me and I'll protect you" daddy-ism -- is the route to the future we all say we want.

 

[neonlyte]

RR - it is reasonably well established from Greenland ice core samples (Carbon 14 dating) and low radiocarbon levels in tree rings from the period that the temperature rise around 1000AD was largely due to solar activity. Texas University has conducted studies modeling solar activity and volcanic activity to mirror the the carbon dating information, the models hold true up to the 1850's when the temperature gradient begins to deviate from the predicted path and requires a new component to balance the readings. It is suggested that 'industrialised man' is the new component.

Either way it matters little. The atmosphere is warming. It's ok if doesn't bother you.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Is Global Warming a Sin?
Alexander Cockburn
The Nation, May 14, 2007 - http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070514&s=cockburn

In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others less virtuous than themselves.

The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind's sinful contribution--and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed.

Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slow arc. The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. It starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e., 1.1 billion metric tons), and peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, plummets into the Great Depression and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 percent drop. Then, in 1933, the line climbs slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.

And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That's the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it's at 380. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 percent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn't even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere's CO2. It is thus impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil fuels.

I met Martin Hertzberg, PhD, the man who drew that graph and those conclusions, on a Nation cruise back in 2001. He remarked that while he shared many of The Nation's editorial positions, he approved of my reservations on the question of human contributions to global warming, as outlined in columns I wrote around that time. Hertzberg was a meteorologist for three years in the Navy, an occupation that gave him a lifelong mistrust of climate modeling. Trained in chemistry and physics, a combustion research scientist for most of his career, he's retired now in Copper Mountain, Colorado, but still consults from time to time.

Not so long ago, Hertzberg sent me some of his recent papers on the global warming hypothesis, a thesis now accepted by many progressives as infallible as Papal dogma on matters of faith. Among them was the graph described above, so devastating to the hypothesis.

As Hertzberg readily acknowledges, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased about 21 percent in the past century. The world has also been getting just a little warmer. The not-very-reliable data on the world's average temperature (which omit data from most of the world's oceans and remote regions, while overrepresenting urban areas) show about a 0.5 degree Celsius increase between 1880 and 1980, and still rising. But is CO2, at 380 ppm in the atmosphere, playing a significant role in retaining the 94 percent of solar radiation that the atmosphere absorbs, as against water vapor, also a powerful heat absorber, whose content in a humid tropical atmosphere can be as high as 20,000 ppm? As Hertzberg says, water in the form of oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor "is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the Earth and the sun.... Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane." And water is exactly that component of the Earth's heat balance that the global warming computer models fail to account for.

It's a notorious inconvenience for the Greenhousers that data also show CO2 concentrations from the Eocene period, 20 million years before Henry Ford trundled out his first Model T, 300 to 400 percent higher than current concentrations. The Greenhousers deal with other difficulties, like the medieval warming period's higher-than-today temperatures, by straightforward chicanery, misrepresenting tree ring data (themselves an unreliable guide) and claiming the warming was a local European affair.

We're warmer now because today's world is in the thaw following the recent ice age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive, all due to predictable changes in the Earth's elliptical orbit round the sun and in the Earth's tilt. As Hertzberg explains, the clinical heat effect of all of these variables was worked out in great detail between 1915 and 1940 by Milutin Milankovitch, a giant of twentieth-century astrophysics. In past post-glacial cycles, as now, the Earth's orbit and tilt give us more and longer summer days between the equinoxes.

Water covers 71 percent of Earth's surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there's 100 times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. "The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards," Hertzberg concludes. "It is the warming of the Earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse." In vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that for the last 750,000 years, CO2 changes have always lagged behind global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.

It looks like Poseidon should go hunting for carbon credits. The human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces and volumes, not to mention the role of the giant reactor beneath our feet: the Earth's increasingly hot molten core.

Next: Who are the hoaxers, and what are they after?

 

[neonlyte]

Is Global Warming a Sin?
Alexander Cockburn
The Nation, May 14, 2007 - http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070514&s=cockburn

And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That's the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it's at 380. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 percent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn't even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere's CO2. It is thus impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil fuels.

As Hertzberg readily acknowledges, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased about 21 percent in the past century. The world has also been getting just a little warmer. The not-very-reliable data on the world's average temperature (which omit data from most of the world's oceans and remote regions, while overrepresenting urban areas) show about a 0.5 degree Celsius increase between 1880 and 1980, and still rising. But is CO2, at 380 ppm in the atmosphere, playing a significant role in retaining the 94 percent of solar radiation that the atmosphere absorbs, as against water vapor, also a powerful heat absorber, whose content in a humid tropical atmosphere can be as high as 20,000 ppm? As Hertzberg says, water in the form of oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor "is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the Earth and the sun.... Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane." And water is exactly that component of the Earth's heat balance that the global warming computer models fail to account for.

It's a notorious inconvenience for the Greenhousers that data also show CO2 concentrations from the Eocene period, 20 million years before Henry Ford trundled out his first Model T, 300 to 400 percent higher than current concentrations. The Greenhousers deal with other difficulties, like the medieval warming period's higher-than-today temperatures, by straightforward chicanery, misrepresenting tree ring data (themselves an unreliable guide) and claiming the warming was a local European affair.

We're warmer now because today's world is in the thaw following the recent ice age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive, all due to predictable changes in the Earth's elliptical orbit round the sun and in the Earth's tilt. As Hertzberg explains, the clinical heat effect of all of these variables was worked out in great detail between 1915 and 1940 by Milutin Milankovitch, a giant of twentieth-century astrophysics. In past post-glacial cycles, as now, the Earth's orbit and tilt give us more and longer summer days between the equinoxes.

Water covers 71 percent of Earth's surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there's 100 times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. "The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards," Hertzberg concludes. "It is the warming of the Earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse." In vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that for the last 750,000 years, CO2 changes have always lagged behind global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.

Next: Who are the hoaxers, and what are they after?

It's a rare thing to see a man's bollocks get in the way of his mouth (or his typewriter) Did he actually read this before sending it for publication?

Next: Who is the hoaxer and what is he after?

 

[rgraham666]

Who are the hoaxers and what are they after?

I can answer that one.

It's the statists. They're using the fear created by global warming to scare people into changing their habits so that the economy is destroyed creating the conditions for a Socialist one-world government to be installed.

 

[R. Richard]

RR - it is reasonably well established from Greenland ice core samples (Carbon 14 dating) and low radiocarbon levels in tree rings from the period that the temperature rise around 1000AD was largely due to solar activity. Texas University has conducted studies modeling solar activity and volcanic activity to mirror the the carbon dating information, the models hold true up to the 1850's when the temperature gradient begins to deviate from the predicted path and requires a new component to balance the readings. It is suggested that 'industrialised man' is the new component.

Either way it matters little. The atmosphere is warming. It's ok if doesn't bother you.

It may well be that 'industrialised man' is a new and critical component. However, we need to define 'industrialised man.' Is 'industrialised man' a factory or a power plant? Is 'industrialised man' a farmer in the Amazom basin who is practicing slash and burn agriculture? Is 'industrialised man' the Chinese government who will allow damn near anything, as long as it contributes to the economic well being of China?

I was a computer programmer. I have talked to guys who were working in the space effort in the early years. There was a guy, at the time, who was desperately afraid that the US would spread Earth microbes to other worlds. The guy had enough clout that all spacecraft components had to be sterilized before being used in a space shot. The sterialization process was an enormous headache for the space effort and caused many failures in early space shots. However, we were doing the right thing!

Then, it was discovered that the Russians had never heard of any such nonsense. They were shooting unsterialized components into space. The sterialization guy's comeback was, "Well, at least we aren't doing it!" It only takes one guy pissing in the drinking water to create a problem.

If you want to stop global warming, the whole world has to be on board. The whole world is not on board.

As an example, Al Gore lives in a 20 room house that is a carbon footprint disaster area. However, Al Gore buys 'carbon offsets' to zero out his carbon footprint. Who does Al Gore buy the carbon offsets form? Why, he buys them from Al Gore, or at least a company in which Al Gore is an executive. What are these carbon offsets? Why Al Gore and his buddies buy stock in companies that are supposedly producing less than their share of carbon and that makes Al Gore's carbon footpriont disaster lifestyle OK so that he can jet around the world [carbon footprint disaster] preaching to others to reduce their carbon footprint. Yeah, right.

Before I make any decision about global warming, I would first need to see a realistic evaluation of the total impact upon the world from global warming before I decide what my stance might be. I am unaware of any such realistic evaluation, although I have requested one.

 

[amicus]

While, with the Indianapolis 500 in the background, (I multi-task), with three women drivers, (hoping for Danica once again), I mused over Mabuese and his "fucking" rant: "...The problems we face as a nation demand solid dispassionate scientific answers, and its looking to me more and more like Al Gore is really the guy who might have them..."

I read, with some small amusement, each post and Roxanne's final pasting of an article and then the ole Amicus chortled out loud and bows in appreciation to the article and Roxanne as she deftly applied the 'coup d'grace', to Mab and the other apologists for Gore and the livid left.

Not just the 'coup d'grace' did Roxanne administer, nay my friends, with a broadsword no less, she lopped off the entire head of the beast and exposed the slimy, slithering black things that squirmed forth and headed for the dark corners of obscurity.

Usually the livid left denigrates 'logic and reason' as being insufficient to discover truth without a good dose of subjective emotion and hissy fits.

They deny any referent to 'absolutes', or axiomatic, self evident 'truths', as those inconvenient truths hinder the progress towards a true egalitarian society under the boot of the socialism so loved by the left.

Presenting us with only a 'one dimensional' vision of the application of logic and reason, they fear another, 'final solution', that of the genocide of the Jews, (and others), by the 'logic and reason', of an efficient extermination and disposal system created from logic, reason and science, that bogeyman of the emotional, compassionate left.

Critical thinking, in any field, based on a faulty premise, is subject to false conclusions regardless of how well the laws of logic, reason and rationality are adhered to.

The left has almost an inherited hatred of all things industrial and mechanical. They hate modern society and modern man and pathetically yearn for a pastoral,agrarian society of old.

Roxanne, my distant and aloof friend, I have been battling the eco freaks on all fronts for over forty years and I bequeath the continuing battle to you and those similar to you and R.Richard, and wish you all the best.

The leader of the band is tired and his eyes are going dim but he takes heart from your efforts.

Keep up the good work.

amicus...

 

[neonlyte]

Hey.. Ami,

I wondered where you'd been. How's things in your part of Utopia?

That Cockburn... quite the guy... eh?

 

[amicus]

neonlyte]Hey.. Ami,

I wondered where you'd been. How's things in your part of Utopia?

That Cockburn... quite the guy... eh?

[/I]

~~~

Hi, Neon, good to see you. Something ate 18 tomato plants I grew from seed. I got a posse together, armed them and we are on a hunt for the dastardly devil.

ami...

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Question for Roxanne

I'm just curious here. This

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is often taken as providing the definitive scientific data on the whole problem of climate change. They're a UN group comprising 2500 scientific experts in their fields, 850+ authors, hundreds of reviewers from 40 countries, backing of over 100 different nations, &c. &c.

Two of their lead findings, taken verbatim from The Wikipedia entry:

--Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

--Most of (>50% of) the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (confidence level >90%) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.

Now, we've crossed swords before on the subject of science and technology, and you might have me down as anti-technology but I'm not, not really (just anti thinking-it-will-fix-everything. ) And here's a place where I'm entirely content to leave it up to the experts to tell me what's what. When they tell me that we're part of the problem, I believe them, and yet you don't. Why?

I don't think you're so naive as to believe that "consensus" business you bring up concerning global warming. You certainly must know that scientific theories rarely have 100% scientific consensus, especially at the stage in their development that the anthrophogenic contribution to global warming is.

(In fact, I just heard something interesting. There's more consensus among climate scientists that humans contribute to global warming than there is among medical researchers that viruses cause AIDS. Apparently some AIDS researchers still think its caused by gay sex and bathhouses. But you wouldn't expose yourself to the AIDS virus because there isn't 100% consesnus, would you?)

As far as discrepancy among the numbers in the predictions and models, that's entirely to be expected too. Modeling is terribly imprecise and difficult and the failure of models is not disproof.

But meanwhile, to believe that what the IPCC report says is wrong, you have to convince yourself that these perfectly reputable climate scientists are engaged in some insane hoax that borders on absolute paranoia, putting their careers and reputations at risk, lying and falsifying data as if they were members of the Bush administration getting ready to invade a foreign country.

Is this your idea of scientific objectivity? You don't think maybe you have some tiny little bias?