Climate change
Greenwood Village
This letter has not been edited.
Chris, you make me want to cry, you really do.
Mainstream media mostly print what is catchy, easy to articulate, thrilling, and above all, earns the most advertising dollars. They are certainly not a good reflection of science.
If you want to know what the best minds in science think then you need to go to sources other than Newsweek: instead try Science, Nature, Scientific American, or others in that realm.
The political bias is very clear, but in the opposite direction to what you think. Large corporations like Exxonmobil have tried very hard to obfuscate and raise fog around issues of climate change – to the extent that several august scientific bodies have called them out on it after studying their behavior for some time.
The big issue isn’t whether the outcome is hothouse earth or ice-age but rather that human activities are significantly driving the currently observed change. This is not much debated anymore amongst the relevant scientists, we are now at consensus that human activities are a significant factor and the “debate” is now about what the exact effects are likely to be, how much, how long, how soon.
We are seeing things change more rapidly than the geological history seems to have ever recorded, and we are seeing mechanisms at play that are happening sooner and to a greater degree than previously expected.
Things like rapid retreat of glaciers, the breakup of a major ice-shelf, and changes in ocean temperature and acid level.
The “mountains of evidence” that show natural episodes of warming and cooling are not denied, and in fact this is freely and abundantly acknowledged in the sciences, but it’s what we see over and above the natural that is causing the stir.
It is the man-made effects on top of natural ones that we are seeing as significant and potent drivers of the current climate changes.
I cannot stress this enough – we acknowledge and know of the natural climatic episodes, but it is the man-made effects on top of that that we see as the major driving force behind currently detected and observed climate change.
Finally, about the direction of the change.
For many decades we have suspected that things are happening, and indeed it looked like we were heading towards cooling. This is because like a long and complicated train of interconnecting gears, we could see significant movements, but deciphering which way the final gear would turn depends on correctly reading how each one in the chain affects the next. Skip a gear or miss the relationship and the predicted outcome goes the wrong way.
However, what has been clear for a long time was that the final gear was going to move, we just didn’t know the direction.
We are more certain about the direction now because we are seeing the really big effects like large glacial retreat, and ice-shelves breaking up – things that take huge amounts of energy.
So please Chris, read Science or Nature for the real dope. They are at your local library, and you can even check out copies prior to the current edition.
You don’t need to be a climatologist, but you do need to be well informed, and the odd glance through a Newsweek article just wont do it.
www.aaas.org
Aass Member - there's a lot of other information out there that disputes your theories.
1) Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, by physicist Fred Singer and economist Dennis Avery was released just before Christmas.
2) The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark and former BBC science writer Nigel Calder (Icon Books), is due out in March.
3) William Gray, the foremost authority on hurricanes right here locally is one of the biggest critics on GW alarmism. He's the one who laughed at the alarmists 2006 hurricane predictions as completely blown out of proportation.
There's some great discussion already taking shape. Get involved in this great debate rather than label disenters as deniers and sell outs to big oil.
Posted by KW on January 30, 2007 11:13 AMKW, you seem to be under the misapprehension that I was offering a theory.
My post explained what the current consensus amongst climate scientists is, how the process of science works, and where the best sources are to read more.
There is no debate in the actual science of climate change for me to be involved in since I have neither done any basic research nor published any original climatological theoretical work.
Discussion and debate is between people engaged at that level whereas my only contribution is to try to pick holes in basic science techniques or methods, or comment on articles or letters in the media that seem to have misunderstood or misrepresented the current science.
So I am unsure what kind of “great discussion” you are suggesting I should participate in other than to explain to the public what the current thinking and positions are or to correct common misunderstandings of what the current theories and explanations are.
I am happy to do this, but then they could do it themselves by reading publications like Science and Nature, and if not, then the next tier publications like Scientific American etc. These are all quite readable as opposed to the tier-1 specialist journals that admittedly may be a bit opaque to those outside the scientific niche of climatology and geoscience.
The books you propose are fine and good as examples of people disagreeing with the current consensus, Fred Singer is a regular letter-writer to Science magazine and he certainly pounds away as an advocate of his organization’s position. I don’t think that a steady diet of such a writer to try to somehow “balance” the views is the right approach though. I would suggest that you rather assimilate the broad agreements and findings than try to find disagreeing voices.
Finally, I label naysayers based on what they say, and I point at “big oil” where they have been exposed for malfeasance, nothing more. The Royal Society amongst others has leveled a finger of blame against Exxon specifically for funding naysayers merely to provide “chaff” to obscure issues.
KW have you actually read those books or did you just read about those books on the Drudge Report, hardly an objective source.
Posted by Sean on January 30, 2007 11:30 PMMost climate scientists have only studied thermodynamics and meteorology and because of that favor greenhouse gases as the cause for global warming.
If you are a researcher today in any natural science, then a good step to take is to add the word global warming to your research paper and in your academic thesis. It will make sure you get your paper published in peer review publication. You can then advance in your academic career and get a higher salary.
At a Danish TV show about Henrik Svensmark’s works which I saw, he was interviewed. He told that when he presented his theory about 10 years ago at a conference it created a very strong emotional reaction from climatologists and that the head of IPCC even told him that the work he was doing was irresponsible.
Posted by Per Strandberg on March 3, 2007 04:43 PM