You know, after reading about Rep. Stark coming out of the closet on his atheism, or at least lack of belief in a supreme being, I started thinking about courage. I mean, it must have taken a lot of courage to come out as an atheist in this day and age of atheism persecution in America, especially for a Democrat in the San Fransisco Bay area.
After being inspired by Stark’s level of courage, I decided that it is time that I, too, come clean about the heretic that I am.
I do not believe in man-made global warming.
I was sort of on the fence, as it seemed the science really did back it up, but I had my reservations. Most of those reservations stemmed from the fact that any opposition to the Church of Global Warming is met with name-calling and death-threats, as opposed to rational debate. It’s a little too fundamentalist for my taste. I had to set out on my own to seek the truth for myself.
Well, today, I finally had the chance. I have a little, and long overdue, break from mom/teacher/cook/housekeeper/nurse/referee duty today, so I decided to watch this UK documentary about global warming.
I was expecting mediocrity and, as a result, to be left still wondering what the real truth is.
What I found instead was real science that actually disproves man-made global warming.
The documentary is a little long (about an hour and 15 minutes), but I am glad I took the time.
I can’t do a full run-down of the film because I have to prepare for my show this evening, but the most shocking revelation was about the science used in “An Inconvenient Truth.”
The scientists in the film, one of which was the Arctic paleoclimatologist who performed the ice core survey used to support CO2-caused global warming, agreed that Al Gore was correct when he stated that there is a correlation historically between CO2 levels and global temperature. What was startling was what Gore did not say, that the rise in CO2 follows the rise in temperature (sometimes by several hundred years). Ergo, my dear readers, the CO2 cannot be causing the rise in temperature.
The film does not stop there. It explains why CO2 levels rise following temperature increase and, brace yourselves, it offers an alternative theory that is backed up using independently gathered scientific data.
There was a scientist that thought the periods of warming historically, because there have been periods of greater warming than this, way before industrialization, might be related to the solar activity.
See, clouds are formed when cosmic (non-solar) rays interact with water vapor in the atmosphere. Clouds keep the earth cooler. When the sun is more active, the solar winds push those cosmic rays away from the earth. The theory is: More solar activity => less cosmic rays come to earth => fewer clouds are formed => warmer temperatures.
To test this, they gathered the historical temperature data and charted that against the historical sun activity data. They found that the correlation was dead on.
Here is a screen shot of a graphic in the film showing historic temperature vs. CO2 levels compared to the temperature vs. sun activity.
There was so much more, but this was I think the most damning piece of information in the film.
I could not in good conscience stay silent about this information after I watched the end of the film, where they addressed the fact that the real victims of global warming hysteria are the people in poor, undeveloped areas, who do not even have electricity, but are being told that they cannot burn the fossil fuels that they have in abundance because we need to err on the side of caution on the issue of man-made global warming.
If you watch no other part of this film, I urge you to view the last 15 minutes.
I know, I know. How dare I question? How dare I speak such blasphemy? Put up the stake and start the fire.
(A very, very big hat-tip to the Chanman for the link to the documentary.)
March 16th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Big whup. You don’t believe in evolution either.
March 17th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
WRONG AGAIN. At least you’re consistent. You really need to do your homework and not let your biases cloud your judgment.
But I still love ya.
March 17th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Two quick points:
1) I detected some not-too-hidden sarcasm in your little bit about “athiest persecution” if you were indeed being sarcastic, I would point out that based on a number of recent studies regarding American’s attitudes towards different minorities, athiests are indeed among the groups that inspire the most social prejudice. This by the way is from a very conservative blog that generally focuses on legal issues, but occasionally strays…
http://volokh.com/archives/arc.....1172018751
if you were not being sarcastic, then this still makes for some interesting reading
2)My wife got a bachelors and a masters in climatalogical geology… She did a lot of the same stuff as the guys who drill into ice looking for historical climate data, but she was drilling into rocks… She says that she (with, remember, 6 years of serious education in the field) doesn’t know enough to make a judgement on the causes of climate change… The sources of data are too numerous, the data itself too complex, and the models too variable for her to pass judgement… With that in mind, I quickly decided that while I’m interested in the problem, I’m never going to be well-versed enough in the subject to have an opinion of my own… All I know is that there are really, really smart folks who have spent their lives studying this and have reached different conclusions… Thinking that you know what’s going on because you watched a 90 minute documentary that was designed to lead you to a particular conclusion is laughable…
And finally, while I don’t know what the cause of climate change is, it does seem to me that we logically have to accept human impact as a possibility, and with that in mind, it seems that reducing our co2 output ain’t a bad idea… Maybe gore etc. are wrong about humans causing climate change, but noone can argue that there’s a lot of other problems that come along with burning loads of fossil fuels (the primary source of co2) like: We have to buy our fossil fuels from pretty unseemly places, I mean do we really want to be giving so much money to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigera, etc…; Other emmitants from the combustion of fossil fuels cause other problems, look at the ones we know about, massive increases in the occurance of athsma in children, skyrocketing cancer rates that have been linked to VOC exposure; and last, but not least, an economic dependance on a single commodity that threatens to destabilize our economy whenever Hugo Chavez, Prince Bandar, George Bush, or Ahmedinnajad (sp?) say something stupid and cause the price of oil to rise…
March 17th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
Anonymous 2:44, thanks for your comments. I was being sarcastic, but I will gladly check out the link you provided.
As for other reasons to reduce CO2 emissions, I support many of the initiatives that are put forth on completely different grounds. The case can be made without the global warming issue. I am going to do a post about that, but the gist is, we would have bipartisan support using other reasons (ie national security).
The thing that angers me is that we are sitting here in the US in homes that have heat, electricity, clean water, and even high-speed internet, yet we are telling the poor people in third world countries that do not even have power that they cannot develop the conveniences that we have because of global warming.
Al Gore can fly around in a private jet and swim in his heated pool, but some poor mother in Africa has to burn dried animal dung in a poorly ventilated house, just to feed her kids. That is an outrage.
I did not base my opinion on that 90 minute documentary alone, but it was influential. Kind of the final push I needed to make up my mind.
I find it interesting that I am getting criticism for basing my opinion on this when so many thousands of people based their opinion on An Inconvenient Truth.
March 17th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
“You really need to do your homework and not let your biases cloud your judgment.“
JD, you make me laugh! You didn’t do your homework. You didn’t watch the documentary, but you relied on what other people said about it.
You quoted in your post,
“We then come to one of the film’s most misleading arguments. Antarctic ice cores show that rises in levels of CO2 have lagged 800 years behind temperature rises at specific times in the geological past. This, argued Durkin, +proves+ that CO2 cannot be responsible for global warming – instead global warming is responsible for increasing levels of CO2. But this was a huge howler.
What Durkin’s film failed to explain was that the 800-year lag happened at the end of ice ages which occur about every 100,000 years.”[Emphasis mine]
The truth is that there was actually another component to his proof that CO2 does not cause global warming.
And, the documentary showed other periods of time when the CO2 followed the temperature rise by only a couple of hundred years. The film did not rely on the 800-year period only.
March 17th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
“I find it interesting that I am getting criticism for basing my opinion on this when so many thousands of people based their opinion on An Inconvenient Truth.”
I think that if you post your opinions on a blog, you are inviting criticism… I love it when people play the “well other people with unfounded opinions aren’t getting the same level of criticism as me” card… If it makes you feel better, I am an equal opportunity criticizer… I’m not criticizing ANYONE’s particular opinion, I’m criticizing people with little or no scientific background, much less knowledge of climatology, which is one of the more complex, inter-diciplinary fields of science who have much of an opinion at all… That’s like me weighing in on the competing interpretations of string theory… It’s retarded for folks like us to even pretend we have a clue… We can listen to the experts, see that there are several interpretations of the data that’s out there, and decide what we’re going to do about it, but acting like it’s even significant what we think about the matter is ludicris….
“yet we are telling the poor people in third world countries that do not even have power that they cannot develop the conveniences that we have because of global warming.”
I’m just curious, who is telling poor people what kind of dung to burn where? I didn’t know that we could tell people in other countries what to do… Who is doing that?
March 17th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Actually, Charity, I did watch a good portion of it. my bullshit-ometer started going off so I decided to look into it some more. The movie gets so much wrong, it’s a joke.Read those sites I pointed to. Thankfully, considering the majority of the science community doesn’t dispute it, things like these won’t really make much of an impact other than to reinforce the misconceptions that people such as yourself have. Your Gore-hatred is clouding your judgment. I suspect if conservatives were ringing the alarm bells, you’d be on board, uncritically.
I find it interesting that I am getting criticism for basing my opinion on this when so many thousands of people based their opinion on An Inconvenient Truth.
Why is that interesting? Even though there are a few flaws to it, it’s infinitely more correct and well-informed than anything you’ve said or pointed to.
Al Gore can fly around in a private jet and swim in his heated pool, but some poor mother in Africa has to burn dried animal dung in a poorly ventilated house, just to feed her kids. That is an outrage
More simplistic, one-dimensional thinking. Al Gore isn’t what’s keeping them burning dung, if anything, the damage wrought by 20th century colonialism, the constant political unrest, unstable governmental systems, and exploitative capitalism have contributed much more than anything Al Gore did. And plus, they’ve been burning dung for thousands of years.. your cultural bias is showing. You burn gasoline. What’s worse? It’s really offensive to assume that they should be living like you.
Another thing that shows you truly don’t grasp the problem: what if all of the people in the Third World lived as Americans do, with all of our ‘conveniences’, wasting, taking more than they ever need, producing the most pollution and such? Things would be ten billion times worse than they already are. Our lifestyle is part of the problem. But God help any conservative that actually has the sense to acknowledge that, they’d get kicked out of the club. I know you don’t get this because you’ve said before that us liberals are just ‘jealous’ of those Hummer drivers, when it doesn’t even occur to you that not all Americans believe the mainstream way of life here is healthy or something worth striving for or emulating.
And if you’re going to try that tired-and-worn-out ‘hypocrite angle’, about Gore’s lifestyle, why hasn’t James Dobson sold his possessions and dropped everything to live poorly amongst the poor, as Jesus did? Why does he continue to be a purveyor of homophobic hate speech? You expect Gore to give up those things as an ‘environmentalist’, is it any less reasonable for me to expect Dobson to give up those things as a ‘Christian’ should?
March 18th, 2007 at 11:41 am
Gee, I wonder if schools will show the UK film along with Al Gore’s.
The gentleman above who admitted that his wife, a climatologist of 6 years experience, is unsure about the claims made concerning Anthropogenic Warming in part because “the models too variable for her to pass judgement” means that the science isn’t settled, in the same way as, say, evolution is or in the same way as Relativity is.
There are no physicists who are ambivalent about Relativity nor are there biologists who dispute the science behind evolution.
This alone should give one pause.
I agree with Carity that there are other, better reasons, for reducing out CO2 emissions and dependence on oil for energy. But the drastic predictions and rhetorical hyperbolie of the converted are not useful.
They are just another form of “Repent! The World is Coming to an End”
March 18th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
JD, my cultural bias? I was referring to the AFRICAN in the film that was talking about how badly they need electricity.
I am not talking about mass consumerism, which I am opposed to and that is no secret. (And I am not afraid of being kicked out of the club for that.)
I am talking about basic life necessities. Yet the environmental police do not want these countries to utilize their coal and oil to meet basic needs because of global warming, yet we can. Who has bias?
Forward to ~ 1:01 on the film for the last segment, which covers this topic. I am not going to reiterate the whole thing.
March 19th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Yeah, we should be promoting coal use(one of the dirtiest sources) in countries with zero environmental protection. Makes a lot of sense.