x

Ohh Nooo!!!

Red Panda Red Panda 9/2/2005

3:30 PM -- Yesterday morning, the President of the United States went on national teevee and said: "I don't think anyone could have anticipated the breach of the levees."

Red Panda's immigration status is somewhat uncertain, so he doesn't want to say this was exactly a "lie." Nor that the remark reveals Mr. Bush, for the umpteenth time, as "dumber than dirt." So let's just comment: "Close, but no stogie."

The fact is, absolutely no one anticipated this tragedy, except of course the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Mayor of New Orleans, and many, many, many, climate scientists, but who listens to what they say? They believe in that "global warming" stuff. 'Nuff said.

But more shocking than the warnings from all those usual suspects is that fact that even Mr. Bill, the animated clay figurine from Saturday Night Live, is smarter than Mr. Bush, the animatronic president-simulacrum.

In a disturbingly prescient ad that CNN aired on May 27, 2004, Mr. Bill shows he has a much better understanding of New Orleans' levee system than Mr. Bush. Then he is eaten by an alligator. Oh nooo!!!

— Red Panda, Picayune Pundit, Light Reading

COMMENTS

Newest First | Oldest First | Threaded View

Add Comment

Page 1 / 39 > >>

dljvjbsl 12/5/2012 | 3:46:57 AM

re: Ohh Nooo!!! http://theaustralian.news.com....

Chris Landsea was the scientist on the IPCC in charge of hurricane studies. He resigned when the chair of the IPCC made scientifically unsupportable statements that linked the inensfication of hurricanes to global warming. Landsea has jsut published a paper in Science which shows that any measured increase in hurricane intensity for the last 30 years is due to an error in which the data was analyzed. Many storms whcih had been categororised as less powerful were in reality category 4 and 5 storms. Thre has been no increase

As Landsea previous position with the IPCC would indicate, he accepts the global warming hypothesis. However it would seem that his acceptance of this hypothesis is conditional on sound scientific evidence and not religious faith.

Do you believe in global warming?

Reply | Post Message | MESSAGES LIST | START A BOARD

rjmcmahon 12/5/2012 | 3:46:57 AM

re: Ohh Nooo!!! Do you believe in global warming?

Hey dljvjbsl,

You seem to be implying that global warming isn't occuring by using the argument that hurricane intensity isn't a scientifically proven effect.

From the article you posted:

"It's not to say that global warming isn't causing changes. I don't dispute the fact that global warming is going on or that it can have an impact on hurricanes," Mr Landsea said.

What exactly are you trying to say?

Reply | Post Message | MESSAGES LIST | START A BOARD

dljvjbsl 12/5/2012 | 3:46:56 AM

re: Ohh Nooo!!! "It's not to say that global warming isn't causing changes. I don't dispute the fact that global warming is going on or that it can have an impact on hurricanes," Mr Landsea said.

What exactly are you trying to say?

Some interesting things are happening with teh so-called scentific consensus surrounding anthropogenic global warming. I had been taught in univiersity astronomy class of the Little Ice Age in which, for example, the Thames regularly froze over. This was related to teh Maunder minimum in which sun spots effectively disappeared and so to possible variations in the solar constant.

Imagine how surprised I was when I read climatologists stating that there had been no Little Age or Medieval Warm Spell. New facts seemed to ahve been developed that indicated that the Earth's climate had been remarkably stable for the last few millenia. This all seemed to be confirmed with the publication of the hockey stick curve by teh IPCC.

Now imagine hoiw even more surprised I am to discover that the hockey stick curve has been discreditted by the NRC. Not only does the curve when properly analyzed show a Little Ice Age, the data behind eh curve is of suchh limited effcicacy that the curve has no predictive value beyond 400 years in the past.

Imagine my other surpise when the mathematics behind the curve was analyzed by a committee of statisticians and found to be entirley deficient. The climatology teams which attempted to confirm the hockey stick curve contaoined no statisticians and so had only a limited understanding of and misapplied the appopriate statistics. They also used the same data sets and so their confirmations are of no probative value.

So what I am really saying is that I would like to see real science applied to the issue of anthropogenic global warming and not religious fervour. I take it from the account of Landsea's Science paper that he would like that as well.

There is no evidence that hurricanes are becoming more intense or frequent due to global warming. This has not stopped global warming advocates from claiming this and using supposed science to mask the uncertainty in their statments.

Do you believe in global warming?

Reply | Post Message | MESSAGES LIST | START A BOARD

rjmcmahon 12/5/2012 | 3:46:56 AM

re: Ohh Nooo!!! So what I am really saying is that I would like to see real science applied to the issue of anthropogenic global warming and not religious fervour.

Do the ice cores give sufficient data to prove, at least to some degree of scientific certainity, that climate change is occuring due to anthropegenic emissions? Or do you think this is all bunk?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warmin...

How would you like to have a time machine that could take you back anywhere over the past 300,000 years? You could see what the world was like when ice sheets a thousand feet thick blanketed Canada and northern Europe, or when the Indonesian volcano Toba blew its top in the largest volcanic eruption of the last half million years.

Well, scientists have such a time machine. It's called an ice core. Scientists collect ice cores by driving a hollow tube deep into the miles-thick ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland (and in glaciers elsewhere). The long cylinders of ancient ice that they retrieve provide a dazzlingly detailed record of what was happening in the world over the past several ice ages.

...

Gases trapped in ice cores show the dramatic impact that human activities have had on the planet since the Industrial Revolution. The first graph reveals how atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides from coal- and oil-burning power plants, cars, and other fossil-fuel-burning sources have climbed along with the world population, with as yet unknown effects on the climate system.

Graph of nitrates and sulphates The second graph displays similar results with sulfates and nitrates. Sulfates, which originate primarily in coal-fired power plants, started rising around 1900. (This rise is partially attributed to increased volcanic activity in the Caribbean around the turn of the century; other volcanic eruptions--represented by large spikes in the graph--can be seen at numbers 1, 2, and 3.) Nitrates didn't begin to climb significantly until after 1950, when cars and oil-powered plants appeared in a big way. Scientists credit the leveling off in sulfates and nitrates at the graph's far right--that is, the most recent period--to a less-polluted atmosphere after the 1972 U.S. Clean Air Act went into effect.

Reply | Post Message | MESSAGES LIST | START A BOARD

paolo.franzoi 12/5/2012 | 3:46:56 AM

re: Ohh Nooo!!!
There has clearly been global warming since the end of the little Ice Age (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... last in the late 1800s. What is not clear is:

1 - How much has humanity impacted this effect?
2 - What will future temperatures look like?

Reply | Post Message | MESSAGES LIST | START A BOARD

OldPOTS 12/5/2012 | 3:46:55 AM

re: Ohh Nooo!!! Only more than a decade ago, probably two, the scientist were saying that we were headed for an ice age using the initial ice core samples.

My 2 cents- as a sailor that studies the weather daily for over 45 years - they don't have much of a clue. Most of my competitors over several decades always do a beter job of predicting the weather every day than the weather men. Especially more than a few days or weeks ahead.

Why? The Weather Bureau still doesn't have a good basic understanding of what causes weather. They focus on measuring more of the effects and the wrong things more precisely.

Weather occurs in a unstable eddy environment. Just checkout a replay of the worlds cloud movement as the earth turns for several weeks from a satelite view. You can't get one anymore because it exposed "The Weather Bureau". Any way the math required is not linear, but requires a math that has just started to be developed for an unstable circular probabilities environment.

While slight progress has been made by the bureau, maybe someday they will measure the real causes of the weather and invest further in the proper math to make good predictions for more than a day.

OP

Reply | Post Message | MESSAGES LIST | START A BOARD

paolo.franzoi 12/5/2012 | 3:46:55 AM

re: Ohh Nooo!!!
rj,

There is actually some controversy whether the ice cores are definitive measurements or not even.

http://www.john-daly.com/zjice...

seven

Reply | Post Message | MESSAGES LIST | START A BOARD

dljvjbsl 12/5/2012 | 3:46:55 AM

re: Ohh Nooo!!! There is actually some controversy whether the ice cores are definitive measurements or not even.

http://www.john-daly.com/zjice...

In the first instange of this disucssion, there was much reference to Karl Popper's idea of "falsification" as the basis of the scientfic method. The reference above shows the difficulty that any naive application of falsification can lead to. According to the paper, the measurement of trapped CO2 in ice cores is fraught with difficulty and requires much interpretation. As well-known this can lead to an experimental bias in which measurements which agree with the experimemter's ideas are found.

In medical research, this isdealt with by use of "doule-blind" echnqiuezs in which the experimenters do not know whether the case they are evaluating has received the new treatment or not. It would seem that such a practice would be of benefit in this field as well. As the paper pointed out, arbtiraty measures (i.e. Cook's variable constant) were applied to air trapped in Mona Loa lava to get the "correct" result. Double blind measures would tend to test the validity of such practices.

Do you believe in global warming?

Reply | Post Message | MESSAGES LIST | START A BOARD

dljvjbsl 12/5/2012 | 3:46:55 AM

re: Ohh Nooo!!! So what I am really saying is that I would like to see real science applied to the issue of anthropogenic global warming and not religious fervour.

Do the ice cores give sufficient data to prove, at least to some degree of scientific certainity, that climate change is occuring due to anthropegenic emissions? Or do you think this is all bunk?

The bunk about global warming occurs when scince becomes mired with politics. It occurs when scientific interpretation become mired with policy genration. Symptoms of this are evident when scientific measurements are interpreted beyond any reasonable justification.

Landsea's hurricane findings show this. Scientist/politicians in the IPCC and elsewhere have made statements about the linkage of hurricane frequency and intensity with global warming. They justify this on theoretical grounds and suppposed measurements. What Landsea has shown is that there is no reliable inidcation of increasing hurricane intensity and what measurements there are tend to show no increase. The problem here is that this is not really a scientific debate. Intensified hurricanes and otehr global warming effects are tools used to promote certain political objectives. That the scientific evidence does not show more intense hurricanes of that hockey stick temperature graphs came from ill-selected ill-intepreted data sets is of little consequence to their proponents. These are used to achieve political and not scientific objectives.

Do you believe in global warming? is a political and not a scientific question. It is not falsfiable but is a question used to explain a prevalent religious catechism.

Reply | Post Message | MESSAGES LIST | START A BOARD

rjmcmahon 12/5/2012 | 3:46:54 AM

re: Ohh Nooo!!! The bunk about global warming occurs when science becomes mired with politics. It occurs when scientific interpretation become mired with policy genration. Symptoms of this are evident when scientific measurements are interpreted beyond any reasonable justification.

I agree that politician's don't tend do science very well. (On either side of an issue). But policy decisions are made via political means, so I don't believe the two can be separated. It will take alarmist rhetoric to make large scale social changes.

Reply | Post Message | MESSAGES LIST | START A BOARD

Page 1 / 39 > >>