The Great Global Warming Swindle

Off-Topic
8

I don`t know if you watched the documentary Foo but it is not saying anything about global polluting that is a very real issue. The point is that this whole environmental issue it seems needs better definition.

i.e. dumping pollutants in the oceans and highly toxic wastes in landfill and rivers is not anything to do with global warming yet important. Again destruction of habitats of animals is a separate but very real issue also.

The scientists in this documentary do not claim that Global Warming is not occurring but you will see that this warming and cooling has occurred over millenia on the earth.
There was also an ice-age cooling scare in the 70`s amazingly!
I found it interesting to to see that in medievil times the average temperatures were actually higher than they are now.

There are correlations with sun activity that fit better than the CO2 corelation in recent times.

Also relating when over long periods CO2 is looked at closer it seems the CO2 follows the temperature by up to 800 years and not the other way around anyway…

As for the war hungry leaders and corporations (the two are very close in recent times), this issue becomes more intriguing when you consider entities such as the Rockefeller Foundation, funding environmentalist groups. Why do the very interests who you would assume would love to propagandize anti-environmentalism have their fingers in the pie of the environmental movement?

Separating to our governments now you can see the use of the environmental movement to encourage such things as a carbon tax, micromanagement of individuals lives etc. A great way for governments to keep greater control of people is to promote scarcity. Again however important to distinguish between CO2 and other issues as the CO2 tax may be completely unnecessary but other environmental considerations more reasonable.

Addressing the Indonesia issue, I would be interested to see what the evidence that:

This was due to global warming. If so were there more tsunamis in hotter times in the past and less in cooler? Am going to have a look into this now myself as it is not an area I have looked into but if you have any leads it would be appreciated. (EDIT: also applying to Katrina.)

Also is the frog issue you are talking about due to direct warming, habitat destruction, or combination?

If it is habitat destruction then yes we would undoubtedly be responsible if human destruction is shown. If due to warming the evidence does not seem to be conclusive that we are, this of course then applies to tsunami creation, if global warming is said to be the sole cause.

I am very open to further views and research on all these things.

Will have a look at this, parts of it are covered in the documentary I linked but would like to see it first hand also.

From what I can tell, this shouldn`t be a fake. It was aired by a mainstream terrestrial station in the UK, though I admit that is certainly no gaurantee of anything :). It seems to be an airing of the alternative view on global warming and yes it certainly has given me food for thought also! :)

Short of the nukes it certainly seems debatable yet :)

9

hmm, while i was down in Florida last year. after a hurricane devastated Billions an possibly Trillions of dollars. i had a thought that maybe it wasn’t the wisest place to be!!

i kept thinking while i as down there a tidal wave was going to wash us all away. funny how the only place i really wanted to go was the bermuda triangle. :D so i got to talking to my friend that owned the house i was staying at in boca raton about all this. he told me something very simple an this pretty much put it into perspective for me.

‘ice takes up more space than water.’

10

This is true in physical space, there is an explanation of that here:

http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae389.cfm

When it floats however the extra volume is held above the surface in the case of icebergs etc.

i.e. the icebergs of the North Pole melting will not make any difference to sea levels as I understand it. The melting of glaciers and land based ice on the other hand may well increase sea levels significantly. There seem to be many conflicting arguments about the conditions that would cause this mass melting in the range of the global warming we are hearing about though…

Unless I have missed something here :)

11

@ledger. About the Ice on the north pole, thats right. Because the north pole bassically is a big chunck of ice, it wont affect sea levels by a centimeter. What the melting of the north pole will do however, (and is doing right now) is affect the warm currents in the atlantic ocean and make northern europe a very cold place to live.
Melting of the south pole will of course mean destruction of the homes and lives of immense amounts of people, as most of the ice on the south pole is on solid ground.

12

Thanks for confirming that sharku. With the point you make about the warm currents, I am interested at looking into more (not got time this sec but will). Did this happen in the previous times of global warming say in the medieval era or was this a contributing factor to “The Little Ice Age” that followed?

Nice bit of googling for me to do :)

13

so the currents are being greatly affected & altered because of more fluid movement happening? an from this happening this will destroy the doldrums, eventually, then completely changing weather patterns everywhere?

14

Ledger, I agree with you totally man… I think was just trying to come at the issue more broadly and general. I certainly know all about things like El Nino or fragile biodiversities. The point I had in mind was more to do with the human condition:

The details are academic. Our presence is not in keeping with our ‘responsibility’. This is not a policy issue. Or a scientific issue. It’s a soul-biology issue. If we don’t nail that problem first we’re stuffed.

15

Well this guy have altered hundreds of government science reports to blur out the connection between man and the climate.

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/06/14/exxon-…ming-documents/

Bush has in a PM forbidden scientist to speak out about the enviroment when they travel outside USA. They are even supposed to get research permition when traveling to “arctic” countries such as Sweden.

http://extra-extra.blogspot.com/2007/03/bu…olar-bears.html

In that video you linked to they say that thousands of jobs rely on the global warming, it may be true but considering a lot of the workers for organisations such as green peace etc are voluantered and considering that workers and the money in the oil industry, the travel industry, the food industry, the car industry etc is much much larger, the oposite is even more true…

So is that video a fraud? Could the persons in that video even have recieved money for figuring in that video? Who knows…

And suppose the climate threat is exaggerated, well then everything is okay even though we take meassures. But suppose it isnt and we don’t take meassures…
Which scenario would you rather have?

I would prefere humans to take the safe way instead of the “perhaps its not our fault way”…

Because what if…

16

Exactly. What’s so bad about efficient energy use and aiming for little (or even zero) footprint?

Ohhh, the jobs. Everybody who lives now will be dust in not even a century wether they had a job or not. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but there is a limit to the extend that the holes people fell into (or got shoved into) can hold our whole future hostage. Put differently: medicine put a lot of charlatans out of jobs, that doesn’t mean we should smash our microscopes.

17

More than 10,000 reputable, peer-reviewed scientists believe the evidence that shows rapid shifts in global temperature are caused by human activity. At last check 24 – that’s 24 – doubt it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_op…_climate_change
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scien…rming_consensus

The only major scientific organization that rejects the finding of human influence on recent climate is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

Maybe some of us agree with 24 reputable scientists and 10,000 fat asses in front of their computer posting crap in forums, but most of us will probably opt towards the 10,000 scientists point of view.

18

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0321-22.htm

19

Read an interesting book lately about the whole energy crisis, the author pointed out that the world-reservoir of oil and gas will last for about another 40 years max and that the industry of nuclear power is basically a horrible thing (and has the problem that the known reservoir of “easy to use”-uranium does also last only for some another 30 years, a fact I didn’t know before). Also he had some quotes from scientists that pointed out that obviously the biggest critics of the “cold fusion”-approach are the scientists that are working on exactly that project … Seems they all are trying to tell the people to “not count on it” but nobody listens. Especially the leader of the whole project in the european government expressed that he is very uncomfortable with the fact that some politicians somehow see this as the holy grail while everyone being involved has no idea when or even if this will ever become reality.
Point is we need to change alot of things very soon. (and he proposed the excessive use of solar energy which is avaiable everywhere in the world and can produce enough energy even in far-north/far-south regions if used on an industrial scale).

When I think about it, I really want to become atleast 70, that’s another 40 years for me to go, my daughter is nine and has atleast another 60 years to go, maybe she will have children in the future and so on, I really don’t want them to grow up in what’s likely going to beome the world of the future as it seems now.
I feel that all I can do at this moment is saving energy by putting energy-saving lightbulbs everywhere, having big switches for all electrical stuff so I can really disconnect if from the power-circuit when I don’t need it, use public transportation or my bike, teach my daughter to switch off lights when she is going from somehwere and so on and so forth.

And I won’t go into this, but if you really start looking closely on things like “the war on terror” a whole new political level of this starts coming up.

f****, it’s an insane world we live in.

20

The other thing that WILL affect sea levels are the ice shelfs which are being suspended over the ocean at the moment. If those melt, and drop into the water, they will raise sea levels, even if only slightly. I was convinced that global warming was somewhat of a ruse until I watched inconvenient truth. It may be a melodramatic movie, but rightfully so. He wants people to pay attention to the issue.

… and here’s my thoughts on it: even IF we aren’t going to all suffer death by boiling planet, should we not start attacking the evil oil companies anyway? They overcharge everyone because there is a “shortage” of oil, yet, they KILL every opportunity to create alternatives. I, for one, am planning on buying a gas hybrid car instead of a regular gas guzzler. These are the kinds of changes that, Global Warming or not, need to come to save the rest of the planet ;)

21

Easy-to-get uranium will last for a few more decades, that absolutely right. However, it seems to be less known that hard-to-get and expensive uranium is just as good and available in vast quantities. Because, even if the price uranium goes up by 300%, the price of the resulting electricity will only go up by a few percent. Uranium fuel price is a tiny part of the cost of fission electricity, the expensive part is building the power plant, and maintaining it (labor). And since uranium can be found practically anywhere (it can be extracted even from seawater), total reserves are somewhere around at least a few million years at the current usage rate.

What needs to be done is completing the nuclear fuel cycle with reprocessing of the uranium (using a fuel-load just once actually only splits a fraction of the uranium) so that it can be put back into the reactor. This takes care of the majority of the radioactive waste, the leftovers will be less radioactive and less dangerous overall, and can more safely be stored for the couple of centuries required.

The problems I see with nuclear fission power are: the somewhat irrational fear surrounding it, the WMD dangers of plutonium which is a minor byproduct in many reactor designs (there are some solutions to this, AFAIK though), the problem with mining and transporting stuff, and the fact that plants are for the most part commercially built: a safe reactor can be built, but the lowest bidder will cut corners. Which kind of sucks.

What bothers me is that many want to dismiss nuclear not just based on the “limited” supply of uranium, but also on the assumption that better alternative power sources will come around. Wind power? Limited, and kills a lot of birds, to the point of completely decimating some populations. Hydro power? Ecological nightmare and limited to suitable rivers. Solar power? Very nice as such, IMO, but it also requires vast areas in order to replace both fossil fuels & nuclear worldwide, assuming we want to replace it.

I’ve seen a plan for building solar panel parks in the world’s deserts, Sanyo proposed it some years ago. The required area would be 4% of the total desert area in order to cover the world’s energy needs as it was then. 4% doesn’t sound like much, but that’s at least 800 km^2 of solar panels, not taking into account growth of energy needs since then and into the future. Plus that solar power is not all that available: think winter and nighttime. Solar energy is a maximum of 1000 W/m^2 mid-day mid-summer, with a cloudy day being perhaps 30-50 W/m^2, and nothing at nighttime. That means it has to be transported and stored, which has it’s own problems, since that 4% doesn’t take into account the increased transmission losses (the Sanyo design called for an assumed-to-be-available superconducting global power network).

I think it’d be great to reduce fossil fuel emissions right now, instead of whenever. Not just for carbon dioxide, but pollution too. China has large amounts of coal reserves, and an exploding economy. Not that Beijing isn’t investing in other power sources (because of the environmental issues with coal), but right now 75% of China’s energy is coal-fired, and the economy (and everything, actually) depends on energy.

I think we really do need fusion power. Real fusion, I mean, not the cold crap.

And also: save energy. :)

22

That seems like a whole other debate that I would be happy to have but I personally think that there is a lot to be said for policy issue/ politics in this subject as it affects directly what happens with it.

@splajn

Interesting links will have to join up to read the full reports from the nytimes but managed to find some stuff on this guy by a search. Certainly would follow from what you would expect if CO2 is the culprit.

Yes could be a fraud, am in the dark about that as much as you. Good that it opens debate however on a very complex issue.

With regards to measures, it all depends what is proposed and on what basis. If for example alternative energy sources are viable and replace current methods then I am all for them.

A part of the debate with fossil fuels is also the other pollution they cause on the local level also which I think anyone who has walked down a busy street could vouch for. A clean in this sense replacement for the internal combustion engine I see would be a very good thing.

Off to do a bit more reading of the links others have posted :)

23

Al Gore spoke in Montreal yesterday with David Suzuki, I didn’t check it out but on the french CBC radio summary from this morning these statements stuck out (I may be paraphrasing)

  • In terms of scientific opinion, the only thing that has greater consensus from the scientific community, other than global warming, is gravity.

  • Winston Churchill wrote in 1938, ‘The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients is coming to a close. We are entering an era of consequences.’

  • Like the abolition of slavery, like the right for woman to vote, we are approaching a new unavoidable era in the history of human civilization.

I am fully aware that Al Gore is a hypocrite but being a hypocrite does not make you wrong. The time for change is now. Yes, everyone is half ass and a liar, but like the sixties was to the consciousness of America, the issue of the environment is the next shift in our global collective consciousness.

We, as humans, have an increasing urgency to reconsider the relationship between ourselves and our surroundings. We are experiencing a historical paradigm shift in perspective that takes the environment, and not human demands on the environment, as the starting point for reflection.

Big tings a gwan.

24

Here is another “documentary” by Penn & Teller on their HBO tv-show “Bullshit”.

Environmental Hysteria Bullshit

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In the episode, Jerry Taylor from CATO claims that scientists predicted an ice age in the 1970s, these predictions of global cooling never occurred in peer-reviewed scientific literature.

No mainstream scientist from the area of climatology is present in the episode. Penn and Teller instead rely on figures such as the statistician Bjørn Lomborg and critic Patrick Moore.

Lomborg is the author of the controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist. Here’s a link to a site about the 319 errors found in that book, 49 errors that were evidently deliberate.

Patrick Moore is ex-Greenpeace. Today, Moore believes that alternatives to fossil fuels must be found and that nuclear energy is one of the most effective technologies to reduce fossil fuel use. This is in staunch contrast to his “nuclear power plants are the most dangerous devices that man has ever created. Their construction and proliferation is the most irresponsible, in fact the most criminal, act ever to have taken place on this planet” view from 1976. People change!

A good show, they showed a lot of pretty clueless people and dancing hippies. I still don’t think any of this should preclude trying.

26

Right on.

27

I like hilariously upgraded drama…

http://api.aniboom.com/embedded.swf?videoar=1224