[legendsfaranna]

1)

"Why So Gloomy?"

About the author: "Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies."

Link to the article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17997788/site/newsweek/

2)

"The 7 biggest myths about climate change"

Authors: Catherine Brahic
David L. Chandler
Michael Le Page
Phil McKenna
Fred Pearce

Link to the article: http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19426041.100-the-7-biggest-myths-about-climate-change.html




#1 says global warming is not real. #2 says it is real. There is nothing wrong with both sources. The author of #1 seems very intelligent because he's from MIT. The authors of #2 makes the article seem peer-reviewed and it is published in New Scientist Mag.


The community of peak oil, Which article is true? Please help.

[dissident]

You are going to have to look at Lindzen's track record and decide.

[NEOPO]

Everything including Science is for hire.
Trust none of us.

[Windmills]

Consider the military-industrial-Congressional complex. Not every player in that game is immediately receiving direct compensation, but each one is playing a part in the game of creating, marketing, and selling by using taxpayer money. I don't see why the same interdependency couldn't be developed in an industrial-academic-Congrressional complex to accomplish desired objectives.

[jedinvest]

I don't know. One article is a pure opinion piece -- was that for the Wall Stree Journal or the New York Times or the Washington Post?? Probably all three ran some variation already. Oh, that's right, it was Time Magazine opinion piece. All have to be highly suspect. Yes, credentialed people can be bought. I would first trust a science magazine over a propaganda source anytime, especially for science itself to be explained.

Oh, I think it was published somewhere how Lindzen does get funding from the energy industry. Yes, amazing that all pure science is practically all government funded. Where would we be without all this government funded science?? Probably better off, but that's another point entirely. But we would certainly have a whole lot less good science available as well. Sorry, I knocked over one of the pillars of Libertarian thinking that government can do no right! However, I am sure Bush is working on correcting, i.e. stamping out, anything good that is left in government.

[Lore]

Oh, I think it was published somewhere how Lindzen does get funding from the energy industry. Yes, amazing that all pure science is practically all government funded. Where would we be without all this government funded science?? Probably better off, but that's another point entirely. But we would certainly have a whole lot less good science available as well. Sorry, I knocked over one of the pillars of Libertarian thinking that government can do no right! However, I am sure Bush is working on correcting, i.e. stamping out, anything good that is left in government.

You can read more about Richard Lindzen here: LINK. He has been one of the media favorites for some of his anti-global warming views. His facts show little conviction, as illustrated by reading the link.

I doubt we'd be better off without government science. Just by the very rules governments "should" play under as opposed to free market business which operates only to serve their shareholders.

[bobcousins]

The community of peak oil, Which article is true? Please help.

If you pick through Lindzen's article, he generally agrees with the science of global warming. Sure, he finds a few small anomalies, but nothing major.

There is a major flaw in the IPCC forecasts, which is that they grossly overestimate the remaining recoverable reserves of fossil fuels. This makes the more extreme forecasts very unlikely, and the claim that the IPCC are "overhyping" is somewhat justified.

He then says "Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. " which is mostly true, science can describe what is likely to happen, but what we do about it is really a political question. He also says "Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right.". This is also true. The rest is really his personal opinions, everyone is entitled to their opinion.

So really both articles are "true". Global Warming is happening, but what we do about it, if anything, is up to us to decide.

[threadbear]

Do what most of the morons do on this forum. Believe whatever feels best and suits your worldview the best. Truth has nothing to do with anything. That's for other forums. Believe me, you've got the wrong one.

[stepka]

Try this. Go on this website: http://www.prwatch.org/
They list all the tricks that companies use to get around the "no funding" and keep lists of phony scientists. Also check out no. 1's political party and religious beliefs. There is your answer.

[stepka]

Okay, I took my own advice and ran Lindzen's name in prwatch, and here is what I came up with:

Home » Spin of the Day » Apr 04, 2004
Seeing Green Through Rose-Colored Glasses
Topics: environment | rhetoric | right wing
Source: Observer (UK), April 4, 2004
"From the heated debate on global warming to the hot air on forests; from the muddled talk on our nation's waters to the convolution on air pollution, we are fighting a battle of fact against fiction on the environment -- Republicans can't stress enough that extremists are screaming 'Doomsday!' when the environment is actually seeing a new and better day," proclaimed an email memo sent to the press secretaries of all Republican congressmen. The email -- sent on February 4 -- bases its assertions that "global warming is not a fact" and that other kinds of environmental degradation aren't really happening on claims by industry supported scientists and organizations, including the Pacific Research Institute (a think tank which has received $130,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998), the discredited Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, and Richard Lindzen, a climate-skeptic scientist who has consistently taken money from the fossil fuel industry. The memo, which was obtained by the Observer, was sent by Republican House Conference director Greg Cist. "It's up to our members if they want to use it or not," Cist told the Observer. "We wanted to show how the environment has been improving. ... We wanted to provide the other side of the story."

[Sixstrings]

Slovenia with record low temperature, -49
Slovenian Media have reported recommendations of the meteorological institute of Germany, which alarms over the risks of having piercings – the metal earrings on people’s body could cause dangerous freezing.

No metal objects attached to the body should be worn, warns the media, for people who must venture outside. For everyone else, Slovenian media urges its citizens to stay in their homes.
Link

AND

Life At Negative 78 Degrees In Alaska
Right now it's cold in Alaska. Really cold. In the town of Tok, it was 78 degrees below zero yesterday.
Link

AND

The very real threat of the approaching and inevitable Ice Age, which will render large parts of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable, is being foolishly ignored.

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.

Most of the long-term climate data collected from various sources also shows a strong correlation with the three astronomical cycles which are together known as the Milankovich cycles.

The three Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over a 41,000 year period; the shape of the earth’s orbit, which changes over a period of 100,000 years; and the Precession of the Equinoxes, also known as the earth’s ‘wobble’, which gradually rotates the direction of the earth’s axis over a period of 26,000 years.

According to the Milankovich theory of Ice Age causation, these three astronomical cycles, each of which effects the amount of solar radiation which reaches the earth, act together to produce the cycle of cold Ice Age maximums and warm interglacials.
Link

So, what do you guys think? I know the Ice Age scare went around in the 70's too, before people got on the global warming bandwagon. Now cold winters in 07, 08, and likely 09 have folks talking ice age again.

I'm reminded of Colleen McCullough's pretty good novel _A creed for the Third Millenium_, a story set in a post 2000's America struggling with the descent of a new ice age.

For those more knowledgeable than myself, perhaps you can answer a question for me. If the Holocene period is ending and we are indeed returning to Ice Age, what would be the progression timewise? How long for the norhern US to be uninabitably cold and such? And how long for ice sheets to form and grow?

[mrbig]

Thailand is colder then usual also.

[Sixstrings]

Thailand is colder then usual also.

How about Sweden? Any difference there?

The ice age article I posted was from Pravda. I did some more digging, here's another from a more credible source (respected American physicist).

BY GERALD E. MARSH


CHICAGO — Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the real danger facing humanity is not global warming, but more likely the coming of a new Ice Age.

What we live in now is known as an interglacial, a relatively brief period between long ice ages. Unfortunately for us, most interglacial periods last only about ten thousand years, and that is how long it has been since the last Ice Age ended.

How much longer do we have before the ice begins to spread across the Earth’s surface? Less than a hundred years or several hundred? We simply don’t know.

Even if all the temperature increase over the last century is attributable to human activities, the rise has been relatively modest one of a little over one degree Fahrenheit — an increase well within natural variations over the last few thousand years.

While an enduring temperature rise of the same size over the next century would cause humanity to make some changes, it would undoubtedly be within our ability to adapt.

Entering a new ice age, however, would be catastrophic for the continuation of modern civilization.

One has only to look at maps showing the extent of the great ice sheets during the last Ice Age to understand what a return to ice age conditions would mean. Much of Europe and North-America were covered by thick ice, thousands of feet thick in many areas and the world as a whole was much colder.

The last “little” Ice Age started as early as the 14th century when the Baltic Sea froze over followed by unseasonable cold, storms, and a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea. That was followed by the extinction of the Norse settlements in Greenland and the loss of grain cultivation in Iceland. Harvests were even severely reduced in Scandinavia And this was a mere foreshadowing of the miseries to come.

By the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, wiping out farms and entire villages. In England, the River Thames froze during the winter, and in 1780, New York Harbor froze. Had this continued, history would have been very different. Luckily, the decrease in solar activity that caused the Little Ice Age ended and the result was the continued flowering of modern civilization.

There were very few Ice Ages until about 2.75 million years ago when Earth’s climate entered an unusual period of instability. Starting about a million years ago cycles of ice ages lasting about 100,000 years, separated by relatively short interglacial perioods, like the one we are now living in became the rule. Before the onset of the Ice Ages, and for most of the Earth’s history, it was far warmer than it is today.

Indeed, the Sun has been getting brighter over the whole history of the Earth and large land plants have flourished. Both of these had the effect of dropping carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to the lowest level in Earth’s long history.

Five hundred million years ago, carbon dioxide concentrations were over 13 times current levels; and not until about 20 million years ago did carbon dioxide levels dropped to a little less than twice what they are today.

It is possible that moderately increased carbon dioxide concentrations could extend the current interglacial period. But we have not reached the level required yet, nor do we know the optimum level to reach.

So, rather than call for arbitrary limits on carbon dioxide emissions, perhaps the best thing the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the climatology community in general could do is spend their efforts on determining the optimal range of carbon dioxide needed to extend the current interglacial period indefinitely.

NASA has predicted that the solar cycle peaking in 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries and should cause a very significant cooling of Earth’s climate. Will this be the trigger that initiates a new Ice Age?

We ought to carefully consider this possibility before we wipe out our current prosperity by spending trillions of dollars to combat a perceived global warming threat that may well prove to be only a will-o-the-wisp.

Gerald Marsh is a retired physicist from the Argonne National Laboratory and a former consultant to the Department of Defense on strategic nuclear technology and policy in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton Administration.
Link

[mrbig]

How about Sweden? Any difference there?

Answer: Yes much colder then the last 3years. but winter isnt over untill late march-mid april. But sure as hell feels like we are in for 2 cold months. Last year we barely saw snow in stockholm.

[Daniel_Plainview]

See also:

Forget Global Warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age (Canada's National Post – Feb. 25, 2008) LINK

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average." China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them. And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past. The ice is back.

[Southpaw]

If I had to chose between an Ice age or Global Warming. I would choose global warming without a doubt. If there is indeed an ice age coming we probably gonna burn natural gas and oil a lot faster then normal.
last year I only turnend on my heater when my 2 sweaters weren't enough but now I'm putting my heater on almost non-stop.

[dohboi]

This thread may be the clearest indication of how far along we are in GW.

We are now shocked and horrified if it actually snows during the winter in Sweden!!???

You guys really are a hoot.

It would be interesting to know if there is evidence of increased global dimming from the hundreds of dirty coal plants being built every year in China. Or if there is new evidence of a slowdown in thermohaline circulation, as some have claimed.

But that is not the kind of discussion that is likely to happen here.

Hey, I heard it's been snowing in the Himalayas, too. Clearly that's evidence that GW is a crock.

[Southpaw]

This thread may be the clearest indication of how far along we are in GW.

We are now shocked and horrified if it actually snows during the winter in Sweden!!???

You guys really are a hoot.

It would be interesting to know if there is evidence of increased global dimming from the hundreds of dirty coal plants being built every year in China. Or if there is new evidence of a slowdown in thermohaline circulation, as some have claimed.

But that is now the kind of discussion that is likely to happen here.

Hey, I heard it's been snowing in the Himalayas, too. Clearly that's evidence that GW is a crock.

Nobody said that GW is a crock. We are just discussing that an Ice Age is possible too.
Unless you have proof that the possibility of a new Ice Age is wrong. I would gladly hear it.

[Valdemar]

This is why climate change is a better term than global warming. Warming of the global climate can cause an ice age to occur, as was the accelerated case in The Day After Tomorrow.

[diemos]

Wake me when the glaciers start growing again.