Al got the science right.
By on Jun 10th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Al got the science right.
Salon takes a close look at the science behind An Inconvient Truth and concludes that, despite what his critics say, Al Gore got pretty much everything right.
View Most Popular
Advertisement
What We're About
What We're Fighting For
What We're Fighting Against
Featured
Subscribe to the Progress Report
Topic CloudView topics sorted by popularity
Afghanistan
Bachmann
Beck
Boehner
Business
Civil Rights
Congress
Corporate Ethics
Dobbs
Economy
Education
Election
Energy
Environment
Ethics
Fox News
Gingrich
Global Warming
Health Care
Hoffman
Immigration
International Relations
Iraq
Justice
LGBT
Lieberman
Limbaugh
Media
Military
O'Reilly
Obama
Palin
Pelosi
Politics
Race
Radical Right
Religion
Sports
Steele
Stimulus
Tea Parties
Tea Party
Terrorism
Veterans
Women's Rights
Visit Our Affiliated Sites
Reports
In-depth studies on select topics
Got a hot tip?
Have a hot news tip? We'd love to hear from you. Use the form below to send us the latest.
ArchivesBlog Roll
Al Gore in 08!!
June 10th, 2006 at 12:32 pmWhy does this science create so much turmoil for the right?
June 10th, 2006 at 12:35 pmHasn’t Bush acknowledged that Global Warming is an issue that needs to be addressed? What would Jesus do?
Judd Legum, research director at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, has rebutted each of Balling’s claims on the Think Progress Web site.
Woo Hoo, Judd & Think Progress!
June 10th, 2006 at 12:50 pm“An Inconvient Truth” – - Hey c’mon, why does TP consistently misspell ‘inconvenient”?
June 10th, 2006 at 12:59 pmI was giving them a pass because they’re partying it up in Vegas, Badmoodman, but I didn’t notice it was a pattern. SpellCheck — good!
June 10th, 2006 at 1:01 pmI wouldn’t put any stock in anything Salon says. They represent the useless wing of the demo-publican party.
Even when they’re right, they’re wrong. Ignore them.
Gore, bless his sweet heart, is a loser. No more gore, no more clintons, NO bUSHES!!!
Salon lost its way when they were swayed by hillary-esque middle-of-the-road-to-nowhere policies.
When I see Salon, like with bush, I know to stop listening. Even when they say something right.
June 10th, 2006 at 1:15 pmI would rather that Al Gore attack Bush butt more on the Iraq war fiasco, then just warning about global warming! Dubya will never regulate industry to stop pollution, nor will he ever end the Iraq war, unless someone like Gore kicks him!
June 10th, 2006 at 1:31 pmYeah. Except for these parts:
So, if you ignore all of that… then yeah, Gore was all right. In an article from Gore-friendly Salon. LOL. Got pretty much everything right, my ass.
June 10th, 2006 at 1:35 pmSeixon real Norwegians care about the environment, so this is another proof you are not in Norway, or you reside in the US embassy there?!
June 10th, 2006 at 1:40 pmWe have more immediate, pressing issues to deal with.
We have to get rid of people like bush, clinton, and even Gore.
Thanks for the info, it will be considered, and should be acted upon by real representatives of the people.
Why go down this road with israel is killing people on the beach in Gaza and getting away with it? Why go down this road when we have demo-publicans like boxer making light of the notion of impeachment?
Why not do the right thing for now and change our current leadership model?
Or will we continue to think we are doing something by reading from a website who’s mouth is brown from cleaning the asses of bush/clinton and Gore?
June 10th, 2006 at 1:53 pm#2: It’s because they don’t believe in science. They’ve done everything they can to stifle real science and prop up pseudo-scientists who are paid by oil companies and right-wing organizations.
In any case, I thought this was a great article. Kudos to Judd/TP for countering the blatant right-wing disregard for science. I can appreciate the couple points where there may be embellishments, but when it comes down to it the scientists don’t disagree at all about the coming consequences of burning fossil fuels at such an amazing pace.
#8 clearly didn’t understand the article if they read the whole thing.
Go Al!!!
June 10th, 2006 at 2:50 pmSycophants for Gore 2008…
Think Progress and Salon claim that scientists say Gore got the science basically right in his film about global warming. Really? They must think we can’t read….
June 10th, 2006 at 3:37 pmYes Jay, I’m the US ambassador to Norway, posting at Think Progress.
June 10th, 2006 at 3:46 pmOh and Jay, if you really think almost 5 million people can be painted with one color like that, I think that says alot about you.
June 10th, 2006 at 3:50 pmOh, and I do care about the environment. Last I checked, CO2 was not dangerous to the environment. There are REAL environmental issues to deal with, and this isn’t one of them.
June 10th, 2006 at 3:53 pmLet the hurricane season roll
June 10th, 2006 at 4:19 pmYes, there are worse problems than C02, like methane…from cow farts! Yep, it’s true. Going vegetarian will help the environment more than any C02 reducing efforts for this reason.
Oh, and there were a couple points in the movie that are claimed to be wrong, but Al Gore didn’t actually state them, like the extreme C02 causing extreme temps…the graph was not complete on purpose, and Al made no claims as to what would happen with temps, because this situation has never happened before. Same thing with the Greenland melting thing … he never said how long it would take.
The point is that human action IS affecting our climate negatively – most nations, and nearly all scientists support this hypothesis. Only the US with oil company misinformation does not. I don’t care if it takes 20 years or 2000 years to make the earth uninhabitable because of global warming, I don’t want to be the cause, and I’m taking positive actions not to be – and you should too.
June 10th, 2006 at 4:42 pmHmm, actually a meteologist and an astrologer here in Norway do not support this hypothesis. Those are only two of many more that have dared actually speaking out in public about it. That is in Norway, a country that relies on the state-owned oil company to pull in the profits from oil.
If you look at the temperature graphs for most countries, it is no warmer now than it was about 70 years ago. Warming beyond that has only happened in some places in the world. Now you could be an idiot and conclude that it is due to CO2 that some places but not others have warmed, or you can be smart and say that there is a complex situation and reason for why it has occurred.
Greenland was a lot warmer 600-800 years ago, many centuries before we invented the automobile. Why do the scientists in the media only focus on CO2? What about methane? Ah, but methane comes from the development of natural gas, as well as processes that produce food. Yet methane is a much more potent warming gas than CO2. Is the focus on CO2 simply a calculated ploy?
Come on people, stop being duped. Things aren’t as simple as Mr. Gore and Think Progress want you to believe. Even the scientists hand-picked by Salon for their article say that.
June 10th, 2006 at 5:06 pmLike I said, even the National Review agrees with the science. You’d have to be a conspiracy theorist to discount the science at this point. This is the the first two sentences from the National Academy of Sciences report commissioned by Bush:
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=3713&method=full
The top climate scientists in the US–including renouned skeptic Michael Lindzen– served on the committee that produced this report. I’d say this counts for a bit more than a Norwegian “meteologist and an astrologer” (sic).
June 10th, 2006 at 5:23 pmWhy do the scientists in the media only focus on CO2? What about methane?
Do you think we’d have all the things we have in the modern world if scientists were in the habit of ignoring basic questions like this? Again, you have to be some sort of conspiracy theorist…
I’ve heard that methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, but I believe we produce CO2 in much greater quantities. If you’ve ever done the chemistry on how much CO2 is produced by industrial processes and combustion engines, it’s quite a bit. But I’m sure there are ways we could cut methane production as well.
June 10th, 2006 at 5:49 pmGreenland was a lot warmer 600-800 years ago
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/03/greenland-used-to-be-green.html
June 10th, 2006 at 6:09 pmEh, National Review just wrote an article going after “the science”, which Think Progress had to fight off because they thought it was so horrible. Didn’t you get the memo? Michael Lindzen?? You mean Richard Lindzen from MIT? The same Lindzen who just wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal about scientists like him being intimidated into shutting up? Is that the guy you claim is supporting this view?
Boy, sure sounds like a crock of you know what to me.
June 10th, 2006 at 6:14 pmJJ, just quoting from that blog post:
So in other words, yes, Greenland was a lot warmer then that it is now. In fact, Norwegian scientists have just uncovered evidence from sediments in Norway that show the temperatures were 2-3 degrees warmer than they are today about 1000 years ago.
So you say, as some sort of argument, that because Norway, Greenland, England, and many other places were warmer back then, that doesn’t mean anything globally. Really? Well that’s a damned shame, because that very same situation is true now. Most regions in the world are no warmer than they were 70 years ago. In fact, there are areas in the world that have actually gotten colder.
In other words, you’re trying to have your cake and eat it too.
June 10th, 2006 at 6:19 pmNational Review agreed with the basics:
NR’s beef was that there was still likely to be a high percentage of natural variability. TP’s response was that they used poor science in reaching this conclusion. And they were right.
June 10th, 2006 at 6:22 pmLIke so many others, I wish Al Gore had been this strong and positive when he ws running for president. We’d never find ourselves in the mess we are in today.
June 10th, 2006 at 8:03 pmAs it is, on the environment, where he has studied and gained much knowledge, Buch&CO smear him, tell their lies, distort the facts, and otherwise try to paint him a fool. Their actions belie the truth – he and his facts and knowledge, as well as science, scares them spitless.
Sexion,
Dude you live in Norway, of course you like Global Warming. Try iving in a hot desert and tell me how you like it.
June 10th, 2006 at 8:22 pmI say we seal up Seixon in a room with half a dozen farting cows — just a couple of days.
June 10th, 2006 at 9:11 pmSeixon, can you tell us which “meteorologist and astrologer(???) in Norway does not support this hypothesis?”
And Seixon, I understand. This is a scary situation, and it can be very comforting to deny its existence. But Gore provided some good news too: it’s not too late to do something about it.
June 10th, 2006 at 10:03 pmJJ,
Uh, nice taking things out of context there buddy. NR said that yes, as I have said, that human activity of course does have an effect, yet as they said, it is likely that our effect on the climate is close to negligent. TP’s response wasn’t right at all, but I guess I’m talking to a wall on that here. You’ll listen to Judd at TP before you’d listen to a climatologist of 50 years. I’d say that says a certain something about you and your movement.
For Truth,
Actually, Norway isn’t any warmer than it was 70 years ago. Just like most places in the world. In fact, Norway is having a bit of a chilly summer so far. The weather just started heating up the end of this week. Norway isn’t as cold as you’re making it seem like, but I guess trying to teach people about the geography and climate of Norway is like trying to learn sheep to read around here.
Zookeeper,
Yes and then we could seal you in a chamber filled with dangerous CO2! Mwahahahaha! Oh wait, you produce CO2 yourself. Damn.
Lily,
Yes, I can. The “astrologer” I was talking about is actually a PhD in solar physics. His name is PÃ¥l Brekke, and has worked with NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
This guy appeared on a TV panel about “extreme weather” right after hurricane Katrina where he countered the arguments of the usual suspects who kept using buzzwords such as “consensus” to try and overrule everyone else. The ones doing the walk for anthropogenic global warming? No climatologists. TV2 couldn’t get a single climatologist to appear on the panel. The TV host said this was because none of them wanted to appear on TV in fear of speaking the truth because their job might be on the line. The only ones shilling for the “consensus view” were two biologists. BIOLOGISTS. Sheesh.
The other guy I was talking about, a meteorologist who called out one of these biologists in a newspaper op-ed, is Inge B. Johannessen who works at the Storm Weather Center.
Lily, there are scientists out there who disagree with all of this, but many of them are scared to speak out because much of their funding rides on having this “crisis” supposedly existing. What is the use for scientists if there is nothing to be working to “cure”? If there was no AIDS, cancer, and disease, what would happen to all the scientists working on a cure for them? Exactly, they’d be out of work.
It’s a common phenomenon within the scientific community that “problems” are overrated so as to get more funding and to conduct more research and projects on topics that really are quite useless. It’s akin to a salesman who has to convince you that you have a particular problem so that he can sell you something to fix the problem. I see Al Gore doing the exact same thing.
Al Gore is scaring the bejesus out of the American people, saying that their “ability to live is at stake” and thus coercing them to do as he pleases.
The fact that most countries in the world are no warmer than they were 70 years ago seems to fade well into the background behind all of Gore’s fearmongering. The man who often claims that the Bush administration fear-mongers with terrorism and uses 9/11 to do this used the exact same tactic in his film, using the site of the WTC as a prop in claiming that it would be under water if Antarctica melted.
As any real scientist has said, if the sea level were to rise to that level, it would take at least 1000 years, and it is not likely to happen or have anything to do with human activity if it does. Does that stop Gore from telling Americans that Ground Zero is going to be submerged if they don’t stop driving cars? Nope, of course not. He is fear-mongering for all he’s worth.
It is not a “scary situation” and I think the fact that you believe this is sad. Look up the weather records for your town or city for the last 100 years and see what you find. Is it really that much warmer now than it used to be? Chances are that it isn’t.
What we have here is a fight between extremists. Those who say global warming is a massive threat to humanity (Al Gore) and those who deny the fact that the Earth has been warming up the last 3 decades (right-wing whackos). The scientists in the middle who don’t comment on any of this do not believe either case and keep their mouth shut because as long as the debate enrages, they are getting their paycheck and nothing harmful is being done. Yet.
If things really were like Gore says they are, you’d see scientists rioting in the streets telling people to get out of their cars and stop using CO2-producing equipment. They’re not. In fact, they’re driving cars just like everyone else.
You’ve been had, plain and simple.
June 10th, 2006 at 11:45 pmLol Seixon you are still on here spewing about Gore being a fraud? You must be the one and only Norwegian who loves Bush in that entire nation > lol. I never inferred you are the American Ambassador in Norway > just an embassy staffer > probably the CIA attache?
June 10th, 2006 at 11:56 pmLOL Jay Randal you are still here ignoring everything I am saying to keep holding on to your untenable view of Gore. Zzzz… I didn’t think criticizing Gore for misleading people, like the scientists in the Salon article says happens with his film, would amount to me loving Bush. But I guess when you have partisan blinders on….
June 11th, 2006 at 7:38 am“Greenhouse gases are responsible for less than half the rise in global temperatures over the past century, a scientist with the European Space Agency says. Physicist Paal Brekke says natural processes involving changes in the Sun could have at least as powerful an effect on global temperature as increased emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2).”
It doesn’t sound to me like he’s denying that global warming exists, only that other causes are contributing to it. So if half is attributed to human activity, that would mean humans have doubled the natural rate of temperature rise. hmmm….still doesn’t sound good.
June 11th, 2006 at 8:39 amSeixon lol > now you try to claim you are NOT a Bush defender/supporter? All your posts up till today have shown otherwise so stop the crap! Everyone on here knows you are paid to post on TP threads as some kind of GOP agent!
June 11th, 2006 at 10:39 amDear Mr. Gore:
I have just seen your new movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” about the threat that global warming presents to humanity. I think you did a very good job of explaining global warming theory, and your presentation was effective. Please convey my compliments to your good friend, Laurie David, for a job well done.
As a climate scientist myself — you might remember me…I’m the one you mistook for your “good friend,” UK scientist Phil Jones during my congressional testimony some years back — I have a few questions that occurred to me while watching the movie.
1) Why did you make it look like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods, droughts, and ice calving off of glaciers and falling into the ocean, are only recent phenomena associated with global warming? You surely know that hurricane experts have been warning congress for many years that the natural cycle in hurricanes would return some day, and that our built-up coastlines were ripe for a disaster (like Katrina, which you highlighted in the movie). And as long as snow continues to fall on glaciers, they will continue to flow downhill toward the sea. Yet you made it look like these things wouldn’t happen if it weren’t for global warming. Also, since there are virtually no measures of severe weather showing a recent increase, I assume those graphs you showed actually represented damage increases, which are well known to be simply due to greater population and wealth. Is that right?
2) Why did you make it sound like all scientists agree that climate change is manmade and not natural? You mentioned a recent literature review study that supposedly found no peer-reviewed articles that attributed climate change to natural causes (a non-repeatable study which has since been refuted….I have a number of such articles in my office!) You also mentioned how important it is to listen to scientists when they warn us, yet surely you know that almost all past scientific predictions of gloom and doom have been wrong. How can we trust scientists’ predictions now?
3) I know you still must feel bad about the last presidential election being stolen from you, but why did you have to make fun of Republican presidents (Reagan; both Bushes) for their views on global warming? The points you made in the movie might have had wider appeal if you did not alienate so many moviegoers in this manner.
4) Your presentation showing the past 650,000 years of atmospheric temperature and carbon dioxide reconstructions from ice cores was very effective. But I assume you know that some scientists view the CO2 increases as the result of, rather than the cause of, past temperature increases. It seems unlikely that CO2 variations have been the dominant cause of climate change for hundreds of thousands of years. And now that there is a new source of carbon dioxide emissions (people), those old relationships are probably not valid anymore. Why did you give no hint of these alternative views?
5) When you recounted your 6-year-old son’s tragic accident that nearly killed him, I thought that you were going to make the point that, if you had lived in a poor country like China or India, your son would have probably died. But then you later held up these countries as model examples for their low greenhouse gas emissions, without mentioning that the only reason their emissions were so low was because people in those countries are so poor. I’m confused…do you really want us to live like the poor people in India and China?
6) There seems to be a lot of recent concern that more polar bears are drowning these days because of disappearing sea ice. I assume you know that polar bears have always migrated to land in late summer when sea ice naturally melts back, and then return to the ice when it re-freezes. Also, if this was really happening, why did the movie have to use a computer generated animation of the poor polar bear swimming around looking for ice? Haven’t there been any actual observations of this happening? Also, temperature measurements in the arctic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930’s…before most greenhouse gas emissions. Don’t you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then were low, too?
7) Why did you make it sound like simply signing on to the Kyoto Protocol to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions would be such a big step forward, when we already know it will have no measurable effect on global temperatures anyway? And even though it represents such a small emission reduction, the economic pain Kyoto causes means that almost no developed country will be meeting its emission reductions commitments under that treaty, as we are now witnessing in Europe.
8) At the end of the movie, you made it sound like we can mostly fix the global warming problem by conserving energy… you even claimed we can reduce our carbon emissions to zero. But I’m sure you know that this will only be possible with major technological advancements, including a probable return to nuclear power as an energy source. Why did you not mention this need for technological advancement and nuclear power? It is because that would support the current (Republican) Administration’s view?
Mr. Gore, I think we can both agree that if it was relatively easy for mankind to stop emitting so much carbon dioxide, that we should do so. You are a very smart person, so I can’t understand why you left so many important points unmentioned, and you made it sound so easy.
I wish you well in these efforts, and I hope that humanity will make the right choices based upon all of the information we have on the subject of global warming. I agree with you that global warming is indeed a “moral issue,” and if we are to avoid doing more harm than good with misguided governmental policies, we will need more politicians to be educated on the issue.
Your “Good Friend,”
Dr. Roy W. Spencer
June 11th, 2006 at 12:54 pmApparently, Mr. Spencer does not publish that much, because his work didn’t make it into these 928 scientific papers published over the past decade confirming the scientific consensus that “Most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrationsâ€:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
As a matter of fact, 0 of these 928 papers challenged the consensus.
There is a good response to this letter by Tim Lambert called “Roy Spencer’s questions answered” (looks like he’s having technical difficulties. Scroll about halfway down):
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/05/roy_spencers_questions_answere.php
June 11th, 2006 at 1:09 pmLily,
Again you go off on the bait and switch so many people like you do. Nobody denies “global warming”, aka that the Earth has gotten warmed over the last 3 decades. That’s simple to see on any temperature graph. The question is how much humans have had to do with that, and as you point out, PÃ¥l Brekke’s opinion is that humans are responsible for less than half of the rise and that it may even be less because we have yet to figure out how much the Sun is playing a part of it.
Jay Randal,
Seixon lol > now you try to claim you are NOT a Bush defender/supporter? All your posts up till today have shown otherwise so stop the crap! Everyone on here knows you are paid to post on TP threads as some kind of GOP agent!
Yawn. Call me when you actually have anything to say other than concocting conspiracy theories in your head to keep it in the sand to evade having to face the truth that Think Progress is denying you.
JJ,
How is a scientific paper supposed to prove or show a negative? How can you have a paper showing that the warming on Earth is NOT from humans? You can’t. You can show that it is from other things, but you can’t prove a negative like that. It is a half truth because if you looked at many other published works, they seek to show that the warming is caused by something or another. They don’t try to disprove that humans are behind it because that is irrelevant/impossible.
I read a scientific paper the other day that evaluates how much the Sun’s influence on the climate has been measured and taken into account. Does that fit into your 0 for 928? Nope. You’re lying by omission, it’s a carefully crafted factoid.
June 11th, 2006 at 2:36 pm“Most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrationsâ€
It appears this so-called “consensus” is an exaggeration of the confidence level of IPCC scientists (one of them an Exxon employee who is a lead author for the report).
“Likely” is not an indicator of a high degree of confidence it it?
In the IPCC Report the following words have been used to indicate approximate judgmental estimates of confidence:
virtually certain (greater than 99% chance that a result is true);
June 11th, 2006 at 2:48 pmvery likely (90−99% chance);
likely (66−90% chance);
medium likelihood (33−66% chance);
unlikely (10−33% chance);
very unlikely (1−10% chance);
exceptionally unlikely (less than 1% chance).
How is a scientific paper supposed to prove or show a negative? How can you have a paper showing that the warming on Earth is NOT from humans? You can’t.
Well now you’re slipping into the areas that the National Review said “No serious person on either side of the global-warming debate questions”.
Technically nothing in science is ever proven. Newton’s law of gravity is just a theory. Apples could fall upward tomorrow and disprove his theories. But is this useful for creating policy? No, that’s absurd. NASA shouldn’t suddenly start training its scientists in case Newton’s theories are wrong.
Here’s examples of the research on which the National Review bases its assumption that “increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, contributes to global warming”:
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=3458&method=full
These experiments are able to tell the “signature” of CO2 levels as a cause for warming.
I read a scientific paper the other day that evaluates how much the Sun’s influence on the climate has been measured and taken into account.
As for the sun’s influence, unlike with CO2, there’s really little or nothing to support that hypothesis (and it would be quite a coincidence to have it warming so dramatically at the same time that we’re increasing CO2 to such large amounts):
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/04/its-sun-stupid.html
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=171
June 11th, 2006 at 3:04 pmFrom the IPCC 2001 Report,
LEVEL OF SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING
The influence of external factors on
climate can be broadly compared using the concept of
radiative forcing. Here is the level of scientific understanding for some
of those external factors, but the understanding of most of the external factors
is very low.
Statospsheric ozone – Medium
Sulphate – Low
Black and organic carbon from fossil fuel burning – Very Low
Solar – Very Low
The IPCC report does a fine job of casting doubt on their predictions for climate change. The don’t even have confidence in their understanding of radiative forcing.
June 11th, 2006 at 3:07 pmThe IPCC report does a fine job of casting doubt on their predictions for climate change.
Sure, but I’m noticing you’re not mentioning risk (not surprising). Check out this quote from science writer Chris Mooney:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ democracy-climate_change_debate/2579.jsp
June 11th, 2006 at 3:18 pm(Sorry, fixed the link: http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-climate_change_debate/2579.jsp)
June 11th, 2006 at 3:24 pmAlso, uncertainty is what the tobacco companies kept trying to peddle to forestall anti-smoking campaigns. All you have to prove is that there is still “debate” in the scientific community, even when that’s an absurd notion.
There’s a Scientific American article that partly deals with this subject:
It’s a hackneyed, tried and true method to confuse the public.
June 11th, 2006 at 3:40 pmJJ,
Comparing tobacco and global warming – nice! One is an issue where we can actually study the effects in their entirety since they happen within a persons body. The other is massive extending the entire atmosphere, something which we are simply unable to measure in every way needed to get a complete picture of what is happening. Hell, there are still many things that happen within humans that scientists STILL can’t figure out, and that is stuff we can study hands-on and repeat the experiment a million times. Can we do that with the atmosphere? Nope.
So yeah, if you look past that gaping hole in your comparison, then it looks like a valid point.
As for the Sun and there being “little to support” the idea that it has anything to do with the warming, really? Here’s a study from 2004 that says:
That’s just one, there are many more studies about the Sun’s effects on the climate, and the current climate models’ complete lack of accounting for this.
If you really think the last 30 years of rise in CO2 and rise in temperature shows the correlation to be conclusive… what about the period between 1930 and 1970? The CO2 was skyrocketing around this time, yet the global mean temperature went slightly down and stayed stable. How do you explain that? How come most of the warming in the 20th century came BEFORE the 1930s and the industrial revolution? Does that make any sense? No, it doesn’t.
In fact, and you can test this yourself, I tested the correlation between the following:
1) CO2 vs. global mean temperature
2) Global population vs. global mean temperature
3) US national debt vs. global mean temperature
Know what I got?
1) 0.84
2) 0.82
3) 0.86
Keep in mind that this is between 1958 and 2002, since I used the CO2 data from the station on Hawaii that started in 1958. I wonder what the correlations would have been like if I had reliable numbers for CO2 back into 1900….
June 11th, 2006 at 6:35 pmHmm, actually a meteologist and an astrologer here in Norway do not support this hypothesis.
Comment by Seixon — June 10, 2006 @ 5:06 pm
Lily, there are scientists out there who disagree with all of this
Comment by Seixon — June 10, 2006 @ 11:45 pm
Lily,
Again you go off on the bait and switch so many people like you do. Nobody denies “global warmingâ€, aka that the Earth has gotten warmed over the last 3 decades.
Comment by Seixon — June 11, 2006 @ 2:36 pm
Which is it? That they don’t support the hypothesis, that they disagree with all of it, or that they don’t deny it exists?
And again, if human activity has caused half the problem, that still means we doubled what would have naturally occured.
June 11th, 2006 at 8:40 pmSeixon
Just go back to Truthout where they don’t care about the truth at all. We got your ilk pegged. Maybe Jason Leopold will be fooled by your arguments, but not here.
June 12th, 2006 at 11:13 amI understand that there is proof that the earth has warmed up some. But the nature is cyclical, especially with weather patterns. I’m glad companies are being forced to run cleaner and produce fewer bad byproducts because the world is self-cleaning only up to a point. I just don’t know much one degree here or there will make that much of a difference.
July 26th, 2006 at 10:56 pm