I just finished reading a book that will never see the inside of a Racine Unified school. All the more reason to read it.
The book is Climate Confusion by Roy Spencer, a former NASA climatologist. Spencer takes on the doomsdayers, explains the issues in an understandable style. Yes, the temperature on earth is warming, slightly. It is far from proven that this slight warming has been caused by man. Humans prosper in warmer climates. Plants benefit from increased CO2. We don't understand fully (or anywhere near it) how our exceedingly complex earth stabilizes itself naturally. As such, computer models are overly simplistic and tend to overstate the effect of "mankind's tiny enhancement of the greenhouse effect." Spencer also argues that many proposed solutions (Kyoto) will harm economies and do little good and bring possible harm to the environment.
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Roy Spencer:
Holds a mico-minority view on global warming.
Is a regular guest on " Coast to Coast AM"
Referred to as the "official climatologist of the EIB Network" by Rush Limbaugh.
A supporter of intelligent design.
A member of the Heartland Institute and a contributor to the George C. Marshall Institute, both of which receive funding from ExxonMobil.
Thought to be a raving loony by the rest of the scientific community.
R key malfunction. micro not mico.
Google Lindzen at Harvard - is he a kook too?
I absolutely LOVE how comments like "it is warmer now than it has been in 247,000 years" get thrown around and no one asks questions. It must be an incredible experience when an archeologist, excavating in pre-stone age sites (long before man even lived in caves and painted on walls, before he would even be recognized as "man"), comes across another fully automated digital thermometer with integrated recording system. I always ask how man could have built these at this time in human history!
Does anyone realize that the experimental error on the best equipment out there today is small but significant? Now throw in estimates of historic temperatures (based on ice cores, etc. which can NEVER be validated with modern equipment because, well, the modern equipment wasn’t around), use some computer models – and poof! Write a grant that props up your university’s atmospheric science department (these people have been less successful in getting funding over the years than the people who research mundane things like AIDS, cancer, etc.) and get your picture in US magazine!
. . . and by the way, techniques like carbon dating, which uses the predictable VALIDATED decay of carbon 14 to determine lengths of time, can be used quite accurately to determine the age of fossils and other carbon-containing materials. The climate people want you to believe that they have a method for determining (quite precisely if you listen to some of these people)what the temperature was 100,000 years ago or more - they don't.
Anon 4:12, I didn't seek out the left wing smear campaign before reading the book, but it would not have concerned me. I have seen, time and time again, efforts to discredit, personally attack etc... those individuals who would dare challenge left wing orthodoxy. Indeed, I am one of those individuals, albeit only locally.
Anyway, is that the best you have got? Heartland Institute member - so what. And he covers in his book exactly the accusation that you are levelling - that they are shills for big oil. It is nonsense. The people who get the funding get it to look for evidence of global warming.
Minority view on global warming? Yes, obviously.
Believes in God. Oh no! A scientist studying the vast exceedingly complex universe with its consistent laws etc... believes that it may be the result of an intelligent being, rather than random chance. What a kook!
Anyway anon, you realize I hope that you have merely attacked the man (ad hominem) and left his arguments alone. Why is that?
From "Lorne Gunter: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof" posted last month:
"While not stooping to such name-calling, weather-satellite scientists David Douglass of the University of Rochester and John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville nonetheless dealt the True Believers a devastating blow last month.
For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA's eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, "variations in global temperatures since 1978 ... cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide."
PS. Since it is now clear that global warming proponents are members of a cult, I would like to object to being called a global warming denier. It would be more accurate to refer to me as a global warming heretic.
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