Global Warming

Two days ago a press release came out about an article indicating that 5,600 years ago (BP=Before the Present Age [you see, BP avoids the word “Christian”–something that is de rigeur these days]) global temperatures in Antarctica were warmer than they are today. Think about that. How old is the Chinese dynasties? What about Egypt? They lived through these times. Did THEY cause “global warming.” Well, today, there’s another press release. This one, too, is about Antarctica and tells us that in the mid-to-late Holocene (our present age)–which is around the same 5,600 years ago as mentioned above, sea ice in Antarctica was in retreat more than it is today. Their results are based on southern elephant seal occupation sites. Read More ›

Two days ago a press release came out about an article indicating that 5,600 years ago (BP=Before the Present Age [you see, BP avoids the word “Christian”–something that is de rigeur these days]) global temperatures in Antarctica were warmer than they are today. Think about that. How old is the Chinese dynasties? What about Egypt? They lived through these times. Did THEY cause “global warming.” Well, today, there’s another press release. This one, too, is about Antarctica and tells us that in the mid-to-late Holocene (our present age)–which is around the same 5,600 years ago as mentioned above, sea ice in Antarctica was in retreat more than it is today. Their results are based on southern elephant seal occupation sites. Read More ›

From a PNAS article: The conditions of methane (CH4) formation in olivine-hosted secondary fluid inclusions and their prevalence in peridotite and gabbroic rocks from a wide range of geological settings were assessed using confocal Raman spectroscopy, optical and scanning electron microscopy, electron microprobe analysis, and thermodynamic modeling. Detailed examination of 160 samples from ultraslow- to fast-spreading midocean ridges, subduction zones, and ophiolites revealed that hydrogen (H2) and CH4 formation linked to serpentinization within olivine-hosted secondary fluid inclusions is a widespread process. And this from a paper in Nature: Methane (CH4) is an important greenhouse gas because it has 25 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide (CO2) by mass over a century. Recent calculations suggest that atmospheric CH4 emissions Read More ›

In St. Louis earlier this month: What do you do if you’re a climate activist and a geoscientist speaks at a meeting near you offering scientific evidence against your point of view? Well, of course—you do what any rational person would do. You attend and listen carefully and weigh the arguments and consider whether you should change your views. Maybe you ask some questions during the Q&A at the end of the talk, challenging some of his evidence or reasoning. Maybe, if you’re really confident of your views, you contact the event organizers in advance and offer to debate the speaker, making the event all the more valuable to people of all persuasions. Or maybe not. Maybe, instead, you just Read More ›

Further to kairosfocus’s thoughts yesterday on the digital empire suppressing the free flow of ideas: Buzzfeed reported August 7 that “YouTube Is Fighting Back Against Climate Misinformation.” As of July 9, “YouTube is now adding fact checks to videos that question climate change … as a part of its ongoing effort to combat the rampant misinformation and conspiratorial fodder on its platform.” … YouTube’s decision might be defensible if it were evenhanded. If, on all videos addressing climate change, from any perspective, YouTube placed a notice that climate change is the subject of vigorous ongoing debate and that equally qualified scientists hold a variety of views on the magnitude, causes, and consequences of human-induced climate change and on the best Read More ›

As opposed to a denier: I propose a basic test to determine who has earned the benefit of the doubt on whether to be labelled a denier or not. Does the person have an academic or professional background in atmospheric science or climatology? If the answer is yes, then they earn the benefit of the doubt and should not be called a denier. Does the person have an academic or professional background in another discipline and not a climate-related field? If the answer is yes, then they have not earned the right to be called anything other than a denier. Brian Brettschneider, “Climate Change Skeptic Or Denier?” at Forbes Reader Otto Pellinen writes to say, This article has an interesting take Read More ›

Specifically, the claim that global warming promotes violence. From the editors of Nature: Such retrospective analyses raise two questions related to cause and effect: did climate change alter the weather? And did the change in the weather provoke the conflict? Only a solid yes to both can justify bold statements that global warming promotes violence — and establishing this answer is difficult, if not impossible, in many cases. That hasn’t stopped such controversial claims being made. A decade ago, the United Nations went as far as to state that climate warming and desertification were one of the causes of the Darfur conflict in Sudan, which started in 2003 and led to the deaths of up to half a million people Read More ›

Oh? From Graham Readfearn at the Guardian: Deniers have found a platform in emerging publications that publish without rigorous review Journals that are “open access” make their money by charging academics or institutions a fee for peer reviewing and checking submitted academic manuscripts, and then publishing them. There are many reputable publishers working this way. But this murky world has a predator of its own – climate science deniers looking to take advantage of the questionable quality controls in return for getting their work published in what the publishers claim are “peer-reviewed journals” but that, in reality, are not. It might make very little difference if they were “peer-reviewed” according to Readfearn’s standards, given how things are going with peer Read More ›

For those of us who have been critiquing evolutionary theory for a long time, and hence, long-time observers of the kind of reasoning evolutionists/Darwinists employ, you can’t help but see the absolute parallel that exists between evolutionary theory and the “science” behind “global warming.” [N.B. If you have to change the name of the ‘science’ from “global warming” to “climate change,” then just admit you’ve lost the argument, else why change the very name you use?.] Both involve ‘consensus’ thinking; both involve criteria that used in one manner provide a solution given ONE SET of facts, but which, given a new, different, and conflicting set of facts, are used in almost the opposite manner; both involve an almost faith-like allegiance Read More ›