Cult Science
| January 19, 2009 | Posted by Dave S. under Global Warming, Off Topic, Science |
A physics professor at Princeton is the latest of hundreds and hundreds of scientists who’ve stepped up to the plate saying anthropogenic CO2 as the cause of global warming is bogus.
Professor denies global warming theory
“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.”
In other news, what I said before is coming to pass. I wrote that when global cooling takes hold we’ll be left with only a fervent wish that more CO2 could warm it back up. Well, a newspaper editor in Flint Michigan has started praying for global warming.
It’s time to pray for global warming, says Flint Journal columnist John Tomlinson
Selected quotes:
At December’s U.N. Global Warming conference in Poznan, Poland, 650 of the world’s top climatologists stood up and said man-made global warming is a media generated myth without basis. Said climatologist Dr. David Gee, Chairman of the International Geological Congress, “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?”
Meanwhile, the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center released conclusive satellite photos showing that Arctic ice is back to 1979 levels. What’s more, measurements of Antarctic ice now show that its accumulation is up 5 percent since 1980.
Ironically, in spite of being shown false, we must now pray for it. Because a massive study, just released by the Russian Government, contains overwhelming evidence that earth is on the verge of another Ice Age.
37 Responses to Cult Science
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Olinto de Pretto
Tolbert
There’s all kinds of data on soot (black carbon) on the web. It’s listed as a significant forcing factor in the 2007 IPCC technical report. It’s shown to be about half of what CO2 contributes but some studies say it’s at least equal to CO2 forcing and some say it’s greater. There are also studies showing the earth’s albedo has been decreasing. This is a difficult measurement and the study, done by measuring the brightness of the moon when it is illuminated only by light reflected from the earth has only been going on since 2002 or so IIRC. The study measured a 1% decrease in reflected light during that time. It’s not possible to separate out different things that contribute to it either. Cloud cover, snow cover, soot, land use changes, all contribute to overall albedo. The biggest factor right now appears to be the cosmic ray hypothesis which generates more or less high altitude clouds which reflect more or less sunlight. The sun’s magnetic field throttles the intensity of cosmic rays. Extreme solar minimums line up quite well with historical cold periods. The sun has been unusually quiet for the past year, a one hundred year low, and sure enough we’re having one of the coldest winters in decades. It snowed yesterday or the day before somewhere in the Middle East for only the second time in recorded history. If the sun stays quiet we’ll get a hard lesson in what global cooling is like and it’s a LOT worse than warming. The primary producers in the food chain don’t produce much on frozen ground. Wherego the primary producers go the rest of the food chain including us.
Joseph,
I was referring to the exact mathematical quantification of the mass=energy relationship.
Olinto de Pretto certaintly had some insights generally regarded as ahead of his time.
(But then, so did Karl Marx for that matter.)
He was certainly onto something but was neither the first to come up with his notions nor the only one at the time of publication. This is not to say his ideas have no merit. They do. But, when it comes to the quantification of mass and energy at the extremes, and how one relates to another under a duress not commonly seen by the human eye and general experience, Hasenohrl gets the billing. His is a more direct linkage.
The probloem is that Hasenohrl, like de Pretto long before, did not make a connection to HOW this might come about. Einstein DID, clerical duties aside.
Eventually.
In fact, Einstein did not make ALL the connections right away either. His first paper made no mention of the term Relativity. He HATED the very term.
Said first draft being called “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.”
But today, we can, if getting past all this bruha about windmills and chicken manure advocacy from the radical enviros, use nuclear energy, as well as, say, maybe even sending Little Adolf over in Iran straight to the Stratosphere. If need be….
PS:
If we really want to get picky, we can trace the REAL heritage of all this squarely back to Galileo, who also made early notes on relativistic behaviors among objects, though the energy/mass dichotomy was not something he hit on. Galileo noticed that objects behaved the same on a moving ship the same as standing on solid ground. And YET, from shore the object’s motion, say, a ball being tossed, appears to arc in a parabola-but NOT to the man tossing it. So it went.
OK, so what is the temperature the Earth should be?
This just in:
Global warming ‘irreversible’ for next 1000 years
I haven’t read the PNAS article yet.
Based on the article you just referenced, and its mention of desertification, water resources under stress, probably food shortages, and the flooding of major tributaries and shorelines where millions of human beings live in order to live off of seafood and other coastal resources now set to be decimated, I’d say the answer to your query is, in a phrase:
Lower than it is now. (Or will be within a few decades.)
Of course, granted, it has been both much warmer and much colder in the distant past. We’ve had periods where ice sheets came down to Missouri and the coast of Florida was hundreds of miles outward from now, and also periods where warm blooded reptiles found the polar regions nice and warm and not a flake of snow probably fell anywhere south of the Arctic circle.
But now, as with other kinds of articles, the one you referenced is a fool’s errand when it comes to predictions that far out. I would cede that point.
So the bottom line is you don’t know what the Earth’s temperature should be.
We will most likely always have shore lines from which to fish from- or launch boats from.
We also have the know-how and technology to prevent desertification by alleviating the pressure on those tributaries.
And by doing that we (could) feed the world.
Better yet my property will be close to the new shore-line. So I say let it melt and please make it sooner rather than later!