Global Warming Conspiracy? [Split from 'Global Warming Alert']

[Vivec]

Well it would still remove the excuse for 90% of wars wouldnt it, which has to be a good thing.

Thankfully between 1000 and 10000 years from now there will be no more of our wars, either through extinction or civilsation.




Another advantage is we could move live and work around OUR world freely without the endless passport/visa checks beaurocracy insanity.
Europe's open borders policy is going in the right direction whereas the USA recently implementing full passport control even for Canadians is going in reverse..

Cheers mate! You are totally right about that! Couldn't agree more!
BAN THE VISAS!!! *lol*

[Groakes]

Only if the actions taken are appropriate and intelligent, and the law of unintended consequences doesn't alter the end result.

The Law of Unintended consequence is already having a drastic impact on the environment at the moment you would have to say.

Currently there's almost a one to one correlation between the amount of carbon emitted by a nation and it's percentage of the world's GDP. Until that number changes, drastic changes in carbon emissions could have drastic effects on human lives.

That's because our economies are at the moment wholly carbon driven. A similiar study in the 1880s could have found a similiar corellation between the number of children working in coal mines and a nation's GDP.

A restructuring of the economy along sustainable lines will develop new technologies and new forms of economy. For example, a shift toward hydrogen and solar would result in capital investment in significant infrastructure supporting transport, energy, manufacturing and agriculture.

But looking at things in terms of purely economic terms is a bit of a dead end. Current economic models, particularly those driven by monetarist policies are based on numerous flawed assumptions as to how the market operates and as to how resources are delivered. There is, for example, little modelling of the feedback consequences of unintended output from market transactions impacting upon supply.

Most economic models assume the earth as being both an infinite supplier of resources and an infinite container fro growth. Neither of these assumptions are valid. Even Adam Smith, whose "The Wealth of Nations" defined the operating parameters for a free market, would not have recognised or condoned the current market state. He specifically spoke of a market where transactions between supplier and producer were conducted on EQUAL grounds and the impact of the transaction had no consequences outside the transaction itself. The capital power of corporations and the leverage of advertising, for example, imbalances the transaction massively in favour of the producer. And the outputs of manufacturing are having direct and quaintifiable impacts on the resource base.

The market is in danger of consuming itself. The carbon economy cannot be sustained at current growth rates with a rapidly diminishing supply of oil.

The best way to get there is science, and the best way to fund science is not to ruin our economies.

Perhaps. But caution needs to be applied as scientific output often reflects the opinions of its funding base. "Scientific" studies funded by tobacco industry found that there was little cause to link smoking to lung and heart disease. "Scientific" studies by the oil and coal industries (using, coincidentally, some of the same scientists that the tobacco industry used - Fred Singer, and Fred Seitz for example) have found no connection between global warming and carbon output. Funding of research that supports anthropogenic global warming, particulalrly in the early days, was independantly funded.

And I do think that the best way to get there is actually through society. Our society has been moulded in such a way as to convince us that happiness is dependant upon consumption. This supports the current economic models and supports the corporate entities that are largely responsible for this view. However changing a society so that it's goal become focussed on creation (the true source of happiness) rather consumption (merely the source of pleasure) is a lot more difficult than redesigning and restructuring a global economy....

However, I have high hopes that there will be significant improvements in greening of the West's economies in the next decade or two. Lot's of good things on the horizon, from improvements in solar efficiency, alternative fuel sources, carbon sequestration plans, to a new generation of building materials from carbon nanotubes that will pay huge dividends in infrastructure improvements. NASA just completed a new photovoltaic cell using carbon nanotubes that uses three dimensions of the surface to absorb solar energy instead of just a two dimensional flat plain.

I agree. And here in Australia, the CSIRO is carrying out similiar important work. But the danger remains in obfuscation and denial by vested interests.

I hate to quote from the Al Gore movie cos it makes me look like some sort of greenie fan boy BUT, he did quote that arch imperialist Winston Churchill (some what ironically in my eyes as I do suspect that Winnie would have been quite supportive of those vested interests).

That said...

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…

And the consequences of doing nothing, of failing to act in the face of massive scientific evidence are morally reprehensible.

[Demiurge]

Like I have said before, acting as if global warming is anthropogenic and taking actions to deal with it will improve our society and will lead to stronger, sustainable and diverse economies. Failing to act could lead to irreversible environmental degadation which will impact drastically on societies and economies.

Only if the actions taken are appropriate and intelligent, and the law of unintended consequences doesn't alter the end result.

Yes, working toward a greener economy makes sense. However, if global warming isn't anthropogenic, do we need to drop our carbon emissions 50-85% by 2050 as the IPCC says we need to do? Currently there's almost a one to one correlation between the amount of carbon emitted by a nation and it's percentage of the world's GDP. Until that number changes, drastic changes in carbon emissions could have drastic effects on human lives.

The best way to get there is science, and the best way to fund science is not to ruin our economies.

However, I have high hopes that there will be significant improvements in greening of the West's economies in the next decade or two. Lot's of good things on the horizon, from improvements in solar efficiency, alternative fuel sources, carbon sequestration plans, to a new generation of building materials from carbon nanotubes that will pay huge dividends in infrastructure improvements. NASA just completed a new photovoltaic cell using carbon nanotubes that uses three dimensions of the surface to absorb solar energy instead of just a two dimensional flat plain.

[Groakes]

On the flip side, even if global warming due to human produced CO2 is propaganda, does the global warming movement still nevertheless offer viable solutions to the real problems facing us in the forms of planetary resource drain and pollution? Or at least serve as an attention-getter to raise awareness?

Absolutely. Unrestrained consumption is the greatest threat facing the planet at the moment. An environmental focussed change against unmitigated consumption is still a change for the better....

[Groakes]

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly...

You have to worry when people start referring to Michael Crichton as some sort of authority. He is one of the most robustly anti-science writers on the face of the planet. His collected body of work is so full of the fear of science as to be almost paranoiac. His "State of Fear" novel has been debunked by legitimate climate scientists http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74.

I agree with Richard Lindzen...

That would be the Richard Lindzen who refused a bet with James Annan that global temperatures would increase over the next 20 years unless he got odds of better than 50:1! And on an unrelated subject thinks there there is little evidence that smoking is related to the incidence of lung cancer....

■Small climate changes do not demand far-reaching restrictive measures
■Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided
■Instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants
■Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus”, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority
■Instead of speaking about “the environment”, let us be attentive to it in our personal behaviour
■Let us be humble but confident in the spontaneous evolution of human society. Let us trust its rationality and not try to slow it down or divert it in any direction
■Let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives.

Unfortunately, it is not an issue of "small climate changes". Each year may be a small change but it is the overall trend that is the worry. The climate is not a linear system, it is, to a large degree, a chaotic one. By chaotic, I mean that there is a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This means that small changes in one part of the system, can cause wildly unpredictable changes in other parts of the system.

I respect Klaus' desires to provide democracy and prosperity - but there is little freedom in a world held captive to the market demands of petroleum. A degraded environment takes away our freedoms and relying on a "free market" to deliver democracy will only result in exchanging the slavery of rigid state control to the insidious slavery of captive consumerism.

Like I have said before, acting as if global warming is anthropogenic and taking actions to deal with it will improve our society and will lead to stronger, sustainable and diverse economies. Failing to act could lead to irreversible environmental degadation which will impact drastically on societies and economies.

[Grey Mouser]

On the flip side, even if global warming due to human produced CO2 is propaganda, does the global warming movement still nevertheless offer viable solutions to the real problems facing us in the forms of planetary resource drain and pollution? Or at least serve as an attention-getter to raise awareness?

[Grey Mouser]

The following article by the President of the Czech Republic is very much to the point I feel. His words echo many of my own reservations.

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

(Ref my quote from President Gorbachev in my first post in this thread).

Full article:

Freedom, not climate, is at risk.

By Vaclav Klaus
Published: June 13 2007 17:44 | Last updated: June 13 2007 17:44



We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.


In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.


The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.


As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.


The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.


The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.


Does it make any sense to speak about warming of the Earth when we see it in the context of the evolution of our planet over hundreds of millions of years? Every child is taught at school about temperature variations, about the ice ages, about the much warmer climate in the Middle Ages. All of us have noticed that even during our life-time temperature changes occur (in both directions).


Due to advances in technology, increases in disposable wealth, the rationality of institutions and the ability of countries to organise themselves, the adaptability of human society has been radically increased. It will continue to increase and will solve any potential consequences of mild climate changes.


I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”.
The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.


As a witness to today’s worldwide debate on climate change, I suggest the following:


■Small climate changes do not demand far-reaching restrictive measures
■Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided
■Instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants
■Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus”, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority
■Instead of speaking about “the environment”, let us be attentive to it in our personal behaviour
■Let us be humble but confident in the spontaneous evolution of human society. Let us trust its rationality and not try to slow it down or divert it in any direction
■Let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives.


The writer is President of the Czech Republic

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9deb730a-19c...b5df10621.html

[Demiurge]

Tales - just reiterating the same IPCC reports and predictions doesn't mean much if it turns out the CERN information is correct - all of those predictions would be rendered completely invalid, as they assume they have factored in every relevant indicator, and if the CLOUD project is right then the single greatest factor would be a variable they didn't account for.

I agree that we need to move toward greener science and economy - the question is how badly and how soon, and what the consequences could be.

The IPCC for example has stated we need to reduce our carbon emissions by 60% our current levels in the next decade or two. That's with a country like the PRC that should be the largest producer of CO2 in the next year or two not being bound by even the limited protocols we have today.

Personally I think any reasonable person understands that it just isn't doable without massive economic deprivation - the Kyoto protocols are described as a mere bandaid, and was decried by many as being only a political measure that didn't address the real science, as it's goals were so far below those that the experts were saying were required to fix the issue. And those goals in many cases aren't being met.

Strong economies are necessary for the R&D required to find a better way out of our current mess. Damaging those economies precipitously might not address the issue and leave us without the only real hope we have of sustaining our society, the funding for scientific initiatives to find better ways to live and the resources in order to deal with any environmental fluctuations that affect our populace.

I'm hopeing CERN is right, because if they aren't, humanity is going to take a beating in the next century.

[Tales from Tanelorn]

Occams Razor states that The simplest explanation is probably the right explanation.
ie. CO2 and temperature historically trend together and the effect that CO2 has on the atmosphere is widely understood and accepted.

The IPCC has the best study I have seen for global warming and should be required reading before suggesting more exotic
and less likely possibilities.

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm

According to the IPCC "Human processes are now critically linked to climate change
The human element probably represents the most important aspect both of the causes and effects of climate change and environmental impacts.
Any policy intervention will have human activities as its immediate target"

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/514.htm#1431

IPCC: Effect of stabilising CO2 emissions at different levels:

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig9-19.htm


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:M...on_Dioxide.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:I...ure_Record.png


Best Historical chart of Earth's Temperature:
(Obviously the older the records the less certainty there is)
(Also note the time axis on the bottom axis where the recent changes are much more rapid than previous ones)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...alaeotemps.png


Important future prediction graph:

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki...Change_Gallery


Finally, whatever the biggest cause of climate change actually is, making like a cross between a lemming and an ostrich, doing nothing and
hoping the problem will go away is clearly not the intelligent approach. Even if we are only as little as 30% of the overall problem we
surely have to try to find ways to reduce our contribution. The question is will Humankind as a species fail the Darwin test?
Clearly Bush and his kind would, dead as dodo.

[Demiurge]

Actually, there's one scenario getting serious interest that could significantly mitigate the anthropogenic view of climate change.

According to our friends at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich the Sun is at a peak of solar activity from the last 1150 years, and in that millenia may never have been more active than the last 60 years....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3869753.stm

Now there's been studies indicating that the amount of thermal energy that has reached the Earth from the Sun doesn't account for the full rate of change of temp in the last 100 years. The Duke study says it could account for between 45-50% of the temperature change seen in the 20th century, and between 10-30% of the change seen in the last twenty years.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/200...GL025539.shtml

However, the rate of change has accelerated in the last 10 years significantly more than thermal variation could account for. What could be causing this?

Water vapor is the most significant factor in the greenhouse effect. We have a relatively poor idea of how clouds form. In the late 90s an astrophysicist postulated that it had to do with ionization from cosmic rays, and recreated cloud formation in the lab utilizing no other seeding agent but said rays.

The folks running CLOUD continue their experiments over at CERN, with the first batch of test results expected this summer. It postulates that the solar wind is affecting cosmic rays which determine how ions form clouds in the Earth's atmosphere, possibly accounting for large amounts of the change in temperature in the last 100 years due to difference in cloud dynamics (water vapor being an order of magnitude more important than man made greenhouse gases in temperature determination). This also would account for the fact that while the ground areas have increased in temp, the troposphere consistently hasn't (according to both satellite and weather ballon observations), which is a huge hole in the current anthropogenic greenhouse emissions models which would expect uniformity in temperature increase throughout the different atmospheric layers.
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/Con...tCloud-en.html

This could be potentially huge. The IPCC is positing that while temperature increases recorded from the late 1890s to modern day is about 1 degree celsius, that in the next century we should see anywhere between 200% to 400% larger increase in temperatures because of the increase in CO2 emissions.

However, if CO2 and other anthropgenic gases aren't the primary cause but just a contributing factor, mankind has a hell of a lot more time to adjust our science and industry to the realities of greenhouse gas emissions.

Considering the fact that the PRC is likely to overtake the United States in a year in emissions, and India is charging up right behind, and even the countries that signed Kyoto are far from reaching their goals, it would be good news indeed if we had decades to implement the changes, not a few years as many alarmists (including Dr. Hansen, as previously mentioned) believe.

So let's hope for all our sakes that the folks at CERN are right.

[Tales from Tanelorn]

Spiritual development, living a meaningful life, and peace of mind are very important even for an aethist/agnostic such as myself. I found my "river" so to speak by gaining an understanding of the imbalance we have today and realising that we urgently have to restore the balance of nature. This transcends all other ideas either religous or materialistic or similar kinds of selfishness.

[Grey Mouser]

Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint...

On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.
This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.

Alexandr Solzhenitzyn - Harvard University Address 1978

[Tales from Tanelorn]

Imagine
John Lennon

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

says it all....

[Morgan Kane]

and religion !

Imagine ! ( by Lenon )

any way no need to think there is a conspiracy .. greed, self hypnotism, and combination of economic interests are enough .....

Eisenhower who is not a leftist denounced the military-industrial complex some years ago ( 1960 or 1961 )

[Tales from Tanelorn]

Well it would still remove the excuse for 90% of wars wouldnt it, which has to be a good thing.

Thankfully between 1000 and 10000 years from now there will be no more of our wars, either through extinction or civilsation.




Another advantage is we could move live and work around OUR world freely without the endless passport/visa checks beaurocracy insanity.
Europe's open borders policy is going in the right direction whereas the USA recently implementing full passport control even for Canadians is going in reverse..