Has Anyone Seen "The Great Global Warming Swindle"

[Zac Naloen]

Why should anyone take the blog of a former radar engineer and economist as any sort of scientific source? Especially when it gives nothing but a broken link to a study in order to establish its credibility?

All I did was post a graph and ask for clarification. I'm not an expert which is the whole reason I'm asking the questions I am, most scientific papers go over my head (due to not being a scientist I'm an IT technician) I tend to get better responses if I ask on here as opposed to trying to find results on google.

[Darth Wong]

All I did was post a graph and ask for clarification. I'm not an expert which is the whole reason I'm asking the questions I am, most scientific papers go over my head (due to not being a scientist I'm an IT technician) I tend to get better responses if I ask on here as opposed to trying to find results on google.

You posted a graph from a worthless source. You don't need to be a scientist yourself to know that the personal blog of a fucking economist is not a valid place to get scientific data.

[aerius]

You don't need to be a scientist yourself to know that the personal blog of a fucking economist is not a valid place to get scientific data.

Which reminds me of joke from way back when...


An Engineer, Statistician and Economist were asked "what does 2 + 2 equal?"
They answered as follows:
Engineer: With a safety factor of 2x, 2 + 2 = 8
Statistician: With a degree of freedom of 1, 2 + 2 = anywhere from 1 to 7,
but I can't be sure.
Economist: What would you like it to equal?

[Zac Naloen]

All I did was post a graph and ask for clarification. I'm not an expert which is the whole reason I'm asking the questions I am, most scientific papers go over my head (due to not being a scientist I'm an IT technician) I tend to get better responses if I ask on here as opposed to trying to find results on google.

You posted a graph from a worthless source. You don't need to be a scientist yourself to know that the personal blog of a fucking economist is not a valid place to get scientific data.

That's why I wasn't using the blog, I used something he'd linked too. I didn't think to check his own source.

[nightmare]

1984 is the year I became certain that global warming occurs. For the past years, I have only needed to casually look out my window to see that global warming is a hard fact. It's getting really bad, fast. Yet another summer is expected to reach a record high warmth. The past winter was colder than satan's own tits, and it lasted only three months as opposed to a normal six. You might think that global warming can't be so bad if the winter's very cold, but this isn't the case. It's the average temperature that matters. A very cold but short winter is just as bad a sign as a long and hot summer. If it wasn't clear already, I live up north, latitude 64 (arctic circle is 66) - and I live near the sea. Imagine the poor buggers inland.

What causes it is utterly irrelevant since we know that greenhouse gasses makes it worse . Consequently, there are only two options, and both involve burning. Less fossiles or more people. If it's going to be the latter, I'll be watching the show from the beach under the palm trees, sipping piña colada.

[SirNitram]

This is a bit late, but there's real irony of the title of the OP. The Great Global Warming Swindle? Easy: The money made by those who will twist, contort, lie, and obsfucate to pretend it doesn't exist.

[Kittie Rose]

This global warming conspiracy thing is getting nuts.

One guy on a TF forum I go to had a link in his sig entitled "Global Warming Fears 'Greatest Deception in the History of Science'... "

So I changed my sig to -

"Global Warming fears 'Greatest Decepticon in the History of Science'... "

[Fire Fly]

Short version for the lazy.

Climate scientist 'duped to deny global warming'

Ben Goldacre and David Adam
Sunday March 11, 2007
The Observer

A leading US climate scientist is considering legal action after he says he was duped into appearing in a Channel 4 documentary that claimed man-made global warming is a myth. Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the film, The Great Global Warming Swindle, was 'grossly distorted' and 'as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two'.

He says his comments in the film were taken out of context and that he would not have agreed to take part if he had known it would argue that man-made global warming was not a serious threat. 'I thought they were trying to educate the public about the complexities of climate change,' he said. 'This seems like a deliberate attempt to exploit someone who is on the other side of the issue.' He is considering a complaint to Ofcom, the broadcast regulator.

Long version for the patient. In this, Professor Wunsch describes what he was trying to get across.

[Fire Fly]

A group of actual, actively researching scientists respond to Swindle

9 Mar 2007
Swindled!
Filed under:

* Climate Science
* Paleoclimate
* Sun-earth connections
* Reporting on climate

— group @ 5:36 pm

By William and Gavin

On Thursday the 8th, the UK TV Channel 4 aired a programme titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle". We were hoping for important revelations and final proof that we have all been hornswoggled by the climate Illuminati, but it just repeated the usual specious claims we hear all the time. We feel swindled. Indeed we are not the only ones: Carl Wunsch (who was a surprise addition to the cast) was apparently misled into thinking this was going to be a balanced look at the issues (the producers have a history of doing this), but who found himself put into a very different context indeed [Update: a full letter from Wunsch appears as comment 109 on this post]

So what did they have to say for themselves?

CO2 doesn't match the temperature record over the 20th C. True but not relevant, because it isn't supposed to. The programme spent a long time agonising over what they presented as a sharp temperature fall for 4 decades from 1940 to 1980 (incidentally their graph looks rather odd and may have been carefully selected; on a more usual (and sourced!) plot the "4 decades of cooling" is rather less evident). They presented this as a major flaw in the theory, which is deeply deceptive, because as they and their interviewees must know, the 40-70 cooling type period is readily explained, in that the GCMs are quite happy to reproduce it, as largely caused by sulphate aerosols. See this for a wiki-pic, for example; or (all together now) the IPCC TAR SPM fig 4; or more up-to-date AR4 fig 4. So... they are lying to us by omission.

The troposphere should warm faster than the sfc, say the models and basic theory. As indeed it does - unless you're wedded to the multiply-corrected Spencer+Christy version of the MSU series. Christy (naturally enough) features in this section, though he seems to have forgotten the US CCSP report, and the executive summary which he authored says Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. New data sets have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies. See-also previous RC posts.

Temperature leads CO2 by 800 years in the ice cores. Not quite as true as they said, but basically correct; however they misinterpret it. The way they said this you would have thought that T and CO2 are anti-correlated; but if you overlay the full 400/800 kyr of ice core record, you can't even see the lag because its so small. The correct interpretation of this is well known: that there is a T-CO2 feedback: see RC again for more.

All the previous parts of the programme were leading up to "so if it isn't CO2, what is it?" to which their answer is "solar". The section was curiously weak, and largely lead by pictures of people on beaches. It was somewhat surprising that they didn't feature Svensmark at all; other stuff we've commented on before. Note that the graph they used as "proof" of the excellent solar-T connection turns out to have some problems: see figure 1c of Damon and Laut.

Along the way the programme ticked off most of the other obligatory skeptic talking points: even down to Medieval English vineyards and that old favourite, volcanoes emitting more CO2 than humans.

It ended with politics, with a segment blaming the lack of African development on the environmental movement. We don't want to get into the politics, but should point out what the programme didn't: that Kyoto exempts developing nations.

I was too lazy to add in the linked pages to peer reviewed papers so I'd suggest you read the actual site.

[Darth Wong]

Is there any political issue on which the right-wing does not misrepresent opposition experts in order to pretend that they're saying the opposite of what they're actually saying?

[SirNitram]

Is there any political issue on which the right-wing does not misrepresent opposition experts in order to pretend that they're saying the opposite of what they're actually saying?

At present? Not really. It's kind of necessary, as they could hardly run on their record, a platform of nepotism, corruption, endless fearmongering, and wasteful, stupidly fought wars.

[Big Orange]

One of the slightly bizarre arguments presented in this documentary was that CO2 was not harmful because we're partially made up of CO2 (carbon) - if so, then how can we drown in H20 when were're mainly made up of H20 ourselves?! And can anyone else poke holes in the theory of nature overproducing CO2 and human output of CO2 being small in comparison (thus downplaying our overall role in the obvious global warming)?

[Catman]

I agree with it, I've always been a sceptic of global warming being the result of man's actions. Two of the guys in it were on Richard & Judy earlier and one said he believes that global warming has become the new religion of atheists. If you disagree you are branded a heretic, there's an almost fantatical belief in it by people without any understanding of how the climate works.

Wow, great. I am also a skeptic.

And there is truly no point if it is typically a lot of scare tactics and emotionalism.

[Rye]

Hey guys, I'm a skeptic of asteroid impacts on human life. The correlations between asteroid impacts and change in the earth's climate do not necessarily prove causation. Sure, an asteroid impact will throw up a lot of dust, and that will cool the planet, but the Earth will naturally put out dust for cooling (which is mostly dictated by the sun, anyway). Who's to say that there wasn't more volcanic activity that put out dust, rather than an asteroid or comet, when the dinosaurs were wiped out? What if the sun just became pretty weak for a while?

There's such an orthodoxy in science that asteroid impacts are actually bad for terrestrial lifeforms, when many dissenting scientists note that life probably started here thank to chemicals brought here in comets and on asteroids. Many tonnes of extraterrestrial matter fall to Earth every year without these doomsday situations the environmentalists and leftists say should happen with multi-ton impacts.

There is no consensus on asteroids being potentially harmful to humankind, all these films like armageddon and deep impact aren't based in science, just hollywood special effects. Atheists are fundamentalists about the supposed negative effects of asteroid impacts, anyone who dissents is called a heretic or stupid. What ever happened to open mindedness and free debate?? It's been hijacked by "the sky is falling" apocalyptic anti-asteroid environmentalists and other leftists to give the UN more power, since asteroids are a (manufactured) global problem and require a global government (new world order) to deal with. It's a pure power play.

[Sikon]

And can anyone else poke holes in the theory of nature overproducing CO2 and human output of CO2 being small in comparison (thus downplaying our overall role in the obvious global warming)?

A very large amount of carbon dioxide is released from natural sources each year, but that would be more or less balanced by absorption by natural sources if not for the extra human emissions.

The following illustration is bit out-of-date in its figures, which are also for billions of tons of carbon content rather than carbon dioxide exactly (1 gigaton C -> 3.7 gigatons CO2), but it shows the basic situation:



The exact data in the figure must have been from a number of years ago, since fossil fuel combustion reached a much greater release rate of 7.85+ Gt carbon/year in 2006.

The imbalance or net extra CO2 adds up over time, causing the CO2 levels in the atmosphere to have gone from 280 ppm in 1750 to 380 ppm today, a very clear man-made effect as described in an older thread.

[Darth Wong]

I agree with it, I've always been a sceptic of global warming being the result of man's actions. Two of the guys in it were on Richard & Judy earlier and one said he believes that global warming has become the new religion of atheists. If you disagree you are branded a heretic, there's an almost fantatical belief in it by people without any understanding of how the climate works.

You know, I've seen many scientific attempts to refute a theory. Usually they involve an experiment involving the underlying mechanism, in an attempt to show that prior work was in error. But attacking the "openness" of its proponents to criticism, no matter how incompetent or ignorant? That doesn't sound like much of a scientific retort to me. What exactly do you think a scientific rebuttal looks like?

Let's get something straight, moron. The biggest, most arrogant, most close-minded prick on the entire fucking planet could make a theory and it could still be a perfectly good one if you can't show that the model produces inaccurate predictions. That is the ONLY way to show that the theory is false.

[wishful]

What you WON'T see in the global warming controversy is that CO2 represents about 10 percent of the warming. The major greenhouse gas is water vapor which accounts for 30 percent of the warming. Scientists uniformly agree that humans can't control water vapor levels in the air.

You also have to dig pretty deep into the research papers to discover that CO2 levels LAG temperature by 800 years over the last 100,000 years.

Most people don't know ... or don't care ... that global temperatures declined significantly from 1940 to 1946 while CO2 levels continued rising. The alarmist scientists try hard to skip over that anomoly because it doesn't fit their theory that CO2 is the direct cause.

Global warming is an artificial crisis designed to garner money for scientists and publicity and votes for politicians.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

What you WON'T see in the global warming controversy is that CO2 represents about 10 percent of the warming. The major greenhouse gas is water vapor which accounts for 30 percent of the warming. Scientists uniformly agree that humans can't control water vapor levels in the air.

90% of the contributing factors to warming being there are a damn sight better than 100% (the extra CO2, say), so we can try to do something about that however troublesome it may be for people who can't adapt

You also have to dig pretty deep into the research papers to discover that CO2 levels LAG temperature by 800 years over the last 100,000 years.

Guess who's doing the digging /me points at you*

Most people don't know ... or don't care ... that global temperatures declined significantly from 1940 to 1946 while CO2 levels continued rising. The alarmist scientists try hard to skip over that anomoly because it doesn't fit their theory that CO2 is the direct cause.

I may be going on a lark, but don't large scale wars kick up a lot of particulate matter? That would tend to reflect radiation, removing it from the incoming end of the energy budget. That may help cool things down.

I remember learning something about some rather large and extraordinary events back in those years. A war, maybe?

Global warming is an artificial crisis designed to garner money for scientists and publicity and votes for politicians.

Prove it. With evidence. Please.

[The Yosemite Bear]

wasn't there some comment about fires burning and putting up so much smoke that it blocked out the sun, causing unseasonable snowfall during that time period....

oh yeah, siege of Stalingrad.....

[JointStrikeFighter]

Most people don't know ... or don't care ... that global temperatures declined significantly from 1940 to 1946 while CO2 levels continued rising. The alarmist scientists try hard to skip over that anomoly because it doesn't fit their theory that CO2 is the direct cause.

Gee, maybe the massive increase in industrial output in World War 2 led to an increase in the ammount of sulphur released into the atmosphere?

Increased levels of sulphur result in an increased albedo for the planet and thus more of the suns thermal eenrgy reflected back into space instead of being absorbed into the atmosphere?

The exact smae thing happens in the aftermath of large volcaninc eruptions which spew large sulphur aerosols high into the upper atmoshere.

[The Yosemite Bear]

no shit, we covered this when I was in grade school, back a quarter century ago.

[rhoenix]

Global warming is an artificial crisis designed to garner money for scientists and publicity and votes for politicians.

Thank you for clearing that up - your wisdom in this matter was missed here before your arrival.

Thankfully, our aim is improving.

You're trotting out old, worn-out nag arguments (without a single source to back up your claims, I noted), and then made the classic "scientists are conspiring!" feces used also by Young-Earth Creationists against evolution, quoted at the top.

Can you explain what efforts such as [url=http://www.ceres.org[/url]CERES[/url] hope to accomplish, if global warming data was quite suddenly treated differently than all other scientific data in the science community and agreed upon with no evidence? Are they simply unwitting dupes of mad scientists, bent on their evil twin Herculean tasks of trying to get humanity to prepare for great calamity, and trying to get humanity to use renewable (and therefore sustainable) sources of energy rather than the finite resources of oil?

[rhoenix]

Duct-tape edit: Link should be CERES.

[His Divine Shadow]

Most people don't know ... or don't care ... that global temperatures declined significantly from 1940 to 1946 while CO2 levels continued rising. The alarmist scientists try hard to skip over that anomoly because it doesn't fit their theory that CO2 is the direct cause.

Gee, maybe the massive increase in industrial output in World War 2 led to an increase in the ammount of sulphur released into the atmosphere?

Increased levels of sulphur result in an increased albedo for the planet and thus more of the suns thermal eenrgy reflected back into space instead of being absorbed into the atmosphere?

The exact smae thing happens in the aftermath of large volcaninc eruptions which spew large sulphur aerosols high into the upper atmoshere.

So can we detonate a few volcanoes artificially? Or is it not technically feasible / short term solution only?

But let it get a bit warmer before trying. I like the milder weather up here in Finland

[JointStrikeFighter]

So can we detonate a few volcanoes artificially? Or is it not technically feasible / short term solution only?

But let it get a bit warmer before trying. I like the milder weather up here in Finland Wink

Well there is a plan involving big giant sulphur spewing cannons......