Hacked Emails Show Climate Science Ridden with Rancor

[Corny]

Oh cool, call me a scientist then

 

[Kulindahr]

News item:


I, personally, think that we just don't know but that it's probably safer to mitigate our impact without inducing an economic disaster. Easy to say, very hard to do.

There's a lot we can do just for the same of national security and the economy -- like eliminate dependence on foreign oil and clean up our air by using non-polluting energy sources.

Anyone who's been on a bicycle when a city diesel bus kicks to a start knows we need to find a better energy source for vehicles!

But as far as the current mess goes, it would help a great deal to establish a number of independent centers to which all raw data would be reported -- one manned by people who don't believe in global warming at all, and one by honest skeptics, just to keep everyone honest.

 

[BeMused]

Climate Change deniers are fun to me. Their arguments are all ultimately Red Herrings.

First of all is the claim that excess carbon won't cause warming. This is demonstrably FALSE. PHYSICALLY Carbon is a heat trapper, and pumping millions of tons of the stuff into the atmosphere in a short period of time is going to have an effect.

Second of all, even IF global warming is not man made in any form or fashion (and the warming itself is universally accepted in the scientific community, if not the causes), why is that an excuse not to DO anything about it?

In the long run the warming threatens MILLIONS of people and society as we know it. So WHAT if we aren't the cause (and, um we ARE )?

If your house is struck by lightning and lights on fire, are you any less likely to try to put it out then if it had started because you left the stove on by accident?

Do we ignore natural disasters because they're natural? No. We shouldn't ignore this either. REGARDLESS of its cause.

 

[Kulindahr]

BeMused has a good point: whether warming is natural or human-forced, we ought to figure how to deal with it.

Part of that should be getting out into space a lot more vigorously. The materials to build a space elevator should be pursued with a vengeance, because if it turns out we need to get up above the earth and build mirrors or whatever, our present methods are far too slow and expensive.

 

[Ambrocious]

What is the best way to get the carbon footprint lowered? Tax us into oblivion, grow more corn for cars literally starving out millions more than currently we are with the transition to cleaner fuels? I think science needs to present the world first with the better technologies and THEN tax us. Produce the means to live well before we are taxed to death so we can have a fair chance to live better.

The in between transition process I can imagine would take a good 5-10 years to fully get new technologies integrated into the system AFTER (maybe longer) all these taxes are put in place. In the mean time, many smaller companies who help support larger companies may not be able to pay the large tax and simply go out of business. This will hurt all the way up to the top of the line IF new technologies are not implemented FIRST.

I am seeing how this is all good for the environment and all but this also goes a bit into humanitarianism too. Last year alone more people died of starvation than Hitler killed during his time of power. This had a large part to do with the taking away of food (corn is a very large part of the global food network especially in third world countries) for humans and the creation of fuel for cars. While we look ahead into the future and hope it will be brighter then, do we shrug our shoulders at the people dying TODAY and say it will all work out in the end? My problem is with the lack of caring about whats happening TODAY. It is said that by aiming to fix the future we can make every day a bit better but so far it doesn't seem better.

Maybe people need to see the results of starvation to understand and I hope this picture is not removed (SO HELP ME IF I GET AN INFRACTION FOR THIS I WILL JUST HAVE TO THROW A FIT!)

http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/assets/wanting_a_meal.jpg

I'm not trying to simply play on your emotions here people, I'm trying to get you to have some emotions. Lots of people do not feel for their fellow mankind because THEY do not understand what starvation is and I am hoping that none of us will have to find out. I don't disprove of all science, just the kind that looks like it is glorious when it instead presents death in multi million body per portions instead.

This is why new technologies should be made that DO NOT take away something as valuable as food to be able to exist. Hydro-electric cars need to be made more, not ethanol burning cars, this takes the food out of the hands of people and puts it into a car. Science needs to be grafted into humanity without infringing on the lives of millions of people every year otherwise it should not be allowed. Just because we don't actually stand in Africa and watch it happen, it makes me personally cry inside (doesn't it do something to you?) to know this is happening and people are cheering for it by the masses.

Maybe I care too much. Maybe I'm insane for not looking at the future ramifications of climate change. I just know that taxing us BEFORE all of the proper technologies are in place will result in a massive decline in food and health. How can people not get this?

 

[mike_n_herrin]

using corn or another biofuel isn't going to take away people food. that's insane. what fake evidence (fox news, or other right-winged "news" source) do you base that on? you wait and see how many people starve to death because we can't grow crops anymore where we used to be able to because it's too dry or too cold, or whatever, or how many people are flooded out of where they used to live because sea levels rose a few feet.

anyone who disagrees with the data is either someone who doesn't understand it or someone who is politically opposed to it. our climate IS changing. will we be able to adapt to climate change? probably. will a lot of lives be lost if we do nothing? absolutely.

I'm not removing the photo or issuing an infraction because I'm part of this discussion. However, it will likely be considered off topic and a picture (similar to gun shot injuries, or pictures of people with terrible diseases, etc) that is that graphic is likely to be removed.

 

[Kulindahr]

What is the best way to get the carbon footprint lowered? Tax us into oblivion, grow more corn for cars literally starving out millions more than currently we are with the transition to cleaner fuels? I think science needs to present the world first with the better technologies and THEN tax us. Produce the means to live well before we are taxed to death so we can have a fair chance to live better.

Corn for fuel won't lower the carbon footprint worth crap. It's also a very inefficient use of agriculture; the carbon footprint of getting a gallon of ethanol to where cars can use it is serious -- in fact, growing the corn for that gallon may burn as much oil as the car would have used anyway, which makes it actually worse for the environment.

The in between transition process I can imagine would take a good 5-10 years to fully get new technologies integrated into the system AFTER (maybe longer) all these taxes are put in place. In the mean time, many smaller companies who help support larger companies may not be able to pay the large tax and simply go out of business. This will hurt all the way up to the top of the line IF new technologies are not implemented FIRST.

Any tax has to take into account the fact that it will tend to favor the large corporations. That's contrary to good economic sense as well as dangerous for liberty.

I am seeing how this is all good for the environment and all but this also goes a bit into humanitarianism too. Last year alone more people died of starvation than Hitler killed during his time of power. This had a large part to do with the taking away of food (corn is a very large part of the global food network especially in third world countries) for humans and the creation of fuel for cars. While we look ahead into the future and hope it will be brighter then, do we shrug our shoulders at the people dying TODAY and say it will all work out in the end? My problem is with the lack of caring about whats happening TODAY. It is said that by aiming to fix the future we can make every day a bit better but so far it doesn't seem better.

Bush was an idiot to do that bit with corn.

I'm not trying to simply play on your emotions here people, I'm trying to get you to have some emotions. Lots of people do not feel for their fellow mankind because THEY do not understand what starvation is and I am hoping that none of us will have to find out. I don't disprove of all science, just the kind that looks like it is glorious when it instead presents death in multi million body per portions instead.

Enough food is wasted each year in the U.S. to feed all the poor in the hemisphere. All we need to do to deal with starvation, at least on our side of the world, is improve the food processing and distribution process, which is where most of that food is wasted.

BTW, you're confusing science with technology: science only provides the knowledge; it's technology that deals death or life.

Maybe I care too much. Maybe I'm insane for not looking at the future ramifications of climate change. I just know that taxing us BEFORE all of the proper technologies are in place will result in a massive decline in food and health. How can people not get this?

Taxing beforehand won't do that unless it is punitive. A small tax initially on only the worst polluters would provide seed money for companies working with new technology. Let it buy stock in those new companies, and let the stock be an asset for Social Security.

Then as things change, the tax could be changed.

But more important than taxation is dismantling stifling regulations. One of my pet complaints is what regulations do to the "anything to oil" technology: due to our labyrinth of regulations, that technology is ten times as profitable in France as it is here! Yet using it would seriously cut into oil imports, and give a cleaner fuel production process -- a gallon of A-t-O fuel has a much smaller carbon footprint than a gallon of crude oil fuel, and not just because it requires much less energy to produce.

 

[Kulindahr]

using corn or another biofuel isn't going to take away people food. that's insane. what fake evidence (fox news, or other right-winged "news" source) do you base that on? you wait and see how many people starve to death because we can't grow crops anymore where we used to be able to because it's too dry or too cold, or whatever, or how many people are flooded out of where they used to live because sea levels rose a few feet.

Try telling that to farmers who have to buy feed for their cattle that has risen in cost more than 30% since Bush implemented his corn-to-fuel program. Since that began, prices on everything with corn or corn derivatives in it have gone up.

All the fields planted with corn for fuel are not fields planted with corn for food, either for livestock or for people. So indirectly, corn-to-ethanol contributes to starvation.

But as I noted above, the true insanity is that by some estimates it will take as much petrol fuel to produce a gallon of ethanol as the car would have used driving on gasoline, and when you add up the energy cost of extraction, transport, and refining, ethanol is not a good deal.

anyone who disagrees with the data is either someone who doesn't understand it or someone who is politically opposed to it. our climate IS changing. will we be able to adapt to climate change? probably. will a lot of lives be lost if we do nothing? absolutely.

That's not entirely so. Ambocious pointed me to an article which in turn led me to others, where I learned that a majority of the satellite-measurement climatology community disagrees with the ground-based community. Since satellites can sample temperatures at a wide range of altitudes, that raises serious questions.

Speaking of lives lost, I saw an article a while back that said there was a fear that a third of Greenland's ice sheet could literally slide off into the ocean, raising sea levels by several meters within weeks. The surge would wreak havoc on North Atlantic coasts, and the rise would flood all at once land we presently figure will take another two hundred years to be claimed by the sea.

 

[Ambrocious]

In "Fall of the Republic" it has a large section on climate change and the fraud that is taking place behind the well meaning people who are oblivious to whats going on. I sometimes can't express correctly what the film says making me look like an idiot. I will try and sharpen up my ways of speaking engagements but I can't explain the scientific things like the film can do and it is done very well.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VebOTc-7shU]Fall of the Republic[/ame]

Before you guys all ram me like I'm some freak or weirdo, give the film a fair chance, it's done really very well. I have a hard time saying what I learned EXACTLY as I heard it and so I think this is why I may have came off as a raving lunatic. I really gotta brush up on me speaking skills lol!

 

[mike_n_herrin]

Try telling that to farmers who have to buy feed for their cattle that has risen in cost more than 30% since Bush implemented his corn-to-fuel program. Since that began, prices on everything with corn or corn derivatives in it have gone up.

All the fields planted with corn for fuel are not fields planted with corn for food, either for livestock or for people. So indirectly, corn-to-ethanol contributes to starvation.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. Yes prices went up, but that was because demand for corn went up. So supply wasn't initially keeping up with demand (whether it was for biofuel or otherwise). My family is a farming family in a agricultural area of the midwest. What happened was most everyone was planting all their fields in corn, instead of their traditional crop rotations. That may have been wheat, sorgam, soy beans, alfalfa, etc. When farmers sell that corn to graineries they have no control over where it goes. it might go for biofuel and it might not. Most of the graineries in rual areas were not selling their corn to biofuel companies. My family also has cattle and there was no shortage of feed for cattle. It's just prices were high.

Incidentally, that change in crop patterns in turned caused prices for wheat to go up (more than 30%). So in subsequent years farmers went way overboard on wheat production. There was no corresponding drop in food availability (either corn or wheat) according to the folks back home that I've talked to, but I could be wrong.

That's not entirely so. Ambocious pointed me to an article which in turn led me to others, where I learned that a majority of the satellite-measurement climatology community disagrees with the ground-based community. Since satellites can sample temperatures at a wide range of altitudes, that raises serious questions.

That's not disagreeing with the data, that's developing additional data that supports a different conclusion. What I was talking about is people just looking at the ground based data and saying the conclusions folks have reached are false. Which is completely ignoring the data that exists on it. If someone has added in the satilte data and then come to a different conculsion that's something completely different and legitimate.

 

[Kulindahr]

I recall watching a documentary recently that discussed how no matter what the contributions of man may be to climate change, there are still some things that are constant and cannot be stopped, most assuredly the sun. At some point, which may be millions of years from now, there will be another ice age.

Good stuff you posted. I'm not convinced on the CO2 following warming item, though.

On ice ages, I've read recently that the best models are saying there will be one within ten or twenty thousand years. Not too long ago they were saying fifty thousand, but the sharper models with new computing power reduced that sharply.

I doubt anyone's planning that far ahead.....


There are also people saying that we have to be careful, that if we try to actually reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases, and manage to do it sharply, we could set off an ice age, which could hit precipitously. I can envision a decade where people are fleeing the lowlands where the sea is claiming land, followed by a period of several decades when people flee from the north as glaciers begin to form and snow fields don't melt in the summer.

In fact I read a novel based on that very thing; they had people moving back to flooded cities as the sea levels dropped due to the ice.

The thing is that we don't know enough -- but since we don't, we should stop adding unnatural elements to the cycles.

 

[Kulindahr]

In "Fall of the Republic" it has a large section on climate change and the fraud that is taking place behind the well meaning people who are oblivious to whats going on. I sometimes can't express correctly what the film says making me look like an idiot. I will try and sharpen up my ways of speaking engagements but I can't explain the scientific things like the film can do and it is done very well.

Before you guys all ram me like I'm some freak or weirdo, give the film a fair chance, it's done really very well. I have a hard time saying what I learned EXACTLY as I heard it and so I think this is why I may have came off as a raving lunatic. I really gotta brush up on me speaking skills lol!

It would help if you would tell us where the climate change stuff starts, so we don't have to wade through political material not pertinent to the thread.

 

[Kulindahr]

I'm not sure that's entirely true. Yes prices went up, but that was because demand for corn went up. So supply wasn't initially keeping up with demand (whether it was for biofuel or otherwise). My family is a farming family in a agricultural area of the midwest. What happened was most everyone was planting all their fields in corn, instead of their traditional crop rotations. That may have been wheat, sorgam, soy beans, alfalfa, etc. When farmers sell that corn to graineries they have no control over where it goes. it might go for biofuel and it might not. Most of the graineries in rual areas were not selling their corn to biofuel companies. My family also has cattle and there was no shortage of feed for cattle. It's just prices were high.

Incidentally, that change in crop patterns in turned caused prices for wheat to go up (more than 30%). So in subsequent years farmers went way overboard on wheat production. There was no corresponding drop in food availability (either corn or wheat) according to the folks back home that I've talked to, but I could be wrong.

What the folks at the local feed store say their suppliers are telling them is that after Bush got his thing mandating a certain amount of ethanol from corn, a number of huge agro companies signed contracts for that corn, and those were agros that had been supplying grain for food stocks. Prices have come down a little, but not a whole lot, as the rest of the farmers have adjusted.

The thing that upsets me about the whole affair is that in some places this has made agrobusinesses expand their fields onto very marginal land. That gets them government subsidies, which is unfair to family farmers. It also ruins the land in many cases, because the fertilizers used overwhelm the natural regime -- and when the land is abandoned for agriculture, the land is screwed up.

On that topic, I wish Congress would remove all farm subsidies from anyone who doesn't live on their land, because the intent of those subsidies originally was to help family farmers, not to subsidize massive corporations which don't give a rip if they ruin the land.

That's not disagreeing with the data, that's developing additional data that supports a different conclusion. What I was talking about is people just looking at the ground based data and saying the conclusions folks have reached are false. Which is completely ignoring the data that exists on it. If someone has added in the satilte data and then come to a different conculsion that's something completely different and legitimate.

Some of those disagreeing with the conclusions from the ground data point out, correctly, that in some cases data is tampered with by local officials for various reasons, and that in a whole pile of cases the data is skewed because development has occurred around a station that has been there for years, and development brings an "artificial" warming.

What's really needed is weather stations for backyards, especially for rural areas, which are automatic and connect through the family's computer to the internet, to give a much more thorough picture. More data points always help, and some of the geographical gaps we have are tremendous.

There are also people using different computer modeling, who claim -- not unjustifiably -- that the older programs have become such patched-together messes that they aren't giving good results. Having done some computer programming, I can believe that; when different programmers add different routines to cover new kinds of input, programs can get so complex no one can be certain that the input is getting treated properly. I had that problem with some of my programs, with routines I'd added myself, and never realized I was getting mangled results until a batch came out and the graph ran into an impossible realm -- and only then did I discover that I'd been relying on garbage. I never did find the problem; I sat down and wrote an entirely new program with the necessary routines incorporated into the flow chart. When I got the bugs out, the results matched hand-and-calculator done output.

So any centers using programs which have been modified a lot could be getting crap out of the data without even realizing it -- and some scientists using new, 'clean', integrated programs are saying that's what's happening.

 

[Ambrocious]

It would help if you would tell us where the climate change stuff starts, so we don't have to wade through political material not pertinent to the thread.

Well really the whole film is very important but I think near the middle of the film begins with the climate details. This film came out of course BEFORE the hacked emails were even known to be hacked. If you look at that part of the film, there is the information in there that I can't exactly say properly. As I said though, the whole video is just fantastic.


NOTE: 1 HOUR AND 40 MINUTES INTO THE FILM GETS INTO THE CLIMATE INFO.

 

[BostonJockGuy]

The Wall Street Journal btw is owned by Rupert Murdoch who owns News corp, FOX NEWS.....just saying.

 

[Ambrocious]

Jesse Ventura did his latest "Conspiracy Theory" episode (December 16th) on Global Warming. It's worth looking into. LOOK HERE for the info, scroll down to my last posting.

 

[JB3]

The Wall Street Journal btw is owned by Rupert Murdoch who owns News corp, FOX NEWS.....just saying.

Just saying what? The ownership means jack shit. WSJ is STILL a more reliable, less biased source of news than the NYT, even with Murdoch as its owner.

 

[Ambrocious]

I found this clip to lighten to mood a bit.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8O-E_GN0Kg]CLIMATEGATE: Hitler flips out over the CRU hacked emails[/ame]