the great global warming swindle

[dedee]

Does anyone really believe that, for example, increasing flight prices (via taxation) will actually lessen air traffic, as it is, supposedly, designed to do?
Ray.

too true.

I cannot even imagine the uproar there would have been had the 1970s politicians told the public how much tax they would be paying on petrol in 2007 and as we all know it has done nothing to halt congestion.

Andy

 

[Jake]

I'll just have to live with the disappointment.

More likely to be the next generation who really has to live with it.

 

[Canadian Scroller]

I feel the amount of energy expended on this thread and the ensuing frustration wrought by people drawn together with the common interest of wood working has also contributed to the global warming effect. :wink:

I am not against exercising ones mind or voicing ones opinions. Both sides can substantiate their own points and negate their opponents.
If we didn't have discussions we could hardly evolve as a civilization.

I also see why it is often said "God created all the creatures on the earth and left the Platypus to a committee."

I am sure glad this is a woodworking forum and not a way to solve world issues :lol:

 

[Matt_S]

Now I've missed this thread which is a shame cos I'm rather interested in it. But this may hav been said before but whether or not human intervention has contributed is it really worth the risk of not reducing our CO2? As someone who lives in Kent I'd say no as I fancy staying above water.

PS I can understand why people doubt the "facts" I have studied global warming as part of a degree and I believe totally us to be the biggest contributer, not the only one.

 

[Anonymous]

Interesting article in today's grauniad
Letter from Wunsch in comments is very relevant.
BTW we are still waiting for Paul and Gill to tell us which bit of the information jigsaw is missing in their opinion.

cheers
Jacob

 

[innesm]

...whether or not human intervention has contributed is it really worth the risk of not reducing our CO2? As someone who lives in Kent I'd say no as I fancy staying above water.

Imagine you lived in a house which you suspected had dry rot. You could sell your car, TV, computer, take your kids out of school and put them to work in your restaurant, and cancel your health insurance in order to pay for the entire house to have its timber components replaced --- because "is it really worth the risk" that there might be dry rot leading to the house collapsing and killing you all?

The way of deciding if it's worth the risk is to try and quantify the risk and then weigh up the pros and cons of spending lots on reducing that risk - leading to sacrifices in other areas.

Coming back to global warming, you decide how much warming you can deal with for a given cost - since spending the money on mitigating the warming means you cant spend it elsewhere. Also, retarding growth for developing nations will have a massive effect on billions of people, so you need to be sure any global warming response is worth it.

Recently the Stern report attempted to weigh up the costs, but this was derided by some economists for the way it fiddled the figures (however, I Am Not An Economist). What bugs me is that Climate Change has become a 'movement', and lots of adherents pay no attention to reality when it comes to deciding how to actually deal with it.

</rant>

 

[Gill]

Interesting article in today's grauniad
Letter from Wunsch in comments is very relevant.
BTW we are still waiting for Paul and Gill to tell us which bit of the information jigsaw is missing in their opinion.

cheers
Jacob

It is an interesting article but it's based on opinion, not data. All I want to see are long term statistics which show that changes in CO2 levels precede corresponding changes in global temperature. This would establish that there could be a link between the two. It would still not be conclusive because other (possibly as yet unidentified) factors might be involved. However, it would be a starting point.

I just want to see some good science!

Gill

Modedit: Newbie_Neil

 

[Anonymous]

Interesting article in today's grauniad
Letter from Wunsch in comments is very relevant.
BTW we are still waiting for Paul and Gill to tell us which bit of the information jigsaw is missing in their opinion.

cheers
Jacob

It is an interesting article but it's based on opinion, not data. All I want to see are long term statistics which show that changes in CO2 levels precede corresponding changes in global temperature. This would establish that there could be a link between the two. It would still not be conclusive because other (possibly as yet unidentified) factors might be involved. However, it would be a starting point.

I just want to see some good science!

Gill

Modedit: Newbie_Neil

The whole gist of all the science quoted in all the links referred to in this thread, point to "long term statistics which show that changes in CO2 levels precede corresponding changes in global temperature".
That's what it's all about.
It's all there :roll: .
Thats the whole point of the concern amongst climatologists.
If you choose not to see it in front of you then no-one can help!

cheers
Jacob

 

[engineer one]

like gil, jacob i disagree with your conclusions about this article, it was no less selective than they claim the programme was.
personally the problem with anything the grauniad says is that once a week it pays ALL its bills by carrying adverts for jobs that the national and local governments want to fill to make us all "green"

perhaps of more interest is the article in today's mail which looks at these new lights the eu will demand that we buy. less light, expensive to make of products that we can't dispose of, and if you use them like we do at this time,then no cheaper because constant turning off and on reduces their life.

i amhappy to admit that i may be wrong, but my training was to look at things practically and based upon what i could see in real life, whether it was turning a lump of scrap into a useable piece of metal, or discovering that all the aerodynamics work done in a wind tunnel is fine as a starting point, but can be a complete flop on the race track, if you do not allow for some potential errors in your figures. it happens every year in F1.

actually what intregues me most jacob is you are the guy who says that woodworking stopped being done properly before the first world war, and we should only use the old methods, and indeed you cycle around france,
but you seem to have taken the hook,line and sinker approach to warming
now that is more of a dichotomy than me claiming to be an engineer when i don't have a degree. somehow don't remember Brunel, Robert Stephenson, or Nigel Gresley having degrees in engineering :roll:

as a student of the railways, those with the most qualifications seem to have made the most expensive mistakes when trying to make things more efficient, and that is verifiable. :?

paul :wink:

 

[Gill]

Not so, Mr Grimsdale!

The data from the Vostok core samples shows that CO2 levels trail global temperature by approximately 800 years! That's why I can't find any information to show that they precede global temperature.

In fact, the data up to 1940 indicates that global temperatures should have been rising in the early middle ages. Lo and behold, they did.

The data from Vostok is available here.

 

[engineer one]

to show i am not a complete heathen, :lol:

one of my weekly if not daily gripes is the stupidity of the size of reciepts we get from the supermarket, or the cafe or whatever. no matter whether you get one item or a dozen, the paper produced is stupidly long, and so far no one seems to be able tosay why.

my personal thought is that it is to do with the tax man, and his requirements, but if trees are so important to us, and re-cycling of paper is an activity which is dependant upon world prices why do we waste so much paper to buy one item? :twisted: :twisted:

there are other things like this that we the individuals can do little about, because they are imposed upon us without any real regard to the impact on us, land fill, and waste of resources. recent reports from the audit office suggest that our leaders still leave the lights on in offices all over the country, and they almost certainly do more damage than we individuals.

paul :wink:

 

[innesm]

The data from the Vostok core samples shows that CO2 levels trail global temperature by approximately 800 years!

As I understand it, the response to that is that there is an interrelationship between CO2 and temperature in that CO2 increases with temperature and temperature causes CO2 to rise. The initial warming was not triggered by CO2, but when warming occurred, CO2 rose and caused further warming. Clearly this feedback loop doesnt keep running indefinitely because otherwise we'd already have a Venusian style climate.
One thing we can perhaps take from this is that the nightmare scenarios of runaway global warming cooked up as an excuse for various Horizon disaster-movie-umentaries are rubbish, since we might have expected such runaway effect to have occurred in the past, and it didnt.

 

[WellsWood]

...no matter whether you get one item or a dozen, the paper produced is stupidly long, and so far no one seems to be able tosay why.

Even more annoying to me is that we are supposedly living in the "paperless society" promised to us 20 odd years ago, and yet I get twice as much paper given to me at the checkout when I pay with plastic than with cash. :?

Mark

 

[Anonymous]

Not so, Mr Grimsdale!

The data from the Vostok core samples shows that CO2 levels trail global temperature by approximately 800 years! That's why I can't find any information to show that they precede global temperature.

In fact, the data up to 1940 indicates that global temperatures should have been rising in the early middle ages. Lo and behold, they did.

The data from Vostok is available here.

Aha! Glad to see you are on the case and looking at evidence.
But it is important to look at the whole picture and not just at selected details - it is complicated with all sorts of positive/negative feedbacks and many blips in the graphs.

cheers
Jacob

 

[Gill]

All of which brings me back to the start. This is exasperating! My last post details evidence that CO2 levels are a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. I want to know where to find the stronger evidence that this data is misleading. We are constantly being told that rising CO2 levels will bring about a rise in global temperatures, but the Vostok sample actually indicates the contrary. There must be stronger evidence elsewhere in order for mainstream scientists to maintain their stance against the heretics. If not, the claims made in the programme that CO2 does not bring about global warming are difficult to refute.

How have mainstream scientists come to the conclusion that rising CO2 levels will bring about global warming despite the evidence to the contrary?

Gill

 

[Anonymous]

All of which brings me back to the start. This is exasperating! My last post details evidence that CO2 levels are a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. I want to know where to find the stronger evidence that this data is misleading. We are constantly being told that rising CO2 levels will bring about a rise in global temperatures, but the Vostok sample actually indicates the contrary. There must be stronger evidence elsewhere in order for mainstream scientists to maintain their stance against the heretics. If not, the claims made in the programme that CO2 does not bring about global warming are difficult to refute.

How have mainstream scientists come to the conclusion that rising CO2 levels will bring about global warming despite the evidence to the contrary?

Gill

Please let us know the details when you have found the answer!

cheers
Jacob

 

[innesm]

How have mainstream scientists come to the conclusion that rising CO2 levels will bring about global warming despite the evidence to the contrary?

Gill

Evidence to the contrary might consist of a graph of historical temperatures where CO2 falls as temperature rises, rather than one where CO2 lags temperature. It doesnt seem unconvincing to me that CO2 might contribute to temperature and yet also lag temperature.

 

[Nick W]

Gill,

I think you are right that the graph shows CO2 lagging T when both are falling, but it is the other way around (though by a considerably smaller margin) when they are rising.

EDIT: Or it might be that I need new glasses. :lol:

 

[Jake]

I don't see the problem with that - no-one is saying that the only reason that there are climate variations is because of greenhouse gas concentrations, or that previous 'hot' cycles were triggered by increases in greenhouse gases (as opposed to them playing a contribution, which could well be in a laggy way). The lag seems short compared to the whole hot cycle in question, so the data is perfectly compatible with greenhouse gases contributing to glbal warming if not triggering it in those previous instances. The fact that it wasn't the trigger isn't surprising given that we live in the first industrial carbon-fuelled society in history.

It seems a bit like measuring the course of your intoxication over an evening, and concluding that wine doesn't get you drunk because you were already tipsy after the beer or G&T or whatever.

 

[Anonymous]

I don't see the problem with that - no-one is saying that the only reason that there are climate variations is because of greenhouse gas concentrations, or that previous 'hot' cycles were triggered by increases in greenhouse gases (as opposed to them playing a contribution, which could well be in a laggy way). The lag seems short compared to the whole hot cycle in question, so the data is perfectly compatible with greenhouse gases contributing to glbal warming if not triggering it in those previous instances. The fact that it wasn't the trigger isn't surprising given that we live in the first industrial carbon-fuelled society in history.

It seems a bit like measuring the course of your intoxication over an evening, and concluding that wine doesn't get you drunk because you were already tipsy after the beer or G&T or whatever.

Exactly. Or think of the heat in a living room: central heating, air conditioning, solar gain, radiation loss, air temp in and out, rate of air exchange, anthropogenic room heating!, heat from appliances, greenhouse effect of gasses and glass, conduction loss and surface effects etc all these working in different ways - and thats just a living room not the whole planet!

cheers
Jacob