Scientists Agree - We are Ruining the World

[Perfection]

So, you're saying we should soften and sugar coat everything?

No, but we shouldn't harden and bitter coat it either, which is what your hippy journalists seem to be doing.

 

[Narz]

No, but we shouldn't harden and bitter coat it either, which is what your hippy journalists seem to be doing.

How would you put it Perfection? It's a pretty serious situation.

By the way, you're calling anyone green a hippie and spelling it wrong makes you look ignorant.

 

[Ayatollah So]

Or maybe you guessed that it got warmer (due to a lack of anti-greenhouse aerosols, less particulate matter to block sunlight, and no condensed vapor trails to reflect sunlight). Also didn't happen.

What really happened is, the days got warmer--and the nights got cooler. The temperature range expanded.

Warmer days, cooler nights is exactly what you'd expect to result from greater transparency of the atmosphere. Particulates and water vapor block visible light by day (slowing the daytime warming) and block IR by night (slowing the nighttime cooling).

On the other hand, I would have thought that air travel's effects are insignificant. The portion of the sky covered by vapor trails is tiny. What makes you think it isn't pure coincidence?

 

[Narz]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070128/...climate_report

Experts: Latest climate report too rosy

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer 11 minutes ago

Later this week in Paris, climate scientists will issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures.

But that may be the sugarcoated version.

Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report. Many top U.S. scientists reject these rosier numbers. Those calculations don't include the recent, and dramatic, melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations:

They "don't take into account the gorillas — Greenland and Antarctica," said Ohio State University earth sciences professor Lonnie Thompson, a polar ice specialist. "I think there are unpleasant surprises as we move into the 21st century."

Michael MacCracken, who until 2001 coordinated the official U.S. government reviews of the international climate report on global warming, has fired off a letter of protest over the omission.

The melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are a fairly recent development that has taken scientists by surprise. They don't know how to predict its effects in their computer models. But many fear it will mean the world's coastlines are swamped much earlier than most predict.

Others believe the ice melt is temporary and won't play such a dramatic role.

That debate may be the central one as scientists and bureaucrats from around the world gather in Paris to finish the first of four major global warming reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel was created by the United Nations in 1988.

After four days of secret word-by-word editing, the final report will be issued Friday.

The early versions of the report predict that by 2100 the sea level will rise anywhere between 5 and 23 inches. That's far lower than the 20 to 55 inches forecast by 2100 in a study published in the peer-review journal Science this month. Other climate experts, including NASA's James Hansen, predict sea level rise that can be measured by feet more than inches.

The report is also expected to include some kind of proviso that says things could be much worse if ice sheets continue to melt.

The prediction being considered this week by the IPCC is "obviously not the full story because ice sheet decay is something we cannot model right now, but we know it's happening," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate panel lead author from Germany who made the larger prediction of up to 55 inches of sea level rise. "A document like that tends to underestimate the risk," he said.

"This will dominate their discussion because there's so much contentiousness about it," said Bob Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a multinational research effort. "If the IPCC comes out with significantly less than one meter (about 39 inches of sea level rise), there will be people in the science community saying we don't think that's a fair reflection of what we know."

In the past, the climate change panel didn't figure there would be large melt of ice in west Antarctica and Greenland this century and didn't factor it into the predictions. Those forecasts were based only on the sea level rise from melting glaciers (which are different from ice sheets) and the physical expansion of water as it warms.

But in 2002, Antarctica's 1,255-square-mile Larsen B ice shelf broke off and disappeared in just 35 days. And recent NASA data shows that Greenland is losing 53 cubic miles of ice each year — twice the rate it was losing in 1996.

Even so, there are questions about how permanent the melting in Greenland and especially Antarctica are, said panel lead author Kevin Trenberth, chief of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

While he said the melting ice sheets "raise a warning flag," Trenberth said he wonders if "some of this might just be temporary."

University of Alabama at Huntsville professor John Christy said Greenland didn't melt much within the past thousand years when it was warmer than now. Christy, a reviewer of the panel work, is a prominent so-called skeptic. He acknowledges that global warming is real and man-made, but he believes it is not as worrisome as advertised.

Those scientists who say sea level will rise even more are battling a consensus-building structure that routinely issues scientifically cautious global warming reports, scientists say. The IPCC reports have to be unanimous, approved by 154 governments — including the United States and oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia — and already published peer-reviewed research done before mid-2006.

Rahmstorf, a physics and oceanography professor at Potsdam University in Germany, says, "In a way, it is one of the strengths of the IPCC to be very conservative and cautious and not overstate any climate change risk."

___

On the Net:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch/

 

[Xanikk999]

Well as technology advances we should find ways around this.

Global warming wont drive us to extinction even with our current trends and if we did nothing for millenia.

 

[CIVPhilzilla]

Yes, because scientists have never been wrong before.

Smoking at one time was recommended by doctors and the scientific community as a safe and effective way at controlling weight.

In the 1970s we we headed for a major global cooling.

Apparently all our oil would of been depleted 3 times over by now.

Acid rain was going to be horrible for all of us.

SARS was going to cause a massive pandemic, oh wait now its bird flu.

Scientists are human, they can make mistakes or exaggerate things for effect to get more attention to their research or projects. If scientists came out and said our way of life would be fine for the next 1000 years, nobody would care about them or their research and the topics of off topic would be absent of climate trends in the planet.

 

[CaptainF]

Yes, because scientists have never been wrong before.

Smoking at one time was recommended by doctors and the scientific community as a safe and effective way at controlling weight.

In the 1970s we we headed for a major global cooling.

Apparently all our oil would of been depleted 3 times over by now.

Acid rain was going to be horrible for all of us.

SARS was going to cause a massive pandemic, oh wait now its bird flu.

Scientists are human, they can make mistakes or exaggerate things for effect to get more attention to their research or projects. If scientists came out and said our way of life would be fine for the next 1000 years, nobody would care about them or their research and the topics of off topic would be absent of climate trends in the planet.

Word.

 

[Xanikk999]

Yes, because scientists have never been wrong before.

Smoking at one time was recommended by doctors and the scientific community as a safe and effective way at controlling weight.

In the 1970s we we headed for a major global cooling.

Apparently all our oil would of been depleted 3 times over by now.

Acid rain was going to be horrible for all of us.

SARS was going to cause a massive pandemic, oh wait now its bird flu.

Scientists are human, they can make mistakes or exaggerate things for effect to get more attention to their research or projects. If scientists came out and said our way of life would be fine for the next 1000 years, nobody would care about them or their research and the topics of off topic would be absent of climate trends in the planet.

All your points are very true. However i still see global warming is an enevitable problem that we should confront.

 

[Narz]

Yes, because scientists have never been wrong before.

Smoking at one time was recommended by doctors and the scientific community as a safe and effective way at controlling weight.

Just because the tobacco companies paid off some despicable jerk doctor to pretend cigs were good for pregnant women doesn't mean the "scientific community" recommended smoking. There simply wasn't enough evidence showing how harmful it is (now there is, same with global warming).

In the 1970s we we headed for a major global cooling.

There wasn't enough organized data and people studying the issue back then.

Apparently all our oil would of been depleted 3 times over by now.

Where do you get that from? US peaked in 1970, world oil production will probably peak around 2008 or 2009, but I don't recall anyone reputably predicting we'd "run out" in the early twenty-first century.

Acid rain was going to be horrible for all of us.

Acid rain still is a problem is some places.

SARS was going to cause a massive pandemic, oh wait now its bird flu.

The media blew up the bird flu "crisis" not scientists.

Scientists are human, they can make mistakes or exaggerate things for effect to get more attention to their research or projects.

Not really, if anything they make their estimates conservative to avoid being wrong (see article above). Official recognition of a problem is always behind the curve, if the government admits led poisoning causes brain damage chances are they've known somewhat for twenty-years or more. You gonna wait for them to do hundreds of peer reviewed studies before you let your kid chew on your cell phone? I'm not.

If scientists came out and said our way of life would be fine for the next 1000 years, nobody would care about them or their research and the topics of off topic would be absent of climate trends in the planet.

I would be curious to see the studies of a scientist who said everything we're doing to the planet is hunky-dorey.

 

[Perfection]

How would you put it Perfection? It's a pretty serious situation.

maybe something like "UN drafts global warming report".

By the way, you're calling anyone green a hippie and spelling it wrong makes you look ignorant.

"Hippy" is a perfectly acceptable alternate spelling (though more common in the UK), and I never called all "greens" hippies. I just called the journalist who wrote this a hippy.

 

[Veritass]

Even 65% of Americans are smart enough to think that global warming is a threat.

65% of American people eat at the Olive Garden; that doesn't mean it's good food (with apologies to Tom).

The media blew up the bird flu "crisis" not scientists.

It's a cooperative effort: you need both scientists who need the funding and scream "DANGER...DANGER...DANGER" plus the media to pick up on it and amplify it..

....The only difference is OUR effort. If we're going to wield power over nature WE have to take the RESPONSIBILITIES.

There is no "WE". Even assuming that anthropomorphic global warming is occurring and is the greatest tragedy of the commons ever recorded, there is no consensus of the people of the world to suffer all of the consequences of changing the world to stop it. Don't bother pointing at Kyoto: that is more evidence of the lack of accord than of accord. That's why it became a politicized agreements with different restrictions on different countries.

 

[Urederra]

I'm sure the victims of 9/11 and the New Orleans tragedy thought the same thing.

Yes, because nobody died of freak weather condition before. Storms and hurricanes never existed before Katrina. [/sarcasm]

 

[Masquerouge]

Frankly I'd rather trust a journalist or the area man over the whole scientific community.


/sarcasm.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

Yes, because scientists have never been wrong before.

Smoking at one time was recommended by doctors and the scientific community as a safe and effective way at controlling weight.

In the 1970s we we headed for a major global cooling.

Apparently all our oil would of been depleted 3 times over by now.

Acid rain was going to be horrible for all of us.

SARS was going to cause a massive pandemic, oh wait now its bird flu.

Scientists are human, they can make mistakes or exaggerate things for effect to get more attention to their research or projects. If scientists came out and said our way of life would be fine for the next 1000 years, nobody would care about them or their research and the topics of off topic would be absent of climate trends in the planet.

You forgot Mad Cow Disease and West Nile Virus.

 

[MobBoss]

Well, scientists agree. How about that.

I think we can all agree that perhaps those scientists should get off their collective butts and invent us a cheap pollution-free energy source. Or a better way to deal with our refuse.

Because no matter what a scientist says, its not going to change the behavior of some uneducated third worlder intent on destroying the earth.

 

[Urederra]

Frankly I'd rather trust a journalist or the area man over the whole scientific community.


/sarcasm.

Lomborg is a scientist that proved many fearmongerers wrong.

In The Skeptical Environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg challenges widely held beliefs that the global environment is progressively getting worse. Using statistical information from internationally recognized research institutes, Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental issues and documents that the global environment has actually improved. He supports his argument with over 2900 footnotes, allowing discerning readers to check his sources.

Lomborg criticizes the way many environmental organizations make selective and misleading use of scientific data to influence decisions about the allocation of limited resources. The Skeptical Environmentalist is a useful corrective to the more alarmist accounts favored by green activists and the media.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

http://www.theage.com.au/news/natio...scientists-warn/2007/01/26/1169788693774.html



In other words, alot of people are screwed. The good news is the ones who are screwed are the ones who deny this type of thing and are caught unawares. Natural selection is due back from her vacation any minute now. What is not sustainable will be eliminated. If humans survive the next couple hundred years, it will be because we've adapted and are living in a completely different way than we are now.

It's good to know the ocean is more resiliant than we once thought. It means that we (the past few generations) probably won't make the planet completely inhospitable (for future generations and those of us who live a long time).

I don't support eugenic arguments for the purpose of eliminating my philosophical enemies. I support conservation and making strides toward sustainable behaviors but advocating screwing people over with "natural selection" has no place in the environment movement. You know that the people who are going to be screwed most are those of us least able to respond... the poor and the young.

 

[Masquerouge]

Lomborg is a scientist that proved many fearmongerers wrong.

Arhm rhm...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjørn_Lomborg

Bjørn Lomborg (born January 6, 1965) is an Adjunct Professor at the Copenhagen Business School and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen. He became internationally-known for his best-selling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist. After the book's publication, members of the Danish scientific community accused Lomborg of scientific dishonesty. These allegations were investigated by appropriate arms of the Danish government and in the end, no official charges were left standing. However, many scientists — including the majority of climatologists — remain critical of Lomborg's work.

Bjørn Lomborg spent a year as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, earned a Master's degree in political science at the University of Aarhus in 1991, and a Ph.D. at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen in 1994.

Great expertise in the field!

Also,

After the publication of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg was accused of scientific misconduct. Several environmental scientists brought a total of three complaints against Lomborg to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The charges claimed that The Skeptical Environmentalist contained deliberately misleading data and flawed conclusions. Due to the similarity of the complaints, the DCSD decided to proceed on the three cases under one investigation.

[edit] DCSD investigation

On January 6, 2003 the DCSD reached a decision on the complaints. The ruling was a mixed message, deciding the book to be scientifically dishonest, but Lomborg himself not guilty because of lack of expertise in the fields in question[2]:
Objectively speaking, the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty. ...In view of the subjective requirements made in terms of intent or gross negligence, however, Bjørn Lomborg's publication cannot fall within the bounds of this characterization. Conversely, the publication is deemed clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice. The DCSD cited The Skeptical Environmentalist for:

1. Fabrication of data;
2. Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation);
3. Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods;
4. Distorted interpretation of conclusions;
5. Plagiarism;
6. Deliberate misinterpretation of others' results.

[edit] MSTI review

On February 13, 2003, Lomborg filed a complaint against the DCSD's decision, with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, which has oversight over the DSCD.
On December 17, 2003, the Ministry found that the DCSD had made a number of procedural errors, including:

• The DCSD did not use a precise standard for deciding "good scientific practice" in the social sciences;
• The DCSD's definition of "objective scientific dishonesty" was not clear about whether "distortion of statistical data" had to be deliberate or not;
• The DCSD had not properly documented that The Skeptical Environmentalist was a scientific publication on which they had the right to intervene in the first place;
• The DCSD did not provide specific statements on actual errors.

The Ministry remitted the case to the DCSD. In doing so the Ministry indicated that it regarded the DCSD's previous findings of scientific dishonesty in regard to the book as invalid [2][3]. The Ministry also instructed the DCSD to decide whether to reinvestigate.

[edit] DCSD response

On March 12, 2004, the Committee formally decided not to act further on the complaints, reasoning that renewed scrutiny would, in all likelihood, result in the same conclusion [4]. Two days later a complaint was issued by Kåre Fog, an ecologist who maintains an anti-Lomborg website; Fog reported that this complaint was rejected on 27th Dec. 2004.[3]

[edit] Response of the scientific community

The original DCSD decision about Lomborg provoked a petition[4] among Danish academics. 308 scientists, many of them from the social sciences, criticised the DCSD's methods in the case. A Dutch think tank, Heidelberg Appeal the Netherlands, published a report in which they claimed 25 out of 27 accusations against Lomborg to be unsubstantiated or not to the point.[5]
Another group of Danish scientists collected signatures in support of the DCSD. The 640 signatures in this second petition came almost exclusively from the medical and natural sciences, and included Jens Christian Skou (a Nobel laureate for chemistry), former university rector Kjeld Møllgård, and professor Poul Harremoës from the Technical University of Denmark.[6]

All I can say is that the guy is extremely controversial, and certainly not the voice of the scientific community.

While I believe science need people like him, precisely to challenge the scientific consensus, and remove it or renforce it in the result, as of today I think the community is correct and he's wrong.



But of course, that might change

 

[StarWorms]

As a matter of fact, 9/11 did give us a unique opportunity to observe global warming in action.

After the attack, the entire U.S. airline industry was grounded. For three days, jet exhaust was absent from the atmosphere, nationwide. The results were immediate--and completely unexpected.

You might guess that it would cool down as a result of less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Didn't happen. Or maybe you guessed that it got warmer (due to a lack of anti-greenhouse aerosols, less particulate matter to block sunlight, and no condensed vapor trails to reflect sunlight). Also didn't happen.

What really happened is, the days got warmer--and the nights got cooler. The temperature range expanded.

This runs counter to a common claim of global warming alarmists. They say global warming will not only produce warmer climate, but wilder climate with greater temperature shifts and more violent weather. Well, 9/11 was an example of the opposite happening.

Shows that we don't know our planet as well as we think......

You don't understand it clearly. Global dimming does not run counter to the claim of global warming scientists and researchers. In fact it just goes to show that it's doubly important that we tackle both greenhouse gas emissions and general pollution or we'll end up with a far worse scenario.

Moving on to the wider issue: a lot of the environmental changes Narz described in the OP have been happening for centuries already. Even when the ocean level doesn't rise, the sea is always eroding steadily at our shorelines--and slowly destroying coastal housing. Venice is gradually sinking into the water. Entire towns and cities sprout at the bases of volcanoes--and then one day that volcano erupts and kills thousands. The inhabitants run away, then clean up and rebuild their city all over again--in the same place.

When something erodes, it does not simply vanish, it gets deposited elsewhere. It's simply the movement of sediment, it doesn't just dissolve in the water for eternity.

In the long term, we humans will keep doing what we've always been doing. We will adapt.

Adaptation is a very, very slow process. Species are constantly going extinct. Contrary to popular belief, our species will not live forever.

How long do you think it would take for a specific sequence of several genes to spread through the world population? Without gene therapy, it would take tens/hundreds of thousands of years. And that's excluding the way that humans with the "wrong" genes will survive almost just as well, because they will be protected with antibiotics or UV blocking clothing or whatever. How many people do you think would have to perish in order for the adaptation to take place? How many diseases, like malaria, do you think would spread around the world?

Do you honestly believe that humans are very good at adapting? Mammals are notably poor at adapting compared with things like bacteria and insects. We rely on other species for our survival. Extinction of species that help us to survive only aid our own extinction.

 

[Urederra]

Arhm rhm...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjørn_Lomborg





Great expertise in the field!

Are you trying to say that Cambridge University Press doesn't peer review the books they published?

Besides, Lomborg is not a climatologist, he doesn't need to be, He doesn't claim he produces data, he just picks up, processes and interprets the data generated by internationally recognized research institutes. his expertise is in mathematics, statistics, and he is more than qualified to do what he did. He wouldn't have get his book published by Cambrigde University Press if he wasn't. Apparently others, like Michael Mann don't know how to process data since his infamous Hockey Stick graph published in Nature had serious problems with the way he processed the data and several corrections had to be made and published.

The fact is that most of the claims he made hasn't been debunked. The magazine Scientic American tried to debunk some but they couldn't and they denied him a full reply letter. Scientific Amerian knows that fearmongering sells more.

All I can say is that the guy is extremely controversial, and certainly not the voice of the scientific community.

The scientific community does not have a unique voice in this case, and if you have to appeal to your scientific status or to consensus to make a point, then your data is not good enough.

I recommend you to go to your local library and have a look at the book, it is eye opening.

Besides, Do you really think that the river Seine, for example, is more polluted today than 30 years ago? or the Thames?. I know that the Nervion is less polluted than 30 years ago, same happens with London's air. It is less polluted today than 100 years ago, when people used to burn charcoal with high sulphur content to heat their houses. Now the smog cloud London used to have is not that big. He show that in his book, with data collected by other scientists and published in internationally recognized research institutes.

While I believe science need people like him, precisely to challenge the scientific consensus, and remove it or renforce it in the result, as of today I think the community is correct and he's wrong.



But of course, that might change

So, have you check any source other than a wiki that any green activist can edit? I mean, wiki is great if you are looking for non controversial information, like what does yellow mean and such, but for controversial issues like these, the ones with more time in their hands, the green activists in this case, always win.

Lomborg is hated among some scientists because he showed the right picture with the data they produced. (His book has more than 2900 references, most of them to peer reviewed articles (I can't say all because I haven't checked them all). He doesn't produce any data, He just collects and puts it together, it is not that difficult to do.

I you have to spend a good time, I recommend this [ulr=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4480559399263937213&q=penn+teller]Penn and Teller[/url] episode where they managed to collect signatures for a petition for banning dihydrogen monoxide, aka water, in a environmentalist demonstration. I know, those are not scientists, but they are the ones who spread the hysteria, the episode is worth watching, specially for the tree hugging and other "expert environmentalists".