Winged Wheeler

This is a deeply flawed analysis. Let's take a look:

1. You wrote "As the atmosphere gets warmer, more moisture evaporates and is allowed to be suspended in the air. When the air cools, it condenses out as snow."

--The hydrological cycle is more vastly complicated than that. When you simplify something so much that your statement is no longer entirely true, you deserved to be called on it. Revise and resubmit.

--Warming and cooling effects in the same observation? Does the same process cause these opposite effects? Explain. Use additional blue books as necessary.

--Did I miss your post when you condemned alarmists for blaming droughts on global warming?

--This was offered as an explanation for the heavy snowfalls on the east coast this winter. These storms were Nor'easters and the moisture came from the ocean--kind of like lake effect snow for the east coast. If a strong low tracks up the east coast and the surface temperatures are below freezing it is going to snow a lot regardless of CO2 levels or any other ridiculous warmist metrics.



2. Then you wrote "Since the United States represents around 2% of the Earth's surface, you shouldn't draw any conclusions because it happens to be cold in February."

--I infer from this remark that you will join me this summer in denouncing those who will cite global warming as a cause of local hot spells.

--You have established that 2% is not a sufficient sample size with which to measure global trends. Since the earth is about 4.5 billion years old we will need more than 90 million years of accurate temperature records.



3. Then you wrote "Global warming," "climate change" and "global climate destablization" are all descriptive terms for the pendulum swinging further towards the extremes. The "warm" will get warmer and the "cools" cooler."

--A declarative statement that you have not justified. You are ascribing to the atmosphere the property of dynamic instability. I don't buy that--think of all the stresses (meteor impacts, volcanoes, ice ages etc.) that we have evidence of. The climate does not spin out of control. I'll call it dynamically stable until someone proves me wrong.



4. Finally you wrote that "It's official now, although Fox viewers haven't heard, the last decade was the warmest on record."

--I believe that you could also say that, during the last decade, the S&P 500 was the highest on record--but that does not mean it is speeding inexorably higher. It would be just as accurate and just as meaningless as the statistic you've used.

--Recall, too, that you established the 2% threshold above. One decade is something like 2.2X10e(-9) of the earth's age, which is a bit less than 2%.


I, for one, am looking forward to the perennial global warming that will begin in earnest in a month or so.

WW

Winged Wheeler

Global warming has morphed into climate change and can now, therefore, explain both heat and cold, droughts and floods, snow and no snow, etc. For the faithful it is the explanation for anything. As for we unsaved, we recall "that which explains everything, explains nothing."

Somehow it reminded me of this:

YouTube - Monty Python - Life of Brian - so is he the messiah or not?

WW

N2264J

I've seen it. It's a hatchet job.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FoxNews

The embattled ex-head of the research center at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal dropped a bombshell over the weekend, admitting in an interview with the BBC that there has been no global warming over the past 15 years.

What Jones actually said was since 1995, the warming trend "is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level." Then he went on to say "I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed" and "there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity."

http://mediamatters.org/research/201002150015

FDXLAG

When Jones and his mediamatters comrades can explain how my F-150 is causing this:

Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says

Then I will listen.

N2264J

I've seen all this before. Medical doctors wearing their white smock coats, flaunting their credentials from the advertising pages of a magazine or a TV commercial and saying things like: "I smoke Chesterfields not just because they relax me but they're smooth."

Back then, the corporate theme was "the science isn't settled - we need more study." Now, they just resort to character assassination.

http://www.climateark.org/shared/rea...?linkid=150824

We've gone from "the science isn't settled" to "the science can't be trusted." The United States once prospered from it's science and technology. Is it a coincidence that we're having this paradigm shift as the US declines into third world debtor nation status? I don't think so.

FDXLAG

Your Cigarette example is a good one. But I like this one as it is a wee bit more recent and more on point:

Newsweek on the cooling world

FDXLAG

You mean as we tie our hands with unproven junk science. Limiting our production of cheap energy. Impose draconian restrictions on production and put hundreds of thousands of farmers out of business to protect the snail darter or the blind one eyed limp wrist mosquito gnat. Yeah I guess it aint a coinkydink.

jungle

Can we parse this?
There has been no significant warming for the last 15 years.
There is evidence that man is causing this, but I can't share it with anyone.
Who is wearing a white coat and smoking a Chesterfield now?

jungle

Perhaps our gentle readers would enjoy a short tale of good and evil?




The Green Deathposted at 12:58 am on February 16, 2010 by Doctor Zero

Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.
Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.
The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives. This was not a gradual process – a surge of infection and death happened almost immediately. The use of DDT reduces the spread of mosquito-borne malaria by fifty to eighty percent, so its discontinuation quickly produced an explosion of crippling and fatal illness. The same environmental movement which has been falsifying data, suppressing dissent, and reading tea leaves to support the global-warming fraud has studiously ignored this blood-drenched “hockey stick” for decades.
The motivation behind Silent Spring, the suppression of nuclear power, the global-warming scam, and other outbreaks of environmentalist lunacy is the worship of centralized power and authority. The author, Rachel Carson, didn’t set out to kill sixty million people – she was a fanatical believer in the newly formed religion of radical environmentalism, whose body count comes from callousness, rather than blood thirst. The core belief of the environmental religion is the fundamental uncleanliness of human beings. All forms of human activity are bad for the environment… most especially including the activity of large private corporations. Deaths in faraway Africa barely registered on the radar screen of the growing Green movement, especially when measured against the exhilarating triumph of getting a sinful pesticide banned, at substantial cost to an evil corporation.
Those who were initiated into the higher mysteries of environmentalism saw the reduction of the human population as a benefit, although they’re generally more circumspect about saying so in public these days. As quoted by Walter Williams, the founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, Alexander King, wrote in 1990: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guayana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Another charming quote comes from Dr. Charles Wurster, a leading opponent of DDT, who said of malaria deaths: “People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”
Like the high priests of global warming, Rachel Carson knew what she was doing. She claimed DDT would actually destroy all life on Earth if its use continued – the “silent spring” of the title is a literal description of the epocalypse she forecast. She misused a quote from Albert Schweitzer about atomic warfare, implying the late doctor agreed with her crusade against pesticide by dedicating her book to him… when, in fact, Schweitzer viewed DDT as a “ray of hope” against disease-carrying insects. Some of the scientists attempting to debunk her hysteria went so far as to eat chunks of DDT to prove it was harmless, but she and her allies simply ignored them, making these skeptics the forerunners of today’s “global warming deniers” – absolutely correct and utterly vilified. William Ruckleshaus disregarded nine thousand pages of testimony when he imposed the DDT ban. Then as now, the science was settled… beneath a mass of politics and ideology.
Another way Silent Spring forecast the global-warming fraud was its insistence that readers ignore the simple evidence of reality around them. One of the founding myths of modern environmentalism was Carson’s assertion that bird eggs developed abnormally thin shells due to DDT exposure, leading the chicks to be crushed before they could hatch. As detailed in this American Spectator piece from 2005, no honest experimental attempt to produce this phenomenon has ever succeeded – even when using concentrations of DDT a hundred times greater than anything that could be encountered in nature. Carson claimed thin egg shells were bringing the robin and bald eagle to the edge of extinction… even as the bald eagle population doubled, and robins filled the trees. Today, those eagles and robins shiver in a blanket of snow caused by global warming.
The DDT ban isn’t the only example of environmental extremism coming with a stack of body bags. Mandatory gas mileage standards cause about 2,000 deaths per year, by compelling automakers to produce lighter, more fragile cars. The biofuel mania has led resources to be shifted away from growing food crops, resulting in higher food prices and starvation. Worst of all, the economic damage inflicted by the environmentalist religion directly correlates to life-threatening reductions in the human standard of living. The recent earthquake in Haiti is only the latest reminder that poverty kills, and collectivist politics are the most formidable engine of poverty on Earth.
Environmental extremism is a breathless handmaiden for collectivism. It pours a layer of smooth, creamy science over a relentless hunger for power. Since the boogeymen of the Green movement threaten the very Earth itself with imminent destruction, the environmentalist feels morally justified in suspending democracy and seizing the liberty of others. Of course we can’t put these matters to a vote! The dimwitted hicks in flyover country can’t understand advanced biochemistry or climate science. They might vote the wrong way, and we can’t risk the consequences! The phantom menaces of the Green movement can only be battled by a mighty central State. Talk of representation, property rights, and even free speech is madness when such a threat towers above the fragile ecosphere, wheezing pollutants and coughing out a stream of dead birds and drowned polar bears. You can see why the advocates of Big Government would eagerly race across a field of sustainable, organic grass to sweep environmentalists into their arms, and spin them around in the ozone-screened sunlight.
Green philosophy provides vital nourishment for the intellectual vanity of leftists, who get to pat themselves on the back for saving the world through the control-freak statism they longed to impose anyway. One of the reasons for the slow demise of the climate-change nonsense is that it takes a long time to let so much air out of so many egos. Calling “deniers” stupid and unpatriotic was very fulfilling. Likewise, you’ll find modern college campuses teeming with students – and teachers – who will fiercely insist that DDT thins egg shells and causes cancer. Environmentalism is a primitive religion which thrives by telling its faithful they’re too sophisticated for mere common sense.
The legacy of Silent Spring provides an object lesson in the importance of bringing the global-warming con artists to trial. No one was ever forced to answer for the misery inflicted by that book, or the damage it dealt to serious science. Today Rachel Carson is still celebrated as a hero, the secular saint who transformed superstition and hysteria into a Gospel for the modern god-state. The tactics she deployed against DDT resurfaced a decade later, in the Alar scare. It’s a strategy that offers great reward, and very little risk. We need to increase the risk factor, and frighten the next generation of junk scientists into being more careful with their research. If we don’t, the Church of Global Warming will just reappear in a few years, wearing new vestments and singing new hymms… but still offering the same communion of poverty, tyranny, and death.

N2264J

There wasn't a worldwide ban on DDT. The ban on DDT in the US however is credited for getting, among others, the Bald Eagle off the endangered species list.

Maybe Doctor Zero is a Monsanto employee.

_________________________________

Criticism of restrictions on DDT use

Critics claim that restrictions on the use of DDT in vector control have resulted in substantial numbers of unnecessary deaths due to malaria. Estimates for the number of these deaths range from hundreds of thousands, according to Nicholas Kristof,[107] to much higher figures. Robert Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health said in 2007 that "The ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children."[108] These arguments have been called "outrageous" by former WHO scientist Socrates Litsios, and May Berenbaum, an entomologist at the University of Illinois, says that "to blame environmentalists who oppose DDT for more deaths than Hitler is worse than irresponsible."[81] Investigative journalist Adam Sarvana and others characterize this notion as a "myth" promoted principally by Roger Bate of the pro-DDT advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM) in service of his anti-regulatory, free market ideology.[109][110]

Criticisms of a "ban" on DDT often specifically reference the 1972 US ban (with the erroneous implication that this constituted a worldwide ban and prohibited use of DDT in vector control). Reference is often made to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring even though she never pushed for a ban on DDT. John Quiggin and Tim Lambert have written that "the most striking feature of the claim against Carson is the ease with which it can be refuted."[111] Carson actually devoted a page of her book to considering the relationship between DDT and malaria, warning of the evolution of DDT resistance in mosquitoes and concluding:DDT - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia