Winged Wheeler

I don't ascribe to the theory that if you once worked for an oil or gas company then, ipso facto, your subsequent points of view are necessarily invalid. Sometimes ad hominem attacks add weight to an argument, most of the time they indicate a weak rhetorical position--this appears to be the case with your argument.

Did you even read the article? I'd actually be interested in discussing legitimate critiques of Lindzen's argument, but what you've put forward so far isn't that compelling; rather, as arguments go it is impotent and lame.

WW

jungle

And the curious might wonder who publishes the "ExxonSecrets Factsheet"?

Well, it is a Greenpeace product, sounds innocent enough?
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"It seems clear that Greenpeace's benign image and name, so redolent of goodness, are a cover for a disdain for capitalism. Not surprisingly, international board member Susan George and military expert William Arkin used to work at the notoriously leftist Institute for Policy Studies.

In many of its utterances, Greenpeace is less an institution dedicated to saving endangered species than it is an advocate of a Big Brother who would run the world the way Greenpeace insiders would like it to be run. This is clearly spelled out in an editorial in the March/April 1990 issue of Greenpeace magazine. The editorial compares Eastern Europe's command economies to the West's "savage capitalism." Mindless of the environmental devastation caused by socialism, the editorial concludes: "From a purely ecological perspective, the two competing ideologies were barely distinguishable." That outrageous statement would hardly sell in the newly freed countries of Eastern Europe, although Greenpeace has recently opened two offices there, but in the pampered West it apparently finds believers."


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The UN and Greenpeace get a free ride on accountability, Exxon has been investigated frequently by governments all over the world.
Who do you think has the straight books?


Still no valid scientific proof.

Do you know the difference between the UN/Greenpeace and Exxon? Exxon actually produces something useful for the world.

N2264J

Source: Forbes, November 11, 1991. By Leslie Spencer with Jan Bollwerk and Richard C. Morais.

You're such a hoot. After ridiculing me about using a source from 1991, you use a source from 1991. You are no longer authorized to use Hunter S. Thompson as your avatar.

It's no secret that an unbridled capitalist media arm like Forbes believes organizations like Greenpeace are a threat to the industrial convenience of using the whole planet as their corporate sewer.

The stewardship of the environment has never been a priority for huge corporations that can't see past the end of the next quarter.

N2264J

I didn't make it past the first paragraph. When he started talking about how the change in temperature of a few tenths of a degree over time is perceived by climate science to be a disaster when daily temperature swings of tens of degrees are routine, I knew he was a quack.

A better analogy would be if the temperature of a human being went up four degrees and stayed there, the person would die. A few degrees is all it takes.

Let me tell you a story. Climate scientists are horrified that the permafrost in the upper latitudes is melting permiting methane to escape into the atmosphere which further warms the upper latitudes allowing even more methane to leak. (Depending on what article you read, methane is 20 to 25 times more efficient at trapping heat than CO2).

Once we get on the other side of that threshold, and we don't know where that threshold is, there's no turning this around. It's what they call a positive feedback loop - a self sustaining engine. And that's just one tipping point of dozens.

Arctic permafrost leaking methane at record levels, figures show | Environment | guardian.co.uk

N2264J

Here's another resource for checking on credentials and backgrounds of climate change deniers.

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environ...niers-47011101

FDXLAG

I am not sure you understand the word analogy. The average human body temperature has remained the same for as long as we have been able to record it. Not so the earth. The planets average temperature has changed multiple times and will continue to do so regardless of our efforts.

jungle

So only your source from 1991 is valid? How convenient.

And the unbridled capitalist media?

The Daily Green.com is published by Hearst Digital Media, a unit of Hearst Magazines. The people who support The Daily Green throughout Hearst Digital Media are too numerous to name -- it's a lot, and we thank them.

Looks like they are all out to make a buck this quarter, real people indeed.

Still no science but you show an extreme bias against capitalism and a love of the non-productive. You have painted a very clear picture here, thank you.

Winged Wheeler

Much better, thank you for making an actual argument instead of an ad hominem attack. I am going to reply to your post with two posts since I am going to include an image in one of them.

Based on the objections that you raised to Lindzen's article, I don't think you earned the ability to label him a quack. His point about the daily temperature swings being orders of magnitude larger than the changes in the global mean temp. anamoly (GATA) is a rhetorical device and not strictly a scientific statement. His article wasn't in a journal, it was a column submitted to a paper and perhaps such a device was beneath his scientific status. You have a good eye to call him out on this--hopefully you'll hold scientists on your side of this issue to the same high standard.

To the best of my knowledge, the climate models (vastly simplified) predict additional heating due to additional CO2. The additional heat leads to more water vapor in the atmosphere which also causes more heat which causes more water vapor, and so on. It always leads to, as you say, a "tipping point". Lindzen's rhetoric may not stand alone as a good scientific statement, but it can lead to a legitimate question--why don't the daily (or the seasonal) temperature increases or decreases cause the kind of positive feedbacks that the warmists anticipate with the much smaller changes in GATA?

If there is a simple answer to that question I'd be interested in hearing it.

Here is a graph that shows, for the years 1895-2009, the annual temperature changes by month. It gives a good visual perspective of the seasonal temperature variation versus the rise in global temps.



The link isgood but for some reason I can't get the image up there today. If anybody else can do it, please feel free.

WW

Winged Wheeler

Analogies, like all models, have their limits. I didn't like your person with a fever analogy:

"The patient presented with a temperature that appears to be higher than last year, but the change is smaller than the rounding error on our thermometers. We also don't know what his temperature is supposed to be. The patient's history shows a slowly increasing temperature for the past 15,000 years and has had predictable warming and cooling cycles for about the past 700,000 years. The patients age is 2 billion years...

You get the drift.

N2264J

If you're naive enough to think exposing a $2,500 a day oil consultant for having his "global warming" paper underwritten by OPEC is an ad hominem attack, I doubt you'll be interested in anything I have say but this is exactly what the tobacco industry did in the 50s. They paid "scientists" to come to a predetermined conclusion favorable to big tobacco.

I'm going to need the reference on your water vapor example because I don't think that it "always leads to a tipping point." Water vapor isn't a one way street like carbon because water vapor also mitigates the warming phenomenon. Water vapor in the form of clouds, for example, reflect great deal of heat by shading the earth's surface. Heat is absorbed when water changes forms (solid, liquid, gas). All large bodies of water yield a huge evaporative cooling effect.

Look, you're not a climate scientist and neither am I but out of the temperature spectrum of the universe, most rational people would agree that life only flourishes on this planet within a very narrow temperature range. In the scheme of things, it's a razor thin margin and since the industrial revolution, we're pushing the boundary.

It's disturbing the way America, once a leader in science and technology, seems to reject the science now based solely on preconceived political/economic grounds. That may be unprecedented. Is it a coincidence that this is happening during our decline as a world leader? I don't think so.

"Climategate" came to nothing. Nevertheless, you continue to besmirch the people who have dedicated decades of their lives to working this problem and are closer to the subject than a few aileron jockeys, who read an article once, will ever be.

It's interesting that while secretly bemoaning the insincere and disingenuous nature of your own airline managements, you enthusiastically carry the water of management at big oil/gas/coal.