NY Times Questions Mr. Gore

klaatu

Fusionist
Apparently the debate is still on... even within the Scientific Community... the argument isnt against Warming or Change.. but the cause and whether or not we've passed this way before.

I watched an interview with Easterbrook on TV.. he says the Ocean is due to move into a cooling period which it has over the past year.. this is good news.. especially for me..since I own a home in Florida near the coast.


http://tinyurl.com/3ykza4


“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,” Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were “overselling our certainty about knowing the future.”


Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,” Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican.”
 
For partisan reasons, the rightwing will never accept that global warming, is overwhelminly viewed be related to human emissions.

How confident do we have to be, to conclude AGW is real? As of 2007, we are 90% confident, based on all the best science. Can you scour the internet and some blogs to find the 10% that raise doubt? Yes.

But how confident do you have to be, to start taking action? Science is NEVER able to prove ANYTHING to 100% confidence. That's not how science works. 400 years after Isacc Newton, were still not even 100% confident how and why gravity works the way it does.

So the question is, how confident do you have to be in the science, before you drop partisanship, and take action? 90% confident apparently isn't good enough for some. 100% confidence is impossible with the scientific method. So we have a good bracket to work with:

Do you need to be 95% confident (not 90% confident), before you drop partisanship, and agree to take action?
 
do we understand how gravity works ? Yet we still accept it as fact.


There's not a scientific theory on the planet, that we are 100% sure we have totally and correctly figured out: Not evolution, not atomic theory, not the theory of gravity.

If any partisan hack is saying we have to wait until we have 100% certain that human emissions are related to AGW, then they don't understand science. If the current 90% confidence isn't good enough for them to drop their Rush Limbaugh talking points, I'm not sure that us being 95% confident is going to make a bit of difference to them.
 
The fact is that Gore is wrong. He said there was a consenus and there is not one. He said that only right wing toads would say he was wrong. Once again he is wrong.
 
Back
Top