There is no such animal, Dean. The only climatologists (true exports in the field) that I know of have completely discounted the predictions (and taken a lot of shit for coming out and saying so). The problem (as I see it), besides the politics of the issue, is that in order to predict climate change (one way or the other) you have to be cross disciplined in multiple disciplines--climate, probabilities, sociology, archeology, etc.

It never seems like more than one specialty has looked at these things.

As you know, the climate model they've fed the last X years of data cannot predict known years with better than coin tossing accuracy (actually, the coin toss is MORE accurate). So if they cannot get the model to work AT ALL, why should we accept their hunch for future years?

The other bollocks is that they've added up all the total emissions man has put into the atmosphere (in the last 500 years) and it something like .0001% of what a moderate volcano puts out in a day. How is that nature can handle what nature produces, which is a million times more significant than what man has done, but man is having an impact? These folks are just nuts.

The person not only has to understand climate, they need to be able to quantify their data.

One of the major FUBARS was the test they did in England. They measured one spot in some village somewhere and since the flora and fauna suffered, and the climate did slightly increase, they blamed in on Global Warming (green houses gases, etc.).

But any idiot could have figured out that BUILDING A DAMN MOTORWAY 1/2 mile from where they were taking the readings would have had more impact on the temperature than the smoke stacks 100 miles away.

If I'm remembering it correctly, there was another one where there had been farmers in an area, the last of the family of farmers died--then the flora changed in the region. He stopped irrigating! He stopped planting anything!

Another was a subdivision was built. On and on.

There are too many extraneous reasons for minor climate fluctuations and they seem unwilling to discount data for logical reasons--they are either stupid or malicious.

The only credible conclusion that a climatologist could claim to make is that he does not know enough.

Hmmm.... These predictions you mention remind me of the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, a.k.a., the Apocalypse.

Ahm, according to Mudvill Gazzett, this so-call report is a worse case scenerio that the Pentigon comission a couple of Sci-Fi writers dreamed up. It has absolutely no basis in fact. But since the military likes to have all possible basis covered (upto and including Alien encounter), I don't find the actual report all that surprising or impressive. What is surprising is how serious some folks in al-Guardian took it.

Dean, nobody knows the future, not even close. Michael Crieghton (i don't believe I spelled that correctly, but you should know who I mean, wrote a series of articles over a span of several years, '93 thru '03.)

I belive there were 5 articles and I wish I could guide you to them, I have them on my hard drive but I have know way to put the in this post.

I've written on the global warming idiocy several times.
And as pointed out above, most climatologists, meteorologists, atmospheric physicists, etc., don't buy it. The bulk of the global warming cheerleading is done by enviromentalists and other such folks with an agenda.

Well, you can't (in most circles) be taken seriously if you refer to portents and omens, but superstition must live forever, it appears. These days, we have to dress up our superstitions in psuedo-scientific terms, but superstitions they remain.

What, after all, is the difference between the "portent" of a "hole" in the ozone layer today and the coming of a comet 1,000 years ago? Functionally, nothing - both those who thought the comet presaged the death of kings and those who think the "hole" in the ozone presages the death of earth were and are going entirely on faith. Once we figure out the ozone layer, then something else will be used.

Why is this? Because ignorance is easier than knowledge - in order to understand the climate, one would have to engage in long study and be prepared for the rebukes of those whose knowledge may be superior...much easier just to make shit up which cannot be disproven in a 30 second sound-bite. Additionally, there are, never forget, a lot of people who are financially quite well off from the procedes of varied cons - from those who propose to channel our ancient spirits, to those who have founded organisations to lobby against nuclear power. You ever seen an environmental activist who has spent all of his money protecting the environment? Doubtful - most have their hands out, as they fly from swanky conference to swanky conference, for us to pony up more money.

Ah, well - as Churchill said, when you have a lot of free speach, its natural that you'll have a lot of foolish speach as well; the key, here, is just to ensure that these mountebanks don't actually control policy decisions.

It's easy to tell the climate Chicken-Littles are as reliable as the original. What's the most important greenhouse gas? Water vapor, by far. So why do the models and Kyoto concentrate on carbon?

Yours,
Wince

I sometimes have fun stumping these types by asking them what the change in sea level will be if the floating artic pack ice were to melt. Sometimes you can prod them with possible answers, like 20 feet? 50 feet? 100 feet?

The correct answer is of course 0, since the ice displaces its own mass either way. It's the same as asking what happens to a glass of icewater, filled to the brim, when the ice melts. But it's fun to watch people try to use their catastrophe brain to answer a simple buoyancy question.

Water is, so far as I know, the only chemical that actually expands when it freezes and contracts when it melts.

George,

Hadn't thought of that myself....of course, our Enviros will swiftly rejoin with the flooding caused by the melting of land-based glaciers...of course, even if this were to come to pass, what we'd lose in Santa Monica (boo hoo hoo...yeah), we'd gain at the higher elevations.

George,
what you say is true, but since the Antarctic ice is not floating, it WOULD raise the ocean level by quite a bit.
So your question is a bit misleading.

Fortunately, the Antarctic ice does not seem to be melting particularly faster than usual. Of course some melts, but some is formed by, get this, SNOWFALL. Whoda thunk?

The Postrels interviewed an astronomer (Sallie Baliunas) a few years ago for Reason, and according to her, the things we don't know about the effects of clouds and the sun's magnetic cycles alone on the weather--irrespective of the meaning of greenhouse gas emissions--are enough to show why the models are so useless.

Now, I didn't read the entire thing, and I've never been to Siberia, but isn't it cold there? If we are suffering from Global Warming, wouldn't the UK become more like Bermuda?

The theory as it goes now is that the warming trend will cause massive climate change everywhere, and areas that are warm now will be colder and vice-versa.

Basic, utter catastrophe everywhere.

The greatest Earth-originated environmental catastrophe ever to befall this planet was when green plants began polluting the nice, healthy methane atmosphere with their poisonous oxygen exhalations.

The report is a bit of a phony....see Tim Blairs blog for where it came from...sorry I don't know how to link.

The only doomsday prediction that I worry about is the recent reports that the earth’s magnetic poles are fading.

"The strength of the Earth's magnetic field has decreased 10 percent over the past 150 years, raising the remote possibility that it may collapse and later reverse, flipping the planet's poles for the first time in nearly a million years, scientists said…

..The weakening -- if coupled with a subsequently large influx of radiation in the form of protons streaming from the sun -- can also affect the chemistry of the atmosphere, said Charles Jackman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

That can lead to significant but temporary losses of atmospheric ozone, he said."

I also wonder if this could have some effect on Global Warming. It’s interesting that the doomsayers have ignored this report – you’d think they’d be interested.

Dean - I did a bit of reading on the water density issue, and it turns out that the reason ice floats is pretty simple... when it freezes, the molecules latch onto one another in an open latticework pattern, one that has a lot of empty space. (Think typical snowflake depiction and that's pretty close. Fractals are cool.) Water molecules, then, are densest before they start to latch on to one another, when they're close together, at about 4 degrees Centigrade.

And now you know!

Regardless of the future climate, and climate changes, awaiting us, this entire issue has been demagogued beyond any usefulness. There are two questions that need to be answered, and until we can at least discuss them, we can make no progress. The first is: can we predict the weather over long time periods? The answer is obvious to anyone who has tried to plan a weekend on the basis of Thursday's weather report. Yet these fools believe that we are so stupid that we will believe their prediction of the weather over year, decade, and century time periods!

The second question is, how can we alter climate? Since the Kyoto Protocol specifically decided that they would only consider carbon dioxide as the cause of warming, and preclude any other possible means of mitigation than reduction of carbon emissions. an idiot can see that their findings could not be useful to any debate on climate. As a tool to institute socialism, or transnational progressivism, Kyoto works. If we are truly worried about our environment, we need to examine the science without this political stranglehold.

Kyoto specifically excludes nuclear power as a means of mitigation of carbon emissions. Since nuclear power has the potential to almost completely stop carbon dioxide emissions by the developed countries within 25 years, we can clearly see that Kyoto and the IPCC are not serious.

And the Pentagon's business is to develop scenarios for all sorts of unlikely, but possible events. And then the topper: the link is to the Guardian, which is an English publication about as realistic as the national Enquirer. 'Nuff said.

This is good on the predictions and how wildly they vary:

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20040222-103504-1476r.htm

I'm no fan of the global-warming "religion" being preached by the environmental extremists, but there are many credible scientists that take global warming seriously. Read the latest issue of Scientific American - there's a long article on this topic that talks about these issues. Granted, SA has slanted to the left, especially over the past couple of years, but my take on the whole GW threat is that the jury is still out on the causes of GW, but there isn't much argument in the scientific community that it is actually happening. The Kyoto treaty, IMHO, is a terrible response, and there is argument about what should be done (if anything) about it. However, the data I've read about, from multiple sources, does indeed show that GW really is happening. Whether or not it will lead to the dire predictions Dean posted about is, I think, still very much an open question - the predictions can't be confirmed, but neither can they be discounted.

Two interrelated factors often overlooked, thougn Sean Kinsell mentioned it above, are the effects of solar output and cosmic radiation on climate change. Dr. Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute has studied the effects of such on climate and with the help of climatologists and archeologists has found that those two factors have a much greater effect on climate than carbon dioxide. The problem is that many of the computer models totally ignore these factors and assume that solar output is a constant.

I've covered this before both here and here.

I'm impressed by George Turner's reminder about the glass filled with ice creating less mass when it thaws.

I suppose this means that instead of disappearing, some of the little island republics out in oceania could expand in size. Like RaraTonga becoming a minor superpower, or something like that. I guess this means the big cities along the US coast will have some new lands freed up to build some crummy new suburbs on.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Here is a link to the people who put the story out.

This is a typical left wing organization with more axes to grind than a Kansas hardware store.

Link

Scientists, they are not. Radical politicans, they are.

Let's note that the UCS report has very little in common with the outlier risks in the military report. The UCS report just points out scientific discrepancies; it doesn't make sweeping judgements like "everything will be underwater in 20 years".

I get a little tired of people discounting global warming because they happen to know this guy who knows this other guy who said that it's all bs.

Thousands of scientists around the world have been studying this problem for over a decade.

Several hundred of them from dozens of different countries have written a series of reports describing what they found. The latest is the 2001 report, which is the third version of the report. Work is ongoing.

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm

At some point you have to apply Occam's razor. Rare is the simplest explanation that everyone else is a liar.

Dear Mrs. du Toit: Please read up on anthropogenic (manmade) emissions of CO2 vs. volcano outgassing. Manmade sources generate over 100 times as much CO2 per year as the roughly 50 volcanos that are active in any given year.

You could start here:

http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/emissions_0207.pdf

Of course, maybe all these people who have studied volcanos for much of their lives are just a bunch of crazy liars too.

I look forward to seeing any information sources you can provide to back up your claims about volcano outgassing.

One quick note: Anthropogenic sources of carbon are measured in PgC (petagrams Carbon) and volcanos emissions are generally specified in TgC (teragrams Carbon).

There are 1000 Tg in each Pg.

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/561.htm

What would a hard-nosed business manager do if warnings of drastic climate change were credible? What if we could predict the weather with such accuracy, say, a year out? How would we know we had arrived at this level of forecasting accuracy? Some examples:
- Millions, and in some cases billions, of dollars are lost every year due to weather related crop failure. Too much rain in some places, too little in others, storm damage, et. al. If it were possible to predict long term weather patterns accurately, farmers would not plant in areas in years where damaging weather events would be a problem. Food prices would drop significantly world-wide since every crop would be a success. Weather-related famine would drop dramatically if not disappear entirely. The amount of arable land would probably go up since we could allow farmlands in weather-threaten regions to lie fallow and use replenishment techniques to restore those that would receive normal amounts of rainfall, sunshine, etc. in future years.

Some other examples:
- Governments would restrict construction, especially housing, in areas where unexpected severe storm and flood damage would occur that would result in loss of life or property damage.
- Insurance companies would restrict policies by zip code due to weather issues by year.
- Civil defense authorities would issue "annual evacuation notices" to communities so that citizens would have time to remodel their homes, plan vacations out of town instead of panic evacuations, and other practical considerations and precautions would be taken.

I'm not referring to areas that flood every year, or "tornado alley". If an insurance company knew a year or more in advance that a hurricane was going to strike a certain area, those customers would either lose their coverage entirely on some pretext or have their rates raised substantially. And if a developer knew that an area that had been destroyed by a hurricane would be safe for decades to come, he'd snap up the ruined properties to rebuild and make a substantial profit. (continued below)

(Continued from above) For every screed from the UCS and organizations that share its agenda that decries man's effect on the planet, you can find studies of artic ice core samples that show dramatic climatic shifts as far back in time as the core drills can reach. Some of the theories for this include volcanic eruptions, large persistent forest fires, or even asteroid impacts on the earth's surface. The earth has climatic cycles--ice ages come and go over thousands of years--that cannot be understood with today's technologies.

It's great to do one's part if you can by taking public transportation, buying a hybrid, and using recycled paper. But if you live in an area that requires you to drive to work, or drive a truck for a living, some of these choices aren't open to you. If you're willing to seriously take the world's largest economy--the engine that fuel's the world's growth--down the Kyoto road, you owe it to yourself and your children to demand irrefutable proof of the problem, just as we now expect "irrefutable proof" of military threats. Are there enough sensors placed around the world to accurately collect all the data required, including temperature ranges? Are they placed so that they record unskewed data; e.g., away from highways that would overstate CO2? Are we getting accurate birth and demographic data on emerging countries to forecast their use, especially those countries that burn lots of biomass instead of using power from electricity and refined fuels? How many different climatic models have been developed, and what assumptions are they based on? Who is running them--or interpreting them--are they paid by political groups with an agenda? Computer power and database software capabilities go up every year, but none can predict the weather very accurately beyond a few days at most. Assuming enough sensors are in place, and that apolitical models are in place and reliable, do you believe that these capabilities will reach levels of capacity great enough to bet the economy on? Remember, NO SENATOR VOTED FOR Kyoto when it came up for a vote during the Clinton administration--were they timid or were they unwilling to bet the country's future on questionable data and assumptions?