How does one explain the warmer global climate during the late 1800's into 1930's compared to today's ?

Question

The period indicated in the question predates major CO emissions. Why didn't the cataclasmic events predicted by political figures not occur?

Why are scientific studies accepted by the Al Gore political backers not peer reviewed? Is this acceptable?

"Meltdown", by Patrick J Michaels

Perhaps do some more research and limit the profanities when you're views are questioned.

Also, global climate temperatures are not the same as a specific geographic temperature. So, an average for a country's temp isn't adequate on the global scale. NASA is another good source for climate averages.

Newspapers, movies and other non-science based publications are not good sources for research.

Answer 1

Nick H, scientists getting large sums of money from the industries their opinion benefits are also not good sources of information. See news article below posted on Yahoo today 7/27/06.


Utilities give warming skeptic big bucks
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer Thu Jul 27, 8:57 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Coal-burning utilities are passing the hat for one of the few remaining scientists skeptical of the global warming harm caused by industries that burn fossil fuels.

Pat Michaels — Virginia's state climatologist, a University of Virginia professor and senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute — told Western business leaders last year that he was running out of money for his analyses of other scientists' global warming research. So last week, a Colorado utility organized a collection campaign to help him out, raising at least $150,000 in donations and pledges.

The Intermountain Rural Electric Association of Sedalia, Colo., gave Michaels $100,000 and started the fund-raising drive, said Stanley Lewandowski, IREA's general manager. He said one company planned to give $50,000 and a third plans to give Michaels money next year.

"We cannot allow the discussion to be monopolized by the alarmists," Lewandowski wrote in a July 17 letter to 50 other utilities. He also called on other electric cooperatives to launch a counterattack on "alarmist" scientists and specifically Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth."

Michaels and Lewandowski are open about the money and see no problem with it. Some top scientists and environmental advocates call it a clear conflict of interest. Others view it as the type of lobbying that goes along with many divisive issues.

"These people are just spitting into the wind," said John Holdren, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "The fact is that the drumbeat of science and people's perspectives are in line that the climate is changing."

Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, a Washington advocacy group, said: "This is a classic case of industry buying science to back up its anti-environmental agenda."

Donald Kennedy, an environmental scientist who is former president of Stanford University and current editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Science, said skeptics such as Michaels are lobbyists more than researchers.

"I don't think it's unethical any more than most lobbying is unethical," he said. He said donations to skeptics amounts to "trying to get a political message across."

Michaels is best known for his newspaper opinion columns and books, including "Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media." However, he also writes research articles published in scientific journals.

In 1998, Michaels blasted NASA scientist James Hansen, accusing the godfather of global warming science of being way off on his key 1988 prediction of warming over the next 10 years. But Hansen and other scientists said Michaels misrepresented the facts by cherry-picking the worst (and least likely) of three possible outcomes Hansen presented to Congress. The temperature rise that Hansen said was most likely to happen back then was actually slightly lower than what has occurred.

Michaels has been quoted by major newspapers more than 150 times in the past two years, according to a Lexis-Nexis database search. He and Lewandowski told The Associated Press that their side of global warming isn't getting out and that the donations resulted from a speech Michaels gave to the Western Business Roundtable last fall. Michaels said the money will help pay his staff.

Holdren, a Harvard environmental science and technology professor, said skeptics such as Michaels "have had attention all out of proportion to the merits of their arguments."

"Last I heard, anybody can ask a scientific question," said Michaels, who holds a Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "It is a very spirited discussion that requires technical response and expertise."

Other scientific fields, such as medicine, are more careful about potential conflicts of interests than the energy, environmental and chemical fields, where it doesn't raise much of an eyebrow, said Penn State University bioethicist Arthur Caplan.

Earlier this month, the Journal of the American Medical Association announced a crackdown on researchers who do not disclose drug company ties related to their research. Yet days later, the journal's editor said she had been misled because the authors of a new study had not revealed industry money they got that posed a conflict.

Three top climate scientists said they don't accept money from private groups. The same goes for the Web site realclimate.org, which has long criticized Michaels. "We don't get any money; we do this in our free time," said Realclimate.org contributor Stefan Rahmstorf, an ocean physics scientist at Potsdam University in Germany.

Lewandowski, who said he believes global warming is real just not as big a problem as scientists claim, acknowledged this is a special interest issue. He said the bigger concern is his 130,000 customers, who want to keep rates low, so coal-dependent utilities need to prevent any taxes or programs that penalize fossil fuel use. He said his effort is more aimed at stopping carbon dioxide emission taxes and limits from Congress, something he believes won't happen during the Bush administration.

___

On the net:

• Pat Michaels' Cato Institute Web site: http://www.cato.org/people/michaels.html

• Intermountain Rural Electric Association: http://www.intermountain-rea.com/

Answer 2

First you will have to tell me where you get your sources I just googled average tempture and got this chart for England 1861-2006

Now I know for a fact in 1760's Ben Franklin took water temp on his trip to England from the US 3 times and current water temps are warmer, but similar ranges. So we know his instruments are accurate.

Now interestingly enought, in when the Pilgrim came to America we were in a period called the Little Ice age.

The good news is the people of Europe to fight the cold winters burned almost all the forest in Europe. This released lots of C02 into the air and reduced C02 consumption (if you saw Inconvient truth) you know how important plant life is to C02 absoption.

So it is very possible that all the forest being burned and C02 being released did help end the ice age before it began.

BUT.....

That will not help if the polar currents fail, we will be in trouble then.

Answer 3

Ever heard of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy? (Shoot at the side of a barn, then draw bulls-eyes around the holes.) If refers to the fallacy of carefully picking a data set that doesn't represent the whole picture and then using it to make a point.

In fact, that warm period DID correspond to higher CO2 levels in the environment. Natural variations in temperature and CO2 track one another. (This was easily the best point in Gore's movie in my opinion.) And now the CO2 levels are even higher now, but this time there's no variation (up and downs) as before. Now it's all up, and not just up, but WAY up. Based upon the agreement of CO2 levels and temperature in the past, then the reasonable prediction is that temperature will increase, on average, with less variation. By the way--not everything needs a study. That is average temperature is increasing is an independently verifiable fact--no study needed.

Since DJ is interested in bunk, maybe he'd be interested in some of the other writings of the experts he listed:

Dr. Roy Spenser--on "Faith-based evolution" http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=080805I

Dr. Frederick Seitz: Dr. Seitz is a former President of the National Academy of Sciences, but the Academy disassociated itself from Seitz in 1998 when Seitz headed up a report designed to look like an NAS journal article saying that carbon dioxide poses no threat to climate. The report, which was supposedly signed by 15,000 scientists, advocated the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol. The NAS went to unusual lengths to publically distance itself from Seitz' article. Seitz signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration.

Nasa scientist James Hansen is one of the world's leading supporters of the theory of global warming--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen

Looks like a cut/paste job to me. try doing a little reading next time.

Answer 4

We really have no way of understanding true weather patterns, as man has only kept weather records for a small period of time in comparison to earth's history. While we do not help with pollution, everything that will happen (as far as global warming) was already destine to happen. We are just helping it happen a little faster. There have consistently been ice ages and little ice ages, this is all just part of living on Earth.

Answer 5

Many of the previous answers are BUNK!

The "Scientific Community" is NOT in agreement that the rise in the global temperature has anything to do with human activity.

DO NOT BELIEVE these lies as Al Gore and his propaganda machine want you to believe.

Here is an excerpt from an excellent article I'm providing the link to:

A few year ago, Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences, launched a petition refuting Gore's claims that global warming is human-induced. The petition states: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth." The Seitz petition has been signed by thousands of scientists.

Renowned meteorologist Dr. William Gray, in a recent interview with Discover Magazine (which has advocated the theory of human-induced global warming), says: "This human-induced global-warming thing ... is grossly exaggerated. ... I'm not disputing there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and '40s, and then there was global cooling in the middle '40s to the early '70s. Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical ... about this global-warming thing. But no one asks us." (Gray was described by Discover Magazine's editors as one of "the world's most famous hurricane experts.")

Commenting on the misuse of science to support political agendas, Harvard's Dr. Malcolm Ross concludes of such folly, "Freeze or fry, the problem is always industrial capitalism, and the solution is always international socialism."

Dr. Roy Spencer, former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, has issued "Questions for Al Gore" based on what he calls "Gore's Inconvenient Truth." Gore's thesis is heavily dependent on Dr. Michael Mann's "hockey stick" temperature graphic, which claims that temps in the Northern Hemisphere were relatively stable for the last nine centuries, but spiked in the 20th century, and that the last decade was decade was the hottest in 1000 years. But Mann's claims have been thoroughly debunked and Mann thesis discredited.

NASA scientist James Hansen, director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, argues, "The natural fluctuations of climate are still large -- at least, the natural fluctuations of weather compared to long-term climate change." (Hansen, it should be noted, is a liberal who publicly endorsed the 2004 presidential campaign of John Kerry.)

Neil Frank, former director of the National Hurricane Center, is a bit less nuanced about Gore's claims: "[Global warming] is a hoax."

Professor Robert Carter, James Cook University Marine Geophysical Laboratory, Australia, notes, "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention. The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

Richard S. Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Science MIT, writes, "A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse."

Dr. Lindzen calls into question Gore's "scientific consensus" claim, citing a recent report that of the 928 scientific papers published on global warming between 1993 and 2003, "only 13 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view and several actually opposed it."

But don't expect to hear from professors and scientists like Seitz, Gray, Ross, Spencer, Hansen, Frank, Lindzen, Carter or Spencer when NPR promotes Gore's globaloney.

Answer 6

All scientific studies and all reputable scientists agree that global warming is real. Please do your homework, and stop thinking that this isn't real just because Al Gore made a movie. Grow the f*ck up.

Answer 7

Congratulations, Nick...I dub thee an intelligent person capable of thinking for yourself!

WE ARE NOT ALONE!!

You obviously know the whole schtick of global warming fearmongers so I don't really need to answer your question.

Answer 8

the earth naturally experiences ups and downs in temperature. Except the one we're in now is not on the scope of said cycle (i.e. it shouldnt be happening now).

Also I have no idea where you heard that bunk but its completely false. Do ANY research.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/images/Library/None/010405N1.gif
Its been rising steadily since the industrial revolution, really.