Why does the Hoax "Global Warming" persist?

Question

The Earth has undegone many warming and cooling periods, long before people were around to emit "greenhouse" gases. Science has yet to explain these natural climate phases. Ice ages and warming ages where ancient jungles reached as far as upstate New York cycled back and forth for billions of years. Many top scientists agree that there is no proof of this new warming cycle being directly linked to any human activity and they point to the solar flares coming off of the sun raising the tempratures on other planets.

And yet it continues....

I firmly believe that this idea of global warming has stuck in the sheeples heads. It reminds them of some kind of bilblical end of times prophescy and global warming scientists couldn't be happier. They raked in an estimated 23.4 BILLION dollars last year with more to come this year.

Why would they want to disprove something so profitable?

Answer 1

As a scientist who is well versed on this issue I find it amazing how different the scientific and non-scientific communities perceive this global warming. There is a dramatic and overwhelming consensus by scientists that anthropogenic CO2 emissions (i.e. human air pollution) are largely responsible for warming that has occurred over the last century and especially over the last several decades. There has not been a single peer reviewed journal article that has been published that has debunked this view, but there have been hundreds that have provided scientific evidence for the human effect. The billions of dollars you cite may have supported research that was well justified based upon the remarkable correlation of historical mean global temperatures and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. The myriad of negative effects from a rapid warming fueled by CO2 emissions has caused the pentagon and many insurance companies to begin to become very concerned with the political instability and economic cost of dealing with this issue in the future. Knowing that dramatic changes have occured in the past simply confirms that our atmosphere is very sensitive, but our earth HAS NEVER experienced such rapid CO2 increases and concommitant temperature increases in the past based upon a wide variety of paleoclimatic evidence. I hope that you will eventually, like GW has done this last week, begin to adress the severe problems that accompany global climate change.

Answer 2

Global warming is not a hoax. There is considerable scientific uncertainty, however, about the ultimate causes of warming and the extent to which human activities are contributing to it. Much of the research that goes into the debate is done by computer simulation modelling of global systems. These models suffer from a number of limitations, such as, they can never truly represent the complexity of those global systems, and they cannot be tested and verified against changing global conditions because those conditions change so slowly. Another drawback is that since the models are created by the scientists using them, they can be designed to say pretty much what the designer wants them to say, should that researcher have some agenda (and this happens on both sides of the debate). Those who believe that human activities are the main and direct cause of global warming (which is happening, that fact is not really in question) have a hard time explaining geologic data which seems to indicate that it has happend in similar fashion in the far distant past, long before humans were around. That would seem to indicate that there are either natural factors involved that are not well understood, and/or that the warming trend that we are seeing is part of a normal, natural cycle of temperature change that includes warming (as now) and cooling (ice ages).

Answer 3

Killer Klingon needs to open a few more books and stop watching ABC,CBS, NBC, and CNN... There are no absolute facts supporting the “theory” that man is responsible for “global warming”, but in the other direction there are the Vostok Antarctic ice core studies that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the earth experiences cyclic periods of warming and cooling accompanied by attending atmospheric Co2 increases and decreases, also coincident with Milankovitch Earth orbit changes on 120,000 year cycles, and we are near a high peak right now. The real fact (proof) would be what percentage of this natural Co2/temp upswing is mans contribution? The new Russian government and their atmospheric scientists say (officially) very little, and don’t think any reduction in mans use of fossil fuel will affect the natural warming cycle.

Answer 4

We are actually heading into an ice age according to cycles of the past thousands of years. Who cares about this moderate warming, when in the next 100 - 200 years most of North America will be covered with ice. Just because we have noticed warming in the past 50 years does not mean factually global warming is true, when there are millions of years with no recorded weather history. We give ourselves way too much importance to think we are the source of the problem.

Answer 5

If the critics arguments were any good, would these people be saying this? They're not dumb or ignorant of the critics arguments.

"The science of global warming is clear. We know enough to act now. We must act now."

James Rogers, CEO of Charlotte-based Duke Energy.

"The overwhelming majority of atmospheric scientists around the world and our own National Academy of Sciences are in essential agreement on the facts of global warming and the significant contribution of human activity to that trend."

Russell E. Train, former environmental official under Presidents Nixon and Ford

"Global warming is already starting, and there's going to be more of it. I think there is still time to deal with global warming, but we need to act soon. Humans now control global climate, for better or worse."

James Hansen, Ph.D. climate scientist, NASA

"By mid-century, millions more poor children around the world are likely to face displacement, malnourishment, disease and even starvation unless all countries take action now to slow global warming."

Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University

"We simply must do everything we can in our power to slow down global warming before it is too late. The science is clear. The global warming debate is over."

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republican, Governor, California

"Our nation has both an obligation and self-interest in facing head-on the serious environmental, economic and national security threat posed by global warming."

John McCain, Republican, Senator, Arizona

"These technologies will help us become better stewards of the environment - and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change."

President George Bush, Republican

I could do a thousand of these. Compare the prestige of these people with that of the critics. The well-funded propaganda campaign to deny global warming is finally running out of gas.

Note that the guy above quotes Warwick Hughes, a "free lance earth scientist". I like my guys credentials better. And most are hardly "liberals".

This article details the strength of the scientific consensus that global warming is real:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

It's 2 years old. The consensus today is even stronger.

Answer 6

The Democratic chairman of a House panel examining the government's response to climate change said Tuesday there is evidence that senior Bush administration officials sought repeatedly "to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming."

Answer 7

Who is "they" that raked in "$23.4 billion" last year? Source?

Perhaps when the concept was introduced, "hoax" would have been an applicable description - but not any longer.
There are simply too many scientists - with no ax to grind - giving serious debate to this subject for it to be a "hoax."

It's a win-win situation if the concern is addressed in a sensible and economically feasible way - if man's contribution is not responsible, we'll end up with a cleaner environment.
If it is and we fail to do anything about it, future generations will suffer the severe consequences.

Answer 8

I think it is all a hoax also. I recently read some info that was pretty neat. I will copy it and my source.....I just thinkl everyone should fully research the subject before believing everything the government and new says.

From: http://www.warwickhughes.com/climate/
"Over a decade the IPCC has published global temperature trends distorted by purely local warmth from Urban Heat Islands (UHI's). These spurious trends have been promoted as “smoking gun” evidence of greenhouse warming. The data were generated by Dr. P.D. Jones and others (1986, 91 & 94), mainly from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia at Norwich in the UK. The CRU and the IPCC claim that our atmosphere has warmed by ~0.6 to 0.8 degrees Celsius since the late 19th Century, and ascribe most of this to an enhanced greenhouse effect.

Ever since the beginning of the greenhouse scare, astute observers have suspected that urban heat was responsible for a large slice of the purported warming. The IPCC has stonewalled, telling policymakers that the urban heat island issue has "...been taken account of." This site proves the contrary. There is simply no systematic compensation for urban warming in the Jones dataset. Occasionally there is a slight adjustment in a record for a site change or other anomaly but the majority of records are used “raw”. This applies even to large cities with large, documented heat islands – e.g. Los Angeles, Chicago, Sydney, Johannesburg etc. etc. In recent years, two independent remote sensing methods – nightlight pictures and infrared heat imaging – have clarified the extent of urban heat islands. Their evidence is incontrovertible. Nightlight images show that the bulk of CRU’s records come from lit areas of the surface. Infrared imaging shows that many are from cities with huge heat islands – enough to raise the annual average temperature by 2-3 degrees Celsius compared to the surrounding countryside.

The problem should have been obvious all along. The UHI was first identified in London 200 years ago, and many studies have shown that it can raise the temperature even in small towns. But political correctness, a desire not to "rock the boat", the corrupting influence of "greenhouse funding" on the science and sheer wishful thinking have made the urban heat island a tabu subject in the greenhouse debate. This site breaks that tabu. It turns the spotlight on individual city records included in the CRU dataset, and also examines the CRU results for various "grid cells" across the globe. It leaves no doubt that the CRU temperature graphs are contaminated with pervasive and substantial urban heat which has nothing to do with greenhouse gases. Satellite images of night lights have been published by NASA and give a good indication of the location of urban areas over the entire earth. Taking the same midwest USA area as the Infra Red image above, this is a small preview of how the Jones / IPCC temperature stations are dominantly located in urban regions.
The IPCC tell policymakers that the urban heat island issue has "...been taken account of.." Sure, we can see that, their data is collected mainly from UHI areas. Follow the Earthlights link for larger images of the USA with Jones stations located. See "City reviews" link at left for UHI contamination in Chicago compared to more rural neighboring stations."

Answer 9

You answered your own question, it is profitable.

As Mark Twain once said, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."

People can take statistics and make them say almost anything, and most people will not check them, or even look close at them they only see the conclusions of what the experts say, experts who are getting grant money to study global warming, so they only say things to make people worry more about it so they can study it more.

Look at the facts! Yes, the temperature in large citys have gone up in the past 100 years (large citys are the only place that kept accurate readings 100 years ago), but the population has also increased, and people mean waste heat! Not just the heat of their bodies, but cooking for them, keeping them cool in the summer, keeping them warm in the winter, transportation, lighting, heck even watching a movie like "An Inconvient Truth" generates heat.

Look at what records exist for rural areas and you will find the most of tempertures have remained steady, or even decrease.

No, you can make statistics say almost anything you want, and people will belive you if you have a pretty graph and some convincing catch phrases.

Answer 10

The real question in my mind is, how can the opposition to global warming persist in the face of such a consensus of opinion in the scientific community?

The more research I do, reading information from both sides of the debate, the more convinced I become that the GW skeptics are just plain wrong. "EricThor" is correct in all that he says.

Anyway, to answer your question about the causes of ice ages, "The consensus is that several factors are important: atmospheric composition (the concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur dioxide,[citation needed] and various other gases and particulates in the atmosphere); changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun known as Milankovitch cycles (and possibly the Sun's orbit around the galaxy); the motion of tectonic plates resulting in changes in the relative location and amount of continental and oceanic crust on the Earth's surface; variations in solar output; the orbital dynamics of the Earth-Moon system; and the impact of relatively large meteorites, and eruptions of supervolcanoes." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age )

However, if you start really looking at temperature graphs, it takes about 5 minutes to see that the climate change we are experiencing since the start of the industrial age and really over the past 40 years, is like nothing that's happened in the last 450,000 years for which I was able to find a good graph. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ice_Age_Temperature.png )

Your statement that many top scientists agree there is no proof is simply ridiculous. First of all, we don't "prove" in science; we only prove in mathematics. In science, we make observations and formulate theories based on those observations. As new data is found, theories may be revised. Nevertheless, in the face of all this uncertainty in what we know, we design and build bridges and send people to the moon and mars.

Secondly, every time I research who these supposed top scientist skeptics are, it turns out that the list was fudged:

The 1992 "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists" is more than a decade old and only has 46 signers.

The Heidelberg Appeal makes no mention at all of climate or climate change, much less global warming.

Most of the signers of the Leipzig Declarations are non-scientists or lack credentials in the specific field of climate research.

Many of the signers of the Oregon Petition are also non-scientists or lack relevant scientific backgrounds.

In April 2006, a group describing itself as "sixty scientists" signed an Open Letter to the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to ask that he revisit the science of global warming and "Open Kyoto to debate". As with the earlier statements, critics pointed out that many of the signatories are non-scientists, or lack relevant scientific backgrounds. For example, the group included David Wojick, a journalist, and Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist. In addition, more than half the signatories cited past or emeritus positions as their main appointments. Only two (Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer) indicated current appointments in a university department or a recognized, research institute related to climate science. One of the signatories has since recanted, stating that his signature was obtained by deception regarding the content of the letter. Richard Lindzen, by the way, has strong ties to the oil industry. They couldn't even find 60 PhDs in Canada to sign the letter; they had to recruit from the US and UK as well.

After the "Open Kyoto to debate" letter, the Prime Minister received a counter letter from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS), a non-profit scientific organization which represents over 800 Canadian atmospheric and oceanic scientists and professionals, which concluded with the statement, "the IPCC assessment
reports truly reflect our current understanding of the complex issue of climate change." (http://www.cmos.ca/LettertoPM20Apr06.pdf )