Science/Environment 'Gaia' scientist : I was 'alarmist' about climate change

[medusala]

Refreshing if not a bit late.

http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_new...lock-i-was-alarmist-about-climate-change?lite

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too.

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.
..

As “an independent and a loner,” he said he did not mind saying “All right, I made a mistake.” He claimed a university or government scientist might fear an admission of a mistake would lead to the loss of funding.

 

[Old Skool]

Does this mean it's credible to bring up Hitler to dismiss right wing politics from now ow?

 

[medusala]

Does this mean it's credible to bring up Hitler to dismiss right wing politics from now ow?

Well given he was a socialist one wouldnt thing so.

Nice on topic reply though.

 

[Old Skool]

From a more balanced source:

While warming may not have reached Lovelock's expectations, it is clearly happening. Global temperature data shows the world is heating up.

http://www.livescience.com/19875-gaia-lovelock-climate-change.html

 

[medusala]

From a more balanced source:



http://www.livescience.com/19875-gaia-lovelock-climate-change.html

With a headline of

"'Gaia' Scientist Takes Back Climate Change Predictions"

And to think you lot attempt to call others "deniers".

NB why in that graph are a number of years warmer than 1998?

 

[Old Skool]

With a headline of

"'Gaia' Scientist Takes Back Climate Change Predictions"

And to think you lot attempt to call others "deniers".

NB why in that graph are a number of years warmer than 1998?

What do you mean "you lot"?

I have no fixed position on global warming other than acknowledging the fact that the world appears to be heating up, and the science behind that is solid.

C'mon, admit it. You took the outlier view of an extrimist position and put it on show to garner some type of infantile one upmanship.

So an extremist view was wrong, bravo, take a bow. Are you going to dismiss global warming altogether on this basis?

 

[medusala]

So an extremist view was wrong, bravo, take a bow. Are you going to dismiss global warming altogether on this basis?

The point is he acknowledges alarmism (and I dont recall Al Gore being called an extremist when they handed him a Nobel prize). As for global warming, who dismisses that? Temps have gone up a bit, so what? That in no way means the armageddon scenario based on computer models has any weight.

Also he makes a very interesting point one rarely acknowledged.

"He claimed a university or government scientist might fear an admission of a mistake would lead to the loss of funding."

 

[Fire]

Well given he was a socialist one wouldnt thing so.

Nice on topic reply though.

My god you can disappoint.

Hitler was a socialist lefty? Seriously?

He was a "national Socialist". Pretty much the polar opposite of a socialist. Why would you even try to imply Hitler wasn't to the right?

 

[medusala]

My god you can disappoint.

Hitler was a socialist lefty? Seriously?

He was a "national Socialist". Pretty much the polar opposite of a socialist. Why would you even try to imply Hitler wasn't to the right?

Seriously. National Socialist German Workers' Party.

"I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and penpushers have timidly begun...I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order."

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

This has been done to death on other threads. That fascism is derived from and a variation of socialism is hardly contentious.

The BBC and ABC (and their fellow handclappers in the education movement) have a lot to answer for with their tendency towards historical revisionism.

..

Anyway about this alarmism...

 

[Richo83]

Well given he was a socialist one wouldnt thing so.

Nice on topic reply though.

And I debunked this theory in the conservatism thread as well.

As for this thread, there's a difference between tempering one's views and abandoning support for human based climate change. I would suggest that if you ask this person if he believes that humans have a large impact in shaping climate he would say yes. So this thread is meaningless.

 

[Dan26]

What do you mean "you lot"?

I have no fixed position on global warming other than acknowledging the fact that the world appears to be heating up, and the science behind that is solid.

The science behind it is not solid at all.

The world has been gradually heating on a wide wide scale since the little Ice age of the 1700's, long before humans could have had an impact.

On a smaller scale the world hasn't warmed in a decade, but these shorter term warming and cooling trends tend to take place over 30 years intervals.

See the above graph? See the IPCC prediction? The IPCC used only the small portion of the graph showing the last few years to show that the line would continue to go up and up and up.

But, as you can see, when you look at the last few hundred years, the temperature fluctuates at roughly 30 year intervals.

Were you aware of this? The IPCC is so good at manipulating data like that, that people of the left-wing, who treat global warming as a religion are easily convinced, when instead those people should be looking at the science.

Those of the left let their political view sway what they beleive their opinion "should" be on this purely scientific manner. I'm not like that. I used to be an alarmist. I changed my opinion to suit the evidence.

You should do the same.

So an extremist view was wrong, bravo, take a bow. Are you going to dismiss global warming altogether on this basis?

No one has ever "dismissed" global warming, or climate change. Both have beee happening for 4.5 billion years.

C02 is being put into the atmosphere by humans and the amount of C02 in the atmosphere is bigger than what it has been at any point in human history. FACT

C02 has a warming effect. FACT.

No sceptic would, has or ever would disagree with those two points.

The debate is whether this extra C02 is bad (it's probably actually good), whether the warming is significant or dangerous (there is no empirical evidence that it is either) and if it is dangerous (which it isn't) whether it would be cost effective to do anything about it anyway.

Do your research.

"Ego" and "pride" (and politics for that matter) are not reasons for people to hold onto a plainly incorrect viewpoint.

You said you don't have a fixed position. Do your research and get one.

 

[Parker100]

Well given he was a socialist one wouldnt thing so.

Nice on topic reply though.

Augusto Pinochet.

 

[Monniehawk]

(Hmmmmm..
Tuesday morning was a damned sight colder than the same time last year. Absolute proof!! There can't be global warming. )

See you and raise you one more isolated, irrelevant news piece!

Skeptic finds he now agrees global warming is real

WASHINGTON (AP) — A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.
The study of the world's surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of "Climategate," a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.
Yet he found that the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
He said he went even further back, studying readings from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. His ultimate finding of a warming world, to be presented at a conference Monday, is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have been saying for decades.
What's different, and why everyone from opinion columnists to "The Daily Show" is paying attention is who is behind the study.
One-quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of skeptic groups and the tea party. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large privately held company involved in oil and other industries, producing sizable greenhouse gas emissions.
Muller's research team carefully examined two chief criticisms by skeptics. One is that weather stations are unreliable; the other is that cities, which create heat islands, were skewing the temperature analysis.
"The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago," Muller said in a telephone interview. "And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias."
Muller said that he came into the study "with a proper skepticism," something scientists "should always have. I was somewhat bothered by the fact that there was not enough skepticism" before......

 

[Docker Clint]

Let it happen, let's just keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and polluting the world if people dont think it matters what we do to the planet.

The real effects of the anthropogenic damage to the Earth will kick in long after the deniers have used up their investment portfolio and shuffled off their mortal coils. Let their grandchildren curse them.

 

[medusala]

And I debunked this theory in the conservatism thread as well.

WTF? His words and actions make it clear what he stood for. He hardly stood for the church, monarchy, individualism, property rights etc.

 

[Dan26]

The fact that you fell for this shit Monniehawk, without doing a ten minute google, says something about you. How is it headline material when someone who was never a skeptic pretends to be "converted" by a result that told us something we all knew anyway (o-look the world is warming)?

The points you need to know about this:

1. Muller was never a skeptic
Here he is in 2003:

“carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history.”

And in 2008:
“The bottom line is that there is a consensus and the president needs to know what the IPCC says”.

2. Muller works at Berkely Earth Science Temperature (BEST) and they broke basicrules of statistics. They statistically analyzed smoothed time series! Douglass Keenan quotes the guru’s “you never, ever, for no reason, under no threat, SMOOTH the series! ” (because smoothing injects noise into the data). BEST did, thus invalidating their results.

3. The BEST results were "adjusted" and not the same as the original readings. The BEST team deny thousands of lying thermometers, news articles, reports of snowfalls and frosts in the 1970′s. Is reality better reflected in historical archives of news reports, and original readings, or through adjustments and reanalysis 40 years later? Hmmm.


Muller earned his 5-minutes-of-skeptical-fame by pointing out a few of the glaring errors of the Global Scare team, but all along he still accepted their results. Sure, they cheated, but their conclusions are still right??????? It doesn’t make sense. But this Muller episode was never about the science, but about the theater, the perception, and the news headlines.

 

[Dan26]

The real effects of the anthropogenic damage to the Earth will kick in long after the deniers have used up their investment portfolio and shuffled off their mortal coils. Let their grandchildren curse them.

And you know this because????

I assume you're going to point out to me that one peer reviewed paper that should exist (but doesn't) that shows that human C02 emissions cause dangerous warming....

Get searching. Find this one paper. You have the whole internet at your disposal...

 

[Old Skool]

Dan, do you believe that god has the power to fix this if it existed anyway?

 

[Parker100]

And you know this because????

I assume you're going to point out to me that one peer reviewed paper that should exist (but doesn't) that shows that human C02 emissions cause dangerous warming....

Get searching. Find this one paper. You have the whole internet at your disposal...

Could you show me anything denying climate change that has been peer reviewed by reputable scientists?

 

[Dan26]

Could you show me anything denying climate change that has been peer reviewed by reputable scientists?

No paper denies "climate change." Climate change has been happening for 4.5 billion years.

But I can show you many papers denying the alarmist theory that human C02 emissions cause dangerous warming.

Here are 900 such papers.

http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html

The consensus is now with the sceptics. Not that I would use this consensus to prove we are right. Consensus is not evidence. But it does prove that the debate is not over.

Most sceptical scientists are retired or independent and therefore are away from the government influenceand the funding that comes with it. The funding to find a link between human C02 emissions and dangerous warming. Even though there is no empirical evidence of this link.

 

[Parker100]

No paper denies "cliamte change." Climate change has been happening for 4.5 billions years.

But I can show show you many paperd denying the alarmist theory that human C02 emissions cause dangerosu warming.

Here are 900 such papers.

http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html

The consensus is now with the sceptics. Not that I would use this consensus to prove we are right. Consensus is not evidence. But it does prove that the debate is not over.

Most sceptical scientists are retired or independent and therefore are away from the government influenceand the funding that comes with it. The funding to find a link between human C02 emissions and dangerous warming. Even though there is no empirical evidence of this link.

I tend not to believe anything set out the way of a blogging website.

Give me a source from a governmental, educational or organisational page and you might convince me.

 

[Dan26]

Dan, do you believe that god has the power to fix this if it existed anyway?

I'm an atheist.

 

[Parker100]

I'm an atheist.

I am ashamed to call myself an atheist now.

 

[Dan26]

I tend not to believe anything set out the way of a blogging website.

Give me a source from a governmental, educational or organisational page and you might convince me.

That link I gave you lists all the 900 papers (or a few hundred of them) and you can use that link to click on the actual peer-reviewed papers themselves.

Isn't that what you want? The actual peer-reviewd papers?

 

[sherb]

The real effects of the anthropogenic damage to the Earth will kick in long after the deniers have used up their investment portfolio and shuffled off their mortal coils. Let their grandchildren curse them.

Yeah, it's all about the economic "now" for them.

And they are so convinced they are right that they are happy to risk the state of the planet for future generations. Including their own children and descendants.

Personally, I don't pretend to know what is the truth. I'm actually astonished there are so many keyboard experts on such a complex topic.

But I don't see why we shouldn't err on the side of caution in the event that the scientists are right. Apart from selfish economic reasons of course.