The Faithful Heritic:

[Reid] Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”

We recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice, seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson interrupts excitedly.

“A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.”

This started as a comment on Mark's blog regarding the suitabilty of An Inconvenient Truth as classroom material. If you'd like to followup or comment on this post, please go there (be polite or I won't invite you to post on Mark's blog again!)

I believe the "Chicken Little" is an apt phrase to use because it _is_ folk wisdom. Consider: Global Warming, Global Cooling/Ice Age, The Energy Crisis, Y2K, Everyone to get cancer by 50 due to "toxins", Peak Oil, Global Famine by the 1980s, Critical Resource Shortages by the 1980s and so forth. That's not to say that there aren't global crisii; for example, there's WWII, just that there's a lot more predictions of disasters than actual disasters. However, fairly predictably every 5 years or so there will be a prediction of disaster and a call for action. Also predictably, the solution will always be along the same lines: power and choice must be stripped from the citizen and invested in a small class wise men who will make wise choices to steer humanity through the shoals.

But let's talk about AGW, i.e. Anthropogenic -- human caused -- Global Warming. I think I can fairly non controversially describe this as follows (in broad strokes):

1. Humanity is pulling a lever (i.e. primarily C02 emissions) that is predictably making the climate hotter and/or more unstable
2. If we stop pulling that level, the climate will predictably improve
3. The present value of the costs of AGW (- the benefits) is greater than the PV of stopping pulling the lever

There's two aspects that we can examine AGW and the case for doing something about it: either through modeling or though the historical record.

The climate is an unstable chaotic system, with a rough ice-age to ice-age periodicity of about 10,000 years. Our knowledge of how the atmosphere (and the ocean) works is _very_ incomplete; our present knowledge of the _state_ of the atmosphere and ocean is likewise incredibly crappy: we simply don't measure that many data points. Our knowledge of their _past_ state is even more spotty and goes back at most a century. Then add in other factors such as extraterrestrial effects such as solar energy and the effects of radiation and solar energy output (and composition) and where do we end up? AGW proponents claim a model that can predict the climate to within a few tenths of a degree over the course of a century? Sorry, models of chaotic systems with poor data inputs and incomplete system knowledge _do not_ have this sort of predictive power.

So then we look at the historical record. Now, one expects that when one is making the claim that significantly restructuring is needed in our economy/society (see point #3 above, the PV(future expenses - future benefits) > PV(restructuring costs)) one would expect the people making the claims would put their best foot forward. What do we get? The hockey stick is wrong, and almost certainly fraudulent; polar bears aren't drowning, they're at near peak populations; various glaciers being pointed to melted long before atmospheric CO2 attributable to humans was significant; and so forth. I've documented much of this on my blog over the last 5 years. (This looks good too, though I haven't gone through it in depth).

So what's after that. Lomberg gets physically attacked while giving presentations, ad-homenim attacks are considered debate, people like me are compare to Nazis (the point of the phrase "GW denier"), Nuremberg trials are proposed. Is this science? Truth?   No, it's the voice of goons.

I'm one of these weirdos that believes that science is understandable and access able to all, and furthermore, that science isn't about Truth but about methodology. When I'm told to lie back and think of England, excuse me, lie back and accept without question what selected scientists are saying, I know I'm in the realm of politics, not science and certainly not Truth.

Mike has a lengthy post about Al Gore and Global Warming. Of particular interest is this paragraph:

We learned this lesson again the hard way in the US when we were warned that the levees were about to break in New Orleans because of Hurricane Katrina and those warnings were ignored. Later, a bipartisan group of members of Congress, chaired by Representative Tom Davis, a Republican from Virginia, said in an official report: "The White House failed to act on the massive amounts of information at its disposal."

This bipartisan group added that a "blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision-making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina's horror".

Actually, the White House was warned that the levees were going to overtop, not break. This is the difference between putting too much water in the bathtub (a few wet towels) and having the bottom falling out of it (tens of thousands of dollars of damage); a person incapable of grasping the difference should probably refrain from lecturing the world on scientific consensus. Like the the melting glaciers of Kilimanjaro (which attempts to pin on C02 an effect that was happening long before), drowning polar bears, melting glaciers and so forth, note the bait and switch to try to sell the unsellable. If there was a strong, or even defensible, case for AGW there'd be no for Gore and his flock of AGW Hysterics to do this.

"Vindication for skeptics":

One of the most decorated French geophysicists has converted from a believer in manmade catastrophic global warming to a climate skeptic. This latest defector from the global warming camp caps a year in which numerous scientific studies have bolstered the claims of climate skeptics. Scientific studies that debunk the dire predictions of human-caused global warming have continued to accumulate and many believe the new science is shattering the media-promoted scientific “consensus” on climate alarmism.

Claude Allegre, a former government official and an active member of France’s Socialist Party, wrote an editorial on September 21, 2006 in the French newspaper L'Express titled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (For English Translation, click here) detailing his newfound skepticism about manmade global warming. See here Allegre wrote that the “cause of climate change remains unknown” and pointed out that Kilimanjaro is not losing snow due to global warming, but to local land use and precipitation changes. Allegre also pointed out that studies show that Antarctic snowfall rate has been stable over the past 30 years and the continent is actually gaining ice.

Kilimanjaro, rising ocean levels, drowning polar bears, disappearing glaciers, and so forth -- if these are the best pieces of evidence being put forward for AGW, why don't they actually support the case?

The Australian reports (via Greenie Watch):

GREENLAND'S glaciers have been shrinking for the past century, according to a Danish study published today, suggesting that the ice melt is not a recent phenomenon caused by global warming.

Danish researchers from Aarhus University studied glaciers on Disko island, in western Greenland in the Atlantic, from the end of the 19th century until the present day.

"This study, which covers 247 of 350 glaciers on Disko, is the most comprehensive ever conducted on the movements of Greenland's glaciers," glaciologist Jacob Clement Yde, who carried out the study with Niels Tvis Knudsen, said.

Using maps from the 19th century and current satellite observations, the scientists were able to conclude that "70 per cent of the glaciers have been shrinking regularly since the end of the 1880s at a rate of around eight metres per year," Mr Yde said.

For you AGW-types, there's this bone tossed:

The shrinking of the glaciers since the 19th century is "the result of the atmosphere's natural warming, following volcanic eruptions for example and greenhouse gases, created by human activities, which have aggravated the situation further," he said.

I assume the phrase "they surmise" is missing there somewhere, as correlation is not causation and one would think they had their hands full already measuring and researching.

I'd like to congratulate the National Post on their fantastic "parody issue", published today (2002.08.26). Here's a few of the sure-to-be-classics:

• A half page set of pictures, courtesy of Greenpeace, of the melting "Blomstrandbreen" glacier in Svalbard, Norway. Greenpeace claims this is due to something called "global warming" and claims most of this melting happened in the last 40 years. There's only one problem -- it's absolute BS. From the Daily Telegraph: But Prof Ole Humlum, a leading glaciologist in Svalbard, 500 miles north of Norway, said yesterday: "That glacier had already disappeared in the early 1920s as a result of a perfectly natural rise in temperature that had nothing to do with man-made global warming".
• In this article, putting "scare quotes" around the word "progress", turning what was supposedly a news article into an editorial. You can tell it's pure humor though, as the staff didn't put their names to the article, and they used Reuters as a news source. Brilliant!
• In the same article, cleverly phrasing a paragraph to put words in the mouth of George Bush. Implying that Bush said he'd rather go to his ranch on vacation that go the Earth Summit is pure Toronto Star! Here's the paragraph: The summit lost much of its gusto when the most powerful man on the planet, George W. Bush, the U.S. President, announced he would skip the event, preferring to continue his August vacation at his Texas ranch. I've been googling around and can't find any quote even vaguely matching this statement.

Once again, great work! You almost had us all fooled.

Two comments:

• Weather's what you get, climate's what you expect
• Climate changes

Links within the quote above were added my me. Originally spotted in .