Now, Walter is a plain ol' conservative. I have no problem with that; conservatives are people too. I wish that there weren't labels like liberal and conservative. However, I've discovered over the years that when the "global warming" hot button is pushed, those labels suddenly take on new meaning. In general:
Conservative on global warming: uninformed and proud of it. Willing to accept any level of nonsensical argument to stay uninformed; not willing to undertake any critical examination.
Liberal on global warming: same thing.
HAHA you say! I thought liberals were informed on global warming! Are they? NO. The general level of scientific illiteracy in this country means that 90% of Americans don't have enough knowledge to understand the basics of this issue, and the more you know, the more likely you are to get confused. The problem is: there are people on both sides of the issue that are trying VERY HARD to keep the confusion level up. The problem with this is that the conservatives who are trying to confuse the issue are generally wrong. The liberals who are trying to confuse the issue are generally right, but they are using the issue for all the wrong reasons.
Al Gore is neither, by the way. Al Gore knows what he's talking about, and he learned it from Roger Revelle, who definitely knew what he was talking about, and furthermore, who was really, really concerned about it, despite what some duncecap-wearing blowhards might say. Link to support this:
Roger Revelle is Solomon's Latest Victim (from Tim Lambert's Deltoid Blog)
I quote, quoting Carolyn Revelle Hufbauer, Roger Revelle's daughter: "Contrary to George Will's "Al Gore's Green Guilt" {op-ed, Sept. 3} Roger Revelle - our father and the "father" of the greenhouse effect - remained deeply concerned about global warming until his death in July 1991. That same year he wrote: "The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time." Will and other critics of Sen. Al Gore have seized these words to suggest that Revelle, who was also Gore's professor and mentor, renounced his belief in global warming.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
When Revelle inveighed against "drastic" action, he was using that adjective in its literal sense - measures that would cost trillions of dollars. Up until his death, he thought that extreme measures were premature. But he continued to recommend immediate prudent steps to mitigate and delay climatic warming. Some of those steps go well beyond anything Gore or other national politicians have yet to advocate."
(Read more at the link.)
Why do I bring this up? Because Walter Williams is the type of secondary pundit that sucks up the swill from the primary sources of global warming propaganda, and spouts it forth unfiltered. To demonstrate this, I know will deconstruct Walter's "Global Warming Rope-A-Dope" piece from Christmas Eve, 2008. Walter deserved a chunk of coal in his stocking for this drivel.
Walter's text is in light blue, and my comments are in orange.
Americans have been rope-a-doped into believing that global warming is going to destroy our planet. Scientists who have been skeptical about manmade global warming have been called traitors or handmaidens of big oil. The Washington Post asserted on May 28, 2006 that there were only "a handful of skeptics" of manmade climate fears. Bill Blakemore on Aug. 30, 2006 said, "After extensive searches, ABC News has found no such (scientific) debate on global warming." U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said it was "criminally irresponsible" to ignore the urgency of global warming. U.N. special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland on May 10, 2007 declared the climate debate "over" and added "it's completely immoral, even, to question" the U.N.'s scientific "consensus." In July 23, 2007, CNN's Miles O'Brien said, "The scientific debate is over." Earlier he said that scientific skeptics of manmade catastrophic global warming "are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually."
The more someone knows about climate, the more they know that climate change = global warming is real. Let's look at a real survey, shall we, Walter?
Examining
the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change
Surely you've heard about this, but if not, here's what happened. They asked two questions:
1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
And here's what they found:
"In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered "risen" to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2."
The global warming scare has provided a field day for politicians and others who wish to control our lives. After all, only the imagination limits the kind of laws and restrictions that can be
written in the name of saving the planet. Recently, more and more scientists are summoning up the courage to speak out and present evidence against the global warming rope-a-dope. Atmospheric scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said, "It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming."
What are scientists, anyway, Walter? Economics is a science (the dismal science, yet, but still a science). Do you think I should consult an economics professor about the details of climate change? Do you think an economics professor has the necessary knowledge to provide an informed opinion about climate change? Nonetheless, we could call an economics professor a "scientist", and thus there might be more than a few practitioners of the science of economics who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming -- particularly if they're politically conservative. And look at this result from the survey!
"The two areas of expertise in the survey with the smallest percentage of participants answering yes to question 2 were economic geology with 47% (48 of 103) and meteorology with 64% (23 of 36)."
(Gee, and we wonder why Heidi Cullen thought that meteorologists should learn more about climate!)
Dr. Goldenberg has the company of at least 650 noted scientists*** documented in the recently released U.S. Senate Minority Report: "More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims: Scientists Continue to Debunk 'Consensus' in 2008." The scientists, not environmental activists, include Ivar Giaever, Nobel Laureate in physics, who said, "I am a skeptic … Global warming has become a new religion." Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an environmental physical chemist, said warming fears are the "worst scientific scandal in the history … When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists." "So far, real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming," said Dr. Jarl R. Ahlbeck, a chemical engineer at Abo Akademi University in Finland, author of 200 scientific publications and former Greenpeace member. Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, said, "Many (scientists) are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined."
*** Noted? How do you define that? Are they "noted" because they are "noted" in the report -- a report in which several of the 650 have noted publically that they totally agree with anthropogenic global warming, and their position has been misrepresented by their inclusion on this infamous/notorious list.
Regarding Mr. Ahlbeck: what type of measurements does he mean? Is he projecting trends into the future, or just complacent about the slightly warmer present? Quotes out of context -- can be twisted any which way.
Regarding Mr. Peden: he has a long op-ed available on the WWW right here: http://www.middlebury.net/op-
It contains a fundamental, frequently-made error (usually by skeptics) regarding how CO2 absorbs infrared radiation in the atmosphere. Here's the answer to why he's wrong:
"If the edges of the absorption bands were completely abrupt, as if CO2 absorbed 600 cycles/cm light completely and 599 cycles/cm light not at all, then once an absorption band from a gas was saturated, that would it. Further increases in the concentration of the gas would have no impact on the radiation energy budget for the earth. CO2, the most saturated of the greenhouse gases, would stop changing climate after it exceeded some concentration. It turns out that this is not how it works. Even though the core of the CO2 band is saturated, the edges of the band are not saturated. When we increase the CO2 concentration, the bite that CO2 takes out of the spectrum doesn't get deeper, but it gets a bit broader."
"The bottom line is that the energy intensity Iout in units of W/m2 goes up proportionally to the log of the CO2 concentration, rather than proportionally to the CO2 concentration itself (we say linear in CO2 concentration). The logarithmic dependence means that you get the same Iout change in W/m2 from any doubling of the CO2 concentration. The radiative effect of going from 10 to 20 µatm pCO2 is the same as going from 100 to 200 µatm, or 1000 to 2000 µatm. "
(Dr. Peden, if you happen to be reading this: go to this link. You actually might learn something useful. The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect And by the way, the atmosphere is a couple miles thick.)
And here's another point of view on the same issue:
A
Saturated Gassy Argument
To address Peden, I'd quote the authors: "So, if a skeptical friend hits you with the "saturation argument" against global warming, here's all you need to say: (a) You'd still get an increase in greenhouse warming even if the atmosphere were saturated, because it's the absorption in the thin upper atmosphere (which is unsaturated) that counts (b) It's not even true that the atmosphere is actually saturated with respect to absorption by CO2, (c) Water vapor doesn't
overwhelm the effects of CO2 because there's little water vapor in the high, cold regions from which infrared escapes, and at the low pressures there water vapor absorption is like a leaky sieve, which would let a lot more radiation through were it not for CO2, and (d) These issues were satisfactorily addressed by physicists 50 years ago, and the necessary physics is included in all climate models."
So Mr. James A. Peden may be a noted scientist on the list of 650, but that sure doesn't mean he's a good one!
The fact of the matter is an increasing amount of climate research suggests a possibility of global cooling. Geologist Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Emeritus Professor at Western Washington University
says, "Recent solar changes suggest that it could be fairly severe, perhaps more like the 1880 to 1915 cool cycle than the more moderate 1945-1977 cool cycle. A more drastic cooling, similar to that during the Dalton and Maunder minimums, could plunge the Earth into another Little Ice Age, but only time will tell if that is likely." Geologist Dr. David Gee, chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress, currently at Uppsala University in Sweden asks, "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?"
I'll answer that, Walter -- a lot longer than three years, and preferably more than a decade. I said three years because according to pretty much everybody's measurements, 2005 was just as warm as 1998, and it didn't have an El Nino event to help, either. So we've been "cooling" since 2005 -- mainly caused by a pretty strong La Nina event.
Furthermore, why is it that even though the warmest year on record was 1998, the next seven (7) are all after the year 2000? Walter, I have a quick question. Do economics professors know anything about statistics?
Now, if it stays cold until 2015, then maybe we could say there's a cooling going on, climatically speaking. Regarding the Sun, the skeptics have been watching the quiet Sun gleefully for the
past year or so. Solar Max is still scheduled for four years from now. I happen to think we'll probably have a nice Solar Max and a globally higher temperature year than 1998 by then. The funny thing is, if that happens, the skeptics will blame it on the Sun. Well, we'll just have to debunk that argument when the time comes.
That's a vital question for Americans to ask. Once laws are written, they are very difficult, if not impossible, to repeal. If a time would ever come when the permafrost returns to northern U.S.,
as far south as New Jersey as it once did, [we'll have to wait about 50,000 years for that, by the way] it's not inconceivable that Congress, caught in the grip of the global warming zealots, would keep all the laws on the books they wrote in the name of fighting global warming. Personally, I would not put it past them to write more.
Well, Walter, that's about it. I'll challenge you, though. Email me when you know the next time you're guesting for Rush. I'll call you. Have them clear the lines so I can get through. I want you
to ask me the top three (five if you have the time) arguments against anthropogenic global warming that you've heard from your skeptical friends. Without the WWW or any other reference, I'll easily refute each of them based on just what I know. Guaranteed. And maybe then you'll stop demonstrating your ignorance about global warming and stick to economics and conservative politics, where you're on much more solid ground.
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