View Poll Results: Have you seen an Inconvenient Truth
Yes, it was good
10
28.57%
Yes, I didn't like it
3
8.57%
No, but I really should
6
17.14%
No
5
14.29%
I will never ever see it
11
31.43%
Voters: 35. You may not vote on this poll
Have you seen An Inconvenient Truth
05-06-2007, 11:27 AM
#1
Gets Weekends Off
Thread Starter
Joined APC: Dec 2005
Position: FO, looking left
Posts: 1,057
Have you seen An Inconvenient Truth
I know quite a few people have seen it. I have rarely heard someone without an agenda give a negative review. While some of you may be skeptical (it is made by a democrat), I think it is balanced and factual (and I am a republican).
I think everyone should try to see it!
Here is a trailer if you are interested:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...nt+truth&hl=en
It is designed to be dramatic, but I promise you the movie is filled with well presented information.
I think everyone should try to see it!
Here is a trailer if you are interested:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...nt+truth&hl=en
It is designed to be dramatic, but I promise you the movie is filled with well presented information.
Last edited by ryane946; 05-07-2007 at 10:39 AM.
05-06-2007, 01:44 PM
#5
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Jan 2006
Position: Sitting down and facing front. Why would you want to know that?
Posts: 536
Lots of people that I talk to will never see it because of the messenger. I find that to be very closed minded. At least see it and make your own decision about it. Like Ryane946 said, it does have it's faults, but nothing is perfect, and there are some really well maid points in the presentation. It would have been more effective if it was presented by a more "neutral" person, and was without the information on Gore, because more people would see it and they would be more likely to believe what they saw.
I liked it a lot, and would recommend everyone to see once.
I liked it a lot, and would recommend everyone to see once.
05-06-2007, 02:02 PM
#6
With The Resistance
Joined APC: Jan 2006
Position: Burning the Agitprop of the Apparat
Posts: 6,191
Yes, I didn't like it because it played to emotion, was fast and loose with facts, embraced unproven theory and used a former politician as a paid talking head shill.
It is a pity that facts and science are never made valid by popular opinion. They must always stand on their own merit.
This Gentleman might just know a thing or two about the subject:
Prominent climate scientist calls warming fears 'absurd'...
The Faithful Heretic
A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions
Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky enough to love it, and then there’s Reid Bryson. At age 86, he’s still hard at it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.
Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.
Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out from a general—and the general’s apology the next day when he learned they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that’s trained some of the nation’s leading climatologists.
How Little We Know
Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.
“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.
In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.
“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”
“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”
Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”—assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data—helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.
We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it’s second-tier stuff. “Don’t talk about proxies,” he says. “We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It’s all written down.”
Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners’ instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.
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.”
What Leads, What Follows?
What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the “greenhouse effect,” various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.
We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:
Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?
A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?
Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…
A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.
This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”
Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up—or down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.
Renaissance Man, Marathon Man
When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate. We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist, about the significance of Bryson’s work in advancing the science he’s now practiced for six decades.
“His contributions are manifold,” Hopkins said. “He wrote Climates of Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures.”
This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson’s high-school interest in archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology, and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. “He’s looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on human societies,” Hopkins says. “He’s one of those people I would say is a Renaissance person.”
The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson’s work today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being outpaced by an octogenarian.
Without addressing—or being asked—that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as “the father of the science of modern climatology.”
“In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the present state of climatology,” Moran says, adding, “We’re going to see his legacy with us for many generations to come.”
Holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, Moran became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “I came to Wisconsin because he was there,” Moran told us.
With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin’s Weather and Climate, a book aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface for the book but Hopkins told us the editors “couldn’t fathom” certain comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that “Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.”
Clearly what those editors couldn’t fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what might make them—and consequently us—behave differently. This was immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing up for work at a job he’s no longer paid to do.
“It’s fun!” he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.
“I think that’s one of the reasons for his longevity,” Moran says. “He’s so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes people don’t react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but that’s how real science takes place.”—Dave Hoopman
http://www.wecnmagazine.com/2007issues/may/may07.html
It is a pity that facts and science are never made valid by popular opinion. They must always stand on their own merit.
This Gentleman might just know a thing or two about the subject:
Prominent climate scientist calls warming fears 'absurd'...
The Faithful Heretic
A Wisconsin Icon Pursues Tough Questions
Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky enough to love it, and then there’s Reid Bryson. At age 86, he’s still hard at it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.
Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.
Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out from a general—and the general’s apology the next day when he learned they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that’s trained some of the nation’s leading climatologists.
How Little We Know
Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.
“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.
In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.
“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”
“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”
Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”—assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data—helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.
We ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it’s second-tier stuff. “Don’t talk about proxies,” he says. “We have written evidence, eyeball evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there? It’s all written down.”
Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland. The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has existed. But around 1200 the mariners’ instructions changed in a big way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking farmsteads are covered by glaciers.
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.”
What Leads, What Follows?
What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that qualifies. There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even though it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual suspect is the “greenhouse effect,” various atmospheric gases trapping solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.
We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:
Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?
A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?
Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…
A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.
This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”
Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up—or down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.
Renaissance Man, Marathon Man
When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate. We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist, about the significance of Bryson’s work in advancing the science he’s now practiced for six decades.
“His contributions are manifold,” Hopkins said. “He wrote Climates of Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures.”
This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson’s high-school interest in archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology, and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. “He’s looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on human societies,” Hopkins says. “He’s one of those people I would say is a Renaissance person.”
The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson’s work today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being outpaced by an octogenarian.
Without addressing—or being asked—that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as “the father of the science of modern climatology.”
“In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the present state of climatology,” Moran says, adding, “We’re going to see his legacy with us for many generations to come.”
Holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, Moran became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “I came to Wisconsin because he was there,” Moran told us.
With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin’s Weather and Climate, a book aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface for the book but Hopkins told us the editors “couldn’t fathom” certain comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that “Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.”
Clearly what those editors couldn’t fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what might make them—and consequently us—behave differently. This was immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing up for work at a job he’s no longer paid to do.
“It’s fun!” he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.
“I think that’s one of the reasons for his longevity,” Moran says. “He’s so interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes people don’t react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but that’s how real science takes place.”—Dave Hoopman
http://www.wecnmagazine.com/2007issues/may/may07.html
Last edited by jungle; 05-06-2007 at 02:15 PM.
05-07-2007, 03:35 AM
#7
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Jul 2005
Posts: 2,242
Global warming is an Al Queda plot to distract us from the task at hand: securing Iraq and making it an even more viable democracy / society than it is now, and preparing for the invasion and occupation of Iran.
Lets keep our eye on whats important maintaining our standing in the world as the most beloved country ever created.
-LAFF
Lets keep our eye on whats important maintaining our standing in the world as the most beloved country ever created.
-LAFF
05-07-2007, 08:09 AM
#8
Prime Minister/Moderator
Joined APC: Jan 2006
Position: Engines Turn Or People Swim
Posts: 39,261
I was extremely skeptical of global warming for years due to lack or reasonable scientific data (homegrown studies by pot-smoking liberal fanatics who have been rejected by their own academic communities don't count).
But in the last couple years, real and apparently valid data has come out, based on accepted scientific principles. I'm now a believer, although the magnitude of the problem is likely exagerated due to a routine short-term warming cycle.
But in the last couple years, real and apparently valid data has come out, based on accepted scientific principles. I'm now a believer, although the magnitude of the problem is likely exagerated due to a routine short-term warming cycle.
05-07-2007, 08:21 AM
#9
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Jul 2005
Position: EMB 170/175 F.O.
Posts: 549
Originally Posted by LAfrequentflyer
Global warming is an Al Queda plot to distract us from the task at hand: securing Iraq and making it an even more viable democracy / society than it is now, and preparing for the invasion and occupation of Iran.
Lets keep our eye on whats important maintaining our standing in the world as the most beloved country ever created.
-LAFF
Lets keep our eye on whats important maintaining our standing in the world as the most beloved country ever created.
-LAFF
Somebody please shoot me now. You cannot possibly believe this can you?
05-07-2007, 08:28 AM
#10
Moderator
Joined APC: May 2006
Position: ATP, CFI etc.
Posts: 6,056
CO2 reduction
Since I took this desk job I gained ten pounds. When winter broke a few weeks back I started riding a bicycle to work, 6 miles each way. I have already lost some weight and I am saving 3 gallons of gas a week.
I am just one rider but if say, 20% of the other factory-office types in this country were to ride a bike to work half the year imagine the gas it would be save and ozone destruction it would prevent. And it would also promote better fitness and reduce congestion on the roads. It's a bit too wet and cold to do in the winter around here, but most of the year you can do it.
Most people think they are going to get hit by car, and that is true, which is why I have this super-bright tail light stuck on my bike. I have been biking as a commuter for years. It's like having an exercise ride before and after work at little cost to your schedule. You feel great at work, do not have to go to the gym, and you look forward to the commute. Of course on wet days you still get in your car and burn gas like crazy. I am not a pot smoking liberal but I like being fit and saving some gas money.
I am just one rider but if say, 20% of the other factory-office types in this country were to ride a bike to work half the year imagine the gas it would be save and ozone destruction it would prevent. And it would also promote better fitness and reduce congestion on the roads. It's a bit too wet and cold to do in the winter around here, but most of the year you can do it.
Most people think they are going to get hit by car, and that is true, which is why I have this super-bright tail light stuck on my bike. I have been biking as a commuter for years. It's like having an exercise ride before and after work at little cost to your schedule. You feel great at work, do not have to go to the gym, and you look forward to the commute. Of course on wet days you still get in your car and burn gas like crazy. I am not a pot smoking liberal but I like being fit and saving some gas money.
Last edited by Cubdriver; 05-07-2007 at 08:59 AM.
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