Great. I fly my jet as little as possible, use as little fuel and electricity as I can and insulated my house, but what about the fat gal's feelings? Can we alter the volatility she speaks of?
Is it possible that all normal people conserve as a way of life even if they don't construct a windmill in their back yard? Isn't it good to have options? Or could it be that some of us just aren't sensitive enough to feel the volatility?

 

250 or .65:

Your crash metaphor is exactly on target--logically and in any practical sense. On science and meteorology websites there is a saying that "weather is not climate".

The problem is that this rule seems to work in only one direction. Record cold? That's the weather. Record heat? Global warming.

I'll give you an example. Last winter, in late Jan there was an exceptionally cold airmass over the northern US. A weather station showed the lowest temp EVER recorded (any day, any year) in the state of IL. This record was disallowed by NOAA because it was recorded by an ASOS. This spring, or early this summer, records were set in Honlulu for high temperatures. These records were crowed about in the local media as evidence of global warming. Of course you've already guessed that they were recorded by an ASOS. I will provide you links to these items should you be interested in reading for yourself.

As to the statement that "the science is settled". I was trying to be ironic by pointing out the ridiculousness of the concept of settled science. Physicists can make observations about electron energy states and confirm Planck's constant to 34 decimal places, yet Quantum Theory remains "just" a theory. Climate modelers fill a computer program with their own assumptions, jimmy it so that it agrees with what has already happened, then let it run and state with a straight face that the predictions of the computer program are somehow incontestable.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to reduce carbon emissions, we have been doing it for centuries. Think about it--up til 500 years ago in the west (and some places today) wood was the primary source of energy. This is the most carbon intensive choice available. Then the transition to coal, and to natural gas each having less carbon/hydrogen than the other. We have been transitioning from a carbon energy economy for a long time without the supervision of governmnet. It will happen as efficiently as our economy can do it.

There is nothing wrong with alternate energy sources except that they are not efficient enough to use, for now. Subsizing windmills, batteries, and solar power now retards their development into more efficient forms in the future.

One other thing. In the original post, I put the comments by the big girl up to demonstrate how biased the reporting is on this stuff. Imagine a different woman from the other end of the political spectrum (say the former GOV of AK) spouting some bilge about how her flights were smoother now that global warming had subsided. I think that would be 24/7 news coverage for a week.

WW

 

Forgive me for missing irony. However, once again, I did not say anything about global warming happening, the need for government involvement, or that we should all stop driving cars, live in tents, and hug trees.

 

Not a problem. I didn't think anything you said was over the top--you made some reasonable statements about responsible environmental stewardship.

I think if you asked, you'd find that the skeptics are not for more pollution. We are not "in the pockets" of big oil. And we are not looking to cull the human heard with mercury, asbestos, and carbon emissons. We are for a prosperous and healthy future, we just don't think giving over our liberty and money to bureaucrats, commisars, and the scientists on their payrolls is the way to get there.

WW

 

I for one don't think that wind power is "green". They are an eyesore and they do kill a lot of birds (I could care less). Ironically, they are now being linked to depression and other ailments because they interfer with your sleep due to low frequency resonance that are produced.

We need to enforce geothermal energy techonologies something you rarely hear anything about) and build more nuclear power plants. We need to combine power / manufacturing facilities. For example, the heat generated by a nuclear power plant could then be used in an onsite manufacturing plant. No longer would the heat be allowed to escape into the atmosphere and a separate manufactuing plant generate its own heat.

 

Usually in any highschool or college level statistics class they do something called Statistical Hypothesis Testing... it basically takes a claim based off of a sample from a population and either supports the claim (to generalize the whole population) or not based on a mathematical look at confidence values, etc. In this type of test, nothing is proven or disproven rather it's supported or not supported.....

I'd be curious to see this test applied to "global warming" with such a sample as the decade's worth of local temperatures, since this sample size is so incredibly small compared to the population of global temperatures for a significant length of time- statistics would probably not support any claim of any significant difference. The "science" behind global warming is subjective at best.

Manipulating statistics has been an art of politicians and otherwise power/money hungry groups. If you take a given sample and out of that sample draw conclusions - then of course their computer climate model stuff makes sense. Put this is broad terms, and realize that their magic numbers come from certain sample sizes that may or may not reflect the population, well now....that changes the objectivity a little.

 

Another thing taught in basic statistics is the concept of outliers.

A month, or even a decade, of data is a fart in the wind in climatalogical time. Since we are at the tail end of an ice age, it stands to reason that things are gradually getting warmer. There is no debate there. Ice core data going back hundreds of thousands of years is enough to convince me. It shows many cycles of temperature swings and very accurate readings on greenhouse gas levels. The only debate in my mind is if man is accelerating the process. An earlier poster implied that carbon emission levels have gone down, not up, in the past few centuries. I find that hard to believe, since there are now over 6 billion people on the planet and God knows how many cattle, whose breath and emissions alone must far outstrip the wood burning activities of the population a few centuries ago.

I get the irony of the original post, but you can safely assume that kooks, political wack jobs, and corporate interests will distort things, as always.

 

I think you meant me. I didn't mean to imply that carbon emissions (hereafter referred to as plant food) had gone down but, as the economies have advanced the per capita plant food emissions have gone down. As the economy becomes more complex, and the citizens more prosperous, the natural tendancy has been toward more efficient fuel. This happens without the government intervening.

I believe that if the gov't was minimally involved you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a nuke plant (with zero plant food emissions) and energy would much cheaper than it is today.

 

Too bad anytime you try to convince someone of this, they look at you like you're some right-wing nutjob... Trust me, it happens all the time to me. Sometimes I hate that people are sheep... Oh wait, I hate it ALL the time

 

Hi!

You are right, the science IS settled. But there are many, especially in the US, who doubt that we have created Global Warming, or even that there is Global Warming.

There will always be doubters, and they can join the Flat Earth Society or one of the groups who said we did not land men on the moon.

Regardless of what anyone says, or what evidence there is, if you don't believe something, then to you it is false.

God bless!

cliff
NBO
PS-God created the process of evolution, which Darwin tried to describe. I have recently discovered new evidence that, in many ways, Darwin was wrong, and I have changed my belief based on this new evidence. Darwin's idea that there is evolution is correct, but a lot of the specific details he was VERY wrong, because science was not advanced enough in his time for him to be able to understand the process better. Lamarck was right, in some ways, and evolution does NOT occur by random chance. Evolution is God's design for creating the universe.