I think the next terrifying trend will be "global climate stagnation."

What actually astounds me about scientists is that it took them basically three times to get it right:

1970's: Global Cooling
1990's: Global Warming
2000's: Global "Change"

My father, tho, was a pioneer in climate science years and years ago when he told me the winters these days were nothing compared to the winters when he was a kid.

I remember being told in the late '70s and early '80s, in no uncertain terms, that an Ice Age was almost upon us.

These clowns claim to predict the climate in the future, yet their models are so bad they can't even take past climate data and "predict" the present situation!

I remember watching a film in middle school about the earth going into another ice age.

I also remember a doom and gloom movie about how the world would be starving by now, and all sorts of awful stuff.

Both films although non fiction at the time, are now apparantly real science fiction.

Just remember: when someone startes using "climate change" instead of "global warming," it means they're starting to figure out how much they got scammed, but aren't ready to admit it yet.

... and Don't forget it was Jimmuh Carter who said the world would be out of oil by the year 2000 and we would all have to wear sweaters so he put one on and showed us the way forward.

Maybe it is big crusading, the kind that seems to happen in the media when a certain party occupies the White House.

A few items for you.

Global Cooling
"This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000."
-- Lowell Ponte "The Cooling", 1976

"If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000...This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age."
-- Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)

World's First Global Thermometer
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,157097,00.html

Global Cooling: Fear the Ice by Bill Walker
http://tinyurl.com/lv2vv

The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.
-- Reid Bryson, "Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man", (1971)

Chris
http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/

It never fails to crack me up that in the vast sweep of history that liberals think nature can be controlled. Except it's not so funny when they implement their programs.

I find this phenomenon really interesting. Why is it that conservatives are convinced global warming is a joke, and liberals are convinced it's real?

How odd! Shouldn't it be a matter of _science_? I mean, if it does happen, it's going to suck just as bad regardless of your politics. So, why is that people's opinion of the science depends on their politics?

Now, I don't personally know jack about it, I'm an economics professor. But, I do have a bunch of friends who are scientists (also profs). They, to a man, are all convinced this is serious business. And they say it's pretty much a consensus in the scientific world. (You can of course always find a skeptic or two about anything.)

I guess I'm inclined to believe them, because I know what smart folks they are. I don't personally know a thing about it; so I have to rely on the judgement of those I trust. I guess maybe that explains it. Prominent conservatives pooh-pooh it, so ordinary conservatives believe it's not so. That still leaves the mystery of why prominent conservatives pooh-pooh it, while most scientists endorse it.

I mean, either they know something that my scientist buddies don't. Or, they just don't trust scientists. Or, they don't care if it happens. Or, they've got a lot of oil money. I wonder which it is.

At any rate, this difference in how people evaluate science based on their politics fascinates me. No matter who is right. What's politics got to do with a scientific phenomenon?

Are the scientists you know without any kind of agenda whatsoever?

DrD,

The problem is that the "smart folks" who put out the most reports keep downgading the actual predictions as their old predictions fall apart, yet keep telling us that the results will be pretty much the same in the long term.

A couple of months of unusual warm weather? "Global warming" caused it. Then, when we had a few months of colder weather, "climate change" was blamed (even though nobody ever got around to predicting it until after a couple of unusual cold winters.)

The predictions haven't been paying off, so they've been having a great time "postdicting" things and telling us hat those events now prove them right...

There's also a lot of people calling themselves climate scientists who, quite frankly, don't know much outside of their very narrow specialty. I was stunned a few years ago when a "climatologist" I was talking to didn't know that insolation isn't a constant (it's a variable, and most of the 1990s climate predictions didn't include current observations, or minimized its effect in their results).

DrD

This is complicated to explain but:

The current global warming hysteria got its start a few years ago with the unveiling of Mann's "hockey stick" that showed global temps as having been as stable as the shaft of a hockey stick is flat, only to swing upwards sharply in the latter part of the 20th century (the blade of the stick)

Far too many of those climate scientists you hold in such high regard accepted the hockey stick without double-checking Mann's work. It took McIntyre, an outsider who wanted to review the data behind the hockey stick to show that Mann's work was riddled with major errors and that climate scientists had not done their work properly in verifying Mann's data.

Climate scientists ridiculed McIntyre and his partner McKitrick for being in the pocket of Big Warming, insisting they M&M weren't qualified to review the research of climate experts.

Now that the hockey stick has been broken, the latest climate reconstructions look a lot less frightening. They show large swings in temperature (a medieval warm period and a little ice age) that have occurred without human intervention. So climate swings happen naturally.

Then a few months ago scientist found that plants emit far more methane than they'd expected. Climate models weren't taking that into account, but still climatologists claim the models were accurate.

Last week, scientists found that the Sun is becoming brighter quickly and is likely to be having a more profound on global temperatures than anything Mankind is doing.

So you see, we conservatives don't have anything against scientists or science (Yay, Science!), but when research is co-opted by anti-capitalist Leftists and anti-american politicians with an axe to grind, we can hardly be expected to go along with the "consensus" without a fight.

P.S. If you want to argue about whether the hockey stick has been repudiated, please don't cite RealClimate.org -- that site is run by Mann. In return I won't cite ClimateAudit.org which is McIntyre's site.

DrD

This is complicated to explain but:

The current global warming hysteria got its start a few years ago with the unveiling of Mann's "hockey stick" that showed global temps as having been as stable as the shaft of a hockey stick is flat, only to swing upwards sharply in the latter part of the 20th century (the blade of the stick)

Far too many of those climate scientists you hold in such high regard accepted the hockey stick without double-checking Mann's work. It took McIntyre, an outsider who wanted to review the data behind the hockey stick to show that Mann's work was riddled with major errors and that climate scientists had not done their work properly in verifying Mann's data.

Climate scientists ridiculed McIntyre and his partner McKitrick for being in the pocket of Big Warming, insisting they M&M weren't qualified to review the research of climate experts.

Now that the hockey stick has been broken, the latest climate reconstructions look a lot less frightening. They show large swings in temperature (a medieval warm period and a little ice age) that have occurred without human intervention. So climate swings happen naturally.

Then a few months ago scientist found that plants emit far more methane than they'd expected. Climate models weren't taking that into account, but still climatologists claim the models were accurate.

Last week, scientists found that the Sun is becoming brighter quickly and is likely to be having a more profound on global temperatures than anything Mankind is doing.

So you see, we conservatives don't have anything against scientists or science (Yay, Science!), but when research is co-opted by anti-capitalist Leftists and anti-american politicians with an axe to grind, we can hardly be expected to go along with the "consensus" without a fight.

P.S. If you want to argue about whether the hockey stick has been repudiated, please don't cite RealClimate.org -- that site is run by Mann. In return I won't cite ClimateAudit.org which is McIntyre's site.

"They, to a man, are all convinced this is serious business. And they say it's pretty much a consensus in the scientific world. (You can of course always find a skeptic or two about anything.)"

People keep forgetting that consensus doesn't mean a damn thing in science - it's all about repeatability. Hello, scientific method, anyone?

There was also a "consensus" once that the Earth was the center of the universe; but for all that it does, of course, still move.

Now, personally, I'll buy that maybe the Earth is getting warmer to some extent; but to think that we alone are responsible for it is just plain silly. I'm even further disinclined to buy that idea given these scientists' track record and the politicization of the issue.

DrD you miss the point-it was the scientists back in the 1970's that were touting the doom and gloom global cooling hypothesis. There was great "consensus" then too that we were heading into another ice age.

Then things got warmer, and the scientists jumped on board the "global warming" hysteria.

Just because some scientist were wrong about the global cooling doesn't mean they are wrong now. We are polluting the air, yeah it could be hurting our atmosphere, but if it is not it is still unhealthy for us humans. Why not make changes to better ourselves and the earth.

"Just because some scientist were wrong about the global cooling doesn't mean they are wrong now."

No, it's the other errors they've been making that means they're wrong now.

The past history is good for poking holes in the cries of "they're experts" from people who don't know how to read critically.

Trust me, "global warming" is a joke. It simply is being overplayed by the media and people like Al Gore. I actually run a weather site called theweatherservice.com . Something called "OLR" is controling our weather. It controls how much heat is let out of the Earth. While we do not know what exactly controls it, it is most like sun acitivity. By the way, I am a demecrat lol.

Weather prediction is unpredictible , hence the lable forecasting !!or guess ? it,s 50/50 from day to day . in other words a filler for air time on network news, everything these days is geered towards the almighty dollar , in other words Global warming is being used to further Big Government.. WORLDWIDE even Or how much will they take before they see the truth......well apparently we have not reached that point yet !

"Why not make changes to better ourselves and the earth."

Did it ever occur to you that alot of those changes to better ourselves are what lead to the pollution?

I wouldn't say weather is unpredictible. Computer models are excellent until about day 4. Then its 50/50 until day 6, when after that it is unpredictible to a point. We use "climate indicies" to predict weather patterns from 1-3 weeks in advance, which can be very accurate sometimes. The reason it isn't always accurate is because there are so many indexes that each time there may be a different combination of indexes and we have to try to figure out what the combination will do to our weather. However, these indexes can not be used to forecast day by day things. Just warmer than normal or colder than normal for a month.

I mean, if it does happen, it's going to suck just as bad regardless of your politics.

Yeah. Those longer growing seasons are just going to be terrible. However will we feed everybody?

...and decades from now, if the ice caps finally get around to melting, the people on the coasts are going to have to move inland a bit. At a rate of about a block a decade.

Of course, some of the neo-climate folks are now saying that generally increased temps might cause more ice to be deposited in the interior of Anarctica (we're already seeing that happen in Greenland), so there's a chance that we might have a lower ocean level. They need a few decades and a couple of hundred million dollars to study it.

That's if the increased global temps don't cause an ice age first, of course...

Then there's the ozone hole, which apparently fixed itself a couple of decades before any of the anti-fluorocarbon measures were supposed to have any effect - it's almost like the ozone levels were fluctuating from a completely different mechanism than the one a handful of folks thought it might have been.

I remember in the early 70's there were all these hysterical predictions about how we were just about to run out of oil, again from scientists; having a science PhD doesn't stop a person from not being able to guess what's going to be discovered tomorrow or next year, and thus not taking those things into account.

There are so many things that scientists don't see...

Hmmmm.

The Right doesn't necessarily think that there isn't any warming going on. It's just that the Left requires such warming to be the result of industrialisation, which has been the evil du jour for the past few decades for those on the Left.

Well. Unless you're a Socialist country then it's a Mark of Progress and the Progress of Marxism.

Just a thought... scientists are basing these figures on how many years of data? And the earth has existed for how long? It seems to me that these predictions are being based on a very limited amount of data. Scientists don't know how these ~100 years of data fit into the millions(?) of years of earth's existance. Seems to me to be irresponsible to make such assumptions with so little data.

kevin, as long as theweatherservice.com doesn't pre-empt Judge Judy we'll get along just fine!

Regarding the "hockey stick"...

At least as far as tree ring studies go - this blog demonstrates you can get the hockey stick using completely random numbers!

"Reconstruction methods from dendroclimatology will generate plausible climate reconstructions even on random numbers!"

It seems they tend to cherry pick their sample data, throw out the data that doesn't fit what you are looking for.

Hell, I can prove to you the earth is flat with that methodology.

"...which can be very accurate sometimes. The reason it isn't always accurate...

If it isn't always accurate, it isn't accurate at all. You don't base accuracy rates only on the times you are right.

A geologist friend once told me that in Earth's history, there has never been Global Climate *Stay the Same* -- it is always either warming or cooling.

Conservative commenters describe anthropogenic global warming sympathisiers or proponents to having a pro statist, anti-big business/fossil fuel bias...I should say the same in spades, to the nay-sayers, who have equally, vested interests, such as Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, the Republican chairman, James 'catatastrophic global warming is a hoax", Inhofe of Oklahoma who receives large election donations from oil, gas and power companies for maintaining 'business as usual'. In the end it will be science that decides who is right. Unless, by that time, 'climate change' has reached an irreversible tipping point that the truth may be so obvious, that it ceases to be a subject for debate.. Unfortunately, as Republican Frank Luntz, cynically advises, Even though,"The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science." and that seems to be the prevailing mood among Conservatives. Anyone looked at the enormous increased hurricane insurance rates this summer? Insurance companies have already decided who is winning the debate.

Well, it seems the predominant view here is that the scientists aren't reliable. Several reasons are given. I'll post my reactions to those, since I can't help but have an opinion myself. But, the larger question still stands. It's not who is right, but why is the question political at all. The policy response is a political issue, but the science shouldn't be. The arguments, and my take on them:

First, scientists have gotten it wrong in the past. Yes, they have. Scientists update beliefs based on new data. If they didn't learn new things, why on earth would we need scientists at all? The whole point is that learning improves over time. The earth is not flat, at least that what the current science says (contrary to the insufferable Tom Friedman).

Second, and a corrolary, is that since scientists make errors we shouldn't place too much stock in what they say now. Well, no, they can't be absolutely sure. But, what in this world can you be sure of? The point is to make the best judgement you can based on the currently available data. Expert judgement is that global warming is in fact a significant risk. Does not knowing for sure mean you should do nothing? That seems a poor principle; no one knew for sure that Katrina was going to hit New Orleans until a few hours beforehand.

Third, scientists are incompetent; see the "hockeystick" issue. Sure, maybe they got the hockeystick wrong, see above. Does that mean that the vast amount of other evidence is wrong? It _might_ be wrong, but if I had to place a bet, it would be with the experts. Perhaps I'm biased because I see non-experts making economic arguments (and policy) all the time that are absolute pure nonsense in my (expert) opinion. So, maybe I'm more likely than average to respect long training in others. However, I imagine people outside of academics have the same instinct. Does the professional carpenter learn much from the do-it-yourselfer? Seldom, I suspect.

Fourth, scientists have a "lefty" agenda. Well, that's my whole point. How did this issue get to be politicized? Yes, they seem to have an opinion on this matter which is now classified as to the left. Well, how did that get to be? The science came first, and then the political label. What I'm wondering about is why one side of the debate became liberal and the other conservative. I mean, couldn't it just as easily have gone the other way on the labels?

Fifth, the _real_ evidence does suggest that global warming isn't a risk. However, the orthodox establishment won't let that work be published. I'm not entirely sure about the hard sciences, but this would not be true in my field. You have a _much_ easier time getting contrarian work published in economics journals if the research is rigorous. Of course, review of the quality might be more stringent for a surprising result. But the result itself is more likely to be published. I do know that at least Science (the top scientific journal) has a similar taste.

Sixth, global warming will be good. Highly unlikely. Someone mentioned longer growing seasons. A recent study in the American Economic Review by Schlenker, et al, demonstrated that previous work suggesting an economic benefit to U.S. agriculture was incorrect. There were two flaws, first an error in statistical technique. Second, neglecting to account for irrigation in the data. So you see, scientific errors go both ways. The best we can do is rely on the totality of the evidence, tempered by the knowledge that some of it may be in error. Best judgement in my field is that the economic costs would be significant here, on the order of 5% of GDP, and much higher in some countries. Best judgement is that the costs of a reasonable carbon mitigation program would run about 1/2 to 1% of GDP. The trick is, we have to make a call now, because if we get enough warming it will likely be irreversible over human timescales (think melting icesheets). So, is there less than the 10-20% chance of global warming which would balance the expected benefits & costs of mitigation? I doubt it.

In the end, I still don't get it. People here have argued many reasons why not to believe that global warming is a risk. What I wonder is why is it conservatives arguing that rather than liberals? The appropriate _response_ to the risk is a political question of course. The _existence_ of the risk should not be.

I have my own opinions about the possibility of global warming. Would I hold different opinions if my politics differed (ex-conservative here)? Quite possibly, and that's troubling. I think it should trouble all of us, from across the political spectrum.

The hurricane cycle was known even before the global cooling concern of the 70's. It's another example of using a phenomenon known to be unrelated to global warming to prove global warming.

I believe global warming is real, but the cause is the sun rather than greenhouse gases. Mounting evidence shows the global climate went through two complete cooling and warming cycles since Roman times. Obviously, these were not caused by human activity. Additional scientific evidence shows that in a warming climate, the biosphere is far better off with increased levels of CO2.

If the sun is driving the Earth's climate, then cycles of warming and cooling will continue apart from our use of fossil fuels. In either case, higher levels of CO2 are beneficial.

Global warming has been happening since the beginning of earth - it's called evolution. How do you think the Great Lakes were formed?... by glaciers. Oh and by the way, NASA scientists have discovered global warming on Mars too. How many SUVs do they drive?