Great Global Warming Swindle

[rounder]

GLOBAL WARMING is a corporate and political farce. if you want truth then watch this - http://youtube.com/watch?v=P6Wr1hcIp2U

[ovyyus]

"The Great Global Warming Swindle" documentary is a swindle...

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/clima ... 72,00.html

Don't let truth stand in the way of a red-hot debunking of climate change


The science might be bunkum, the research discredited. But all that counts for Channel 4 is generating controversy

George Monbiot
Tuesday March 13, 2007
The Guardian


Were it not for dissent, science, like politics, would have stayed in the dark ages. All the great heroes of the discipline - Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein - took tremendous risks in confronting mainstream opinion. Today's crank has often proved to be tomorrow's visionary.
But the syllogism does not apply. Being a crank does not automatically make you a visionary. There is little prospect, for example, that Dr Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang, the South African health minister who has claimed Aids can be treated with garlic, lemon and beetroot, will be hailed as a genius. But the point is often confused. Professor David Bellamy, for example, while making the incorrect claim that wind farms do not have "any measurable effect" on total emissions of carbon dioxide, has compared himself to Galileo.

The problem with The Great Global Warming Swindle, which caused a sensation when it was broadcast on Channel 4 last week, is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Just as the government launches its climate change bill and Gordon Brown and David Cameron start jostling to establish their green credentials, thousands have been misled into believing there is no problem to address.
The film's main contention is that the current increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the sun. It is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on Earth are in "strikingly good agreement" with the length of the cycle of sunspots.

Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the "agreement" was the result of "incorrect handling of the physical data". The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, Friis-Christensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results. But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes - in this case in their arithmetic.

So Friis-Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating that the sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the sun and global cloud cover. This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming. But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data which did not in fact measure global cloud cover. A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that, when the right data are used, a correlation is not found.

So the hypothesis changed again. Without acknowledging that his previous paper was wrong, Friis-Christensen's co-author, Henrik Svensmark, declared there was a correlation - not with total cloud cover but with "low cloud cover". This, too, turned out to be incorrect. Then, last year, Svensmark published a paper purporting to show cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere. Accompanying the paper was a press release which went way beyond the findings reported in the paper, claiming it showed that both past and current climate events are the result of cosmic rays.

As Dr Gavin Schmidt of Nasa has shown on www.realclimate.org five missing steps would have to be taken to justify the wild claims in the press release. "We've often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work," Schmidt says, "but this example is by far the most blatant extrapolation beyond reasonableness that we have seen." None of this seems to have troubled the programme makers, who report the cosmic ray theory as if it trounces all competing explanations.

The film also maintains that manmade global warming is disproved by conflicting temperature data. Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he discovered between temperatures at the Earth's surface and temperatures in the troposphere (or lower atmosphere). But the programme fails to mention that in 2005 his data were proved wrong, by three papers in Science magazine.

Christy himself admitted last year that he was mistaken. He was one of the authors of a paper which states the opposite of what he says in the film. "Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected."

Until recently, when found to be wrong, scientists went back to their labs to start again. Now, emboldened by the denial industry, some of them, like the film-makers, shriek "censorship!". This is the best example of manufactured victimhood I have come across. If you demonstrate someone is wrong, you are now deemed to be silencing him.

But there is one scientist in the film whose work has not been debunked: the oceanographer Carl Wunsch. He appears to support the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for rising global temperatures. Wunsch says he was "completely misrepresented" by the programme, and "totally misled" by the people who made it.

This is a familiar story to those who have followed the career of the director Martin Durkin. In 1998, the Independent Television Commission found that, when making a similar series, he had "misled" his interviewees about "the content and purpose of the programmes". Their views had been "distorted through selective editing". Channel 4 had to make a prime-time apology.

Cherry-pick your results, choose work which is already discredited, and anything and everything becomes true. The twin towers were brought down by controlled explosions; MMR injections cause autism; homeopathy works; black people are less intelligent than white people; species came about through intelligent design. You can find lines of evidence which appear to support all these contentions, and, in most cases, professors who will speak up in their favour. But this does not mean that any of them are correct. You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of contradictory data. To form a balanced, scientific view, you have to consider all the evidence, on both sides of the question.

But for the film's commissioners, all that counts is the sensation. Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail. It keeps commissioning people whose claims have been discredited - such as Durkin. But its failure to understand the scientific process just makes the job of whipping up a storm that much easier. The less true a programme is, the greater the controversy.

[rounder]

I would not say that all the conclusions in the movie where accurate. but i would say that the political use of global warming to sideline undeveloped poorer country's that to date have no electrical grid or running water or sanitation or a mean to refrigerate food, are getting the coldest shoulder of all from the rest of the developed world. who are pushing measures apon them not to produce green house gases leaving them in the dark. and the developed world just keeps on doing what they have always done. looks like a hijacking of the moral good will to me.

[Vic Hays]

I don't think that CO2 reduction is going to occur nor do I think that it is the worst form of pollution that we are putting into the ecosystem.

With 6 billion plus people upon the earth it is probably well past its carrying capacity already.

The rebuttal paper missed commenting upon the CO2 lagging behind temperature change. This correlation is about the only substantial evidence offered by the global warming people.

There is no ecological balance. Things change. Sometimes it is for the worst.

The best thing that we could do is find a source of pollution free energy. Build those wheels.

[winkle]

either that or keep our head in the sand until our butt melts

i'm starting a new prize

find the answer to either Bessler wheel or global warming and win the

winkle prize of a free can of pork an beans

that ought to get things moving

[docfeelsgood]

WINKLE; the answer for global warming is very simple . everyone in the world must plant a tree to absorb the co2. then turn back total world population to what it was in 1700 . i propose having mandatory castration clinics, starting with politicans . yep,, thats right, if ya wanna be a politician ya gotta get the chop !!! nope,,, dont wanna perpetuate that speceis . then chop anyone else who is not a firm believer in johann bessler . so now you know what to do , grab yer burdizzo clamps , have at it. send the beans to Scott for hosting the forum . " Doc"

[rounder]

I went up north last summer with about 60 people and we planted over 3 million trees in under 2 weeks. but they are going to take about 50 years to reach maturity, and once they are that big they all will be clearcut once again.

[winkle]

thats about 3500 trees for each person per day
for a 8 hr day that would be about 7 trees a minute with no breaks
maybe it just seamed like three million

[rounder]

Most people put in 12 or more hours a day and some are lifers . most people put it 3000 to 4000 trees a day. you can make anywheres from 6 cents to 25 cents a tree depending on the trench and the quality of the land your planting helilift planting price range differs also. some people are making 1000 a day clear after camp costs. but most people make about 400 a day. it's one of the hardest jobs out there tho, i think they compare it to training for the Olympics. You will lose weight very fast and you must bring at least 10 liters of water with you every day. the sun in unrelenting because there is no shade in a clearcut forest and your pretty much out on your own in the middle of nowhere carrying around 400 trees on you waist and shoulders. It is not a job that most people can hack and lots of newbies quit on the first day. it is summer work. and good money if you can handle living in tent. rain or shine everyone plants. 3 million might seem like a lot but that was just one contract for one area.

[winkle]

i don't quite get how people make a living growing trees on their land
one pay day every 60 years might not work very well for me

[rounder]

well its not private land its the crowns land up here,and they only stop planting trees if they stop cutting down trees, and we both know that will never happen.

[winkle]

yes but in this country there are private land owners that grow trees

[rlortie]

Just happen to have a couple of tree planting tools. Heavy wedges with a "T'd" pipe handle. There is an extension on the wedge one side for your foot. If kept sharp they also make good root cutters for stump removal.

I do not know about 7 trees per minute but I could easily handle 4 to 5 in that time. Pretty easy actually, Doubt if I could make it for a twelve hour shift Though.

In this part of the country, its Fir, Pine and Hybrid Popular. They are only about six inches tall so it does not take much of a hole to plant them.

Ralph

[winkle]

Popular would be a quicker payday than Fir or Pine but still a long time between paydays

[rounder]

Birch trees were all discarded and left behind and some the loggers didn't even cut them down. they would just leave one tree standing in the middle of nowhere. so when it gets windy out and your planting they'll make you put on safety helmets so the tall trees will nail you into the ground,instead of killing you, ''when the fall''. they like to log pine up here so thats what we plant. i think if a private land owner is growing trees they may be growing Christmas trees.