History Forum / General / British History / October 2005

Hilarious!

Gans is now claiming to be an expert CLIMATOLOGIST -- whereas he has NO
credentials in CLIMATOLOGY at all.

Gans is a journeyman physical chemist, self-described, who mostly
teaches lower-classmen [freshmen and sophomores] at the third-rate New
York University.

Gans has NO expertise and NO practical experience in either CLIMATOLOGY
or METEOROLOGY -- yet he is now prattling and bugling on USENET as if he
does.

Hilarious!

D. Spencer Hines

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

Vires et Honor

You know, there is a Great Deal of Truth in what you say below.

I interact regularly with very bright young folks from Ivy League
colleges who are trying to make career decisions.

They tell me that invariably the Best and Brightest among them with a
scientific bent go to a top Medical School and get their M.D.'s --
whereas the ones who are not bright enough to gain admission to a
Medical School have to settle for getting a Ph.D. in Chemistry or
Biology and going into Academia.

By the same token, these stellar young folks tell me that invariably the
Best and Brightest among them with a Liberal Arts bent go to a top Law
School and get their J.D. -- whereas the ones who are not bright enough
to gain admission to a Law School have to settle for getting a Ph.D. in
History, English, Sociology or Political Science and going into
Academia.

Mediocre Academics with Ph.D's often have this LOONY idea they are the
Smartest Folks Among Us -- but it Just Isn't So.

Then they COMPOUND that error by trying to Poach Out Of Field [POOF] --
leading inexorably to Egregious Pratfall.

DSH

"FIVE BEST"

"Green Gray Areas"

"Books that question the conventional wisdom on the environment."

BY MICHAEL CRICHTON
Saturday, October 29, 2005
The Wall Street Journal

1. "Playing God in Yellowstone" by Alston Chase (Atlantic Monthly Press,
1986).

That raw sewage bubbles out of the ground at Yellowstone National
Park -- after more than a century of botched conservation -- would come
as no surprise to Alston Chase, who 20 years ago wrote "Playing God in
Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park."  Mr.
Chase, a former professor of philosophy turned journalist, presents a
clear critique of ever-changing environmental beliefs and the damage
that they have caused the actual environment.  As a philosopher, he is
contemptuous of much conventional wisdom and the muddle-headed attitudes
he calls "California cosmology."

2. "The Culture Cult" by Roger Sandall (Westview, 2001).

In "The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays,"
anthropologist Roger Sandall explores romantic primitivism -- the myth
of Eden and the Noble Savage.  Mr. Sandall's histories of utopian
communities (Robert Owen's New Harmony, John Humphrey Noyes's disastrous
Oneida) are vivid, and his portraits of leading primitivists, from
Rousseau to Mead to Levi-Strauss, are sharply drawn.  This ignorant
nostalgia for our tribal past ignores the truly horrific reality of
tribal initiation, warfare, mutilation and human sacrifice.

3. "Man and the Natural World" by Keith Thomas (Oxford, 1984).

Don't be put off by the academic title of Keith Thomas's "Man in the
Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800."  The book's a
delight.  Mr. Thomas's account is both detailed and charming as he
guides the reader from the Tudor view, that nature was made for man to
exploit, through the later sense that nature was to be worshipped and
cherished (such that trees became pets and aristocrats gave names to
their great estate trees and said good-night to them each evening).
Still later came the Romantic preference for untouched nature and rough
settings, a rarified taste that required "a long course of aesthetic
education."  At every turn, Mr. Thomas emphasizes the contradictions
between belief and behavior.

4. "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjorn Lomborg (Cambridge
University Press, 2002).

No one should miss Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist."
The author, a Danish statistician and former Greenpeace activist, set
out to disprove the views of the late Julian Simon, who claimed that
environmental fears were baseless and that the world was actually
improving.  To Mr. Lomborg's surprise, he found that Simon was mostly
right.  Mr. Lomborg's text is calm and devastating to established dogma.

5. "The Logic of Failure" by Dietrich Dorner (Perseus, 1998).  ******

Future environmentalists will heed Dietrich Dorner's "The Logic of
Failure."  Mr. Dorner is a cognitive psychologist who invited academic
experts to manage the computer simulations of various environments (an
African herding society, a town in Maine).  Most experts made things
worse.

Those managers who did well gathered information before acting, thought
in terms of complex-systems interactions instead of simple linear cause
and effect, reviewed their progress, looked for unanticipated
consequences, and corrected course often.

Those who did badly relied on a fixed theoretical approach, did not
correct course and blamed others when things went wrong.  Mr. Dorner
concludes that our failure to manage complex systems such as the
environment reflects bad habits of thought, overreliance on theory and
lazy procedures.  His book is brief, cheerful and profound."

"Mr. Crichton is author of the novels "State of Fear" and "Jurassic
Park," among many others, and creator of the television series "ER.""
----------------------

DSH

"The New York Times (Aug. 14, 1975) saw "many signs'' that " Earth may
be heading for another ice age.''"  [George Will]

Read it and Weep -- or Laugh. -- DSH

"Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned about "extensive Northern
Hemisphere glaciation.''  "Continued rapid cooling of the Earth''
(Global Ecology, 1971) could herald "a full-blown 10,000 year ice age''
(Science, March 1, 1975).  The Christian Science Monitor reported (Aug.
27, 1974) that Nebraska's armadillos were retreating south from the
cooling."  [GW]

Tres drole.  Those poor Nebraskan ARMADILLOS. -- DSH

"Last week The Washington Post reported that global warming has caused a
decline in Alaska's porcupine caribou herd and has lured the golden
orange prothonotary warbler back from southern wintering grounds to
Richmond, Va., a day earlier for nearly two decades.  Or since global
cooling stopped.  Maybe."  [GW]

"Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law
of Doomsaying'': Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no
sooner than five years away -- soon enough to terrify, but far enough
off that people will forget if you are wrong."  [GW] ******

Hilarious!  The LAW OF DOOMSAYING. -- DSH

"Because Crichton remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions
of his readers will be wholesomely skeptical of today's."  [GW]
-------------------------------------------------

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

"The final happiness of man consists in the contemplation of truth....
This is sought for its own sake, and is directed to no other end beyond
itself."  Saint Thomas Aquinas, [1224/5-1274]  "Summa Contra Gentiles"
[c.1258-1264]

"Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.  Odi profanum vulgus et arceo."

Quintus Aurelius Stultus [33 B.C. - 42 A.D.]

Prosecutio stultitiae est gravis vexatio, executio stultitiae coronat
opus.

D. Spencer Hines

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

Vires et Honor

Are you trying to tell me the Earth is getting warmer, in part, because
the sun is getting hotter -- putting out more heat?

Nonsense!

That's not a Politically Correct explanation.

Find some way to blame George Bush -- and don't forget to hammer on the
point he rejected the Kyoto Protocol, which would have Saved The
World -- and be sure to include some mention of the greedy, capitalistic
petroleum companies and their obscene profits as well as the wicked
SUV's.

Oh, yes, also mention that ALL the **responsible** scientists and
experts agree on this and only Right-Wing, anti-social, psychopathic
loons, with no scientific background, do not.

Scorched Earth...

We Have No Enemies To The Left.

DSH
--------------------------

"The truth about global warming - it's the Sun that's to blame"

By Michael Leidig and Roya Nikkhah
(Filed: 18/07/2004)
The Telegraph

"Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter
because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the
past 1,000 years, according to new research.

A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing
radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.

Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for
Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said:
"The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be
affecting global temperatures.

"The Sun is in a changed state.  It is brighter than it was a few
hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in
the last 100 to 150 years."  ******

Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of "greenhouse
gases", such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the
Earth's temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater
impact.  ******

Average global temperatures have increased by about 0.2 deg Celsius over
the past 20 years and are widely believed to be responsible for new
extremes in weather patterns.  After pressure from environmentalists,
politicians agreed to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, promising to limit
greenhouse gas emissions between 2008 and 2012.  Britain ratified the
protocol in 2002 and said it would cut emissions by 12.5 per cent from
1990 levels.

Globally, 1997, 1998 and 2002 were the hottest years since worldwide
weather records were first collated in 1860.

Most scientists agree that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have
contributed to the warming of the planet in the past few decades but
have questioned whether a brighter Sun is also responsible for rising
temperatures.

To determine the Sun's role in global warming, Dr Solanki's research
team measured magnetic zones on the Sun's surface known as sunspots,
which are believed to intensify the Sun's energy output.

The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years.  They
found that a dearth of sunspots signalled a cold period - which could
last up to 50 years - but that over the past century their numbers had
increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer.  The scientists
also compared data from ice samples collected during an expedition to
Greenland in 1991.  The most recent samples contained the lowest
recorded levels of beryllium 10 for more than 1,000 years.  Beryllium 10
is a particle created by cosmic rays that decreases in the Earth's
atmosphere as the magnetic energy from the Sun increases.  Scientists
can currently trace beryllium 10 levels back 1,150 years.  ******

Dr Solanki does not know what is causing the Sun to burn brighter now or
how long this cycle would last.

He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has
not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that
the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud
cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself.

Dr Bill Burrows, a climatologist and a member of the Royal
Meteorological Society, welcomed Dr Solanki's research.  "While the
established view remains that the sun cannot be responsible for all the
climate changes we have seen in the past 50 years or so, this study is
certainly significant," he said.

"It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit
further research.  Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to
correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are
the major contributor."  ******

Dr David Viner, the senior research scientist at the University of East
Anglia's climatic research unit, said the research showed that the sun
did have an effect on global warming.

He added, however, that the study also showed that over the past 20
years the number of sunspots had remained roughly constant, while the
Earth's temperature had continued to increase.

This suggested that over the past 20 years, human activities such as the
burning of fossil fuels and deforestation had begun to dominate "the
natural factors involved in climate change", he said.

Dr Gareth Jones, a climate researcher at the Met Office, said that Dr
Solanki's findings were inconclusive because the study had not
incorporated other potential climate change factors.

"The Sun's radiance may well have an impact on climate change but it
needs to be looked at in conjunction with other factors such as
greenhouse gases, sulphate aerosols and volcano activity," he said.  The
research adds weight to the views of David Bellamy, the conservationist.

"Global warming - at least the modern nightmare version - is a myth," he
said.  "I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists.  But
what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and
policy-makers are not.  ******

"Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately,
become one of the central credos of the environmental movement: humans
burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide -
the principal so-called greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing
the atmosphere to heat up.  They say this is global warming: I say this
is poppycock.""  ******
--------------------------

D. Spencer Hines

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

Vires et Honor

Bingo!

Pogue Kenneth M. Towe, a Duke graduate, can chime in on this one -- and
Igor Weller, his sidekick and manservant as well.

How Sweet It Is!

Obviously, Pogue Gans, as usual, is Dead Wrong on this one.

The experts DO disagree about the causes and degree of Global Warming.

Only someone who is used to dumbing things down for none-too-bright
college freshmen and sophomores would think otherwise and then trumpet
it on USENET.

DSH
--------------------------

October 19, 2005

"Hotter sun may affect global warming"
by Ashley Dean
The Chronicle of Duke University

"Despite old evidence suggesting that greenhouse gases and pollution
cause global warming, new research by two Duke physicists indicates that
the sun may simply be getting hotter.  ******

Inspired by research from Columbia University indicating that current
data on solar output was erroneous, Nicola Scafetta, research associate
in Duke’s physics department, and Bruce West, adjunct physics
professor, examined solar changes over the past 22 years to determine
the sun’s direct role in global warming.

What they found contradicted previous thoughts and studies regarding
global warming trends.  Since the 1980s scientists have believed that
global warming was not influenced by increased heating from the sun.

“The sun may have minimally contributed about 10 to 30 percent of the
1980 to 2002 global surface warming,” Scafetta and West said in their
report, which was published Sept. 28 in Geophysical Research Letters, an
online research journal. This contribution to global warming is higher
than what researchers previously thought.

Scafetta and West said the 22-year interval they used was longer than
the time studied by most current researchers, which allowed for more
accurate results.

Scafetta and West introduced new statistical methods to test their
hypothesis.  The new methods better described the atmosphere’s delayed
response to solar heating and filtered out temperature-changing effects
from the sun unassociated with global warming, they claimed.

“The actual role of solar variability is very contentious because the
evidence is contentious,” said Thomas Crowley, professor at the
Nicholas School of Environment and Earth Sciences.  “Sometimes you find
lots of evidence and sometimes you don’t.”

Scafetta and West stressed that their findings do not completely
contradict the previous evidence that global warming is caused by carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to human production.  ******

Although these causes do play a role, their research indicates the sun’
s direct role in global warming has been underestimated, Scafetta and
West said.  ******

“If the solar activity increased during the last 25 years, this means
that we cannot neglect the solar activity for evaluating the global
warming phenomenon,” Scafetta added.

Crowley said he does not believe the findings will radically revise the
current thinking on global warming.

“It will require the climate modeling community to look at the way they
configure and estimate the amount of global warming,” he said.

Scafetta and West hope their findings will increase understanding of
what has happened in terms of global warming and solar output during the
last century.

“For now, if our analysis is correct, I think it is important to
correct the climate models so that they include reliable sensitivity to
solar activity,” Scafetta said in the report.  ******

Despite this new research, many unknowns regarding global warming still
exist.

The future of global warming probably depends on natural effects, and
the strength of these effects is unknown, Scafetta noted.

“If I were to make a guess, I think 10, 20, 30 years from now, the
global temperature might still increase, even if the solar activity
would decrease even a little bit,” he said."
---------------------------------------------

D. Spencer Hines

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

Vires et Honor