Google Insights for Search on al gore, global warming, climate change

Google Insights for Search (GIS) is Google's latest functionette on offer. It is fascinating, but not all it could be. More like a tease.

GIS provides a graphical output for up to five search terms. Numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don't represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100; each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100.

So away I went, plugging in two terms, global warming; and climate change for parameters, worldwide, and for all recorded time (2004 - present).

Interesting graph (I also chucked in Al Gore). GIS also scales countries of the world. Here's the top ten countries sorted on global warming.

Top regions for global warming
Region	al gore	global warming	climate change
Indonesia	19	100	25
Philippines	41	77	29
India	18	76	27
South Africa	37	69	43
Australia	47	54	80
United States	100	51	19
New Zealand	38	49	56
Singapore	36	43	29
Canada	63	42	37
Kenya	0	39	100

Still, it's a cool tool.

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2007 — when global warming finally cut through

clipped from www.desmogblog.com Hark, The Herald (And Lots of Other Papers) Finally Sing About The Climate 24 Dec 07 Big wake-up to global warming To illustrate, the Philadelphia Inquirer tracked the number of times the term "global warming" was mentioned in their paper over the years. In 2007 "global warming" was mentioned over 400 times, more than double any previous year. An attitude shift as inexorable as global warming itself this year brought world groups together to debate risks. "This was the year that global warming hit the mass radar screen, driven by a drumbeat of catastrophic predictions from top scientists, a jaw-dropping acceleration in polar ice melt..."

Global warming survival guide

Just in Time.

clipped from www.time.com The Global Warming Survival Guide GLOBAL WARMING 51 Things We Can Do to Save the Environment Can one person slow global warming? Actually, yes. You—along with scientists, businesses and governments—can create paths to cut carbon emissions. Here is our guide to some of the planet's best ideas. Enter the Time Magazine Survival Guide More Stories Graphic: Effects of Climate Change by 2020 A forecast of how climate changes will impact the environment and society by mid century. Graphic: The Earth Friendly Home Are you wasting energy? There are ways you can alter your lifestyle to reduce your carbon footprint, the measure of carbon you produce What Now? On the Front Lines Of Climate Change By Mark Hertsgaard Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Bookmark this page and tell your everyone you care for about it.

Where have all the global warming denialists gone?

Now that Rupert Murdoch drives a hybrid and has announced an intention that News Corp. become carbon neutral within three years, strange, strange things are happening on Fox:



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What Is Denialism?

Five general tactics are used by denialists and the modern-breed of global warming skeptics to sow confusion. They are:

1. conspiracy;
2. selectivity or cherry-picking;
3. fake experts;
4. impossible expectations or moving goalposts; and,
5. general fallacies of logic.

clipped from scienceblogs.com Denialism is the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none. These false arguments are used when one has few or no facts to support one's viewpoint against a scientific consensus or against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They are effective in distracting from actual useful debate using emotionally appealing, but ultimately empty and illogical assertions. Examples of common topics in which denialists employ their tactics include: Creationism/Intelligent Design, Global Warming denialism, Holocaust denial, HIV/AIDS denialism, 9/11 conspiracies, Tobacco Carcinogenecity denialism (the first organized corporate campaign), anti-vaccination/mercury autism denialism and anti-animal testing/animal rights extremist denialism. Denialism spans the ideological spectrum, and is about tactics rather than politics or partisanship.

Rupert backs Rudd: St Kevin's Kyoto coronation

In early 1066, an ambitious bloke called Guillaume le Bâtard (William the Bastard) left his dukedom to flick off to Rome and clear his regal ambitions with the pope of the day, Alexander II. Later that year, having being blessed in battle where he had flown the papal banner, Bâtard changed his name. History now knows of him as William the Conqueror, King of England.

I'm pretty sure nobody called him "bastard" again.

Guillaume was a tough and resilient man, smart and wily, but so too was his adversary, King Harold II. No worthy historian should underestimate the value of papal blessings when realms revise.

Yesterday an ambitious bloke called Saint Kevin (Aussie irony that approximates to 'bastard') left his dominion to flick off to New York and clear his prime ministerial ambitions with the patriarch of today's Anglosphere, Murdoch II.

'Tis a well beaten path that Kevvie le Heavy troddeth; the carbon footprints of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and George W. Bush can't be too hard to miss. As a punter our fellow has form; so did Rupert give Rudd his papal banner? :::[SMH]

Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch has endorsed Labor leader Kevin Rudd, saying he would make a good Australian prime minister.

Mr Rudd met for a one-hour private meeting with Mr Murdoch at the News Corporation's New York headquarters today, but the meeting was extended when the pair decided to have dinner together at a local restaurant.

When I was in sales I would always try to schedule my most important meeting for 11 am, just on the off-chance that my prospect enjoyed food. With this life lesson satisfactorily under above my belt I can confidently asset the following -- whomever Pope Murdoch breaketh bread with can consider themselves anointeth:

Channel Seven reported that when asked if Mr Rudd would make a good prime minister, Mr Murdoch replied "Oh, I'm sure."

I would love to see how the bookmakers odds changed after His three words. So -- Roopy is sure of Kevvie? Why is this good news for those concerned about global warming?

Mr Rudd has met with US government officials and business leaders and yesterday addressed the prestigious left-wing thinktank, The Brookings Institution.

In his wide-ranging speech on the Australia-US alliance, Mr Rudd urged the United States to ratify the Kyoto protocol, and said the economic potential of the relationship with China for both Australia and the US was great.

The Kyoto Protocol runs to 2012, but we two countries have been the hold-outs to date -- joining at this late stage can achieve less in terms of practice, but it is still very symbolic and very important that Australia, and hopefully the US, signs up. It's like playing cards with a full deck. Certainly, in the coal-coked context of Australian (and US) politics, Rudd has taken a bloody courageous stance, but the Murdoch imprimatur helps heaps. Good on you.

I'm pretty sure no one will call him 'Saint Kevin' again, definitely after December.

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Solomon needs his temple foundations examined

David Solomon needs to take great care with his statistical work, if he does not want to be tarred with the same 'Chicago school of economics' oily brush that brought us the Iran-Contra affair, the invasion of Iraq, and Paul Wolfowitz.

He doesn't take care, and so his latest work is gleefully used by Andrew Bolt to prove that activities directed towards 'global-cooling' are a waste of time. What results is an insight into the workings of noble-lie theory.

clipped from anonymouse.org Earth Hour made not even a minute difference 16 Comments | 0 Trackbacks | Permalink | Andrew Bolt Blog By Andrew Bolt, Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 06:34am Sydney’s Earth Hour - in which global warming cultists turned off their lights to symbolise what green policies would mean to us - was claimed to have saved enough carbon emissions to offset, er, just four return flights to London. David Solomon of Chicago University’s Graduate School of Business checks the figures and works out that stunt was even more useless than that: ‘Earth Hour’ shows a decline of only 2.10%, statistically indistinguishable from zero… In terms of reducing electricity consumption, ‘Earth Hour’ was, statistically speaking, a failure.

Solomon's caveats in the conclusions of his work tell us the real story of not comparing apples to oranges:

It is nevertheless possible that ‘Earth Hour’ may have had a significant effect in a more localized area than New South Wales. The Energy Australia estimates were based on Sydney CBD only, and so may not be directly comparable.

Keep in mind that the majority of the 57% of sydneysiders who tuned-in and 'switched-off' would have necessarily been in the suburbs, because the CBD doesn't support 2.2 million people, except on NYE, and it certainly didn't that night.

Taking the point estimate of the EarthHour Dummy variable in the full specification after controlling for EarthDay fixed effects, the estimated impact of half of Sydney apparently sitting in darkness using no appliances was to reduce statewide electricity use by around 2.1%.

Here's Solomon's conclusion:

This is a useful, albeit rough, example of the potential economic cost of some currently debated policies that seek to reduce Australian greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by the year 2050.

All it tells us is that a 10.1% drop in electricity usage observed within the Sydney CBD and not the suburbs, results in a 2.1% drop in electricity being consumed in the state of New South Wales.

Is that useful? Solomon's right about it being rough, though.

Italics and bolding mine.
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One Bolt doeth not a thunder-storm maketh

Climate change denial advocate, Andrew Bolt, doesn't know that the increase in average temperatures from around the globe, measured over time is what we commonly call "global warming". That's a lot of individual measurements, in the googles, yet he persistently claims to debunk the theory based on his observations of the temperature on any one day somewhere in the world. :::[Andrew Bolt Blog: Snowing on the warming parade]

Love the headline:

Snow won’t dampen global-warming rallies

And the story isn’t bad either:

The weather forecast for Saturday’s global warming rallies in Grand Rapids and Holland calls for snow and cold rain and temperatures in the 40s—about 10 degrees below normal.

For some, this might make global warming a tough sell.

It's a neat trick of the skeptics; I am sure it will get his regulars howling, "If they can't get a seven day weather forecast right, how can they get one of them one hundred years climate-model forecasts right, huh?".

Hmmm. Here's what global warming looks like as a snapshot of a real-time compilation of a gigantic network of ocean-borne sensors on bouys. The blue represents unexpected cooling, the yellow through to red represents unexpected temperature increase, and the white tells us that this area is as we would expect. As it should be. :::[The Age]
The absurdity of picking on a single temperature point somewhere in the world, "Grand Rapids and Holland", to support the "no-global warming" hypothesis; Yet Bolt soldiers on with his cunning brand of mendacity.

This is what one of his regular commenters, Nobull Warning, posted to the "Boltmoderators bouncing his blog", and then emailed me saying, "just in case it doesn't get posted, would I...?".

Dear Andrew,

The snowmaster speaks. This bit caught my attention...

"... but if we're really reasonable about it, we're not talking about individual weather on individual days," Locke said. "We're talking about something much larger, on a global scale, which science has been tracking for decades."

Funny that, a cultist calling for reason.

I thought the journo was ok, but a bit fuzzy with this line.

Opponents in the debate say natural events such as solar activity are causing the warm-up.

Everyone knows there are no opponents in the scientific debate, and as for the media debate, well that's just a pr smog job.

Nobull Warning from Leichhardt

Would I?

It wasn't the Bolt Moderators who roughly bounced me out his blog, it was the big man himself. Totally unreasonably too, I thought. Figures.

Global Warning Climate Change

UK politics now just a climate change auction

I started blogging about global warming, I dunno, about 14 months ago. Mainly out of a sense of frustration born of the media and greater public attitudes towards climate change. The media reported a 'debate' on global warming, while science reporters (and I) knew there was no question in the climatology community that it was happening. Big time.

It was an awful time. The media gave 50% of time to the reporting the facts of global warming, and 50% of the time to skeptics making a living from disputing these facts on decidedly unscientific grounds. Thinking like, "It's sheer arrogance and utter hubris to think that man can affect the climate", became reported as if this was reasonable logic. I would not have believed it, other than the fact that I had just witnessed an uncritical media swallow all the stories the White House spun, whole, and end up embedded in a UN unsanctioned military adventure trying to relive the Ted Turner Gulf War I glory days. Any Orwellian bullshit was possible. I was staring at a future that that I had been warned about in fifth form English literature. So I blogged, inspired after reading Flannery's The Weather Makers.

But by now the harsh reality of Iraq rented the cosy fabric of this mediaverse, and all sorts of light is streaming in. An Inconvenient Truth has woken the globe to global warming, and The Stern Report gave a financial framework for us to contextualise the problem within. Al Gore has an Oscar and Tim Flannery is the Australian of the Year. Hard to believe.

And now UK politics is a law and order, war on terror, national security, climate change auction. The Tories, Labour and Lib Dems are scrapping it out to take the green crown ahead of the Climate Change Bill tomorrow. Hot button issues are green house gases, green taxes, nuclear power, renewable energy and recycling. The truth is the winner.

We live in interesting times. :::[The Independent: Which political party is the greenest?]


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Who's winning the global warming war?

Bolt goes:

US chills
17 Comments 0 Trackbacks Permalink Andrew Bolt Blog
By Andrew Bolt Friday, March 09, 2007 at 04:42pm

The US National Climatic Data Center has chilling news: The average temperature in February 2007 was 32.9 F. This was -1.8 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 34th coolest February in 113 years. Most predictions of global cooling say it won’t happen for a decade or two yet. But who knows?

The Bolt-strokers go "Ooohh!".

Carbonsink goes "Ahhh...".

Posted by carbonsink on Fri 09 Mar 07 at 06:41pm

Hey nutbars,

Have a look at this graph from the U.S. National Climatic Data Center and see if you can discern a trend?

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2007/jan/glob-jan-pg.gif
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2007/jan/glob-jan-pg.gif

Notice anything? Yeah, global cooling is just around the corner.

Sheeesh!

And Andrew, seeing as you’re fair and balanced, how about posting the above graph in your next missive?

And so it goes.

So who do you put your money on? And will Bolt post graph?

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Neville Chamberlain of Climate Change

Andrew "Neville" Bolt is preparing for his 7:00 am debate on global warming with David Koch:

By Andrew Bolt
Tuesday, February 27, 2007 at 04:45pm

David Koch, host of Channel Seven’s popular Sunrise program, is apparently not pleased with my reference to him on Alan Jones’ show this morning.
And so we shall debate global warming, or so I’m told, on his show tomorrow just after the 7am news. Cover up well.

Among the commenters on his site are those known as the Boltstrokers. They have not been helpful contributors on the strategy development front:

Posted by Dan_W on Tue 27 Feb 07 at 06:54pm
Rug up, Andrew.

Posted by Alastair of Melbourne on Tue 27 Feb 07 at 06:58pm
I hope you take the opportunity to put him in his place once and for all!

Posted by Greg Williams of Perth on Tue 27 Feb 07 at 07:13pm
If they stay away from fluffing the subject you will absolutely annihilate him. Don’t let him lull you into an overly familiar friendly chat; this is a chance to burst this irrational bubble they are in on this show. Good luck!!

Posted by jenn of prahran on Tue 27 Feb 07 at 07:21pm
dont worry Andrew,

He is just a boring bald accountant on a show where he is laughed at, not with.
But he keeps the oldies amused I guess.
Your a rocket scientist next to him, but I think you will get ambushed or cut off. The show is “green” remember.
cheers

Posted by al gore on Tue 27 Feb 07 at 07:23pm
Koch is starting to take himself way too seriously. He is starting to sound arrogant.
Andrew he needs a dose of reality knock him down a few pegs.

So I tried to help him make sense of his recent positioning on the issue:

Andrew,

Have you a strategy? Which of your stances will you adopt?

1. Climate change is not happening: “Vanuatu is not sinking!”.


2. It is happening, but man does not cause it.


3. Mitigating it is a waste of money.


4. It is happening and mitigating it is not a waste of money, if we only spend our money on nuclear power, because, ........ of, of something to do with base-load power.


5. It's happening, but alarmists have hijacked the show; along with climate scientists, people who understand science, big business, and messianic politicians, Aussies of the year, airline owners, private aeroplane owners, city building management, and 90% of the general public. And all my other targets for good measure (So because of this, I propose we do nothing).


6. If we take alarmists seriously, alarming things will happen. Not that we’re alarmists, ja?

Hope I have been useful. Good luck.

AGW Fundy

Good luck indeed to the greatest appeaser of the denial lobby in Australia. Tune in for a Koch coshing - Andrew's words.

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Back to reeducation camp for global warming ex-skeptic

In September 22, 2006, Ronald Bailey of Reason Magazine published his Confessions of an Alleged ExxonMobil Whore. Reason Foundation had been in receipt of $250,000 of ExxonMobil's money since 2000 - to promote a contrarian media view to the scientific consensus on global warming.

Earlier in the week, Bob Ward, the British Royal Society's senior manager for policy communication, had sent a letter to the oil giant ExxonMobil accusing it of funding groups that misinform the public about the reality of man-made global warming, asking it to cease and desist.

It's safe to say that Ward may count the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine and Reason Online as one of the 39 groups that he believes misleads the public on the issue of climate change. If that's the case, then at least some of the information that Ward says "misrepresents" climate change science may be past articles written by me. So the question is: Why did I do it? Did ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond hand me brown paper bags filled with stacks of unmarked bills in the back of taxis while whispering, "Ron, we're counting on your widely read and highly influential articles to help stave off the Green onslaught against our soaring profits"? Or was I a simple-minded dupe, passing along misinformation supplied to me during expensive lunches at the Palm by corrupt scientists who had been paid off by the oil giant? Or perhaps I am just generally skeptical of end-of-the-world scenarios and believe, as Carl Sagan famously did, that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?

It's extraordinary that he didn't look at the extraordinary body of evidence that had been accumulating since before the first IPCC conference in 1988. Extraordinary he chose to base his skepticism on the discrepancy between ground temperatures, and atmospheric temperatures measured by satellites and by balloons. That's it.

Ronald Bailey's conversion was sudden. The day the scientific peer-review process established that satellites and weather balloons had not be measuring temperatures correctly, and that in fact the atmosphere is indeed experiencing upward trends in warming rates, as predicted by earlier climate models, he publicly recanted.

In August 2005, Science magazine published three papers that went a long way toward resolving the issue. One paper found that Christy and Spencer had failed to take proper account of satellite drift, which produced a spurious cooling trend to their dataset. Another found that the operation of weather balloons also tended to add spurious cooling to their data. When the corrections were made the satellite and weather balloon datasets were in better agreement with the surface thermometer datasets that showed higher warming trends. On the day that the studies were released I wrote a column for Reason in which I declared that my skepticism of man-made global warming was at an end. The column was titled, "We're All Global Warmers Now." The first line read: "Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up."

The Committee for Reeducation note that the conversion is not total, and recommends further rigorous attention in this matter.

In the column, I quote Christy saying, "The new warming trend is still well below ideas of dramatic or catastrophic warming."

[...]

I reviewed former vice-president Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth for Reason. I agreed that Gore has "won the climate debate" and that "on balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science" though I argued he exaggerates just how bad future global warming is likely to be.

We further note that he has tried to deny that he is nought but a 'corporate shill', employing the same scant logic that makes the Reason Magazine masthead a major misnomer, and which fuels the media 'debate' on the scientific consensus.

ExxonMobil has been a supporter of the Reason Foundation. Folks at the foundation confirmed when I called yesterday that the company has donated a little over $250,000 since 2000. The company's latest contributions were $10,000 in 2003 and $20,000 this past January. The last contribution poses a possible conundrum for hard-line corporate conspiracy theorists because it arrived about five months after I declared, "We're All Global Warmers Now." I would suggest that ExxonMobil supports the Reason Foundation because my colleagues robustly defend the free enterprise system.

Er, ExxonMobil has given Reason Foundation $230,000 since 2000 to deny global warming, and then five months after the public conversion of Bailey, Reason's science correspondent for nearly eight years, they get another $20,000 in the post. And he uses this to deny he is a shill? There's a lesson for you in speed if you were the ship-jumping rat type.

Good Members of the Committee for The Global Warming Apocalypse Reeducation Unit of the One World Government, come on? You can bet your bottom carbon trading offset investments that, if Reason was so far off the money on the science and so slow on the evidence, their invoicing of ExxonMobil wouldn't be any quicker.

Our constitution allows us to accept conversions-in-full only. My recommendation to the Committee is for further reeducation - Ronald Bailey is to be subject to 500 hours of watching An Inconvenient Truth, and a further 25 hours of Al Gore's live PowerPoint presentations.

He'll have plenty of time to look at ALL that science that he got so wrong for so long. And to think about how much carbon dioxide was actually emitted into the atmosphere on his watch, and during his long career working for ExxonMobil funded think tanks. For penance he will write an insiders tell-all about big fossil-fuel's long and hard campaigning to sow public confusion about the global warming scientific consensus. Upon doing so, the Committee should determine his conversion as complete, and reset Ronald Bailey's status to good chap, and action all consequent privileges under the Single Government of the Global Carbon Economy.

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2007 IPCC report released to the world

The much awaited 2007 IPPC Report was delivered in Paris last night: :::[SMH]

A turbulent future of violent storms, devastating drought, higher temperatures and rising sea levels is inevitable, according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released its 1200-page report in Paris last night. The work of 2500 scientists over six years, it is considered the most authoritative evaluation of climate change ever produced.

Great solemnity had marked it's release European cities. The 20,000 light bulbs on the Eiffel Tower were turned off for five minutes the night before, and blackouts were staged in the Colosseum in Rome and the Greek Parliament in Athens. The Spanish were not to be outdone and the Puerta de Alcal in Madrid, the Giralda Tower in Seville and landmarks in the ancient Mediterranean city of Valencia were plunged into darkness. There has been a sea-change in the general public awareness of global warming since the 2001 IPPC Report, boosted by the worldwide success of An Inconvenient Truth, and the conversions of big business to the need for a carbon price signal, and of the powerful Murdoch press to the cause. The release of the Stern Report knocked out the denialists argument that changing the status quo would send our economies into tailspin. It turns to the opposite is true - the cost of not reducing emissions is estimates to be 20 times the cost of not doing anything.

Six scenarios depicting temperature rises from 1.1 degrees to potentially 6.4 degrees Celsius are presented, along with the claim that it is 90 per cent certainty that we who burn fossil-fuels are the cause of the global warming of the last 50 years. The anthropogenic cause is now defined as "very likely" , whereas in the previous IPCC report it was defined as "likely", or a 65 per cent certainty.

The scientists have finished their job. Only fool waits for 100 per cent certainty of an impending and irreversible disaster.

The rest is up to us. The situation requires immediate and urgent and lasting action.


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Michael Duffy: New green heresy hunter

SMH's Michael Duffy has a crack at painting the 80% or so of us who acknowledge the science of global warming as members of a new green religion. It's an old motif that is done the rounds of the fossil-fuel think-tank shills who pose as journalists, but Duffy's own brand of spin is good for a belly laugh: :::[SMH]

In my lifetime I've experienced two religious movements, Christianity and Marxism. Now there's a third, the belief our civilisation is doomed unless we take urgent and significant action to reduce our output of carbon dioxide.

He's light-on in justifying this outlandish claim, and it is painful reading his tortured logic.

Late last year World Economics, a reputable and mainstream British academic journal, published a lengthy rebuttal of the review by 14 experts. It's worth quoting from the abstract at some length because the rebuttal has been almost completely ignored. Google Australia gives it 10 references compared with more than 10,000, mostly adulatory ones, for the Stern review itself.

That's fundamentalism in action, too.

Google might be surprised to know their algorithm shows fundamentalist neo-green religiosity. Go, the Gaiagle Algorithm. But you have to get dragged to the last sentence of his concluding paragraph before we see the point Duffy has been labouring so hard to make:

The non-religious view of global warming is this: we know the world has warmed slightly over the past century, but we don't know how much of this was caused by humans and how much by the natural variations in temperature that occur frequently. We have no idea if the warming will continue or, if it does, whether this will be good or bad.

"No idea if the warming will continue... "? This sounds familiar; "no idea whether there is a link between cancer and smoking... ".

"... or whether this will be good or bad". No? Not the findings leading to the first IPCC in 1980 at the Rio Earth Summit? Not those resolutions of Kyoto Protocol in 1988? Not the entire corpus of climate modeling studies? Not the scientific consensus measured by Naomi Oreskes as total? Not the Stern Report conclustions which tell us that not doing something will cost us 20 times what we need to spend on combating global warming? Not the observed climatic effects of climate change events, like the collapsing of the Lars B iceshelf? Not the recent public conversion of the last hold-out politicians like Howard, and Bush? Not the cry by big business for a carbon price signal, so they can get on with the business of makeing business plans?

None of this dents Duffy's faith. What can you say?

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The end of our epoch? All in good Time #2

Post a blog entry on how successfully Time Magazine's cover "Be Worried. Be Very Worried" gets picked up by the Internet, and the skeptics swarm in, armed with ad hominem attacks and familiar arguments.

And, lately, loaded with links to the works of Messrs. Harrison Hieb and Monte Hieb.

The following comment is a classic denialist-in-service attack:

At 9:46 AM EST, E L Frederick reckons this...

In the mean time, I suggest you get yourself an education and stop listening to the celebrities and the junk science.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/global_warming.html

At 11:57 AM EST, Wadard reckons this...

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/global_warming.html

Education? OK, I'll play. Who the hell are Monte Hieb and Harrison Hieb and what is their background in the field of climate science? Why does their site link to a whole bunch of fossil-fuel info links?

If I am looking for an 'education' on mining engineering, I would possibly consult Monte Hieb, since he worked as chief engineer for the West Virginia Office of Miner’s Safety. If I were an fossil hobbyist I would probably look at his amateur fossil website.

But he is not a climate scientist, which is why he has not published any scientific papers on causes of global warming. A search through the peer-review scientific journals where all new claims are tested and confirmed by scientists specialising in the field shows no ground-breaking advances in understanding by Monte Hieb or Harrison Hieb.

However he has published a lot of opinion pieces on global cooling, and the role of water vapour in global warming. On the latter makes this colourful claim:

Water Vapor Rules

By Monte Hieb

Just how much of the "Greenhouse Effect" is caused by human activity?

It is about 0.28%, if water vapor is taken into account-- about 5.53%, if not.

I won't take you through it because, until it is verified by peers, it is opinion masquerading as science, targeted to a gullible public. If I was looking for a real education on the role of water vapour I would get it from the horses mouths' themselves; the scientific discussion at Realclimate.org is a good place to start, and is positively swimming with references to peer-reviewed science.

If Hieb is not interested in advancing scientific understanding via the time-honoured peer-review method, it's most likely that his agenda is to create the impression that there is scientific doubt about global warming. A conspiracy? Who benefits - well, his employer - the coal industry. While the public believes there is doubt among scientists, there is less political will for a carbon tax. So people like Hieb publish junk science to create the public conditions that help the fossil-fuel industry stall the inevitable tax on carbon emissions.

But at what cost to us? An impost so large, it is intergenerational one. It is worth noting that this is the second occasion that Time Magazine has written a cover story on global warming.

On April 9, 2001 their cover read "GLOBAL WARMING. Climbing temperatures. Melting glaciers. Rising seas. All over the earth we're feeling the heat. Why isn't Washington?"

Almost exactly five years later this question remains utterly unanswered. No progress has been made by either the Australian and US governments to reduce our emissions today.

That is a frying shame.


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