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'The Great Global Warming Swindle': Is Climate Change A Myth?

Between 1966 and 2015, every named glacier in the park got smaller, some by more than 80%. In late summer when the glaciers are most visible,

Seems counter intuitive. I suppose snow cover in Winter covers more than glaciers but don't glaciers expand in Winter as well?
 
It's curious that again we have the problem of the period over which the records are being inspected.
"Between 1966 and 2015" could just be a statistical anomaly in which the measurements were different enough to be noticeable.
I am always suspicious of a data set taken from a certain small window and not a greater length of time.
I wonder what the measurements show over the course of (eg) a 500 year period?
Does the glaciation in the area indicate both increases and decreases of a greater and lesser amount?
 
So no, there is no incontrovertible proof of anthropogenic global warming.
Yes, there absolutely is. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, full stop; look at Venus. Any sincere planetary scientist would recognise that the effect exists; AGW is most certainly incontrovertible. We can certainly debate the strength of the greenhouse effect, but not that the effect exists.

The more important question is - how severe will anthropogenic warming be, and will we notice the effect among all the other phenomena that impact our environment. I think we probably will, but it is not impossible that variations in plant respiration, solar luminosity and orbital eccentricity will mask the effect and make AGW into a minor annoyance.

It's a bit like the Titanic colliding with an iceberg and hoping that the ice will plug the hole - a meagre hope, but not impossible.
 
Yes, there absolutely is. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, full stop; look at Venus.
Venus does have a very dense atmosphere that is mostly CO2, and it is a lot closer to the Sun.
So, probably not comparing the same thing.

Venus: 96.5% CO2. Density: 92 bar.
Earth: 0.04% CO2. Density: 1 bar.
 
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Swap the 92 bar of CO2 for 92 bar of nitrogen, and Venus would have a surface temperature of 70C; much warmer than Earth, but much cooler than it is today.
 
Yes, there absolutely is. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, full stop; look at Venus. Any sincere planetary scientist would recognise that the effect exists; AGW is most certainly incontrovertible. We can certainly debate the strength of the greenhouse effect, but not that the effect exists.

The more important question is - how severe will anthropogenic warming be, and will we notice the effect among all the other phenomena that impact our environment. I think we probably will, but it is not impossible that variations in plant respiration, solar luminosity and orbital eccentricity will mask the effect and make AGW into a minor annoyance.

It's a bit like the Titanic colliding with an iceberg and hoping that the ice will plug the hole - a meagre hope, but not impossible.
I don't want this to degenerate into 'no it isn't'. But your assertion is unsupportable. It's typical of the myopic focus on one line of data out of thousands that plagues modern 'scientific' thinking because scientists in the main are not data analysts.

Is Venus as it is because of AGW?

Real science is based on experiment. Modern 'science' is based on modelling which is little different to astrology.
 
It is easy enough to demonstrate experimentally that carbon dioxide has a greenhouse effect. Arrhenius did it more than a hundred years ago.

I repeat; global warming due to increased carbon dioxide is incontrovertible (assuming all other effects remain unchanged), and nothing you have said has, or can, refute that.

But as I have said all along, the degree of warming is still uncertain, because all the other effects do not remain equal.
 
Is Venus as it is because of AGW?
Well, that is an interesting question.

Obviously the cause was not anthropogenic, but there are some theories that Venus once supported a biosphere, and that biogenic production of carbon dioxide started the ball rolling towards a runaway greenhouse effect. If this did happen, it probably happened more than a gigayear ago.

Could it have been due to an industrialised civilisation on that world? This seems unlikely, because Venus was a thousand million years younger than Earth is today, so would need to have undergone much faster evolution than we have. But it is not impossible
 
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I think we will run out of resources long before this becomes a real problem.
I hope you are correct. Certainly the easy reserves of oil would probably run out before we could cause severe AGW.

Unfortunately there are plenty of other forms of reduced carbon in the accessible layers of the Earth's crust; coal, lignite and shale-oil for example. There is enough kerogen in the crust to convert our atmosphere to 10 bars of carbon dioxide (at least). In this scenario we'd run out of atmospheric oxygen first, of course, so it would be difficult to achieve in practice.
 
In terms of 'millions of years', current CO2 levels and average temperatures are at all time lows, with some relatively minor amounts of increase over the past few hundred years.
This will most likely continue for a few hundred years.
We have plenty of time as a global community to deal with any uncontrollable rises as a result of our existence.
As we are coming to the end of a geological cool period it should be expected that a warm period will be asserting itself.
But that isn't going to happen next Tuesday afternoon.
All the doom-mongers need to calm down a bit really, it's not good for their anxiety levels and general health, which are the things more likely to kill them than 'climate change'.
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That graph is somewhat misleading, since it has a logarithmic timescale; on an arithmetic timescale the periods of high CO2 would have been displayed further away from the present.

Note that high CO2 in the very distant past was advantageous to the existence of life on Earth, because the Sun was fractionally less bright in those days. Due to the build-up of helium in the Sun, our star is getting slightly denser over time, an effect which makes it slightly brighter, and therefore makes the Earth hotter as time goes on. Luckily, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been gradually decreasing over the same period, making the Earth correspondingly cooler. These two effects don't exactly balance out, and sometimes the balance fails altogether (notice the big dips in temperature during the Precambrian and the Ordovician, when CO2 became minimised due to geological reasons).

The fact that the increase in solar helium and the decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide roughly balance each other out is a lucky coincidence- some people put this down to the Gaia Hypothesis, and suppose that the Earth regulates its own temperature in some way like a living organism. I don't believe that - it is just sheer luck, and we can't rely on the Earth 'fixing' itself at any time in the future. Which is why we can't really afford to fuck around with the atmospheric balance too much - there is no Gaia Earth spirit waiting to save us, and we can't rely on a regression to the mean to get us out of any future problems.
 
As a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, I tend to err on the side of disbelief. By all means dispute the consensus - but make sure you know the science.

In a climate context that can lead to a certain pessimism. We have no guarantee that the climate will remain favourable for our current pattern of population distribution, so even without AGM we will eventually have to adapt to changed conditions.
 
Indeed, we can all choose what to believe and what not to believe.

I believe(!) that that isn't true. I strongly suspect that we are all irrational actors, some more so than others, admittedly but no one is anywhere near fully rational or "objective".

I don't think you are choosing not to believe in AGW, any more than those who believe in it are choosing to do so. You are following your own set of prejudices and inclinations, as is everyone.

That is not to say that all prejudices and inclinations are equal - no sleight to anyone intended. Though anyone who thinks they are fully "objective" is amongst the worst set of fools. To be clear, I don't think anyone here would make such a claim though we have all met people who have.
 
I like to think that mostly the people who visit these message boards / forums are a fairly well-adjusted, often sceptical and questioning bunch, open to new information being presented to them.
Opinions change. Science moves on as new experiments yield results.
 
We have no guarantee that the climate will remain favourable for our current pattern of population distribution, so even without AGM we will eventually have to adapt to changed conditions.
Agreed.
 
That graph is somewhat misleading, since it has a logarithmic timescale...

I don't think it is a logarithmic scale. Yes, the Pre-Cambrian is very compressed and the Cenozoic is stretched out - but the Paleozoic-Mesozoic scale seems to... vary. eg the Silurian is very wide for <30My, and looks about the same as the Jurassic c 60My. The presentation has probably been adjusted to highlight features of interest. But that makes it difficult to read the overall picture.

What puzzled me is the chart showing the early pre-Cambrian temperature at a lower level than today, surely "four billion years ago the Earth was a just a ball of molten lava." ?
 
That graph is somewhat misleading, since it has a logarithmic timescale; on an arithmetic timescale the periods of high CO2 would have been displayed further away from the present. ...

Furthermore, that particular chart is old. It was last updated in 2008, and some of its cited data sources date back as far as 30+ years.
 
I like to think that mostly the people who visit these message boards / forums are a fairly well-adjusted, often sceptical and questioning bunch, open to new information being presented to them.
Opinions change. Science moves on as new experiments yield results.
I changed my opinion about AGW over the years. When I was young and idealistic back in the 70s and 80s, I was a bit of a green-agenda-loving hippie. I acquired new knowledge over the years and thought a lot more, to the point where I now question what is going on.
I agree with certain things and disagree with others.
 
To be fair, that chart I posted was one of many that were basically identical and just happened to be the one that I chose because it was quite a sharp image at a smaller size. I think they messed with horizontal scale of some bits just for the sake of presentation, getting it to fit on one page. Okay so it is a few years old but the data points from the historical periods are correct.
 
Life seems to have started somewhere around the 4 billion years mark, so the outer crust was mostly solid.

There were several very cold episodes in the Precambrian, (the Huronian and the Neo-Proterozoic, or Marinoan episodes). The latter episode was so cold, ice reached to the equator.

This image shows another long-term trend I haven't mentioned; the cooling of the mantle. This takes the form of a reduced heat flux from under the Earth. It also shows increasing solar radiation (as a red dotted line).
1-s2.0-S1674987112000898-fx1.jpg
 
I did point this out at the time, but I was criticised for being a 'climate change denier', and laid into by a load of people (mostly in other places but IIRC there were a couple here too - that's okay though, I can accept when people have an opposing point of view).

Fresh Doubts Emerge About 40.3°C U.K. Temperature Record Next to Airfield Runway
Doubts are rising about the recent U.K. record high temperature, measured by the runway at RAF Coningsby on the afternoon of July 19th. Over six minutes, the temperature jumped suddenly by 1.3°C to 40.3°C at 15.12 (3.12pm), and was 0.6°C lower just a minute later. In just two minutes from 15.10 the rise was 0.6°C. The record was set during a mini-heatwave last summer, and has rarely been out of the headlines promoting climate ‘breakdown’ and the need for a Net Zero solution ever since.
(...)The thermometer at Coningsby, the RAF’s primary Typhoon station, as with all airports, is placed next to the runway to provide vital operational information. In the absence of credible meteorological explanations for such a large spike, aeroplane movement must be suspected as the most obvious cause.
(...)According to the plane spotters guide website Thunder & Lightnings, on a good day at Coningsby, “it can be wall-to-wall action” with never more than half an hour or so quiet. Modern fighter aircraft are extremely powerful machines. Spotters note fence panels blown away by the after-burners, while photographers are warned that “heat haze” can spoil pictures. When the jets are taking off or taxiing, they are pumping considerable amounts of hot gas into the surrounding atmosphere.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/11/27...k-temperature-record-next-to-airfield-runway/
 
I get really annoyed with nonsense like this being trotted out as though it is in any way sensible, and then (as has happened many times in the past) using it to make up some baseless conjecture about sea levels etc.
It's all very well saying that the temperatures are (eg) 3 degrees warmer than they were in 1945, or whenever, but if (as in this article) at no point do they mention what actual temperatures they have actually measured then it's totally irrelevant.
If it was 40 degrees below freezing there in 1945, and it is now 37 degrees below freezing, it doesn't matter. It is still many degrees below freezing.
You might say "Oh but they can extrapolate from that increase how long it will be until it has such-and-such effect" but that is purely guesswork.
If I measured the temperature today and it was 3 degrees colder than it was yesterday I wouldn't think means that it'll be minus 17 by next Thursday.
Idiocy dressed up as science to fool the easily led.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...-hottest-cause-sea-levels-rise-20in-2100.html
 
Perhaps some of the swindle was on the part of oil companies.

Exxon’s Own Models Predicted Global Warming—It Ignored Them​

Scientists working for the oil giant Exxon in the 1970s and 1980s estimated temperature increases with remarkable accuracy. Those findings could now be used as evidence in climate litigation

It’s been seven years since journalists first revealed Exxon Mobil Corp.’s decadeslong efforts to undermine the scientific certainty around climate change, despite knowing how serious a problem it was.

Now, a new analysis demonstrates exactly how much the company knew — and how its public disinformation campaigns sabotaged the warnings of its own scientists.

Exxon wasn’t just aware of the greenhouse effect. It had its own teams of scientists developing models to project the effects of carbon emissions on the global climate. And those models, it turns out, were highly accurate.

“We have our scientists do good science, but we have our corporate board not listening,” Ed Garvey, who worked on climate science for Exxon in the late 1970s, said in an interview.

The analysis, published Thursday in the journal Science, captures that sentiment. Exxon's models matched state-of-the-art simulations being used by academic scientists at the same time period. And the company's predictions accurately foresaw the warming that’s actually occurred since the 1970s, according to the study written by researchers Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf and Naomi Oreskes. ...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...els-predicted-global-warming-it-ignored-them/


The findings deepen Exxon's reputation for climate disinformation. And they may carry legal consequences as well, by becoming evidence in litigation that could cost the fossil fuel industry hundreds of billions of dollars. Two dozen U.S. cities, counties and states are suing Exxon and other energy companies in an attempt to show that they misled the public about their contributions to climate change.
 
Perhaps some of the swindle was on the part of oil companies.

Exxon’s Own Models Predicted Global Warming—It Ignored Them​

Scientists working for the oil giant Exxon in the 1970s and 1980s estimated temperature increases with remarkable accuracy. Those findings could now be used as evidence in climate litigation

It’s been seven years since journalists first revealed Exxon Mobil Corp.’s decadeslong efforts to undermine the scientific certainty around climate change, despite knowing how serious a problem it was.

Now, a new analysis demonstrates exactly how much the company knew — and how its public disinformation campaigns sabotaged the warnings of its own scientists.

Exxon wasn’t just aware of the greenhouse effect. It had its own teams of scientists developing models to project the effects of carbon emissions on the global climate. And those models, it turns out, were highly accurate.

“We have our scientists do good science, but we have our corporate board not listening,” Ed Garvey, who worked on climate science for Exxon in the late 1970s, said in an interview.

The analysis, published Thursday in the journal Science, captures that sentiment. Exxon's models matched state-of-the-art simulations being used by academic scientists at the same time period. And the company's predictions accurately foresaw the warming that’s actually occurred since the 1970s, according to the study written by researchers Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf and Naomi Oreskes. ...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...els-predicted-global-warming-it-ignored-them/


The findings deepen Exxon's reputation for climate disinformation. And they may carry legal consequences as well, by becoming evidence in litigation that could cost the fossil fuel industry hundreds of billions of dollars. Two dozen U.S. cities, counties and states are suing Exxon and other energy companies in an attempt to show that they misled the public about their contributions to climate change.
I think this is some of the best evidence yet of the fact that climate chnage is being anthropomorphically driven.

If the oil companies had figured it out in the 70s, and decided to hide it, then that is the most damning point.

Whatever climate change is underway, it is being exacerbated, if not accelerated, by human produced emissions.
 

Study Finds Zero Loss of Antarctica Sea Ice – But BBC Spins as “New Record Low”


The BBC recently copied a headline from the U.S.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) claiming Antarctica sea ice had hit a “new record low”.

Inexplicably missing from the story was the later observation from the NSIDC that since accurate satellite records began in 1979, the trend in the minimum ice extent is “near zero”. Any loss was said to be “not statistically significant”.

According to a recent paper (Singh and Polvani), the Antarctica sea ice has “modestly expanded”, and warming has been “nearly non-existent” over much of the ice sheet. According to NASA figures, the ice loss is 0.0005% per year.

In 2021 [the South Pole] recorded its coldest six-month winter since records began, and last year the temperature was 0.4°C colder than the average over the last 30 years. In addition, the Pole recorded no less than seven new daily temperature lows.

https://dailysceptic.org/2023/02/21...tica-sea-ice-but-bbc-spins-as-new-record-low/

maximus otter
 
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