Essay:The Truth about Global Warming

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Essay.svg This essay is an original work by abunchofnumbers.
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What else do you need to know?

A note to all who are about to read this essay[edit]

It is not a parody. Do not add it to Category:Parody because it does not fit there. Some people believe that everything that is in a skeptic point of view is a parody. They are wrong.

Essay.svg This essay is an original work by an anonymous IP.
It does not necessarily reflect the views expressed in RationalWiki's Mission Statement, but we welcome discussion of a broad range of ideas.
Unless otherwise stated, this is original content, released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 or any later version. See RationalWiki:Copyrights.
Feel free to make comments on the talk page, which will probably be far more interesting, and might reflect a broader range of RationalWiki editors' thoughts.

What is Global Warming?[edit]

.

Anthropogenic Climate Change[edit]

The phrase “Global Warming” is also used to refer to the rapid rise in temperatures the planet has experienced since the start of the Industrial Revolution. This is caused by the sun being hotter.

However, some people who refuse to accept the truth say that it is because of a gas called C02 which is magically heating up the planet.

Because the people who refuse to accept the truth want tons of money they have lied by saying that Global Warming is being caused by man. The disinformation campaign is very active as seen with Al Gore winning the nobel peace price and is a large threat to our freedoms. (terrorism doesn't even strike a match compared to the fear being spread by so-called "environmentalists")

Hierarchy of Global Warming Rationalizations.[edit]

These lairs who wish to infect our nation with facsim have stereotyped all global warming deniers as below:

1. Global warming isn’t happening - so we don’t have to do anything.

2. Global warming is happening, but it’s not caused by humanity - so we don’t have to do anything.

3. Global warming is happening, it is caused by humanity, but it may be a good thing - so we don’t have to do anything.

4. Global warming is happening, it is caused by humanity, it is a bad thing, but China isn’t doing anything - so we don’t have to do anything.

5. Global warming is happening, it is caused by humanity, it is a bad thing, but even if China does something it’s too late for us to do anything and it would cost us money - so we don’t have to do anything.

6. (There is an hypothesized sixth step, "Global warming was happening, it was caused by humanity, it is a very bad thing and previous governments should have done something.")



Debunking Global Warming[edit]

NASA and the Y2K bug[edit]

Steve McIntyre deduced, and NASA recently admitted, that NASA programmers had a Y2K bug in their source code that processes temperature data. This bug introduced a 0.02 percent change in the temperature data that has been corrected. Before this correction 1998 was the listed as the hottest year recorded but this difference was statistically non-significant with the second place year 1934. With the correction 1934 becomes the hottest year but it is still statistically non-significant. 1934 was a period of intense drought in the United States, as it was during the Dust Bowl years in the Great Depression. The old temperature series data for the U.S. was as follows:

Gissusold.png

With the correction it changes to:

Gissusnew.png


Glacier retreat calculations[edit]

Scientists have found DNA from ancient animals in an ice layer of Greenland, 1.2 miles beneath the surface.[1] This is of course caused by global warming which is caused the sun! It is competly natural.

Nature generates more CO2 than man[edit]

It is true that natural sources of CO2 release represent a much higher percentage of CO2 output, natural carbon "sinks" that take up that CO2 balance it out. The amount of CO2in the atmosphere has been relatively constant for hundreds of thousands of years due to output and input being equal. What man is doing is burning and releasing sources of CO2 without adding additional carbon sinks. We are actually removing carbon sinks. This means the net amount of CO2 is increasing over time due to our involvement even though our total output is less than natural sources.

One of the interesting things is that the natural outputs of CO2 and the man made outputs are chemically different, but this does not prove anything.

As you can see the arguments spread by the people who choose to believe are silly

CO2 levels lag behind temperature increases[edit]

There have been several major changes in the earth's climate over its 4.5 billion year history. These have includes spectacular effects such as the snowball earth and have also included periods of intense global warming. These periods of warming and cooling all have a range of causes mostly involving positive feed back loops, such as ice reflecting the sun back to space causing more ice, reflecting more sun. This is the only good cause of Global Warming.

It has been hotter in the past so it is just cyclical[edit]

While it is true that there have been cyclical patterns of temperature changes through out our planet's history that does not mean that causes are unknown, unknowable or all the same. Science and the application of the scientific method is a great method for working out cause/effect relationships. We have managed to link several warming and cooling cycles in the geologic history to specific causes. People have also shown that the modern warming is due to an increase in the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere by using phony graphs. Also the reality of previous warming cycles does mean that its a big deal. These previous cycles destroyed a great deal of life on the planet and if similar effects occurred today they would probably destroy all of human civilization (it would be under water) and probably all of humanity as well. It does mean that the earth itself will survive.

Global warming has more to do with the humans than the sun[edit]

Changes in the sun have been shown to provide a significant change to the earths climate. When it goes red giant certainly. One thing that can change is small perturbations in the orbit of the earth that draw the planet closer or further from the sun. These perturbations might be linked to the start of several of the major climate changes in the geologic history of the earth. There is no evidence that is an increase in atmospheric CO2 levels happening now, but even if it has it can only explain a very small percentage of the increase in global temperature. The main cause is the sun and orbital shifts.

Warming of other planets[edit]

Many of the planets in our solar system and some moons are big enough and active enough geologically to have an atmosphere and a climate. In any given system there will be some planets increasing in temperature and some decreasing in temperature. This is due to changes in the localized climate, just as it is with earth. The causes are usually the sun but this is less present when we get farther away from it. Pluto is cooling down because it is moving away from the sun.

Using anecdotal evidence[edit]

Like using "Wow, it's really fucking hot today!" Global warming is real! Haha. It is hot every summer. Get used to it. There is no "global warming".

Conservapedia[edit]

Of course the insane lairs say that if Conservapedia supports one viewpoint it is always false.

Conservapedia

Reality

Consensus = liberal conspiracy ?
[edit]

Richard Lindzen wrote in 1992,

Indeed, a recent Gallup poll of climate scientists in the American Meteorological Society and in the American Geophysical Union shows that a vast majority doubts that there has been any identifiable man-caused warming to date (49 percent asserted no, 33 percent did not know, 18 percent thought some has occurred; however, among those actively involved in research and publishing frequently in peer-reviewed research journals, none believes that any man-caused global warming has been identified so far). [2]

Oddly enough, even though 82% of US climate scientists refused to support the global warming theory then, liberal activists were already claiming a scientific consensus for Anthropogenic global warming. (It's hard to understand how 18 percent credence in any global warming translates into "consensus" support for human-caused global warming.)


Note that a full citation for the poll isn't given by Lindzen; perhaps this is because he intentionally lied about its results..? Despite the identical claims of Rush Limbaugh and George Will, the Gallup poll in question found that a majority (66%) of the 400 scientists questioned believed in human-caused global warming, while 23% were undecided and only 10% disagreed. [3] The San Francisco Chronicle published a correction from Gallup regarding this: "Most scientists involved in research in this area do believe human-induced global warming is occurring now."[4] The fairly significant minority in this poll who did doubt human-induced global warming were likely borne of the relative scarcity of convincing evidence for it in 1991.[5]

Are the Himalayan glaciers retreating?
[edit]

Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame." [6]

In typical fashion, Conservapedia omits the wide body of evidence that glaciers are retreating worldwide in favor of mentioning an expanding anomaly. Fowlera and Archer (2006) is the study Conservapedia's source is referring to. It says,

"Temperature data for seven instrumental records in the Karakoram and Hindu Kush Mountains of the Upper Indus Basin (UIB) have been analyzed for seasonal and annual trends over the period 1961–2000 and compared with neighboring mountain regions and the Indian subcontinent. Strong contrasts are found between the behavior of winter and summer temperatures and between maximum and minimum temperatures. Winter mean and maximum temperature show significant increases while mean and minimum summer temperatures show consistent decline. ... This divergence commenced around the middle of the twentieth century and is thought to result from changes in large-scale circulation patterns and feedback processes associated with the Indian monsoon. The observed downward trend in summer temperature and runoff is consistent with the observed thickening and expansion of Karakoram glaciers, in contrast to widespread decay and retreat in the eastern Himalayas. This suggests that the western Himalayas are showing a different response to global warming than other parts of the globe."

This study clearly does not contradict Gore's assertion; in fact the authors reaffirm it in the abstract! (Other studies ignored by Conservapedia have likewise confirmed Gore's claim.[7][8])


References[edit]