The Great Global Warming Swindle

http://www.viddler.com/explore/micheleforan/videos/2/

Will take an hour and a bit of your time but it's an interesting "other view" from Al Gore and a billion others !!
Took a while for me to find a full version "on line" since this came up a couple of years ago.
It's from 2007 so the George Bush ref's are slightly out of date.
It's a UK program made by Channel 4.

Enjoy and take from it what you want,

Marty.

Thanks MartyMart! I've put that shortcut on my desktop.

Yeah, the whole thing is a total scam to separate you and I from our $ and freedom.

I'm not sure that it's an elaborate scam like Claude eludes but it's a scam none-the-less.  Most of the prominent scientists are given incentives in the form of further funding to continue their research.  They aren't solicited to find out if AGW is real, they are solicited to find the proof that it's real.

Most of the knowledgeable scientists steer clear of this as it's one of those situations where if you don't agree with the masses then you will be blacklisted and seen as a phony.

It's much like mob mentality.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/

let that website be your new bible for AGW.

I'm sorry to say that there is a lot of agenda-driven stuff out there about this.

I read a book by one of the apostles of GW, Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded.  He is willing to concede that a lot of outspoken people are driven by radical anti-growth agendas, and he tries to distinguish himself from them.  But once in a while he shows his stripes, and speaks glowingly of past Presidents who suspended fundamental rights, subscribes to the FDR mythology of how he saved us from the Great Depression, and expresses the wish that we could suddenly be like the Chinese for a day (passing sweeping and irrevocable laws to accomplish what he believes must be done).

I'm not entirely certain about the data, but I'm quite sure about the slant placed on it and the almost overwhelming "beating of the drum" to get us all conditioned to the inevitability of massive restrictions.

Hey Claude, you actually into DIY electronics at all?

Well it's a foregone conclusion dontcha know!

Even the incubus himself had the lights on at Villa Occidental in Nashville during "Earth Hour" this past weekend.  Oh, that's right!  The incubus is actually Al Gore and not KKKarl Rove.  Whodathunkit?

How long before all the scary "investigative journalists" leave camp xray on Cuba and start realizing that "Crap and Afraid" is actually a huge derivatives market.  Can you say "carbon default swaps"?  Talk about making a market out of thin air.  There's something George Soros can go long on!

[crickets]
Mike

Having read quite a lot about this over the last four years, it seems that the C4 film at least points to
the main "misconception" that CO2 levels DON'T drive the temperature of the planet, it's in fact the
other way around ! ( CO2 levels lag behind the temp changes by several decades as proven from Ice core records )

Also pointing out that the "Sun" ( what a surprise ) and it's complex and violent radiation combined with Clouds and precipitation
are what's really controlling Temp / weather.

Should we cut down on CO2 and other nasty stuff - sure, let's at least not "poison" the planet but as far as changing
it's temp /weather ..... how arrogant of us to think we even can.

It makes me mad that the IPCC reports are "twisted" to say what politicians want it to say, with total disregard for the
experts findings, even keeping their names on the documents when they have refused to have the incorrect facts published.

Isn't it wierd though that the huge fuel companies are NOT pushing as hard for the other view ? that would be of benefit
to them wouldn't it !
Yeah let's keep the 3rd world as it is - no electricity or hot water, in case they may contribute to the CO2  !!  : :

Don't forget to turn off that TV and don't leave it in "standby" ......

The real problematic gas we all have to worry about is methane as its is reportedly 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

tonebucket said:

The real problematic gas we all have to worry about is methane as its is reportedly 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Click to expand...

If we all produce as much as I do ...... we are REALLY in trouble !!  :-[ :-[

I have read about this program, would not spend much time on it for anything else than the amusement.......
Take a look at this article in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/mar/13/science.media

Greeteings from Roar up north in Norway quite near the Russian tundra that already has begun melting and releasing enormus amounts of metan gas......

Why bother? I am at least going to hell on first class! ;D

The real problematic gas we all have to worry about is methane

Click to expand...

NO.

The real problem is water vapor. 

Water vapor contributes 60% to the greenhouse cycle whereas CO2 contributes 20%.  Oxides of nitrogen and sulfur, ozone, methane and other gasses fill in the rest in that order.

Although I'm not a believer in "man made accelerated global warming" I do have something I feel strongly about..

What did we put on EVERYTHING in the past in order to fight pollution? 

I'll give you a hint..

It turns volatile, but atmospherically SHORT LIVED(that means they break down quickly in UV) "gasses" into CO2 and water vapor(the two main components of the supposed AGW).....



EDIT:  On another note, I haven't seen the movie or anything.  I've studied USGS data, coring data, sea floor data, satellite data, ice shelf data, volcanic eruption data and so on.  It all concludes that the earth has been simply getting warmer due to the natural cycles that it goes through.  In a few years we'll start cooling down and things will get back to normal.  The problem is conjecture.  The way people's minds work is that they MUST fill in the blanks between facts.  That's how dreams work, that's how hallucinogenics work and that's how we jump to conclusions like AGW.  It's known that we don't have good data before the 1960's, it's also known that we didn't have reliable satellite data until almost the 1980's yet we still try to "guess" and fill in the blanks. 

Oh and there are THOUSANDS of instances of this:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/28/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-86-when-in-rome-dont-do-as-the-romans-do/#more-6610

It is hard to decide which fallacy dominates the discussion of global warming, I tried to look up the one I was thinking of and didn't find it, but I found these...

-Fallacy Of The Crucial Experiment:
claiming that some idea has been proved (or disproved) by a pivotal discovery.

-Argument By Scenario:
telling a story which ties together unrelated material, and then using the story as proof they are related.

-Argument By Laziness (Argument By Uninformed Opinion):
the arguer hasn't bothered to learn anything about the topic. He nevertheless has an opinion, and will be insulted if his opinion is not treated with respect

-Pious Fraud:
a fraud done to accomplish some good end, on the theory that the end justifies the means.

-Inflation Of Conflict:
arguing that scholars debate a certain point. Therefore, they must know nothing, and their entire field of knowledge is "in crisis" or does not properly exist at all.

-Special Pleading (Stacking The Deck):
using the arguments that support your position, but ignoring or somehow disallowing the arguments against.

-Excluded Middle (False Dichotomy, Faulty Dilemma, Bifurcation):
assuming there are only two alternatives when in fact there are more.

-Burden Of Proof:
the claim that whatever has not yet been proved false must be true (or vice versa). Essentially the arguer claims that he should win by default if his opponent can't make a strong enough case.

-Reductive Fallacy (Oversimplification):
over-simplifying.

-Poisoning The Wells:
discrediting the sources used by your opponent

-Argument By Emotive Language (Appeal To The People):
using emotionally loaded words to sway the audience's sentiments instead of their minds.

-Argument From Authority:
the claim that the speaker is an expert, and so should be trusted.

-Appeal To Anonymous Authority:
an Appeal To Authority is made, but the authority is not named.

-Appeal To False Authority:
a variation on Appeal To Authority, but the Authority is outside his area of expertise.

-Statement Of Conversion:
the speaker says "I used to believe in X".

-Bad Analogy:
claiming that two situations are highly similar, when they aren't.

-Argument From Spurious Similarity:
this is a relative of Bad Analogy. It is suggested that some resemblance is proof of a relationship.

-Reifying:
an abstract thing is talked about as if it were concrete.

-False Cause:
assuming that because two things happened, the first one caused the second one.

-Argument By Generalization:
drawing a broad conclusion from a small number of perhaps unrepresentative cases.

I got bored and didn't list more...  Now guess which side is using which fallacies to make their point?

JR

hmm I think AGW fanatics are fairly guilty of using them all in every argument..  ;D

Although I know some anti-AGW folks tend to spout BS too, I tend to see they are generally more civilized.

I do think Internet rules 14 and 19 apply here.

thanks for the link. saw 1/2. downloaded whole thing to watch later

I think humans in general seem to need a crisis to keep the collective guilt tethered, if its not something we can blame others for, we will invent it to blame ourselves.

I'm not sure if we found utopia we could handle it yet, as a species we seem to thrive on drama and crisis.

Here's what is so stinking sad...there are real and actual crisis on our planet that need the billions of dollars that we pump into the placebo crisis to massage our conscience...Darfur, clean water, disease and so many other things, heck just plain old food for a good portion of the planet, these are real and answerable crisis that we have generally ingested and spat out of our awareness now that we've heard about it, and the media and the moguls are now marching us to thwart some unforeseen event with unpredictable outcomes using untold millions of carbon-offset-dollars.

Its as if the devil (if you believe in such things) would love to see us focus on warming temperatures instead of the very real fact that children go to bed hungry and the estimate of deaths from dirty water sources is somewhere in the neighborhood of 135 million by 2020...

Why solve a crisis you are capable of solving if you can spend billions solving one that deflects your attention and makes you rich?

"I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. Because you say, 'I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing'--and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked--

Click to expand...

Svart and JR - great posts and very informative too.
An interesting point made by JR in another thread, which will wipe the smiles off all our faces
quite soon is that "Water will be the next Oil" !!
I can see that becoming important for the 1st and 2nd World - it's important right now for the 3rd world but we
don't seem to take much care about that one !!

Whether or not all the CO2 "facts" are correct, it doesn't dispute the fact that there have been long periods
of "very hot" and "very cold" in the last several hundred years - Jeez how worried would we be in the UK if
the river Thames in London started to regularly "freeze over" ! and who would we point the finger at ?
We can't even cope with 8cm of snow ( this year ) without the whole country coming to a stand still, so we
had better get prepared for more of that  :-[ :-[

MM.

Humans are incredibly capable to adapt to slow changing conditions. I suspect the globe will warm up or cool off despite our best, only human efforts.  I suspect human activity could make some small difference, but first we would need a far better understanding of the system. The whole system. The sun is not a constant output candle but runs in cycles with significant variation around those.

The carbon tax policy looks and feels like a manifestation of the group think that we should live in communes and have a group hug to keep warm, or go skinny dipping in the pond to cool off.  A carbon tax will be extremely regressive and slow down the improving quality of life, that some of our less fortunate populations are only now seeing.  We would be wiser to spend our resources on mitigating change. Filter the mercury and heavy metals out of smokestacks, but carbon seems hard to avoid. My personal tailpipe poots carbon from both ends.

The only thing I know is that I don't know all the answers, so full speed ahead activity seems imprudent. If this was only some marginal drag on the world economy I'd say whatever, if it makes everybody feel good, but this will be a significant sea anchor on everybody, at a time when the public sector is grabbing more and more private resources. Not a good recipe for economic growth and healthy world economies.

Of course I could be wrong...

JR

If you can find actual raw coring data you can see that during the peaks and valleys of the warming/cooling cycle there are also oscillations in temperature.  It's like a signal modulated onto a carrier frequency.  We happen to be on the peak of a long term heating cycle but have been going through the smaller oscillations that ride on that carrier frequency.  It's completely normal but it's hard to see these smaller oscillations just on coring data from any once source.  Combine this with the sun cycles and you can have perceptibly random but academically expected fluctuations in temperature cycles too.