This documentary claims to be about the real cause of global warming. It discusses the idea that CO2 is not cause of global warming. This documentary discusses many topics that are not covered in the Global Warming Swindle such as the hockey stick graph, from the viewpoint of Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas.
I find it amazing the lengths that 'flat-worlders' will go to when trying to prove their illogical arguments. Are these people visionaries or just nut-jobs...you decide!
16 comments:
It would be a shame for people to watch this documentary without realizing the extent to which it presents outdated and/or thoroughly debunked arguments against man-made climate change. Lars Oxfeldt Mortensen, who wrote and directed the documentary, is an independent journalist who has quite a track record in opposing decades of growing -- and in my opinion, incontrovertible -- evidence gathered by scientists around the world.
For more specific accusations, take a look at this critique of this documentary -- http://www.cicero.uio.no/webnews/index_e.aspx?id=10572.
Or, do a Google search on any of the talking head scientists in the film. It's not surprising what you'll find:
-- John Christy's theory regarding the temperature of the troposphere is taken seriously by very few climate scientists. Christy is tolerated by many of these scientists, though, simply because he seems to put his theological bias aside (he is a seminary-trained Southern Baptist theologian) in favor of some acceptance of man-made CO2 increases as being responsible for global warming.
-- Much of David Legates's work has been funded by EXXONMobil. Enough said.
-- Sallie Baliunas is a familiar figure on the anti-global warming circuit despite widespread knowledge that much of her working is funded by the American Petroleum Institute. The work that she is shown doing in this documentary cited 13 papers in support of her theories. The authors of all 13 papers have refuted her interpretation of her work, and have renounced her somewhat bizarre conclusions.
And so on, and so on.
I'm far from an expert on global warming, and I'm happy to grant that there is much room for skepticism. These are uncharted waters we're sailing into. And yet, the ridiculous contention at the beginning of this film that most climatologists are uncertain about the causes and rapidity of global warming makes this film immediately suspect. The simple fact that Mortensen defies by making such a claim is that every reputable climate scientist currently working has endorsed the basics of the Kyoto Protocol and the UN Commission. Every one of them (reputable, that is).
Sorry to rant and ramble. It makes my blood boil, though, to see and hear such attempts to discount global warming -- a dire and immediate crisis, not a political or theocratic football.
There is no basis for calling people unconvinced about man made global warming "flat-earthers". As far as scientific theories go, man made global warming is very recent and extremely poorly supported one. Big Bang theory used to have much stronger evidences in its support _and_ was able to provide immediate predictions which could falsify it, but people did not call Fred Hoyle a "flat-earther". As it happens, his stubborn disbelief in predominant theory seems to be one of the main reasons why we remember and respect him, even though he was proved wrong.
But if remaining unconvinced earns you the title of a "flat-earther", I'm going to wear it with pride.
Andrzej Rosa
Ohh please. I love it when people are tagged with the "big oil" accusation when they speak out against the climate change hysteria. Essentially it's like screaming "heretic!" in medieval Europe. No one denies that climate change is real. The question remains for rational people is how much of this is part of a natural cycle and how much of it is being affected by humans. This planet is far more vulnerable to ice ages than at any other epoch in geological time. It seems to be me that we should be celebrating a gradually warming of the planet. Every living organism on this planet thrives in heat - none enjoy the cold. Climate will ALWAYS change, regardless of whether human beings are here or not. Acknowledging that is the first stop in now being terrified by a bunch of environmental end-timers.
anon, i agree with your comment 100%.
andrzej, you too.
dave10, you need to step away from the TV and stop listening to the greens. you never heard of the word propaganda? it's all a scam for money, quite why so many people have become sucked into it is beyond me.
i, for one, will NOT be buying into the silly green ideals. i'm not getting a bloomin' hybrid car! call me a "flat-earther" if you want, but the whole idea that WE cause global warming? absolutely ridiculous. the best way to get around global warming? stop breathing. oh wait, and if you stop breathing, you're not allowed to die either, because the process of decomposition also exerts masses of co2. and you have to remember that photosynthesis works both ways; when the sun goes down, the plants start emitting co2 as well. oh my god. lets cut down all the trees! SAVE THE PLANET!
i really think some people are such fools. the sooner people realise, the better.
i doing my masters in resource management, and global climate change is part of our subjects.
IPCC is right, when it says the earth is warming, and the warming to a certain extent is caused by co2 emission. the sudden increase in CO2 will have short term sudden consequences, but on long term basis all the scientists in this video are smack on....right!
on a long term basis nothing can effect earth, another logical explanation to the rise in temperature is because we have cleaner etchnology now then we did 50years ago. in the last 200 years of industrialisation, of which for most part the emissions contained large amounts of carbon and other particles which caused enormous cooling, and since the last 40 years our technology is getting cleaner and cleaner hence more heat.
watch the documentary 'global dimming'
it is a great idea to go as green as possible, resources are limited and trust me we will never find another planet or our technology will never become so good that we can colonise another hostile planet or live in space ships like star trek. non of that is likely to happen.
use what you need, take what you want but do it in a sustainable manner, using fossil fuel isnt bad, but sustainability is the key.
every human should planet at the least one tree every year, and we will have a wonder planet forever.
IPCC is kinda become a gang of scientists, if you dont agree with em, they really do make your life difficult. propaganda from any and all UN organisation shouldnt be taken so seriously.
No offense, whatistheworldcomingto, but it is YOU who sounds unhinged to me.
Well, I hope you folks are correct, and that anthropogenic climate change really does turn out to be an elaborate conspiracy on the part of the liberal elite to ... well, I'm kind of hazy as to why thousands of peer-reviewed studies confirming the basics of global warming are an elaborate myth, or why the Nobel-winning IPCC is trying to dupe us, but maybe I'm just too stupid to see through their propaganda.
Rather than argue scientific evidence, though, I'd rather understand why and how some people see a body of research one way, and another group sees the same body of research in complete antipathy. I'd like to know why any substantive debate on the Internet quickly devolves to flame wars, then outright chaos.
I think this group has done well. But for the love of Pete, people, go and reconsider your views.
If you have religious objections to the notion that man has so befouled the planet that we have placed ourselves in grave danger, check out the positions of the Roman Catholic Church or the Southern Baptist Convention, two of the longest holdouts against global warming as a man-made crisis.
If you have political objections, please check out the conclusions of hundreds (if not thousands) of conservative climate scientists who have followed the empirical dictates and ethics of their profession to arrive at the only conclusion presented by the evidence.
And if you don't think Big Oil is playing a major part in the campaign to discredit independent, published, and peer-reviewed evidence on climate change, well, I can't help you. (Nor can I help you when you make a ludicrous statement like "every living organism on this planet thrives in heat -- none enjoy the cold.)
Again, I hope you-all are correct. I hope that I've been duped by a nefarious conspiracy that reaches from small college science labs to the thousands of scientists who continue to endorse the conclusions of the IPCC.
Because if I'm not completely incorrect, this planet is going to uninhabitable, probably within the lifetimes of our children or our grandchildren. And that's a fact.
To me, it's kinda like saying "Well there have been varying levels of bird-poop in my back-yard for years now, so it wont make any difference if I start using it as a toilet either"
dave10, It doesn't need to be a myth or a conspiracy to be wrong. Science very often is wrong, especially if it deals with a complicated problem. For example, do you treat Freud's theory of dreams seriously? Because if you made a survey not very long ago among psychiatrists, most would agree with the basis for it.
I mean, consensus among scientific elite, even if it happens to exist, is no substitute for *evidence*. You need observations, theories which organize them and provide non-trivial predictions. If you have all that then you can hope that your description of reality is not far off. If you can describe a system with reasonable accuracy, you can make prediction about how it's going to behave in a distant future.
Climatology simply does not have all that. Instead of observations, hypotheses and testable models they turned into computer simulations, and there are voices against this trend even among well established climatologists, so it's not like only "disbelievers" see it as a problem.
If consensus is an equivalent of a proof, then superstring theory is well established (this is a joke!). If consensus is what matters, then the concept of intelligent design was right and Darwin was wrong.
And last but not least, there is no real consensus too, as far as I can tell.
BTW - Nobel-winning IPCC? They won a Nobel in politics, they shared it with a politician so they should be trusted as much as you trust any other politically driven organization. No less and no more than that.
@dave10
''Because if I'm not completely incorrect, this planet is going to uninhabitable, probably within the lifetimes of our children or our grandchildren. And that's a fact.''
the IPCC says in the worst case senario the planet will be warmer by 6degree within the next 25years. i.e the global average temperature.
the earths global temperature now is something like 15 to 20 degree, and in the worst case senario 26 degrees according to IPCC, not much will change.
perhaps less rain, less food, more storms, more droughts.....but humans are so resiliant we will all find a way.
not long ago the entire scientific community said darwin is mental, they claimed galileo is a screw up but they said the world is flat and all civilisations except thiers was inferior....now we know otherwise.
the globe is warming, and the anthropogenic carbon emission only accelarates the process, but this is not significant enough...at least not as IPCC potrays it.
they have been so many catastrophic climate disasters during the 5 something billions years of earth, like comets, asteroids, geo magnetic switching, valconos, solar winds etc etc
at each event the climate would have been altered instaneously in global scale but....the earth and its natural cycles have recovered and all animals and planets have adapted.....they same will happen now.
IPCC is wrong simply because, the earth system is just way too complicated for them or anyone else to predict.
''what you know is only right untill someone proves you wrong''
rigs
Andrej,
Thanks for answering. I agree with you! I hope that's a surprise, but I think we're in accord about the importance of evidence, the importance of the scientific method, and not letting politics or popular opinion dictate the outcome of scientific inquiry.
I am also ready to concede that there is room for debate within the scientific community when it comes to "climate change." (Notice how nobody says "global warming" anymore.) I am far from an expert in climatology, so I must depend on the findings of scientists and, in smaller part, on the way those findings are presented.
Maybe what touched a nerve about this particular documentary is that it was so blatantly one-sided, which is (ironically) what touched a nerve in lots of people about Gore's film. I wish the filmmaker had included a few divergent opinions and presented a more balanced view. That would have helped me a great deal.
Most of all, though, I appreciate the way those of us in this brief discussion have handled differences without resorting to the same tired flame wars that seem to dominate so much of the web. Thanks for taking the time to make your very good points. You have helped me to be more open-minded about this decidedly political issue. (I think you convinced me with your point about string theory! What a mess that is!)
I truly hope that the scary predictions I've bought into really are wrong. It's obvious that we all want to leave behind a planet that is at least as sustainable and vital as the one we have enjoyed.
So, thanks again for your kind discussion, my friend, and for reminding me that "science" is not always as clear-cut in its conclusions as I sometimes fool myself into wishing!
The concept of a flat earth was invented by Washington Irving in his "biography" The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.
He added the proving the world was round bit because... well... who knows.
calling people "flat-earthers" shows how easily you can be manipulated by those in authority.
I grew up believing the whole schpeel because that's what I was told. By parents, teachers, the media, etc.
I have learned to question what I "know" and try to find the truths and facts by myself.
Well, I was going to leave this whole discussion alone and move on. However, this latest comment has my blood boiling again.
Without wanting to start a flame war, I have to repeat that I remain surprised by the rejection of mainstream science -- that is, empirically-based, independent, peer-reviewed, published findings -- in favor of a "belief" that there is a vast attempt to manipulate or deceive the public about anthropogenic climate change.
I read a letter in the Waco newspaper this morning stating that global warming is hogwash because mankind is too puny to affect the environment, only God can do that.
Digging a little more, I read that some 41 percent of the American population continues to believe that global warming is either a mistake, a hoax, or part of a grand conspiracy to manipulate the populace.
I'll stop there, because I am a First Amendment purist, and I think that everyone has the right to be free to express whatever they want to.
But I won't rest if I don't state again, clearly as I can, that from my reading and understanding, global warming is real, it is at least partly of human causation, and that we are quickly approaching a tipping point beyond which catastrophic damage will occur to our planet.
More than that, I wish for peace for all who have contributed here, and in no way do I want to argue the issues or try and convince anyone to change their beliefs. Be well, all. This has been an education for me, and I thank you...
dave10 (who can't log in for some weird reason!)
Why would we make decision one based on a model of the Earth that doesn't take into account the fluctuations in the suns output?
You move our planet a little bit farther out or a little farther in it becomes uninhabitable. We know that the suns output fluctuates, has burst emissions and that stars have a life cycle that effects their output.
Why are other, much more fundamental, reasons for global warming dismissed to focus on man-made CO2? Perhaps ego?
I have a few friends who are doing research in to global warming. (NEVER CALL IT CLIMATE CHANGE, that is a word the bush administration made up. (see Denial Machine)). Let me assure you, the models they come up with are very sophisticated. they address all the questions raised. I have seriously looked at both sides, and it is very clear which side is looking at all the evidence, and which side is picking out things that support them.
There are people that fear the idea that people are responsible. This is because that way they would responsible for fixing it. but it's about time we get past this fear. Doing something is hard, but it needs to be done.
Yeungx
Someone brought up sun light output as a possible source of warming. I humbly suggest you Google, pan evaporation rate, and global dimming. Many research have shown that the amount of sunlight hitting the earth is actually lower the it was in previous years. And yes, the computer models do take that into account.
There are people out there, that is just trying to muddy the water. Giving counter arguments that have far far far less research and evidence, just to introduce doubt. So don't take them too seriously, they really don't know what they are talking about.
lol ego...
Yeungx
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