Climate change is not just about what might go wrong or what’s wrong. But also about the opportunities we have to get it right and to improve our existing lifestyle and infrastructure.
How the Power Grid Gets Smart: The Electric InterGrid – part 1
After writing my article How BBC Warmists Abuse The Science – A Response I thought what the heck lets join the conversation on Watts Up With That. And I posted the following comment:
Seriously? You post an excerpt from a column where one of the arguments is “Even the weather has turned against them, showing that all the computer models based on the assumption that rising CO2 means rising temperatures have got it wrong.”. Which can be paraphrased as it’s snowing outside so global warming is not happening… Cold spells can happen, even when the planet is warming up.
However, it’s again someone who’s work is being used which also says that second hand smoking and asbestos don’t cause cancer. And even has been critical on the theory of evolution saying “rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions”.
Continue reading Leaving a Comment on WattsUpWithThat
I probably shouldn’t for the sake of my blood pressure, but I do keep taps on what people on the other side of the debate are saying, especially the more vocal ones. I use it to keep myself appraised of any contrary evidence and queues me on possible cases where a critical look at evidence might be needed.
But I have to say this, most of the time what is being put out by the “sceptics” is severely lacking. Errors and misrepresentation galore, a lot of it being unintentional as climatology is a difficult subject. But often it has its root in what, to me, looks like intentional misdirection and butchering of the science.
And the latest butchering was promoted in a post on the blog Watts Up With That, a website that has a reputation of misdirection and scientific errors:
In this excellent BBC Horizon episode Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse examines why science appears to be under attack, and why public trust in the key scientific theory of global Warming has been eroded. With excursions into the subjects of the safety of GM food and the denial of the medical fact that HIV causes AIDS to gain a…
I’m amazed that each winter I hear this, “It’s cold, so global warming must not be real”. Do I have to remind people that generally speaking it is colder during the winter months than it is during the summer? And that cold spells do happen, regardless of any current climate trend? But I can understand the confusion a big cold spell like this can cause.
A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that most people think that Global Warming means that it gets warmer every single year, for any given month in a year and at every single location on the globe. Unfortunately it’s not that simple.
For example if you take a look at the global temperature records in the past you can see it’s not a smooth graph with every year being warmer than the previous. And you see exactly the same pattern for local temperature records. So if a few subsequent years haven’t been warmer, or you get a couple of frigid winters in a row, it does not mean that global warming has stopped. Or even isn’t happening.
During my discussions with a lot of climate change sceptics I’ve often heard that CO2 is plant food. And that putting more in the atmosphere is a good thing for plants, as they will grow faster and produce more food.
Which is a very good point. As you can see from the video from CO2Science, plants can indeed grow a lot faster if you give them more CO2. And this is exactly what a lot of growers do in their greenhouses. They add CO2 to stimulate the growth of their crops and increase their yields.
So what people are saying with this argument is that it’s just another fertilizer, like nitrogen. So you should get the same benefits if you increase a nutrient. But, with nitrogen we do see that there is a point where if you add to much nitrogen, the plants get more susceptible to pests. As they will grow so fast they cannot develop their defences properly or fast enough. And there’s even a point where to much nitrogen will kill plants.
Professors Andrew Dessler from Texas A&M and Richard Lindzen from MIT debated the scientific evidence of anthropogenic global warming at the University of Virginia School of Law. The above debate is long, with a duration of almost two hours, but well worth a watch. It’s a perfect example of how you conduct an excellent debate on climate change, and how the…
I’ve been active on YouTube for almost a year, and I’ve been producing videos for about half a year. For me it all started with following a few channels and joining the discussions.
SpaceRip is one of the channels where I contribute now and then. And the last video I had a serious discussion on with another user was the video “Global Temperature Puzzle”:
The discussion I had on that video took the better part of two weeks and was triggered by the following comment:
Lee made the extraordinary claim that a green energy company had sent a fake bomb to a professor who is critical on the industry. When I followed up on the mentioned source it turned out the situation wasn’t as clear cut as he represented it in his video. Watch this video on YouTube And this isn’t exactly the first time…
