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The Forum > Article Comments > Cool rationality shatters greenhouse hype > Comments

Cool rationality shatters greenhouse hype : Comments

By Bob Carter, published 4/8/2005

Bob Carter argues the Group of 8 meeting recently blew open the global warming scam.

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Congratulations on an excellent article. I have long believed that this subject had become more of a secular religion designed to denigrate capitalism than a rational debate. One of the most basic inputs to both the carbon emission and african famine debate (which are very similar), is that to achieve anything you must first stabilise world population, and this is politically unacceptable. It all goes back to one of the most significant, but totally unknown politicians of the 20th century, Konrad Henlein, who was the leader of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia in the nineteen thirties, who said: "We must make demands that cannot be satisfied".
Posted by plerdsus, Thursday, 4 August 2005 9:59:11 AM
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An excellent and timely expose' of the "CO2 Flux Clan", Bob.
The only thing more dangerous than a myopic bureaucratic ideologue wielding a blunt instrument is a sleazy Eurocratic spiv wielding a Kyoto Protocol. When we eventually get hold of all the relevant files, history will judge the Australian Greenhouse Office to have fully explored the boundaries of treason.
Posted by Perseus, Thursday, 4 August 2005 11:15:54 AM
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Has our Liberal Party come in on the grouter and helped to knock out Kyoto? From an old cockie who has learnt the hard way about caring for the environment, finally giving credit to hard-fighting greenies and forward thinkers, the move against Kyoto seems too much like dirty underhand politics to steal the limelight to do something about our fast proving hotting up cataclysmic global future. Probably typical of Howard and Bush, but did they work this out while honest little Johnnie was over visiting in God's Own Country?

George C - WA - (Bushbred)
Posted by bushbred, Thursday, 4 August 2005 11:19:42 AM
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C'mon, seriously now, Professor Carter. You don't expect us to believe you're injecting rationality and cool, dispassionate detachment back into the global warming debate when you use words such as "propaganda", "apocalypse", "fear-mongering", "scaremongering", "outrageous", "alarmist", "warming evangelists", "naive theory", and "global-warming hype"...do you?

You criticise those who support the idea of human-induced global warming as being politically motivated, infering that those who deny such "naive theories" instead base their judgements on sound scientific knowledge, when in reality the whole debate is a political one. How can a balanced assessment be made when you deny that human's have had no impact on climate change? What is such a dangerous denial based on, if not political motivations?
Posted by mbd, Thursday, 4 August 2005 2:09:53 PM
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"Let rational discussion of the real climate change issue commence.": And what may that real issue be exactly?
Posted by Exadios, Thursday, 4 August 2005 2:38:56 PM
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Antarctic ice shelf collapse linked to global warming

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200508/s1429905.htm

mbd
you forget Bob also tries to slip in the slime that global warming freaks are only scaremongering in order to foil 'capitalism', whatever that is. I don't bellieve it exists, I mean where's the evidence? Sure you can come up with all sorts of numbers and there are all these 'shares' traded on stockmarkets, but where is the evidence that this leads to 'capitalism'. Looks like a leap of faith by a nuch of scardeycats to me.

Bob is the conspiracy freakhead. Paranoid, believes in things that aren't there, blames everyone else for them not working perfectly like wot god ordained.

....

I agree that risk management is important, but sliming people with this degree of silliness is not risk management, its political spin.

Mind you it is just a fear of fear opinion piece and so need not have anything to do with reality.

Risk management involves looking at risk, evaluating it by identification, impact, and how to avoid/manage it. Bob just wants to a call a spade an implement of fear in order to avoid discussing the risks, and calls those who do fearmongers, all the while trying to scare us with the 'it will destroy capitalism' scaremongering. Considering that there is no proof capitalism exists, as I have indicated above, this is all a bit rich.

The proper thing to do would be to look at our perceptions of risk, of nature, of work, of the market, but to do so involves psychological appreciation. Bob's not ready to do that, he just what to throw blame and scare people, much like he accuses the global warming scaremongers of doing, it could well be projection.

Unless he is working for a thinktank in which case it is paid for propaganda to hold the line while major investments are realigned....

except of course capitalism does not exist, or at least, maybe it has not really been tried yet...

Whatever happened to our leaders saying "we have nothing to fear except fear itself"

Or "fear of fear" for that matter.
Posted by meika, Thursday, 4 August 2005 2:47:10 PM
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interestingly, bob carter is a member of, and has published papers for the Tech Central Science Foundation, with an anual budget of $150,00US, $95,000US consisting of grants from ExxonMobil.

http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/files/corporate/giving_report.pdf
Posted by its not easy being, Thursday, 4 August 2005 5:04:30 PM
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"interestingly, bob carter is a member of, and has published papers for the Tech Central Science Foundation, with an anual budget of $150,00US, $95,000US consisting of grants from ExxonMobil."

Why am I not surprised? No wonder Bob is so keen to expose and discredit global warming "evangelists". Too bad your own credibility is shot. It's reminiscent of the natural progression of Bush climate change advisors - straight onto ExxonMobil's payroll. But I forgot, global warming denialists are completely apolitical, right? Let the rational discussion commence, just don't mention the responsibility of our corporate backers.
Posted by mbd, Thursday, 4 August 2005 5:48:37 PM
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A couple of points-
Those ‘scientists’ that believe global warming due to co2 is a crock are vastly outnumbered by those who believe in its generally agreed impact, present & future.
The article is quite possibly the most inflammatory, rhetoric laden, non-factual pile of…..oh why bother it deserves no further comment….
Posted by Swilkie, Thursday, 4 August 2005 7:26:38 PM
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Iteresting article .
I recall a news story only aired on one day in hobart , Then not mentioned again , not locally anyway . Something about a study of growth rings in deep sea kelp south of Tas indicating sea temperature increase fairly constant over past three hundred years or so .
You'd think that would inspire great discussion but it went quiet very quickly . Hmmm .
Posted by jamo, Friday, 5 August 2005 1:16:51 AM
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Bob Carter is just another of the mouthpieces for the global fossil fuel conglomerates desperately trying to avoid responsibility for the consequences of their means of wealth accumulation.

The presence of the greenhouse gases CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere over the last 450,000 years has been determined by examination of polar ice cores. In the four interglacial warm periods prior to the present one the CO2 never rose above 300 parts per million and CH4 never went above 800 parts per billion. The current situation is that CO2 is approaching 400 ppm and CH4 is over 1700 ppb.

This is incontrovertible evidence that the present situation is not some natural phase but a massive climate change unprecedented in the past half million years. All the name calling by the oil companies' paid scientists will not alter that, but it may well discourage any efforts to make timely and sensible preparations for the inevitable impacts of global weather disruption.
Posted by Sympneology, Friday, 5 August 2005 4:19:50 AM
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Goodness me, Bob, "no evidence that capitalism exists", the greens must have put a call out to "rentadiatribe" by the nature of the invective that is flying about.

For the record, Sympneology, I have the graph of the Vostock Ice Cores in front of me, courtesy of Qld NRM. See: Gabriel. M and Wilcocks. J, "Climate Change, the challenge for natural resource management" Qld NRM 2004, (Fig 2 p2).

It provides what is termed a temperature variation from the mean which could not possibly refer to the mean over the 420,000 years as only about 5% of the data set actually matches that mean. The rest is all 5 to 10 degrees C below it. The usual sloppy work, they are probably referring to the contemporary mean temperature. Ditto for Fig 3 (p3) where the line attributed to an 11 year mean temp. actually precedes the data to which it refers. Could it be that someone simply moved the trend line to the left a bit to make the rate of change appear more dramatic?

About the only message the ice cores send us is that CO2 might be a really good way to avoid or reduce the catastrophic consequences of a 100,000 year ice age.
Posted by Perseus, Friday, 5 August 2005 10:58:56 AM
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From the majority of comments so far, looks like the contributors believe that Professor Bob', is on a mission, but, by the looks - a money mission - so shocking for an academec who should be the other way round, looking after our planet instead of supporting those who are denuding it. As farmers we know very well what denuding means, over-clearing the planet of nature's way of purification- for without the trees and forests we would return to a 'scape like Mars.

Go for it, you insightly ones, the world so much needs you, the wealth that you are acccumulating is not money-wealth, but the wealth akin to foresightliness and commonsense, so much sorely needed these days both in economics and politics.

George, C - (Bushbred)
Posted by bushbred, Friday, 5 August 2005 1:04:33 PM
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Just read in the Aussie reprint of the "Guardian" two interesting pieces on the Kyoto Incident:

1. Who would believe it, but China has suggested to the rest of the ratpack anti-Kyoto mob she has just joined, that it is so important for both groups to get together and rationally discuss the worsening problems of the global ecology.

2. The Green Party has suggested that the new anti-Kyoto jag is really a coal pact involving cleaner ways of burning coal, and including with the US, four of the world's largest coal producers. Also, Australia and the US being on the wrong side of Kyoto, might miss out on a pro-Kyoto boom in clean-air technology.

Putting the two of the above together, China should get top marks for political and economic insight.

George C, WA - (Bushbred)
Posted by bushbred, Saturday, 6 August 2005 1:30:02 PM
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I think you misunderstand the graph, Perseus. What it shows is that the temperature variation is closely correlated with the rise and fall of the carbon gases in the atmosphere. After each ice age the CO2 and CH4 have risen steadily and the temperature has risen correspondingly until a peak has been reached where CO2 is about 280 ppm and CH4 is about 700 ppb. Then after a comparatively brief warm period (a few thousand years) some control mechanism kicks in and temperatures drop back to normal (ice age) levels for the next 100,000 years. What seems to be happening now is that, whatever the control mechanism was, it has been overwhelmed by the massive increase in the carbon gases over the last century. This may have saved us from the next ice age (though that may be just wishful thinking) but in the meantime we will have to endure the consequences of our profligate expenditure of the Earth's carbon capital. These will include rising sea levels, spreading deserts, more severe storms, ocean acidification, to mention just a few. This is not scaremongering, it is just facing the facts. All the weasel words of the spokesmen of the fossil fuel industries, designed to protect their profit margins, will not alter these facts.

I recommend you have a look at this site:

http://www.science.org.au/events/rowland
Posted by Sympneology, Saturday, 6 August 2005 10:46:55 PM
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Interesting article outlining the fact that we really don't whether global warming is primarily natural or influenced by human factors. It is a serious matter when the political Left (or Right) can influence scientific judgement. It is important to remember people are making as much money out of the "human caused disaster" scenario as any other with movies, political donations, board games and TV cartoon shows etc etc as the so-called oil lobby.

The problem for most of us is that we are suspicious of the misguided environmental evangelists yet would like to do our best to preserve our environment. We don't really know whats happening with our environment and it scares me when some pretend they do without scientific backup.
Posted by Livingstone, Sunday, 7 August 2005 6:31:20 PM
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Livingstone's "people are making as much money out of the "human caused disaster" scenario as any other with movies, political donations, board games and TV cartoon shows etc etc as the so-called oil lobby."

Yeah, right, there are these big corporations equivalent to Shell, Exxon, called umm, see, like , um, you know and then there's, and these large corporation make money like, from, like um, you know lets call them service stations they have hundred of cars coming into each one every day.

Your statement does not compute.

and "The problem for most of us is that we are suspicious of the misguided environmental evangelists yet would like to do our best to preserve our environment. We don't really know whats happening with our environment and it scares me when some pretend they do without scientific backup. "

you ever heard of the precautionary principle? If you don't know, don't leap before you look. Which is how we generally deal with externalities generating by our short term decisions in the market. You seem to be waiting for the glug glug glug around you throat.

The other problem with you sensate information seekers is that when daddy says "Don't touch it Johnny, its hot!" You have to reach out and touch it, and gee, goodness it is hot.

And now your finger's burnt. Trouble is daddy isn't getting paid to warn you. Thinking he _hurt_ you by telling you want to do, when in fact its you own ill-disciplined urges burning your fingers.

Corporations are toddlers, run by toddlers, 'NOBODY TELLS ME WHAT TO DO'

The temerity that some customers have because they do look ahead, in order to warn, leads to all sorts of psychological projection. Toddlers can't cope with it. Even though deep down they need it.

That people warning of a possible problems are lumped with the nonsensical spin that they are making more/same money out of it than petroleum companies? And you vote? Where are the figures?
Posted by meika, Monday, 8 August 2005 9:17:58 AM
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Carter has falsely claimed that the US National Academy of Sciences has disasociated itself from the joint statement. It has not. They disagree with the Royal Society's press release but stand by the statement. You can read the statement at http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/document.asp?latest=1&id=3222

Carter makes another outrageously false claim when he says that global temperatures are falling. Look at the graph and judge for yourself:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
Posted by Tim Lambert, Monday, 8 August 2005 11:33:45 PM
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Your site fails to tell the whole story, Sympneology. Increased CO2 follows temperature increases, not the other way around. You have the cart before the horse when you say;

“After each ice age the CO2 and CH4 have risen steadily and the temperature has risen correspondingly until a peak has been reached where CO2 is about 280 ppm and CH4 is about 700 ppb. Then after a comparatively brief warm period (a few thousand years) some control mechanism kicks in and temperatures drop back to normal (ice age) levels for the next 100,000 years”

You should see www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s605542.htm the intro of which states;

“Increased CO2 brings higher temperatures, Right? Wrong. Measurements of the Vostock Ice Cores reveal records of CO2 dating back 400,000 years and it’s been found that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the lowering of the temperature precedes the lowering of CO2 by several thousand years”.

Of particular interest is the period from 125,000 to 110,000 years ago when the CO2 lingers for 15,000 years in the upper 270 -280 ppmv range while temperatures trend consistently down to the opposite extreme, some 10 degrees C cooler. The increases and decreases in all the other interglacial temperature spikes precede the corresponding CO2 changes. So while there is obviously a correlation between the two data sets, changes in CO2 levels are clearly an effect rather than a cause of temperature change.

You, and the rest of the CO2 Flux Clan, cannot have it both ways. You cannot claim, on one hand, that CO2 causes temperature to rise while leaving the cause of temperature decline to “some unknown control mechanism”, as you call it . For the cause – effect relationship to exist it must operate in both directions. It operates in neither. And 15,000 years is a very long time for an inconvenient anomaly.
Posted by Perseus, Tuesday, 9 August 2005 10:17:01 AM
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What kind of nonsense is Mr Carter mouthing when he infers that Lord Robert May, President of the Royal Society and someone who can understand the mathematics of chaos theory and a great deal more, is so lacking in intelligence and integrity that he can have the wool pulled over his eyes in the matter of global warming?

What are the alarmist claims he refers to?

Are we to believe that Fred Singer’s views merit greater attention than those of the major scientific bodies around the world? Perhaps we can explore the research which supports a finite universe, that Wegener got it wrong about colliding continents, that dinosaurs were contemporaneous with earliest humans.

Perhaps social anthropologist Benny Peiser can contribute further scholarly research to those questions. Just as he did to “Adapt or Die” purporting to document the politics of climate change and supported by Exxon-Mobil. Peiser certainly is a most widely knowledgeable fellow. He has also analysed the published research on climate change. He has concluded, in a response to David King, Britain’s Chief Scientific Advisor, that “most researchers who support the theory of anthropogenic global warming are by no means agreed that it will result in large-scale calamity even if CO2 emissions were to double”. What researchers?

He also says, “'Throughout history, moderate warming has significantly contributed to enhanced living standards”. Peiser publishes in Spiked on-Line, a website like TechCentral.

Carter refers to the British House of Lords expressing scepticism about climate change. This is the select committee on economic affairs, not the select committee on science! Lord Wakeham, Chair of that Committee, was a director of Enron. It is not relevant to the argument that he is to be investigated over his role in the collapse of that company.

Mr Carter seems to have missed the fact that whether or not the Kyoto protocol will reduce global warming is not an argument about the causes of or evidence for global warming!

It is a great tribute to free speech that Mr Carter is able to air his views! Again!
Posted by Des Griffin, Tuesday, 9 August 2005 2:38:54 PM
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Perseus quoted from the ABC site:
"Increased CO2 brings higher temperatures, Right? Wrong. Measurements of the Vostock Ice Cores reveal records of CO2 dating back 400,000 years and it’s been found that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the lowering of the temperature precedes the lowering of CO2 by several thousand years”.
and added:
Of particular interest is the period from 125,000 to 110,000 years ago when the CO2 lingers for 15,000 years in the upper 270 -280 ppm range while temperatures trend consistently down to the opposite extreme, some 10 degrees C cooler. The increases and decreases in all the other interglacial temperature spikes precede the corresponding CO2 changes. So while there is obviously a correlation between the two data sets, changes in CO2 levels are clearly an effect rather than a cause of temperature change.

You will note that the only gas Michael Ghil referred to is CO2, not CH4. In the Vostock graph of the latter the fall in CH4 levels during that period _preceded_ the drop in temperature. Furthermore, the CO2 graph shows only one spike where the temperature rise slightly preceded the CO2 rise, the last glacial maximum, and there the temperature rise followed the CH4 rise.

Of even more interest is the sudden dip in temperature at the time of the Toba eruption, 74,000 years ago, which _was_ followed by a drop in CO2 levels, presumably as a result of the mass extinctions of mammals it caused, but had negligible effects on the CH4 levels.

The conclusion I draw from all this is that although climate change is an incredibly complex phenomenon, there is enough evidence now available to feel reasonably certain that anthropogenic greenhouse gases, not just CO2 but methane and chlorofluorocarbons as well, are an avoidable hazard to future life on this planet. Those who so strenuously try to deny this are either whistling in the wind or have a short term agenda to enrich themselves at our children's expense.
Posted by Sympneology, Tuesday, 9 August 2005 10:40:31 PM
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Not a very convincing effort, Sympneology. You forgot to mention all of the instances where the temperature drops while the CO2 merely trends down. You are still left high and dry with a leap of faith that the historically lagard CO2 will now become a cause of rising temperatures.

Qld DNRM as quoted earlier highlight the same leap of faith when they state;

"The cycles are driven by slight variations in the Earth's orbit and the angle of tilt in the Earth's axis towards the sun that cause fluctuations in climate AND SUBSEQUENT CHANGES IN GREENHOUSE GASES AND ICE SHEETS. We are now in a favourable warm period between ice ages".

But they provide no actual cause/effect to explain the leap of faith that followed when they continued with the predictable;

"The increase in greenhouse gas levels is causing further warming and pushing global temperature TOWARDS (my emphasis) levels not seen for thousands of years".

Note the term TOWARDS does not mean those temperatures have already arrived. Indeed, the Vostock graph clearly shows the past 10,000 years to have fluctuated within the temperature range exhibited in the past 150 years. It is the usual departmental spin.

I suggest you take a good look at "still waiting for greenhouse" at www.john-daly.com
Posted by Perseus, Wednesday, 10 August 2005 12:13:11 PM
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well, thank goodness he has been unmasked as a stooge for the oil industry.

having just been nearly broiled alive in the northern hemisphere, I reckon the evidence of my senses (and record electricity use, record temperatures, record droughts) is enough to persuade anyone that something unpleasant is happening to our climate. oh yes, and the record number of named hurricanes early in the season. connect the dots, Bob. Working for big oil means you can never shed the grease.
Posted by sarah m, Thursday, 11 August 2005 8:52:08 PM
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I'm not a scientist, but I did study geology at university. The preceding debate just goes to show how raw data doesn't mean a thing, it's how you interpret it that counts. Does the truth depend on philosophical leanings or financial dealings? I don't wish to incur a debate on objectivity and truth, but I applaud Sarah's injection of common sense into this debate. Going on first principles, the greenhouse gases we have released into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is IN ADDITION to any natural causes/fluctuations we can analyse from ice cores, etc. What we have done is unprecendented. In that sense, Professor Carter, and indeed the "influential" (cue exaggerated bow) Economic Affairs Commitee is right in asserting that climate science is "uncertain". Is that a permit to dismiss alternative views blindly and buy shares in ExxonMobil? We can gaze at ice cores and associated graphs as long as we like, but no-one really knows the consequences of human input into the carbon cycle.
Posted by mbd, Thursday, 11 August 2005 11:52:36 PM
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All over Queensland on Friday 12th August 2005, towns have experienced the lowest winter maximum temperatures on record. Rockhampton had the lowest temp since 1899. This is an equally valid indication of a pending ice age as a hot summer is of global warming.

We will only know for sure in 5,000 to 10,000 years. And the most probable consequence of waiting will be an extended interglacial warm period in which man will continue to thrive. The worst case scenario is that we put our entire world economy into free fall to restrict CO2 and then get hit with a 10 degree temperature drop that we are unable to cope with. Ten to fifteen millenia is the extent of the recorded variance between temperature changes and CO2 changes.

Do I need to spell that out again? Levels of CO2 have been demonstrated to act independently of temperature for up to 15,000 years. So anyone who seeks to extrapolate from a data set as short as a century is doing so for reasons other than science.
Posted by Perseus, Saturday, 13 August 2005 3:28:16 PM
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