Global warming - myth, threat or opportunity : Comments

By Walter Starck, published 14/7/2008

The most critical problem we now confront is how to provide enough affordable fuel to avoid severe recession before alternative energy can become reality.

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Posted by one under god, Tuesday, 15 July 2008 9:39:30 AM

Strewth! Years ago I taught this myopic style of reasoning to sell products only then we called the “Reduction to the ridiculous technique” (Answer each point in isolation, ignore the ‘Big Picture”) followed by “YOU might miss out threat technique” (if it’s wrong YOU’ll miss out on something).

Fundamentalist “intelligent design” (sic) theorist use this same methods of pedantic fact by fact arguing while ignoring the linkages between disparate facts.

The problem isn’t ‘global warming’ as understood by the public aided and abetted by self interested or opportunistic “nay sayers”. Warming, cooling who cares what is important that the environment that supports us is being polluted to the point of being no longer able to recover. Evidence is both apparent and from multi- disciplined Science (Agriculture to Zoology). It therefore stands to reason that any solution should be also multi-focused THERE IS NO magic Bullet.

Comparisons with Y2K are spurious as it was a single discipline issue failure.

The much overlooked issue is that our civilization is based on petrochemicals products and by-products. Petrochemicals (oil) supplies us with plastics, fabrics, tyres, flavourings, dyes, pharmaceuticals in fact almost every thing we associate with modern living. Common sense there dictates we seek other forms of fuel and cut emissions but the others?

The author’s “…drastic cuts in carbon emissions to prevent global-warming is to climate what anorexia is to obesity” is colourful but hardly accurate. His assumptions are predicated on the belief that current ways are the only ways. This issue proves that our current ways (version of Capitalism?) are dysfunctional.

To even consider profit and galloping intellectual inertia as more acceptable than potentially human survival is bizarre at best. It reminds me of the man who fell from the Empire State building. He was heard saying as passed each floor “So far so good. Where’s the problem?”

To me it comes down to really want to be the most spectacular among the other fossil record? Like the Indian Chief said in essence “When all the food is gone try eating your money”

Posted by examinator, Tuesday, 15 July 2008 12:25:46 PM

The authors updated their earlier work to show that the oceans were not in fact cooling - this was a spurious result caused by two uncontrolled biases in the Argo instruments. To cite:

Correction to “Recent Cooling 1 of the Upper Ocean”

Josh K. Willis, John M. Lyman,3, Gregory C. Johnson and John Gilson

Two systematic biases have been discovered 9 in the ocean temperature data used by Lyman et al. [2006]. These biases are both substantially larger than sampling errors estimated in Lyman et al. [2006], and appear to be the cause of the rapid cooling reported in that work.

Most of the rapid decrease in globally integrated 18 upper (0–750 m) ocean heat content anomalies (OHCA) between 2003 and 2005 reported by Lyman et al. [2006] appears to be an artifact resulting from the combination of two different instrument biases recently discovered in the in situ profile data. Although Lyman et al. [2006] carefully estimated sampling errors, they did not investigate potential biases among different instrument types. One such bias has been identified in a subset of Argo float profiles. This error will ultimately be corrected. However, until corrections have been made these data can be easily excluded from OHCA estimates (see http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/ for more details). Another bias was caused by eXpendable BathyThermograph (XBT) data that are systematically warm compared to other instruments [Gouretski and Koltermann, 2007]. Both biases appear to have contributed equally to the spurious cooling.

Or in more layman's terms:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/ocean-cooling-and-global-warming/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/ocean-heat-content-revisions/

Posted by Barry Brook, Tuesday, 15 July 2008 2:12:30 PM

Barry,

Maybe Don Aitken should be made aware of this as he mentions the Argo research in his article

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7639&page=0

I don't like people of his stature misrepresenting the science.

Posted by Q&A, Tuesday, 15 July 2008 2:49:30 PM

So it's all just a big conspiratorial scam to raise more taxes?

Considering that it's the politicians who actually implement these measures that are going to take any hit at the ballot box and mainly future ones - years from now - who will reap any huge taxation benefits, I don't think that argument makes much sense, especially when entire governments could change in that period.

What politicians tend to do is to create some sort of menace, amplify and distort it and then bravely step in to save us all in the hope of winning more votes at the next election.

The can't do that here because any perceived benefits would take years to become known.

Maybe - just maybe - the scientists are telling the truth.

Posted by wobbles, Tuesday, 15 July 2008 3:47:47 PM

"Being energy independent would be a huge competitive advantage in a time of high energy costs and shortages everywhere else." Not at all - the competitive price for the fuel would be what it gets on the world market. Competitive advantage derives from being able to offer the buyer a more attractive deal than your competitors while getting at least as high a return on your investment and inputs as you could in their best alternative use, it's not affected by being "energy independent."

Posted by Faustino, Tuesday, 15 July 2008 5:52:33 PM

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