I have two words that give me the last laugh no-matter what: Inland. State.

Not that it's not a desert. And I might miss theme-parks.

They are quite "righteous"... however, you seem quite upset by the tone of the blog...

Whenever somebody tells me to trade my truck in for a Hybrid or something, the excuse is always to "Save on Gas" or "Save the Environment"... when it's the later, I laugh.  Those batteries go someplace when you throw em out, right?

But my favorite is the first one... save on gas.  It's quite the short term goal, as the maintenance is near twice as expensive, and the half life of a hybrid is nowhere near what my Truck's lifespan is.

...of course... they don't really look at it that way.

Remember Captain Planet?

They are obnoxious to begin with, I mean, how arrogant do you have to be to believe that we can alter the course of nature? Its like saying we have the power to stop a tornado or a tsunami. We know the earth is probably warming, but we can't prove why, or even more importantly, if theres anything we can do to stop it.

And perhaps they should start with smaller tasks, for instance, how do we keep the San Andreas fault from changing the geography of America. It could be 100 years from now or it could be tomorrow, but we know that California will almost certainly see dramatic, catastrophic changes in the future...

The thing most people forget is that nature and the weather is cyclical.  There are periods of warming and cooling, who is to say that we are having any kind of effect at all.  As George Carlin once said (I'm paraphrasing here) "The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years.  Man has been around for a couple million.  And we have only been in the industrial age for about a hundred years.  I think the earth will be ok."

That's not to say that we shouldn't be looking for alternatives to oil, oil is a finite resource and will eventually run out.  So we need to spend time now finding renewable energy for our own longevity, not because the environment is in peril.

I think OPEC has finally spurred us to do just that.

As for Global Warming, Al Gore is still out there (yesterday in fact) spouting his new religion. With no facts. Just belief. You cannot debate a religion and that is what this is. It is not science, but the latest mysticism that the "nobless oblige" have taken up when they threw off the old gods.

The debate about whether global warming is real, or if it is then 'manmade' or exacerbated by man's activities, is not one that can occur in popular press. It's nice that Dr. David Evans posted an article in The Australian. However, as a scientist he will know better than anyone else that the way to expound his beliefs on this topic is to have them published in a scientific journal, where they will be open to peer review by other credentialled scientists.

Whether or not your "smug" relatives obnoxiously declare that global warming is real and they know it 100% around the dinner table is really quite irrelevant. On the other side of the coin, if you're not a scientist (credentials) and you haven't published anything in a journal for peer review, then your viewpoint falls into the same boat. This applies to me as well as I'm not credentialled and have never published a science paper!

So, we must trust the scientific method. It is what has taken humanity this far thus far. And thus far, it  appears (notice how I said appears, not is for certain) that global warming is probably real and caused or exacerbated by man.

The Australian and NYT and the WAPO can publish all the articles they want about the falsity of global warming, and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh can rail against it all they want. It really doesn't mean anything until the theory has been disproven by the scientific method, which if it is, I suspect quite a few people will breathe a sigh of relief!

Wow. I'm pleased to know that the global warming crowd has promoted the topic back to being something that can be debated.  I was under the impression that "the debate is over" and that those who were skeptical were "deniers" who just need to know the "facts".

That said, your argument that I have to be an acredited scientist to have valid opinions on a particular topic is nonsense.  We are not all seperated by two camps (scientists and laypeople).  There is a wide gap between individuals in their knowledge and understanding of tehse issues. 

Human produced global warming, as a hypothesis, is not particularly complicated.  I am educated enough to look at the evidence and make my own conclusions. 

What seperates me and the global warming zealots is that I am not trying to force governments or people to change their economies or ram my opinions down people's throats.  I've looked at the available evidence and have never been persuaded that humans are the primary cause.  I don't need to write peer reviewed science papers to be confident in my own judgment.

Just remember, it's not "our side" that is out browbeating people over the head with "climate change" dogma.  We're insulted and patronized simply because we're skeptics.  So your message should really target thoe global warming zealots, not those who are skeptical.

Truer words have never been said on this topic.

That’s because your side believes were not contributing too global warming, “The earth is not in peril, we must do absolutely nothing right now”, pretty redundant don’t you think?

"We must do absolutely nothing right now" is the funniest slogan I've heard since the evangelical agnostic warcry, "Accept ambiguity into your possibly existent soul!"

Excuse me for complaining about bugs, but when I click the Login button at the top of Draginol.joeuser.com, I get taken to draginol.joeuser.com/%20login.  In IE or Firefox.  Of course I removed the %20 but that didn't help.  Then I tried the register link at the bottom of this page and got to draginol.joeuser.com/+login.  The weird thing is that after I did that in Internet Explorer, now the original login button takes me there too -- in Internet Explorer and Firefox.  Even though I never visited the register link in Firefox.

"Global warming crowd"? If there is such a group I don't consider myself part of it. I have never stated that absolutely 100% global warming is man-made, just that I believe much I have seen from scientists and their publications indicates that there's a high probability. Once again, I don't give a crap about the so-called "zealotry" you claim we are all victims of. This does not come down to the media, or Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh or the Heritage Foundation or Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. Quite simply, we need to let the scientific method run it's course free from interference!



This is true. Conceptually, the way an engine works isn't overly complicated. Conceptually, the fusion reaction we call the sun isn't over complicated. That does not mean that these things are actually simple, and the devil is indeed in the details. You should know this better than anyone here, as you come from a programming background (please correct me if I'm wrong?)

Conceptually, I understand that complicated programs are at their base level comprised of fairly simple commands that create things like feedback loops and at the machine level move bits through a register somewhere. And that's great. But for me to say that since I succeeded in causing a fan to turn on a circuit board with some assembly programming in college that I can now understand and write code for games, is a far stretch indeed.

At it's core, the global warming theory is easy to understand, but our atmosphere, climate and ecosystem and the interaction of all these things is very complicated. As is the same with all things in life, the whole becomes much greater than the sum of it's parts. Whatever we decide to call "the whole" whether it be a large IP network that has converged and is running properly, or a PC Game or an automobile engine, to really get into these things we need people who know enough about them to really make informed decisions. I sure don't know enough to make an informed decision and if I wanted to I would have to change careers and dedicate much of my life to research. Thankfully though there are people out there right now already doing that, so we should seriously listen to them!

And to be honest I blame both camps on this issue for muddying things up for the public. The truth is, there shouldn't be any "sides" on this issue. There should only be the scientific method, which is the best thing we've got for determining issues like this. Big oil companies should be ashamed for offering large sums of money for people to produce papers that will contradict global warming. So too should organizations like greenpeace that state unequivocally (spelling??) that we're all gonna be roasting in a self created hell for driving to the corner store.

Rather than let lay-folk who really don't know enough about the topics to fill the airwaves with biased rants for or against, we should all be LISTENING to the scientific community.

The Australian and NYT and the WAPO can publish all the articles they want about the falsity of global warming, and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh can rail against it all they want. It really doesn't mean anything until the theory has been disproven by the scientific method, which if it is, I suspect quite a few people will breathe a sigh of relief!

Excuse me?! And I do believe that this is the key flaw in your argument: it is up to the person or persons who advocate a position to prove it - not up to the disbelievers to disprove it. That, is a very major part of the scientific method!

Hell, I said that 10 years ago! 



I love this argument. How do you know that he did not publish a paper for peer review?

Next, we come to the biggest lie ever told. The IPCC report on Global Climate Change was never sent up for peer review. The supposed consensus of scientists that concur with this report is another lie told to give it credibility. The consensus held up for us to see is the letter written by the writers of the report saying that they stand behind their contribution to the report but not any other part of the report. This means that there is not a consensus that the report is valid or that his has been challenged by peer review. Credentialed scientist have not signed off on this report in the review process and with that I will add that the IPCC is now backing down from its claim that man is the cause or even a contributing factor of this global warming/climate change.

The IPCC has been forced to admit that during the 10 years they have been telling us that we are all going to die from man made global warming the planet has been cooling off and getting colder. This was in a press release go to the UN website to see it for yourself.

Because the Earth was going through its normal warming cycle while the study was being prepared everything looked as if it was going to continue on the trend they had seen and hoped for. Then that reality thing got in the way. The last ten years the earth has been cooling, as I said, and solar climatologist are worried because the Sun is not giving off as many sunspots as they think it should and that means we are in for colder times for us on the Earth. Now that can change at any time but as it is looking now we are in for colder winters and cooler summers. This summer has been cooler than last summer in my part of the world and we are seeing more rain than last year so far.

This is the part I like. I told everyone in my global warming articles the sun was the reason we have hot or cold weather and man has little to do with it.




If you trust the scientific method why do you trust the IPCC report, or the global climate change nuts? The Sun is the cause for our warming. This is a theory put forth 40 years ago. It has been proven in 1977 and again in 1980. It was subject to peer review and no one but nuts have objected to it. The only alternative theory to the one NASA put out for the world to review is the IPCC report, witch has been discredited by credentialed scientists over the last five years but no one wants to listen to them because there is this supposed world wide consensus that no one can find. All we get are letters from the same scientists that wrote the report.

Just incase you did not read it the first few times I wrote this, a consensus is an agreement by all parties to agree or at least go along with the proposal. Since that would mean all climatologist would have to agree or it is not a consensus. You don’t have a consensus. A consensus is not a scientific fact, it just means that people agree even though there is no proof that the agreement is correct or factual. A consensus is not peer review of any sort. Now some elements of the report have been published and reviewed by peers the entire report has not. The IPCC just published the entire 10 year old report two years ago and as it is being reviewed it has been debunked. Each fact has to be checked and tested this will take years and in just a few months of its publication people started backing away from it.



If that is your stance you are welcome to it but I thought you wanted to stand on the scientific method rather than people just stating their opinions.

The IPCC report on Global Climate Change is not anything more than a hypothesis, a guess if you will. The scientific method means it has to be proven independently by at least one outside laboratory or group of scientists. When there is more facts to suggest it might be true then it moves to the realm of scientific theory. The example would be the theory or relativity. It is just a theory because it has not been proven though some elements have been proven. There are too many mistakes in the math to make it a fact yet. This theory has been tested for the last 80 or 90 years and we are still calling it a theory.

The theory of evolution is another one, there are no facts to prove this theory, there are some facts that suggest it is not totally wrong but nothing to prove it is right. The theory has been tested for the last 100 years and we still have no proof.

If people take this theory of climate change as fact they are headed for a disaster, because they want to change the world and it might do more harm than good. During the last theory on climate change people were talking about melting the ice caps at the poles to save mankind from the impending doom of the next ice age. This may sound silly now but 30 years ago when we were just coming out of our cooling cycle the consensus was in 10 to 20 years the Earth will be covered in ice 3 miles thick. 30 years later you can’t find a scientist that will stand behind the theory. This is what makes it so dangerous, we act now and find out later we screwed the pooch. Once the peer review process is over in maybe 20 years we might have some more facts but right this minute the working theory is that the Sun is the cause of our climate warm or cold just as it is on every other planet in the solar system.

Keep in mind that the heat from the Sun radiates out at about a million miles an hour and terminates at the thermal shock barrier. This barrier is some distance from the Sun. do the math. One million miles an hour and it takes 400 days to reach the barrier. From that point it really gets cold. Without our Sun the planet Earth would be a nice comfortable -400 degrees C. The temperature on the Moon without and atmosphere to speak of is a nice +250 in sunlight and -240 in the shade. The reason the Moon is so warm in the shade is because of the heat radiating from the Sun. I will also mention that the atmosphere on the planet Mars is CO2 a green house gas that we are all told will trap in the heat making it so warm it will melt our ice caps and drown us all. The summer heat wave on the planet Mars is around -75 to -48 degrees. Where is all the heat it is trapping, why have not the ice caps melted yet?



For that you need an unbiased press. As it stands right now the press is pushing global climate change and man is the cause. People who can read disagree with them and this is where the line is drawn. People that believe in man as the cause do so not for scientific reasons but for political reasons. But politics has become a driving force in the debate. There is no scientific proof of man made climate change only anecdotes. There are reams of scientific evidence that proves other wise from NASA, ESA, and the USGS to name a few. These reports some of them written long before the climate change people had a report to point to, and no political axe to grind. President Johnson was in office when it was theorized that the Sun controlled our weather. President Carter was in office when the theory was proven so it is not a democrat vs. republican thing or not until recently. Two different congresses have voted down the Kyoto accords one democrat one republican. Two presidents chose not to sign off on the accords, President Clinton and President Bush. Again no left right politics involved. Then the climate nuts started to fund the democrats and they jumped on the band wagon. Not because they are true believers but because they are getting money to support the theory, and money equals votes.



YEAH, what he said!  

Paladin-

Nowhere in my comments here have I even mentioned or referred to the IPCC report on climate change. That is a political document, NOT a scientific paper. In that I agree with you 100 % However, that paper was produced because most of the research conducted, using the scientific method, supports the position that there is a good chance our activities are contributing noticeably to climate change. As I have said before, if the wool has clearly been pulled over our eyes you should be writing all of the organizations that have signed onto it and showing them the error of their ways with your "warm sun" theory.

And yes, I know that the sun is responsible for warming the earth. I don't think we'd be here without it

Bunna-

Actually, it's both. The beauty of the scientific method is that it is very demanding and unforgiving; if 100 experiments are conducted that support a particular theory, that's great. If just one valid, legitimate experiment is conducted that proves that theory to be false or incorrect, then it must be revised or thrown out altogether.