In an early blog post titled 'Debate and Dissent is Healthy', part of my series on Al Gore's movie 'An Inconvenient Truth', I explained how tabloid e-news site Crikey had started a list of global warming skeptics and was suggesting that we were a small and misguided 'clique'.
According to their journalist Sophie Black I got on the list because I once wrote: "As a consequence of the burning of fossil fuels, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are currently increasing. There is no evidence, however, to suggest this will bring doom or that, by signing the Kyoto Protocol, Australia would make a significant difference to global carbon dioxide levels or to the rate of climate change."
So it's not so much that I deny global warming or climate change (and by the way I don't), or that I deny that increasingly levels of carbon dioxide may drive some warming, but rather I have been labeled a skeptic because I don't believe in Kyoto or that the current elevated atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide mean we are ruin.
Today Crikey has published the names of MORE so-called global warming skeptics. It includes: Miranda Devine (Sydney Morning Herald columnist), my colleague at the IPA Alan Moran, Prof Jon Jenkins, (NSW Parliament), blogger Tim Blair, radio broadcaster Alan Jones, the Prime Minister John Howard, Alan Oxley (Head of APEC Studies Centre at Monash University), Christopher Pearson (columnist with The Weekend Australian), The Australian Industry Greenhouse Network's John Eyles and Christian Kerr (Crikey journalist).
But Christian was given the opportunity to immediately deny that he is a skeptics with the comment: "I’m not a climate change sceptic. I’m not a Chicken Little, either. Science shows us that global temperatures have varied throughout the earth’s history. And science has also shown itself more than capable of overcoming remarkable challenges. Sorry if that disappoints the apocalyptically-minded."
Come on Christian Kerr! If I am a skeptic you're a skeptic. I also believe in science and technology and haven't written anywhere that the sky is falling in.
The original global warming skeptics list published by Crikey on Friday included William Kininmonth (former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation), Ray Evans (once executive at Western Mining Corporation), Chris Mitchell (Editor-in-chief of The Australian), Terry McCrann (News Ltd business writer), Andrew Bolt (Herald Sun columnist), Hugh Morgan (head of the Business Council of Australia until 2005), Alan Wood (The Australian's finance writer), Ian Castles (Former head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics), Ian Plimer (Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide), Bob Carter (A former director of the Australian Ocean Drilling Office, Professor of paleoclimatology at James Cook University) and me.
I am going to nominate a reader, commentator and contributor to this blog Paul Williams to the growing clique of global warming skeptics for his great contribution to dissent and debate by way of that blog post titled 'Hockey Sticks & Ancient Pine Trees'.
And also, On Line Opinion editor and blogger, Graham Young, for suggesting Tuvalu and Kiribati still exist as Pacific Islands in his blog post of 8th May last year entitled 'Antropophagai anyone'.
I invite others to nominate their favourite skeptic with a short justification by way of comment below.
You may also like to send your nomination and justification to Crikey with an email to boss@crikey.com.au.
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Today's Crikey list include the following contributions from the named skeptics:
Miranda Divine for 'Its the End as He Knows it' published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 10th August, and
Alan Moran for 'Alarm on Global Warming Just a Load of Hot Air' published in the Age on 8th September.
Ian, a good post...
"These NASA guys appear to be extrapolating from the rate of glacier melt which is much faster than the melting of the main ice body. We need to know what proportion of the total sheet area is taken up by glaciers before drawing any conclusions."
I haven't studied this , but as I understand most of Greenland and Antarctica are an ICE SHEET. And an ice sheet is also a glacier.
Glaciers are classified based on their size and their relationship to topograhy. The smallest glaciers are valley glaciers or alpine glaziers.
Larger masses are called ice caps.
The largests of the world's glacier's are ice sheets. An ice sheet is a body of ice that covers an entire land mass or continent.
So the question arise , do coastal glaciers melt faster than the inland ice sheet, are there variations....
Luke,
I would prefer we stuck to the issues. But you seem incapable of it - when its not going so good with the argument you revert to personal attack of professional scientists who disagree with your position.
If qualifications are so important then please list your qualifications here or send them to me and i will post them as as a new thread.
Oh - his field - is that modern meteorology? or geology?
That's bloody insulting - it has nothing to with "better funded science manager" - it has all to do with logic and facts. As for "nasty" - Jen - take a serious read of the totally abusive style of you "contrarian" clique which you pander to. Utterly abusive in the main.
So you agree with the warming since 1998 ruse then? and the satellite ruse. You are blind to any fundamentals in the debate. Do you fully support Carter's comments as discussed above then? Yes or no.
Carter is not commenting as some hack on a blog - but in national newspaper position pieces as a professor of a serious institution.
I find it interesting that you guys can serve it out - name calling BoM, CSIRO, the IPCC, Flannery, Lowe - a huge body of staff- with such venom but do the glass jaw routine if anyone say "boo" in return. Unimpressed.
No Luke, Profesor Bob Carter is an expert in his field while you and Mr Lambert just hang off every word from the better funded science manager.
Graham - you haven't even bothered to put the brain in gear and consider my response.
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/co2-lags-not-leads.html
Of course you'll have to hold two issues in your mind at once which might be a challenge.
There is more in the science literature.
The issue with continents in different configurations at different latitudes with vastly different ecosystems, flora and fauna with who knows what orbital arrangements of the sun/earth means simply that you have no real idea what prehistoric climate was really like. And we have had not had 6 billion humans with the world in its current configuration and current ecosystems exposed to vast quantities of atmospheric CO2 before. And you seem to forget that drought, floods, heatwaves and hurricanes already do us considerable harm. Your argument is utterly meaningless as any comparison with the modern day, and really quite stupid.
Perhaps you might argue that the world survived Krakatoa too - pity those sitting under it did not !
You might ask yourself what forces drive evolution - I think you'll find climate is a significant factor. Climate effects from asteroid impact or other effects may have caused massive extinction events.
And the outcome of evolution does not have be something you "prefer". Cockroaches are just fine if that's what works.
It's not the IPCC average temperatures that are an issue - it's changes in the extremes of the distributions. That's what causes problems with wildlife. Graham - where do you suggest a montane species near its thermal limit go to if it's near the top of a mountain. Anyway - you know the examples of all this. you're just being provocative.
Re Bob Carter - are you really serious ! He's just a knocker not a researcher in the field.
http://timlambert.org/category/science/bobcarter/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=290#comment-11443
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/04/warming-stopped-in-1998.html
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/04/a_picture_is_worth_a_thousand.php
http://timlambert.org/2005/07/bob-carter-yet-again/usand.php
These NASA guys appear to be extrapolating from the rate of glacier melt which is much faster than the melting of the main ice body. We need to know what proportion of the total sheet area is taken up by glaciers before drawing any conclusions.
I do note, from reversing the maths back from total sea area of 362.5 million km2 multiplied by the 0.007km projected sea level rise that the assumed average depth of the 1.7m km2 ice sheet is a very neat 1.5km thick. If it were a number more like 1.63 or 1.42 it would have the ring of a properly calculated value but this neat 1.5km which is exactly half of the widely touted "up to 3km thick" indicates that it is merely an assumption.
But even if we accept the assumed depth of 1.5km we get a total ice volume of 2.5378 million km2, of which an anual loss of 220km2 is only 0.00867 of 1% a year which, on a straight line basis would take 11,535 years for complete melt.
The problem with extrapolating from glacier melting rates is that once they have melted the melt rate reverts to zero while the rest of the ice sheet just sits there as it has always done.
To use a rate based on a doubling of volume every 10 years, (ie 7% annual increment) and continuing at that rate in perpetuity, is so misleading as to constitute misrepresentation.
And it is worth noting that the article itself is guilty of exaggerating its own data, claiming that melt volumes doubled in five years when the actual period was 1996 to 2005.
Luke, yes, I tend not to spend a lot of time monitoring this blog. If you can't answer a simple question straight, what's the point in hanging around?
Your answer to my two questions appears to be that because continents were differently aligned in the past higher CO2 levels didn't lead to higher temperatures. You've got to do a bit better than that. That's not an argument, it's an assertion.
Then you throw in a bit of nonsense about how there were different species then, so it would all be different now. Well, not really. It wasn't the temperature that primarily caused there to be different animals then, it was evolution. And higher temperatures now, even of those in the order of the IPCC's most likely scenarios wouldn't kill off our wild life.
You didn't even bother to answer the issue of CO2 peaking after temperature rises and declining after temperature falls, which arises from observations, not theories. But you did have a gratuitous go at smearing Bob Carter, which is par for the course with the Global Warming Alarmists - try to ridicule anyone who points out problems with your theories.
As a student of social behaviour, the group think and moral panic that this issue brings out is enthralling. Luckily, for those of us in the west it is unlikely to have any serious outcomes - we'll be comfortable no matter what action is forced on us to counteract global warming. It could be more serious for those in the developing world. But anyway, we do need to find substitutes for carbon fuels some time in the next couple of hundred years, so perhaps it's all just a harmless sideshow.
Hey Ian, I try to not cop out but math calculations ain't my strong side...
OK,found an interesting article that seems to support Holdrens position. Even Greenpeace's and the Maine University's study seems to be outdated.
It was thought the entire Greenland ice sheet could melt in about 1000 years, but the latest evidence suggest that could happen much sooner.
The new data will cut this timescale...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4720536.stm
Ian,
I think you have misunderstood me a little bit...
I stated that Professor Holdren said that it was within the possibility that a sea level rise with about 4 metres might occur within the next century or so...This seemed to be the latest news.
OK guys, I know you are not any fans of Greenpeace, but their ship the Arctic Sunrise was up in Greenland last year together with independent scientists from Maine University and their predictions were that it will take about 1000 years to melt the Greenland ice sheet...
BTW, I saw the documentary from the expedition on the melting of the glaciers and trust me, it was a bit scary, the pace was indeed very fast...