While various commentators have suggested that the debate is over, that anthropogenic global warming is a reality and the deniers should be silenced, if not jailed, last week there was a high profile debate on the motion "Global Warming is not a Crisis" in New York.**
The proposition, Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen and Philip Stott, won by 46% to 42%. Before the event the organizers found the motion would have been disapproved of 57% to 30%, indicating a swing in favour of the global warming skeptics.
This morning I received an email requesting I post the details of a second possible debate, this time between The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and Vice-President Albert Gore on the subject “That our effect on climate is not dangerous” to be held in the Library of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History at a date of the Vice-President’s choosing.
Ewire.com is advertising the debate with comment that:
"Monckton a former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said, "A careful study of the substantial corpus of peer-reviewed science reveals that Mr. Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, is a foofaraw of pseudo-science, exaggerations, and errors, now being peddled to innocent schoolchildren worldwide."
Monckton and Gore have once before clashed head to head on the science, politics, and religion of global warming in the usually-decorous pages of the London Sunday Telegraph last November.
Monckton calls on the former Vice President to "step up to the plate and defend his advocacy of policies that could do grave harm to the welfare of the world's poor. If Mr. Gore really believes global warming is the defining issue of our time, the greatest threat human civilization has ever faced, and then he should welcome the opportunity to raise the profile of the issue before a worldwide audience of billions by defining and defending his claims against a serious, science-based challenge". [end of quote]
My guess is that Al Gore will decline the invitation. He has so far been reluctant to debate, declining the opportunity to go head-to-head with the skeptical environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg, when he visited Denmark last year.
Monckton ended his invitation with "May the truth win! Magna est veritas, et praevalent".
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** You can read a 79 page transcript of the New York debate at http://www.crichton-official.com/GlobalWarmingDebate.pdf
And so will I, Arnost!
Luke
Typical of you Luke - you just link what appears to be convenient and then use this as a basis to ad hom others.
Sigh - as I said in the comments on that post a month ago, the jury is still out.
All the paper is saying is that a correction to satelite data appears to be required since it appears that there's more clouds than the satelites measured.
It's not saying anything about GCRs. All that is Nexus' interpretation.
So what you really can take out of it is that the GCM's are probably underestimating the cloud cover (I betcha they use this "wrong" satelite data) and therefore their projections overestimate the projected warming.
I'll take Shaviv over Nexus any time.
cheers
Arnost
But alas Arnost you ahve failed to read Nexus above. A snippet ! (drat eh?)
We have demonstrated that the long-term global trends in cloudiness from the ISCCP record are influenced by artefacts associated with satellite viewing geometry. Results from earlier studies based on these trends may be influenced by these non-physical artefacts, and we therefore suggest that development of a correction for the data is warranted. As the number of publications on the subject of climate change continues to grow [Stanhill, 2001], this paper highlights the need to critically explore the source of any trends in global, multi-decadal satellite data sets.
Paper and Nexi's post has more.
There are two theories:
More solar activty = Higher Temps
More solar activity = Less Cosmic Ray influence = Less Clouds = Higher Temps.
cheers
Arnost
"(1) If cosmic rays affect climate then you will have another possible explanation to the observed global warming, since overall, the cosmic ray flux (at high energies, those which are responsible for the tropospheric ionization) has increased over the 20th century (increased up to the 1940's then again from the 1970's).
[Response: Some say that the cosmic flux has to decrease in order to get a warming, the hypothesis being that they affect the nucleation of cloud condensation nuclei and thus the low cloud cover (personally, I'm still far from convinced!). So, how do you propose that the rays affect the climate (I must have missed something here - admittedly, I didn't look up all your links...), and why do you think that the other explanation is wrong and yours is true (they clearly cannot both be true). -rasmus]"
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/thank-you-for-emitting/
So has rasmus got it right here? There are two sides claiming a solar influence that has been unaccounted for, each contradicting the other.
Yea - he got a good hearing. You think he won do you? Pity all his satellite data is unravelling just like for UHI.
http://n3xus6.blogspot.com/2007/02/its-curtains-for-cosmic-rays.html
Whoops !
If you want to have a look at Shaviv in action as per Sid's post, see this Real Climate thread esp. 37 - 125
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/thank-you-for-emitting/
And the principal deabate is with the RC principals Gavin / Rasmus etc...
cheers
Arnost