Defining the past, in terms of the present, is how you rewrite history to make it appear align with present politics. This is called political science and is an effective tool for manipulation. For example, today I can walk in a straight for miles. When I was a baby, many years ago. I used to wobble and walk in a meanadering path for only a few steps. If I define the past in terms of the present, I must have either been playing around or not trying hard enough as a baby since I obviously know how to walk. Or maybe I was not feeling good that day (thats the ticket). These is wiggle room for political science. If you define the present in terms of the past, it tends to align the past and present with that inconvenient truth called reality. Using the walking example, babies can't walk well, which is normal. I would conclude I must have progressed from that simple beginning to the present, with walking improving with age and practice. Which of the two would approaches is better for political science, allowing one to take a side and define it the way you need? If the current political climate is about X and I define the past in terms of X, I create the illusion that the current X is a natural and logical progression from the past. This appears to firm the present position.
We've already done that. Right now 90% of the money is on the denier side - Exxon, Halliburton, BP etc etc. Fortunately money and politics does not always trump science, although sometimes it's a tough battle. The Marshall Institute is the undisputed king of political science. The tobacco industry wants to sell more cigarettes; they send millions to the Marshall Institute, and the Institute "disputes" the link between smoking and cancer. Coal power plants want to avoid regulation; they send millions to the Marshall Institute, and the Institute "disputes" the link between pollution and acid rain. They are, effectively, pseudoscience for sale. Well, you could shut down the Marshall Institute I suppose, but there's no real reason for it; people realize where they are coming from.
Incorrect reality denier. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Figure 7 (above): The three main records of global average surface temperature. Red line = NOAA record, blue line = NASA record, black line = Met Office/ UEA CRU record, with grey shading showing 95% confidence interval on Met Office/UEA CRU record. Source: Met Office Hadley Centre. Before 1850, instrumental time series measurements with global coverage are not available. [IPCC AR4 (2007) (Working Group 1; 1.3.2)]. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Figure 11 (above): Global average surface temperature record averaged over each decade since 1850 (expressed as temperature difference from the 1961-1990 average). The uncertainty in the observed estimates is shown in the error bars. Source: Met Office
I am not denying reality, you are misrepresenting it. From 1910 to 1940, a span of 30 years, the temp went from ~ -.5 to ~+.0C, or a change of ~ .5 C degrees or a rise of a bit less than ~.2 C per decade. Then it cooled a bit. Which is why GISS averages the temps from 1951 to 1980 to come up with it's zero line. Which then shows that from that zero line (ending in 1980) that the temp has warmed about the same .5 C in the 30 years from 1980 to 2010, or also ~ .2 C per decade. So, it's obvious that the warming in the first half of the 20th century until the zero line between 1951 and 1980 was of a very comparable rate and magnitude as the warming after 1980 until the present. If you use the HadCrut3 data and plot the trendline for the 30 years from 1910 to 1940 you get 0.015 degrees per year and from 1980 to 2010 you get 0.016 degrees per year, again within the error bars for being identical. Arthur
What is your source for this? Because feedback effects have increased the rate of warming beyond predicted levels.
Shirley, you jest? The money that the governments and universities are putting into climate change research and reporting DWARFS by many orders of magnitude the amount of money being spent by oil companies. http://climatequotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/cc-funding2011.pdf More to the point, the oil companies no longer particularly care that much since all the oil companies are in the NG business as well and the bad guy on the CO2 emissions block is the COAL industry and in contrast the darling of lower CO2 per kWh/BTU is NG, so any expected regulations don't particularly hurt them (since there is little alternative for oil anyway).
There are companies that benefit from denial (Exxon, Halliburton etc) and companies that benefit from alarmism (Kyocera, Solectria etc.) The amount of money from the deniers outweighs the amount of money from the alarmists by at least an order of magnitude. Of course the amount of money that universities are putting into it are greater than both, since the charter of universities is research and education. They don't care about making more money? All companies do. (Well, most do; the ones that don't aren't here any more.) Agreed about coal being a bigger problem though.
Hadcrut3 data from Hadley Climate Center. As to your claim that warming is beyond predicted levels, first, that doesn't support your claim that the rate is unprecedented, because I used ACTUAL figures. Secondly, according to the 1990 IPCC FAR, they predicted that in the Business as Usual case (which is pretty much what we have had) Under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, the average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century is estimated to be about 0.3°C per decade. Which would mean from 1990 to 2010, we would have expected about a 0.6 C increase. But, the average anomaly using HadCrut3 data from 1986 to 1990 was 0.15 C and the average anomaly from 2006 to 2010 was .41 C or an increase of only 0.27 C, or less than half the Business as Usual projection made by the IPCC in 1990. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_spm.pdf (note under their emission scenarios which assumed progressively increasing levels of controls (Scenario B), average rates of increase in global mean temperature were estimated to be about 0.2°C per decade, or 0.4 C from 90 to 2010, and again, the actual falls quite short of that) Arthur
From your own link: • under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0 3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0 2°C to 0 5°C per decade), this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years... Anything that happens to the climate that hasn't happened since the last ice age I considered unprecedented in human history.
Yes, that was their PREDICTION, that if we continued releasing GHGs as we had been then the temps would increase .3 C per decade and continue for a century, and that rise, 3 C, would be greater than our past history. BUT That hasn't happened. Not even for a decade. Arthur
