G'day Redewenur,
What you are asking requires effort, something since, Mr Morgan will not accept any research that disagrees with global warming or questions scientific methodologies of studies that relating to global warming over and over and over again, is as best as I can see a big waste of time.
If you really were open minded, you should be willing to poke around a little yourself. I wouldn't suggest you look at future predictions based on computer models because to date none has proved even remotely accurate. However, there is a great deal of information available even on the net from respected scientists about the continued rise of CO2 in the atmosphere and reasonable projections based on solid data. I personally tend to agree that there will be a 60% increase in CO2 atmospheric output before there is any prospect of a levelling off simply because of the needs of developing nations mainly China and India. They are not going to simply stop modernisation because ANYONE suggests they should bear the brunt of a CO2 reduction.
The point you seem to be missing is that CO2 will continue to increase because of what we have done in the past with estimates ranging up to around 600ppm and that is without the sensible addition of the world's increasing ouput of carbon as the population peaks at 9 billion or a bit more and modernisation occurs. These sorts of figures can be found all over the place. Some of the predictions are really far fetched but you can find many where the arguments are reasoned and the science sound. I'm just not going to do the searching for you because I don't need to justify the comment at all. It was provided as "food for thought" rather than a post where I wanted to refer to very specific research.
Actually, the question of increased CO2 regardless of what is now to be done, is on so many pro-global warming sites, you would be hard put not to find such a reference.
My point was that if an increase to 330ppm is so disastrous then surely 400ppm or 500ppm or even 600ppm is even more so. And once the results are catastrophic the actualy degree of damage may not be that important. If, as is now being suggested, the "tipping point" has already been breached, then it doesn't matter what anyone does, the world is doomed.
If you turn off your airconditioning and so does everyone else, industry reduces CO2 by 60% in say 5 years but 330ppm is disastrous anyway, if everything you do means that the CO2 levels reach say 525ppm rather than 540ppm, do you really think that is going to really do anything to save the planet?
I don't know how far these threads are achived but, contradicting Mr Morgan completely, myself an two or three others, actually went to a great deal of trouble to answer specific points, including references to research. I even spent several hours once listing a reasonable list of research papers addressing points that Mr Morgan raised. The response? Mr Morgan said that basically were rubbish. And he said this after two days when, unfortunately, pretty much all research that I quoted is not available on the net unless you have a paid prescription to various sources.
However Mr Morgan has never, not once, actually discussed any issues raised as to serious flaws with various research. He refers to newspaper or news articles pretty much exclusively and almost all of those say "if this continues ...", "the scientists say this may ...", in other words guesswork about the future without anything solid to really back it up.
The Antartic is a prime example. Myself and another member quoted various studies that showed the actually locked ice had increased in 50 years. Mr Morgan ignores this type of comment, especially when it is backed by hard solid research. Yet he still happily posts threads that predict or point to the loss of ice from the Antartic. A much simpler example is that, unlike Mr Morgan, I have a decent background in palea-climatology and have been studying climate at a fairly detailed level for more than 30 years so when someone posts a comment about climate that is just plain wrong such is Mr Morgan did with respect to the supposed 2007 going to be a record hot year and I replied to that post detailing the events of the last few months relating to the switch from an El Nino event to a developing La Nina, you get ... deafening silence. You should have no trouble looking this up. It is a few threads down from this.
I've posted threads or posts on this site that have gone to considerable trouble to point out inaccuracies in global warming hysteria, including some major points relating to Mr Gore's book and film. None of these were the subject of counter discussion because that would then involve real science and that is not allowed on this thread.
Mr Thompson's study that Mr Gore uses extensively seems to be deeply flawed in its methodology. He drills six ice cores. He gets six different results. Two of them agree with his world view. Four do not. The two that do agree are statistically more extreme than the other four so Mr Thompson averages the results and announces to the world his findings "proving" his theory. I don't think any reasonable scientist would suggest that averaging results in this situation was appropriate or that the end results proved anything. Yet, Mr Thompson is a darling of the global warming brigade, despite a number of scientists, even those that think his conclusions are probably valid, have a great deal of difficulty with the science.
The hockey stick curve is another example of really flawed science. This one even very very pro global warming advocates attacked on the basis of the science. Mr Gore still uses it, as does a number of other prestigious institutes. And if you drill down to the actual science involved, it revolves around the use of tree rings to determine historic climate. Those that specialise in this field and solid scientifically valid methodology trials and tests show that tree rings are a terrible indicator of historic climate unless you know the precise precipitation rates where the tree was and what stresses the tree underwent. I don't need to refer to any of these studies to appeal to anyone with an understanding of basical agricultural knowledge to show why this is so. A thicker tree ring means the tree grew more that particular year. Why? Cut down a plantation pine ten years old where all weather data is known and the answer is: precipitation levels. More rain (up to the point of flooding) more growth. Next comes CO2 uptake. That is also just straight logic but again studies on trees such as plantation trees bear this out. If a tree takes up less CO2 because of disease, overcrowding, another tree falling into its canopy etc, then the tree ring will be thinner, regardless of precipitation or temperature. Finally, we reach the effect that is the one that everyone uses to "prove" historic temperatures, the change in the tree ring size because of temperatures. A mild winter and a warm summer and everything else being equal, the tree ring will be wider. But a really hot summer and low precipitation and the CO2 uptake goes down and the tree ring gets narrower.
So saying that a wider tree ring indicates a higher temperature is obviously not even close to the truth. Yet that is exactly what pretty much all global warming studies that want to argue about the relative temperatures during the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, the Romam Warm Period, the Bronze Warm Period, etc do.
And in the most general terms the studies do tend to suggest a trend in temperatures historically. There might be droughts periodically and too heavy rain at times and stresses over the life of the tree but pretty much any tree ring of the period will show a narrowing during the three Little Ice Age cold periods and a widening in the Medieval Warm Period. But other than the broadest terms, without actual rainfall records for the particular tree, relative temperatures simply cannot be determined. You can't say, for instance, that the Mediaval Warm period really wasn't that warm. From tree ring analysis all you can say was that it was warmer than the surrounding periods. It could have been record hot temperatures or only fractionally warmer with better average rainfall but the tree rings simply won't tell you this.
I have challanged Mr Morgan many times to discussions on any aspect of climate change, including backing everything up with actual peer reviewed research studies to back up the various views and Mr Morgan has never once even attempted to do this.
I asked him to simply go to the NASA site and look at their dataset to see for himself that the majority of world sites do not show a warming trend (not a particularly difficult task becgause of how the site is set up and takes only a few minutes to perhaps an hour depending on the sample you decide to use). I even did a random sampling, listed all the sample locations and what they showed, and invited discussion. The result? More garbage about Mr Morgan only believing something if it is in a peer reviewed paper. All that shows is Mr Morgan does not wish to actually think for himself. He's happy to insult people merciliously, attack their credentials (which is just straight defamatory and actionable but that hasn't stopped him even when warned) but not to actually do anything to really support his views.
Instead of taking what I said as an insult to humanity and to yourself because I suggested your family at least should be safe, perhaps you should actually think about the science involved in climate change, if it really is that important to you and actually go to the trouble of not simply accepting what is published as gospel but passing a critical eye over a few things.
My view wasn't actually a lack of humanity, by the way, but rather a failure to see how the current attempts will have any effect at all even where they have the potential to do substantial harm and to cause greater suffering and deaths in the third world. It really irks me that the US government now allocates $3 billion of its $9 billion pure research budget to global warming. It certainly needs studying but the studies should be subject to the same need to impose adequate scientific processes on the studies as for just about any other field. A fraction of that money could actually save millions of lives yearly if applied to really practical research, so even creating global warming as the preiminent threat the world and something that can obviously be solved if you throw enough money at it, donate as much as possible to Greenpeace, etc, has managed to cause immense harm for no discernable benefit.
Oh and as food for thought, perhaps you might like to watch a UK production of a show that aired in early March relating to "the great CO2 swindle". I haven't seen it and it might not even be backed by good science but I have been told that the science is actually backed by scientists that really should know their field and hard laboratory research. You might not agree with it at all but it has to be of benefit.
I read Mr Gore's book and watched the movie. I was amazed at how tenous his arguments often where and how sometimes the information was actually outright false but it still was enlightening. The presentation was exellent and Mr Gore relates to his audience very well indeed. I could easily see him as a US President if he campaigned a similar way to the way he does his presentations. Some of his facts were accurate and I did learn from it. Perhaps, if you wish to do other than insult someone for being a bit flippant, without really knowing how they actually felt about humanity at large, you might wish to look at just a fraction of what I have suggested here. Since I doubt I'll be back again, if you want further topics to look at such as sea temperatures, sea level changes, locked ice changes, glacier retreats, the science of ice core analysis to name but a small selection just go back a few months a read some of the posts. You might find the post on just how big a difference different averaging techniques for weather stations make to the statistics. I covered that one in considerable detail.
Regards
Richard
