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With science, the public accepts the reliability of the scientific method. We accept that results are checked and double-checked. We accept that there is repeated analysis and inspection on the problems and that if someone disagrees, there is a mature and reasonable discussion of the issues.

Obviously, the East Anglia CRU emails show that the discussion is not very open.  It shows that some people are willing to go out of their way to discredit others. It also shows a general unwillingness to publicly display the technique used to arrive at a conclusion. This all goes against the scientific methodology.

As to if this will result in a general disdain for scientists that they are only puppets and tools of politicians – I don’t know.  Frankly, I cannot think of a worse insult then to be called a politician!

“Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that’s still justified,” Gore told Newsweek . “But a comprehensive plan to solve the climate crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all” of the greenhouse culprits identified in the Nasa study.”

I have not posted on this site for awhile as I was becoming disgruntled at the lack of real conversation that was happening on the subject. Believers in global warming seemed to be unwilling to acknowledge that there were some concerns about using computer model projections to drive massive and expensive changes in our economic and social structure. The worst among them even started to call people that had concerns names such as “Neanderthals” or “criminals” or worse. On the opposite side, those with doubts have not been able to layout a fairly consistent scientific description of the various natural phenomenon that were occurring in the world and offer proactive discussion to remedy changes.

Worse, neither side wants to do the truly difficult things in solving many of the energy problems that are occurring in the world. Everyone seems to have their head in the sand on the realities of energy and its importance in the world economy.

Maybe now that Mr. Gore appears to be pulling back from his “science is settled” hard line, I should re-join the discussion. Look for more posts in the future.

Below are the highlights of the article that I read that discusses this. You can read the entire discussion at Prison Planet.

Before we get too excited, Gore is not backing away from his support for the theory of man-made climate change, but his concession that carbon dioxide only accounted for 40% of warming according to new studies could seriously harm efforts to tax CO2, that evil, life-giving gas that humans exhale and plants absorb.

“Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the need to limit carbon emissions,” reports BB News.

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“Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that’s still justified,” Gore told Newsweek . “But a comprehensive plan to solve the climate crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all” of the greenhouse culprits identified in the Nasa study.”

Gore now blames soot and methane for the majority of global warming, leaving the door open for a tax on livestock, a tax on meat, a tax on milk, and on and on until he changes his mind again and blames another culprit so that too can be taxed.

In another indictment of Gore’s accuracy in warning about climate change, he has now virtually abandoned scientific “facts” in favor of characterizing his Inconvenient Truth presentation in the context of a religious sermon.

“Simply laying out the facts won’t work,” admits Gore.

For years, it has been assumed that one or two drinks of alcohol per day were good for you. I am sure the vintners of the world helped to increase that belief. Now, the NY Times (and I saw it on Lifehacker) is reporting that this may not be true. It seems that just because healthy people drink an occasional glass of wine, the wine itself is not making them healthy!

If you remember your high school analytic geometry, this is called a transposition proof. Healthy people drinking wine does not automatically imply that in order to be healthy, you must drink wine.  This is similar to the old argument: “If there is fire present, then oxygen is present” does not conclude “If there is oxygen present, then fire is present”.

If something as simple as the belief that ingesting a poison (alcohol) is good for you has become wide spread with as much as we know about the human anatomy and that poison, then how can one be confident about any statement regarding the complexities of the climate?

Recently, there was a rather foolish announcement that said that said global warming kills over 300,000 per year already.  I didn’t talk much about this report here, as I thought it didn’t merit my time.  However, I do wonder how many real deaths (as opposed to Kofi’s fictitious 300K) are caused by poor drinking water. If you have ever been in a Starbucks, you have likely seen the bottles of Ethos water which donate part of the proceeds to clean drinking water to poor countries. Their site says:

Worldwide, nearly 1.1 billion people (roughly 20% of the global population) lack access to safe drinking water. This crisis impacts children in the developing world most. In fact, out of the 2.2 million unsafe drinking water deaths in 2004, 90% were children under the age of five.

I have a suggestion for the fiscally-stupid politicians of the US government – don’t tax me on my electrical bill with cap and trade but tax me on my water and put that money towards water for some of those 2 million children that die each year due to bad water.

I think I am going to go out to Starbucks and buy a water as soon as this post goes out! As their bottle says “Helping children get clean water”

I originally found this list of filthy water on Net-Cool (which is a great resource for finding unique things on the Internet).

How To Fight Climate Change With Cow Dung

After the long gap, I needed an “event” to kickoff again.  That event was the first weekend of the New Year.  I hope all that read this blog enjoy a wonderful 2009.

Carbon Cycle

I must say that I have enjoyed the last year and I continue to think that the discussion on this topic is still very relevant. I plan to continue this discussion and exploration for the foreseeable future.

I didn’t quite make my goal of averaging a new article every day. Instead, I have posted 351 times so I am 14 short. I am happy to report that almost 20,000 people have viewed this site in the last 12 months. I wish I could thank each of you personally but I am afraid that this public announcement must suffice.

The most popular articles have been:

1. 35 Inconvenient Truths: The errors in Al Gore’s movie – Part 1 of 5
2. Compact fluorescent lamps
3. Sunday Global Warming Comics
4. Global Warming Editorial Cartoons
5. Climate skepticism: The top 10

And the least popular articles were:

1. Global warming is making us sick
2. Schwarzenegger urges U.N. to move on climate change
3. Carmakers Defeated On Emissions Rules
4. New Times Atlas displays effects of climate change
5. Uniting to fight warming U.N. chief enlists governor’s help in stemming climate change

I am not sure what conclusions to draw from these best and worst lists except that maybe most of you have a sense of humor and you like cartoons!

The easiest way to stay on top of global warming news is simply to subscribe to this site via email or RSS feed. The links are available in the upper right corner of the page.

Thank you for your support and for being concerned about our environment, our world, and the political forces that control it.

I am sure that we all have much to be thankful for. I hope that you find this day to be relaxing and a way to see the best side of every issue and every person.

I have been nominated for a blogging award, the “thinking blogger” award.  I am extremely honored by this award that someone out there actually feels that I make them THINK.  I am not sure that it is possible to give someone a better compliment (I take that back – Donald Trump, I will accept a million dollars if you are feeling generous).

I was nominated for the award by Scott of BUUUUURRRRNING HOT. Check out his blog as it is very good and deals with a variety of issues.  Thank you Scott for this nomination!

The idea of Thinking Blogger was hatched in the thinking blog and you can read the article that launched the whole effort here.  The basic idea is to have bloggers nominate other blogs that encourage their readers to think. This is a great mission statement as I am constantly asking my readers to think and challenge the status quo.

Now that I have been nominated, I will follow suit and nominate five other blogs that make me think.

1. RealClimate
2. DevTopics
3. Kitchen Warfare
4. Candidate Positions
5. JunkScience

I could have nominated scores of others but I will keep it to five.  The list is not in any particular order, rather, I number it just so I can easily comment on each below. Keep reading if you are still interest as I make a few comments on the list:

1. RealClimate - If you are interested in climate science, there is probably not a better blog out there.  I have mentioned it before but they have a lot of really smart people over there that write the articles and make comments.  I occasionally don’t agree with their conclusions but that is okay since they always make me “think” and I often have to do side research just to keep up. If you don’t read this blog regularly, you should.
2. DevTopics - I have been in the software industry for about 20 years. This is a new blog by one of my former co-workers and it is excellent. There is no way that you can read this blog without “thinking”. I have an RSS feed to this blog on my site so it is easy to see the latest articles.
3. Kitchen Warfare – Food is important to me.  I have 3 kids so my time is somewhat limited but this site is a great read to think about the quality of what we eat and what we can do to make it better for ourselves. I hope that someday, the author of this blog gets a TV show on the Food network since you can bet it would be a big hit. I have an RSS feed to this blog on my site so it is easy to see the latest articles.
4. Candidate Positions – In the US, politics is a part of life. We choose a President every four years and it is always important and always a big show. This election the rush for the presidency is starting earlier than ever before due to a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it is the first time in decades that an existing President or Vice-President has not announced that they are running. This site details the positions of each candidate in a scorecard and then references when the candidate stated that position.
5. JunkScience - I end the list by going back to the same topic that I started the list with – climate change.  JunkScience is a great site and while it may not technically be a blog (since there are no user comments areas) it is updated daily with a bunch of articles across the web on climate change.  This site and RealClimate were the primary motivators for me to start this blog as I felt that there was room for a different perspective between these two very well written sites.

So there you have it.  Take a minute and go to each site.  Bookmark the ones you feel you want to read. If the site is advertiser supported and you see an ad that catches your eye, click a link and support them.  Thank you for reading my blog.  Stay tuned for my next entry.

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This is an easy article since it should have no controversy.  It is simply a list of statistics regarding automobiles.  Since many people think that we should cut back on auto emissions to reverse global warming, this should be an interesting read.

• 232 million – Number of registered vehicles in the U.S.
• 600 gallons – Average amount of gasoline consumed by one U.S. car each year.
• 12,000 pounds – Amount of carbon dioxide emitted from one U.S. car each year.
• 240 – Number of trees needed to absorb the 12,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emitted from one U.S. car each year.
• 2.7 trillion – Number of miles U.S. cars and light trucks traveled in 2004. That’s the equivalent of taking 10 million trips to the moon.
• 5% – Percent U.S. population is of the world population.
• 30% – Percent of world’s automobiles in the United States.
• 45% – Percent that the United States contributes to the world’s automotive carbon dioxide emissions.
• 4 – Number of car companies that support a national cap on global warming pollution. They are Ford, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler and Toyota.
• 0 – Number of bills passed by Congress to cut global warming pollution.

You can read the article and check out the references here.  You can also sign their petition.

Did you know that you can have these articles emailed to you?  Click on the “Subscribe to email” link in the upper right corner, fill out the details, and you are set.  No one will see your email address and you won’t get more spam by doing this.

I hope you enjoy this read and make sure that you watch Mr. Stossel’s program on 20/20!

Please tell your friends about this video. We all send jokes to our friends. Send them this piece of good news. Probably the best way to do that is just send them this article. The URL for this posting is: http://globalwarming-factorfiction.com/2007/04/16/what-kind-of-world-do-you-want/
Check out this great video here: http://www.whatkindofworlddoyouwant.com/videos/view/id/233984

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…as much as you would like to think that your opinions on the risks and realities of climate change are based entirely on your rational and purely objective assessments of scientific evidence, they aren’t. They are shaped by primordial human brain wiring and anthropological patterns of behavior.

Charles Darwin explains a lot of this. Global warming simply does not present the kinds of stimuli that the human nervous system evolved to respond to in order to survive threats from bears, lightning, rolling boulders and mean cavemen.

The problem with the Darwinian angle here is that it doesn’t explain why some human brains do feel threatened and worried by global warming and some don’t. The biggest variable here is probably simple anthropology: as social mammals, we use the group to survive and thus tend to share the beliefs of our own group.

Compared to other countries, Americans display an unusually large disconnect in describing themselves as environmentalists by being broadly unwilling to support voluntary restraints and vigorous laws and regulations.

Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed

Read the article here.

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This is an interesting blog entry. The article discusses the costs of preventing a catastrophic danger. It starts out with a discussion regarding a theoretical asteroid hit that might happen in 3 decades but then starts to deal with the costs of avoidance of preventing global warming.

What the entry does not explore is the concept of lost opportunity cost. If the global economy spends 1 trillion dollars preventing or reversing global warming, what could we have done with that money and was it as good of an investment. To continue that thought, what good would occur if we only spent half of that money? Would that be enough to do 90% of the 1 trillion? Difficult issues, I grant you, but issues that must be discussed.

The cost of a direct hit by the asteroid on earth is estimated at $400 billion. The expected damage cost today – the expected benefit of avoiding a collision, ignoring discounting – is a shade under $8.9 million. It is $5 million if an annual discount rate of 2% is used.

The ‘asteroid problem’ sounds analogous to the theoretical paradigm for dealing with the effects of global warming by accounting for catastrophic risks

…if tagging of the asteroid can be done quickly enough, the decision to intervene in planning a defection mission can be postponed until the likelihood of a hit can be known with certainty. The idea that dealing with catastrophic outcomes associated with climate change can be deferred until their likelihood is known with certainty is less plausible.

The known (but uncertain) possible consequences of doing nothing add a lot more to the expected costs than do the known (but uncertain) possibilities of adaptation and so on producing lower-than-expected costs. Even more important, the ‘unknown unknowns’, that is, the possible consequences of which we are not yet aware, are dominated by nasty surprises that await us if we continue changing the climate rapidly.

It would only sensible to apply the ‘asteroid problem’ logic if you could delay taking strong and expensive policy actions to deal with potentially catastrophic effects of climate change until you know for sure whether they will occur.

Read the blog here.

This article discusses that the University of Minnesota is planning on giving former Vice President Al Gore a honorary doctorate in climatology. I won’t bother to make any comments.

University President Bob Bruininks spilled the beans at the February Board of Regents meeting, saying that “two of our colleges are working with Vice President Gore to provide, we hope, an honorary doctorate.”

“He’s in the news and is a legitimate expert on a pressing issue of global concern, climate change, so this level of interest is understandable,” Wolter said. “However, no plans have been set and it’s unlikely that would occur this spring.”

“It’s mainly a publicity thing,” she said. Scantlebury said if anyone else had made the same documentary, the University probably wouldn’t recognize him or her. “People will pay more attention because of who he is.”

Read this article here.