My god... I just had the most horrible idea.

[lord of flies]

Now, bear with me here:

 

What if corporations co-opted protests? I was attending a protest earlier in the week, and the thought struck me that people notice and react to protesters far more than they do to ordinary billboards and commercials. So what if, for example, Pepsi organized a nationwide anti-Coca Cola protest? Is this the most horrible idea ever?

[Oblarg]

Now, bear with me here:

 

What if corporations co-opted protests? I was attending a protest earlier in the week, and the thought struck me that people notice and react to protesters far more than they do to ordinary billboards and commercials. So what if, for example, Pepsi organized a nationwide anti-Coca Cola protest? Is this the most horrible idea ever?

 

It would probably be laughed at.

[Humodour]

Now, bear with me here:

 

What if corporations co-opted protests? I was attending a protest earlier in the week, and the thought struck me that people notice and react to protesters far more than they do to ordinary billboards and commercials. So what if, for example, Pepsi organized a nationwide anti-Coca Cola protest? Is this the most horrible idea ever?

 

What do you think has happened to Climate Change? The real message and science is being drowned out by corporate and political greenwash.

[Monte Carlo]

What do you think has happened to Climate Change?

 

Reasonable scientists and others are challenging the hysteria and slowly de-bunking the whole thing, I suppose.

[Oblarg]

What do you think has happened to Climate Change?

 

Reasonable scientists and others are challenging the hysteria and slowly de-bunking the whole thing, I suppose.

 

What dream world do you live in?

[Walsingham]

I can't imagine commercial players being able to maintain secrecy if they got involved. The negative fallout from being found out would be enormous. Far in excess of any damage to the original target.

 

However, you will find that journalists speak to competitors of a subject in trouble to get industry inside gen, and that 'helps'.

[Monte Carlo]

What do you think has happened to Climate Change?

 

Reasonable scientists and others are challenging the hysteria and slowly de-bunking the whole thing, I suppose.

 

What dream world do you live in?

 

One based on open, peer-reviewed science, not astro-turfing leftist groupthink

[Purkake]

Yes! I can see Steve Jobs leading a rebellion of hipsters, destroying Xboxes, PCs and Zunes everywhere they go.

[Meshugger]

Hipsters are worse than than Xbox-jocks, PC-elitists and Zuners though.

[Calax]

What do you think has happened to Climate Change?

 

Reasonable scientists and others are challenging the hysteria and slowly de-bunking the whole thing, I suppose.

 

What dream world do you live in?

 

One based on open, peer-reviewed science, not astro-turfing leftist groupthink

Really? Because most of the information I've seen has said that yes, it's happening.

[Humodour]

What do you think has happened to Climate Change?

 

Reasonable scientists and others are challenging the hysteria and slowly de-bunking the whole thing, I suppose.

 

What dream world do you live in?

 

One based on open, peer-reviewed science, not astro-turfing leftist groupthink

Really? Because most of the information I've seen has said that yes, it's happening.

 

Quite. But the thing we have to realise, Calax, is that most peer-reviewed scientific journals are just full of astro-turfing and leftist groupthink (e.g. Nature or Science).

Edited June 7, 2010 by Krezack

[Moose]

Global warming is a scientific fact. The exact cause is still up for debate, but make no mistake - it is happening.

[Orogun01]

Not only would be rendered futile if found but it would kill the idea altogether since the next protest would dismissed. Plus it only leaves a short list of causes for protest that actually make sense. Pepsi vs Cola, who would actually protest that? Cola wins hands down.

Edited June 7, 2010 by Orogun01

[Hiro Protagonist]

Global warming is a scientific fact. The exact cause is still up for debate, but make no mistake - it is happening.

 

If it's a fact, then can you tell me why:

 

It's well known that eastern England is falling, Scotland's rising. Scandinavia's rising, Holland is sinking. We're getting the land go up and down, we're getting sea levels go up and down. We've got this wonderful measuring station in Port Adelaide where sea level was measured here, and people have claimed sea level has actually risen. But in fact, the measuring station has fallen.

 

Why they're (the IPCC) is not looking at the total system of the planet, which includes the influence of space, the influence of sun, the influence of the oceans, ice and the earth.

 

Barry Brook is a biologist. He's done some very good work on the mass extinctions of macro fauna in Australia. He's not a climate scientist, he's done no climate science. Yet he gets quoted by the IPCC on climate change.

 

Professor Kurt Lambeck is a geophysicist who's done a lot of work on sea level changes. What he hasn't looked at is the broad scale of sea-level changes. Sea levels go up and down all the time. He also has not done work on, say, Tuvalu, where the floor of the Pacific Ocean and there's little wonder that Tuvalu is getting a relatively high sea level and nowhere else in the world is. And again, his work is very narrow geophysical work, mainly in the Mediterranean. Yet, Professor Kurt Lambeck is a Climate Change believer who regularly gets quoted by the IPCC. Why are some scientists only looking at different regions and not all regions.

 

If we just take the last 2000 years. The planet was hot in Roman and Greek times. Then it cooled in the dark ages, then it warmed in the medieval warmth. Then it cooled in the little ice ages, and we are now, we've just come out of the little ice age.

 

In the 1930s, it was much hotter. We had from 1920 to 1940 far less arctic sea ice than now, much, much warmer temperatures. Confirmed by NASA.

 

The Hadley Centre in the UK has shown that global warming stopped in 1998. That's one of the four centres, and the four centres differ. That's one of the four centres that put out climate data, and the Hadley Centre use a slightly different database from some of the American centres, they use temperature based on thermometer measurements - some of the others use satellite and balloon.

 

The British meteorological society has actually withdrawn the comments, that the years 1998 to 2006 include the hottest, the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth hottest years in recorded history. NASA also gave similar figures, which they withdrew. NASA was wrong and NASA withdrew as a result of that. NASA had the hottest US temperatures, not the hottest global temperatures. They occur in mid-latitude deserts. They don't occur in areas such as the US, which is not mid-latitude desert.

 

We have 30 years of satellite and balloon measurements of global temperatures. They are not in accord with the other ways we measure temperature, which is done with thermometers in areas where we've got a huge amount of heat given out by villages as small as 1,000 people. And so one set of data where we use a thermometer gives us a completely different story to when we use radioson balloons and satellites.

 

The first thing is that global temperature is a very difficult thing to measure. Secondly, we have a huge bias in the measuring station, and they are mainly in western countries, European countries - they're not in areas where we might get very high temperatures such as in the deserts.

 

We know from 1959 the Royal Society of meteorologists in the UK argued that the variable climate was due to the atom bomb. In the 1970s, they argued that it was due to global cooling. Now they are arguing that we're all going to fry.

 

Why is the ice in Antartica growing and not shrinking.

Edited June 7, 2010 by Hiro Protagonist

[Walsingham]

Is it Ok to be in the middle, undecided? I mean, I'm not happy with either the data or the political surrounding analysis.

 

More to the point, what has this got to do with the topic?

[Hurlshort]

Is the ice in Antarctica really growing? Huh...why don't we just move the Polar Bears down there then?

[Moose]

Let me address some of Hiro's points. Firstly you're citing a lot of localised examples, and as I'm sure you're aware for every example of cooling I could point to somewhere warming. Let's stick to the global average.

 

Now here's a graph based off the Goddard institutes instrumental temperature recordings:

 

 

As you can see it peaks and troughs throughout the individual decades, but overall the average global temperature is clearly increasing. It's just a fact, nothing political about it.

[heathen]

We're coming off a millennia-long cooling period now. It remains to be seen if our CO2 emissions really amount to as much as the worst predictions say, but make no mistake, the earth is definitely warming at a steady pace.

 

So basically what Moose said

[Calax]

In terms of global warming, the question is not "is it happening" it's "Did Aye Dooo THAT!?"

[Walsingham]

In terms of global warming, the question is not "is it happening" it's "Did Aye Dooo THAT!?"

 

Neatly put.

[Hiro Protagonist]

Let me address some of Hiro's points. Firstly you're citing a lot of localised examples, and as I'm sure you're aware for every example of cooling I could point to somewhere warming. Let's stick to the global average.

 

No, you didn't address any of my points. So you think the ice in Antartica growing and not shrinking is a localised example. We had from 1920 to 1940 far less arctic sea ice than now, but then that's just a localised example according to you. Why does the Hadley Centre in the UK has shown that global warming stopped in 1998.

 

What you're doing is cherry picking from different sources. When other sources are saying the opposite. Science is about what we can prove, thinking of alternative explanations, investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It's not about going off one graph and exclaiming there and then the science is settled.

 

It goes back to what I said in my previous post about the weather stations used in global temperatures. We are currently in a cooling face, before that we were in a warming phase. From 1940 to 1976 we were cooling. So we go through regular cycles of cooling and warming. Also the NASA Goddard Institute has been widely criticised for its data. As stated before, NASA has had to withdraw statements in the past.

 

Also, what about things like volcanoes? Volcanic eruptions will release carbon dioxide; in particular that submarine volcanoes emit huge amounts of CO2 and that the influence of the gases from these volcanoes on the earth's climate is drastically underrepresented in climate models. Have we seen an increase or decrease in volcanic activity over the last 20/30/40 years? There's so much that isn't represented or researched properly to prove or disprove anthropogenic global warming.

 

BTW, I'm not a climate change sceptic. I just don't believe wildly and blindly in climate change. For me, the science isn't settled. There's more research to be done and more factors to research into than cherry picking results to prove a hypothesis.

[Moose]

I have addressed these points already.

[Hiro Protagonist]

I have addressed these points already.

 

No you haven't. Where were the temperatures taken? In the middle of the desert? In NZ? In Australia? Or in the U.S.? In Antartica? How were the temperatures correlatted? All you've done is shown a graph (from wikipedia) and that's it. Nothing scientific about that when even the research behind it is questionable. Why does one weather centre contradict another weather centre? Out of the top 10 warmest years half occurred before 1940. The years 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2004 were cooler than the year 1900.

Edited June 8, 2010 by Hiro Protagonist

[Moose]

The graph on wikipedia looked more presentable than the one on Nasa's site, it was really for your benifit. You can view the one on Nasa's site here: Clicky.

 

The readings from this dataset are taken from more than one station. You can read here about quality Clicky.

[Walsingham]

Can I interject, gentlemen? Surely the point is less how spotless the science is than how enormous the consequences of either theory. Global Warming, and especially man made global warming, both have massive logical implications for our individual and collective behaviour. Implications which include the loss of life, loss of territory, and loss of strategic interests which would constitute reasons for war at any other time. I don't think the Anthro Global Warming crowd grasp this at all. If they ever did get their message across to the ordinary public the panic, and the demand for extreme action would be overwhelming. It wouldn't propel us into a new age of cooperation!

 

Linking this back to the topic, having the debate seeded with nutters doesn't so much bolster one side over another, but makes the ordinary man giev up in disgust and preserves the status quo.