Avery and Singer: Unstoppable Hot Air
~
Filed under: Climate Science Paleoclimate Greenhouse Gases— David @ 4:28 pm
~
Last week I attended a talk by Dennis Avery, author with Fred Singer of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years. The talk (and tasty lunch) was sponsored by the Heartland Institute, and was apparently enthusiastically received by its audience. Still whoozy from a bit of contention during the question period, a perplexed member of the audience told me privately that he thought a Point/CounterPoint discussion might be useful (he didn't know I wrote for RealClimate; it was just a hypothetical thought). But here’s my attempt to accommodate.
~
Note: The Points are paraphrases from the slides and my notes from Avery’s talk.
~
Point: The existence of the medieval warm and the Little Ice Age climate intervals, and the 1500 year D-O cycles in glacial climate, proves that the warming in the past decades is a natural phenomenon, not caused by human industry at all.
~
CounterPoint: The existence of climate changes in the past is not news to the climate change scientific community; there is a whole chapter about it in the upcoming IPCC Scientific Assessment. Nor do past; natural variations in climate negate the global warming forecast. Most past climate changes, like the glacial interglacial cycle, can be explained based on changes in solar heating and greenhouse gases, but the warming in the last few decades cannot be explained without the impact of human-released greenhouse gases. Avery was very careful to crop his temperature plots at 1985, rather than show the data to 2005.
~
READ ALL Point/CounterPoint
~
Point: Environmentalists do what they do because they miss having their mommies reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales to them. They like getting all scared.
~
CounterPoint: To hybrid-phrase Thomas Jefferson and Richard Feynman,
~
Last week I attended a talk by Dennis Avery, author with Fred Singer of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years. The talk (and tasty lunch) was sponsored by the Heartland Institute, and was apparently enthusiastically received by its audience. Still whoozy from a bit of contention during the question period, a perplexed member of the audience told me privately that he thought a Point/CounterPoint discussion might be useful (he didn't know I wrote for RealClimate; it was just a hypothetical thought). But here’s my attempt to accommodate.
~
Note: The Points are paraphrases from the slides and my notes from Avery’s talk.
~
Point: The existence of the medieval warm and the Little Ice Age climate intervals, and the 1500 year D-O cycles in glacial climate, proves that the warming in the past decades is a natural phenomenon, not caused by human industry at all.
~
CounterPoint: The existence of climate changes in the past is not news to the climate change scientific community; there is a whole chapter about it in the upcoming IPCC Scientific Assessment. Nor do past; natural variations in climate negate the global warming forecast. Most past climate changes, like the glacial interglacial cycle, can be explained based on changes in solar heating and greenhouse gases, but the warming in the last few decades cannot be explained without the impact of human-released greenhouse gases. Avery was very careful to crop his temperature plots at 1985, rather than show the data to 2005.
~
READ ALL Point/CounterPoint
~
Point: Environmentalists do what they do because they miss having their mommies reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales to them. They like getting all scared.
~
CounterPoint: To hybrid-phrase Thomas Jefferson and Richard Feynman,
I tremble for humanity when I reflect that nature cannot be fooled.
You're damn right I’m scared.
~
Filed under: Climate Science Paleoclimate Greenhouse Gases— David @ 4:28 pm
~
Federal Leadership Needed To Tackle Climate Change
~
Make a difference right now. Take Action!
~
Filed under: Climate Science Paleoclimate Greenhouse Gases— David @ 4:28 pm
~
Federal Leadership Needed To Tackle Climate Change
~
Make a difference right now. Take Action!
