Food for thought for you global warming bedwetters.

Let's say that humans play no role in global warming, and that global warming itself is a myth.

In that case, I'd still follow the tree hugging hippies' message of conservation and finding alternative fuels, because oil is running out and we don't want to be dependent on the middle east.

Also, human activities are contributing to pollution; no one can deny that. I, for one, don't want to have to do all my runs in a smog filled haze of a city.

this is the same old bullshit. We're supposed to take this article, which probably wasn't written by a scientist, is not linked, and doesn't cite it's sources, as truth? It doesn't even tell us whose these mysterious three scientists are! I bet they're in bed with the oil lobby, like every other anti-global warming scientist.

And I guess we're supposed to take Al Gore's word for global warming, who isn't even a scientist, as truth? Global warming is political, and Democrats and even Republicans are banking on this so-called "issue" to help them get elected. You know what bigger threat is out there than global warming? Islamic extremists. Yes, terrorism is a bigger issue than global warming. So you environmentalist piss-heads can rant all you want.

RE: Food for thought for you global...

"food for thought?"

no... someone must've already eaten it.

because it looks like shit to me.

hmmmm.... wrote:

Let's say that humans play no role in global warming, and that global warming itself is a myth.

In that case, I'd still follow the tree hugging hippies' message of conservation and finding alternative fuels, because oil is running out and we don't want to be dependent on the middle east.

Also, human activities are contributing to pollution; no one can deny that. I, for one, don't want to have to do all my runs in a smog filled haze of a city.

If only more people thought like this. Who cares if global warming is 'real' or not? The potential solutions would make a better world for everyone anyway! Politics ruins everything.

Al Gore wrote:

And I guess we're supposed to take Al Gore's word for global warming, who isn't even a scientist, as truth? Global warming is political, and Democrats and even Republicans are banking on this so-called "issue" to help them get elected. You know what bigger threat is out there than global warming? Islamic extremists. Yes, terrorism is a bigger issue than global warming. So you environmentalist piss-heads can rant all you want.

You are exactly correct, and THIS is precisely why we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel to extricate our gross reliance on and de facto subsidy for the extremist Arab states. That, and the fact that we do put a ton of cancer-causing shit into the air.

Al Gore wrote:

You know what bigger threat is out there than global warming?

Yes. Pollution, oil running out, and increased dependence on the Middle East for oil.

All of them can be fixed (at least partially) by conservation and using alternative fuels.

Al Gore wrote:

And I guess we're supposed to take Al Gore's word for global warming, who isn't even a scientist, as truth?

You don't take it for truth because Al Gore said so, but because it's backed by the vast consensus of climate scientists. Similarly, you don't take global warming is BS because Senator Inhofe or Fox News or the random scientist or article says so. And as others have clearly and intelligently stated, energy independence and sustainability are positive goals in and of themselves (something we should have focused on back in 1973).

While I admit global warming may be "real," it does not take a higher presidence than terrorism. I am more concerned about catching Osama than erasing my carbon footprint. And the reason I don't take Al Gore's word for anything is because he is a phony. The whole global warming issue is still being debated among scientists today. As for me, I am going to continue driving my Dodge diesel truck for as long as it will last me.

Hey, I read Science every week and I read Nature every week and I have a Ph.D. and I read the article in question

and

I'm not sure James Lewis and I read the same article.

But I am sure that James Lewis is a helluva quoter-out-of-context.

Here's a paragraph from the article:

The challenge to one part of the latest climate assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "is not a question of whether the Earth is warming or whether it will continue to warm" under human influence, says atmospheric scientist Robert Charlson of the University of Washington, Seattle, one of three authors of a commentary published online last week in Nature Reports: Climate Change.

Gosh, somehow the quote from Charlson didn't quite make it into Lewis' article. How could that have happened?

And it might be noted that it was a "news" article, written by a science journalist. It was not a research report.

Folks, if you care about this stuff go to the source. Many libraries have subscriptions to Science. Go read!

People like the OP would do well to lay off the third or fourth-hand garbage that's out there.

Good show runtime.

what the heck, here's the whole article. See for yourself how carefully Lewis must have read it. And don't fail to notice all the parts he failed to quote. Whoever he is, he should be ashamed of himself.

---------------------------------------------------------------CLIMATE CHANGE:

Another Global Warming Icon Comes Under Attack

Richard A. Kerr

Climate scientists are used to skeptics taking potshots at their favorite line of evidence for global warming. It comes with the territory. But now a group of mainstream atmospheric scientists is disputing a rising icon of global warming, and researchers are giving some ground.

The challenge to one part of the latest climate assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "is not a question of whether the Earth is warming or whether it will continue to warm" under human influence, says atmospheric scientist Robert Charlson of the University of Washington, Seattle, one of three authors of a commentary published online last week in Nature Reports: Climate Change.

Instead, he and his co-authors argue that the simulation by 14 different climate models of the warming in the 20th century is not the reassuring success IPCC claims it to be. Future warming could be much worse than that modeling suggests, they say, or even more moderate. IPCC authors concede the group has a point, but they say their report--if you look in the right places--reflects the uncertainty the critics are pointing out.

Twentieth-century simulations would seem like a straightforward test of climate models. In the run-up to the IPCC climate science report released last February (Science, 9 February, p. 754), 14 groups ran their models under 20th-century conditions of rising greenhouse gases. As a group, the models did rather well (see figure). A narrow range of simulated warmings (purple band) falls right on the actual warming (black line) and distinctly above simulations run under conditions free of human influence (blue band).

Figure 1 Not so certain. The uncertainty range in the modeled warming (red bar) is only half the uncertainty range (orange) of human influences.

...sorry, couldn't figure out how to paste in the

figure...

CREDIT: ADAPTED FROM S. E. SCHWARTZ ET AL., NATURE REPORTS: CLIMATE CHANGE, 23-24 (2007)

But the group of three atmospheric scientists--Charlson; Stephen Schwartz of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York; and Henning Rodhe of Stockholm University, Sweden--says the close match between models and the actual warming is deceptive. The match "conveys a lot more confidence [in the models] than can be supported in actuality," says Schwartz.

To prove their point, the commentary authors note the range of the simulated warmings, that is, the width of the purple band. The range is only half as large as they would expect it to be, they say, considering the large range of uncertainty in the factors driving climate change in the simulations. Greenhouse-gas changes are well known, they note, but not so the counteracting cooling of pollutant hazes, called aerosols. Aerosols cool the planet by reflecting away sunlight and increasing the reflectivity of clouds. Somehow, the three researchers say, modelers failed to draw on all the uncertainty inherent in aerosols so that the 20th-century simulations look more certain than they should.

Modeler Jeffrey Kiehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, reached the same conclusion by a different route. In an unpublished but widely circulated analysis, he plotted the combined effect of greenhouse gases and aerosols used in each of 11 models versus how responsive each model was to a given amount of greenhouse gases. The latter factor, called climate sensitivity, varies from model to model. He found that the more sensitive a model was, the stronger the aerosol cooling that drove the model. The net result of having greater sensitivity compensated by a greater aerosol effect was to narrow the apparent range of uncertainty, as Schwartz and his colleagues note.

"I don't want certain interests to claim that modelers are dishonest," says Kiehl. "That's not what's going on. Given the range of uncertainty, they are trying to get the best fit [to observations] with their model." That's simply a useful step toward using a model for predicting future warming.

IPCC modelers say they never meant to suggest they have a better handle on uncertainty than they do. They don't agree on how aerosols came to narrow the apparent range of uncertainty, but they do agree that 20th-century simulations are not IPCC's best measure of uncertainty. "I'm quite pleased with how we're treating the uncertainties," says Gabriele Hegerl of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, one of two coordinating lead authors on the relevant IPCC chapter, "but it's difficult to communicate" how they arrived at their best uncertainty estimates.

Hegerl points out that numerical and graphical error ranges in the IPCC report that are attached to the warming predicted for 2100 are more on the order expected by Schwartz and his colleagues. Those error bars are based on "a much more complete analysis of uncertainty" than the success of 20th-century simulations, she notes. It would seem, as noted previously (Science, 8 June, p. 1412), IPCC could improve its communication of climate science.

------------------------------------------------------------

Finally, just about any student who ever took Stat 1 knows the difference between uncertainty ranges and confidence levels (as in significance tests). Lewis, it seems, does not. His statement "The data in the SCIENCE graph therefore does not meet routine scientific standards" is nonsense because it confuses two completely different things.