(Holly, you will find that I am prone to occasional outbreaks of wacky humor and what my students term “randomness.”)

Fascinating. Thank you, Jim. Coming from you, that means a great deal. I AM exerting considerable effort.

(Oh, and incidentally – He’s dead, Jim. You get the tricorder, I’ll get his wallet. We really must learn to put our security in some color than red. It draws entirely too much attention. Then again, logically, it IS better than having the command crew shot at.)

I’m Stephanie (Steph) Osborn, former rocket scientist, current math/science tutor (elementary to college levels) and SF novelist. I have degrees in 4 sciences and worked in military and civilian space programs for 20+ years. I worked Shuttle and Station, and had a friend aboard Columbia when it went down.

The statement on “consensus science” is entirely correct. The prevailing view is determined by consensus, but science itself is not generated by consensus. The scientific method defines science. Reproducible results determines science. The statement that the greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus is also true. Breakthroughs in science occur when someone is willing to “think outside the box” (Shroedinger’s or otherwise), trace that thought to its ultimate conclusion, and then determine if that conclusion is verifiable and reproducible.

Let me also point out that, climatologically speaking, 100 years of data points is actually a pathetically small database compared to the Earth’s climatological history and covers very little. Certainly not enough to determine a statistically significant long-term trend, let alone distinguish one cause from another. (Think about Carl Sagan’s “existence of the universe compacted into a year” and you have maybe a fraction of a second on New Year’s Eve, here. Although I may be going back before some folks were born, and revealing my age in the process, in using that analogy.)

There is at least as much evidence to suggest that the oceanic salinity equilibrium cycle has as much to do with current short-term trends as anything that mankind can do; and plenty of evidence to indicate that said equilibrium cycle is capable of absorbing the amount of variation we are seeing and shifting the vector in the other direction. A sine wave, if you will. Demonstrable, proven, with evidence in many different places, including ice caps, sea floor sediments, and ancient coral reefs.

Unfortunately, we never seem to hear about that, and other such equilibrium cycles of which the planet is possessed.

As for worldwide trends, certainly the DEGREE of variation would depend on the location in the world. But in order for there to BE a worldwide trend, the variations all have to be going in the same direction, regardless of size. Unfortunately, they aren’t.

As to why a government – or any other organization – would want to perpetrate a “crisis” mindset, just as a suggestion, consider this thought: He who controls the power supply, controls the economy and the people. Gasoline taxed to the heavens? We don’t travel. We stay where we’re put. We eat what we’re given. We work where we’re told.

Now combine that concept with the mindset of handouts to the poor (and let us not get into the argument about why some of them are so), and bailouts to the rich corporations, and we see a distinct redistribution of the economy. And not a particularly pretty one.

Consensus in fact means “General agreement, characterized by the absence of sustained opposition to substantial issues by any important part of the concerned interests and by a process that involves seeking to take into account the views of all parties concerned and to reconcile any conflicting arguments.¹”

There is clear and sustained opposition to the global warming theory by an intelligent, informed, and relevant minority of qualified professionals, as well as by intelligent laymen who have done their homework, and no process that involves taking our views into account or reconciling conflicting arguments is being made.

Instead, global warmists are working diligently to sweep all dissenters under the rug by either declaring them unqualified or in the pay of oil companies while claiming consensus exists. Just because they say it does not make it true.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122843562763381277.html

Unlike you, I don’t have the luxury of living in a place that’s warm and sunny all the time and where solar power is viable as a stand-alone source. And I actually live in one of the better areas in the US for solar power. Even so, it’s dark here by 5 PM and doesn’t get light until 7 AM right now. Solar would be a nice addition to the grid, making running air conditioners in the summer less of a drain. But solar cannot BE the grid. Neither can wind. Not in their current states. Considering the vast failures in making them scalable, probably never. Nuclear is too worrisome in the long term to win overall support. Which leave oil, coal… and maybe eventually hydrogen. Those are the options that won’t destroy the country. For me, the survival of the country and the people who inhabit it is of paramount importance.

And here, among the idiocy, is someone who is projecting a scheme that will encourage uninformed voters to destroy industry out of personal greed, and in doing so, destroy themselves:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026855.800-yes-you-can-change-the-climate-mr-obama.html

The Malthusian population scenario can assuredly be brought to pass if enough people can be deluded into voting for their own demise. Convincing them that such a vote will profit them is certainly a way to get the clueless to the polls. “You betcha, Clem. We’re going to destroy energy, food production, goods production, transportation, and heating, but while we do it, you’re going to get a nice check every month…until all the profitable industry leaves and you get to stay behind and starve and freeze.”

I have posted here and in numerous other places in this writing diary my reasons for not finding the human-caused, fossil-fuel-based global warming “climate crisis” to have any merit. I still do not find that it has any merit. It is not predictive science, in that the things it has so far predicted have not come to pass, the things it claims are causative have not been demonstrated to cause actual results, and the methodology it uses to foretell the future (computer modeling) uses insufficient data, cooked data, and cherry-picked data. Garbage in, garbage out.

I don’t doubt that Bush has been supporting US oil interests.

I do doubt that his motives are any worse than the motives of those at the top of the fight against fossil fuels.

And frankly, I don’t think “climate crisis” plays any part in the calculations of those at the very top of either side in the fight. I think the actual issue is political power, who has it, and who loses it: from everything I have been able to deduce, global warming is a convenient sales pitch that can be sold with alarmist overtones to people who don’t have the science to understand what they’re being sold, or the logic to follow through from cause to effect if they get what they think they want.

“I think that the program was managed as a windfall for certain politically-connected corporate farms that got out of hand.”

That sounds hideously plausible.

“the data just simply DO NOT support the contention that manmade activity has a dramtic effect on global climate, much less that we’re marching to a global-warming induced doom.”

The data is like that famous picture where some people see the old lady and some people see the young lady. I hope you know the one I mean. Most people see the old lady, and most people look at the data and see global warming.

If the extra carbon is coming from the oceans, why are the oceans getting more acidic? Surely you’d expect just the reverse. In fact the oceans have become acidic enough that it’s beginning to affect phytoplankton, which is the base of the marine food chain. Our fish supplies may be in danger. Only “may”. And if we go on overfishing at the current rate, it’s academic anyway.

I think you’ll be surprised to hear that the “bankrupting coal” remark never made it across the Atlantic. I had a bit of a hunt to find it, and then another one to find the uncut version. (I don’t know about you, but when I see a cut version “just found” two days before the election, surrounded by comment supporting the other party, I see a whole forest of red flags go up.) What Obama actually said was that his cap-and-trade plans would bankrupt coal over time, and if they couldn’t sort out the emissions. I think both the caveats are important. He doesn’t say what sort of timeline he’s thinking of, so he could easily be thinking of 2050 or so. Certainly any politician who wants to be re-elected (and he does) would be taking note of how much the cap was damaging the economy and any new scientific data before ratcheted the cap down. If you want to see the uncut video, it’s at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMwBbl6RoIs

The net effect of global warming is that (some) coastal regions become marginally less hospitable — and the fraction of the earth suitable for agriculture becomes significantly greater.”

Er no. It’s far more complicated than that. Take a look at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11655 For example: “A two-decade study of rainforest plots in Panama and Malaysia recently concluded that local temperature rises of more than 1ºC have reduced tree growth by 50 per cent”. A warmer earth also expands the deserts and reduces rainfall in many areas, so that they produce less crops. And more storms means more wrecked crops, although there’s no knowing how much.

Realistic assessments put the worst case sea level raise from warming at less than 2 feet, not the 20 feet that our former Vice President claimed in his self-serving polemic.”

This sounds like the report that “explicitly notes that it was unable to include possible dynamical responses of the ice sheets in its calculations.” They only took a very simple model of how the ice sheet behaves, which predicts much slower melting than what we’re already seeing.

And other realistic assessments put it at “meters” http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526141.600-huge-sea-level-rises-are-coming–unless-we-act-now.html?full=true

See what I mean about he old lady and young lady?

This article says,

Although some ice sheet experts believe that the ice sheets are more stable, I believe that their view is partly based on the faulty assumption that the Earth has been as much as 2 °C warmer in previous interglacial periods, when the sea level was at most a few metres higher than at present. There is strong evidence that the Earth now is within 1 °C of its highest temperature in the past million years. Oxygen isotopes in the deep-ocean fossil plankton known as foraminifera reveal that the Earth was last 2 °C to 3 °C warmer around 3 million years ago, with carbon dioxide levels of perhaps 350 to 450 parts per million. It was a dramatically different planet then, with no Arctic sea ice in the warm seasons and sea level about 25 metres higher, give or take 10 metres.”

Mind you, I don’t trust Al Gore either. I have the distinct impression that he was casting around for some cause to hitch his wagon to, and found global warming handy. Bear in mind that after the business about him inventing the internet, he’d be looking for something true this time.

Here’s the bit about the Bush administration interfering with climate science. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11074

I hope to be starting a temporary job soon, so I won’t have time to hunt out references then.

All the best