www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Archbishop George Pell on Global Warming

Archbishop George Pell on Global Warming [sydney.catholic.org.au]

Evidently certain hierarchs of the Church are paying attention now to the debate surrounding this issue.

Meanwhile it's 71 degrees in North Carolina today!

Let us not apply reason and logic to that which shall have no debate according to Al Gore.

Not just Al Gore, but most of the scientific community- including for example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

"Human activity has been increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (mostly carbon dioxide from combustion of coal, oil, and gas; plus a few other trace gases). There is no scientific debate on this point." see:
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration- Global Warming [ncdc.noaa.gov]

See also this recent study from MIT:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/roulette-0519.html

I want to ask all of you who deny global warming- what source could satisfy everyone? What scientific study or organization bears enough authority that everyone on both sides could be silenced and have to accept its findings?

I submit that one's ideology determines one's belief or unbelief in global warming and that science has nothing to do with it. Both sides can come up with a scientific study.

Global Warming (Al Gore's Global Warming) is mostly a front for a pseduo-religion. If you read the studies (the second link is a hype article - you'd have to look at the data) you will see they have plenty of data of climate change. In the spring data released other studies have shown we are in a cooling cycle. Where they make their mistake is with their predictions. The MIT study shows its flaw when it uses the same model to predict future temperature rise that it used in a study in the early 1990s. Then they were off wildly (predicting a 7-10 degree rise before 2000 that never happened). Of course, the big give away here is the reference to "effects of economic activity" being part of the analysis. That should immediately tell people that the project is not scientific but has an agenda.

Look where they are honest: "Since there are so many uncertainties, especially with regard to what human beings will choose to do and how large the climate response will be, "we don't pretend we can do it accurately. Instead, we do these 400 [roulette] runs and look at the spread of the odds." In the end they are taking data and attributing cause to it without any science. Responsible people should skip the hype and instead focus on good stewardship of God's gifts.

Go and study the Middle Age Warm-Up, referenced by Cardinal Pell. Temperature increases in Europe of about 5-6 degrees. No industries and decent wines in southern Britain. Go find the global warming people who can explain with exactitude those 4 centuries of global warming, and the little ice age that followed. They can't. They've been asked by other scientists and just don't respond. Sound science is important. For a model to be scientific it needs to be able to work with past climate change.

I am routinely amazed at how many people fall for hype.

The Administrator is entirely correct. The so-called "gold standard" study on global warming, the IPCC Study, is riddled with methodological errors, which the IPCC itself has had to recognize. They have on various occasions recalled their study to revised (downward) their projections, to the point that the Executive Summary of the study--which, apparently, was not prepared by any of the study's main researchers--no longer accurately represents what is contained in the study it purports to summarize. Indeed, a number of the participants in the IPCC study have dissented from its conclusions, citing the same methodological errors which critics outside IPCC have identified.

In another thread, I also noted that climate is cyclical, that these cycles predate the industrial revolution--indeed, predate the emergence of humanity itself. The Administrator is correct concerning the Medieval Optimum period, which lasted from about 1000-1300, and which allowed for the great expansion of the high Middle Ages. It was followed, almost overnight, by the Little Ice Age that lasted into the first half of the 19th century. During the first part of the Little Ice Age, crops failed, famine was widespread, and the Black Death removed about a third of the population of Europe--which did not reach its pre-Little Ice Age levels until the 18th century, a period of five hundred years.

Climatic cycles are recorded back into Roman times. During the period between 100 BC and AD 400, temperatures were considerably warmer than they are today. The Romans were growing wine on the border of Scotland. The climate was uniformly mild, and this allowed populations to expand dramatically. From 500-900, the climate cooled drastically, which, as in the 14th century, resulted in crop failures, famine and plague that carried off about a third of the population of the Empire, opening the door for the final collapse of Roman culture in the West. Population did not begin to recover until the beginning of the Medieval Optimum, around the year AD 900.

This points out something said by environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, that more people are killed by excess cold than by excess heat, and that any deaths from global warming will be more than offset by the people who do NOT die from the cold.

Beyond that, there is a growing recognition that earth's climate is a very complex phenomenon with many variables, most not particularly well understood by scientists (particularly the manner in which they affect one another). All climate models are build on foundations of sand, because they have been validated not by their ability to predict past climate fluctuations, but by the extent to which they concur with earlier models. Thus, Model Z is validated against Model Y is validated against Model X, going all the way back to Model A, which was never validated at all.

This is a dirty little secret, but one of which more scientists are becoming aware as the divergence between model predictions and actual data continues to increase.

It's also becoming clear that a lot of people are invested in anthropgenic global warming for reasons that have nothing to do with science, and everything to do with political and financial gain.

"Not just Al Gore, but most of the scientific community- including for example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: "

The debate is not helped by the confusion of terms and a masking of the a prioi assumptions the activists rely on when framing environmental policy.

Carbon dioxide is a natural and essential molecule to the health of our planet. Since the Supreme Court declared that molecule a pollutant and the EPA has a right to regulate its emission, perhaps the government will be kind enough to tell me how many times I should exhale in an hour.

Terry

it is not clear at all what roll CO2 plays in climate change, and whether it is a leading or trailing indicator. Most of the CO2 on earth is dissolved in sea water. The colder the oceans, the more CO2 they can hold, and vice versa. Now, if the oceans warm, more CO2 is released into the atmosphere, but it is not clear if that is what caused atmospheric warming in the first place, or if it has any direct effect on atmospheric temperatures at all. If ice core samples are to be believed, it would seem that first something must warm up the oceans, then CO2 levels rise. But oceans are great heat sinks; they warm and cool much more slowly than the atmosphere, so ocean temperature changes lag behind atmospheric changes. That in turn implies the atmosphere warms before CO2 levels rise, and that CO2 levels rise in response to increases in atmospheric temperature and their its effect on oceanic temperatures.

Either way, almost every study conducted shows even radical reductions in CO2 emissions yield very small decreases in temperature, which can be converted into trillions of dollars of incurred costs for each degree reduction in projected temperature rise. Human activity contributes little to overall CO2; a single volcano spews out more in a day than all the cars and trucks in the world do in a year.

So pursuing CO2 reductions is a very poor allocation of resources, though one which does necessitate giving many more intrusive powers to government and massive subsidies to inefficient substitutes for carbon-emitting energy sources and industrial processes. No wonder carbon caps are popular--the well connected will get rich with little sacrifice on their part. Meanwhile, the poorest of the poor will be consigned to perpetual poverty.

One would think this the purpose: "though one [allocation] which does necessitate giving many more intrusive powers to government and massive subsidies to inefficient substitutes for carbon."

I don't want to get too involved in this debate because I've chosen to do my own unscientific study. It's almost the end of May and the mornings in central PA are still cold and damp. My arthritis says it feels like late October and I'm still wearing a wool hat when walking outside early in the mornings. If there is global warming going on, please turn up the thermostat here. My fleece pullover feels so good tonight.

BOB

Well, it never got over sixty today outside DC, and we've had one of the coldest, wettest springs on record. All the data collected from all sources--satellite and terrestrial--indicates that the warming trend stopped in 1998, that temperatures have remained largely constant since then, and have been falling for the last several years. Not enough time to make a trend line, but enough to put a damper on Chicken Little "the Earth is burning up" hysteria.

It was in the 90s today, but it was oddly cool and cloudy last week.

What I find so amazing about the global warming alarmism is that while we can't accurately predict LOCAL weather with any exactness 3 months ahead,let alone a week, why do so many put such great faith in computer models predicting what "might" or "might not" happen 3 years from now?

CO2 plays a role in global warming (!) and so does sunspot activity(!!). The debate is whether the sun has more effect on the planet than mankind.

On a local level man does directly impact the ecology, and to a lesser extent, the climate; however the impact of all the local models mashed together may or may not be at all accurate. The science of climate change is a practice even though many feel it to be indisputable. There has been little (and inconclusive at that) independent proof of the various global warming models hypothesised.

Weather and climate are not the same thing, but the inability to predict either with accuracy is something they have in common. In addition to CO2 and solar activity, other variables that affect climate are changes in the earth's axis of rotation, oceanic currents, changes in albedo (the reflectivity of the atmosphere), seismic activity (earthquakes can effect sea level, volcanoes spew lots of greenhouse gasses). Human activity ranks far down the list, and since there was radical climate change before Adam and Eve were still gleams in God's eye, one would have to say that whatever effect we have on the climate isn't very dramatic.

The scale of the climate is vast. It is so vast that it is nearly unimaginable and fairly difficult to appreciate.

As I mentioned on one of the other threads, it takes a certain kind of secular hubris both to believe that man is capable of radically altering the earth's climate and that he is capable of undoing what he supposes he did. It places man at the center of creation, not as steward, but as master, which is most definitely usurping the role of God as King of all creation. But then, secularists don't believe in God, they believe in man.