| Final-Fan said: I quoted the statement regarding CO2 because even if it is not some huge danger and directly responsible for disastrous global warming, I think that the claim that massive CO2 emissions are not only benign but BENEFICIAL was not at all substantiated unless I missed something obvious and I don't think he has anywhere near sufficient data to back up such a claim. Unless he refers to his constant harping on the danger of global cooling -- but then, he can't be, because he doesn't think it's a forcing agent of global warming. As for the Bush Administration, perhaps I was exaggerating a bit but I remember the following news items quite clearly: Philip A. Cooney, the former White House staff member who repeatedly revised government scientific reports on global warming, will go to work for Exxon Mobil this fall, the oil company said yesterday. Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming (June 8, 2005) Mr. Cooney resigned as chief of staff for President Bush's environmental policy council on Friday, two days after documents obtained by The New York Times revealed that he had edited the reports in ways that cast doubt on the link between the emission of greenhouse gases and rising temperatures. A former lawyer and lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, the main lobbying group for the oil industry, Mr. Cooney has no scientific training. The White House, which said on Friday that there was no connection between last week's disclosure and Mr. Cooney's resignation, repeated yesterday that his actions were part of the normal review process for documents on environmental issues involving many government agencies. "Phil Cooney did a great job," said Dana Perino, a deputy spokeswoman for the White House, "and we appreciate his public service and the work that he did, and we wish him well in the private sector." http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=42957 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08climate.html So some petroleum lobbyist with NO EXPERTISE gets to edit reports to downplay climate change and his punishment is a(nother) cushy job with big oil and a pat on the back from the White House. I'm not at all saying that Bush ordered him to pull those stunts but his administration sure as hell isn't doing much to discourage that type of behavior. The Bush administration was yesterday accused of systemic tampering with the work of government climate scientists to eliminate politically inconvenient material about global warming. At a hearing of Congress, scientists and advocacy groups described a campaign by the White House to remove references to global warming from scientific reports and limit public mention of the topic to avoid pressure on an administration opposed to mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions. Such pressure extended even to the use of the words "global warming" or "climate change", said a report released yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project. The report said nearly half of climate scientists at government agencies had been advised against using those terms. ... In the survey of 1,600 government scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 46% had been warned against using terms like global warming in speech or in their reports. The scientists interviewed were working at seven government agencies, from Nasa to the Environmental Protection Agency. Forty-three percent of respondents said their published work had been revised in ways that altered the meaning of scientific findings. Some 38% said they had direct knowledge of cases where scientific information on climate was stripped from websites and printed reports. "There were a very large number of edits that came at the 12th hour after all the earlier science people had signed off," said Mr Piltz, who eventually resigned from his job because of such pressure. In one such case, a White House appointee, Phil Cooney, demanded 400 last-minute changes which significantly changed the meaning and tone of the report. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jan/31/usnews.frontpagenews Now, The New York Times might not be the be-all-end-all of journalistic integrity, but it and the significantly more left-leaning Guardian are both highly respected publications worldwide. I don't think they were likely to make or transmit unfounded allegations here. [edit: If even a third of what is in this news story is true I certainly think that counts as "bullying" and/or "censoring" and I would be very surprised if you disagree that the administration is "up to its eyeballs in special interests", considering Mr. Cooney's employment both immediately before AND immediately after his job as a Bush appointee.] |
My point was less about Bush and more about the fact that its used as a scapegoat for everything now. Or perhaps more accurately a dumping grounds. Some people think that if you say Bush was censoring scientists that it proves global warming true. But even if we want to assume these articles are 100% factual it doesn't mean anything in the realm of science for proving the theory one way or the other. Really I don't care much about the bush-bashing, its mostly that it distracts from the issue at hand.
Aside from that, do you doubt that this happens both ways?
As for your quote about the C02 connection in the yale pdf, I think there is very good reason to call that data into question based on existing scientific work. It is well documented that the ocean absorbs C02 when its cold and releases it when it warms back up this process happens over the course of 800 years or so. When dealing with a graph whose scale is 100 million years per 'tick line' I think it is more than reasonable to expect that the increase in temperature and accompanying increase in C02 is to be indistinguishable in terms of which came before the other. To be clear I understand that the graph is showing two different models of C02 estimation, but the idea is that this information is later taken and used to graph against temperature to show a correlation.
In that situation the proper thing to do is consult the existing convention. The existing theory, which to my knowledge has been rigorously proven sound already, says that the increasing temperatures cause the increasing C02 not the other way around.
So considering that the prior work in this field was accepted without contention up to now I find it hard to understand why that it should be ignored so that this newer theory fits. If anything the new theory needs to be examined, corrected, and potentially thrown out unless it can provide a new mechanism to explain this issue or show cause to believe that the existing convention is false. That is the way these things have been handled in the past, why should this be different this time?
As for the water vapor issue, is there something specifically you wanted me to comment on (perhaps you could quote what I appear to have missed)?
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