The Great Global Warming Swindle

[Sacul15]

http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?q=the+great+global+warming+swindle#

Just discovered this enlightening documentary. Enjoy and discuss.

[Mr. Happy]

Only watched the first 15 minutes since I gotta go to bed but I'd like to make a few initial comments:

1. No one came up with this theory as a way to hinder African countries development. That's a side effect.

2. Global warming is a fad. Six months to a year ago it was the people who thought it was a reality that were rediculed. That doesn't effect wether or not its a serious problem or not, etc.

3. As they mentioned, the "fear" of global warming is creating many many new jobs, thats a GOOD thing.

4. It doesn't matter whats causing the warming since it's still happening, and personnally I don't want to see more hurricanes, dying crops, and for my city to get any hotter than it already is in the summer.

5. And finnally, wether CO2 is causing the warming or not, smog, coal dust, etc, smells bad and is bad for your lungs (so bad some cities have daily advisories to stay indoors) that it should be done away with anyway.

Of course, if it's not CO2, that needs to be recognized and we need to figure out what natural process is causing it so we can stop it.

So basically, I'm predicting that this documentary is a waste of time belaboring a pointless nuiance to the issue. I'll still finish watching it though in the morning.

[RawMeat3000]

This documentary is absolutely not a waste of time. It presents loads of very compelling evidence as to why global warming is not caused by humans. I'm almost ashamed at how quickly it convinced me that much of what popular news has to say about global warming is completely wrong, since I've gone for so long convinced that humans were destroying the planet (which I guess we still are, global warming aside).

But when it mentioned that water vapor made up 95% of all greenhouse gasses, I suddenly remembered a video I saw not too long ago; I don't remember what it was called, but it showed studies done on and around September 11, 2001, when all flights in the US were grounded, and compared the difference in ground temperature between the 11th, 12th, and 13th to the days before and after. The conclusion was that the mean temperature was higher while all flights were grounded because there were no jets to make contrails (which are mostly water vapor). This article can explain it better:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/contrail.html

My whole point is, humans have a large impact on the environment. Whether or not we have/can have an impact on global temperatures, I don't know, and I don't think anyone really does at this point. Although this video is very convincing...

[Mr. Happy]

Except that it doesn't matter wether we cause global warming or not, the effects are still bad.

[RawMeat3000]

Well of course they are, I'm implying that the billions of dollars and thousands (millions, maybe) of man hours being spent on cutting down on carbon emissions are completely pointless if this video is correct. It's a huge waste of resources.

[Mango]

Global warming is caused by sunspot activity. The sunspots are enormous explosions of energy and highly charged particles. There is an intimate correlation between sunspot activity and temperatures in the solar system. Mars' icecaps are receeding at several miles per year, moons of Jupiter and Saturn which used to be ice are now liquid seas. Look at the size of Earth compared to the Sun - carbon on Earth is not causing the solar system to heat up.

Environmental conservation is very important, but let's not use shonky science and political propaganda as motivation. The government's solution is a carbon tax which, as the Club of Rome reported, is a tax on life. Carbon is a life gas: it was on Earth even before oxygen. With all the problems of food shortages and the monopolisation of fossil fuels, the last thing we need is a global carbon tax: it will plunge many millions of people into poverty and starvation.

It is the government that is brainwashing your children, with films and animations in schools telling them the Earth is going to die and polar bears will drown. It's energy companies that're running schemes such as http://www.climatecops.com/, trying to make your children into stasi-like tattle-tale squads and spies. Oooh, report ECOCRIMES and CLIMATECRIMES against mother earth.

Is this what you want? Is this right? Is this fair?

This is part of a bigger programme, read the UN Treaty on Biological Diversity and look at the Wildlands project. This is the government idea of conservation, re-wilding and fencing off vast swathes of the USA.

[The Wanderer]

In response to the sunspots in correlation with temperature:
Sun Makes History First Spotless Month in a Century

Basically prepare for a cold winter

edit: just read this article, it appears that the arctic sees are growing now instead of shrinking.

Global Cooling, the new Global Warming

sounds cooler too

[Puhnkss]

Oh so you found your serious discussion topic then Sacul eh? lol

In the UK that doco's kind of old-ish news and there was some fall-out after it aired, with complaints being sent to the regulating body "Ofcom."

Complaints/Misrepresentations

Letter signed by 37 scientists to the programme maker.

News of Ofcom ruling

Ofcom defines a misleading programme as one by which the audience is "materially misled so as to cause harm or offence", and that Swindle does not meet this "high test".

"The programme has been let off the hook on a highly questionable technicality,"

"The ruling noted that Channel 4 had admitted errors in the graphs and data used in the programme, yet decided that this did not cause harm or offence to the audience."

Make of that what you will guys. Im off to the pub!

[Mr. Potato Head]

My 2 cents . I can remember the weather 40 years ago being very differant than now here in the northwest U.S.A. . You cant keep crapping in your well and not have bad water.

[Sacul15]

Yeah, after watching it I immediately went to wikipedia and Amazon to see the criticisms of it. Though there are some obvious faults with the movie, it seems like most of them are with misquoting people and similar technical and legal debates, and not with the actual science. I have to say, I've always been skeptical about global warming (mainly because hippies support it, and I don't trust those folks ), but for now I'm pretty confident that it isn't caused by humans. I'm always willing to change my view, provided the scientific evidence is there, but what I'm opposed to is the politics that goes along with it. Yes, it creates jobs, but what happens when the myth is debunked? Those people could have been put in more important positions, but now they're jobless.

As for us doing something even if it isn't caused by CO2, I'm not quite sure if that would be the best policy. Man has survived far higher and lower temperatures, without the knowledge and technology we possess today. We'll get by. If this is worse than anything in history, then maybe something should be done. But our current plan consists only of decreasing carbon outputs, which obviously won't help at all.

And yes, Puhnkss, I did find my serious discussion, but it wasn't exactly what I had hoped it to be. We interlopers aren't environmental scientists, so it's kinda hard to have a true debate. In the end we'll just end up throwing numbers at each other and yelling at hippies (which I guess is pretty fun!) Game on!

[Mr. Happy]

Hippies while misguided are motiviated by the prinicple of being nice to people, so there is nothing wrong with them. I'm an ex-hippie


So annyway, sunspots eh. Well that's gotta be a recent development, like in the last year or two. We've known for a long time that there is a direct correlation between sunspot activity and global climate, but as one of my astronomy professors 2 years ago said "we have no fucking clue why." Though he may not have been fully up on it.


I do think that both sides act really silly sometimes. When I look at this whole issue I think of the best evidence that increases in atmospheric greenhouse is a bad thing is the developmental model of the planet venus.

We know (well, at least as well as we CAN know about something that happened billions of years ago) that a rapid increase of the greenhouse effect on Venus caused it to reach it's current temperature of 600K. What we are worried about is that that will happen on Earth...eventually. Not tommorow, and anyone who says that it will happen soon is a fool.

They mentioned how the temperature/CO2 correlation as evidenced is "more complex" than Gore says. It is. But they say it's opposite. Sounds good to me. But that's not a complexity. That's just as simple.

And nothing in science is simple, these ARE complex systems.

Let's look at Venus, it formed with very little water, and as they say, water sequesters carbon dioxide/methane, and when it evaporates becomes a greenhouse gas itself.

So what you got is this:

Lot's of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere -> evaporating water -> even more greenhouse gases in the air (water vapor AND the gases it previously sequestered) -> even more evaporation -> etc.

Eventually the cycle starts to speed up dramatically, the cooling periods don't fully reverse the warming periods, and you get exponential growth in the rate of warming during the warming periods.

That's what's worrying. But we aren't just pumping CO2 into the air, we are also actively destroying the second major active sequestion site: plant life.

So what if we do dramatically increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, AND it's no longer being sequestered, AND this happens during a natural warming period? EVENTUALLY it'll tip the balance so that natural cooling periods don't reverse the warming, and the NEXT warming period will be even more extreme, and countered even less by the NEXT cooling period, meaning the NEXT warming period will be terrible, etc.

So what we have to do is make sure that we don't AID the warming periods.

Of course there are other very good reasons why the global warming craze is a good thing, even if it's untrue, that being the creation of new jobs, advancement of energy technology, cleaner air = lower rates of lung cancer, and we stop giving hundreds of billions of dollars to our enemies.

As for Africa, I honestly don't think that the poorest regions have a chance of industrializing during my or my childrens or my grandchildrens lifetimes. Not enough water.

No matter what though, I don't want it to get any hotter, it's already fucking 105 degress and 99% humidity in the summer. If that means aiming particle beams at the sun to stop the sunspots let's go for it. I'm sure that technology can be weaponized anyway so our government will definitely pay for it! Sunspots are evil anyway, fucking with my wireless internet


EDIT: Long story short, whatever causes global warming theres no reason to fuck with the balance via CO2/methane because we don't know what it'll take to push it to far in either direction.

[zombie@computer]

my current view on global warming:

ignorance is bliss.

so, whats for dinner?

[RC-1290]

my current view on global warming:

ignorance is bliss.

so, whats for dinner?

Mashed potatoes with extra global warming and CO2.

[Edit]A few days later I realize I was posting in the serious discussion forum. So, sorry to anyone who felt offended that this wasn't very serious.

[Rasky_26]

First off, I haven't watched the video yet, I'll get around to it when I have some more time.

First off, climatologically speaking, yes there have been periods of much warmer temperatures and much cooler temperatures in the past. And, yes, Earth does appear to under-go a 100,000 year cycle with CO2 and temperatures. The problem comes in that we have never seen a rise in CO2 as abruptly as we are currently. CO2 causes such a big problem in that it can easily absorb long-wave radiation that the Earth emits and re-emit it back to the surface, therefore keeping an overall surplus of energy stored close to the surface.

CO2 isn't a good absorber of shortwave radiation (sunlight) so most of that energy can pass through the atmosphere until it reaches the surface. When it hits the surface, it is absorbed there and turned into heat. We feel this heat when it is radiated away from the surface in the form of long-wave radiation. During the daytime the solar energy is greater than the long-wave radiation so it warms up. During the night, there is no solar radiation so the heat has a chance to radiate away to space and cool the area. With greater levels of CO2 in the atmosphere the long-wave radiation can not escape the atmosphere as easily and instead a portion gets radiated back to the surface. This portion, though small, accumulates over time which leads to a warming trend.

The one factor that can not be argued is that our oceans are becoming more acidic. Oceans have been a wonderful source for taking up CO2. They hold more CO2 than our atmosphere currently has in it and easily can absorb CO2 our of the atmosphere. However, CO2 can alter the oceans' acidity making the pH level decrease (lower means more acidic). This shows that more CO2 is entering our atmosphere/oceans from some source and that we have greater amounts than we have had in human history.

[Stubby]

Um, Until we have the technology to detect weather patterns. im going to say STFU to anyone who belieives global warming is real.


The FACT is WE DONT FUCKING KNOW IF ITS REAL.


I really want to know who the fuck gave that ass hat Al Gore his information.

Because, im pretty sure we dident have to tools to measure tempature thousands of years ago to know if this is a cycle or not.

And if it turns out that co2 is the problem then there is NOTHING we can do about it.
Humans Account for 3% of all the Co2 so your damn hybrid vehicles dont mean shit.

All im saying is that until its 100% proven. and we 100% know the solution to the problem.
We shouldent change out lifestyle or standard of living for something we dont know exists or even if its going to help.

(althought i do think we need to Diversify our energy resources so that the middle east doesnt own us any more.)