> I agree. Which is why I sourced the link from the Australian Skeptics
> and from geologists (who have been involved in ancient climate studies).
> The link in question was one suggested as "Exploring the global warming
> myth for dummies" :-)
One also needs to keep in mind that some geologists are also the people
who keep the petroleum industry in business. I also think it is important
to seperate between whether greenhouses gases are increasing, and what the
impacts of this will be. No one (well, I'm sure someone does) seems to
doubt they are increasing.
> Without sources, it can be just as easily argued, a massive majority of
> climate scientists _don't_ support global warming. Anecdotal does not
> equal evidence.
See http://www.ametsoc.org/POLICY/climatechangeresearch_2003.html from the
American Meteorological Society which has 11,000 members. That I'm
guessing was approved by at least half of their members which is a pretty
fair number.
> From _our_ perspective of fish keepers climate change is not really the
> problem. Instead manmade disturbances are the _real_ issue.
I think that both are problems. The immediate problem is as you
described, but global warming will be a significant issue for many
critters and habitats.
> The "proof" is not proof, and effects are unsubstantiated and not
> causally linked. As a scientist, you believe this to be reason enough
> to devote time, energy and money?
There are ample predictions out there, some bad, some worse, some say
nothing will happen (mostly not climatologists though). Do we need to
wait until we start to see them begin to happen? That was my point. We
know gas concentrations are increasing (see below), and we can predict
that that should cause warming. The big unknown seems to be how much, and
what impacts will it have on weather patterns, sea levels etc.
> Given that a majority of people producing the model(s) and studying it
> have a vested financial interest (ie/ their jobs, not to mention
> millions of dollars worth of funding), I think you analogy is rather
> flawed.
There are lots of interesting problems out there to conduct research on
besides global warming that one can get large grants to study. Improved
weather predicting, El Nino, paleoclimates etc etc. Research scientists
typically don't make large paychecks and even the money they get as grants
pales in comparison to income generated from the oil industry. People say
the same thing about biologists who work on endangered critters. We
wouldn't want to delist them as we'd be out of a job, thus we keep finding
excuses to keep them listed and get money to work on them.
> The ozone layer is a slightly different kettle of fish. The single
> biggest contributor to ozone lose (from literature I have read) are jet
> engines combusting the ozone.
The major problem with airlines is they fly so high. The chemicals we
release here today on the ground take 15 years on average to get up to the
ozone layer. Output from planes obviously takes a lot less time. The
type of chemicals released are also important as many have very long
persistance times and do not break down easily. Ozone is also regenerated
by processes in the atmosphere, thus you can still release some chemicals,
but if they break ozone down faster than it gets generated you are fried.
> I too performed similar experiments at Uni (in Chemistry though). This
> is why "Greenhouse Gases" are called greenhouse gasses. They are (in
> order of magnitude) H2O, CH4 and CO2. Given that levels of all three
> have not changed significantly to match the "global warming" models over
> the last 50 years, why do you support the models? On an off chance they
> _might_ be correct?
CO2 levels have increased, depends what you mean by significant. Annual
growth rates for CO2 and CH4 (methane) are 0.4%. Their proportional
contribution to greehouse warming is 60 and 20% respectively. These
figures are from page 18 of
http://www.bom.gov.au/info/GreenhouseEffectAndClimateChange.pdf And of
course there are a couple other things that contribute too, but those are
the largest two.
Cheers
Peter Unmack