Comments | neoteny: The sky is not falling

neoteny

The sky is not falling

Mar 16, 2007 18:13

Very interesting hour-long UK Channel 4 documentary - "The Great Global Warming Swindle" (1h 14min).

Quote - "The sun is driving climate change, CO2 is irrelevant"

Disputing anthropogenic climate change isn't just for Penn & Teller anymore...

Comments 9

splanky March 17 2007, 05:28:26 UTC

Very interesting indeed.

It's actually a Channel 4 documentary, not BBC.

neoteny March 17 2007, 07:10:15 UTC

Right you are. Corrected.

entomologist March 17 2007, 19:44:42 UTC

Interesting critique. I did notice a some problems with it. First, the theory of impending climate change (probably not uniform "global warming") due to greenhouse emissions doesn't require that any of the changes over the last 150 years were due to greenhouse emissions, a position which the filmmakers seem to have set up as a straw man. Second, just because the agrarian societies of 800 years ago were able to adjust and even benefit from a warmer climate does not mean that our current civilization could do so as easily. For all its advantages, it has certain frailties associated with larger populations and the way resources are allocated to feed them that could actually make it more vulnerable to disaster than an agrarian society with lower population density ( ... )

flamingnerd March 18 2007, 23:01:47 UTC

Yeah, very interesting. This isn't my field, and generally one gets by best assuming that the brightest scientists in the area usually know what they're talking about.

I'm eager to hear what our friend A of Berkley Environmental Science has to say on this documentary. Certainly the data they show is rather moving. I don't have the background to critically analyze them without a big time investment.

A few things did jump out at me.

1. they assume the human CO2 contribution is insignificant, but where are the numbers? They just *say* it's TINY. Furthermore, just because it's small doesn't mean it's insignificant. They state truly that the atmosphere contains about 1% CO2. Yeah, that's true --but that just means that compared to the other gasses, an equivalent absolute increase is a lot MORE significant.

2. The show that CO2 enters the atmosphere from the decay of all the living matter on the planet -and that's true. It's called the carbon cycle. But what makes it different NOW as oppossed to a couple hundred years ago is ( ... )

flamingnerd March 18 2007, 23:17:03 UTC

oops I mean ~0.1% CO2

neoteny March 21 2007, 23:23:36 UTC

> Did you know that the New Zealand Green Party resolved to ban DHMO?

Hey, don't laugh, that stuff kills...

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/living/16793273.htm?source=rss&channel=journalgazette_living

Thread 6

The Debunker Debunked entomologist March 18 2007, 23:21:35 UTC

After a bit of research, it appears that this video relies for its factual claims that global warming is the result of solar variation, that the troposphere is warming less than the earth's surface, and that volcanoes emit more CO2 than industry (note that the other sources of "carbon emissions" mentioned are irrelevant, as they are internal to the global carbon cycle -- only volcanism and fossil fuel burning actually add sequestered carbon to that cycle) on studies that had been discredited between the time they were performed and the time it was filmed. Apparently, that's standard operating procedure for director Martin Durkin. He has a history of distorting the positions of the people interviewed in his documentaries after misleading them about the nature and bias of those documentaries. Durkin's methods of argument would be readily familiar to any proponent of "creation science" or "intelligent design," as they too support their positions with old, discredited data and grossly distort the views of scientists to make it appear ( ... )