AP is another Global Warming Alarmist

most newspapers are going out of business because they have to compete with the internet, which provides free news, & because of the current state of the economy. As far as the environment goes, it should be obvious that the world is warming up & something must be done. Im not saying that we are the primary cause of it, but we are contributing.

If newspapers would provide news that people actually want to read I don't think they would be in the dire straits that they are in right now.  I'm not saying they would be well off, but I don't think they would be struggling as much.

I don't think anyone denies that global warming is happening.  Where we all tend to differ is in what the ramifications of that are.  I personally see global warming as part of the cyclical nature of weather.  The earth goes through periods of warming and cooling, sometimes those periods are more extreme than others.  This doesn't mean that man has any impact on it and it certainly doesn't mean that man can do anything to stop the cycle.  The earth is not going to die because of man.  The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, man has been around for a few thousand years and we have only been industrialized for about 150 years.  The earth will survive, man may not, but the earth will.

That all said I still think we should look for more environmentally friendly ways of living, but they also need to be reasonable.  Yes it would be wonderful if we could get all the power we need from the sun and/or wind.  But as of right now that simply isn't feasible so we need to continue to produce energy by the old tried and true methods until those cleaner forms of energy are more reasonable.

I'm going to do a Clinton on you - it depends on what you define Global Warming as.  If you define it as some years lately have been warmer, it sure looks that way.  If you define it as an irreversible trend, then no it is not.  Right now, the earth is going through a warming cycle, primarly due to the sun.  That can change in a year, or 10 years or a lot longer (since before hysteria set in, calm rational scientists generally agreed we were still warming from the last glacial era about 10k years ago).

But one thing is certain.  Man's effect on it is not demonstrable, or even evident based on the meager history of the movement and their hysterical claims.

I should have been more clear.  Rational people won't deny that the earth is currently warming. 

Man-made global warming is simply impossible to prove and anyone who tells you differently is either lieing to you or a nut-job (possibly both).  We simply don't know enough about the earth's history and our potential impact on it.  I'm certainly not saying that man hasn't had any impact, I'm simply saying that the hysteria surrounding global warming is uncalled for.

Except for this year.

And, unfortunately, there is little that is rational about the AGW proponents' hysteria: Link

Why?  I had fun doing a clinton!

It depends on where you are.  Where I live we have had a relatively mild winter.  Sure we've had more snow so far this year than we did by this time last year but I am fairly sure that we have had warmer overall temps.  For instance even though it snowed here on Friday it was in the 50s yesterday and was into the low 70s here today, yet tonight it is expected to get back to freezing along with some icy conditions.

Not really.  2008 has been the coolest year (globally) in a decade.  The alarmists will say it's just an oscillation in 'the' upward trend, but the fact is they don't know.  If 2009 remains cooler, it'll be interesting to see what rationalization they come up with then.

They'll just that it is cooler because of global warming.  You know, ice caps melting causing the oceans to cool which then cause the overall temp to be cooler or some such nonsense.  Maybe Al Gore will start reciting lines from "The Day After Tomorrow" to justify his position.

That is cute. Now liberals are injecting religion.

And I would not equate man with God, as we still dont know a wit of what he does.

Out of interest, are you disputing any of the following:

"Since Clinton's inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton's second inauguration"?

So would many statisticians. If you have an upward trend, that doesn't mean you won't have the occasional 'blip' in such a trend. So if you have say 10 years of hot weather (with the overall average temperature increasing) and 1 year of very cool weather, it suggests the trend is hot weather. If you have 10 years of hot weather then 5 years of cool weather, it suggests that you probably don't have that hot trend. If you want to try and deny global warming you're going to have to do better than coming up with one year! A very basic measure would be to just plot the temperature of the last 15-20 years and do a simple linear fit (straight line) that best matches the data, and see if it looks like it's upward sloping. If you want to get a more sophisticated measure there are various reports scattered around which probably provide such information.

And a very stupid measure.  To take less than a blink of the geologic eye and call it a trend of any sort is foolish.  The 15-20 year data are more likely the 'blip' than a true trend.  But we've had this discussion at length in other threads.  It's a religion and no amount of contrary data will dissuade believers.

Edit: I should qualify that - the religion I'm referring to is AGW, not climate change per se.  We know we've been in a warming phase, but to say that the loss of arctic ice is proof of AGW, or that it requires that we 'do something yesterday' without knowing the consequences of what we 'do' is folly to use as kind a word as I can muster.

I wasn't trying to be comforting.  I was just refuting what a lot of global warming alarmists like to claim: "We are killing the planet" or CNN's series "Planet in Peril."  The earth will survive until the sun expands and swallows it up in a couple billion years.

Animals were going extinct long before man came along.  Now may be the polar bears turn if they are unable to adapt to the new environmental conditions.

It's not that they didn't quote a source but that they did not write a fair and balanced article that included the opposing side.  There are many scientists out there that disagree with global warming and have mountains of evidence to support their side that completely contradict the global warming argument.

To which I say so what.  We have also lost a lot of planetary ice coverage since the last ice age, big deal.  What a lot of global warming alarmists are ignoring is the fact that weather is cyclical.  There are bound to be warming trends, and there are bound to be cooling trends.  Sometimes those trends can last for decades but the cycle will repeat itself it is all completely and totally natural.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking for more environmentally ways of living just that the situation isn't as dire as many make it seem.

If you want to accurately get a picture of whether we are in a catastrophic global warming trend you need to really pull data from the past 50-100 years (even that is too short a time span) and see how weather has been cycling up and down and then determine if we are trending upward faster than any other warming trend of that time period.  The problem is that a lot of that data isn't available because global weather trends haven't been tracked for that long which renders this entire discussion rather moot.

Yes.  Since that has already proven to be false.  The readings were defective and the claim has been withdrawn.  The HOTTEST years on record were during the 1930s.  Some of them have been since Clinton was inaugurated, but not THE hottest and of course not the top 10.

A pretty hilarious 'counter' given just a moment before you were implying that 1 year seemed to be sufficient evidence against a trend. You can't have it both ways you know!

Well you've only managed 1 year so far, which is even less than the quoted "propaganda" from the OP.

Hence you have to work with what you're given. Better to have a very rough idea than no idea at all. It's also why you don't rely on the statistics alone, but make sure there is actually some reasoning(/science) to back them up. For example if the area of ice in the arctic appears to have fallen inversely to industrialisation/certain gas emissions, then it suggests there might be a relation between the two. However to actually be confident that there could be such a relation you'd then need the backing reasoning - such as the industrialisation producing gases which cause the suns rays to heat up the earth more than they were before which causes temperatures to rise which causes the ice to melt, causing the area to decrease (and obviously the science would come in to play wrt the gases causing the earth to heat up more since the rest are already fairly logical consequences)

I can understand how you'd misinterpret it but actually, no.  I did not offer it as evidence against a trend and didn't state that it was the sum total of 'contrary data'.  I merely commented on the fact of it and speculated on how the zealots would 'explain' it away in the context of the AGW religion.  'Evidence of a trend' requires a geologic timeline extending back thousands, perhaps millions, of years.  Besides, if you look at my edit, I am not arguing with the notion that climate change occurs and have no intention of trying to refute it.  I strongly argue against the notion that man is the proximate and substantive cause of the current warming trend, however.

Unless the 'rough idea' is wrong.  Making decisions that impact us on such a massive scale on the basis of a 50/50 proposition is pretty dicey, at least in my opinion.

thats true for both directions though, taking no action is just as much a decision based on luck as taking action then (that is from your standpoint that all the studies which indicate the probability of a manmade influence are not even slightly better than a cointoss.)

If you argue this way why it is better than to take no action than to take action? The difference is that in scenario "taking action" you pay money now to prevent a potentially much bigger damage later and in scenario "no action" you save your money now and risk a much bigger damage later on. Risk-affine people tend to avoid short-term losses even if that means bigger potential long-term losses, while people who prefer to be on the safe side accept short-term losses to prevent bigger potential long-term losses.

I personally don't blame people who are >50 for totally ignoring the potential harm which is done later, it won't affect you so its the rational thing to do but many people who have the probabilty to live 80 maybe even 100 more years are willing to invest now to prevent potential damage later. Its like an insurance. I mean when you have an insurance it can turn out it was totally bullshit to spent money on it because there was never an accident, so you payed money for nothing, but it can also turn out that you profit from that insurance because you lose your leg in a tourist-sawmill.

That argument assumes AGW is a fact - it's not.  It's a hypothesis at best.  And I have no problem 'going green' at a reasonable cost, but not to the point that we disadvantage our children's future.  Adapting to environmental change is something we can do and where we should expend our precious capital.  We've been doing it for thousands of years and I have complete faith in our ability to do so in the future.  The species has a knack for self-preservation that does not, and never will, require a Kyoto Protocol.

It's a conceipt, however, that whatever we do will 'save the planet' since there is no evidence whatsoever that we know WTF we're doing when we try.  We are clueless.  Al Gore can huff & puff all he wants and we won't know an iota more than we did pre-huffing.  The scale of the problem is simply too vast.  The stuff proposed (so far) to deal with climate change is premised entirely on the acceptance of AGW as fact (and, conveniently, on a process that would/will make Mr. Gore a very wealthy man).  The notion that we must 'fix the problem' at all costs will cost all - it's simply impossible.

Very, very wrong.  First the global warming alarmists need to prove that man has a significant enough impact on global warming.  They have yet to satisfy the burden of proof (which lies on them).  As I pointed out there is not enough data from which to pull to truly get a sense of whether this warming trend is abnormal or not so it is nearly impossible for the global warming alarmists to prove their point.  Therefore we cannot undergo extremely expensive methods to attempt to lessen our impact on the environment.

And there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of diabetes cases since Coca-Cola was introduced so it must be due to Coca-Cola so we should just get rid of all soda-pop right?  A correlation is hardly enough to act on, especially when we are dealing with something as complicated and expensive as dealing with global warming.

And this is the stance that is the most reasonable.  Yes we should attempt to lessen our impact on the environment, but we shouldn't be doing it at great expense.  Yes we should look into solar and wind power but at the moment they cannot replace fossil fuels for this country's power needs.  Maybe one day they can, but they are no where near being able to do that today.  Especially in todays economy we have more important things to deal with than global warming.

there is no thing as a proof in sciences (except for formal sciences like mathematics and logic), you can only proof that something is wrong, but never that something is right.

While I will agree that this is applicable in some areas of science, like the theory of evolution, gravity, theoretical physics, etc.  You can prove things in science, what you can't do is prove a negative which is why the burden of proof is on the person making the affirmative claim (ie global warming exists).  And even if you can't prove something you still need to have a proponderance of evidence with which to create a strong theory (like evolution and gravity).  To date there simply isn't that proponderance of evidence for man-made global warming.  In fact there are scientists out there that have just as much evidence disproving man-made global warming.

Here, take a look at what might happen over the next few years (could take decades or even centuries) as a result of global warming (man-made or otherwise):

1. Global Warming leads to snow and ice melt which in turn leads to increased water levels in bodies of water and a decrease of sunlight reflected back into space leading to more warming.

2. That increased warming causes increased evaporation of the various bodies of water leading to decreased water levels.

3. That increased evaporation leads to increased cloud cover which then leads to increased amounts of sunlight reflected back into space.

4. That increase sunlight relected back into space causes a period of global cooling.

5. The cooling allows the clouds to start releasing more precipitation.

6. The precipitation causes increased snow and and cooling along with precipitation creates increased ice.

7. This returns us to roughly the same place as we were in part 1 of this cycle and the cycle repeats.

Now are all of these steps going to happen, I don't know I'm not a scientist but based on my limited knowledge of science I would say that they certainly could and would render global warming as part of a cycle that will self correct.

Old saying in science: association is not causation.  As in 'I haven't had a cold since I bought my new shoes.'