Kevin Crean

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  Kevin commented on the article | almost 3 years ago

  Global Warming Deniers, Delayers Gather for Unreality Check

  That's quite a biased news item.  If you read the new book "The Deniers," by Lawrence Solomon, you'll see that the dissenters are not just a bunch of cranks, but that in reality many are respected scientists.  If you bother to read their work, you'll find credible methodologies and data that are elegantly organized by those methods.  You'll find nothing so much as a rational debate among hundreds of serious scientists.  So the charge of charlatanism is misplaced.
  It's easy to socially exclude and diminish dissenters and it always has been.  The real question is whether one has the courage to look at the facts in an unbiased way and to allow science to lead where it will.  Take a look at the work of the Russian scientist Abdussamatov, for example.  If CO2 were causally related to increased temperatures,as is commonly believed, the 4% rise in CO2 in the last decade would have caused a .1% centigrade increase in global temperatures.  That rise did not happen, however.  Instead, the actual data are better represented by a solar theory that accounts for deep cycles that predict the current downward trend in temperatures (the last 8 years), followed eventually by a sharp downward fall in temperatures (2045 to 2055, lasting 45 to 65 years thereafter).  In just a few years (6 to 8 years), we'll have enough data to know if this working hypothesis is well-founded.  If it is, the theory strongly suggests that we could be facing another Little Ice Age, similar to the one that occurred after the "Maunder Minimum," and running between roughly 1650 and 1715, when, as Virginia Woolf put it, they roasted oxen whole on the Thames.  
  If this were to happen, the human consequences, especially in terms of food security, and especially as it affects the world's poor, would be extreme.  There are real consequences to the theories we support, both intellectually and financially.
  On the other hand, you may just be inclined to believe the telegenic Al Gore (whose basic forecasting has been demolished by J. Scott Armstrong, a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the International Journal of Forecasting--but what would he know?).  Gore certainly captured the popular imagination with images of melting icecaps--which bucks 750,000 years of data.  I suppose, as Joseph de Maistre said of a people having the government they deserve, that one similarly holds the scientific theory that one deserves, based on critical analysis and a measured view of human nature.