“It’s gonna be hot!… and wet! That’s nice if you’re with a lady, but ain’t no good if you’re in the jungle!” — Roosevelt E. Roosevelt, Good Morning Vietnam
I just heard that European insurance carriers are no longer willing to insure ski resorts at altitudes under 6,000 ft.
*sigh*
You just tagged a bunch of people to get involved in fighting global warming. You wont find a more obsessive and rabid bunch than skiers! Someone should make a simulation which shows how many slopes will be knocked out with global warning, that’ll really get ’em going!
Might be offset by those people who don’t like shoveling their driveways so often in the winter.
Sounds like an opportunity for Berkshire Hathaway to step in and make a killing like they did last hurricane season.
Earlier this month, the BBC (correction: British TV 4) released The Great Global Warming Swindle (full video). Paleoclimatologist Professor Ian Clark claims that warmer spells in the Earth’s history came an average of 800 years before the rise in CO2 levels.
That video is extremely interesting in the things it sheds light on that commonly get ignored today in the global warming hysteria (hard to have a rational discussion when people are being burned at the stake as ‘witches’ & heretics). The common sense points the documentary makes about the sun and solar impact on climate are both obvious and mostly ignored today. I personally don’t doubt the earth has warmed in the last 25 years (several prominent Russian and Chinese scientists, conveniently or not in relation to their economic development, are proclaiming they anticipate a period of global cooling is most likely to occur in the near future as from 1940 to 1980), but I don’t for a second believe it’s primarily attributable to CO2 levels.
However, it’s actually Channel 4 Britain that is responsible for that documentary, here’s the link. At first I thought it was the BBC as well, but in hindsight there’s no way the BBC could have ever produced something so skeptical about the more common irrational (not to mention ignorant) beliefs regarding global warming.
Thanks for that link – although it seems to have been taken off googlevideo now… I’m still quite keen to see it. It is depressing that rational discussion on the subject is drowned out, and from what I hear and read there is plenty to chew over on this documentary.
However, it doesn’t help when it is made by someone like Martin Durkin, who has an awful track record of misrepresentation in popular TV documentaries. Why is it that we seem to have either reasonably interesting, challenging and valuable examinations of complex phenomena produced by careless numpties, or glossy, sensationalist, doom-laden ratings-boosters like Horizon on the BBC? pah!
interesting article and comment thread here
One problem would seem to be that however minimal man’s impact upon climate change may prove to be, it is still quite a dangerous message to transmit that it is acceptable to burn through energy and take it for granted, which is one sadly inevitable result of programmes like this – however well intentioned or researched they are…
You can watch the full 75 min. program here, for now:
The point about warming leading CO2 increase is true, but there is more to it than that. Vostok ice core data reveal that warming episodes did occur (as climate is anything but a static physical variable), which then triggered the release of more CO2 into the atmosphere. The hypothesis is that this increase then lead to additional warming, until the dominant physical forcing mechanism (orbit, tilt, solar output, etc..) swung climate back in the other direction. The difference now is that CO2 concentrations are acting as both a forcing and a feedback mechanism, rather than solely a feedback mechanism. There are still a lot of areas within this argument which need to be addressed, such as why did CO2 increase following the initial warming, so much more work remains. While this is obviously an overly simplified explanation, it illustrates a cogent point about taking a true systems approach to scientific problems (remember the first lesson in a college statistics class: correlation does not equal causation).
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