« OSU stiffs Kulongoski on “state climatologist” title request | Main | The sorrow of sowing invasive deer food »

February 16, 2007


Good column. Last night Bill Maher brought this all up on his HBO show, Real Time. Carly Fiorina, the ex CEO for HP made the point that it's better to do something and hope it makes a difference than the reverse. What do we lose by improving gasoline mileage-- unless we work for an oil company that profits from excess usage. The ones out there fearing that we will improve air quality mystify me other than it's the same old battle-- never enough profit, never enough excess. To begin, they won't be the ones paying the price for global climate change accompanied by massive flooding. It will be mostly the poorest. Although the super storms that are predicted might surprise some of these people who could care less and only follow a political agenda, not one that seeks to look at facts.

Please stop using RIGHT WING in every sentence -- you sound like a true crackpot


George H. Taylor is the State Climatologist for Oregon, and a faculty member at Oregon State University's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. He manages the Oregon Climate Service, the state repository of weather and climate information, and supervises a staff of ten.

Mr. Taylor is past president of the American Association of State Climatologists. He is a member of the American Meteorological Society and has received certification as a Certified Consulting Meteorologist by the Society. He also has a California Lifetime Community College Credential. He has published over 200 reports, symposium articles, and journal articles.

Prior to joining Oregon State University in 1989, Mr. Taylor operated his own consulting business in Santa Barbara, California. Previously he was employed as a meteorologist by North American Weather Consultants and Environmental Research and Technology.

Education: B.A. Mathematics U.C. Santa Barbara, 1969
M.S. Meteorology University of Utah, 1975

Family: Married; 3 children

[Caution: no peer-reviewed scientific evidence is cited here. So be highly doubtful that what is said is anything more than a personal opinion. My new blog policy is to add this cautionary statement when someone posts a comment that confuses the facts about global warming. See:

Remember Global Cooling?
Why scientists find climate change so hard to predict.


How did NEWSWEEK—or for that matter, Time magazine, which also ran a story on the subject in the mid-1970s—get things so wrong? In fact, the story wasn't "wrong" in the journalistic sense of "inaccurate." Some scientists indeed thought the Earth might be cooling in the 1970s, and some laymen—even one as sophisticated and well-educated as Isaac Asimov—saw potentially dire implications for climate and food production. After all, Ice Ages were common in Earth's history; if anything, the warm "interglacial" period in which human civilization evolved, and still exists, is the exception. The cause of these periodic climatic shifts is still being studied and debated, but many scientists believe they are influenced by small changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun (including its "eccentricity," or the extent to which it deviates from a perfect circle) and the tilt of its rotation. As calculated by the mathematician Milutin Milankovitch in the 1920s, these factors vary on interlocking cycles of around 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years, and if nothing else changed they would be certain to bring on a new Ice Age at some time. In the 1970s, there were scientists who thought this shift might be imminent; more recent data, according to William Connolley, a climate scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who has made a hobby of studying Ice Age predictions, suggest that it might be much farther off.

No one knows how many millions of volcanoes have erupted all over the world in the last 600 million years; - - any one of which might have expelled more CO2, CO, sulfuric acid, and other toxic substances than all of mankind has done in the past thousands of years.

The earth recovered.

In that 600 million years, the earth has gone through periods of tropical climate at very high latitudes, as well as ice ages with glacial ice half-way to the equator. During most of the world’s history, the poles were not covered by ice and snow. None of the above was due to human influences.

The earth recovered.

Many so-called experts have forecast disasters ranging from the coming of ice ages, to the millennium-time-change fiasco.

Very likely the earth will recover nicely again, - it didn’t need Al Gore’s help in the previous 600 million years.

Ken, I suspect you haven't watched "An Inconvenient Truth." At least, you don't seem to have understood a key undisputed fact.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere now are at unprecedented levels, higher than at any time in the past 700,000 years, I recall from the movie.

This is clearly human caused. So whatever happened in the past isn't a reliable guide to the future, because humans are a new influence on climate change.

Gore points out in the movie that a certain difference in CO2 levels produced two mile thick ice sheets. He then points to the much larger difference being observed now, in the opposite warming direction and asks, "What will this produce?"

Excellent question. One that must be addressed scientifically, not by falling back on "nature knows best" platitudes. We are part of nature now. And humans need to decide what is best for our survival.

Firstly as Ken says, if the earths climate was that unstable, it could not have supported and nurtured life for the past millenia.The atmosphere would by now have been driven off by the huge fuel air explosions as suggestedin the recent British Sunday Times Special!!!!

Secondly, and I know that Mr Gore rather CONVENIENTLY overlooked this, the earths temperature changes over the last 700,000 years have LED the change in CO2 by about 800 years. THAT IS TEMP CHANGES FIRST AND THEN CARBON CHANGES LATER!!! Do a search - it's true.

Thirdly why is the atmosphere not warming rapidly at 30,000ft as predicted by the Carbon led Global Warming models?

Fourthly, why is the IPCC ignoring the recent evidence for Cosmic Radiation effects on the global temperature as influenced by sunspot activity. The stronger the sunspot activity the warmer the earth becomes due to less ionising radiation that helps to form clouds, and cloud cover cools the earth. The suns magnetic field doubled in strength during the 20th century. More sunspots = higher global temperatures.

I'm not right wing. I am in favour of reducing carbon fuel use big time. I am in favour of the best use of science to inform and direct, not the current misuse to disinform and further certain anti mankind political goals.

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment


Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been posted. Post another comment



Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.


Post a comment

Your Information


Strange Up Salem

Welcome to HinesSight

  • Salem Political Snark
  • Twitter with me
    Join Twitter and follow my tweets about whatever.
  • Church of the Churchless
