

  (Source: Smart Power)
Study says skeptics are not well-informed on the topic













Comments     Threshold


RE: Of course its part of a clique
By Suntan on 6/28/2010 5:20:17 PM , Rating: 5
Meh, I’ll just put this out there.

I’m a degreed mechanical engineer specializing in thermodynamics and heat transfer. Back a few years ago (when Al was just starting to get rolling on his war path) I worked for a company that made advanced refrigeration equipment. Due to the fact that they would be very much impacted by any legislation that would further curtail the types of refrigerants available to use (R404a has a GWP that is over 3 thousand time higher than carbon dioxide) I spent the better part of a week digging online for information. (Lest you think I was motivated to believe AGW was false out of some sense of fear for my job, I can tell you that the best thing for an engineer is to have the government outlaw their current designs. It insures a healthy future for engineers when they have to completely redesign all the current products to meet a new government mandate.)

Most of the stuff available then, as now, was just warmed over opinion based on a few actual source reports available at the time. (You can usually tell the difference between a source report and an article of supposition just by asking yourself “where did they come up with that information” as you read the claims, if they don’t have direct explanation of the base data, you know it is just supposition.) Anyway, after a good few days of searching, I found a couple of places that had the actual compiled test data. One was a NOAA report of about 150 pages. The one that most of the papers that started exploding into the public were based on at the time. Looking through it (the base data of the various tests and observation sites around the world) and taking time to make sure I understood the data that was contained within it, for a few days, I finally came away with the belief that no person with a strong foundation in science would actually be convinced that the climate community knew enough to make a thumbs up or down judgment on the topic.

Now I don’t mean to imply that I am an expert on the topic of climate, I certainly wouldn’t know what to investigate to clarify the debate myself, but I do understand how hot bits and cold bit interact with each other better than the average person, and more importantly, I understand how to interpret data and how to vet other people’s conclusions of a set of data. Many of the articles that I then read (one that based their opinions on the NOAA data) just didn’t make sense, by that I mean I could not understand how they formed the conclusions they came to based on the data they referenced. It often didn’t add up, or there was conflicting data that flat out was not evaluated in their reports (even though the conflicting data came from the same massive NOAA report that they got their supportive data from.)

To add on to this, it was right around that time that researchers off the coast of one of the northern islands of Alaska confirmed that they found liquid water vapor within cloud formations where the air temperature was -60°F. Prior to this, “common belief among the climatologists around the world” said that there was no possible way that cloud formations would have liquid water vapor in clouds at temperatures that low. Now if you know something about how differently the sun’s energy reacts to water vapor, as it does to crystalline ice particles in the sky, you would know that this is something that climatologists should have under their belts *before* proclaiming to the world that they know how the model of our Earth heats and cools.

Lastly, this was also the spring/summer after Katrina. Back then, all the climatologists were predicting that the following hurricane season was going to be even worse than the one before (the one that spawned Katrina) and that it was likely that the Gulf area would see at least 12 or 13 hurricanes that season. Guess what, that following season the gulf saw no hurricanes make landfall. Climatologists couldn’t use their computer models to make an accurate prediction out 4 months, yet they expect us to believe they can accurate model events out 20 30 years?

Taking these three separate issues (vast numbers of sensationalist reports that didn’t measure up to the base data, the fact that climatologists still don’t even understand the full workings of the atmosphere, and the fact that their models have been proven to be wrong every instance where time has caught up to their forward looking projections) that is why I disagree with the notion that “the scientific community at large knows AGW is true.” Not because I watch Fox News (I don’t) or because I dislike Keith Oberman (I do) but because I took enough time to make an informed decision on the topic myself. I suggest you all do the same.

Since then I’ve looked into it a few other times, not as deeply, but enough to come away once again that nothing has changed since may initial judgment on the debate (that climatologists still don’t have a foggy clue that actually happens in up in the air around us.)


RE: Of course its part of a clique





RE: Of course its part of a clique
By William Gaatjes on 6/29/2010 4:22:40 PM , Rating: 2
Very true. You just summed up exactly the same reasons why i have my doubts as well about Man made global warming.

But i have no doubt about man made global pollution. And that is something humanity should be worried about.

RE: Of course its part of a clique
Define “global pollution.”






