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1. Posted by: bing on July 31, 2008, 8:59 pm

   It is ridiculous to deny the consequences of Global Warming. But I am somewhat sympathetic toward his sentiment that “I’m a skeptic of the people who say it’s a catastrophe and we can fix it.”

2. Posted by: gladeyoung on August 03, 2008, 12:32 am

   Its wery unpopular to disagree with the the idea that we humans are responsible for global warming.
   I applaude those who dare take a stand against the arogant liberal status quo. 
   Scientist mostly buy into the idea becuase there is alot of reasearch money to had in climate change. And anyone who theatens their golden goose is going to take a beating.. It’s also been a powerful polical ploy and no politicaian in their right mind would dare call BS on this baby.
   Rarely do the climate change experts talk about solar activity and how it coincides with climate change.. Funny because the green house effect is a drop in the bucket compared to solar activity.
   When we start slipplng into our next mini iceage the enviros will be blaming consevativesfor that and the’ll scream louder yet.  Its what they do so well.

3. Posted by: Liberty on August 03, 2008, 8:15 pm

   John Stossel has an opinion that is shared by 1000’s of scientist who understand that the the climate cycles. That temperatures rise and fall. Just as we see in recent numbers showing 2007 was colder than 2008 YTD. NationalWord.org has a great article on global warming that everyone can understand so one doesn’t have to take the word of those self proclaimed heroes who say they can fix it.

4. Posted by: takkak on August 04, 2008, 7:50 am

   Wow.  For a minute I thought I’d been transported back to the era of the 1950s communist witch hunts, but it’s 2008 and he uses the phrase “socialist media.”  That’s dumber than anything those “dumb reporters” could say…  The MSM is a wholly-owned subsidiary of big coporations, probably the LEAST socialist entities in the world.  That being said, I’m also a skeptic that we’re facing a catastrophe but by switching light bulbs we can avert it.

5. Posted by: alternativecatII on August 05, 2008, 8:36 pm

   People can Google Saturn and Global Warming to come up with a link like this one http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070125_planet_mystery.html

   You can Google Mars and Global Warming to come up with links like this http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/newsroom/pressreleases/20031208a.html NASA must be making the while thing up (joking).

   This site lists some documentaries that have been made outside the US on climate change.  People should check them out. One was made for Chanel 4 in the UK and the other one was shown by the CBC
   http://mrxfromplanetx.com/global-warming-or-global-governance

   As the site says, I want clean air.  What I don’t want is a system where we can go around the world imposing UN sanctions on everyone because they don’t want to comply with a carbon credit cap and trade.  It’s insane.

6. Posted by: malachibean on August 06, 2008, 10:54 am

   wow.  I’ve been reading articles from this site for some years now at least five. and honestly this article is heart breaking.  Who ever wrote it is obviously writing a little biased.  The article completely leaves out the fact that john seems to believe there is global warming he just doesn’t think it’s possible to do anything about it.  I live the green life but vegan, light bulbs, moped if not the bike, however that doesn’t mean i’m dumb enough to not realize that their’s no way of stopping the inevitable.  Really disappointed with the Center for the first time…. IN YEARS which means your still a great source of information.

7. Posted by: alternativecatII on August 06, 2008, 11:23 am

   Another documentary people should watch is James Burke’s Connections I volume 8 “The Trigger Effect”

   The documentary looks at climate change that took place about 400 years ago.  James Burke states Greenland used to be green and then—for some unknown reason—the climate to got really cold.  That trigger (cold climate) changed the way everyone lived.  People had to adapt or die.  The Europeans made a great many technological advances at the time to adapt to how the climate changed.

8. Posted by: paulbythebay on August 06, 2008, 4:34 pm

   Seems to me that this article gives this speaker more than too much credibility.  Lets balance his perspective out a little: The burning of fossil fuels is believed by most scientists and world leaders to be a primary cause of global warming – triggering huge storm losses and potential environmental catastrophes.  Hurricanes such as Katrina may be early examples. The Energy Information Administration projects carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will rise from 25 billion metric tons in 2003 to 33.7 billion metric tons in 2015. Developing countries account for most of the projected rise because of large increases in those regions’ energy use and continuing reliance on coal, gas and oil. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 governments in Mauritius in January 2005 that he personally believes that the world has “already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” and called for immediate and “very deep” cuts in the pollution if humanity is to “survive.” (Independent/UK, January 23, 2005).

   A study published in the journal Nature in January 2005 concludes that global warming might be twice as catastrophic as previously thought. The study used the computing capacity of 95,000 computers in 150 countries to predict what would happen if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were double that of the 18th century (before the Industrial Revolution) – the situation predicted for the end of this century.
   The study found that: “Globally, average temperatures could reach 11C (19.8F) greater than today, double the rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body set up to investigate global warming. Such high temperatures would melt most of the polar icecaps and mountain glaciers, raising sea levels by more than 20ft.  . . . flooding settlements on the British coast and turning the interior into an unrecognizable tropical landscape . . .”
   David Stainforth of Oxford University, the chief scientist of the study, comments, “It is possible that even present levels of greenhouse gases maintained for long periods may lead to dangerous climate change . . . When you start to look at these temperatures, I get very worried indeed.”  More recent Reports under the auspices of the United Nations underline the urgency. The latest of the three suggests that a very substantial reduction in fossil fuel use must take place in the next eight years. Severe consequences are already being felt. Scientists have long predicted the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere by increasing greenhouse gases would spawn extreme storms. Weather-related disasters in 2004 cost the global insurance industry more than $35 billion – a record loss, according to United Nations and industry officials (One World US, 12/16/04). “Climate change is already happening, with rapid melting of the Arctic and glaciers worldwide,” says Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP). “Climate scientists have anticipated an increase and intensity of extreme weather events, and this is what the insurance industry is experiencing,” he said. In October 2003, a group of scientists from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published research concluding that about 160,000 people die every year from side-effects of global warming ranging from malaria to malnutrition – and the numbers could almost double by 2020. Another recent study (http://cta.policy.net/dirtypower/docs/dirtyAir.pdf) found toxic pollution, rising rates of asthma, cancers and nearly 24,000 deaths in the United States result from power plant pollution alone each year.
   A Worst Case Scenario?  John Atcheson, a Department of Energy geologist, issued the most ominous alert in an article entitled Ticking Time Bomb – A Growing Threat To Life On Earth (Baltimore Sun, December, 2004). Atcheson postulates that global warming could trigger the release of large amounts of methane trapped in Arctic ices and the permafrost. Methane is a greenhouse gas 20 times stronger than carbon dioxide. Once started, Atcheson suggests that such a release of methane could cause an uncontrollable and irreversible chain reaction leading to a mass extinction of life on earth – an extinction rivaling those that appear to have taken place twice before, 55 million and 251 million years ago. Within the last five years the surface permafrost in an area in Siberia, the size of France and Germany combined, has started to melt for the first time since the last ice age, 11,000 years ago.  One estimate suggests that all mammalian life could be snuffed out in the arctic in as little as 15-25 years.  Worst case, the Oxford study indicates many human lives could be extinguished on earth about 2050.  According to one well informed individual, the correct date may prove to be even earlier.
   “In some areas, it took more than 100 million years for ecosystems to reach their former healthy diversity… If we trigger this runaway release of methane, there’s no turning back. No do-over. Once it starts, it’s likely to play out all the way.”  Myles Allen of Oxford University captures the essence of the situation in one sentence: “The danger zone is not something we’re going to reach in the middle of the century; we’re in it now.”  You go with Stossel opinion if you want ;-) ~ In the meantime I am developing alternate energy technologies NOW so my kids have an opportunity to have the life on this planet that I have known. And if I was wrong about GW - then they will simply have a cleaner planet to live on!

9. Posted by: shiva on August 16, 2008, 11:25 pm

   In response to Paulbythebay’s long dissertation, the BBC has actually made a documentary refutting all you have said.  I urge you to watch it:

   http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8767530517523882044&q=bbc global warming&ei=6l5iSL3kC4Xg-wGEzLiZAw&hl=en

10. Posted by: alternativecatII on August 17, 2008, 10:18 pm

    Agreed shiva.  That documentary is listed on http://mrxfromplanetx.com/global-warming-or-global-governance as well as “Global Warming Doomsday Called Off”
    ***********************************************************************************
    Another documentaries people should see on that site are “The Power of Nightmares” and “Century of Self”  How can Dems compete with the Neocon war on terror?  Tell everyone they will be under 10 feet of water.
    ***********************************************************************************
    I would also like to mention there have been cases in the past were scientists didn’t agree on an issue, and the majority held consensus turned out to be wrong.  Take the case of Eugene DuBois  

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugène_Dubois

    The History Channel program, “Ape to Man” covers this issue:
     
    Reenactments of the work of Eugene DuBois, an Amsterdam physician who left his practice in 1890 in search of the Missing Link and found what would be called Homo erectus, a 500,000-year old ape-like skeleton, in Sumatra. DuBois’ assertion that he has found the Missing Link results in his rejection by the scientific community. Only later did people realize the impact of the discovery.

11. Posted by: paulbythebay on August 20, 2008, 1:57 am

    ... My head was spinning for a while.  Turns out after some further research that the channel 4 documentary is nothing more than non scientific propaganda!  There science is wrong… they misrepresented the scientists that they interested who then demanded apologies…The movie is widely discredited!  Good representative response here from a reputable paper in the UK…

          o George Monbiot
          o The Guardian,
          o Tuesday March 13 2007
          o Article history

    Were it not for dissent, science, like politics, would have stayed in the dark ages. All the great heroes of the discipline - Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein - took tremendous risks in confronting mainstream opinion. Today’s crank has often proved to be tomorrow’s visionary.

    But the syllogism does not apply. Being a crank does not automatically make you a visionary. There is little prospect, for example, that Dr Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang, the South African health minister who has claimed Aids can be treated with garlic, lemon and beetroot, will be hailed as a genius. But the point is often confused. Professor David Bellamy, for example, while making the incorrect claim that wind farms do not have “any measurable effect” on total emissions of carbon dioxide, has compared himself to Galileo.

    The problem with The Great Global Warming Swindle, which caused a sensation when it was broadcast on Channel 4 last week, is that to make its case it relies not on future visionaries, but on people whose findings have already been proved wrong. The implications could not be graver. Just as the government launches its climate change bill and Gordon Brown and David Cameron start jostling to establish their green credentials, thousands have been misled into believing there is no problem to address.

    The film’s main contention is that the current increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the sun. It is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on Earth are in “strikingly good agreement” with the length of the cycle of sunspots.

    Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the “agreement” was the result of “incorrect handling of the physical data”. The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, Friis-Christensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results. But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes - in this case in their arithmetic.

    So Friis-Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating that the sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the sun and global cloud cover. This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming. But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data which did not in fact measure global cloud cover. A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that, when the right data are used, a correlation is not found.

    So the hypothesis changed again. Without acknowledging that his previous paper was wrong, Friis-Christensen’s co-author, Henrik Svensmark, declared there was a correlation - not with total cloud cover but with “low cloud cover”. This, too, turned out to be incorrect. Then, last year, Svensmark published a paper purporting to show cosmic rays could form tiny particles in the atmosphere. Accompanying the paper was a press release which went way beyond the findings reported in the paper, claiming it showed that both past and current climate events are the result of cosmic rays.

    As Dr Gavin Schmidt of Nasa has shown on www.realclimate.org, five missing steps would have to be taken to justify the wild claims in the press release. “We’ve often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work,” Schmidt says, “but this example is by far the most blatant extrapolation beyond reasonableness that we have seen.” None of this seems to have troubled the programme makers, who report the cosmic ray theory as if it trounces all competing explanations.

    The film also maintains that manmade global warming is disproved by conflicting temperature data. Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he discovered between temperatures at the Earth’s surface and temperatures in the troposphere (or lower atmosphere). But the programme fails to mention that in 2005 his data were proved wrong, by three papers in Science magazine.

    Christy himself admitted last year that he was mistaken. He was one of the authors of a paper which states the opposite of what he says in the film. “Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected.”

    Until recently, when found to be wrong, scientists went back to their labs to start again. Now, emboldened by the denial industry, some of them, like the film-makers, shriek “censorship!”. This is the best example of manufactured victimhood I have come across. If you demonstrate someone is wrong, you are now deemed to be silencing him.

    But there is one scientist in the film whose work has not been debunked: the oceanographer Carl Wunsch. He appears to support the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for rising global temperatures. Wunsch says he was “completely misrepresented” by the programme, and “totally misled” by the people who made it.

    This is a familiar story to those who have followed the career of the director Martin Durkin. In 1998, the Independent Television Commission found that, when making a similar series, he had “misled” his interviewees about “the content and purpose of the programmes”. Their views had been “distorted through selective editing”. Channel 4 had to make a prime-time apology.

    Cherry-pick your results, choose work which is already discredited, and anything and everything becomes true. The twin towers were brought down by controlled explosions; MMR injections cause autism; homeopathy works; black people are less intelligent than white people; species came about through intelligent design. You can find lines of evidence which appear to support all these contentions, and, in most cases, professors who will speak up in their favour. But this does not mean that any of them are correct. You can sustain a belief in these propositions only by ignoring the overwhelming body of contradictory data. To form a balanced, scientific view, you have to consider all the evidence, on both sides of the question.

    But for the film’s commissioners, all that counts is the sensation. Channel 4 has always had a problem with science. No one in its science unit appears to understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a clipping from the Daily Mail. It keeps commissioning people whose claims have been discredited - such as Durkin. But its failure to understand the scientific process just makes the job of whipping up a storm that much easier. The less true a program is, the greater the controversy.

12. Posted by: alternativecatII on August 20, 2008, 12:26 pm

    I agree the planet is becoming polluted as hell.  I think the planet is becoming over populated.  I’m still not impressed with the debunking.  If things aren’t heating up because of solar activity, why are the other planets in the solar system heating up as well?

    Saturn http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070125_planet_mystery.html

    Mars http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/newsroom/pressreleases/20031208a.html

    There’s also the CBC’s Global Warming Doomsday called off, which was on the http://mrxfromplanetx.com/global-warming-or-global-governance page

    Did you know 30 or so years ago scientists were freaking out about global cooling?

    *********************************************************************

    Now we have this crazy carbon credit idea.  This is going to give groups like the UN and the WTO incredible power to go around policing countries. Countries who won’t be able to defend themselves.  Oh wait, China’s supposed to be exempt.  Despite they’re one of the worst polluters.  Perhaps they can’t be pushed around. 

    Carbon trading is going to be a multimillion if not billion dollar business.  This is very dangerous.  Do you have any clue how dangerous a global carbon credit cap and trade actually is?

    Check out John Pilger’s The New Rulers of The World http://mrxfromplanetx.com/the-new-rulers-of-the-world

    This documentary takes a look at the global economy and how people in third world nations have been screwed over by it.  Many people claim $1 a day is a great wage for workers in Indonesia.  John Pilger shows what desperate conditions they actually live under.  John Pilger also shows the WTO is looking out for multinational corporations.  Not people.  Who is going to handle carbon credit trading?  One reason George Bush used as an excuse to go into Iraq was to enforce UN sanctions.  Do you see the potential for abuse here?

    You should also watch Paying The Price: Killing The Children of Iraq.  http://mrxfromplanetx.com/paying-the-price-killing-the-children-of-iraq

    This documentary looks at how UN sanctions spear headed by the US killed one million people in Iraq, half of them children.  Most of this documentary was actually filmed in Iraq, and includes interviews from people who quit the UN because they were appalled by the agency’s actions.

    George Galloway backed up what John Pilger had to say when he spoke before US Congress http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrdFFCnYtbk

    Here’s the full version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3VHAco8y18

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