Everybody of all persuasions must go to see "An Inconvenient Truth". Granted there is about five minutes of political stuff, but edit that out. They chart out 600,000 years of climate history through Antarctic ice. There WAS a cycle. The cycle has changed in our lifetime as the world population is rising from 1B to 9B.
John K, it is always possible to catch a good weather streak on the Oregon coast in February. Monday we set an alltime high in June of 102 in Portland. Portland thunderstorms are more prevalent now than at anytime in the last 40 years IMO.
We are lucky that we spend 4 hours in low gear on thea golf course. I pray our grandchildren will be as fortunate.
Jim K, They did a 10% sampling of articles about global warming that were publshed in peer reviewed publication.
The number supporting global warming was 928. The number against was zero. The perception problem is that 50% of the non peer review (geared to the general public) say there is a question that it is man caused. I think the argument is based on the long cyclical pattern which was permanently broekn when the inevitable exponential growth of the human race hit during our lifetime. Let me know if your opinion changes after seeing the movie. Go to a matinee, its cheaper and it gets you out of the heat of the day.
Peter -- not everyone believes Gore's movie or view are accurate. Here are a few scientific reviews:
"Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention. The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science." – Professor Bob Carter, of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia, June 12, 2006
“A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously
ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse.” - Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT
Lindzen says the study Gore cites, which claims 100% consensus on global warming, is flat-out wrong:
“…A study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the
consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.”- Lindzen wrote in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal.
Roy Spencer, principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, wrote an open letter to Gore criticizing his presentation of climate science in the film:
“…Temperature measurements in the arctic suggest that it was just as warm there in the 1930's...before most greenhouse gas emissions. Don't you ever wonder whether sea ice concentrations back then were low, too?”- Roy Spencer wrote in a May 25, 2006 column.
Former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball points out problems with Gore’s claim that there has been a sharp drop-off in the thickness of the Arctic ice cap since 1970:
"The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology.”
IMO Gore is another hack politician. His warnings about the environment carry as much weight as his claim that he invented the internet.