From: session@seq.uncwil.edu (Zack C. Sessions)
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d,alt.rush-limbaugh,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Global Warming, again (was Re: Media bias)
Date: 26 Jul 92 19:09:55 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Univ. of North Carolina @ Wilmington

szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo) writes:

>>Proponents of Global Warming claim that urban heat islands are contributing
>>factors to the heating up of the earth.
>
>Ha ha!  This is a beauty.  The proponents from the Greenpeace or
>Earth First!, perhaps?

I didn't say from where, or how credible they are. I simply indicated
that they ARE.

>Legitimate climatologists are concerned about the impact of greenhouse
>gases such as water, CO2, CFCs, and methane.  The contribution of 
>industrial heat generation is quite insignificant, except for the
>local measurements near urban areas, which throw off determination
>of the actual global average.

Legitimate climatologists are also quite capable of recognizing that
urban heat islands exist and compensate the temperature readings
according to allow for such outside effects to determine the REAL
average temperature. And they have done exactly that. The data from
East Anglia has such a correction factor built in.

>>Also, the data I have quoted which was from the Unversity of East
>>Anglia, took the concept of heat islands into account and compensated
>>the data appropriately. It still showed an unexplained half degree C
>>increase over ther last 100 years. 
>
>This is smaller than the margin of error between measuring instruments,
>and could easily be due to ocean current cycles, solar cycles, glacial
>trends, or other non-greenhouse causes.

You are disqualifying the data presented by East Anglia before you even
know how the data was even gathered. You apparently do not give these
esteemed climatologists enough credit to know their business.

>>(See Sep 1989 Scientific American, page 72, article by Dr. Stephen 
>>Schneider who is head of the National Center for Atmospheric 
>>Research's interdisiplinary climate-systems program)
>
>Ah yes, Stephen Schneider, who urged climatologists to exagerate global
>warming so they could get attention.  He recently quit pretending to
>study the climate and has now decided to go torment biology and some other
>field (sociology?).  He is a quack political activist, not a respectable
>climatologist.

Oh, really? According to the April 2, 1992 issue of Nature, Schneider is
very much still in the heat of the fray, garnering as much as $3,000 per
lecture. (Oh, don't worry, the other side is equally well represented,
with Patrick Michaels also getting up to $3,000 per lecture.)

And just who considered Schneider a "quack political activist" other than
yourself? Care to produce some cites? And I'd also like to know the exact
quote of him urging disinformation.

>>[Science articles on global warming] have been numerous one over the past 
>>decade. And, just as you'd imagine, not all of them agree with each other. 
>>But approximately 70% of them DO feel that global warming is happening.
>
>But 0% of these have actually provided successful predictions of
>the climate.   This may change in the next decade as more information
>is gathered and models improve.  However, the most important task is
>getting rid of the political activists and restoring scientific
>debate on models that have _not_ been empirically demonstrated, ie
>restoring the ability of scientists to publish new models that disagree 
>with the current given wisdom of the Scheideristas, who have made
>up their minds and feel like their God-given task is to enlighten
>the world about their computer-generated "discoveries", abandoning the
>scientist's task to search for the truth.

In the summer of 1990, James Hansen predicted that one of the first three
years of the 1990's would be the warmest ever recorded. He didn't have long
to wait. 1990 did it for him, and 1991 did again. (Science, January 19,
1991)

You're pretty good with the conservative, anti-science rhetoric. Ever
consider a job with the Bush re-election campaign? According to you,
all climatologists who are pro-global warming are nothing but a bunch
of political activists. You also appear to think that the entire concept
of global warming depends on computer models and the presence of computer
models which disagree with global warming thus refutes the entire process.
You couldn't be further from the truth.
-- 
Zack Sessions
sessions@seq.uncwil.edu
University of North Carolina at Wilmington
"Good health is merely the slowest form of dying."
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d