From: session@seq.uncwil.edu (Zack C. Sessions)
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d,alt.rush-limbaugh,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Media bias
Date: 26 Jul 92 18:15:39 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Univ. of North Carolina @ Wilmington

john@anasazi.com (John R. Moore) writes:

|]If one beleives the University of Anglia and the UK Meteorology Office, average
|]global temperatures HAVE been increasing. These figures have been published
|]by not only National Geographic, but such notable peer-reviewed journals as
|]the Scientific American and Science.
|
|Yes, and if you look close, you will see two things: (1) Urban heat island
|effect is responsible for a lot of the rise; (2) what is left occurred mostly
|prior to 1940, which is to say when there was much less CO2 in the atmosphere.

<sigh>

As I have stated in numerous articles, the data published by Goddard and
East Anglia did indeed take heat islands into account. And if you study the
graph, you'll find that HALF of the increase of the last 100 years took
place between 1920 and 1940, and the other half took place between late 1960
and the present.

|]How many times have you cursed the weatherman when you got rained on and
|]didn't take your umbrella since they predicted sunshine? Long term predictions
|]of climate changes are based on factors not even considered when predicting
|]the weather. Ask a climatologist. I am not one. But I have read them. And
|]they clearly state over and over how much more reliable climatology is
|]than meteorology is.
|
|Yes, they do say that. However, there is no reason to believe them.

Do you believe ANYONE? Do you believe ANYTHING? Is the sky blue?

| Furthermore,
|it depends on whether you ask a historical climatologist or a modeller.
|Climatologists can quite accurately predict the climate if nothing changes.
|They cannot do a decent job of predicting the effects of new phenomena like
|CO2 increases. Furthermore, there are powerful, poorly understood
|nonlinear feedback effects that add chaos to the whole thing... it makes
|their predictions very suspect. This is true of climate change in addition
|to weather.

Historical climatologists generally agree with the modellers, as studies
have shown that fluxuations of atmospheric CO2 levels correlated with drastic
climate changes.

|]Heat islands most certainly exist. And they are part of the problem, as
|]they themselves only exasperate global warming.
|
|They have no significant effect on global warming. They simply result in
|excess heat in urban areas, which are a microscopic portion of the earth's
|surface. Their main effect is to distort temperature readings. Add to that
|the fact that most reporting stations poorly represent global temperatures
|because they are poorly distributed... most of the earth's surface is oceans,
|but the records of temperatures there are very rough. Historical climatologists
|have gotten ship's logs to help look for global warming signatures, but
|haven't found much.

I agree that the effects of heat islands on global warming is far from
significant, however, I feel that its effect is not zero. Goddard and East
Anglia didn't just take data from recording stations and graph it. A great
deal of analysis was apparently performed on the collected data. Effects
from heat islands were taken into account. Movement of recording stations
was taken into account. And the East Anglia data even includes data taken
at sea.

The US Navy alone has provided a wealth of data. When I was in the Navy, I
stood Quatermaster watches at sea. One of my responsibilities was to take
hourly weather observations which included recording the temperature. This
data, along with our current position and the time, was signalled to a
group which collected and maintained this data. I am sure that the Navies
of most other countries perform a similar function.
-- 
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,alt.rush-limbaugh,talk.politics.misc