Well then, I guess I'll be forced yet again to be the loner regarding climate change. I do not believe in anthropogenic global warming (that is, climate change caused by humans). Just a warning - I suck at debating something when I just enter the debate. I prefer it when people have challenged specific points I've made
. Here goes...
First, here's parts of an email conversation I had with the retired university professor, Tim Ball (Ph.D Geography). Dr Ball is a global warming skeptic. His words are in red, mine in green
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I totally agree with you when you say "No doubt passive acceptance yields less stress, fewer personal attacks and makes career progress easier." I openly do not believe humans cause global warming, and this has left me open to mockery. I think that, perhaps, a belief in global warming as a natural cycle is one of the most socially unacceptable beliefs to have these days.
While I never pretend that I know a lot about the subject, my personal view on climate change is a strong one. I've heard that some governments subsidise only the scientists who find evidence of the existence of global warming, leaving many to pick between putting bread on the table and searching for the truth independently.
This is very true and typified in this cartoon. Cartoonists see the fallacies and inconsistencies in society and can summarize them in a humorous but effective way. My fellow students' most commonly cited source is Al Gore, which frustrates me - he is a politician, not a climatologist, and probably just realises where the money is to be made.
I urge you to take a look at "The Great Global Warming Swindle" available here.
store.demanddebate.com/
I was proud to be involved in the development of this video and to participate. It was partly designed to offset Gore's fantasy movie.
Here is the UK court ruling on Gore's movie as propaganda and scientific errors. I would be very interested to learn more about climate change, in order to properly debate the topic with my friends. Is it true that the climate cycle is caused by slight change in the earth's tilt? What are some examples of the impending return of global cooling when you state, "the major mechanisms and the global temperature trends now indicate a cooling."
Most school textbooks and therefore most of the population still believe the earth's orbit is a fixed elliptical obit and the tilt is fixed at 23.5° In fact, we have known for at least 130 years that the orbit changes from almost circular as now to more extreme ellipse 22,000 years ago mostly caused by the gravitational pull of Jupiter. Similarly the tilt varies between approximately 21.8 to 24.4° and back again over approximately 40,000 years. These changes combined with something called the Precession of the Equinox explain approximately 75% of long term climate change. Despite this they are not included in the IPCC computer models. The total pattern of these sun/earth relationship changes are called the Milankovitch Effect. Here is a good site.
www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.htmlThank you very much for writing your article. It has not only helped me realise the difficulty of seeking truth independently and going against the consensus, but has allowed me to see the stranglehold of the media over people's "personal" beliefs concerning such issues. I'd love to receive assistance from you; however I'll understand if you have too much work up your sleeves.
Some good web sites to provide a great deal more information.
www.nrsp.com/
www.friendsofscience.org/
www.junkscience.com/
www.co2science.org/
wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/
Hope this helps.
Regards
Tim BallI'll avoid going into details for now, but basically the theory of natural climate change cycles includes the following ideas:
1. Sun/Earth relationship - The Sun’s output of energy is known to change over an 11-year cycle, and variations over longer periods occur as well. A number of correlations between solar activity variations and climate changes, some more significant than others, have been reported
2. The Earth's orbit - See Tim Ball's words above.
3. Water vapour as a greenhouse gas - I'll write more about this if you guys want, but basically water vapour is by far the largest greenhouse gas. Carbon Dioxide attributes to around 0.5% of all greenhouse gases, and anthropogenic carbon dioxide amounts to less than 3% of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Here's a graph showing the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area:
arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.jpgAnd another graph, showing Southern Hemisphere sea ice area:
arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.area.south.jpgPlease remember, also, that a global consensus is not scientific fact. I believe that there are far greater environmental challenges that the world faces today, such as consumerism, pollution, and reliance on non-renewable resources.