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Telly addicts

The Great Global Warming Swindle - C4 (I think)

112 replies

Gobbledigook · 08/03/2007 22:02

Is anyone watching? It's very interesting.

OP posts:
DominiConnor · 10/03/2007 18:48

Custardo, what we know is that it's harder for the Earth to radiate off heat the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere.
That's because the Sun is very hot, so gives off relatively high frequency light, the sort you can see with.
The Earths surface almost never gets hot enough to glow in visible light, but does so with lower energy light we label infra red.
We evolved to see in the wavelengths that the air is transparent to. Bit it is less transparent to infra red, and co2 is a sort of fog, so heat leaves the Earth more slowly the more you have of that sort of gas.

That's a straight bit of physics you can do in a school lab.
Humans have been burning carbon based fuels a lot in the last few centuries, and at the same time CO2 has gone up. A lot.

But that's not proof that humans did it. Lots of other sources of CO2, indeed human activity is a relatively small % of CO2 produced on earth. If humans stopped burning carbon, it would be sucked up by plants quickly.
A change in the balance between CO2 producers and consumers could produce a far bigger effect. We know this has happened in the past, though it's hard to get an accurate timescale on how quickly the change happened. It's believed that it took longer, usually.
We know that for a large % of it's history the Earth has been a lot warmer than it is now. Many scientists call the time we are in now an ice age, because there is all year round ice at the poles. That has often not been the case. The use of "ice age" has of course been a casualty of political correctness, and is in rapid decline.

The Earth is strongly homoeostatic, ie it will act to reduce stimuli applied to it in accordance with Le Chatelier's principle. When this was rediscovered and applied to complex biological systems by Lovelock, dippy green arts graduates by the million thought he had discovered the Earth Goddess.
They get a bit sad later when since he was proper scientist he supported nuclear power.

For instance the atmosphere is a gas, when you make it hotter it expands. This uses up some heat, and also increases some of the ways it can lose heat. Heating/cooling water is more complex, but vital since such a large % of the Earth is covered by it. Water vapour is itself a greenhouse gas, but clouds reflect incoming light.
Almost all plants don't get enough CO2, so if you increase the supply they grow more, sucking it out of the atmosphere faster.

Thus we have been able to get away with seriously dumb stuff like burning oil, growing rice and raising sheep, without trashing the atmosphere. But since only the first is seen as an American activity, it gets the most focus by the arts grad Greens.

CO2 does seem to correlate awfully well with both increases in temperature, and more dangerously a more variable set of temperatures.
Thus CO2 is like smoking. The first evidence of it being bad was entirely correlations, we simply did not know enough to work out what was going on. Even now meedja types still give publicity to those who claim that passive smoking is safe, and for many years used the term "nazi" to anyone who implied smoking was a bad thing.
The test for any scientific model is predictions. If you feed the model data it has not "seen" before, and it gives numbers that are like what you see in real life, then it's a good model. The more accurate the numbers ,the better the model. Our climate models are quite good on this score, but what you won't see on the BBC is any critique or health warning about computer models. Part of my work includes this, and right back when I started, the example of computer models giving mad results was climate ones. They produce such strange numbers sometimes that the whole field of Chaos theory evolved from trying to work out what's going on.
We've come a long way from that, but computer models do not equal truth, a fact that a Apple Macintosh using arts grad from the BBC can no more grasp than the fact that 11 samples are not a valid basis for saying that MMR is dangerous.

expatinscotland · 10/03/2007 21:14

Excellent post, speedy.

I agree.

grannycrackers · 11/03/2007 09:39

haven't had time to read through all the posts, but here is a summary of climate change and its effects from the WHO, a well respeced organisation, often quoted on mn
WHO

DominiConnor · 11/03/2007 10:39

WHO has managed to avoid being captured by the malign and corrupt incompetence of the UN, so I tend to believe what it says.

speedymama · 12/03/2007 19:57

The problem with the WHO report is this paragraph:

"Today, humankind?s activities are altering the world?s climate. We are increasing the atmospheric concentration of energy-trapping gases, thereby amplifying the natural "greenhouse effect" that makes the Earth habitable. These greenhouse gases (GHGs) comprise, principally, carbon dioxide (mostly from fossil fuel combustion and forest burning), plus other heat-trapping gases such as methane (from irrigated agriculture, animal husbandry and oil extraction), nitrous oxide and various human-made halocarbons".

Once again, they ignore the fact that most of the CO2 and methane arises from naturally occurring sources, not man.

The focus needs to shift from climate change to sustainability.

Gobbledigook · 12/03/2007 19:58

It's repeated tonight on MORE4 I think!

OP posts:
paulaplumpbottom · 12/03/2007 20:23

I hope more people will watch it tonight, Most of it was nothing new to me personally but I think it might be a revelation to many.

grannycrackers · 13/03/2007 09:43

i watched the programme. i turned it off when i saw regional changes (the little ice age)being used to cast doubt on present understanding of climate change. i also did not want to spend hours of my time listening to sweeping generalisations accusing academics (some i know who are definitely not motivated by political ideologies and are trying to work on sustainable development in developing countries) and scientists who are working in the field of climate change as being "against industrialisation" , and turning their backs on the developing world.

there is a wealth of scientific information about climate change and its causes here new scientist

allmytimeonmumsnet · 13/03/2007 10:18

I watched the programme and found it interesting. Its good to hear a counter arguement to what is pushed all the time. However DH commented that the director is well known for twisting facts. Apparently he did a doc on breast implants protecting against cancer with lots of professionals talking. C4 later had to publish an apology to all the scientists as he had edited in such a way that they seemed to say different things to what they said originally. I think this is the problem. Put a load of experts on TV and people believe them. But we should never under-estimate the power of editing.

My own view is that it makes no odds whether climate change is caused by man or other factors. We should all still make every effort to minimise the impact we have on the planet but we also need to look into serious ways of protecting ourselves in the future. At the end of the way we may be fighting a loosing battle and we need to face up to this.

I think green issues are being used to manipulate people and people are getting fed up of feeling guilty. Put something like this on and everyone jumps at it as it exonerates them. I think the gov etc need to reassess how they combat global warming - perhaps combat is the wrong word. Perhaps we just need to deal with the consequences instead. But my own view is to be rather sceptical of this programme, interesting though it was.

KathyMCMLXXII · 13/03/2007 10:22

Apologies if someone has already done this link - this is what Ben Goldacre (Bad Science man) had to say.

2ManyPimms · 16/03/2007 11:46

I'm glad that someone exposed this "documentary" for the pile of misleading donkey turd that it is.

What is frightening is that so many people were taken in by it.....

ArcticRoll · 16/03/2007 11:54

Thanks for the link Kathy.
Ben Goldacre is fab.
I thought the programme was very misleading.
Especially the section on the effects of green policies on developing countries.

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