Is Global Warming a Sin?

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ElfDude
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Is Global Warming a Sin?

Post by ElfDude »

There's a remarkable article in The Nation magazine by Alexander Cockburn. Alexander Cockburn is quite left-of-center, as is the magazine. That's what makes this article so remarkable.

You have to be a subscriber to read it online, so I'll share some quotes from it.
In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the Tenth Century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide. Then, as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in 'carbon credits' is in formation. Those whose 'carbon footprint' is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others less virtuous than themselves.

The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind's sinful contribution -- and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed. Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slow arc. The first wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. It starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e., 1.1 billion metric tons), and peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, plummets into the Great Depression and by 1932, human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 percent drop. Then, in 1933, the line climbs slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons. And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That's the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it's at 380. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 percent cut in manmade CO2 emissions didn't even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere's CO2. It is thus impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil fuels.

I met Martin Hertzberg, Ph.D., the man who drew that graph and those conclusions, on a Nation cruise back in 2001," Oh, wouldn't that have been a fun boat to be on? "and he remarked that while he shared many of The Nation's editorial positions, he approved of my reservations on the question of human contributions to global warming as outlined in columns I wrote around that time. Hertzberg was a meteorologist for three years in the U.S. Navy, an occupation that gave him a lifelong mistrust of climate modeling. Trained in chemistry and physics, a combustion research scientist for most of his career, he's retired now in Copper Mountain, Colo., but still consults from time to time. Not so long ago, Hertzberg sent me some of his recent papers on the global warming hypothesis, a thesis now accepted by many progressives as infallible as Papal dogma on matters of faith. Among them was the graph described above, so devastating to the hypothesis." Well, I'm loving this! Here's a liberal in The Nation talking about how global warming is nothing more than a religion. Now, here's the nut of this: "As Hertzberg readily acknowledges, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased about 21 percent in the past century. The world has also been getting just a little warmer.

The not very reliable data on the world's average temperature ... show about a 0.5 degree Celsius increase between 1880 and 1980, and still rising. But is CO2, at 380 ppm in the atmosphere, playing a significant role in retaining the 94 percent of solar radiation that the atmosphere absorbs, as against water vapor, also a powerful heat absorber, whose content in a humid tropical atmosphere can be as high as 20,000 ppm? As Hertzberg says, water in the form of oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor 'is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the earth and the sun. ... Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane.' And water is exactly that component of the earth's heat balance that the global warming computer models fail to account for.
It was the denier of the global warming religion, Roy Spencer, University of Alabama-Birmingham that told us that. They don't even model precipitation or water in any form because they can't. And compared to it, man-made CO2 is just "a few farts in a hurricane".
We're warmer now because today's world is in the thaw that follows the recent ice age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive, all due to predictable changes in the earth's elliptic orbit around the sun and in the earth's tilt. As Hertzberg explains, the clinical heat effect of all of these variables was worked out in great detail between 1915 and 1940 by Milutin Milankovitch, a giant of Twentieth Century astrophysics

...

The human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces and volumes, not to mention the role of the giant reactor beneath our feet: the earth's increasingly hot molten core.
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Soup4Rush
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Post by Soup4Rush »

Cockburn?
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Post by CygnusX1 »

Soup4Rush wrote:Cockburn?
It hurts just SAYING it.... :-D :???: :shock:
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Post by Soup4Rush »

how can you take a guy serious whose last name is Cockburn?
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Post by CygnusX1 »

Soup4Rush wrote:how can you take a guy serious whose last name is Cockburn?
dunno Brudda, but I bet his childhood reeked BIG TIME. :-D
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Post by zepboy »

forged global warming . . . sounds like he had his own kind of warming!
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Post by CygnusX1 »

zepboy wrote:forged global warming . . . sounds like he had his own kind of warming!
Oh say-it-ain't-so....

GENITAL WARMING??? :shock: :???: :roll:
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Post by ElfDude »

It's pronounced Co-burn...
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Post by CygnusX1 »

ElfDude wrote:It's pronounced Co-burn...
WHERE??? LOL
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Post by Soup4Rush »

a silent CK :roll: whatever dude. he just tells people that. :-D
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Post by ElfDude »

Soup4Rush wrote:a silent CK :roll: whatever dude. he just tells people that. :-D
He's Scottish, but raised in Ireland. Have you ever seen that last name, Schu?
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Post by CygnusX1 »

ElfDude wrote:
Soup4Rush wrote:a silent CK :roll: whatever dude. he just tells people that. :-D
He's Scottish, but raised in Ireland. Have you ever seen that last name, Schu?
life is tough....

...with a name like that it Geds even tougher. :lol:

*looks for another thread to hijack*
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Post by ElfDude »

CygnusX1 wrote:

*looks for another thread to hijack*
Yeah, what's up with that? I post this article that breaks all the current political boundaries and instead of commenting on it you guys go all Beavis and Butthead on me! :angry1:

;) :-D
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Post by Walkinghairball »

Looks like a normal day here at By-Tor.


I was just going to mention how I was in the Army with a dude named Glasscock, but now I won't.
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Post by Soup4Rush »

dude, what did you expect? :roll: you put an article written by some dude named Cockburn or Coburn, whatever, anyway and you actually expected US to let that go???!!! We would have done a diservice to all of the shallow minded people of the world to let that one go. It is our duty as pervs and idiots to keep on keeping on... :-D
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