Despite the overwhelming consensus among climate experts that human activity is contributing to rising global temperatures, 66 percent of Americans incorrectly believe there is "a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening." The conservative media has fueled this confusion by distorting scientific research, hyping faux-scandals, and giving voice to groups funded by industries that have a financial interest in blocking action on climate change. Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets have shied away from the "controversy" over climate change and have failed to press U.S. policymakers on how they will address this global threat. When climate change is discussed, mainstream outlets sometimes strive for a false balance that elevates marginal voices and enables them to sow doubt about the science even in the face of mounting evidence. Here, Media Matters looks at how conservative media outlets give industry-funded "experts" a platform, creating a polarized misunderstanding of climate science. http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/11/28/meet-the-climate-denial-machine/191545#watts
One would think this kind of effort would be directed towards an undecided energy sector, but we don't have an undecided energy sector. At least the bigger ones, who have made public statements on their websites.
When you first meet Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, leading climate âskeptic,â and all-around scourge of James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and sundry other climate âalarmists,â as Lindzen calls them, you may find yourself a bit surprised.... ....Nor, of course, is he the only skeptic with serious scientific credentials. Judith Curry, the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, William Happer, professor of physics at Princeton, John Christy, a climate scientist honored by NASA, now at the University of Alabama, and the famed physicist Freeman Dyson are among dozens of scientists who have gone on record questioning various aspects of the IPCCâs line on climate change. Lindzen, for his part, has said that scientists have called him privately to thank him for the work heâs doing. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/what-catastrophe_773268.html?page=1
Sometime in the not too distant past someone said to futurecurrents ... "...Let's go to Room 101....."
fc - your agw nutter propaganda is very old .. you need to update your knowledge of today's science... this will be my standard response to your repetitive non substantive b.s. http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/fe...ant-growth.html 1. A new NASA computer modeling effort has found that additional growth of plants and trees in a world with doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would create a new negative feedback â a cooling effect â in the Earth's climate system that could work to reduce future global warming. The cooling effect would be -0.3 degrees Celsius (C) (-0.5 Fahrenheit (F)) globally and -0.6 degrees C (-1.1 F) over land, compared to simulations where the feedback was not included, said Lahouari Bounoua, of Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Bounoua is lead author on a paper detailing the results that will be published Dec. 7 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 2. CO2 is a powerful coolant and thermostat per NASA science. http://science.nasa.gov/science-new...12/22mar_saber/ Mlynczak is the associate principal investigator for the SABER instrument onboard NASAâs TIMED satellite. SABER monitors infrared emissions from Earthâs upper atmosphere, in particular from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances that play a key role in the energy balance of air hundreds of km above our planetâs surface. âCarbon dioxide and nitric oxide are natural thermostats,â explains James Russell of Hampton University, SABERâs principal investigator. âWhen the upper atmosphere (or âthermosphereâ) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.â Thatâs what happened on March 8th when a coronal mass ejection (CME) propelled in our direction by an X5-class solar flare hit Earthâs magnetic field. (On the âRichter Scale of Solar Flares,â X-class flares are the most powerful kind.) Energetic particles rained down on the upper atmosphere, depositing their energy where they hit. The action produced spectacular auroras around the poles and significant1 upper atmospheric heating all around the globe. âThe thermosphere lit up like a Christmas tree,â says Russell. âIt began to glow intensely at infrared wavelengths as the thermostat effect kicked in.â For the three day period, March 8th through 10th, the thermosphere absorbed 26 billion kWh of energy. Infrared radiation from CO2 and NO, the two most efficient coolants in the thermosphere, re-radiated 95% of that total back into space. 3. Change in co2 follow but lag change in ocean temps. Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO2 variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes in atmospheric CO2, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO2. In our analysis we use eight well-known datasets; 1) globally averaged well-mixed marine boundary layer CO2 data, 2) HadCRUT3 surface air temperature data, 3) GISS surface air temperature data, 4) NCDC surface air temperature data, 5) HadSST2 sea surface data, 6) UAH lower troposphere temperature data series, 7) CDIAC data on release of anthropogene CO2, and 8) GWP data on volcanic eruptions. Annual cycles are present in all datasets except 7) and 8), and to remove the influence of these we analyze 12-month averaged data. We find a high degree of co-variation between all data series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature. The maximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature is found for CO2 lagging 11â12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature, 9.5-10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to global lower troposphere temperature. The correlation between changes in ocean temperatures and atmospheric CO2 is high, but do not explain all observed changes. See: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2012.08.008 The highlights of the paper are: ► The overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 11â12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5-10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature. ► Changes in ocean temperatures appear to explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980. ► CO2 released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO2, and changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions. The paper: The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature Ole Humluma, b, Kjell Stordahlc, Jan-Erik Solheimd http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/...global-warming/
Here you go.... http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/cooling-plant-growth.html http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/22mar_saber/