We Are All Doomed, Uh, Again

Hey folks,

Happy Monday to you. If you are like me, it’s more like a Sunday. The reason this is so late this morning. Anyway, seems we are all doomed again. At least according to the IPCC, and the Loons that run it.

According to this article from AFP - UN scientists to hammer out final climate change report

The UN's top climate scientists gathered in the Spanish port city of Valencia Monday to boil down their landmark report on global warming into a summary version for policymakers.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which won this year's Nobel Peace Prize, has warned of dire consequences unless rising temperatures caused by greenhouse gases are held in check.

With ABSOLUTELY NO actual Scientific proof.

The document to be issued in Valencia next Saturday distills its 2,500-page, three-volume assessment -- the first since 2001 -- into a 25-page synthesis designed to guide government decisions on how to best accomplish this.

There will also be a companion technical summary of about 70 pages.

What gets put in and left out will weigh heavily, for example, when the world's governments meet in Bali, Indonesia next month to shape global climate change policy for next decade and beyond.

So they will decide what goes in and what stays out? That right there tells you it’s nothing but bunk. Seriously, think about this. OK, I tell you that Gravity is real. I write a report on it. I decide to leave out the fact that everything falls at the same rate. Or, that EVERYTHING on Planet Earth is effected by it. I guess just to save time. But if this is all fact, as it is, then WHY would I leave it out? So we are to be lead to believe that if they leave something out, one, you will not know what it is, but it’s not important? Or what they put in is more?

If you are going to do a report on studies, to make it accurate, you have to include ALL aspects of it. It is what it is, or it’s NOT what it is NOT, regardless of what you report.

The more forceful the panel's conclusions, the more pressure it will put on policymakers to adopt measures -- some of them politically costly -- ranging from carbon taxes and mandatory caps on CO2 emissions to huge investment in renewable energy.

Power, control, and of course MONEY.

But even as it basks in the limelight of the Nobel Prize, the IPCC has been criticized for being too conservative in the face of mounting evidence of a global crisis.

By the Loons. The “Chicken Little Crowd.”

“Even the gloomiest of the IPCC predictions underestimate the severity of climate change,” said British scientist James Lovelock, who blames the consensus rule that governs IPCC proceedings for enabling a handful of governments to downplay “forthright and inconvenient forecasts” made by experts.

In other words folks, he wants to SILENCE the opposition. He no longer, like Al Gore, wants you to hear the TRUTH. It’s a bunch of bunk. Who is Dr. James Lovelock? This is interesting. According to Dr. Gert Korthof, who is a Dutch biologist who is trained in Utrecht University,

James Lovelock is a visionary character, a colourful person and an independent scientific thinker and inventor. Lovelock is widely known for his Gaia theory. The earth is a superorganism, consisting of both living organisms and a non-living environment. Gaia has the ability to self-regulate climate and chemistry of the earth. Lovelock invented instruments to detect chloro-fluoro-carbons and found them present in the atmosphere, but initially judged them not dangerous for human health. Later Lovelock developed the daisy-world computer model to prove that organisms could self-regulate the earth's climate and that daisy-world does not contradict neo-Darwinism. He proposed ideas how to make Mars habitable, and claimed that radioactivity is as dangerous as breathing oxygen.

In his 1979 book Gaia Lovelock wrote that plants produce oxygen because it benefits life as a whole. That version of the Gaia hypothesis was teleological (goal directed), because it involved impossible foresight and planning, and Lovelock did not propose a mechanism. No wonder it was strongly criticised by biologists and especially neo-Darwinists. Richard Dawkins pointed out that "if plants are supposed to make oxygen for the good of the biosphere, imagine a mutant plant which saved itself the costs of oxygen manufacture." Indeed, the non-oxygen producing mutant would soon become the dominant form, and oxygen production would vanish from the earth. "This was a final condemnation. Teleological explanations are a sin against the holy spirit of scientific rationality." Lovelock reacted to this and other criticisms by developing the daisy model. The daisy model was non-teleological (no goal involved). Black and white daisies in the model regulate the temperature of the earth by reflecting few or much sunlight, thereby cooling or heating the earth's atmosphere.

The original observation that triggered the Gaia hypothesis is that the earth's atmosphere is in a chemical disequilibrium. If methane reacts strongly with oxygen, then how can it be measurably present in the atmosphere? The cause is the constant input of methane from micro-organisms. The most dramatic feature is the level of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere. The 21% oxygen is now necessary for life, but when life originated on earth oxygen was absent. Oxygen did not arise from extraterrestrial or geological sources, but was produced 2.5 billion years ago by life itself as a toxic by-product. Eventually the rest of life adapted to oxygen. Contrary to the earth's atmosphere, the 'dead' atmosphere of Mars is the atmosphere of a dead planet. But there is more. Apart from the presence of oxygen, there is the observation of the constancy of the oxygen level over hundreds of millions of years.

Any theory of life on earth, including the theory of evolution, needs to integrate this knowledge. Another factor is the constant temperature of the atmosphere of our planet.

How do we explain the relative constancy of oxygen? Evolution has no foresight: oxygen is not produced to make land animals in the future possible. It can't be an example of self-regulation. It must be a by-product. If oxygen really would be produced by one species for the sole benefit of other species that would refute Darwin! Because no species survives such an altruistic act in the long run. According to Lovelock, the constancy of 21% oxygen may be an example of self-regulation.

Lovelock introduced atmospheric science into (evolutionary) biology. The lesson is that tiny micro-organisms can have an enormous effect on the earth's atmosphere. This lesson is missing in most evolution textbooks. Richard Dawkins justly criticises Gaia's self-regulating capacity, but he is not interested in the amazing effect of micro-organisms. There is neither oxygen nor atmosphere in Douglas Futuyma's textbook! Strickberger however, has an elaborate discussion of oxygen. When organisms have created the habitability of our earth in such a significant way it ought to be incorporated in the theory of evolution. The question remains how the constancy has to be explained. Explaining it by 'homeostasis' is not a real explanation, since there is still no mechanism. Secondly, 'homeostasis' strongly suggests a living organism, because there is no homeostasis without an organism. The statement 'maintained at an optimum by homeostasis' and this maintenance is performed by the biosphere itself" is no explanation, because it reintroduces the notion that Gaia is alive, which Lovelock rejected earlier. Homeostasis makes only sense within an organism. Indeed the expression "the atmosphere as a circulatory system" reveals that Lovelock uses the analogy of the blood system and its properties. However, there is a big difference between homeostasis of the blood system and of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere. Good analogies invite good questions. Wrong analogies invite wrong questions, but at the same time could produce new discoveries. Does Daisy world explain homeostasis? An indication of Lovelock's doubt is the odd remark that his theory need not be true to be useful.

Both Lovelock and Margulis claimed in their earlier writings that Gaia is a living organism, and later changed changed to claims that are more moderate. According to Margulis, Lovelock defended that "the earth is a organism". Margulis: "I cannot stress strongly enough that Gaia is not a single organism". And "Rather than state "Earth is alive", we prefer to say that Gaia is a hypothesis about the planet Earth, its surface sediments, and its atmosphere".

Before we can answer the question Is Gaia alive?, we need to know to what life is. Lovelock recognises the need for a definition of the concept 'life'. He observes that the Dictionary of Biology has no entry for 'life'! In general biologists avoided the question, he says. However, I disagree that no one has yet succeeded in defining life. Lovelock did not know G�nti's definition. Lovelock attempts to define life, but misses the dual nature of life (metabolism-heredity). On the other hand he quotes Schr�dinger's definition: living systems have boundaries and are open systems at the same time. This is a dual nature from another perspective. In the context of thermodynamics: life is a self-organising system characterised by an actively sustained low entropy. Because Lovelock overlooks the importance of 'minimal life' in defining life, he fails to give a thorough and satisfactory definition. A probable cause is his focus on planetary biology and symbiosis (life exists in communities and collectives). The lack of a good definition of minimal life prevents a good understanding of problems inherent in the origin of life. For example when discussing the origin of life, he states "The first living cells may have used as food the abundant organic chemicals lying around; also the dead bodies of the less successful competitors..." However, by definition, the first forms of life could not have used dead bodies.

Secondly, Lovelock seems to dismiss the criterion of reproduction for reasons unclear to me. I guess in order to maintain the idea that Gaia is alive notwithstanding the obvious fact that Gaia does not reproduce. Only individual organisms reproduce. Just because the atmosphere is in disequilibrium, improbable, anomalous and these properties are caused by living organisms, does not mean that the earth itself is alive.

Whether or not the earth is a self-regulating superorganism, the fact that tiny creatures can influence and even create the earth's atmosphere (with huge dimensions relative to the size of microbes themselves), is interesting enough. I agree that the earth's atmosphere cannot be understood by physics and chemistry alone, but biology is needed to explain its anomalous nature (chemical disequilibrium).

Lovelock developed the Daisy world computer model as an answer to the apparently justified criticism that Gaia was teleological (goal directed). He wanted to show that ordinary natural processes can account for the constancy of the earth surface temperature despite the increasing luminosity of the sun during the last billion years. Regrettably, I did not find a good explanation of the model and no information about the assumptions of the model in this book, although there is information about the output of the computer model. So it is impossible to evaluate his Daisy model from the information in this book. According to Lynn Margulis the Daisy world model shows that the daisies cool their world despite the warming sun (10). From other sources describing the daisyworld model I come to the tentative conclusion that it is an unrealistic model because the temperature of the earth is not determined (let alone stabilised) by the reflective properties of organisms. For ecological reasons the earth's surface cannot be covered with enough daisies [or animals or other plants] to have a sufficiently large effect on the temperature of the earth's atmosphere. The daisies must exclude all other species from the environment to dominate life on earth. However, each individual plant needs some space around it to flourish. Flowers are small and are not present the whole year and flowers are rarely black.

There is no empirical or experimental evidence showing the claimed effect on the individual plant, or an effect on the local or global environment. We need real-life data. We need measurements.

Sofar the model works best in an abstract computer world. Daisy world is a virtual world. A computer model is no substitute for empirical evidence. No refinement of the model can help in that respect. You can teach a dog many tricks, you can teach a computer nearly every trick.

Lynn Margulis seems to agree about the artificiality of Daisy-world: "In real life, as opposed to Daisy World, microbes, not daisies, play the crucial role" (11). Daisies and plants seem a bad choice to model the contribution to the temperature of the atmosphere. Land ice and snow seems to do a better job in reflecting light. Aren't gases (methane, carbondioxide) produced by microorganims better candidates to influence the climate? The daisy world model cannot be a general model for animals anyway (not enough polar or black bears to cover the earth!). Adding goats and foxes to the model doesn't seen to solve these problems.

Basically, to break it down for you, the guy is a nut. He had to change and create other models just to attempt to prove his HYPOTHESIS. Even the new models are now accepted by some in the REAL scientific community.

Back to the article.

Other scientists -- including many within the IPCC -- say the panel is not quick enough in incorporating recent research, much of which shows global warming has accelerated even more quickly than the report indicates.

Prove it? It seems to have accelerated even more the closer we get to 2008. {Smile}

“The IPCC's slowness means that it is indeed well behind the state of the knowledge,” leading it to underestimate the likely effects of warming, said US scientist James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

Uh Yes, Dr. Hansen. Get this. These are actual quotes by Dr. Hansen

Warming in recent decades has been driven mainly by non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as chlorofluorocarbons, CH4, and N2O, not by the products of fossil fuel burning, CO2 and aerosols, the positive and negative climate forcings of which are partially offsetting.This does not alter the desirability of limiting CO2 emissions, because the future balance of forcings is likely to shift toward dominance of CO2 over aerosols

Because we BANNED aerosols. {Laughing}

A global tipping point will be reached in 10 years (starting from 2006) if levels of greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2 are not reduced. Global warming at this point becomes unstoppable.

Well, it's 2007, almost 2008, so we do we stand now? Kind of like Al Gore saying we have ten years left, like 12 years ago. Or like Y2k. That was a big let down wasn't it?

Global warming was 0.5–0.75 °C in the past century, and about 0.3 °C in the last 25 years

{Sigh} What about all that Global Cooling in the 70s?

Climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling is 3±1 °C.

Prove it?

The dangerous concentration of CO2 can be no more than approximately 450 ppm. However, he now believes that it is "probable that the dangerous level is even lower."

Probable? That is a guess at best. Probable.

A feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting greenhouse gases from the air.

When asked about "science skeptics", he replied that he "actually don't like the word "skeptics" for them; I think it's better to call them "contrarians," because all scientists are skeptics. If you're not skeptical as a scientist, you're not going to be very successful. You have to continually ask yourself how well your theories agree with the real world, and you can't fudge that."

He IS Fudging it folks. He, and others like him, ARE fudging it. They want to SCARE you into simply accepting that it is reality, we are all going to die, and it's YOUR fault.

But even IPCC's critics acknowledge that its inherent caution has also bolstered its authority and helped it raise global warming into one of the dominant international issues of the early 21st century.

That and the main stream Media Pushing it.

The IPCC, jointly launched 20 years ago by the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.

That alone should tell you something. Even Al Gores own Scientists are coming out saying that the Movie was full of, uh, junk science? Basically, out right lies.

Like I said before, you want to listen to the “Chicken Little” crowd, go for it. You want your money, and lives controlled even more by the Government based on a scam? Go for it. Sorry, I like reality. I like TRUTH. The TRUTH is, “Global Warming” is a cycle, Man made “Global Warming” is a SCAM. The mounting evidence it the fact there are more and more scientist start to say that the tempts are stabilizing and will most likely start getting cooler again. But the TRUTH is, that is a guess also.

Where were all the storms this year? Uh, last year? Maybe next year? Were is the PROOF?
Peter

Sources:
AFP - UN scientists to hammer out final climate change report
Dr. Gert Korthof - The Two Sides Of Gaia
Wikipedia - James Hansen