"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 5 May 2008 00:59:35 -0400, with neither quill nor qualm, "Ed
Huntress" quickly quoth:

"Larry Jaques" wrote in message
. ..
Do you see your own severe biases, Ed? You read three paragraphs
about a guy and then come back with "...who has apparently made his
fame..."

Well, that's all you gave me to work with, and that's what it said. I read

I got to looking at that accusation and found 3 fingers pointing back
at me. Sorry about that, as I'm guilty of the same jumping. blush


the NYT piece that the Wikipedia item points to, in which he's quoted, and
the abstract of the talk he gave on the subject to the Geological Society
of
America. He uses geological data to show that other warming cycles have
occurred without the implication of CO2, and concludes from them that CO2
cannot explain those cycles. But the abstract does not imply that he has
any
information from which to draw conclusions about the climatic effects of
large increases in CO2. This is a very curious kind of skepticism about
the
effects of CO2, IMO.

Current data shows that warming seems to -precede- CO2 rises, making
most talk about CO2 curious, hmm?

Yeah, it's curious. I have no idea what it really means, but it's curious.



Do you have more paragraphs about him I should read? I think the question
is
whether these people really have the credentials to make expert judgments
about the climate science itself, right? I mean, that *was* the issue,
correct?

I think that having informed people, scientists of all shapes and
sizes, questioning the (apparently HIGHLY political) outcome of some
of their peers is to be encouraged. Keeping the leading edge experts
apolitical and on track is A Good Thing(tm), IMHO.

I couldn't agree more, Larry. Open criticism and analysis is an essential
part of the process. And it's true that the serious criticism, the
scientifically meaningful part, goes on in the professional literature where
most of us don't even know it's going on. We need some popularizers and
vulgarizers to make these things known to the public at large. It's our
lives they're talking about, after all.

But popularizing has its limitations, to. There are such strong economic and
political interests involved that it's likely that the popularizers are
going to exploit our lack of deep scientific knowledge. And I think they
have. Most of the skeptics -- though certainly not all -- have an ax to
grind or are on the payroll of somebody who does. When you list the skeptics
you want me to read and I find that many of them are being paid by political
think-tanks, my warning flags go up. And then we see that most of the rest
are not experts in the science of it at all. They're mostly coming in out of
the outfield to write about things of which they have little or no
scientific background.



What's you're coming up with is a bunch of those people that we so often
make fun of, who think their expertise in one field qualifies them to
pontificate in others. Easterbrook does *not* conclude in those references
that human-produced CO2 cannot cause warming, only that it hasn't in the
geologic history. He is, after all, a geologist, not a climatologist. So
why
is he called a "skeptic," if he makes no attempt to be skeptical about the
climatological claims about what is happening *now*?

He's a geologist with a book on environment-related geography.

I'm sorry, but that sounds to me like being a military strategist with a
book on space travel. g

No doubt there is a lot of useful information about historical climates to
be gained from geologists who know about the relationship. But Easterbrook
is facing a current situation with no known precedent. He can tell us what
has happened before but it doesn't tell us what is likely to happen in this
new situation. And that, it appears, is because he isn't educationally
equipped to do so.

At least, that's what I could gather from his quotes in the NYT and from the
abstract of his speech. Maybe the full speech went into a lot more. I'm not
going to look it up right now.



It seems that he is not challenging the basic points that Gore made, only
some of the details. I can appreciate that the devil is in the details on
this subject. I just haven't seen anything from him, in my cursory
checking,
to indicate he challenges the general picture of human-induced global
warming at this time in history. He points to other climatological cycles
that have caused warming and cooling, but so do the real climatologists.
Their job is to separate the noise from the trend. He just points out the
noise.

Gore went totally overboard in both his claims and the suggestions for
solving what I feel is pretty much a non-issue. Yes, I'd love to see
humans tread a lot more lightly on the Earth, but Gore is pointing us
toward a damnear Neanderthal existence while using $35k in utilities
every year. (OK, so after that was pointed out, he spent a mil on
retrofitting his humongous Tennessee estate with the latest in green
baubles so it's no longer true.)

It appears that many of the real scientists agree that Gore went somewhat
overboard in suggesting that the likelihood of the more disastrous possible
effects is higher than it really is. But most say he got the science
essentially right.



A Curmudgeon's Convention, huh? g I don't know what's supposed to be
significant about that. Apparently you're impressed by it. Good enough,
then
it must be impressive.

Quite!


wrote a very interesting book, _Hard Green_. Read it!

No thanks. I have other things to read. Right now I'm reading _Bad Money:
Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American
Capitalism_, by Kevin Phillips. It's a real mood-lifter. Read it!

To where does it uplift your mood, into the ****ter?

Well, you know how many technical books have an accompanying CD bound into
the back cover? This one has a razor blade and a diagram of how to slit your
wrists.



Add to that the fact that the older I get, the less I'm able to be
impressed. I've known a lot of brilliant people who are full of crap.
Nothing impresses me much these days. I've grown unimpressible. g

Watch out for the mammoths, then.
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2008/04/29/

Ha-ha! Watch what you step in...


Give me a couple hours or days with 'em and I sure would try.

OK. Let us know how it comes out.

Alas, noone has offered to let me play with their computer modeling
prog yet. Mebbe next year, global flooding notwithstanding.

Look up "climate model" in Wikipedia. There are a number of them, including
the GFDL model, that you can download and play with.


Ciao!

--
Ed Huntress