Ode to Gramps

This post is dedicated my loyal (and possibly only) reader. Further to my post on the IPCC, he wrote a fairly extensive comment which requires a response.

Over to Gramps:

"Firstly, it's rubbish that noone has EVER made average temperature measurements of ANY PART of the Earth's surface"

Re-reading Dr Vincent Gray's comments:

"1. No average temperature of any part of the earth's surface, over any period, has ever been made."

I can see the message was badly communicated. What I believe he was saying, is that an an average global temperature of the the earth cannot be measured. There is no system today which can reliably measure daily temperatures in many areas (read most of the earth's surface...think middle of the Paciific Ocean, or middle of the Sahara), and thereby calculate an accurate "average" of the Earth's temperature. Sure, you could use satellites, but the director of one of NASA's research institutes, a certain Mr James Hansen has in fact been using satellites to derive a mean temperature of the American mainland, and surprise surprise, this guy has been revising the measurement errors upwards to support the notion of The Warming. Strangely enough, temperature data for the rest of the world was calculated minus Canada and Africa, and through magic of statistics and removing the colder averages, voila! the result was a Warming earth.

Why? Well apart from the fact that he hates George W. Bush, but he's pretty cozy with Laurie David (one of the co-producers of "An Inconvenient Truth"), and it seems that he and Gore have remarkably similar lines to feed the media.

And even if you could point to a reliable, scientifically sound, measurement system that could take an accurate average temperature of the entire Earth's surface, will it be able to tell me what the average temperature was yesterday? 10 years ago? 10,000 years ago?

Back to Gramps:

"measurements are made mostly near urban settlements. Yes. Agreed. What's the population increase in recent years and where are all these people living?"

If you want to take pictures of the stars, you go out of the city where the effect of the city lights is minimised. If you want an accurate temperature measurement of the entire planet, you need to take readings outside of urban areas as well, to counter the heat-island effect. Rates of growth of these areas is irrelevant to the collection of temperature data.

Gramps then makes a long point about Glaciers:
Yes it appears that some of the Antarctic Glaciers are shrinking however the jury is still out as to whether this is a global phenomenon, given that some glaciers are increasing in size, admittedly less of them than those that are shrinking, still, our best climate scientists can't tell us why this might be so.

Gramps again:

"I also believe in the Cooling. You know why? It's called natural history. It's also called the Milankovitch Cycle. It's also called the carbon cycle. Geologists and climatologists have mapped through the ages the changes in naturally occurring isotopes and determined that warm and cool periods are the norm and the planet has techniques for dealing with them. "

Yes, I have already written on the Milankovitch cycle and Carbon cycle here. And I agree that cooling periods are the norm. As are warming periods. However my argument is the mathematics behind these does not have a confidence interval high enough for governments to base economic policy on. And the incredible rort that is Carbon Credit trading (ie. the only serious policy being pushed) will do more to damage any country's economy who decides to adopt said schemes so as to critically handicap any serious effort being made to reduce pollution.

Gramps:

"But to believe that the massive amounts of CO2 that humans disgorge into the atmosphere through human industry are having no impact on the planet is simply doing your best emu impersonation."

I never said that we should continue to pollute the way we have been. We pump much more toxic things in the atmosphere yet I don't hear any screams of outrage from the usual sources. To quote myself:

"And if CO2 is bad, then we should be doing things to reduce it. Period."

The ONLY thing being mooted everywhere is this glorious Carbon Credit scheme-cum-panacea that will solve all our !@#$ing problems, kick Dubya out of the whitehouse, cure cancer, and lead us into a bright new future where all of us can run in the tulips hugging puppies and laugh at the days when our less evolved selves actually used internal combustion engines.

Gramps:

"Exactly what impact it is happening, the models will never tell us because it is impossible to account for all the variables. That's what models are there for - to model. If they were real then ... they'd be the reality!"

So why are all the models showing the same thing? Why, when all the scientist are estimating or guessing the parameters, then run the calculations that somehow all come up with Warming? One could think that the scientists in question are not so much observing natural phenomena, rather influencing their results to fit in with a preconceived agenda. It has a certain 'dogma' feel about it: I am being told to believe in it...because..OK...just because.

If someone can really prove to me that it is happening then I will change my mind, however on the basis of sketchy maths, politically driven propaganda and a really really bad film made by a United States politician, I will remain a skeptic, or a denier if you will, and proud of it.

And Gramps with the final word:

"And I don't like Kevin Rudd."

You and me both....