The WSJ had an article that the "Hockey Stick" graph that is used to 'prove' the temperature has risen sharply in the last 30 years, and used in the movie, is not the full story.
In the article, they place the original graph next to the hockey stick chart. The original data indicates a rise in temperatures from 1100-1300AD that is very similar to the last 30 years but is missing from the hockey stick data. They don't explain why the data is missing.
So, I guess that could be one source for factual errors.
Consensus science in not real science.
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This is normally the space where people post something insightful.
I didn't see the movie, but I think it would be interesting to see it, for entertainment if nothing else. I can imagine it was not too different than Tom Brokaw's special which seemed to me fairly lean on facts and heavy on hype.
There is of course plenty of hype on both sides. I don't think anyone serious about the issue should trust the assessments of a politician or a journalist any more than a publication devoted to near-term business interests.
People who are serious about understanding the issue should take a look at credible sources such as LANL, LLNL, NANA, NOAA, NAS, WHOA, IPCC, NAS whose comments are linked in the thread "The Cylce of Global Warming"
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I saw it. It made me mad. Mad on one hand because a movie like that had to be made in the first place, but also because "global warming" is being used as a blunt instrument to try to shift unsustainable behaviour. What is most maddening is the tendency for people to use science to baffle scientifically illiterate or ill equipped audiences into believing their position though the use of unjustifiable extrapolations or connecting unrelated events for convenience.
The point in Gore’s move that had me boiling was attributing global warming to the swamping of New Orleans. Hurricanes have always happened and big ones have hit that area before and that’s why there are dykes. If there weren’t millions of people living below sea level in that area would it have been a ‘disaster’? I digress, my point is there is no provable cause-and-effect relationship between global warming and hurricane Katrina, but there it is large as life on the screen with a brainiac ‘scientist’ saying there’s a direct connection, so who’s gonna say there ain’t?
There must be a word for that kind of thing: experts in one area overstepping the bounds of their qualifications and using their reputation to lend credibility in another area where they shouldn’t be practicing.
"There must be a word for that kind of thing: experts in one area overstepping the bounds of their qualifications and using their reputation to lend credibility in another area where they shouldn’t be practicing."
There is: Politics.
Cheers
Greg Locock
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curtacrankndaddy, there's another word, propaganda.
I would also say that's its not just "unsustainable behavior" (whatever that is) these people are trying to shift, its behavior they find undesirable, particularily in OTHER people.
Some of these people won't be satisfied until we're all living in mud huts.
Unsustainable or just bad behaviour, either way there are things that it would be better to change. Diverting attention away from pollution or other less arguably poor attributes is a bad thing.
I do not thing they want us in mud huts. I think the overboard rhetoric is to push in the direction they want. Identifying tear jerker bad things and them attempting to relate them to a cause is a poor way to change minds like those that would visit this site. But for the masses, it might have proven effective over the years.
Perhaps human activity *has* dramatically increased the CO2 level in the atmosphere. Perhaps the temperature of the Earth *is* rising due to fossil fuel combustion. Perhaps that will lead to severe changes in weather patterns and the concomitant shifting and/or destruction of fertile areas and substantial rising of tidal levels.
Perhaps.
I haven't seen the movie and don't spend much energy on the global warming thing. It does strike me, though, that many of you seem to already have your minds made up that this is just a scare tactic by people who are pushing a political agenda and not a legitimate concern.
Surely as engineers, you strive to keep an open mind and consider those things that seem unlikely for a variety of reasons.
Surely you also consider not just the probability of an event but also the severity of its outcome in making your judgements about desirable courses of action.
I, for one, am pleased to hear this issue being addressed.
and others that illustrate our society’s addiction to oil and our ignorant insistence that it is somehow our ghawd given right to use as much of it as we want. No, I’m not a tree hugging, mud hut dweller, I own 7 antique cars and I’m addicted to vintage racing so I’m just as guilty as anyone, but I do bike to “work”.
My point is this: oil is at $76 (+- something) a barrel and it’s only going to get costlier and more people will die so the machine can get more of it. There’s no question that there’s a limited supply of oil and we’re using it at an unsustainable rate. So what are we doing about it? Bugger all. Read the weekly ‘cars’ section of your local paper (or the SAE magazine ;-) ): the emphasis is on more power, bigger engines, and faster cars. The gains our brilliant mechanical engineers are making in harnessing the energy of gasoline is being used to make cars faster rather than more economical. If every new car had an acceleration and speed governor (easy to program into the ECU) how much fuel could be saved? Would it work? Not a chance. It’s an infringement on your ‘rights’. I tell ya, your ‘rights’ will surely be infringed when you have to choose between driving to the corner grocery store or saving the fuel so your food can be transported to that store. The faster our society uses up the oil, the sooner that day will come.
Or perhaps they're not wrong? Where I'm going with my diatribe is that we all realize we're not doing the right thing by using fossil fuels at the rate we are, but, as engineers, we need an indisputable connection between the cause and effect before we completely buy into the argument. There are just too many variables in the equation to make the connection, although there’s sufficient evidence to suggest there is one. The confusion comes in when history is considered objectively: before the industrial revolution there were droughts, extreme storms and receding glaciers so to use those as conclusive evidence of global warming only works for people that don’t think too hard.
What Gore does in his movie is use the evidence in a very economical and biased way. Not a true scientific consideration of facts, but a Hollywood style cherry picking of convenient truths to make his point.
That's just it. We keep an open mind. Look at the FACTS. And realize that there are conclusions and "sky-is-falling" screamers (Gore) out there that go waaay beyond factual knowledge and use political driven hysteria to move the politics their way.
I love the environment. I hike, climb mountains, hate pollution. But when lots of technical people discuss the potential for Global warming, we find that there is no set factual-based consensus YET. To over-react and spend millions of dollars based on this sort of emotion is not my idea of having an "open mind".
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