On Special Report, Barnes misled on global warming
SUMMARY: During a discussion on Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume about the global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes claimed, "It's not known for certain or anywhere near certain whether the small increase in temperature over the last hundred years is caused by man or not." However, there is little debate within the scientific community about whether human activity is responsible for the increase in global surface and water temperatures, save for a small group of skeptics, many of whom are tied to organizations with a financial stake in combating global-warming theory.
During a panel discussion about the global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount Classics, May 2006) on the May 23 broadcast of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes claimed, "It's not known for certain or anywhere near certain whether the small increase in temperature over the last hundred years is caused by man or not." Barnes supported his claim with the misleading argument that warnings about rising sea levels are exaggerated because "[i]t's getting colder in Greenland." However, as Media Matters for America noted, there is little debate within the scientific community about whether human activity is responsible for a global increase in surface and water temperatures, save for a small group of skeptics, many of whom are tied to organizations with a financial stake in combating global-warming theory and, in some cases, whose works on the issue have been discredited by the scientific community.
A 2001 National Academy of Sciences report commissioned by the Bush administration found that greenhouse gases are "causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" and that "[t]he changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities." In addition, according to the Third Assessment Report of the United Nation's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): "Changes in climate occur as a result of both internal variability within the climate system and external factors (both natural and anthropogenic)." The IPCC report, released in 2001, also concluded that "[e]missions of greenhouse gases and aerosols due to human activities continue to alter the atmosphere in ways that are expected to affect the climate." Citing multiple studies that demonstrated "evidence for an anthropogenic signal in the climate record of the last 35 to 50 years," the IPCC stated: "There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."
Barnes also asserted that the "hysterical position is to say that sea levels -- based on some glaciers in some places melting -- based on that, sea level is going to rise 20 feet. ... It's getting colder in Greenland." But climate scientist Petr Chylek of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who found in a 2004 report that "Greenland coastal stations data have undergone predominantly a cooling trend," published a study a year later that attributed this cooling trend to local climate patterns -- specifically, the North Atlantic Oscillations (NAO). Chylek then analyzed the temperature record in the Danmarkshavn region of Greenland -- an area on the northeastern coast apparently unaffected by the NAO -- and found that the rate of warming there was 2.2 times faster than the global average. This corresponds with United Nations climate-change models that show Greenland warming at a faster rate than the rest of the planet and partially explains the rapid deterioration of the Greenland ice sheet in recent years. In addition, recent studies documenting the increased melting in Antarctica and Greenland, as well as studies of past ice-sheet melting, have strengthened the case for accelerated sea-level rise over the course of the next century. As the weblog RealClimate noted, new evidence "probably nudge[s] us closer to the upper end of the IPCC predictions."
From the May 23 broadcast of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume:
BARNES: You notice the key word at the beginning of what Al Gore [the subject of An Inconvenient Truth] said, you know what that word was? If. If. And, look, there is an hysterical position on global warming, and then there is a reasonable position. The hysterical position is to say that sea levels -- based on some glaciers in some places melting -- based on that, sea level is going to rise 20 feet. That's hysterical. Look, they're melting in some places. It's getting colder in Greenland. I mean, look at Alaska, where the glaciers are. It was warmer earlier in the century, the 20th century, then it got colder, now it's gotten a little warmer again. The problem is, the people like Al Gore exaggerate wildly and draw these conclusions that are just not substantiated by any evidence. I don't care what President Bush says. It's not known for certain or anywhere near certain whether the small increase in temperature over the last hundred years is caused by man or not. It's just simply not known. If you go back -- and these hysterical projections are based on computer models which basically don't work if you use those -- the computer models and go back to the data at the beginning of the last century, it predicts much more global warming than actually happened, more than double the amount that actually happened. So, look, the question is whether you are going to take a reasonable approach and say it's gone up a little, we have to do some things, or whether you're going to be hysterical about it like Al Gore.
there is better evidence for man-caused global warming than for the much-hyped Y2K problem that earned companies millions of dollars.
Potential energy is stored (in coal, oil, uranium, etc.), stored energy is converted to heat energy (by boilers, furnaces, engines, etc.), and this heat energy is dissipated (into the atmosphere, the oceans, etc.).
One aspect of global warming is that there is a finite ability of the oceans and the atmosphere to dissipate heat energy.
Not only do we humans add to the heat energy from natural sources, in our horribly inefficient methods of energy conversion, gasses are released into the atmosphere that really exacerbate the problem.
A basic rule of physics is TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
Easy enough for you, Fred?
Since most of the energy sources tapped by humans are so inefficient, the vast majority of the energy generated dissipates into the air as waste heat, carbon dioxide and particulate matter or, in the case of nuclear energy, produces highly unstable radioactive solids which can be refined into plutonium 239. Yet, according to knowledgeable sources paid for by ExxonMobile, the rampant discharge of waste byproducts has nothing to do with mean global temperatures rising. It's just "nature" at work. Well, last I looked WE are part of nature. WE aren't some separate element living in a closed cycle of consumption independent from the balance of the ecological climes and biotopes of the world. A home and an office building aren't outside of nature but in it. When O when will these cretins get it?
"Potential energy is stored (in coal, oil, uranium, etc.), stored energy is converted to heat energy (by boilers, furnaces, engines, etc.), and this heat energy is dissipated (into the atmosphere, the oceans, etc.). "
Heat released by human activity is not the problem. It is solar energy (short-wave IR radiation) that warms the earth, which in turn emits that energy as longwave IR radiation - it is the latter that is trapped in the atmosphere by the so-called greenhouse gases, such as CO2. I'm quite sure the amount of heat released by fossile fuel combusion or nuclear fission is inconsequential. However, the CO2 released into the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion is a major problem - atmospheric CO2 levels have been rising steadily since the industrial revolution.
Plato
Is like people denying that evolution happens.
Or that bears crap in the woods.
It has been proven. There is a consensus about humans causing global warming in the past 100 years.
And global warming does not mean that it will get warmer in every place around the world. And the fact that we know that global warming has been caused by humans does not mean that we know exactly how much it will cause sea levels to rise in the next 30-100 years. It's a strawman argument to suggest that because we don't know exactly how bad it will be, we cannot say that we know that human-caused global warming is happening.
In the clip that Media Matters posted, Fred Barnes said the word "hysterical" five times. It's another example of how conservatives turn every policy discussion or rational debate into an attack on liberals. Al Gore ought to call out Fred Barnes for dishonorbly libeling him as "hysterical." And if Barnes was reckless enough to call me "hysterical" to my face I would challenge him to a sanctioned boxing match to defend my honor. Otherwise let his actions speak for themselves, he tries on manhood from within the safety of the Fox News studio.
as always they like to talked in terms like 'I believe" instead of "these are facts'.
Again we see neocon nutjobs criticizing a film they likely haven't seen and presumably will never see.
Don't bother watching the film for yourself, Fox News is there to make up your mind for you, with only the film's title and narrator's name as the basis.
... to see these idiots repeat the same discredited claims over and over as though they were gospel truth.
And it's getting even more irritating to see them constantly quote-mining legitimate science to make it seem like it supports their postion.
The evidence for anthropogenic global warming and it's dangers is overwhelming now to the point that you're seeing such high profile skeptics as SciAm columnist Michael Shermer and Ronald Baily of Reason Magazine (both well known libertarians) come out with endorsements of the scientific consensus on climate change. Those who remain (like the idiot in the video) are better simply referred to as denialists.