[Vision2020] Bad Science

[Pat Kraut]

Did anyone else watch the 2020 myths, lies etc last night? I only saw the
last part but what I saw was great. It talked of the bad science that it
reported on many subjects. I found the parts I saw very interesting.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Nisbet" <pcnisbet1 at hotmail.com>
To: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 31, 2005 12:44 PM
Subject: [Vision2020] Bad Science


I read this particular New Your Times Op/Ed with more than the average bit
of laughter;

"A BLAST FROM THE PAST To find out whether human activities are changing the
atmosphere, scientists took ice cores from ancient glaciers in Greenland and
Antarctica. Bubbles of air trapped in the ice provided a pristine sampling
of the atmosphere going back 650,000 years. The study, published last month
in the journal Science, found that the level of carbon dioxide, one of the
greenhouse gases that can warm the planet, is now 27 percent higher than at
any previous time. The level is even far higher now than it was in periods
when the climate was much warmer and North America was largely tropical.
Climatologists said the ice cores left no doubt that the burning of fossil
fuels is altering the atmosphere in a substantial and unprecedented way."

Let's start with the fact that the planet is a few billion years older than
a mere 650,000 years and realize that there have been periods on the globe
when conditions in the atmosphere were higher in CO2 than they are
currently.  As a matter of fact, the atmospheric content of CO2 was three or
four orders of magnitude higher than it is presently during the Archaean.

Further, the base condition over the last 650,000 years has been one
dominated by glaciations or rather thin interglacials, so relating it to
other periods of planetary history and paleo-atmospheric conditions need to
be considered.

The next statement that North America was a tropical environment at some
point over the last 650,000 years comes out of the blue in the next
sentence.  Never happened.  There is no basis for making a claim that ice
core data can make any such determination.  Yes, North America many years
prior to any data that is layed out in ice core had a tropical environment,
but we have no means related to ice cores of determining what the
paleo-atmospheric CO2 content of those periods were.  Further, the tropical
environments of the Paleocene, 50,000,000 years ago, occurred when the North
American continent was at completely different latitudes than it currently
occupies.  Continental drift has impacts on paleoclimate, which is why you
can also find tropical regimes in the stratigraphy of Antarctica.

Yes, human induced warming is occurring and it needs to be dealt with.  But
No, putting out bad science does not serve the cause of finding solutions to
what is not currently a crisis.  These sorts of writings remind me most of
the old saws they used to put out in schools about smoking dope and having
your nose fall off in consequence.  Those bad science anti-drug messages did
little to stem the flow and usage of drugs and breed contempt for the
messengers.

Phil Nisbet

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