Global cooling

[GURGLETROUSERS]

Classic stance by Kennedy, a protesting prophet of doom of man made global warming. (Our lifestyle.)

Will you then give up your phone and CAR?

No! 'I do not believe that quality of life (i.e. MY quality of life) should be sacrificed for the environment.'

Precisely Mr. Kennedy. So what exactly are you protesting about?

[techno900]

[mrgybe]

[mac]

NW says:

[KGB-NP]

[keycocker]

I never understood the critics of Gores investment strategy.
Putting your money where our mouth is- a rare form of honesty.

Gore has been suggesting we all make money doing the same investments he does.

If a gold guy promotes gold that is just natural, a broker says the market will boom and invests accordingly he is a genius.

When Gore does the same it is a conflict of interest. Double standard.

[boggsman1]

Exactly...and he's not a lobbyist, he's a private businessman. Unlike Republican Trent Lott, who is lobbying for Russian banks, the same ones we are imposing sanctions on. Rethugs can mock Bobby JR, and Al Gore all they want, I'll focus on scumbags Trent Lott, and Billy Tauzin.

[mac]

I've never been a big fan of Al Gore--or of fuzzy logic. When Tipper went after the record industry with proposals for censorship, I concluded that there was more than a little demagogue in their political approach.

But his environmental credentials are pretty solid, especially for a politician who spent most of his career representing Tennessee in the House and Senate. He had the courage to join the Army, despite his opposition to the Vietnam War. He approached climate change as a politician, using hyperbole to try to make it a moral crusade. While he made mistakes in his movie, they are relatively minor, and his understanding of the issue is pretty deep and broad.

He has been both a successful capitalist, and a philanthropist. He takes advantage of tax incentives--as does the carbon industry. What shows me the emptiness of the logic behind the far right is that their objections to him focus on minor mistakes he made in the movie Inconvenient Truth--while they ignore the systematic and wholesale lies perpetuated by groups funded by the carbon industry--and bruited here on the forum by retired oil executives with large carbon footprints.

Gore's philanthropy, or his hypocrisy, do not change the importance of his message. Just as the contributions of the Broad foundation in granting scholarships do not change the misguided nature of their overall approach to public education. Those who were taught, and learned to practice, ignore the screeching about Gore and Kennedy's using tax incentives--as they do the use of the energy industries use of tax incentives--and examine the underlying issue. They pay attention to information that comes from outside their belief structure, and challenge their assumptions. Alas, a tendency in serious decline in the United States.

[isobars]

From the AP via the Washington Post ... sorry, guys, but both liberal ... comes this:
Study links changing winds to warming in Pacific ...

A new study released Monday, Sept. 22, 2014, finds that warming temperatures in Pacific Ocean waters off the coast of North America over the past century closely follow natural changes in the wind, not the increases in greenhouse gases related to global warming. (Jeff Barnard, File/Associated Press)
By Associated Press September 22

The study compared ocean surface temperatures from 1900 to 2012 to surface air pressure, a stand-in for wind measurements, and found a close match.

“What we found was the somewhat surprising degree to which the winds can explain all the wiggles in the temperature curve,” said lead author Jim Johnstone, who did the work while a climatologist at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington.

“So clearly, there are other factors stronger than the greenhouse forcing that is affecting those temperatures,” he added.

The study released by the online edition of the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences does not question global warming, but argues there is evidence that in at least one place, local winds are a more important factor explaining ocean warming than greenhouse gases.

It was greeted with skepticism by several mainstream climate scientists, who questioned how the authors could claim changes in wind direction and velocity were natural and unrelated to climate change.

They pointed out that the study sees a correlation but did not do the rigorous statistical and computer analysis to show that the cause of the wind changes were natural — the kind of analysis done when scientists attribute weather extremes to global warming.

“This may say more about the state of climate modeling than it says about causes of warming in the Pacific Northwest,” Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology, said in an email. “The authors ... have not established the causes of these atmospheric pressure variations. Thus, claims that the observed temperature increases are due primarily to ‘natural’ processes are suspect and premature, at best.”

Johnstone and co-author Nathan Mantua, a research scientist with the NOAA Fisheries Service in Santa Cruz, California, pointed to the fact that one steep ocean warming period from 1920 to 1940 predates the big increases in greenhouse gases, and an ocean cooling period from 1998 to 2013 came while global average temperatures were at or near all-time highs.

They also noted that the wind changes consistently preceded the ocean surface temperature variations by about four months, showing the wind was causing the changes to temperature, not the other way around.

James Overland, a research oceanographer at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, said the study reinforced findings that the North Pacific has a lot of natural variability in 5- to 20-year time scales, and he reached the same conclusions on changes in the Bering Sea.

“Natural variability cannot be ruled out as an important mechanism,” he said in an email.

During the entire period from 1900 to 2012, there has been an increase of about 1 degree Fahrenheit in ocean surface temperatures in the area from Hawaii to Alaska, and down the coast to British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California, according to the study.

The wind acts to change temperature through speed and direction. When the wind blows faster across the water, evaporation increases, and like sweat drying on the skin, cools the water surface. Winds from the south drive warmer air and water to the region. Winds from the north drive in colder air and water.

Mantua said he and Johnstone took the potential inaccuracy of the data into account, comparing it to several other sources, including land surface air temperatures along the coast, which also agreed.

“It just seems to us it’s a pretty simple story,” Mantua said. “Yet it’s going to take people by surprise, because it is ingrained in our minds that if the climate warms up in the course of the century, it’s probably because of global warming, the increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases and other things humans have done that have pushed it in a warming direction.”

[MalibuGuru]