2. Climate Change -- the objections

This video, the second in the series, looks at alternative hypotheses explaining global warming. This video only looks at alternative hypotheses put forward by real, professional climate researchers, and the findings of real, professional climate researchers who disagree with them. Yes, a lot of the detail has been left out. This is a 10-minute video summarizing the arguments and counter-arguments, not a PhD thesis.

3 - Climate Change -- Anatomy of a myth

There were supposed to be several myths in this video, but the author discovered such an appalling web of deceit and fabrication in the first one that he felt he had no choice but to thoroughly debunk it. "Like many ingrained myths, this one is so ubiquitous that it takes an awful lot of hard evidence to convince true believers that it's been fabricated."

4 - Climate Change -- Gore vs. Durkin

This video, the fourth in the Climate Change series, looks at urban myths spawned by two iconic films -- An Inconvenient Truth and The Great Global Warming Swindle. Whatever you "believe" about climate change, there is no excuse for the kind of exaggerations, fallacies and fabrications we see in films like these. The aim is to cut through the junk science designed to evangelize this issue, and show what the actual scientific research shows us.
The video cuts short at the end, and the final sentence should read: "As I look at more of the urban myths they've spawned."

5. Climate Change -- isn't it natural?

More urban myths about climate change are busted as I look at the Earth's climate over the last 500 million years. What causes it to change? Since carbon dioxide was much higher in the past, why do climatologists say higher CO2 now poses a problem? And of course there's the familiar myth that CO2 can't influence temperatures because the climate was much colder in the past when carbon dioxide levels were much higher.

6. Climate Change -- Those hacked e-mails

Now that the conspiracy theorists have blown off steam, it's time for a more sober analysis of those e-mails and what they mean. I can't go through all of them, there are far too many. So I've taken the two that seem to be getting conspiracy theorists most worked up -- Phil Jones's e-mail about "Mike's Nature trick" and Kevin Trenberth's e-mail about a "travesty." As you'll see, very few commentators who jumped on the conspiracy bandwagon even before reading the e-mails managed to get it right.

7. Climate Change - "Those" e-mails and science censorship

Are climatologists censoring scientific journals and silencing alternative hypotheses on climate change? This is the second part of a look at the hacked/stolen e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit in the UK. Debates in science aren't settled by those who argue the longest or the loudest, but by the accuracy of facts and the consistency of hypotheses with the facts.

8. Climate Change -- Has the Earth been cooling?

This video also looks at whether other planets are also warming, and an Internet myth that NASA is now attributing warming to the sun. This video examines the importance of sources -tracking information back to a source and making sure the source is credible. Sources are cited throughout the climate change series. These videos are not personal opinions. The reporter is not a climate scientist or a researcher and has no qualifications to do anything other than report on what real climate scientists have discovered through their research.

Interspersed with the bracing facts and future predictions is the story of Gore's personal journey: from an idealistic college student who first saw a massive environmental crisis looming; to a young Senator facing a harrowing family tragedy that altered his perspective; to the man who almost became President but instead returned to the most important cause of his life. With an emphasis on hope, An Inconvenient Truth ultimately shows us that global warming is no longer a political issue but rather, the biggest moral challenge facing our civilization today.

After having its U.S. debut at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and international premiere at Cannes, An Inconvenient Truth opened to rave reviews and enthusiastic audiences everywhere. A smash hit, the film went on to win Academy Awards for Best Documentary feature and Best Song. It also became a global phenomenon, one of the highest grossing documentaries of all time with a worldwide audience estimated at 5 million people.

How is Gore trying to be a climate change profiteer? Essentially, he wants to make a fortune by creating a new market for a product that he is attempting to create by legislative fiat. If he succeeds and carbon emissions trading comes to the United States, Al Gore will be uniquely positioned to cash in. He’s made sure of that.

Gore himself is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). He says the London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are becoming environmentally-friendly, to use green parlance. GIM appears to have considerable influence over major carbon credit trading firms: the U.S.-based Chicago Climate Exchange and the U.K.-based Carbon Neutral Company. CCX appears to be the only firm in the U.S. that claims to trade carbon credits.

As a politician, Gore speaks warmly of transparency. But as GIM chairman, Gore has not been forthcoming. Little is known about his shadowy firm Generation Investment Management finances, where it gets funding and what projects it supports. Given that he already has the media and much of Big Business on his side, Gore must believe it pays to shut up.

"CLIMATE GATE"

On Thursday 19th November 2009 news began to circulate that hacked documents and communications from the University of East Anglia’s Hadley Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) had been published to the internet.
Some of the excerpts include this email, purportedly from Phil Jones to researchers that appear to show how climate change data was fudged and the peer review process skewed to favor the manmade climate change hypothesis.

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxxxxxx,mhughes@xxxxxxx, mhughes@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxx,t.osborn@xxxxxxxxxDear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil

And this excerpt in which researchers appear to discuss ways to discredit James Saiers of the Geophysical Research Letters journal because he seems to be sympathetic to climate realists:

M,
This is truly awful. GRL has gone downhill rapidly in recent years.
I think the decline began before Saiers. I have had some unhelpful dealings with him recently with regard to a paper Sarah and I have on glaciers — it was well received by the referees, and so is in the publication pipeline. However, I got the impression that Saiers was trying to keep it from being published.
Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted. Even this would be difficult.
How different is the GRL paper from the Nature paper? Did the authors counter any of the criticisms? My experience with Douglass is that the identical (bar format changes) paper to one previously rejected was submitted to GRL.
T.

According to Investigate magazine out of Australia, Dr. Phil Jones has now confirmed that these emails are real. It is imperative that we have a true and open debate about climate change before we make potentially world-changing decisions based on this science.

It's evident the debate over climate change is a heated one. Are skeptics clouding the public judgment for money? Are climate-change believers merely alarmists who risk the present for the future? It's wise to remember that for each argument one side makes, the other has a counterargument and can dismiss the other every step of the way.

Global Warming Skeptics' Arguments.
Since global warming became a major issue, climatology has become a hot-button scientific field. Weather stations throughout the world collect data to help scientists create computer models that help them track global climate change.
Some people simply don't believe that the Earth is undergoing a global warming trend or climate change. Others believe in global warming and climate change, but don't believe that people are responsible. The skeptics who don't believe in global warming at all are the ones who most vehemently attack weather data, the analysis of the climatologists and the predictions of the models.

Global warming skeptics say the placement of some weather stations in urban areas may produce inaccurate measurements. According to them, the data are being corrupted by the urban heat island, an effect produced by cities' transportation, large amounts of heat-absorbing asphalt, and high concentrations of carbon dioxide coming from the many homes and businesses in high-population areas.
Global warming skeptics also believe the models used to predict Earth's future under global warming are unreliable. They feel that while the sun, clouds, gases, glaciers and oceans are responsible for weather, so, too, are other factors, including some we don't currently understand. According to global warming skeptics, computer models are merely a guess at what will happen on Earth in the future (something climatologists don't deny) and an arguably poor guess at that. After all, if we can't accurately predict the weather a week from now, how can we predict the global climate in 100 years?

Others don't believe we're experiencing a global warming trend at all. The annual temperature between 1998 and 2007 actually decreased, despite the 4 percent increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during that same period. They also point out that, while the Northern Hemisphere has warmed, the Southern Hemisphere has actually cooled. "Global warming was supposed to actually be global, not hemispheric," says skeptic and Executive Director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project Tom Harris.
These same skeptics find fault in the historical data used to graph things like glacial loss and hurricane frequency. Although weather data, like temperature, have been actively collected since 1850, it wasn't until the relatively recent access to detailed weather satellite photography that scientists were able to see changes in the Greenland ice shelf that global warming believers say is in such danger. Skeptics ask: How can we know how long it's been receding?

Perhaps the meteorological event most often used by global warming skeptics as a counterargument is the Medieval Warm Period. Around the 9th to 14th centuries, regions around the world experienced an increase in temperatures, similar to what we see today. Following this period, the Earth experienced a Little Ice Age where global temperatures cooled. It is conceivable that the Earth is currently experiencing something similar to this, skeptics say. Their point is we simply don't know enough about long-term weather systems to say for certain one way or the other.

The skeptics of human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming don't dismiss global warming outright, they just don't believe that human activity is responsible.

Anthropogenic Skeptics.
A 2003 research paper published in the journal Science discussed the analysis of three ice core samples taken from Antarctica. The ice was around 240,000 years old, from the third Termination period, a climactic shift which ends each ice age. The findings showed that carbon dioxide concentrations rose between 600 to 1000 years before temperatures did, and before the Antarctic glaciers began to melt. The paper's authors suggested that carbon dioxide may not be the cause of global warming, but that it contributes to the process: Rising temperatures release carbon dioxide trapped in glacial ice and elsewhere, causing global temperature to rise even further.
This paper shows that the carbon dioxide increases may follow rising temperatures, not the other way around. What's more, the ice samples suggest this is a natural process. This observation is just one of the factors that, in the eyes of anthropogenic global warming skeptics, lets humans off the hook for global warming. Although they are satisfied with findings that the Earth is in a major warming trend, anthropogenic global warming skeptics believe that science places the blame on humanity without enough scientific proof to back it up.

Skeptics of anthropogenic climate change claim that reports compiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are the result of diplomatic negotiations, rather than unbiased science. For example, a representative from an oil-producing state may object to including analysis which is particularly harsh toward use of fossil fuels in a report. If all of the science isn't present in the reports released by the IPCC, skeptics reason, what else is missing?

For example, in 2001, the IPCC used a graph nicknamed the "hockey stick," produced by climatologist Michael Mann, in its Third Assessment Report. The graph clearly shows the effects of human activity on climate change, with a spike upwards around the advent of the Industrial Revolution, when humanity's carbon dioxide emissions began in earnest. This graph is a dramatic representation of humankind's interference with nature and appears to be irrefutable proof of anthropogenic climate change. But skeptics investigating Mann's methods believe that he had misused some data, specifically data from tree rings which indicated a response to carbon dioxide rather than temperature, to make his graph show the results he wanted. Mann vehemently defends his methodology.

Regardless of who or what is to blame, if anthropogenic climate change skeptics believe in global warming, then where's the rub? Read on to find out about what's at stake in the debate over climate change.

Mitigation and Adaptation
In its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of the dire future the Earth will face if global warming continues at the predicted rate. As many as 70 percent of extant species may become extinct if temperatures increase by more than 3 degrees Celsius per year. Millions of people may die from floods, droughts, blizzards and other weird weather patterns. Currently arable land will become arid desert, and water resources will become strained. To combat these dire consequences, the IPCC advises people to take a two-pronged approach toward dealing with global warming: mitigation adaptation. Rather than serving as a uniting force -- a rallying point for believers in climate change to meet -- this approach created a schism between climate change factions.

Mitigation supposes that people can have an impact on reversing climate change. It also implies that human activity is at least in part responsible for global warming. Anthropogenic skeptics find this claim to be false and opt instead to support adaptation measures.
Adaptation efforts aim to help humanity thrive as a species under the future conditions of climate change. These include relocating settlements in areas projected to become arid land or under water in the next century or encouraging the reuse of gray water. Or learning how to farm on mountaintops, where much of the precipitation is projected to occur by 2100 or keeping an eye on diseases which thrive in hotter climates, like malaria.
Anthropogenic warming skeptics believe adaptation is the key to surviving what they consider an irreversible tide. They believe mitigation, on the other hand, could spell disaster. If enforced, they say, mitigation could actually prevent adaptation.
Mitigation relies on regulation. The IPCC's mitigation measures include, first and foremost, a reduction in the emission of carbon dioxide. Skeptics claim that government-mandated reductions could damage economies by forcing developing countries to utilize expensive alternatives to fossil fuels for their budding industries. If regulations are enforced, and if mitigation isn't enough, these nations won't have the finances to fund adaptation procedures when they're most needed.

Skeptics also criticize the effects bio-fuel could have on the global food supply. Arable land is valuable throughout the world, and if farmers opt to grow switch-grass for use in ethanol fuel production, food supplies could become strained as prices rose. And those in developing countries eating grain-based diets wouldn't be the only ones to suffer. Livestock requires grain, and an increase in grain prices could also lead to reductions in meat production, affecting richer countries as well. Then again, livestock requires water -about 1,000 times more per ton than it takes to produce a ton of grain. So if future climate change reduces global water supply, people won't have livestock anyway. Not to mention the myriad of other problems that will come along with global warming, if the IPCC is correct.

And here we reach the reason for the urgency, and the passion, behind the arguments on both sides of the climate change debate. Inaction risks future catastrophe. Hasty action may cause present calamity.