Refreshing response-
No paranoia, no political agenda.
Just thoughtful insight.

Thanks Bill-

Dan Thirkill



"bildan" wrote in message
...

I was a weather forecaster with the US Navy in the 1960's and later
worked with Dr. Paul MacCready at his first company, Meteorology
Research, Inc. Dr. MacCready was warning about CO2 buildup causing
global warming in 1965 - he was very concerned about it.

Since I now fly out of Boulder, CO, I know some of the researchers at
NCAR and have sat through presentations on global warming and
discussed their results with them.

Do contrails warm the earth or cool it? They do both by cooling the
earth in the day by reflecting sunlight back into space and warm it at
night by reflecting heat back to the surface. The net result is
warming since contrails tend to dissipate in the day and persist at
night.

Solar radiation effects on climate are indeed included in climate
models - they are some of the best data they have. Far from causing
warming, it appears the sun has been slightly cooling the climate for
the past century.

I once sold software for the supercomputers used at the national labs
so I know a bit about big computer models and the people who write
them. I am incredibly impressed by these researchers. They are doing
great work under trying circumstances. As scientists, they are
professional skeptics.

The IPCC is a group of outstanding scientists from almost every
country in the world assembled by the UN and asked to make their best
prediction they could using available data. As with any effort to
predict the future, they know the result is imperfect.

Even the most professional among them are still human beings
passionate about their work. They don't suffer fools gladly and, on
occasion, can choose some unfortunate language in the heat of the
moment. Please read the stolen emails with that in mind.

The climate models are some of the most complicated computer models
ever built and there are several. While the models disagree about the
degree of future warming, they all agree that it will be significant.
Some you don't hear about call for truly catastrophic warming with the
most recent data seeming to confirm them.

The whole climate 'debate' reminds me of the "tobacco wars" of the
1970's and '80's when the big tobacco companies funded any researcher,
no matter how disreputable, if it looked like the results might show
tobacco was harmless. Even if they couldn't prove tobacco was
harmless, they could confuse the issue and reduce it to a raucous
public 'debate'.

Today big oil companies are funding the same disreputable 'scientists'
to create publicity saying either global warming won't happen or if it
does, it's not caused by burning their product - in other words
'debatable'. The amount of money available for this 'research' is
enormous and although the results are never peer reviewed, they still
get wide publicity.

In fact, one substantial rumor has it the people who stole emails from
the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, then released
cherry picked examples just two weeks ahead of a major U.N. climate
change conference in Copenhagen, were former KGB agents working for
the Russian oil industry.

The real research conducted at universities and national labs is peer
reviewed before publication in reputable journals. The articles tend
to be too complicated and dense for main stream news outlets who find
Big Oil's prepackaged "news bites" more suited to their format.

The past US president and his party are tightly aligned with the
interests of the oil industry and would seem to be acting as it's
lobby in Washington. The danger for them is that dramatic effects of
global warming may be clearly visible by the 2016 presidential
election.

So, do I 'believe' in global warming? It's not a matter of belief -
it's a matter of what the data is saying. What is available now is
extremely alarming.

Bill Daniels