There’s nothing like a comm arts major speaking like a PhD in atmospheric science or statistics. As someone pursuing a PhD in a quantitative field, I can safely say that Mr. Waisbren’s claims are bogus and fail all tests of statistical analysis.

The climate data that we have are highly corrupted and have a strong upward bias. Consider most NWS reporting sites, which are located at airports around the country. When these airports were built, they were on the edge of the city. Now, they are often in the middle of town and are affected by the urban heat island phenomenon.

You discuss one-time events like floods and heavy snow events. These just happen every once in a while and are impossible to predict. Global climate change had nothing to do with them; check out the last few hurricane seasons as an example. They are caused more by patterns like La Nina than anything else.

We only have data in the polar areas since 1979, which was right after several of the coldest winters on record at other Northern Hemisphere reporting sites. So to say that the ice caps are smaller is not a surprise, especially given sunspot data that shows that the climate warms somewhat when there has been a lot of solar activity. That has been the case over the past 10-15 years, and is now subsiding.

Is there some human component to climate change? Quite possibly. Should we prepare for a slightly warmer climate, which will save thousands of lives worldwide as cold kills many more people than heat? Yes. But is it worth disrupting our economy and causing human hardship to prevent a tiny fraction of natural climate change? I don’t think so.

I highly encourage Mr. Waisbren to read the classic text How to Lie With Statistics. It’s an old book and quite politically incorrect in its illustrations, but the premises are absolutely correct.

Its true that grad students sometimes just suck up information without questioning it too? Hmmm. Good to know.

Climate change: such a nebulous, slow moving cause to get excited about. Would you get motivated if I told you GASOLINE WILL COST YOU $4.00 PER GALLON IN 2008?

Alternative energy now, please.

idiotarian nattered: “Would you get motivated if I told you GASOLINE WILL COST YOU $4.00 PER GALLON IN 2008? Alternative energy now, please.”

It was the cult of “alternative energy” (particularly the ethanol pimps with their brilliant idea to burn food) that sowed the seeds of high gasoline and food prices.

Want affordable energy? Drill in ANWR. Drill offshore. Build refineries. Set free enterprise free.

How does Al Gore propose to cap emissions from Mona Loa? Sacrifice a few of Bubbah’s interns maybe? To hell with this globaloney nonsense.

La Nina is coming. Global temperatures expected to fall. Global temperature has not risen since 1998.

What we know is that in 900 to 1300 there were dairy farms in Greenland, and the Vikings had colonies. The Inuit were caribou and to a lesser extent cattle herders. It was warm throughout Europe. Growing seasons were longer. We don’t know much about Polar Bears but clearly they survived. We don’t know about the South Pole Glaciers because no one had ever gone there. We do know that Earth abided.

About 1325 it rained a lot and began to get colder. Greenland became uninhabitable if you insisted on being a dairy farmer. The Vikings began to pull out. The Inuit came in, but could not sustain by herding reindeer and began to fish and hunt seals. The Earth grew colder. The Little Ice Age had begun.

By 1776 it was cold enough that cannon could be hauled across the frozen Hudson River to General George Washington on Haarlem Heights. The cannon saved his army: Howe, having “won” at Bunker Hill in a Pyrrhic victory, was afraid to close with Washington’s Continentals, and by not eliminating the Patriot Army allowed the American Revolution to continue: but it was cold.

About 1825 the world began to warm. The warming trend continued until about 1970, halted, and by the late 1970’s there was concern about upcoming new famines and new ice ages: Global Cooling was the concern of Big Science and the coming doom was big at annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

We also know this: if you need to heat the Earth you need to heat the oceans. CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas overwhelmed by water vapor: that is, if the air is moist, the CO2 plays little to no part in the “greenhouse effect.” Thus CO2 mostly operates in cold, dry places, such as deserts. It has little effect at all over the oceans.

Global warming may be a problem. A mile of ice over most of Wisconsin would be a bigger problem, at least for me.

Let have many nuclear power plants and run everything possible on electricity.

I’m sure being a “PhD in a quantitative field” absolutely qualifies you to speak about climate change as well, especially since your political apologism shapes your statistical arguments.

Two years ago, you people were crying global warming because it was too warm of a winter. Now you claim changing climates because we had a lot of snow this year. Can you people for stop changing your rationale and stick with something?

This article should be a propaganda advertisement if anything else, but not an opinion article.

As someone who has two degrees in the atmospheric sciences I was going to post a comment on here about the ignorance of people like Mr. Schryver. But the first comment nearly exactly states my sentiment. I would add, for those going to the meeting here are some simple things to listen for or ask about: 1. The natural disasters that have been increasing, have there been adjustments for the fact that more people are living in more disaster prone areas than before, like the coast of Florida or the Mississippi River valley, or surround by a 20 ft levy next to the coast below sea level at the mouth of the mississippi. 2. You speak of an increase in storm violence, what metrics using? This might be a good time to mention latent heat, he probably doesn’t know what it is. 3. What is the most abundant greenhouse gas? 4. What role does water vapor and the remainder of the hydrological cycle play in the greenhouse scenario? 5. How will precipitation change in a warmed planet? 6. Where are the clouds in global climate models? (spoiler there are none)

Secondly, there is no reason to bash the speakers, just ask reason minded questions about the science behind their extremist view of global warming and you will see that it quickly falls apart. Global warming has been happening since at least 1950, but how are people affecting it and why hasn’t there been a direct correlation between CO2 increase and warming?
Mr. Schryver is only trying to get people to conserve and recycle and drive less, I wish he would admit that he doesn’t know what he is talking about and just ask people to be more friendly to the environment.

Global warming is soooooo last century!

UN meteorologists claims global temperatures this year will be lower than in 2007 due to the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific.

The World Meteorological Organization’s secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.

Puhlease….. a communications arts major does NOT qualify you to render anything but an uniformed opinion on the topic of ‘Global Warming’. An Incoherent Half Truth is not ‘good science’ any more than ‘C average’ politicians like Al Gore and Comm Arts majors like you are good scientists. Sacrificing our global energy supplies and economies on the shaky altar of Man-Made Global Warming is the equivalent of the Azteks offering human sacrifices to secure favorable weather and good harvests. “Ignore the naysayers - the Virgin dies! The Prophet has Spoken!(Pay no attention to the little algore behind the curtain….)”

You have to be willfully ignorant, uneducatable, or just out right lying to claim ‘there is no debate’ on the topic of man-induced global warming. As simple refutation of “the debate is over” claim, I offer a series of on-line sources, for students at UW-Madtown that wish to be educated rather than indoctrinated. Please access the following websites and articles and forward them to others that seek knowledge on the topic. Warning!!!!!!! Real ‘Science’ Ahead!

“Cosmic Rays and Climate” http://www.denmark.dk/en/menu/AboutDenmark/ScienceResearch/ResearchAreas/ClimateResearch/CosmicRaysAndClimate/

“Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm

“Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate” http://www.heartland.org/article.cfm?artId=22835

“Temperature Monitors Report Wide Spread Global Cooling” http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Worldwide+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm

“Solar Inertial Motion hypothesis and effects on terrestrial climate” http://icecap.us/index.php/go/new-and-cool/rhodesfairbridgeandtheideathatthesolarsystemregulatestheearthsc/

Link to current discussion of the waning sun spot cycle # 23 http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/solar-cycle-minimum-at-the-earliest-in-second-half-of-2008/

Are YOU prepared to DEBATE these topics, Mr. Waisbren? Didn’t think so…….. You accept what you are told as an article of faith, because you are unprepared to assess validity for your self.

Has your communication arts degree adequately prepared you to identify and understand all of the manifold variables that influence terrestrial climate changes? Are you prepared to determine which are the most significant independent variables, which variables have the most significant interactions with each other, and then model them all with sufficient fidelity to predict a ‘global mean temperature’ 50 or 100 years from now with +/- 2C accuracy?

In short response to those rhetorical questions: NO. I say that with surety because NO ONE on earth today can answer each of those questions with a high confidence ‘yes’. We are just barely beginning to identify SOME of the important variables and how they MIGHT interact.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report selectively used only those variables and data sets that supported the hypothesis of man-induced global warming. Much of the UN-IPCC reports have been challenged, even by the scientists that provided data, because their results were edited by the UN panel to draw the conclusion they desired. In any branch of science, that is unacceptable. It is fraud.

A re-ananlysis of the UN-IPCC data, in conjuction with more recent data, clearly shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)levels do not ‘lead’ or ‘cause’ global warming (see the 1st link above). The hypothesis of ‘Man-made Global Warming is not supported.

For those who would learn rather than be mindlessly led, please check out the information referenced here, make up your own minds, and pass the info on.

Why do environmentalists always try to shut people up by saying that there is no controversy about global warming? Its science, there always is debate and controversy about information. But whenever someone tries to have a conversation about the issue, environmentalists such as Mr. Waisbren try to threaten and demean them by calling them a “flat-earther” or saying that they believe the moon landings were staged. It used to be the scientific consensus that the universe revolved around earth, but obviously science changes. The climate has always changed throughout the earth’s history. What makes our climate that we experience now the correct climate.

There are much respected scientists that don’t agree with global warming. The founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, believes that man-made global warming is “the greatest scam in history”. Now I think he knows a little more about weather than Mr. Waisbren. Of course the activists try to discredit him though and say he isn’t the right kind of scientist to report about the problem.

Dr. Reid Bryson believes that the climate has always changed and that this change going on right now is not caused by humans. If you don’t know Dr. Bryson, he is a UW professor and the man who started the Department of Meteorology at this campus, now called the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science. He also founded the Center for Climatic Research. This list of scientists who have different views of global warming goes on but Al Gore and other activists don’t want you to know about these people.

The media has also taken global warming as fact. A recent 60 Minutes interview of Al Gore basically heralded him as a king. There belief of important scientists that don’t agree with global warming is Dick Cheney, which even Republicans would think is a joke. That was the only person they named and the entire interview was in a positive light of Gore and not even close to being fair and balanced.

Environmentalists need to stop using intimidation and fear-mongering to make people believe that there is no controversy or debate when there really is a controversy. And they also need to stop blaming every weather event on global warming. I’m starting to think that I might burn to death in a cold flood.

But facts are facts, no? It is a fact that there IS controversy. There are many highly regarded climate scientists who do not agree with the mainstream global warming claims, and they seem to have very good reasons for their views.

Just last month there was a conference in New York with hundreds of presenters who challenged the current global warming mantra.

The scientific way to deal with these critics is to address their actual arguments and give them a fair hearing.

Uhhhhmmmm…. we just set the all-time record for total snow fall and some of the coldest temperatures recorded ever in Wisconsin this winter. Spring isn’t coming “3 weeks early”, no matter how many predictions are made by Mr. Schryver, Al Gore, Gov. Doyle, or Mr. WasteBrain. The only man-made contributions to Global Warming are all of the hot air pumped out by them.

The weather changes all the time. The climate changes all the time. It always has and it always will. If it didn’t, Wisconsin would still be under a mile thick layer of glacial ice. The planet has been ‘warming’ for the last 10,000 years. That is the duration to date of the current interglacial warming period. It wasn’t caused by carbon dioxide emissions in the last 100 years, man made or otherwise!

The National Weather Service is predicting SNOW for Madison this Saturday and Sunday! There’s An Inconvenient Truth for you! It doesn’t support the Global Warming hyperbole at all. How do you address that? Rename it “Climate Change” and claim the deep snow and bitter cold is all the result of man. “And so this winter, the weather patterns were very much in line with what we expect to see as a result from global warming, where we have nice weather in between major snowstorms.” says Mr. Schryver. Nice weather? Do you mean those below zero and blowing like 60 interludes between blizzards? That is classic Orwellian double speak, ala “1984”. Global Warming is causing colder, snowier winters? C’mon - even a Comm Arts major should be able to suss his way through that incontinent discharge of nonlogic!

And, then again, maybe not…..

“Want affordable energy? Drill in ANWR. Drill offshore. Build refineries. Set free enterprise free.”

HA! You probably think you’re brilliant with this quip. You probably think there’s a magical place in the Middle East called “Iraq” that has bazillions of gallons of oil that we can enjoy any time.

I wish military occupations were as easy as they used to be.

Maybe we should drill for oil in the Gulf, before the Chinese, drilling sideways from Cuba, suck all the oil out?