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Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice — 41 Comments

  1. The Twilight Zone could have some hokey storylines but most of them worked then and still work today. My teenage daughter watches them (and old Alfred Hitchock’s) on the recurring marathon weekends. Something happened in the ’70s that has made it impossible to recreate this type of TV series. The remakes are uniformly awful. This maybe that they required you to think about something outside everyday life and conventions while the remakes had to stay more politically correct. The late Michael Crighton said he thought the 1950’s had more freedom of thought than today.

  2. For me …. the fact that mean global temperature as measured by SATELLITE is the same as the year 1980 is proof enough that warming is not occuring.

    Satellite is not prone to the Steve McIntyre findings that temperature reading stations more and more are found closer to heat sources (altering data). Garbage in – Garbage Out.

    Additionally Steve found places that were using previous month entries (like August) for September or October by accident (why doesn’t it ever happen that December is used for March???? When these data points were corrected you see no hockey stick, no warming, etc.

    So people can make CLAIMS with no basis in fact – but the earth will do as it will do in-spite of CO2 going from it’s very miniscule amount on earth to a slightly higher miniscule amount.

    CO2 is not poisonous, nor is it a pollutant. It is what vegetation breathes and converts to Oxygen.

    Plant farms (I refuse to use the word Greenhouse as it has a connotation) which have CO2 pumped in have plants that do much much better.

    Computer models on this topic are all flawed.
    http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/12/22/why-global-warming-alarmism-is-wrong/

  3. DirtyJobsGuy: one of the best things about Twilight Zone was that it was in black and white. It also used marvelous actors, for the most part. I think Rod Serling was some sort of genius, as well.

  4. funny thing is that hansen was originally pushing global cooling, but we entered a warming trend and he had to switch tack… now that it took so long to sell us on the false crisis, the sun has reversed and now we are way into cooling.

    whats more interesting is that the sun in solar cycle 24 is still pretty blank!!!

    if it keeps going, we may have a small ice age. and the greenies are going to find that its easier to live in the heat and use the energy to survive, but its near impossible to generate enough energy to live in the cold.

    go here and check out the movies of the sun. very blank, and has been there almost for record time, and we are still waiting to see what hapens. maunder minimum was the mini ice age…

    sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/realtime-update.html

  5. Simple Question, Simple Answer…Not

    “Plants do better with extra CO2, therefore global warming doesn’t exist” is not a terribly cogent argument.

    Ill-informed global warming skeptics are very much reminding me of the old HIV denialists. The real question to ask yourself is whether you disbelieve in global warming because you think it isn’t true or because you wish it isn’t true.

  6. Twilight Zone was pretty good although it did often stray into finger wagging preachiness. Should the idea be reprised by a Hollywood that’s short on originality here might be an idea for an episode.

    Actt I: Perpetual fear mongers go about preaching they have the solution to any number of global problems which threaten to wipe out humanity — but no one will listen.
    Act II: With great angst and melodrama they try to prove they’re smarter than everyone else — and they’ve got the computer models to prove it.
    Act III: They imagined every danger possible except the danger to themselves. Denouement – they’re the ones wiped out and humanity lives more happily ever after.

    THE END

  7. DUMB AND BROKE
    Some say the world will end in dumb,

    Some say in broke.

    From what I’ve heard from the Goreish bum

    I hold with those who favor dumb.

    But if it had to end flat broke,

    I think I know enough of busted

    To say that for destruction broke

    Leaves me more disgusted

    Than what Gore spoke.

  8. Hyman, Reading comprehension is required.

    Where did I say, “Plants do better with extra CO2, therefore global warming doesn’t exist

    I didn’t did I. Therefore you lied in attributing that statement to me. But I’ll grant you reading comprehension issues instead…..

    Let me ask you for an ACTUAL honest assessment of what my statement of how well plants do with more CO2 means to you. What do you HONESTLY think I was saying.

    I hope you HONESTLY think I was saying, “Plant farms (I refuse to use the word Greenhouse as it has a connotation) which have CO2 pumped in have plants that do much much better

    Because that is what I said.

    Hyman – the same question could be put back to you… Do you wish/hope for global warming to be true??

    Because if the data shows that there are fluctuations and that this year has had a mean temperature like 1980, then where is the warming? The .6 degree warming trend in the last 100 years has backed off since 1998. Since 1998 Hyman. Since 1998. 5 of the top 10 hottest years in this last 100 years was during the 1930’s. During the 1930’s!!! Before the increase in CO2 output that everybody wants to link to.

    The argument is NOT settled and taking resources away from shelter, food, medicine to throw at a problem with solar, wind, hydro is …. (insert adjective here).

    Efficiencies have been gained. I am happy to let market forces and everyone’s natural caring about the environment to work. Read that again if you don’t understand.

    Comprehend what you read! 🙂

  9. Sorry about that. Next time I won’t assume that a sentence in the middle of your post has some relevancy to the other sentences in the post. I’ll just realize that it’s a non sequitur.

    The fact that CO2 forms a minuscule part of the atmosphere but is still relevant to the greenhouse effect means that human action can have a much greater influence. We can double 0.038% of the concentration of the atmosphere more readily than we could 10%.

    I don’t care one way or the other. (To quote T’Pau, “The air is the air. What can be done?”) I expect the recession will do more to reduce CO2 emissions than any orderly plan could have done.

    Here’s some more RealClimate – 2008 Temperature Summaries and Spin.

  10. First, thank you once again neo for reminding me of yet another poem I enjoyed from long ago!

    Second, one doesn’t have to be a “denier” to believe that the planet goes through heating and cooling cycles -much as the year goes through seasons.

    However, in the current politically correct environment any assumption that any temperature change is a natural phenomenon unrelated to human activities is considered heresy and debate is forestalled by a screaming temper tantrum as the greenies through a hissy fit.

    Finally, it’s time to consider plans for an extended cooling spell – which of course will conveniently be laid at the feet of “global warming” or “climate change” as anytime the planet warms or cools it is to be considered the result of human activity.

    How oh how did the cavemen manage to bring on the ice ages?

  11. In the link you provided Hyman, take a ruler to the graph at mark 0. You see the end points are at 0.

    From your link:

    hmmm. And… 5 of the hottest 10 in the last decade were in the 1930’s…

  12. In the link you provided Hyman, take a ruler to the graph at mark 0. You see the end points are at 0.

    From your link:

    hmmm. And… 5 of the hottest 10 in the last decade were in the 1930’s…

  13. In the link you provided Hyman, take a ruler to the graph at mark 0. You see the end points are at 0.

    From your link:

    “You can get slightly different pictures if you pick the start year differently, and so this isn’t something profound. Picking any single year as a starting point is somewhat subjective and causes the visual aspect to vary – looking at the trends is more robust. However, this figure does show that in models, as in data, some years will be above trend, and some will be below trend. Anyone who expresses shock at this is either naive or … well, you know.

    As for the next few years, our expectations are not much changed. This coming winter is predicted to be ENSO neutral, so on that basis one would expect a warmer year next year than this year (though probably not quite record breaking). Barring any large volcanic eruption, I don’t see any reason for the decadal trends to depart much from the anticipated ~0.2ºC/decade.

    Update: Just FYI, the same figure as above baselined to 1990, and 1979.”

    hmmm. And… 5 of the hottest 10 in the last decade were in the 1930’s…

  14. Something happened in the ’70s that has made it impossible to recreate this type of TV series. The remakes are uniformly awful. This maybe that they required you to think about something outside everyday life and conventions while the remakes had to stay more politically correct.

    The Twilight Zone was never an easy show to watch. It required you to put aside your sense of what was right and fitting and let the story take you where it wanted you to go. Sometimes you thought you knew where it was going, and that made it easier, but there was usually a point where your nerves started to screech like a badly played violin.

    That it was in black and white probably helped; it allowed you to give yourself to the story without being completely immersed. Also, I suspect that the network execs back then didn’t quite realize what they had. And writers, even the arty ones, weren’t so locked up in the dominant themes of the day. Plus, of course, you had Rod Serling and his sensibilities, which few “commercial” people have.

    Viewers may have changed, too. Like the mystery reader who wants to find a good series detective, we want a return on our investment of learning time. We want variations on a theme, rather than new and challenging themes. We’ve been spoiled by television series with their unchanging milieux and never-developing characters. (There are pleasant exceptions, of course.)

    Ironically, the proliferation of cable channels may once again make a long tail possible, but only if the cable operators can be convinced to give some of those channels over to independent producers, just to see what some of them can do.

    Finally, remember that not all of the episodes were of the first water. A few of them were, and many more were very good. But The Twilight Zone was not the Deacon’s Shay; it had a weak spot or two.

  15. I love the old Twilight Zone. I’ve seen many of the episodes many times. Yes, some of them were clunkers, but its best episodes are timeless classics.

    Yesterday morning my car had a coating of ice on the outside of the windows, and frost on the inside.

  16. “On January 4, 2008, a reversed-polarity sunspot appeared–and this signals the start of Solar Cycle 24,” says David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
    science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/10jan_solarcycle24.htm

    Spotless Sun: Blankest Year Of The Space Age
    Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the “blankest year” of the Space Age.
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081006184638.htm

    Sun Shows Signs Of Life: Long-Awaited Solar Cycle 24 Starting To Take Off
    ScienceDaily (Nov. 12, 2008) – After two-plus years of few sunspots, even fewer solar flares, and a generally eerie calm, the sun is finally showing signs of life.
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081111230341.htm

    well… i gave the link above for watching the sun spot mpegs created by nasa. the sun activity did not pick up as they said in the last article. its still blank (i just checked).

    The Maunder Minimum is the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time. It is named after the solar astronomer Edward W. Maunder (1851—1928) who discovered the dearth of sunspots during that period by studying records from those years. During one 30-year period within the Maunder Minimum, for example, astronomers observed only about 50 sunspots, as opposed to a more typical 40,000—50,000 spots.

    the world is overwhelmingly warmed or cooled by the activity of the sun, which swamps everything else. (despite what many who live off of the states largesse may claim disengenously).

    70 years of minumum appeared out of no where… and a mini ice age occcured.

    cooling starts years before the minimum, and now we have a broken record for minimum in the modern age.

    along with that we have had snows and record colds. how about snow in southern california?
    Not only did it hail, and maybe even snow a bit, in San Francisco early this week; it also snowed several inches in Southern California and Las Vegas, Nevada. The snow was limited to mountains and high deserts, but it was still very unusual.
    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=49&entry_id=33774

  17. twilight zone was great…
    but it was before the era that everthign had to ahve a message… you know, when making good entertainment for money was the way…

    also, the average intelligence was higher than now… more rigourous too… which is why you cant do more complex stories, and stories dont have to even follow real world principals, the majority cant tell.

  18. If you have a Mac, there’s a dashboard widget that shows a new picture of the Sun every day so you can see the sunspots, or lack thereof.

    I’ve had it for over a year, and look at the picture every day. There have been hardly any sunspots to speak of during that time.

  19. A World War II veteran, Rines has spent 37 years hunting for Nessie with sonar equipment. In 2008, “despite having hundreds of sonar contacts over the years, the trail has since gone cold and Rines believes that Nessie may be dead, a victim of global warming.”

  20. sorry hit too fast, here is fox list of things that were blamed on global warming, from the death of nessie above and many more

    http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,472084,00.html

    I kind of like the giant killer burmese python migrating… though i am torn as to the killer stingray invasion… anorexic wales, wet dying baby penguins, and so much more…

  21. “Ill-informed global warming skeptics are very much reminding me of the old HIV denialists”
    What about well-informed AGW skeptics? They include, for example, a founding father of paleoclimatology, former director of Geography Institute RAN Andrey Kapitza. He was the head of two Antarctic expeditions that started drilling of Antarctic ice sheet and gave the most detailed and reliable climate record and record of atmosphere composition for thousand years. These ice kerns established beyond doubt that rise of CO2 always lag behind rise of temperature by around 800 years (the time necessary for mixing of ocean waters and recovering dissolved CO2 into atmosphere or, in case of cooling, for dissolution of atmospheric CO2 in ocean water). As he said, AGW hypothesis put the horse before the cart and confuse cause and effect: CO2 emission from ocean is the result of warming, not the cause of it.

  22. One of the things that I liked about Twilight Zone (and Hitchcock) was that the violence that occurred often took place off-camera and made you use your imagination, which is far more terrifying than anything special effects, especially back then, could induce. Even when it was on-camera, it wasn’t gory. Today, everything is in your face and rarely serves a purpose except to shock. After a while, even the most grotesque special effects become commonplace and the producers keep making it more shocking to hang onto an ever more jaded audience. Why not try going back to intelligent plots, good acting, and understated screenplay? It might get me back to the movies more than 1-3 times a year.

  23. The real “deniers” are people who don’t grasp the basic fact that the climate is continually in a warming or cooling state. Otherwise we would have invented a word for observable planetary weather patterns thats very definition didn’t suggest fluctuation.

  24. Regardless of other causes of shifts in climate, the premise of global warming theory is that human activity has a significant effect as well. My feeling is that skeptics are skeptical because they do not wish people and ideas they hate to be correct. Then they latch on to some purported disproof of the theory without bothering to verify if it is correct or if it has been refuted. Evolution “skeptics” do the same thing.

    I’m mostly speaking of non-specialists. Scientists are more likely to just follow the evidence and change their minds as warranted, but even they will have members who become fixated on some premise and never loose themselves from it. Think of Einstein refusing to accept the inherent randomness of the universe (God’s dice).

  25. Some say the class will end in As
    Some say in Cs
    From how I test on certain days
    I’d like to think that I make As
    But if it brought me to my knees
    I think I know enough of school
    To say that for my passing Cs
    Are also cool
    And I’d be pleased. -cp

  26. A few of my favorite quotes as of late:
    “”“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” – Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden. ”

    and

    “Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist. ”

    and

    ” “Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” – Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles. ”

    Quotes from here : http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2158072e-802a-23ad-45f0-274616db87e6

  27. “My feeling is that skeptics are skeptical because they do not wish people and ideas they hate to be correct. Then they latch on to some purported disproof of the theory without bothering to verify if it is correct or if it has been refuted.”

    No Hyman, we are skeptical because a significant portion of the (junk) “science” which supposedly supports current global warming theory is seriously flawed, and has been shown clearly to be so by highly qualified and credible experts in their fields. The core of the rationale for the “solutions” being proposed by the Gore crowd is probably short sighted in the long run, and likely of marginal real value. Hyman, you’re projecting, and like the simpletons that you people are, you reduce the environmental equation to something very simplistic (human generated CO2) instead of the significantly more complex array of issues that are the reality. There is a strong rationale for recognizing “adaptation” as the more relevant issue for focus. Anyone with a mature, humble, honest and practical sense of intellect judgement understands that this is and will be an ongoing issue, and that for practical purposes the relevant science is early in development. Clean coal technology, for example, is going to improve the quality of life, as well as save lives during the next long or short cold spells; As well, the development of seawater desalinization and desert cultivation, during average planetary temperatures, or slightly higher, including droughts. These ideas are just the tip of the “iceberg” in terms of the relevant complexity of issues. One of the major problems with the global warming crowd is their arrogance. Arrogance combined with political and authoritarian ambition is significantly more dangerous than a 2 degree average change of temperature, in either direction, over the long haul. People can survive in the cold north, as well as the tropics, it’s a no brainer, at it’s most basic. More dangerous is a movement of foolish demagogues and international left-wing political opportunists. We’ve been down that road with similar foolishness during the twentieth century. The current “global warming” hysteria is just another variety of that same kind of moronic and pseudo intellectual mob behaviour.

  28. There is a very troubling history of previous environment scares, each of them being proclamed as established science and completely debunked later. The list includes:
    1) DDT scare, leading to universal ban on production of this most effective and non-toxic insecticide and millions of children lives lost to malaria. As subsequent studies shown, all toxic effects to birds were caused not by DDT itself, but by impurities, other biphenoles produced by industrial method used these days, but absent in new, more advanced technologies. But demonization of the substance by amaterish journalists still prevents its use and production, and preventable lost of children lives continue.
    2) Asbestos scare. This very efficient electric and thermal insulator and construction material was banned because some sorts of it caused cancer. But it became clear later that chrysolite asbestos (a variety of this mineral) is absolutely harmless, and there are many deposits of it. But the industry was destroyed, and we still pay dearly for absence of this material where it could have reduce costs and improve quality of goods.
    3) Population explosion scare boosted by Roman club environmentalists. All their prognoses turned false, but this anti-human, anti-growth agenda is still alive and fuel Green demagogy.
    4) Ozon hole scare and ban on production of freons by Montreal protocole. Later it was established that ozone layer depletion was a result of natural variability and has nothing to do with freons or any human activity. But billions dollars were lost, refrigeration industry in many countries wiped out, and replacing of cheap and efficient freons by more costly and less effective refrigerants still makes us pay more for worse products.
    This list can be prolonged, but the pattern is the same as in present AGW scare: politization of half-baked or junk science, silencing of critics, demonization of a substance and using the public fears for political gains by international bureaucracy to the harm of industry and economics.

  29. “For example, the UN claimed 2,500 scientists supported its key claim that human-generated greenhouse gases are the primary cause of global warming. But those 2,500 weren’t asked to support it–they were only asked to review it. Only 62 completed the review, and 55 had serious concerns, leaving a total of seven to support the science that is the basis of the IPCC climate-change policy.'”

    from this Canadian article: http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=46999d7c-4078-4fe4-a0e0-3df0eaac0f4f&&p=1

  30. Funny you should mention the Twilight Zone and Global Warming – I was thinking today about the episode where the scientists know that the sun is about to implode/explode (forget which), and that all life will be wiped out in a matter of days.

    The debate is whether or not to tell the people. Because if they know, in advance, they can say goodbye, set things right with estranged family members, make peace with their maker, etc. But the downside will be hysteria and riots and suicide and angst and pain and horror. Whereas, if they do not say anything, people would go about their day happily, blissfully ignorant…

    Today’s scientists have decided that they ‘know’ that what is coming is bad, and they have no such compunctions. They, in fact, WANT to scare the crap out of everyone, make everyone suffer as much as possible, make everyone feel guilty…

    I think Rod Serling would find it very amusing.

  31. See Newhouse ML, and Sullivan KR (1989). British Journal of Industrial Medicine 46(3):176-179. Conclusion is that chrysotile is not cancerogenic in concentrations occuring at workplace if adequate measures if industrial hygiene are followed.

  32. Here’s an abstract stating

    In contrast to amphibole forms of asbestos, chrysotile asbestos is often claimed to be only a minor cause of malignant pleural mesothelioma, a highly fatal cancer of the lining of the thoracic cavity. In this article we examine the evidence from animal and human studies that relates to this issue. Reported data do not support widely quoted views regarding the relative inertness of chrysotile fibers in mesothelioma causation. In fact, examination of all pertinent studies makes it clear that chrysotile asbestos is similar in potency to amphibole asbestos. Since asbestos is the major cause of mesothelioma, and chrysotile constitutes 95% of all asbestos use world wide, it can be concluded that chrysotile asbestos is the main cause of pleural mesothelioma in humans.

    Lie lie lie…

  33. Coincidentally, here’s a recent RealClimate on ozone depletion. It talks about the human-caused ozone depletion denialists and reports that a recent prediction by a few scientists that galactic cosmic rays significantly affect ozone depletion failed. Ozone Holes and Cosmic Rays

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