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• Tuesday, July 1, 2008 04:23 PM

  Mike Sulzer

  To answer your first question: I live in a manner that is consistent with my conservative ethic of being careful with my resources. I live in a house that allows me to walk instead of drive as much as possible and sharing a house with people is also a part of my belief in conserving resources. Could you imagine how much worse it would be I didn't pick out recycling out of the trash of my house-mates or didn't turn off the lights and water or didn't turn down the heat in the house? But yes, it is trying living with such profligates.

  For your second question, well I question some of the arguments that people give for accepting global warming, which is that there is a scientific consensus. Accepting something because there is consensus is a terrible argument. As warm(pun intended) and fuzzy as that is, science is not decided on by consensus.

  Richard Lindzen, atmosphere physicist/professor of meteorology at MIT, has expressed doubt on the danger of anthropogenic global warming.

  http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/230_TakingGr.pdf

  I particularly like what he's said previously in another article, "Picking holes in the IPCC is crucial. The notion that if you’re ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don’t have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing, it’s like quackery in medicine – if somebody says you should take jelly beans for cancer and you say that’s stupid, and he says, well can you suggest something else and you say, no, does that mean you have to go with jelly beans?"

  And I am not entirely convinced by the changes NASA has made in interpreting the satellite data of the troposphere to be more consistent w/ the mean of the global surface temperature. Yes, they have taken great care in not only collecting the data, but massaging the data as well. I think that there is an overly simplistic understanding by the public on data collection and analysis. Data is almost always "massaged." David Douglass has published some different conclusions using the same data of tropospheric temperature trends.

  http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117857349/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

  As far as climate models, I don't think they have accurately simulated clouds. Considering that water vapour is 95% of all greenhouse gases, I think that's a fairly considerable factor that hasn't been accounted for properly.

  I think currently there are many scientists in fields such as physics, statistics and computer science that might take issue with some of the methodology of climatologists, but fear reprisals when it comes to funding and academic appointments.

  —laggal Read laggal's other letters
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