By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — After I wrote a commentary here on June 3, 2012 about global warming and climate change and what all this might mean for the future existence of Israel as a state in the arid Middle East, an Israeli scientist that I contacted told me that he thought I was barking up the wrong tree and was wrong about global warming. This led to what, for me, was a fascinating e-dialogue.
I met Professor Emeritus Giora Shaviv, the Swartzmann-Medvedi chair in Space Sciences at The Technion in Haifa after coming across a 2009 news article in the Jewish Chronicle in London headlined “Israeli scientist denies global warming.”
Although Dr Shaviv and I don’t see eye to eye on this, I wanted to find out more about his ideas and climate views, after reading this opening lines of the London story: “A leading Israeli scientist has renounced the concept of man-made global warming at a lecture given to the British Technion Society, just days before world leaders meet to discuss ways to halt it. Professor Giora Shaviv professor of physics at the Technion, claimed that the accepted level of carbon dioxide in the air is wildly exaggerated.”
”Dr Shaviv said that though for years the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has claimed that an increase in carbon dioxide has led to an increase in temperature, in fact, the reverse is correct. He argued that the movement of the sun affects temperature, which influences the levels of carbon dioxide, and that these levels have risen and fallen for centuries, even before mankind.”
Then came the clinker: “CO2 is not responsible for heating the earth, the cause is the activity of the sun which we cannot control,” Dr Shaviv said.
And one British defender of Dr Shaviv’s views was quoted as saying:”There is a hysteria and exaggeration of the issue with people worrying that the end is nigh. People need to calm down. The reality is we haven’t got a clear idea what the climate is doing.”
So, having read all this, I emailed Dr Shaviv in Israel and in Internet time, received a reply from him and we later exchanged a few more cordial and friendly messages back and forth. He knows that I feel that global warming maybe very well spell the end of the human species in the next 500 years, if we do not halt CO2 emissions worldwide. And I know that he disgress with me.
”Dear Danny,” Professor Shaviv wrote to me, when I asked him about global warming, “I did not deny the possibility of global warming in that 2009 article you read online. I argue that
a) If at all, it is not man made, b) It is due to solar activity, c) The effect is much smaller than claimed, and d) It is periodic and warming and cooling happened in the past before the industrial revolution and when there were no humans around.”
When I asked Dr Shaviv what his opinion of climate activist Al Gore, he told me: “Al Gore is an idiot who does not know what he is talking about. He shows two graphs and hides the third one. Moreover, there is evidence that temperature rise preceded the CO2 rise (long before the industrial revolution) so that the cause and effect that Al Gore claims is completely wrong.”
When I asked Dr Shaviv what he thought about my ideas on climate change, especially about the possibility that the very future of Isreal could be at stake within the next 500 years if climate change is not halted, he replied: “I see your points, Danny, and I remain calm. The sun will take care of it.”
What Dr Shaviv was getting at was this: He believes that the sun is most responsible for the flucuations on the Earth’s temperature over millions of years and that global warming is caused by the sun even now, and is not caused by humans or the industrial output of carbon dioxide emissions or cars or India’s and China’s coal burning factories. He believes the sun will take care of eveything and that Al Gore is very very wrong about almost everything.
So we agreed to disagree, and remain online friends. I appreciated his candor in replying to my emails.
Meanwhile a headline on the Climate Depot website extrapolated from my concern for Israel’s future existence that I was acusing climate skeptics of anti-semitism, I simply do not understand how the editor of that site could twist my op-ed about the future of Israel’s existence into that. It just does not compute at all.
But as the climate wars heat up, the language is going to heat up too, and we must all be on guard against twisting the words of our opponents into false accusations.
*
Bloom is Taiwan bureau chief and cyber-surfer in chief for San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com
The cause of global warming is the heat emitted by our energy use. It is not the CO2 by-product from combustion of fossel fuels, it is the heat( isn’t that why we burn them). In the past century CO2 rose from 320 to 380 ppm, a 20% increase. CO2 is a greenhouse gas but with far less impact than water vapor, (8000ppm). During this time annual fossil fuel consumption increased 800%. Greenhouse gases moderate climate by retaining heat. Is the rise in temperature due to the modest increase in greenhouse gas or to the large increase in the heat to be contained? In 2008 50x10E16 btus were emitted into an environment whose atmosphere has a mass of 530x10E16 kilograms. This has the potential to raise the temperature by 0.17*F. Measured rise was 0.04*F due to cooling by photosynthesis,glacial melting and heating of the earth’s surface..Let’s focus on heat, not CO2. Stop sequestration of CO2 other than through photosynthesis, and stop research and promotion of advanced nuclear processes. Just recently the U.S. issued permits for two AP1000 type nuclears. Nuclear plants emit a total of twice as much heat as their electrical output
It does not matter the weight of CO2 we emit to the atmosphere but the proportion of the total annual budget. Our part of that budget is about 3% the rest being from natural emitters, like volcanoes, plants at night etc., over which we have no control. The heating effect of greenhouse gasses has never been proved from observation only by model runs which prove nothing. High resolution ice core data shows that temperature rises before a parallel atmospheric CO2 rise. This is caused by the oceans outgasing dissolved CO2. As regards nuclear research I might agree if you mean on PWR’s which use water at very high pressure and are not that safe but there are other designs which are safe one being the LFTR or Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor which is far more efficient, works at normal atmospheric pressure so is far safer than PWR’s or AGR’s. They can also use the highly radioactive fission products from PWR’s which we now have to store underground. The generation is two stage and the waste heat can be used for desalination to produce drinking water. And no they do not heat the planet.
Agree with you. Also agree with thorium reactors as something to quickly pursue.
Here’s the math on the political carbon swindle. Amount of carbon in atmosphere is 4/100th of 1%. Manmade carbon (5%) is therefore 2/1000th of 1%. Reduction of manmade carbon to reach the target of 350 ppm would be ?? Clearly too small to withstand any reasonable margin of error. Add to that the complexity of factoring in a reasonable carbon seasonal variation of 7 ppm and one can understand that AGW “good science” is indeed on thin ice.
Pingback: “Al Gore is very very wrong about almost everything…” | pindanpost
Pingback: And another thing « Counter Propaganda News : The truth is out there
Climate denialist Climate Depot website in DC picks up this oped above, headlining it: ”Another Dissenter! Israeli Prof Giora Shaviv says ‘Gore is an idiot who does not know what he is talking about’ — Declares ‘CO2 is not responsible for heating the earth’ ”..and think hot links to the SDJW site here. But conveniently leaves off the ending of the oped which states: ”Meanwhile a headline on the Climate Depot website extrapolated from my concern for Israel’s future existence that I was acusing climate skeptics of anti-semitism, I simply do not understand how the editor of that site could twist my op-ed about the future of Israel’s existence into that. It just does not compute at all.
But as the climate wars heat up, the language is going to heat up too, and we must all be on guard against twisting the words of our opponents into false accusations.”
At &:43 AM on 13 June, Egg Man had begun:
The use of the term “denialist” by the True Believers in (and perpetrators of) the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) fraud is a pejorative deliberately derivative of the correct disdain for those who continue to refuse acknowledging one of the more egregious examples of government-gone-juramentado – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party effort to enslave and slaughter a particular religious minority (among other ethnic, political, and religious minorities) – in the bloody socialist history of the 20th Century.
It’s an intellectually dishonest tactic, and in itself quite contemptible, but it’s certainly true.
Those of us with training in the sciences who have for decades followed the development and malignant implementation of the CAGW fraud have tended reliably to agree that there is no validity in the claims of those whom we like to call “las warmistas,” and whom we condemn as either hysterical idiots or scheming con men.
Hey, like you didn’t expect that flinging pejoratives tends to bring reciprocation?
The confusion on the part of the innocent idiots seems to be the result of a general failure to understand (and/or to exercise) the error-checking mechanisms of the scientific method in their consideration of that which the flim-flam artists have been peddling as “the consensus,” the so-called “settled science” of the climatology cabal as has been manifest in the hideously flawed products of the United Nations’ IPCC propaganda machine.
What should have triggered the “smell test” in the minds of the uncritical suckers – as it has for the past thirty-odd years among those of us who regard this preposterous CAGW bogosity with due skepticism – was the very expression “settled science.”
That’s because those of us educated in the sciences and especially those of us experienced in scientific investigation know that vanishingly little in science is ever “settled.” Any intellectual concept – any conjecture, hypothesis, theory, or even well-accepted law – may be called into question if observed phenomena indicate that what had been tested before (and found robust) might not be working as previous conclusions had led us to think it ought.
And even if the test – whether experimental or purely observational – doesn’t disprove the applicability of the concept under examination, it certainly expands our knowledge of the phenomena themselves, and commonly yields advances in methods of investigation.
This is all good stuff, and it all comes of “denialist” refusal to accept uncritically the assertions of slovenly malpractitionate pseudoscientific charlatans, or the ill-informed (or uninformed, or deliberately misinformed) anxieties of True Believers who demonstrate with appalling consistency their failure to appreciate (and their unwillingness to learn) just how “science” works.
Gullibility is a very human characteristic. It’s not criminal negligence in and of itself, but to advocate political action – government abrogation of individual human beings’ rights to their own lives, their liberties, and their property – on the basis of half-baked (or wholly concocted) simulacra of “science” is most certainly a malignant violation of the social contract, a breach of the public peace which must earn las warmistas the hatred of those who suffer the adverse effects of political thuggery to no valid purpose and for no reason other than the True Believers’ irresponsible and idiotic hysteria.
Dan, I’m sure you are a nice, well-intentioned man.
However, Shaviv is right and you are wrong. And if you continue to write about the “globalwarmingclimatechangeclimatedisruption” in the manner you are, Shaviv and I will say the same thing about you as he did about Gore.
Study the science for a few years, Dan. Don’t be that guy.
As to “Bobbert”, if the best you can do is regurgitate Gavin Schmidt’s “real climate” diatribes, I suggest you need to spend a decade researching yourself, and stop believing everything those on the AGW research funding gravy train keep spoon feeding you. There’s an entire world of other science out there that directly controverts the prevailing GHG Thermaggedon paradigm, and the CERN experiment is just one example.
AGW is not a threat to anyone. Not Israel, not the U.S., not the Maldives. But the policies you people are advocating are a threat to everyone. And, for your information, the policies you are advocating for are already killing people in the developing world. This is documented, and the blood is on your hands.
Hashem knows this, too.
In short, Mr. Bloom, Dr Shaviv is right on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) or “man-made climate change,” or whatever the fraudsters are calling it lately.
/
Attempts to create conceptual models representing real-world phenomena (whether they’re expensively computerized or merely sketched on a napkin) can never be more than approximations predicated upon assumptions about what the theoreticians think they understand of verifiable observational data.
/
What has happened in the charlatan-raddled and politically corrupted field of climatology is that the seductive error of foundational incompetents like Trenberth and Hanson back in the 1970s were rewarded by political opportunists to create yet another in that “endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary,” with which to stampede gullible voters.
/
Proof that this AGW conjecture started as an error and was “cooked” into a fraud can be found in the ways that the field’s carefully concocted orthodoxy has concertedly evaded, rejected, and even obliterated by recordkeeping corruption those observations which have tended with increasing reliability to prove their concepts erroneous.
/
In real science, observed facts force theories to bend in reconciliation. In the “Cargo Cult Science” of this AGW fraud, inconvenient truth – the hard evidence – disproving the politically advantageous IPCC grab for power and pelf is obliterated, and intellectual honesty like that of Dr. Shaviv is punished as heresy.
/
I repeat: he’s right, and you’re horribly, misfeasantly, embarrassingly wrong.
Pingback: June 14, 2012 | Another Slow News Day
I agree with the last few comments.
Global warming / climate change is one gigantic scam, hoax and fraud perpetrated on every person in the world other than those who stand to gain financially from the myriad of governmental polices and schemes that use “climate change” as an excuse to curtail out liberties and rights. Environmentalism and “sustainability” are extremely dangerous ideologies that aim to end the industrial era (and all the improvements made to human existence) and rapidly and drastically cut human population from 7 billion, to 500 million.
People need to wake up the the existence of “Agenda 21” and the oppressive global governance that the UN hopes to establish all in the name of “saving the planet”.
Pingback: Latest Global Warming Climate Change News | Impacts Of Climate Change
“climate change” would be merely an extremely obscure scientific discussion IF some clever folks had not dreamed up a way to make money by producing a scare. It’s like the “racial equality” schtick. That got turned into jobs for EEO bureaucrats. And professors who now need constant research-funding. And lawyers. Gosh, the same three groups that love the “climate change” problem…..
Follow the money….
That’s a likely assumption but that would be saying the sun is getting hotter and hotter as the time passes by. However, I have to argue that global warming is partly caused by man – the carbon dioxide emission that it creates, wars, decaying dead bodies and etc.