Flying by Air- the carbon footprint

[Guest]

If sangabriel losing his cool isn't further proof of global warming, then some people will never be satisfied.

[Road Runner]

(sangabriel @ Feb. 17 2007,18:37) So go fuck yourself.

Thankyou for your intelligent and well reasoned response.

I hope you are more careful and objective in your research.

I'd hate to think that the 30 years work I've put in collecting data was going to waste.

RR.

[Guest]

Remember how the unusually large number of hurricanes a couple of years ago was hyped in the media as being a result of global warming, with more such hurricanes being predicted to return the following year and the years thereafter?

But, when not one hurricane struck the United States all last year, the media had little or nothing to say about the false predictions they had hyped. It's heads I win and tails you lose.

Are there serious scientists who specialize in weather and climate who have serious doubts about the doomsday scenarios being pushed by global warming advocates? Yes, there are.

There is Dr. S. Fred Singer, who set up the American weather satellite system, and who published some years ago a book titled "Hot Talk, Cold Science." More recently, he has co-authored another book on the subject, "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years."

Other serious scientists who are not on the global warming bandwagon include a professor of meteorology at MIT, Richard S. Lindzen.

His name was big enough for the National Academy of Sciences to list it among the names of other experts on its 2001 report that was supposed to end the debate by declaring the dangers of global warming proven scientifically.

Professor Lindzen then objected and pointed out that neither he nor any of the other scientists listed ever saw that report before it was published. It was in fact written by government bureaucrats -- as was the more recently published summary report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that is also touted as the final proof and the end of the discussion.

You want more experts who think otherwise? Try a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, Patrick J. Michaels, who refers to the much ballyhooed 2001 IPCC summary as having "misstatements and errors" that he calls "egregious."

A professor of climatology at the University of Delaware, David R. Legates, likewise referred to the 2001 IPCC summary as being "often in direct contrast with the scientific report that accompanies it." It is the summaries that the media hype. The full 2007 report has not even been published yet.

Skeptical experts in other countries around the world include Duncan Wingham, a professor of climate physics at the University College, London, and Nigel Weiss of Cambridge University.

The very attempt to silence all who disagree about global warming ought to raise red flags.

Anyone who remembers the 1970s should remember the Club of Rome report that was supposed to be the last word on economic growth grinding to a halt, "overpopulation" and a rapidly approaching era of mass starvation in the 1980s.

In reality, the 1980s saw increased economic growth around the world and, far from mass starvation, an increase in obesity and agricultural surpluses in many countries. But much of the media went for the Club of Rome report and hyped the hysteria.

[Guest]

An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change
Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months€™ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

The small print explains €œvery likely€ as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain€™s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter۪s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Ad̩lie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.

So one awkward question you can ask, when you€™re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is €œWhy is east Antarctica getting colder?€ It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you€™re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it€™s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.

Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.

The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.

What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.

Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun€™s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun€™s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.

The only trouble with Svensmark€™s idea €” apart from its being politically incorrect €” was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark€™s initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it €œA new theory of climate change€.

Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.

The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark€™s scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Nature€™s marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.

[Guest]

The politics of global warming

Timothy Ball is no wishy-washy skeptic of global warming. The Canadian climatologist, who has a Ph.D. in climatology from the University of London and taught at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years, says that the widely propagated €œfact€ that humans are contributing to global warming is the €œgreatest deception in the history of science.€
Ball has made no friends among global warming alarmists by saying that global warming is caused by the sun, that global warming will be good for us and that the Kyoto Protocol €œis a political solution to a nonexistent problem without scientific justification."

Needless to say, Ball strongly disagrees with the findings of the latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which on Feb. 2 concluded that it is €œvery likely€ that global warming is the result of human activity.

Q: The mainstream media would have us believe that the science of global warming is now settled by the latest IPCC report. Is it true?

A: No. It€™s absolutely false. As soon as people start saying something€™s settled, it€™s usually that they don€™t want to talk about it anymore. They don€™t want anybody to dig any deeper. It€™s very, very far from settled. In fact, that€™s the real problem. We haven€™t been able to get all of the facts on the table. The IPCC is a purely political setup.

There was a large group of people, the political people, who wanted the report to be more harum-scarum than it actually is. In fact, the report is quite a considerable step down from the previous reports. For example, they have reduced the potential temperature rise and they€™ve reduced the sea level increase and a whole bunch of other things. Part of it is because they know so many people will be watching the report this time.

Q: You always hear the argument that the IPCC has several thousand scientists -- how can you not accept what they say?

A: The answer, first of all, is that consensus is not a scientific fact. The other thing is, you look at the degree to which they have controlled the whole IPCC process. For example, who are the lead authors? Who are the scientists who sit on the summary panel with the politicians to make sure that they get their view in? €¦ You€™ve got this incestuous little group that is controlling the whole process both through their publications and the IPCC. I€™m not a conspiracy theorist and I hate being even pushed toward that, but I think there is a consensus conspiracy that€™s going on.

Q: What is your strongest or best argument that GW is not €œvery likely€ to be caused by SUVs and Al Gore€™s private planes?

A: I guess the best argument is that global warming has occurred, but it began in 1680, if you want to take the latest long-term warming, and the climate changes all the time. It began in 1680, in the middle of what€™s called €œThe Little Ice Age€ when there was three feet of ice on the Thames River in London. And the demand for furs of course drove the fur trade. The world has warmed up until recently, and that warming trend doesn€™t fit with the CO2 record at all; it fits with the sun-spot data. Of course they are ignoring the sun because they want to focus on CO2.

The other thing that you are seeing going on is that they have switched from talking about global warming to talking about climate change. The reason for that is since 1998 the global temperature has gone down -- only marginally, but it has gone down. In the meantime, of course, CO2 has increased in the atmosphere and human production has increased. So you€™ve got what Huxley called the great bane of science -- €œa lovely hypothesis destroyed by an ugly fact.€ So by switching to climate change, it allows them to point at any weather event -- whether it€™s warming, cooling, hotter, dryer, wetter, windier, whatever -- and say it is due to humans. Of course, it€™s absolutely rubbish.

Q: What is the most exaggerated and unnecessary worry about global warming or climate change?

A: I think the fact that it is presented as all negative. Of course, it€™s the one thing they focus on because the public, with the huge well of common sense that is out there, would sort of say, €œWell, I don€™t understand the science, but, gee, I wouldn€™t mind a warmer world, especially if I was living in Canada or Russia.€ They have to touch something in the warming that becomes a very big negative for the people, and so they focus on, €œOh, the glaciers are going to melt and the sea levels are going to rise.€ In fact, there are an awful lot of positive things. For example, longer frost-free seasons across many of the northern countries, less energy used because you don€™t need to keep your houses warm in the winter.

Q: Is the globe warming and what is the cause?

A: Yeah, the world has been warming since 1680 and the cause is changes in the sun. But in their computer models they hardly talk about the sun at all and in the IPCC summary for policy-makers they don€™t talk about the sun at all. And of course, if they put the sun into their formula in their computer models, it swamps out the human portion of CO2, so they can€™t possibly do that.

Q: Is the rising CO2 level the cause of global warming or the result of it?

A: That€™s a very good question because in the theory the claim is that if CO2 goes up, temperature will go up. The ice core record of the last 420,000 years shows exactly the opposite. It shows that the temperature changes before the CO2. So the fundamental assumption of the theory is wrong. That means the theory is wrong. ... But the theory that human CO2 would lead to runaway global warming became a fact right away, and scientists like myself who dared to question it were immediately accused of being paid by the oil companies or didn€™t care about the children or the future or anything else.

Q: Have you ever accepted money from an oil company?

A: No. No. I wish I did get some. I wouldn€™t have to drive a €™92 car and live in a leaky apartment bloc.

Q: Why are sea levels rising and should we worry?

A: Sea levels have been rising for the last 10,000 years. In fact, 8,000 years ago, sea level was almost 500 feet lower than it is today. It€™s been rising gradually over that time. It€™s risen very slightly in the modern record, but it has risen no more rapidly than it has in the last 8,000 years. One of the factors that people forget is that most of the ice is already in the ocean, and so if you understand Archimedes€™ Principle, when that ice melts it simply replaces the space that the ice occupied -- even if the ice caps melt completely. What they do is they say if we estimate the volume of water in Antarctica and Greenland, then we add that to the existing ocean level. But that's not the way it works at all. But it does work for panic and for sea-level rises of 20 feet, like Gore claims.

Q: Why are the sea levels rising, just because we are in a warming period?

A: Yes. We are in an inter-glacial. Just 22,000 years ago, which is what some people can get their minds around, Canada and parts of the northern U.S. were covered with an ice sheet larger than the current Antarctic ice sheet. That ice sheet was over a mile thick in central Canada. All of that ice melted in 5,000 years. There was another ice sheet over Europe and a couple more in Asia. As that ice has melted, it€™s run back into the oceans and of course that€™s what€™s filled up the oceans. But if you drilled down in Antarctica, you go down almost 8,000 feet below sea level. That ice below sea level, if it melts, is not going to raise sea level. The other thing, just to get a little technical, is that sea level variation is called €œeustasy,€ and it can vary for a whole variety of reasons. It can vary simply because of the water being a little warmer by thermal expansion. The problem with that is, we really don€™t know what sea level is. Sea level is not level. That means if you go through the Panama Canal, you are at different sea levels on the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. There are areas off the coast of eastern North America where sea level is 100 feet higher than the surrounding sea, simply because of different gravitational pulls within the Earth.

Q: So there is no global sea level?

A: Exactly. Then you add to that that the crust of the Earth also moves up and down. For example, if you fly into Hudson Bay, as you fly in you cross about 150 beach lines because Hudson Bay is rising. If you looked at that and stood on the shore at Churchill on the Hudson Bay, you€™d say, €œOh, the sea level is dropping.€ No it isn€™t. It€™s because the land is rising. That€™s called €œisostasy€ and that, by the way, is what€™s going on in the Gulf of Mexico. People are saying, €œThe ocean is coming in and we€™re seeing the evidence of sea level rising.€ What you€™re seeing is the evidence of land sinking.

Q: If someone asked you where he should go to get a good antidote on the mainstream media€™s spin on global warming, where should he go?

A: There are three Web sites I have some respect for. One is the one I helped set up by a group of very frustrated professional scientists who are retired. That€™s called Friendsofscience.org. It has deliberately tried to focus on the science only. The second site that I think provides the science side of it very, very well is CO2Science.org, and that€™s run by Sherwood Idso, who is the world expert on the relationship between plant growth and CO2. The third, which is a little more irreverent and maybe still slightly on the technical side for the general public, is JunkScience.com.

[Guest]

Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe
"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists
By Tom Harris
Monday, June 12, 2006

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?

No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.

Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."

This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.

So we have a smaller fraction.

But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."

We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.

Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:

Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"

Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.

Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier," says Winterhalter. "In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form."

Dr. Wibj€“rn KarlÈn, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."

But KarlÈn clarifies that the 'mass balance' of Antarctica is positive - more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the 'calving' of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans. When Greenland and Antarctica are assessed together, "their mass balance is considered to possibly increase the sea level by 0.03 mm/year - not much of an effect," KarlÈn concludes.

The Antarctica has survived warm and cold events over millions of years. A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future.

Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."

KarlÈn explains that a paper published in 2003 by University of Alaska professor Igor Polyakov shows that, the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise. "For several published records it is a decrease for the last 50 years," says KarlÈn

Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down. The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. A sharp drop of 30% occurred again 1996-1998 and since then there has been a steady increase to reach near normal conditions since 2001."

Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."

Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records," he says. "The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual."

Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

In April sixty of the world's leading experts in the field asked Prime Minister Harper to order a thorough public review of the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Canada. Considering what's at stake - either the end of civilization, if you believe Gore, or a waste of billions of dollars, if you believe his opponents - it seems like a reasonable request.

[katoeylover]

Grunyen

Research well done.

Just proves what i said earlier, there are differing views on all sides, and separating the wheat from the chaff is a difficult task. The facts are that climate change is taking place, whatever the reasons are, but it is not just down tio us, and has been happening since the world begun.

[Road Runner]

Hello Grunyen,

Thankyou for a well researched response to what has been written before.

Despite what Sangabriel seems to think I am not totally convinced about global warming.  I have noticed that over the time I have been collecting data for the UK Met Office that the sea temperatures around the UK and in the approaches from the North Atlantic have been apparently increasing.  This could just be from normal fluctuations in the Gulf Stream  -  it does have many factors affecting it.

Also you get to notice what is happening to the wildlife. It's quite worrying to look back and see how much has changed over 30 years.
It used to be that as you approached the coast of the USA that you would see more sea gulls.  Now you see no sea gulls but lots of garbage.

RR.

[stogie bear]

You seem to have a low opinion of a large part of the scientific comunity...

He's not the only one! These halfwitted buffoons know as much about climate change as me.

It's guess work and poorly paid guess work at that. Scientists make shit money and will pretty much sign anything that they think is right rather thatn what they know to be incontravertable evidence.

Also - sangabrial is spot on about China (and other countries) who will sign pretty much anything you put in front of them if it means they won't have to change a damn thing in the future.

The sooner you understand that climate change is a political issue and NOT a geographical one then you'll start to become more skeptical about this corrupted guesswork that the so called 'scientific community' is passing off as 'evidence and accurate conjecture!'

A coal fired powerstation every ten days? If it IS true who cares? Sheffield 60 years ago was a mess, but where were these greenies then? Oh yes... there wasn't any political future in it then...

[stogie bear]

Here's what I think. CO2 emissions don't mean shit. Let's get away from this myth.

The earth may be getting warmer and if it is, it's because the protective layer of oil that protects us from the heat of the earths crust is being syphoned off for human use.

I now consider myself an expert in this field of guesswork and I expect to be called 'professor Stogie' from now on!

[Guest]

(stogie bear @ Feb. 18 2007,09:28) I now consider myself an expert in this field of guesswork and I expect to be called 'professor Stogie' from now on!  

Professor Stogie, we'd like you to put your name to this Report.

The cheque's in the mail

[Tomcat]

i think some are missing the point,. the world is industrialising fast. The current rate of Industrial expansion of China, Brazil, India and Russia is moving the goalposts....

technology is moving fast and more is known about the Sun now than 5 years ago. there are plenty of instruments in space measuring the phenomena and so the readings and models are more and more accurate each year. tehnology doesnt stand still..

For every case that Grunyen may state there are plenty more that go the otherway, thats what the IPCC report is about........these were studies published on the 15th feb 2007 ....

Nepals Khumbu Glacier has receded by three miles since 1953

In the Andes all of Perus glaciers below 18,000 ft will be gone by 2015

In the Alps, Switzerlands glaciers shrank by one per cent in area in the 12 years to 1985 but by 18 per cent from 85-2000

. As Sangabriel states ; the report does say that its a 90% chance that Humans are to blame.....well thats pretty high isnt it?. anyone would think that the report is trying to commit genocide . It seems to be a wake up all to me...

[Tomcat]

(sangabriel @ Feb. 18 2007,02:37) how did I allow myself to get drawn into a debate about global warming with a bunch of belligerent fucks on the a bulletin board about transsexuals?

well, like your cartoon states, there are no winners on internet debates, that is a certainty.

[katoeylover]

(Tomcat @ Feb. 18 2007,21:36) i think some are missing the point,. the world is industrialising fast. The current rate of Industrial expansion of China, Brazil, India and Russia is moving the goalposts....

But industrial production is declining in the west, such as UK and Europe. Same amount being done, just in different places.

[Tomcat]

(grunyen @ Feb. 18 2007,04:48) More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

I agree with you Grunyen, thats roughly how it works. Old models crumble and better models come through.

One can never arrive at the truth although im sure its out there somewhere..... just the best explanations at the time. I just happen to agree with one explanation at this moment and you another ...