Saturday, December 19, 2009

An open letter to Damini Purkayastha

An open letter to Damini Purkayastha, who has an utterly clueless article, CITY CRIBS - A GLOBAL WARNING, in the city supplement of the Hindustan Times today.Normally I would not be moved to react, but her photo is cho chweet that I could not help myself but respond.
DAMINI PURKAYASTHA
Cannot find the article online but here is it-


My letter-

Dear Ms. Purkayastha

I was going to write a long rebuttal but what the heck! there are so many things to do and so little time. So, in brief -

1) WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE-
so the warmth you perceive outside your window proves nothing, nada, zilch about global temperatures.If it did, then from the following you would have to conclude that the world is cooling-

In a strange twist, a Washington snowstorm is forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, to make an early departure from a global warming summit here in Denmark.


Due to weather complications #Obama leaves #Copenhagen before #cop15 concludes. Oh - the irony

and he (Obama)landed in washington He had raced back to Washington to avoid the worst of a winter storm barreling through the northeastern United States that threatened to dump up to two feet (61 centimeters) of snow on the last weekend of the Christmas holiday shopping season.


All of which, as I said, says nothing about Global temperatures -because WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE


2) DISEASES AND CLIMATE CHANGE-
This article by Paul Reiter, a professor of medical entomology might be instructive-The inconvenient truth about malaria. Summary - environmentalists claim malaria is moving higher up in latitude where it had not been present before due to global warming. Conclusion -wrong!



As Prof.Reiter says-

The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.


These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them.


3) AH, THOSE HIMALAYAN GLACIERS, the poster boy of global warming, like Kilimanjaro earlier.

Kilimanjaro snow melting due to GW, as claimed by Al Gore,refuted here(Kilimanjaro's shrinking snow not sign of warming -reuters), but does it matter? Environmentalists and their sleeping partners(ideologically speaking) journalists keep parroting the same lies anyway.



Let me not delve into V.K. Raina's inconvenient study of these glaciers that caused Pachauri to have a fit.
A recent Nasa study-

New Study Turns Up the Heat on Soot's Role in Himalayan Warming





A new modeling study from NASA confirms that when tiny air pollution particles we commonly call soot – also known as black carbon – travel along wind currents from densely populated south Asian cities and accumulate over a climate hotspot called the Tibetan Plateau, the result may be anything but inconsequential.

----------------------------
"Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally," said William Lau, head of atmospheric sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Based on the differences it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in this region. There’s a localized phenomenon at play."

Conclusion -climate science is complex.Very complex. What is not known far,far outstrips what is, though Pachauri and Al Gore(both famous climate scientists, I'm sure) may disagree




4) YOUR FILM RECOMMEDATIONS-

 What to say.

35 Inconvenient Truths -The errors in Al Gore’s movie



A judge in Britain's High Court has ruled that Gore's apocalyptic movie on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, should come with a warning that it promotes "partisan political views" and is riddled with errors.

Wish you would inform your readers about it.


For balance (journalists are supposed to maintain balance,right?)you might recommend -

The Great Global Warming Swindle

and Not Evil Just Wrong




No, Damini, my head is not in the sand or in the media bubble in which everything is the fault of America, West, Bush, neo-conservatives and where Obama, Gore, U.N. and Pachauri are gods.But last time I was in the sand I did glimpse a pretty face looking very anxious about the weather outside of it.

Cheers and regards,
gurmeet





Update-
             corrected a couple of spellings

3 comments:

nitin said...

You put an ice-cube in an oven, it'll melt. Thats the deal behind calling it global warming. Carbon traps heat, heat melts ice. This shifts pressure belts and most importantly convection beds in the ocean floor; in the long run. A subsequent freeze is predicted. But the time line is very long. What we in our lifetime can prevent is the trigger mechanism which is - the warming process we are aiding. Science is simple, and pedictions don't vary. By which I mean no two schools of thoughts contradict the very phenomena in sequence, but its ramifications and the pocess spans. A time line to these events cannot be ascertained accurately, since the earth is a little more complicated than an oven and an ice cube. But, to reach a conclusion statistics are a telling tale. Tempeatures have been changing, ie the weather has been changing. If you recollect 15 years back, October was cold, and now it isn't. Climate might be a broader term, but weather is definitely a subset, and in a transitory period between two stable climatic conditions, alluding to the changing weather as 'climate' is just a matter of semantics. The bottom line is, we are facing change which is not welcome, and something needs to be done about it.
Its good to see you have a point of view, and beg to differ, and I donot intend to change your point it. That said, you could advertise it in a manner less libellous, and attention seeking, for your own little sake.

I am a reader of HT as well, and boss, thaand rakh.





Original comment date- 2009-12-2. See here- http://libertynewscentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/drudgery-of-importing-haloscan-comments.html

nitin said...

You put an ice-cube in an oven, it'll melt. Thats the deal behind calling it global warming. Carbon traps heat, heat melts ice. This shifts pressure belts and most importantly convection beds in the ocean floor; in the long run. A subsequent freeze is predicted. But the time line is very long. What we in our lifetime can prevent is the trigger mechanism which is - the warming process we are aiding. Science is simple, and pedictions don't vary. By which I mean no two schools of thoughts contradict the very phenomena in sequence, but its ramifications and the pocess spans. A time line to these events cannot be ascertained accurately, since the earth is a little more complicated than an oven and an ice cube. But, to reach a conclusion statistics are a telling tale. Tempeatures have been changing, ie the weather has been changing. If you recollect 15 years back, October was cold, and now it isn't. Climate might be a broader term, but weather is definitely a subset, and in a transitory period between two stable climatic conditions, alluding to the changing weather as 'climate' is just a matter of semantics. The bottom line is, we are facing change which is not welcome, and something needs to be done about it.
Its good to see you have a point of view, and beg to differ, and I donot intend to change your point it. That said, you could advertise it in a manner less libellous, and attention seeking, for your own little sake.

I am a reader of HT as well, and boss, thaand rakh.





Original comment date- 2009-12-20. See here- http://libertynewscentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/drudgery-of-importing-haloscan-comments.html

libertynewscentral said...

Hi, Nitin, I love the xyz.com stuff.I do it myself sometimes.

Let me just quote from the skeptic's handbook by Jo Nova (link-http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/)-

"The carbon that's already up in the atmosphere absorbs most of the light it can. CO2 only soaks up its favorite wavelengths of light and its close to its saturation point. It manages to grab a bit more light from wavelengths that are close to its favorite bands but it can't do much more, because there are not many left-over photons at the right wavelengths.

The natural greenhouse effect is real,and it does keep us warm, but its already reached its peak performance.

Throw more carbon up there and most of the extra gas is just unemployed molecules.

AGW says: The climate models are well aware of the logarithmic absorption curve and use it already.

Skeptics say: The models make brutal estimates and many assumptions (guesses).
Lab-warming doesn't necessarily translate to a planet-warming: test tubes don't have ocean currents, clouds,
or rain. The 'clouds and humidity'? factor is bogglingly complex. For example, high clouds tend to warm the planet but at the same time, low clouds tend to cool it. So which effect rules? Models don't know but they assume clouds are net-warming. This is not a minor point, the feedback from clouds and humidity accounts for more than half of carbon's alleged ˜effect. Ea'Gad.


AGW says: It's not 100% saturated.

Skeptics say: True, but meaningless. Log curves never get to 100. (So even the air on Venus,which is almost pure CO2, does not absorb 100% of the infra red light). Every CO2 molecule will increase warming by a small amount ad infnitum,but it has less effect than the CO2 that's already up there. And the effect is already so small, it's unmeasurable."

But as they say, do read the whole thing.


As I said, climate science is much, much more complex than those who believe in dangerous AGW admit.

By the way check out the latest satellite temperatures here-
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/12/uah-msu-temperatures-for-2009-and.html

This is curious -who am I libeling? A case of thin skin?But whose?

Lastly, do you see me as being more sensationalist than all those screaming headlines and activists which shout that the world is going to end soon? Really?

I suspect, Nitin, you are not used to opinions outside your bubble.Hope I am wrong.





Original comment date- 2009-12-20. See here- http://libertynewscentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/drudgery-of-importing-haloscan-comments.html