From about 1978 to 2006, I was a true believer.
Skipping the first few decades … Colorado went through a terrible drought during 2002-2003, and then 2006 started out hot. January was more like April, and July was more like Arizona. I was convinced that we had ruined the atmosphere.
But then came September, and the weather turned cold and wet. December was the biggest snowstorm in the history of Fort Collins, and the rest of the winter was bitter cold. With the arrival of the cold, I realized that all the trapped heat crap I had been hearing for 30 years was probably nonsense. Greenhouses don’t stay below zero F for weeks on end.
For the next few years I studied, and I watched the hockey team convert from confused to criminal. Over the last 24 months, global warming has gone from an interesting theory – to the biggest scientific scam in history. Almost all of their projections have failed miserably, so they have reverted to massive data tampering, denial, and outright fabrications.
A man should know when he is defeated.
My “conversion” came when I watched The Great Global Warming Swindle. Being an old school sceptic I didn’t believe a word of it. But I was impressed on how convincing the documentary was. So I started looking around for rebuttals, and then I became *very* surprised on exactly how weak the rebuttals were. Something interesting was going on here…
(Having said that, the Swindle has its own technical flaws, but nonetheless it is still worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet.)
My conversion came after I realized what a dope I had been for trusting government and university studies, while writing a paper on Desertification in the mid 1980’s. I should have known better as I had studied geology for years before I had my first climatology class.
A few years later when I heard the term ‘Global Warming’, in regards to CO2, my exact response was ‘BS’.
Will, how did I miss your comment earlier? My conversion also came when I watched The Great Global Warming Swindle!
There’s a reason why the warmists tried to move heaven and hell to suppress the showing of The Swindle in the UK. I think it was the airing of The Swindle that marked the start of the warmist decline. Yes, large parts of the show were not perfect, but, as I say in my comment below, it was just the ~ 3 minutes on CO2 with Al Gore the caused me to flip.
Also, if you ever want to know the URL to link to the key CO2 part from The Swindle, I’m using that youtube as my website, so just click my name if any of my comments are in view.
Hi Gator! Yes, the best 2 letters to describe global warming is BS. It looks like, while a lot of us were duped in the early days, you were ahead of the curve.
A Mann’s got to know his limitations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VrFV5r8cs0
Well Steven I’m glad you made it over from the dark side , you have thrown off the effects of listening to the proctocraniologists and come into the light. Hey I even wave at bicyclists now so see anyone can change. Hahahahahaha , I don’t hold out a lot of hope for the warmistas though because I don’t think they are smart enough to figure out the truth. About the only thing we can do with them is relegate them to irrelavent.
Here is the video — the three and half minutes of video — that converted me into a skeptic (disbeliever actually). In ~ June of 2007, by a chance click of a link, I watched the hour long Great Global Warming Swindle. But it was just the short “Al Gore segment” on CO2 that really really got my attention. I watched in astonishment as I realized, then and there, if this was true, that I had been had by the warmists. After I had done extensive googling looking for an effective rebuttal from the warmists, and found none, I was an anti-warmist. Realize that what this video shows is algor repeating the ipcc’s deception on CO2. This is a deception that pretty much still holds with the public at large, that’s why it’s important to try to share and promote this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg&feature=player_embedded
Till 2009 I was a climate-agnostic. Because we have suffered in The Netherlands for centuries from religious debates, the Dutch have become quite relaxed on metaphysical issues. So the preachings of Al Gore had not much influence on my position. In the course of years I had developed a peculiar relationship with the science-boy of my newspaper. Each time he wrote as chief science editor some devastating book review, I went to the bookshop, bought that book, and had a hell of a time reading it. He had become my most reliable guide on scientific issues, except for my own field of experience. Early 2009 he wrote a truly hysterical piece about a settled climate science, human-caused warming being turned over in a hard fact, and that from now on dissident opinions should not be published any more in his (left-wing) newspaper. It was this call for censorship in our tolerant society that gave me the motivation. I guessed that the negation of all he wrote might be close to the truth and began to read hundreds of articles on the internet. Barely finished with that I saw climate-gate breaking out on the internet and on my TV a bunch of fools taking the train from Amsterdam to Copenhagen. Since that time I’m pretty convinced that climatology is a pseudo-science and part of a swindle with far-reaching consequences.
I was pretty much neutral till a friend told me about Chicago Climate Exchange and how Al Gore was involved with Carbon trading. That’s when I started digging into for more information. I was never too fond of Federal Gov’t regardless of which party anyway.
I consider myself to be a simulation expert (15+ years of supporting 100’s of simulation users), and had my questions regarding the fixing of the Climate Sensitivity value used in GCM’s, and then about 12 years ago I read an editorial in Car and Driver pointing out that human CO2 was ~4% of the Carbon cycle. That led to a lot of reading, chart drawing, equation solving and finally downloading all of the weather station daily data (Global summary of Days) from NCDC.
Climate change was, for me, in the “Must read about this one day” folder. One day, I had time to read about it. In 30 minutes I found out that 99% of it was about computer models, projections, not actual measurements. And that was that — it was all mind stuff, a digital-statistical trip. Yet, it could be the wrong method yelding the right result — it happens. With time I was certain that almost none (I’m being nice here) of the CAGW forecasts were verified in the real world.
By any criterion in science, the conjecture should have been thrown in the wastepaper bin. It wasn’t. Then I found out the trillions it moves. Etc etc etc.
Hm. Fantasy and simulation more real than reality. Simulacra and simulation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation). Matrix, anyone? 😉
“Greenhouses don’t stay below zero F for weeks on end.”
They do when they are broken. 😉
In `1964 or 19655 I read analysis by R W Wood (published in Phil Mag, 1914) on why a “greenhouse atmosphere” is meaningless, no one refuted Woods, and Woods’ study simply meant Arrhenius, Glass, Calender, etc made mistaken assumptions, and I thought, no one in their right mind would continue to support the logic behind AGW
I am an optimist, and believe that nobody with a science background really believes AGW, but they are too sheepish for one reason or another to admit it
The first time I heard the words, ‘global warming’ was in the early to mid 90’s. My first reaction was: “It’s part of a natural cycle”. In 2008, I decided to find the truth. I was right the first time.
Ironic that Steve routinely discusses Hansen since his 1988 congressional testimony on TV was the first I heard of “global warming” presented as future doom. I figured it must be true coming from scientists at NASA. So I watched for greenhouse the next 15 years, then stumbled across Steve McIntyre’s first weblog (forget the name now) and wondered why he was so interested in getting data from “real scientists” and questioning their expertise.
It snowballed from there.
1988 was a drought year in Michigan, so Hansen picked the right time to scare the public. I remember well the jump in hay prices.