Here at City Hall in HK. Ian Plimer, the climate change skeptic is speaking. About 100 local HK people, just two "foreigners", like myself.
He's talking about sea levels. Rises are good for coral, he says.
Talking now of the Great Barrier Reef. 4000 years ago sea levels were 2 m higher. So sea levels have gone down.
10:50 HKT: now he's saying that temps are changed by big factors, such as distance from the sun, not Co2.
He's also saying that CO2 changes are after warming, not before warming (I've seen this claim before, and also its refutation)*.
Now: if there were another ice age would be much worse than warming.
Best times for humans are in warm periods.
Says we are in a period of cooling! [think this has been debunked: see Deltoid]
CO2 is "not the villain it's meant to be"!
And now Prof Wyss Yim, in Cantonese...
Prof Yim's presentation focusses on volcanos. Perhaps there's going to be link to Plimer's claim that volcanos produce more CO2 than humans. (US Geology Service says humans produce 100 times more)
HK was 2-3 C warmer 130,000 years ago than now.
UHI is important in Nathan Rd station. Temp rise in HK would be about 25% less without it. temp changes at Waglan Station nothing.
If you google him, the first page is almost all debunking of his ideas. The best two are on Australia's ABC TV, where he is pummeled by George Monbiot and a dismantling of his book "Heaven and Earth" by Tim Lambert at Deltoid. See also "Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming", which includes discussion of the issue of CO2 absorption.
To be fair to professor Plimer, he did not deny the role of CO2 in global warming, just that it was not the whole story and "not a pollutant", that it's good for plant growth, etc, and that we'd be better off concentrating on other issues facing humanity, eg hunger in Africa. There's no doubt something in that. Also, to give him his due, he did say that more individual frugality, less rampant consumerism, would be a good thing.
Professor Yim's presentation concentrated on Volcanos, their impact on cooling; the Urban Heat Island effect, and pointing out that in the past the earth warmed 800 years before CO2 increased, not after.
[*]These points are covered in Deltoid's Global Warming Sceptic Bingo.
On UHI, there's more to it than what's dismissed by Deltoid: see Hong Kong's UHI, which agrees with Prof Yim, that about 70% of the observed warming in Hong Kong since the late 19th Century is due to UHI.
Postscript: above "Liveblogging" was just a practice of using my Twitter account (@fusaisee) with tag #climate to notify twitterati that I was doing it, and see how easy it would be to blog in real time. I couldn't use my laptop, since there was no wi-fi, so had to use the iPad, which is slower to type on. But it works.
He's talking about sea levels. Rises are good for coral, he says.
Talking now of the Great Barrier Reef. 4000 years ago sea levels were 2 m higher. So sea levels have gone down.
10:50 HKT: now he's saying that temps are changed by big factors, such as distance from the sun, not Co2.
He's also saying that CO2 changes are after warming, not before warming (I've seen this claim before, and also its refutation)*.
Now: if there were another ice age would be much worse than warming.
Best times for humans are in warm periods.
Says we are in a period of cooling! [think this has been debunked: see Deltoid]
CO2 is "not the villain it's meant to be"!
And now Prof Wyss Yim, in Cantonese...
Prof Yim's presentation focusses on volcanos. Perhaps there's going to be link to Plimer's claim that volcanos produce more CO2 than humans. (US Geology Service says humans produce 100 times more)
HK was 2-3 C warmer 130,000 years ago than now.
UHI is important in Nathan Rd station. Temp rise in HK would be about 25% less without it. temp changes at Waglan Station nothing.
********
Later: Prof Plimer's presentation seemed to be along lines familiar for him, as far as I've read them in online articles. If you google him, the first page is almost all debunking of his ideas. The best two are on Australia's ABC TV, where he is pummeled by George Monbiot and a dismantling of his book "Heaven and Earth" by Tim Lambert at Deltoid. See also "Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming", which includes discussion of the issue of CO2 absorption.
To be fair to professor Plimer, he did not deny the role of CO2 in global warming, just that it was not the whole story and "not a pollutant", that it's good for plant growth, etc, and that we'd be better off concentrating on other issues facing humanity, eg hunger in Africa. There's no doubt something in that. Also, to give him his due, he did say that more individual frugality, less rampant consumerism, would be a good thing.
Professor Yim's presentation concentrated on Volcanos, their impact on cooling; the Urban Heat Island effect, and pointing out that in the past the earth warmed 800 years before CO2 increased, not after.
[*]These points are covered in Deltoid's Global Warming Sceptic Bingo.
On UHI, there's more to it than what's dismissed by Deltoid: see Hong Kong's UHI, which agrees with Prof Yim, that about 70% of the observed warming in Hong Kong since the late 19th Century is due to UHI.
Postscript: above "Liveblogging" was just a practice of using my Twitter account (@fusaisee) with tag #climate to notify twitterati that I was doing it, and see how easy it would be to blog in real time. I couldn't use my laptop, since there was no wi-fi, so had to use the iPad, which is slower to type on. But it works.
