Why Secretary of State John Kerry Is Flat Wrong on Climate Change

[MattCW]

Originally Posted by Mircea

Um, that is not true.

Columbus was tried by the Inquisition. He was permitted to conduct his voyage as part of his attempt to prove his innocence.

Regardless, he did believe it was round. He was off in his measurements of how big it was, but even one of the Monarchs he requested aid from believed the Earth was round. Regardless, I'm not sure what your true point here is.

The radius of the Earth was not accurately measured 2,000 years ago.

Yes it was, by Eratosthenes. He was a bit off, but it was very close considering the primitive nature of the observations.

The Earth is a spheroid, not a sphere, and so the radius of the Earth varies at each point along the Equator where longitudinal lines cross, and also varies at each point along any given meridian north or south of the Equator where longitudinal lines cross.

And then the meridional lines all vary in length....which is why the a meter was redefined as so many wave-lengths of the orange-red radiation in Krypton, before being redefined as the distance light travels in a vacuum over a period of time.

Now you're trying to hide in the details. Yes, it's an oblate spheroid, but that doesn't throw the calculations off by much.

In fact that Earth wasn't accurately measured until the 1980s when the space shuttles engage in a series of surface mapping missions, complemented by a series of ground-penetrating radar missions in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Those missions were primarily military in nature to gather data for the BGM-109G -- you know, the Ground-Launched Cruise Missile, and also the air-launched and sea-launched variants.

So what? All that did is refine the calculations to a few more decimal places. That's like arguing the Earth's temperature has dropped 0.13 degrees vs. 0.1268 degrees. Has no bearing on the overall argument here.

Uh, well, you know, you are in the midst of an Inter-Glacial Period.

Yes, which works to make my point...

Please elaborate in detail what global temperatures should be doing during an Inter-Glacial Period.

Fluctuate, warm up after one glacial period, then cool down before the next. All I said was that temperature shouldn't only increase, it varies...which is exactly what you're saying.

Common sense says you should first find out what drives the pre-Glacial Period to a Glacial Period to a post-Glacial Period to an Inter-Glacial Period and then back to a pre-Glacial Period.

Sure maybe it's nice to find what drives it, but regardless of of what drives it, the data says that we're now cooling down. That's all I'm saying.