NOAA: Carbon Dioxide Rises to Record Level
... The reading was up 2.6 parts per million, according to preliminary calculations, David J. Hofmann of the Office of Atmospheric Research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday. ...
...Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas. Those are chemicals that have been increasing in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, raising fears of altering the planet's climate by trapping heat from the sun. ...
Yes, it's been the warmest Canadian winter on record
...This winter's preliminary figures show temperatures averaging 3.9 C above normal. That makes it not just the warmest winter but the most overheated season – winter, spring, summer or fall – on record. The weather has been even more unseasonable in some places than in others.
- FROM JAN. 24, 2006: NASA calls 2005 the warmest year in a century
Winter temperatures have been above normal across Canada, the report says, with most of the country at least 2 C above normal and with Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories all experiencing temperatures greater than 6 C above normal. ...
1 comment:
Global Warming – Man Made or Nature’s Cycle R8.
The debate: Is the observed global warming natural or man made?
Global Warming or natural climatic rhythm?
Global Warming Man made or natural cycle?
Compiled by Yehuda Draiman, Energy Analyst
An extensive look at Global Warming – Cause and effect.
The dominant greenhouse gas is WATER, not carbon dioxide. It is responsible for up to 95% of the so-called "greenhouse effect". Carbon dioxide is only a minor player, and Man's activities put only about 3% as much CO2 into the atmosphere yearly as does Nature. How does the atmosphere distinguish between them? Its concentration is believed to have increased from 0.00028 of the atmosphere to 0.00038 over the past couple of hundred years.
There are numerous pros and cons as to the cause of Global Warming.
After some study and research I share with you the various opinions.
This consensus in this on-line article represents the views of some researchers and forecasters, but does not necessarily represent the views of all scientists. It was not the intention of this article to discount the presence of a human-induced global warming element or to attempt to claim that such an element is not present. There is a robust, on-going discussion on climate change within the scientific community.
It takes a certain kind of gumption to stand up to the status quo.
Folks who challenge the mainstream media and popular culture are subjected to some of the nastiest insults and character assassinations. And such retribution is nowhere more severe than for those who take issue with popular views about global warming.
There are a number of very bright climatologists and meteorologists out there who believe that this century’s warming trend is neither critical nor man made. Now you can agree or disagree with these folks. But you can’t pretend that these folks are crazies or ill informed or just in it for the money. They believe that the models used by the “We’re all going to die!” global warming worriers are far too severe and fail to take enough natural factors into consideration in their climate models. For their audacity to take on the status quo, they have been censured, excoriated and labeled as lackeys for the oil companies.
One degree. On a thermometer, it doesn't seem like much at all. But that degree has sparked intense debate among experts who monitor the temperature on Earth.
In a new report issued by a leading group of scientists and meteorologists, research shows the planet has warmed one degree during the last 100 years. That report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserts that Earth will continue to warm between 2 and 10 degrees during the next century.
Those researchers believe that global warming could be boosting the planet's temperature. Global warming is a phenomenon of temperatures rising on Earth. Scientists have said that some human activities cause gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide to build up in the atmosphere. Those gases trap heat closer to Earth's surface giving the planet a worldwide fever.
Many experts say two chemicals -- carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide -- are most responsible for global warming. Cars, trucks and factories around the world emit those chemicals everyday. Once in the atmosphere, those chemicals act as big reflectors, bouncing back sun rays to the Earth and warming the planet.
But there are scientists, climatologists and weather watchers who believe that the warming trend is not an aberrant threat, but part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling on Earth. "We just haven't been around long enough to know if it's a fact," said CNN weather anchor Orelon Sidney. "The Earth is more than 4 billion years old and humans haven't been around that long. So this could just be a part of cycle."
The scientists who believe the Earth is warming say years of research are needed to determine why.
Dr. Lonnie Thompson, a researcher at the Byrd Polar Research Center located at Ohio State University, is among those attempting to discover the causes of global warming. He spends many months away from his home in search of answers.
Thompson's latest trek to the Andes Mountains showed substantial changes in a glacier.
"The glacier we have been studying has been melting at an unbelievable rate," Thompson said. "Where there was once ice, there is now a lake." Thompson photographed the new lake and glacier to show "obvious changes in our world because of temperature increase," he said. Thompson said a warmer earth could lead to more erratic weather. "If energy in the system -- the heat on the Earth's climate system --increases, then you're going to have more water vapor. More water vapor feeds more storms -- larger hurricanes, maybe larger snowstorms too."
As a meteorology student at the University of Maryland, Antony Chen is among those who would watch for those weather changes. He is part of the next generation of researchers who will have to figure out what's behind the cause of the temperature bump.
Chen says we have to look at the big picture then determine what changes people should make on the local level. "We need to know what's going on in the atmosphere, the magnitude of changes we are making to our climate system," Chen said. "Then we can start coming up with solutions."
Professor Bruce Doddridge is one of Chen's professors and is encouraged by the caliber of young people he's seen entering the earth sciences. "I'm impressed with the variety of smart and intelligent people coming through that can do this work," he said.
Doddridge concedes that there are many potential causes of global warming, but said he believes the new technology could help assess and solve the problem. "The issues are becoming more complicated," Doddridge said, "but I think the tools we have to work with are becoming more sophisticated."
Many experts say two chemicals -- carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide -- are most responsible for global warming. Cars, trucks and factories around the world emit those chemicals everyday. Once in the atmosphere, those chemicals act as big reflectors, bouncing back sun rays to the Earth and warming the planet.
But there are scientists, climatologists and weather watchers who believe that the warming trend is not an aberrant threat, but part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling on Earth. "We just haven't been around long enough to know if it's a fact," said CNN weather anchor Orelon Sidney. "The Earth is more than 4 billion years old and humans haven't been around that long. So this could just be a part of cycle."
The scientists who believe the Earth is warming say years of research are needed to determine why.
Dr. Lonnie Thompson, a researcher at the Byrd Polar Research Center located at Ohio State University, is among those attempting to discover the causes of global warming. He spends many months away from his home in search of answers.
1. The authors of Unstoppable Global Warming - Every 1,500 Years, say that history, ice core studies and stalagmites all agree on a natural cycle at roughly that interval that is superimposed on the longer, stronger ice ages and interglacial phases.
They point as evidence of this natural cycle to the “Climate Optimum” - a period of warmer and wetter weather than the present Earth’s climate, which took place 9,000 years ago to 5,000 years ago, and a cooling event 2,600 years ago.
During the Roman warming period from 200 BC to around AD 600 North Africa and the Sahara were wetter and supported crops. In more recent times they point to the medieval warming of 900 to 1300, when Eric the Red’s descendant’s colonized Greenland and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1850 which saw the Norse dairy farmers on Greenland grow short from malnutrition and eventually die out.
Mr. Avery, a former US agriculture official whose celebrated earlier book was Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High Yield Farming suggests that the natural cycle of warming and cooling may come from variations in cosmic rays which have been linked to cloud formation.
This theory was validated in a recent paper in a Royal Society journal by scientists from the Danish National Space Centre who showed that sub-atomic particles - cosmic rays from exploding stars - play a major role in making clouds. During the past century cosmic rays became scarcer as vigorous activity by the sun forced them away. So there was less cloud cover to reflect away sunlight and a warmer world, according to the Danish scientists.
2. Policymakers have been arguing for nearly a decade over what to do about global warming. Noticeably missing from this debate has been any mention of the fact that natural fluctuations in the Earth’s temperature, not Man, are the likely explanation for any recent warming.
Proponents of the global warming theory repeatedly cite a 1.5° F temperature increase over the last 150 years as evidence that man-made CO2 is dangerously heating up the planet and will cause huge flooding, severe storms, disease and a mass exodus of environmental refugees. Based on this, the Clinton Administration and its environmental allies want Congress to ratify a treaty that will hike consumer prices 40 percent and cost the American economy $3.3 trillion over 20 years. But the apocalyptic predictions on which they justify these drastic steps are totally unsubstantiated and ignore some fundamental truths about the Earth's climatic behavior.
The fact is, the planet's temperature is constantly rising and falling. To put the current warming trend in perspective, it's important to understand the Earth's geological behavior.
Over the last 700,000 years, the climate has operated on a relatively predictable schedule of 100,000-year glaciations cycles. Each glaciations cycle is typically characterized by 90,000 years of cooling, an ice age, followed by an abrupt warming period, called an interglacial, which lasts 10,000-12,000 years. The last ice age reached its coolest point 18,000 to 20,000 years ago when the average temperature was 9-12.6° F cooler than present. Earth is currently in a warm interglacial called the Holocene that began 10,700 years ago.
Although precise temperature readings over the entire period of geologic history are not available, enough is known to establish climatic trends. During the Holocene, there have been about seven major warming and cooling trends, some lasting as long as 3000 years, others as short as 650. Most interesting of all, however, is that the temperature variation in many of these periods averaged as much as 1.8° F, .3° F more than the temperature increase of the last 150 years. Furthermore, of the six major temperature variations occurring prior to the current era, three produced temperatures warmer than the present average temperature of 59° F while three produced cooler temperatures.
For example, when the Holocene began as the Earth was coming out of the last Ice Age around 8700 B.C., the average global temperature was about 6° F cooler than it is today. By 7500 B.C., the climate had warmed to 60° F, 1° F warmer than the current average temperature. However, the temperature fell again by nearly 2° F over the next 1,000 years, settling at an average of 1° F cooler than the current climate.
Between 6500 and 3500 B.C., the temperature increased from 58° F to 62° F. This is the warmest the Earth has been during the Holocene, which is why scientists refer to the period as the Holocene Maximum. Since the temperature of the Holocene Maximum is close to what global warming models project for the Earth by 2100, how Mankind faired during the era is instructive. The most striking fact is that it was during this period that the Agricultural Revolution began in the Middle East, laying the foundation for civilization. Yet, Greenhouse theory proponents claim the planet will experience severe environmental distress if the climate is that warm again.
Since the Holocene Maximum, the planet has continued to experience temperature fluctuations. In 900 A.D. the planet's temperature roughly approximated today's temperature. Then, between 900 and 1100 the climate dramatically warmed. Known as the Medieval Warm Period, the temperature rose by more than 1° F to an average of 60° or 61° F, as much as 2° F warmer than today. Again, the temperature during this period is similar to Greenhouse predictions for 2100, a prospect global warming theory proponents insist should be viewed with alarm. But judging by how Europe prospered during this era, there is little to be alarmed about. The warming that occurred between 1000 and 1350 caused the ice in the North Atlantic to retreat and permitted Norsemen to colonize Iceland and Greenland. Back then, Greenland was actually green. Europe emerged from the Dark Ages in a period that was characterized by bountiful harvests and great economic prosperity. So mild was the climate that wine grapes were grown in England and Nova Scotia.
The major climate change that followed the Medieval Warm Period is especially critical as it bears directly on how to assess our current warming period. Between 1200 and 1450, the temperature plunged to 58° F. After briefly warming, the climate continued to dramatically get colder after 1500. By 1650, the temperature hit a low of 57° F. This is regarded as the coldest point in the 10,000-year Holocene geological epoch. That is why the era between 1650 and 1850 is known as the Little Ice Age. It was during this time that mountain glaciers advanced in Switzerland and Scandinavia, forcing the abandonment of farms and villages. Rivers in London, St. Petersburg and Moscow froze over so thoroughly that people held winter fairs on the ice. There were serious crop failures, famines and disease due to the cooler climate. In America, New England had no summer in 1816. It wasn't until 1860 that the temperature sufficiently warmed to cause the glaciers to retreat.
The significance of the Little Ice Age cannot be overestimated. The 1.5° F temperature increase over the last 150 years, so often cited as evidence of man-made warming, most likely represents a return to normal temperatures following a 400-year period of unusually cold weather. Even the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the chief proponent of the Kyoto Protocol global warming treaty signed in December 1997, concludes that: "The Little Ice Age came to an end only in the nineteenth century. Thus, some of the global warming since 1850 could be a recovery from the Little Ice Age rather than a direct result of human activities."
Leading climate scientist Dr. Hugh Ellsaesser of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory says we may be in for an additional 1.8° F of warming over the next few centuries, regardless of Man's activities. The result would be warmer nighttime and winter temperatures, fewer frosts and longer growing seasons. Since CO2 stimulates plant growth and lessens the need for water, we could also expect more bountiful harvests over the next couple of centuries. This is certainly not bad news to the developing nations of the world struggling to feed their populations.
Thus, far from being a self-induced disaster, global warming is the result of natural changes in the Earth's climate that promises to yield humanity positive benefits. In the geological scheme of things, the warming is not even that dramatic compared to the more pronounced warming trends that occurred during the Agricultural Revolution and the early Middle Ages. Moreover, there is strong evidence that this long-needed warming is moderating. All things considered, global warming should be viewed for what it is: A gift from the often fickle force of Nature. Enjoy it while you can.
3. Global warming is a natural geological process that could begin to reverse itself within 10 to 20 years, predicts an Ohio State University researcher.
The researcher suggests that atmospheric carbon dioxide -- often thought of as a key "greenhouse gas" -- is not the cause of global warming. The opposite is most likely to be true, according to Robert Essenhigh, E.G. Bailey Professor of Energy Conservation in Ohio State's Department of Mechanical Engineering. It is the rising global temperatures that are naturally increasing the levels of carbon dioxide, not the other way around, he says.
Essenhigh explains his position in a "viewpoint" article in the current issue of the journal Chemical Innovation, published by the American Chemical Society.
Many people blame global warming on carbon dioxide sent into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels in man-made devices such as automobiles and power plants. Essenhigh believes these people fail to account for the much greater amount of carbon dioxide that enters -- and leaves -- the atmosphere as part of the natural cycle of water exchange from, and back into, the sea and vegetation.
"Many scientists who have tried to mathematically determine the relationship between carbon dioxide and global temperature would appear to have vastly underestimated the significance of water in the atmosphere as a radiation-absorbing gas," Essenhigh argues. "If you ignore the water, you're going to get the wrong answer."
How could so many scientists miss out on this critical bit of information, as Essenhigh believes? He said a National Academy of Sciences report on carbon dioxide levels that was published in 1977 omitted information about water as a gas and identified it only as vapor, which means condensed water or cloud, which is at a much lower concentration in the atmosphere; and most subsequent investigations into this area evidently have built upon the pattern of that report.
For his hypothesis, Essenhigh examined data from various other sources, including measurements of ocean evaporation rates, man-made sources of carbon dioxide, and global temperature data for the last one million years.
He cites a 1995 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a panel formed by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme in 1988 to assess the risk of human-induced climate change. In the report, the IPCC wrote that some 90 billion tons of carbon as carbon dioxide annually circulate between the earth's ocean and the atmosphere, and another 60 billion tons exchange between the vegetation and the atmosphere.
Compared to man-made sources' emission of about 5 to 6 billion tons per year, the natural sources would then account for more than 95 percent of all atmospheric carbon dioxide, Essenhigh said.
"At 6 billion tons, humans are then responsible for a comparatively small amount - less than 5 percent - of atmospheric carbon dioxide," he said. "And if nature is the source of the rest of the carbon dioxide, then it is difficult to see that man-made carbon dioxide can be driving the rising temperatures. In fact, I don't believe it does."
4. Is human activity warming the Earth or do recent signs of climate change signal natural variations? In this feature article, scientists discuss the vexing ambiguities of our planet's complex and unwieldy climate
Newspaper headlines trumpet record-breaking temperatures, dwindling sea ice, and retreating glaciers around the world. Concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases responsible for scalding temperatures on Venus and at least 33 degrees C of normal warming here on Earth, are on the rise. Our planet seems destined for a hot future!
But is it really? Or are we simply experiencing a natural variation in Earth's climate cycles that will return to "normal" in time?
Correlations between rising CO2 levels and global surface temperatures suggest that our planet is on a one-way warming trend triggered by human activity. Indeed, studies by paleoclimatologists reveal that natural variability caused by changes in the Sun and volcanic eruptions can largely explain deviations in global temperature from 1000 AD until 1850 AD, near the beginning of the Industrial Era. After that, the best models require a human-induced greenhouse effect.
In spite of what may seem persuasive evidence, many scientists are nonetheless skeptical. They argue that natural variations in climate are considerable and not well understood. The Earth has gone through warming periods before without human influence, they note. And not all of the evidence supports global warming. Air temperatures in the lower atmosphere have not increased appreciably, according to satellite data, and the sea ice around Antarctica has actually been growing for the last 20 years.
It may surprise many people that science -- the de facto source of dependable knowledge about the natural world -- cannot deliver an unqualified, unanimous answer about something as important as climate change.
Why is the question so thorny? The reason, say experts, is that Earth's climate is complex and chaotic. It's so unwieldy that researchers simply can't conduct experiments to check their ideas in the usual way of science. They often rely, instead, on computer models. But such models are only as good as their inputs and programming, and today's computer models are known to be imperfect.
Most scientists agree that no single piece of data will likely resolve the global warming debate. In the end, the best we can expect is a scientific consensus based on a preponderance of evidence.
5. 30 Natural Global Warming Episodes Have Occurred During the Past 5,000 Years.
David Dilley of GWO has discovered a powerful natural forcing mechanism that controls global warming cycle, hurricane track landfalls, El Nino cycles and many other climate weather cycles.
David Dilley of Global Weather Oscillations Inc., Ocala Florida, has completed groundbreaking research on Global Warming. This research found that the current global warming episode is a "Natural Recurring Cycle", and that this current cycle will begin to diminish as early as 2015, and no later than 2040.
Mr. Dilley’s 15-years of ongoing climate research has uncovered a very powerful external forcing mechanism that causes shifts in regional weather cycles, and the world’s climate. This forcing mechanism is called “the Primary Forcing Trigger Mechanism”, or PFM. The PFM is a cyclical forcing mechanism that can be forecast years in advance, or even traced back through the earth’s climate history. The major influence of the PFM on the earth’s climate is that it causes the world’s dominating regional high-pressure systems to shift position, or become displaced from their normal seasonal position.
Because the PFM is cyclical, the earth’s weather and climate is likewise cyclical. As an example of an induced PFM climate cycle, the subtropical high-pressure system in the central South Pacific normally causes the ocean’s water temperature to stay relatively cool in this region. Dilley’s El Niño research (see link) explains that the PFM cycle induces a shift in the position of the high-pressure system where El Niños form. The resulting wind shift then triggers the formation of an El Niño by inducing a rapid warming of sea surface temperatures. Dilley says that research going back to 1915 showed 24 such PFM cycles and 24 El Niño occurrences. This research is currently under peer review and will go to a leading climate journal this summer.
Further research by Dilley and Global Weather Oscillations, indicates that this same PFM forcing mechanism displaces high-pressure centers in such a way to control the tracks of hurricanes from one year to the next. (See hurricane link) Knowing how and why this forcing mechanism controls weather cycles opened the door to the ground breaking global warming research.
Mr. Dilley states that the current global warming cycle is without a doubt the result of a known external “natural” forcing cycle. According to Dilley, most government officials, climatologists and meteorologists are looking only at the increase in temperatures and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels over the past 50 to 100 years. These correlations and findings are only representative during global warming episodes. When you take into account nearly 30 other global warming episodes over the past 5 thousand years, it becomes very apparent that CO2 levels cannot be the forcing mechanism that has caused global warming, but rather Long-term PFM climate forcing cycles. These cycles likely displace high-pressure systems and the polar jet stream northward during an approximate 200-year recurring PFM forcing cycle.
the years 1050 to 1205 AD. The peak warming of this cycle lasted 90 years from 1090 to 1180 AD, as delineated by the red box. The second global warming cycle was from 1285 to 1415 AD, with a 65-year peak from 1315 to 1380. The third global warming episode was from 1440 to 1590 with a 50-year peak from 1520 to 1570. The fourth was from 1700 to 1845 with a 45-year peak from 1740 to 1785. Finally, the current global warming episode began about 1910 and the peak about 1950, or about 57 years ago.
The graph and research indicates that each global warming cycle has duration of 130 to 160 years, and the peak of each cycle has duration of 50 to 90 years. Analyses of the 5 warming cycles and the history of PFM cycles, indicates that the current cycle is about the same duration as the one that occurred about 900-years ago. Therefore, the current global warming cycle will run from 1910 to 2060, with the duration of the peak warming occurring between 1950 and 2015. The peak warming will level off around 2015 and then begin diminishing rapidly by no later than the year 2030 to 2040. Once cooling begins it will only take 20 to 30 years to cool to the lowest part of the cooling cycle, temperatures much like what was recorded in the 1800s.
In addition to the 5 global warming cycles found during the past 1000-years, it should be noted here that a total of approximately 30 global warming cycles have occurred during the past 5000 years, with the warmest cycle occurring approximately every 1000-years, and the peak of the warmest cycle having a duration of 60 to 90 years. Referring to the 5000-year graph, the present long-term warming cycle can be seen on the right hand side of the graph, and 4 other long-term warm cycles date back 5000-years on the left side of the graph.
Analyses of the 5000-year graph indicates that long-term warming cycles have durations as short as 500-years as seen in the 2 cycles labeled A, to as long as 1000-years as seen in cycle C nearly 4500-years ago. Further analyses of cycle durations indicates that if the current long-term warming cycle which began in the year 1500 AD was of the same duration as cycle A, the peak of the current warming would of ended back in the year 1750, and it did not. In addition, if the current cycle was the same duration as cycle B, the peak warming of our current global warming cycle would have ended in the year 1900, and it did not. Now let’s take a look at cycle C. in the next paragraph..
Further research by Research by Global Weather Oscillations indicates that the PFM climate forcing cycle normally occurs in cycles of 5. Therefore looking back 5 warming cycles and 5 PFM cycles, we find cycle C that occurred 4,500 years ago and had a 1000 - year duration of the entire warm cycle. Using the mid-point of this cycle (500-years), the current long-term warming that began around the year 1500 AD will peak around the year 2000 AD, and end by 2500 AD.
Reconstructed Carbon Dioxide CO2 and Temperature Proxies Past 400,000 Years.
The graph below shows reconstructed Ice Core temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations over the Antartica from near present time back 400,000 years. Of particular importance is that this graph shows 5 Natural Cycles during the past 400,000 years and as temperatures rise the carbon dioxide concentrations also naturally rise, thus mirroring the cyclical temperatures. It is well known throughout the scientific community that warmer temperatures can hold more water vapor, and water vapor absorbs and holds carbon dioxide. Thus these 5 Natural Cycles during the past 400,000 years mirror the 200-year global warming cycles shown early. Therefore, it is likely that the peak of all 30 global warming cycles during the past 4,000 years likewise had carbon dioxide concentrations very similar to the values found today.
Thus, carbon dioxide levels are not the cause of global warming....all global warming cycles are "Natural".
Natural Global Warming Cycles …. Putting it all together
The current long-term 1000-year warming cycle began about the year 1500 AD and will continue to near 2500 AD. This current long-term cycle will consist of 5 cyclical short-term global warming and cooling episodes. The world is now in the third of the 5 short-term cycles, and the warmest of the 5. The first short-term global warming episode peaked between 1520 and 1570 AD, followed by a cooling period until the next global warming episode peaked between 1740 and 1785. Temperatures remained cool throughout the 1800s to early 1900s, and then the third short-term global warming episode began. The peak of this current global warming episode began in earnest around 1950 and will level off as early as 2015, and no later than 2030-40. Then within 20 years temperatures will cool rapidly to the same levels as seen in the 1800s. The global warming cycles are approximate 200-year cycles, so the next global warming cycle will peak about 150-years after the end of the current cycle, or about the year 2200. This will be the 4th of 5 cycles within the current 1000-year primary warm cycle, and it will not be as warm as the current episode.
Global warming research has found 5 natural global warming cycles during the past 1000-years, and approximately 30 global warming cycles during the past 5 thousand years.
Actions - While we argue a lot about details on how bad global warming is and how responsible mankind is for it, we did agree that individuals acting on their own to conserve energy or clean the environment is always preferred to a government mandated, centralized policy of coercion. In that respect, I was able to support his project of working with Corporate America and other companies to give consumers incentives to buy energy-saving light bulbs—a private sector initiative that he claims will save a lot of energy and produce less CO2.
Cleaner burning energy that takes some of the profit out of the pockets of our “friends” the Saudis wouldn’t be such a bad thing. It may not be much, but it’s a start and a way to bring two divergent sides of the global warming debate together.
Perhaps a non-coercive method of voluntary action on CO2 emissions will work. The one thing we’re learning from the example of Europe’s Kyoto experiment is that government coercion doesn’t work. Freedom of choice is not only right, it’s practical!
In conclusion - let the reader make up his own conclusions.
Data compiled by Yehuda Draiman, Energy Analyst – 12/16/2007
P.S.
Global Warming scientist skeptics list is growing...
6/23/2007
Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose the perceived alarmism of man-made global warming.
The media's climate fear factor seemingly grows louder even as the latest science grows less and less alarming by the day. It is also worth noting that the proponents of climate fears are increasingly attempting to suppress dissent by skeptics.
Once Believers, Now Skeptics
Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006.
...
Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta recently reversed his view of man-made climate change and instead became a global warming skeptic. Wiskel was once such a big believer in man-made global warming that he set out to build a “Kyoto house” in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997.
...
Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel's top young award winning scientists, recanted his belief that manmade emissions were driving climate change. ""Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye,” Shaviv said in February 2, 2007 Canadian National Post article.
...
Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the Australian Government, recently detailed his conversion to a skeptic. “I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause. I am now skeptical,” Evans wrote in an April 30, 2007 blog. “But after 2000 the evidence for carbon emissions gradually got weaker -- better temperature data for the last century, more detailed ice core data, then laboratory evidence that cosmic rays precipitate low clouds,” Evans wrote. “As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’” he added.
...
Climate researcher Dr. Tad Murty, former Senior Research Scientist for Fisheries and Oceans in Canada, also reversed himself from believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic. “I stated with a firm belief about global warming, until I started working on it myself,” Murty explained on August 17, 2006. “I switched to the other side in the early 1990's when Fisheries and Oceans Canada asked me to prepare a position paper and I started to look into the problem seriously,” Murty explained.
...
Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University and host of a popular UK TV series on wildlife, recently converted into a skeptic after reviewing the science and now calls global warming fears "poppycock." According to a May 15, 2005 article in the UK Sunday Times, Bellamy said “global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.” “The climate-change people have no proof for their claims. They have computer models which do not prove anything,” Bellamy added.
...
Climate scientist Dr. Chris de Freitas of The University of Auckland, N.Z., also converted from a believer in man-made global warming to a skeptic. “At first I accepted that increases in human caused additions of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere would trigger changes in water vapor etc. and lead to dangerous ‘global warming,’ But with time and with the results of research, I formed the view that, although it makes for a good story, it is unlikely that the man-made changes are drivers of significant climate variation.” de Freitas wrote on August 17, 2006.
...
Meteorologist Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, was pivotal in promoting the coming ice age scare of the 1970’s ( See Time Magazine’s 1974 article “Another Ice Age” citing Bryson: & see Newsweek’s 1975 article “The Cooling World” citing Bryson) has now converted into a leading global warming skeptic. In February 8, 2007 Bryson dismissed what he terms "sky is falling" man-made global warming fears. Bryson, was on the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?” Bryson told the May 2007 issue of Energy Cooperative News. “All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air,” Bryson said.
...
Global warming author and economist Hans H.J. Labohm started out as a man-made global warming believer but he later switched his view after conducting climate research. Labohm wrote on August 19, 2006, “I started as a anthropogenic global warming believer, then I read the [UN’s IPCC] Summary for Policymakers and the research of prominent skeptics.” “After that, I changed my mind,” Labohn explained. Labohn co-authored the 2004 book “Man-Made Global Warming: Unraveling a Dogma,” with chemical engineer Dick Thoenes who was the former chairman of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society. Labohm was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, “’Climate change is real’ is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause.
...
Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, of Carlton University in Ottawa converted from believer in C02 driving the climate change to a skeptic. “I taught my students that CO2 was the prime driver of climate change,” Patterson wrote on April 30, 2007. Patterson said his “conversion” happened following his research on “the nature of paleo-commercial fish populations in the NE Pacific.” “[My conversion from believer to climate skeptic] came about approximately 5-6 years ago when results began to come in from a major NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Strategic Project Grant where I was PI (principle investigator),” Patterson explained. “Over the course of about a year, I switched allegiances,” he wrote.
...
Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the Central Laboratory for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in Warsaw, took a scientific journey from a believer of man-made climate change in the form of global cooling in the 1970’s all the way to converting to a skeptic of current predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming. “At the beginning of the 1970s I believed in man-made climate cooling, and therefore I started a study on the effects of industrial pollution on the global atmosphere, using glaciers as a history book on this pollution,” Dr. Jaworowski, wrote on August 17, 2006. “With the advent of man-made warming political correctness in the beginning of 1980s, I already had a lot of experience with polar and high altitude ice, and I have serious problems in accepting the reliability of ice core CO2 studies,” Jaworowski added.
...
Paleoclimatologist Dr. Ian D. Clark, professor of the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Ottawa, reversed his views on man-made climate change after further examining the evidence. “I used to agree with these dramatic warnings of climate disaster. I taught my students that most of the increase in temperature of the past century was due to human contribution of C02. The association seemed so clear and simple. Increases of greenhouse gases were driving us towards a climate catastrophe,” Clark said in a 2005 documentary "Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What You're Not Being Told About the Science of Climate Change.” “However, a few years ago, I decided to look more closely at the science and it astonished me. In fact there is no evidence of humans being the cause. There is, however, overwhelming evidence of natural causes such as changes in the output of the sun.
...
Environmental geochemist Dr. Jan Veizer, professor emeritus of University of Ottawa, converted from believer to skeptic after conducting scientific studies of climate history. “I simply accepted the (global warming) theory as given,” Veizer wrote on April 30, 2007 about predictions that increasing C02 in the atmosphere was leading to a climate catastrophe. “The final conversion came when I realized that the solar/cosmic ray connection gave far more consistent picture with climate, over many time scales, than did the CO2 scenario,” Veizer wrote. .
Saturday, June 23, 2007.
The makers of the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle have made many science documentaries before. The thing they found most shocking when they started to make this one, was the weakness of the case for man made global warming, and the quantity and quality of the evidence which flatly contradicts it.
http://greatglobalwarmingswindle.co.uk/
La Nina threatens to wreck world’s weather
‘Fertilising’ oceans with iron may combat climate change | Damage to the planet ‘is already inevitable’
Experts predict a run of severe weather in the coming months, with devastating floods striking some parts of the world while severe droughts afflict other regions, as the climate phenomenon known as La Niña gathers momentum.
A chronic drought afflicting southern California and many southeastern states of America could be exacerbated, with Los Angeles heading for its driest year on record. In contrast, western Canada and the northwestern US could turn colder and snowier. Mozambique, southeast Africa, and northern Brazil may face exceptionally heavy rains and floods, while southern Brazil and much of Argentina suffer drought.
La Niña could even rearrange the pattern of sea ice around the Antarctic, pushing the ice pack towards the Pacific side of the continent. Already, torrential rains have triggered severe floods across a huge swath of Central Africa, stretching from Senegal in the west to Uganda in the east.
Related Links
Warm waters may trigger Mediterranean hurricane
Rupa Kumar Kolli, chief of world applications at the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in Geneva, predicts that the worst of La Niña is yet to come. “This La Niña is now in its developing phase and getting stronger, and we can expect it to peak this coming December and January,” he said. Whether this episode of La Niña will make itself felt in Britain and continental Europe this winter is not certain. “We tend to get a mild end to winter with La Niña, but it’s not a strong signal,” said Adam Scaife, at the Hadley Centre of the Met Office in Exeter.
Met Office scientists have found that La Niña is likely to have played a part in the abysmal British summer. By upsetting the usual track of the high-altitude jet stream towards Britain, it delivered barrages of slow-moving Atlantic depressions with torrents of rain. La Niña may also have been involved in the spectacular Asian monsoon this summer, leading to floods that killed about 1,000 people in India and Bangladesh. And it allows hurricanes to develop - already this month the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico have experienced two monstrous Category 5 storms. Another hurricane broke the record for the fastest intensification of a storm.
La Niña occurs when the tropical seas of the Pacific off the coast of Latin America cool down, while the waters turn warmer towards Australia, the Philippines and Indonesia. That lurch in ocean temperatures can send weather systems into havoc over vast areas, delivering huge deluges of rain over the Far East and tropical Australia, while western parts of Latin America turn much drier than usual. This is the flip side of El Niño, although La Niña lasts for a shorter time, usually no more than a year.
The way that La Niña casts its spell over the globe, from the Pacific to the rest of the world, is known as a “tele-connection”. By disrupting sea temperatures, pressure systems and winds over the Pacific, it interferes with the atmospheric circulation around the tropics. This sends out waves in the atmosphere, like casting a stone into a pond, which can change the strength and position of jet stream winds several miles high. In this way the Pacific can have a huge impact on the weather far from the tropics.
We really DO NOT know that carbon dioxide is causing climate change. There are several alternative suggested causes and the current warming (which seems to have stalled around 1998) is probably more likely a continuation of the warming that has taken place since the end of the Little Ice Age, from around 1850 (which by no coincidence is the starting year for Gore's temperature chart that supposedly shows alarming warming).
The dominant greenhouse gas is WATER, not carbon dioxide. It is responsible for up to 95% of the so-called "greenhouse effect". Carbon dioxide is only a minor player, and Man's activities put only about 3% as much CO2 into the atmosphere yearly as does Nature. How does the atmosphere distinguish between them? Its concentration is believed to have increased from 0.00028 of the atmosphere to 0.00038 over the past couple of hundred years.
If the Kyoto Accord were put into effect...heck, if ALL manmade CO2 emissions were stopped immediately...there would be no discernible temperature effect 50 and 100 years from now. (As an aside, we don't even have accurate ground-level temperature measurements over most of the world.) The scare tactics are based on glorified video games and are not to be trusted to the extent of spending billions of dollars and damaging our economies. Canada, and every other country, would be foolish to take heroic action on the basis of shonky "everybody-knows" pseudo-science. Even the much-quoted IPCC reports are more political than scientific and should be approached with great caution as a source of information.
Ian L. McQueen
Here's how Essenhigh sees the global temperature system working: As temperatures rise, the carbon dioxide equilibrium in the water changes, and this releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. According to this scenario, atmospheric carbon dioxide is then an indicator of rising temperatures -- not the driving force behind it.
Essenhigh attributes the current reported rise in global temperatures to a natural cycle of warming and cooling.
He examined data that Cambridge University geologists Nicholas Shackleton and Neil Opdyke reported in the journal Quaternary Research in 1973, which found that global temperatures have been oscillating steadily, with an average rising gradually, over the last one million years -- long before human industry began to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Opdyke is now at the University of Florida.
According to Shackleton and Opdyke's data, average global temperatures have risen less than one degree in the last million years, though the amplitude of the periodic oscillation has now risen in that time from about 5 degrees to about 10 degrees, with a period of about 100,000 years.
"Today, we are simply near a peak in the current cycle that started about 25,000 years ago," Essenhigh explained.
As to why highs and lows follow a 100,000 year cycle, the explanation Essenhigh uses is that the Arctic Ocean acts as a giant temperature regulator, an idea known as the "Arctic Ocean Model." This model first appeared over 30 years ago and is well presented in the 1974 book Weather Machine: How our weather works and why it is changing, by Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist magazine.
According to this model, when the Arctic Ocean is frozen over, as it is today, Essenhigh said, it prevents evaporation of water that would otherwise escape to the atmosphere and then return as snow. When there is less snow to replenish the Arctic ice cap, the cap may start to shrink. That could be the cause behind the retreat of the Arctic ice cap that scientists are documenting today, Essenhigh said.
As the ice cap melts, the earth warms, until the Arctic Ocean opens again. Once enough water is available by evaporation from the ocean into the atmosphere, snows can begin to replenish the ice cap. At that point, the Arctic ice begins to expand, the global temperature can then start to reverse, and the earth can start re-entry to a new ice age.
According to Essenhigh's estimations, Earth may reach a peak in the current temperature profile within the next 10 to 20 years, and then it could begin to cool into a new ice age.
Essenhigh knows that his scientific opinion is a minority one. As far as he knows, he's the only person who's linked global warming and carbon dioxide in this particular way. But he maintains his evaluations represent an improvement on those of the majority opinion, because they are logically rigorous and includes water vapor as a far more significant factor than in other studies.
"If there are flaws in these propositions, I'm listening," he wrote in his Chemical Innovation paper. "But if there are objections, let's have them with the numbers."
Adapted from materials provided by Ohio State University.
A Brief History of Ice Ages and Warming
Global warming started long before the "Industrial Revolution" and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Global warming began 18,000 years ago as the earth started warming its way out of the Pleistocene Ice Age-- a time when much of North America, Europe, and Asia lay buried beneath great sheets of glacial ice.
Earth's climate and the biosphere have been in constant flux, dominated by ice ages and glaciers for the past several million years. We are currently enjoying a temporary reprieve from the deep freeze.
Approximately every 100,000 years Earth's climate warms up temporarily. These warm periods, called interglacial periods, appear to last approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years before regressing back to a cold ice age climate. At year 18,000 and counting our current interglacial vacation from the Ice Age is much nearer its end than its beginning.
Global warming during Earth's current interglacial warm period has greatly altered our environment and the distribution and diversity of all life. For example:
Approximately 15,000 years ago the earth had warmed sufficiently to halt the advance of glaciers, and sea levels worldwide began to rise.
By 8,000 years ago the land bridge across the Bering Strait was drowned, cutting off the migration of men and animals to North America.
Since the end of the Ice Age, Earth's temperature has risen approximately 16 degrees F and sea levels have risen a total of 300 feet! Forests have returned where once there was only ice.
Is there a scientific consensus about global warming?
All climate scientists accept that there are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, and that in consequence the world will warm somewhat. There is no consensus on the central question of how much warming there will be. The main area of dispute is about the magnitude of the temperature effect of carbon dioxide. Arrhenius (1896) was the first to calculate the effect of doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide, concluding that global temperature would rise by 8C.
In the 1970s, experiments showed that at the Earth’s surface the principal absorption bands of atmospheric CO2 were saturated, and it was thought that a doubling of CO2 might raise temperature by as little as 0.5C. However, subsequent experiments indicated that in the much thinner air and much lower temperature at the tropopause – the top of the main atmospheric layer, around 5 to 11 miles up – the secondary absorption bands of CO2 were not fully saturated. Some of the outgoing, long-wave radiation from the Earth’s surface would be intercepted at the tropopause and scattered back into the troposphere. The UN’s 1990 and 1996 Assessment Reports suggested that additional warming of 4.4 watts per square metre per second would occur. The 2001 report cut this figure to 3.7 watts. However, it is not clear how much of this additional energy reaches the surface.
A submission to the UN by Dr. Hugh Elsaesser suggested that only 1.5 watts would reach the surface.
See also De Laat et al. (2004) and Etheridge et al. (1996) for a discussion of man’s contribution to the greenhouse effect.
Leading climate scientists who strongly disagree with the view that additional carbon dioxide in the air will have the large effect on the climate suggested by the UN include Professor Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who recently received a £10,000 prize for courage in opposing
conventional thinking. Some 41 scientists recently wrote to the Telegraph to say they were not part of, and were not convinced by, the “global warming” consensus.
Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years by Dennis T. Avery, S. Fred Singer
The advertising for the book says: ""Singer and Avery present in popular language supported by in-depth scientific evidence the compelling concept that global temperatures have been rising mostly or entirely because of a natural cycle. Unstoppable Global Warming explains why we're warming, why it's not very dangerous, and why we can't stop it anyway."
Reviewer: Crosslands (Maryland USA) wrote: Excellent Resource, November 13, 2006Mrs. Avery and Singer provide an excellent readable and well documented book on the global warming hoax. The reader can only conclude that this book is an invaluable resource on the topic of global warming. The work refers to a vast amount of scientific research in a wide variety of scientific journals indicating a natural sunspot magnetic wave is causing what little global warming exists. Man created carbon dixoide has very little effect on the earth's climate.Avery and Singer go further by providing an in depth expose of the fallacious research that alledgedly supports man made global warming. In particular the authors make an incisive investigation into the so called hockey stick hypothesis of unprecedented recent warming hoax widely enunciated by the UN's climate change panel. This hoax was first exposed by two skilled and courageous Canadian researchers - McIntyre and McKitrick.Pseudoscientists and others with a vested interest in controlling the global economy by use of the global warming hoax will not like this work. However informed readers concerned with human welfare and human progress will find this book invaluable. This book should be read by all Amercians and really by everone else in the world.
There is another theory of global warming and cooling that Gore does not address in An Inconvenient Truth. The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory posits that cosmic rays, not humans, cause climate change. The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change (2007) by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder is the first book to be published on this subject. Svensmark proposed this theory in 1996 and supplies the scientific input for the book. Calder, a British science writer, "strung the words together," as he puts it. He does this very well and explains Svensmark’s theory in an engaging and easily understandable way. It will be published in the U.S. March 25 (I obtained my copy from the UK, where it was published last month).
The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory says that cosmic rays make clouds. Exploding stars continually spray the galaxy with cosmic rays, which consist of protons, alpha particles (helium nuclei), electrons, and muons (heavy electrons). The muons in this mix of atomic bullets make low-level (below 8,000 feet) clouds. They do this by knocking electrons off atoms and molecules in the air, and these liberated electrons seed the formation "cloud condensation nuclei." Water vapor in the atmosphere condenses on these specks to form cloud water droplets. The wet clouds thus formed block sunlight and reflect its rays back into space, which has a cooling effect. In 2006, Svensmark and colleagues showed experimentally how it is done, which involves adding sulfuric acid to these condensation nuclei. (Plankton, microscopic plants in the ocean and to a much lesser extent volcanoes and fossil fuels, continually restock the atmosphere with sulfur.)
The sun’s magnetic field encloses its planets in a magnetic solar wind (the heliosphere) that shields us from many of the cosmic rays that exploding stars shoot our way. Sunspots, dark spots made by pools of intense magnetism seen through a telescope, indicate heightened magnetic activity, which deflects more cosmic rays away from Earth. During the 20th century the sun’s magnetic shield more than doubled, and the sun had a lot of sunspots. Fewer cosmic rays reached Earth to make clouds, and global temperatures rose. When the sun’s magnetic activity wanes and sunspots disappear, more cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere to make clouds; and the globe cools. The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory of climate change explains observations made over the last 400 years since the advent of the telescope that correlate sunspots with global warming and cooling.
The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory explains climate change on a geologic time scale. Our solar system in its rotation around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy passes through one of its spiral arms every 135 million years. These arms contain high levels of cosmic rays. Astrophysicist Nir Shaviv and geologist Ján Veizer in "Celestrial Driver of Phanerozoic Climate?" (Geological Society of America Today 2003;13:4-10) and Veizer in "Celestial Climate Driver: A Perspective from Four Billion Years of the Carbon Cycle" (Geoscience Canada 2005;32:13-30) show that the variability in the Earth’s temperature over the past 500 million years correlates well with the intensity of cosmic rays hitting the planet when it passes in and out of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. They found that at one point atmospheric CO2 levels were 18 times higher than they are today, and they were 10 times higher when the planet was an "icehouse" during the Ordovician glacial period (450 million years ago).
During one warm period, 50 million years ago, the weather in the arctic was like that in Florida today. The Arctic Ocean was free of ice year-round and was populated by alligators and turtles. Axel Heiberg Island, in the high Canadian arctic 600 miles from the North Pole, has a well-preserved fossil forest (discovered in 1985), in what once was a semi-tropical swamp. At the other extreme, 2.2 billion years ago, and several times more recently, the planet was covered in ice down to the equator, making it a "Snowball Earth." Planetary factors that have played a role in these climate changes include the position of drifting continents and the evolving composition of the atmosphere.
Other cycles that drive climate change include the Earth’s 100,000-year elliptical orbit around the sun and its 41,000-year axial tilt cycle. (In the most elliptical phase of the Earth’s orbit, the sun’s rays must travel 3 percent farther to reach the planet. The Earth’s axial tilt ranges from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees and is currently at 23 degrees.) And then there is the 1,500-year solar cycle.
S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery describe the 1,500-year solar warming and cooling climate cycle in their book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years (2007). It has 528 references, a glossary, and an index. This well written book is arguably the best book to date on the politics and science of global warming. In addition to presenting evidence for the 1,500-year solar cycle, first proposed by European researchers in 1996, the authors address both the Greenhouse and Solar/Cosmic Ray theories of climate change.
The sun’s role in climate change is due not so much to changes in intensity of its visible and/or invisible rays, or irradiance, but to its magnetic effect on cosmic rays. Changes in the sun’s magnetic activity have a four-fold greater effect on the Earth’s temperature than variations in its irradiance.
Today’s global warming is part of a natural 1,500-year, plus or minus 500-year, solar cycle operating for at least a million years. The Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled nine times in the past 12,000 years, in lock step with the waxing and waning of the sun’s magnetic activity (Science 2001;294[7 December]:2130-2136). Over the last 1,200 years there has been a "Medieval Warming" (900-1300), when Greenland was green; a "Little Ice Age" (1300-1850), when New York harbor froze, and people could walk from Manhattan across the ice to Staten Island a mile away (in 1780); and the current global warming (1850-?). Rather than "global warming," a better term for this phase of the solar cycle is "Modern Warming." Since 1850, temperatures have risen 0.8 degrees C, most rapidly in 1850-1870 and 1920-1940. Temperatures in the 1,500-year solar cycle fluctuate within a 4 degree C range – two degrees above and two degrees below the norm.
The Modern Warming is not confined to this planet. Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, and Triton (Neptune’s largest moon) in the solar system are also warming.
It is not surprising that the former vice president did not address the Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory of Climate Change in An Inconvenient Truth. This "documentary," as the Christian Science Monitor notes, is really a docuganda, propaganda disguised as documentary. It manipulates the audience, with alarming images and a skewed presentation of facts, into believing that humans cause global warming and that "polluting" the atmosphere with carbon dioxide will have catastrophic consequences. Unlike a true documentary, which seeks to inform the audience about a given state of affairs in a balanced and unbiased fashion, in An Inconvenient Truth Gore ignores or misrepresents evidence that refutes the human-caused Greenhouse Theory. Addressing competing theories on global warming in an even-handed way is not his intent.
Christopher Horner, in his recently published book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (2007), gives a lively account of the data Gore omits that contradict his global warming alarmism, especially with regard to hurricane frequency and severity and the increase in weather-related damages. He also addresses the film’s misrepresentations and some outright falsehoods.
The discredited "hockey stick" graph of the Earth’s temperature over the last 1,000 years is one of them. This widely publicized and cited graph reported by Mann and colleagues in 1998/1999 expunges the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age from the climate record. By getting rid of these two phases of the most recent solar cycle, they make the temperature for the first 900 years relatively flat and unchanged, with the rise in temperature in the 20th century on the graph made to look like the blade of a hockey stick. This graph so constructed matches that of atmospheric CO2 levels during this time period, which remained unchanged for 900 years until they began their rapid rise in the 20th century. Although now acknowledged by climate scientists to be false, Gore nevertheless makes this hockey stick graph the centerpiece of his "documentary." (Horner’s colleague, Marlo Lewis, has put together an excellent critique of this film on PowerPoint slides, available here.)
Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, in a tightly woven and sober manner, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, with rapier wit, expose the flaws in the human-caused Greenhouse Theory. The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory presented in The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change is more convincing.
At CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory in Geneva, researchers are building the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the $2.4 billion Large Hadron Collider. In the upcoming CLOUD experiment (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets) led by Jasper Kirby, investigators will generate high-energy particle beams in this accelerator simulating cosmic rays that they will use to validate and better understand the connection between cosmic rays and clouds.
Al Gore tells us in An Inconvenient Truth that he has given this lecture more than 1,000 times around the world. To help solve the climate crisis (his term for global warming), as a "recovering politician," he has gone on a crusade against CO2. Gore and his fellow climate alarmists do not want anything to do with CLOUD and wish it would go away. As Calder recounts in The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, climate scientists wedded to the greenhouse theory were able to block it when Kirby proposed doing this experiment in 2000; but now, in 2007, with CERN’s backing and funding secured, CLOUD will come online in 2010.
A basic rule of investigative journalism and criminal investigation is "Follow the Money," or as Cicero put it, "Cui bono?" ("To whose benefit?," literally, "[being] good to whom?").
Al Gore profits handsomely from his climate crisis activities. Validation of the Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory poses a major threat to this source of income. He will not disclose his speaking fees, but he reportedly received $250,000 for a speech that he gave in Saudi Arabia recently, and his average speaking fee for his global warming lectures is said to be $50,000 to $100,000. Gore is also a founding partner and Chairman of Generation Investment Management (GIM), a firm that "manage[s] the assets of institutional investors… as well as those of select high net worth individuals." [Emphasis added.] GIM invests in companies poised to cash in on CO2-caused global warming solutions, such as government subsidized solar and wind alternative-energy ventures and projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe.
The day after he won his Academy Award The Tennessean reported that Gore’s electrical and natural gas bills for his home in Nashville in 2006 were $27,360. This amount of energy, all of it generated from fossil fuels, is more than 20 times than that consumed by the average American household. A spokesperson for Gore pointed out that he buys "carbon offsets" to pay for his large "carbon footprint." Gore invests these offset funds in GIM, the company he chairs; and his apocalyptic climate forecasts (reinforced by those currently being made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scare citizens and government leaders around the world and persuade them to invest in alternative energy programs, raising the value of GIM’s privately held shares.
Can an individual who stands to make millions from the CO2 global warming paradigm be trusted to present an unbiased review of this subject and view with an open mind alternative theories of climate change?
Global warming is now a $5 billion industry, which benefits the government and its politicians and bureaucrats, environmental activists, the media, executives and shareholders of "green" industries, and climate scientists. Businesses profit by gaming the regulatory and planned "cap and trade" process rather than have to make money by producing things people want. The ("good news is no news") media shamelessly plays along and profits by frightening people. And we see how the movement’s most prominent activist, former Vice President Al Gore benefits. Climate scientists are awarded $1.7 billion a year in government grants to study climate change, but under the condition that these scientists continue to support the "consensus" or lose their funding. Climate scientist Richard Lindzen, in Climate of Fear, writes : "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis."
The global warming scare enables government to intervene and extend its control over people’s lives. The House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, looking for ways to keep Social Security and Medicare afloat and balance the budget, are investigating proposals for a carbon tax, under the pretext of cutting down on Greenhouse emissions.
Gore barely mentions the Kyoto Protocol in his film and says nothing about what sacrifices people will have to make in order to reduce CO2 emissions. He does say, however, that combating CO2-induced global warming will take a commitment similar to what the country had to make to win World War II. At some point in this climate war the government will ration CO2 and issue "carbon credits" – CO2 ration cards. In World War II Americans had to have the appropriate ration card to purchase gasoline, tires, coffee, sugar, meat, and shoes; a certificate to purchase a stove; and an authorization for vacation travel. At the height of the War on CO2 global governance, which only a socialist state can provide, will be required to rein in CO2 emissions, with international inspectors at one’s doorstep prosecuting and confiscating property of people and industries that make "greedy [CO2-producing] choices," like using an air-conditioner and driving a SUV.
Government leaders, environmental activists, and "select high net worth individuals" (including, of course, Hollywood celebrities) will not be inconvenienced by the strictures on CO2 emissions government imposes. In medieval times the nobility invoked sumptuary laws to limit what it considered to be conspicuous consumption of the bourgeoisie. Carbon offsets in the CO2 war will create a de-facto sumptuary law rendering the elite exempt from the hardships that carbon rationing will cause.
Human emissions of CO2, which account for 3 percent of the CO2 in atmosphere, may not have caused the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. It is a reasonable hypothesis, but it has not been tested. Habibullo Abdussamatov postulates a different cause for the rise in CO2 levels: "Increased solar irradiance warms Earth’s oceans, which then triggers the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations." Whichever way it has happened plants thrive with rising CO2 levels. Studies show that plants and trees raise their productivity by 30-80 percent when the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is doubled from 300 to 600 ppmv. Orange trees produce twice as many oranges. Satellite observations from 1982 to 1999 show that global vegetation increased more than 6 percent.
The Environmental establishment is able to ignore these benefits, but the Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory of climate change is another matter, particularly when validated by the CLOUD experiment. It is a paradigm shift that will topple the charade of human-caused warming. Vested interests will fight it. Too much money, power, and control are at stake.
Claims of warming due to human production of CO2 are supported only by its association with a recent rise in temperatures and on global climate models, which fail to account for past climate changes and whose future predictions have yet to be verified. Experimental evidence and empirical observations of past global warming and cooling events underpin the Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory of climate change.
One hopes that science will prevail. It is the only way people can prevent the climate alarmists, backed by the media and the state, from carrying out their plan to "save the planet." If not stopped, they will eventually establish global governance; dismantle modern technology; cripple industry; impose carbon rationing with radical reductions in the average American’s standard of living and quality of life; and inflict untold misery, suffering, and death for hundreds of millions of people around the world.
The Variable Energy Output of the Sun Appears to Be the Major Determinant of Decadal- to Millennial-Scale Global Climate Change
So how do the small changes in solar radiation inferred from the cosmogenic nuclide variations bring about such significant and pervasive shifts in earth's global climate? In answer to this question, which has long plagued proponents of a solar-climate link, Bond et al. describe a scenario whereby solar-induced changes high in the stratosphere are propagated downward through the atmosphere to the earth's surface, where they likely provoke changes in North Atlantic Deep Water formation that alter the global Thermohaline Circulation. In light of the plausibility of this scenario, they suggest that "the solar signals thus may have been transmitted through the deep ocean as well as through the atmosphere, further contributing to their amplification and global imprint."
Concluding their landmark paper, the authors say the results of their study "demonstrate that the earth's climate system is highly sensitive to extremely weak perturbations in the sun's energy output," noting that their work "supports the presumption that solar variability will continue to influence climate in the future." It is readily evident, therefore, that the study of Bond et al. provides ample ammunition for defending the premise that the global warming of the past century or so may well have been nothing more than the solar-mediated recovery of the earth from the chilly conditions of the most recent Little Ice Age, and that any further warming of the planet that might occur would likely be nothing more than a continuation of the same solar-mediated cycle that is destined to usher the globe into the next Medieval-like or Modern Warm Period. Consequently, since there's plenty of precedence for this scenario - it's happened over and over for more than a million years - and none for a warming of the planet as a consequence of atmospheric CO2 enrichment (see CO2-Temperature Correlations in our Subject Index), it would seem the height of folly to implement any energy policy that would restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions for the avowed purpose of attempting to prevent future global warming. It's not CO2 that's been causing the earth to warm. It's the sun!
Post a Comment