Posted on 01/30/2007 11:45:37 PM PST by neverdem
It may well turn out that George W. Bush's greatest service to the country won't involve terrorism or Iraq at all, but his steadfast refusal to be buffaloed into joining the panicky consensus on global warming.
Rumor had it that Bush intended to embrace the warming thesis at last in his State of the Union address. Instead Greens nationwide went into depressed tailspins as he called for an attack on the problem by means of technical advances, a curve ball very much in the old Bush mode, of a type that we've seen too little of recently. Bush is acting in defiance of much of the civilized world, led by a former vice-president and including the media, the entertainment community, the Democrats, most of the policy elite, that peculiar and never-before-encountered group known as "mainstream scientists", and now even corporations, eager to clamber aboard the Kyoto wagon while there's still room.
As James Lewis recently put it on these pages, global warming is most likely a crock. Some of us are old enough to remember similar hysterics over air pollution, overpopulation, and universal famine, none of which ever came to pass. The science behind warming is so full of lacunae, speculation, and outright fraud (e.g., the famed "hockey stick chart" purporting to show temperature levels over the past millennium while conveniently dropping both the medieval warm period and the Little Ice Age) to be in any way convincing.
One curious element involves certain facts that, on first consideration, would appear to be crucial but never seem to come up in debate. I have spent several years trying to track down the actual values of two numbers - the annual amount of carbon dioxide emitted by all human activities, and the amount of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere. There are as many answers as there are sources, the first ranging from 3 billion to 28 billion tons, the second from 750 billion tons to 2.97 x 1012 tons, a number so large that there's no common English word for it. Variations of this size - up to three orders of magnitude - suggest a serious lack of basic knowledge. The fact that it never comes up suggests that scientists are well aware of this. (It's doubtful we'll see the question addressed in this week's IPCC report either.)
* How warm was it during the LCO? Areas in the Midlands and Scotland that cannot grow crops today were regularly farmed. England was known for its wine exports.
* The average height of Britons around A.D. 1000 was close to six feet, thanks to good nutrition. The small stature of the British lower classes (and the Irish) later in the millennium is an artifact of lower temperatures. People of the 20th century were the first Europeans in centuries to grow to their "true" stature - and most had to grow up in the USA to do it.
* In fact, famine - and its partner, plague -- appears to have taken a hike for several centuries. We have records of only a handful of famines during the LCO, and few mass outbreaks of disease. The bubonic plague itself appears to have retreated to its heartland of Central Asia.
* The LCO was the first age of transatlantic exploration. When not slaughtering their neighbors, the Vikings were charting new lands across the North Atlantic, one of the stormiest seas on earth (only the Southern Ocean - the Roaring 40s - is worse). If you tried the same thing today, traveling their routes in open boats of the size they used, you would drown. They discovered Iceland, and Greenland, and a new world even beyond, where they found grape vines, the same as in England.
* The Agricultural Revolution is not widely known except among historians. Mild temperatures eased land clearing and lengthened growing seasons. More certain harvests encouraged experimentation among farmers involving field rotation, novel implements, and new crops such as legumes. While the thought of peas and beans may not thrill the foodies among us, they expanded an almost unbelievably bland ancient diet as well as providing new sources of nutrition. The result was a near-tripling of European population from 27 million at the end of the 7th century to 70 million in 1300.
* The First Industrial Revolution is not widely known even among historians. Opening the northern German plains allowed access to easily mined iron deposits in the Ruhr and the Saarland. As a result smithies and mills became common sights throughout Europe. Then came the basic inventions without which nothing more complex can be made - the compound crank, the connecting rod, the flywheel, followed by the turbine, the compass, the mechanical clock, and eyeglasses. Our entire technical civilization, all the way down to Al Gore's hydrogenmobile, has its roots in the LCO.
bttt
Muller's HISTORY OF CLIMATE you've linked/ posted here is absolutely incredible. This is probably the most comprehensive and simple to understand history of the last several million years that I've ever seen! I will be utilizing this extensively!
Thank you so very much!
What is crazy is if you listen to many of these wackos they tell us record cold temps are really due to global warming. Al Gore only looked at 100 years and if you look back in history only 100 years... yes, we are warming.... but we are not as warm as 1000 years ago. I'd rather be warm than in an ice age.
There's the answer to "man-made" Global Warming in a nutshell.
Sure.
I was happy to find it some time ago. The graphs speak for themselves. And Muller is not a partisan of any kind, just a scientist doing an honest work.
Earth warming trend is indeed there. And we should be very grateful. The whole human civilization started and developed during this relatively unusual for the Earth time. If trend continues some areas may suffer, but on the scale of the whole globe, we will be much better off than if opposite - Ice Age - happens.
Thank you!
Bump
Thanks for posting Muller.
Now, THIS article says we're NOT doomed. I am so confused!
Bookmark.
The Independent Institute
San Francisco, CA
November 15, 2005
by Michael Crichton
Is this really the end of the world? Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods?
No, we simply live on an active planet. Earthquakes are continuous, a million and a half of them every year, or three every minute. A Richter 5 quake every six hours, a major quake every 3 weeks. A quake as destructive as the one in Pakistan every 8 months. Its nothing new, its right on schedule. At any moment there are 1,500 electrical storms on the planet. A tornado touches down every six hours. We have ninety hurricanes a year, or one every four days. Again, right on schedule. Violent, disruptive, chaotic activity is a constant feature of our globe. Is this the end of the world? No: this is the world. Its time we knew it. |
Continue here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1551707/posts
Does it help your confusion if I note that the author of this is stupid? He makes us think that the number is uncertain because he found various estimates for it, without saying where they were from, how they were made, what the error budget, was, etc. In contrast, we have:
Global, Regional, and National Fossil Fuel CO2 Emissions
OK, he does say "all human activities", and this is just for fossil fuels. You've got to add in some from cement production, too, and a little from land-use change. Ultimately you get this:
and those are pretty much where the estimates converge.
In the neighborhood of the Federal budget.
When it comes to blaming man for Global Warming, you sir are the unchallenged FR Champion.
Do you work with Heidi Cullen?
Your insistance on the validity of anthropogenic global warming prompted me to recall that methane's effect is 21 times the effect of carbon dioxide and to show or link their relative concentrations in comment# 1, courtesy of the EPA.
No.
This is the radiative forcing due to various factors. Methane's contribution is about 1/3 of CO2's contribution. Controlling methane would be useful and I believe that Jim Hansen includes it in his "alternative scenario" -- even though I posted a link to it earlier today I haven't read it for a couple of years, so I'm not sure.
http://ess.geology.ufl.edu/ess/Notes/070-Global_Warming/IPCC_G2.gif
Thank you for not stating the source of your graph.
I can't understand true believers like you. How is limiting carbon dioxide going to have any meaningful result when there is so much more methane, which is also increasing, and has an effect that is so much greater? You don't have to answer. Adios
Methane should be controlled, if possible, but its contribution is not expected to grow as much as CO2.
Control Of Methane Emissions Would Reduce Both Global Warming And Air Pollution, Researchers Find
Yes they do and only to a point. Too much oxygen is poisoness to many plants and animals. The stuff is highly reactive you know. Another word for oxidation is rusting.
In fact I learned the other day that when the first plants that made oxygen (not all plants do, just most) appeared, the oxygen level did not rise all that much, because the oxygen got dissolved in the oceans, where it combined with the iron there to form rust (iron oxide) which precipitated out and dropped to the bottom of the ocean. Until the iron was mostly depleted, animals which used oxygen could not appear on the scene.
I suspect all that ocean bottom "rust" is now a component of the very common "red clay soils" prevalent around the world.
No doubt, but the history charts, especially the longer scale 420 kyr one, show that what follows the rise, is a fall sometimes, often in fact, into an Ice Age, small or large. Given the apparent periodicity, the next fall might not be into a "Little Ice Age".
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