Posted on 01/31/2007 2:51:38 AM PST by Exton1
Most of the literate world today regards "global warming'' as both real and dangerous.
Indeed, the diplomatic activity concerning warming might lead one to believe that it is the major crisis confronting mankind.
The June 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, focused on international agreements to deal with that threat, and the heads of state from dozens of countries attended.
To show why I assert that there is no substantive basis for predictions of sizeable global warming due to observed increases in minor greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons, I shall briefly review the science associated with those predictions.
By assuming a shift toward the increased use of coal, rapid advances in the third world's standard of living, large population increases, and a reduction in nuclear and other nonfossil fuels, one can generate an emissions scenario that will lead to a doubling of carbon dioxide by 2030--if one uses a particular model for the chemical response to carbon dioxide emissions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I's model referred to that as the "business as usual'' scenario.
The crude idea in the common popular presentation of the greenhouse effect is that the atmosphere is transparent to sunlight (apart from the very significant reflectivity of both clouds and the surface), which heats the Earth's surface.
The infrared radiation increases with increasing surface temperature, and the temperature adjusts until balance is achieved.
If the atmosphere were also transparent to infrared radiation, the infrared radiation produced by an average surface temperature of minus eighteen degrees centigrade would balance the incoming solar radiation (less that amount reflected back to space by clouds).
Many of us were taught in elementary school that heat is transported by radiation, convection, and conduction.
Without that feedback, no current model would predict warming in excess of 1.7 degrees centigrade--regardless of any other factors.
Those predictions were considered interesting, but largely academic, exercises--even by the scientists involved.
Al Gore's Committee on Science, Technology and Space, said, in effect, that he was 99 percent certain that temperature had increased and that there was some greenhouse warming.
Despite the fact that those remarks were virtually meaningless, they led the environmental advocacy movement to adopt the issue immediately.
In Europe the movement centered on the formation of Green parties; in the United States the movement centered on the development of large public interest advocacy groups.
Within the large-scale climate modelling community--a small subset of the community interested in climate--however, the immediate response was to criticize Hansen for publicly promoting highly uncertain model results as relevant to public policy.
Other scientists quickly agreed that with increasing carbon dioxide some warming might be expected and that with large enough concentrations of carbon dioxide the warming might be significant.
In the winter of 1989 Reginald Newell, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lost National Science Foundation funding for data analyses that were failing to show net warming over the past century.
In the spring of 1989 I prepared a critique of global warming, which I submitted to Science, a magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Cries followed from environmentalists that skeptics were receiving excessive exposure.
The publication of my paper was followed by a determined effort on the part of the editor of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Richard Hallgren, to solicit rebuttals.
Such articles were prepared by Stephen Schneider and Will Kellogg, a minor scientific administrator for the past thirty years, and those articles were followed by an active correspondence mostly supportive of the skeptical spectrum of views.
Indeed, a recent Gallup poll of climate scientists in the American Meteorological Society and in the American Geophysical Union shows that a vast majority doubts that there has been any identifiable man-caused warming to date (49 percent asserted no, 33 percent did not know, 18 percent thought some has occurred; however, among those actively involved in research and publishing frequently in peer-reviewed research journals, none believes that any man-caused global warming has been identified so far).
The notion of "scientific unanimity'' is currently intimately tied to the Working Group I report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued in September 1990.
Two years ago, I had pointed out that if the source of water vapor in that region in the tropics was from deep clouds, then surface warming would be accompanied by reduced upper level water vapor.
Gore asked whether I now rejected my suggestion of two years ago as a major factor.
Biologists and physicians are rarely asked to endorse some theory in high energy physics.
Under the circumstances, it would be very risky for politicians to undertake such agreements unless scientists "insisted.'' Nevertheless, the situation is probably a good deal more complicated than that example suggests.
As Aaron Wildavsky, professor of political science at Berkeley, has quipped, "global warming'' is the mother of all environmental scares.
"Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realizing the environmentalist's dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population's eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.'' In many ways Wildavsky's observation does not go far enough.
The Working Group I report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested, for example, that a 60 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions might be needed.
Major agencies in the United States, hitherto closely involved with traditional approaches to national security, have appropriated the issue of climate change to support existing efforts.
A parochial issue is the danger to the science of climatology.
At least in the United States, however, industries seem to be primarily concerned with improving their public image, often by supporting environmental activists.
It is worth noting that about 1.7 trillion dollars have been spent on the environment over the past decade.
Should scientists publicize such predictions since the models are almost certainly wrong?
This person doesn't want to ever work for the Weather Channel, I assume....
I mean, injecting actual *facts* and even a little *common sense* into the "discussion".. REALLY!!!!!!
Global Warming is the financing arm of global fascism, and we'd best not regard it dismissively lest we empower our enemies within to subjugate us in the process.
" Please give me some reasons not to be more afraid of this than of terrorists. "
Wish I could -- the enviornazi One Worlders are closer to winning than the terrorists are....
I've been learning 3rd world subsistence farming skills -- just in case.....
Well that says it right there dosent it.....we are all IDIOTS!
Here is some more idiocy(sarc)
Sun to Blame for Global Warming
by John Carlisle
Those looking for the culprit responsible for global warming have missed the obvious choice - the sun. While it may come as a newsflash to some, scientific evidence conclusively shows that the sun plays a far more important role in causing global warming and global cooling than any other factor, natural or man-made. In fact, what may very well be the ultimate ironic twist in the global warming controversy is that the same solar forces that caused 150 years of warming are on the verge of producing a prolonged period of cooling.
The evidence for future cooling is supported by considerable scientific research that has only recently begun to come to light. It wasn't until 1980, with the aid of NASA satellites, that scientists definitively proved that the sun's brightness - or radiance - varies in intensity, and that these variations occur in predictable cyclical patterns. This was a crucial discovery because the climate models used by greenhouse theory proponents always assumed that the sun's radiance was constant. With that assumption in hand, they could ignore solar influences and focus on other influences, including human.
That turned out to be a reckless assumption. Further investigation revealed that there is a strong correlation between the variations in solar irradiance and fluctuations in the Earth's temperature. When the sun gets dimmer, the Earth gets cooler; when the sun gets brighter, the Earth gets hotter. So important is the sun in climate change that half of the 1.5° F temperature increase since 1850 is directly attributable to changes in the sun. According to NASA scientists David Lind and Judith Lean, only one-quarter of a degree can be ascribed to other causes, such as greenhouse gases, through which human activities can theoretically exert some influence.
The correlation between major changes in the Earth's temperature and changes in solar radiance is quite compelling. A perfect example is the Little Ice Age that lasted from 1650 to 1850. Temperatures in this era fell to as much as 2° F below today's temperature, causing the glaciers to advance, the canals in Venice to freeze and major crop failures. Interestingly, this dramatic cooling happened in a period when the sun's radiance had fallen to exceptionally low levels. Between 1645 and 1715, the sun was in a stage that scientists refer to as the Maunder Minimum. In this minimum, the sun has few sunspots and low magnetism which automatically indicates a lower radiance level. When the sun began to emerge from the minimum, radiance increased and by 1850 the temperature had warmed up enough for the Little Ice Age to end.
The Maunder Minimum is not an isolated event: it is a cyclical phenomenon that typically appears for 70 years following 200-300 years of warming. With only a few exceptions, whenever there is a solar minimum, the Earth gets colder. For example, Europe in the 13th and 15th Centuries experienced significantly lower temperatures and in both cases the cold spells coincided with a minimum. Similar correlations were found in the 9th Century and again in the 7th Century. Since 8700 B.C., there have been at least ten major cold periods similar to the Little Ice Age. Nine of those ten cold spells coincided with Maunder Minima.
There is no reason to believe that this 10,000-year-old cycle of solar-induced warming and cooling will change. Dr. Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and one of the nation's leading experts on global climate change, believes that we may be nearing the end of a solar warming cycle. Since the last minimum ended in 1715, Baliunas says there is a strong possibility that the Earth will start cooling off in the early part of the 21st Century.
Indeed, it could already be happening. Of the 1.5° F in warming the planet experienced over the last 150 years, two-thirds of that increase, or one degree, occurred between 1850 and 1940. In the last 50 years, the planetary temperature increased at a significantly slower rate of 0.5° F - precisely when dramatically increasing amounts of man-made carbon dioxide emissions should have been accelerating warming. Further buttressing the arguments for future cooling is the evidence from NASA satellites that the global temperature has actually fallen 0.04° F since 1979.
Of course, it is impossible to precisely predict when solar radiance will drop and global temperatures will begin falling. But one thing is certain: There is little evidence that mankind is responsible for global warming. There is considerable evidence that the sun causes warming and will most likely stimulate cooling in the not so distant future.
A hard read but a great post. thanks...
oooops I wrote too soon....I jumped the gun after the first few paragraphs....sorry.
There are two major problems with the GW crowd:
1) The contention that GW is human-based cannot be supported with scientific fact. Indeed, recent revelations about warming on such planets as Saturn, Mars and (the former planet of) Pluto, and the moon Titan all cast grave doubts on the arguments advanced by the GW crowd. Since there are NO humans or human colonies (to the best of anyone's knowledge) on any of those galactic bodies, the GW "scientists" have yet to yield an explanation to account for the rise in temperatures there. In fact, the GW crowd steadfastly ignores the warm temperature measurements anywhere but on earth. While many of us poke fun at the Martian SUVs, we are still waiting for credible evidence to refute our contention that GW is part of a natural solar cycle versus anything that can honestly be attributed to human beings.
2) Given the paucity of accurate and regular temperature data that extends beyond about the past 120 years or so, we have no way of knowing if what is currently being passed off as human caused GW isn't really the next step in a natural cycle of warming and cooling periods in which the earth is returning to a warming period at the end of a natural cooling cycle. We simply don't have the historical scientific data to be able to state confidently that humans are the cause of the current slight temperature rise of approximately 1 degree F.
The damning fact about the entire GW argument is that the current level of hysteria surrounding the issue, coupled with intervention by government at various levels, will continue to obfuscate the real causes of GW for generations to come. Worst case scenario for those of us who doubt the human caused GW argument is if our galaxy enters another cooling period in the foreseeable future, the GW crowd will crow that their efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions are the reason that temperatures are retreating. This will only generate a heightened level of more draconian measures to control greenhouse emissions that will remain in effect until the next natural warming cycle begins and all the greenhouse gas emission controls in the universe won't stop the natural cycle of events.
Should that scenario come to pass, future generations will shake their heads in astonishment at the unabated level of global ignorance and "chicken little" syndrome that the historical record will leave behind. The greater pity is that those climatologists actually endeavoring to determine what is really behind the recent temperature fluctuations are being drowned out by the hysteria of the GW crowd. The GW crowd, it should be noted, is largely comprised of those whose prescient ability doesn't permit them to accurately forecast next week's weather in Sheboygan, but they will state with absolute certainty what the weather will be like in the next 80 - 100 years!
Everyone knew the global warmers used coersion and funding to make 'scientists' worship at their alter, and it is great that someone gave the inside story in exactly how and what was done.
What agression, you haulacaust-denier/flat earther/big oil whore..../s
Social engineering through bogus science. I am not worried about the withdrawal of any significant amount of carbon from production and consumption. We simply cannot do that and run our economy. What does worry me is that they will use this as an excuse to raise taxes, which is what they really want.
You have summarized what I have been saying. Watch out for the UN mandated carbon police.
The present hysteria formally began in the summer of 1988, although preparations had been put in place at least three years earlier. That was an especially warm summer in some regions, particularly in the United States. The abrupt increase in temperature in the late 1970s was too abrupt to be associated with the smooth increase in carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in testimony before Sen. Al Gore's Committee on Science, Technology and Space, said, in effect, that he was 99 percent certain that temperature had increased and that there was some greenhouse warming. He made no statement concerning the relation between the two.
The activities of the Union of Concerned Scientists deserve special mention. That widely supported organization was originally devoted to nuclear disarmament. As the cold war began to end, the group began to actively oppose nuclear power generation. Their position was unpopular with many physicists. Over the past few years, the organization has turned to the battle against global warming in a particularly hysterical manner. In 1989 the group began to circulate a petition urging recognition of global warming as potentially the great danger to mankind. Most recipients who did not sign were solicited at least twice more. The petition was eventually signed by 700 scientists including a great many members of the National Academy of Sciences and Nobel laureates. Only about three or four of the signers, however, had any involvement in climatology. Interestingly, the petition had two pages, and on the second page there was a call for renewed consideration of nuclear power.
When the petition was published in the New York Times, however, the second page was omitted. In any event, that document helped solidify the public perception that "all scientists'' agreed with the disaster scenario. Such a disturbing abuse of scientific authority was not unnoticed.
That describes Communism to a tee. Who is pushing this movement?? The Left/Communists, chief among them Gore and the Clintons.
In the winter of 1989 Reginald Newell, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lost National Science Foundation funding for data analyses that were failing to show net warming over the past century.
How does the left deal with dissent? They silence them. How many more dissenters learned and remain silent, or support bogus science, to stay on the government funding tit??
He was there to discuss his (and his daughter's) book, "Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future" by Orrin H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-jarvis
Art has an extreme, unreasoning attitude toward accepting global warming, climate changes, everything.
The author agreed completely (he would never have been invited on the show otherwise) but argued that the quantitative modeling that global warming enthusiasts do is bad. How can you say what the temperature is going to be 50 years from now?
But qualitative modeling is valid. I.e., predictions that temperatures will continue increasing are just fine.
Mr. Bell, the hyper-global-warming advocate fretted all night worrying that the listener will not understand. He kept repeating and getting his guest to say that global warming is real, real, real, real . . . .
Maybe Mr. Bell has another book coming out?
The dissimulation of the leftist global warming mob is obviously ideological and borders on insanity also. They got more than books in mind.
If it's America's fault how do you explain the cycles over millions of years. None so far can.
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