Bush sets September climate conference

Terra Daily ^ | 08/03/2007 | AFP

[cogitator]

US President George W. Bush has invited major world economies to a multinational climate change conference in Washington on September 27-28, the White House announced Friday.

Bush has invited representatives from Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, the European Commission and United Nations, it said.

The conference, which the US president previewed on May 31, will aim to set the stage for setting a long-term goal to cut emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

"The United States is committed to collaborating with other major economies to agree on a detailed contribution for a new global framework by the end of 2008, which would contribute to a global agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change by 2009," Bush said in his invitation.

The US president, frequently accused in Europe of dragging his feet on efforts to curb climate change, said he would address the conference, which will be hosted by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

While the European Union sets climate policy for its members, Bush has asked British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi to send representatives, said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

The president has invited the European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso but also "wanted to make sure that these leaders, who have shown great leadership and great interest on the issue of climate change, are represented as well," she explained.

[vbmoneyspender]

AHEM. Stratospheric cooling is a predicted and observed consequence of both ozone depletion (the primary cause) and global warming* (the secondary cause).

Yet another example of why I generally ignore your posts. If stratospheric cooling is a consequence of ozone depletion, then the reduction in CFCs should have led to an increase in stratospheric temperatures. The fact that a decrease has occurred should lead a reasonable observer to question why not?

[cogitator]

Yet another example of why I generally ignore your posts. If stratospheric cooling is a consequence of ozone depletion, then the reduction in CFCs should have led to an increase in stratospheric temperatures.

The qualitative explanation is that the reduction in ozone concentrations has occurred over several decades, affecting the stratospheric temperature, and the recovery (to date) has not been sufficient to compensate for the loss. As you noted, the recent ozone holes have been record-breakers. Since it's the ozone and the not the CFCs that is important, then the stratosphere is still cooling off. (Unfortunately.)

In the graph below, TLS stands for "Temperature Lower Stratosphere". This is MSU/AMSU data analyzed by Remote Sensing Systems. What I'd like to see is what the trend is after the end of the Pinatubo effect, i.e. from 1994-present. Eyeballing it on the -1.0 line makes it look pretty flat.

Another way to see it is below. I invite you to peruse the whole article -- it's nice and short, but I think it addresses the substance of the points you've raised. (They misspelled "El Chichon", by the way.) I particularly note the importance of the section entitled "Greehouse gases cause cooling higher up, too" for anyone who thinks that global warming due to anthropogenic GHG emissions to the atmosphere is not occurring.

Global warming causes stratospheric cooling