Ignore Al Gore - but not his Nobel friends

This week, the United Nations' climate scientists will release a major report synthesising the world's best global warming research. It will be the first time we've heard from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since its scientists won the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore.

The IPCC's Assessment Report will tell policy-makers what to expect from man-made climate change. It is the result of rigorous and painstaking labour: more than can be said for the other Nobel Prize winner. The difference between Gore's claims and IPCC research is instructive.

While Gore was creating alarm with his belief that a 20-foot-high wall of water would inundate low-lying cities, the IPCC showed us we should realistically prepare for a rise of one foot or so by the end of the century. Beyond the dramatic difference, it is also worth putting that one foot in perspective. Over the last 150 years, sea levels rose about one foot - yet, did we notice?

Most tellingly, while Gore was raising fears about the Gulf Stream halting and a new Ice Age starting, the scientists discounted the prospect entirely.

The Gulf Stream takes warm water from around Mexico and pushes it toward Europe. Around 8,000 years ago, a melting lake in the region of the present-day Canadian Great Lakes broke through and a massive torrent of cold, fresh water flooded into the North Atlantic, significantly slowing the Gulf Stream for around 400 years. Gore worries that Greenland's ice shelves could melt and do the same thing again.

Gore's claims have received a lot of notice. Hopefully, the careful work of the IPCC will also receive the attention that it deserves.

..Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, former CEO of the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute: “I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society.”

QUOTE: “..There are by now a few dozen such models in the world, but they are not entirely independent of one another, often sharing common pieces of computer code and common ancestors.” ~ K. Emmanuel MIT

QUOTE: “..The problem here is that many important processes are much smaller than these scales. For example, cumulus clouds in the atmosphere are critical for transferring heat and water upward and downward, but they are typically only a few miles across and so cannot be simulated by the climate models. ... there are not too many ways to test the model, and projections of future climates must necessarily involve a degree of faith. “ ~ K. Emmanuel MIT

QUOTE: “... all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models.

Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests.

They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.

The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.

It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.”.... Freeman Dyson, (8/8/07) http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html

QUOTE: “The data don’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations [for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions] upon the data. We’re basing them upon the climate models” (Chris Folland, UK Meteorological Office)

QUOTE: “The climate modelers have been cheating for so long it’s almost become respectable” (Richard Kerr, discussing adjustments in climate models, Science 1997)

The Christion Science Monitor had a detailed article recently that brought in a surprisng source - NASA GISS - an entity that seems firmly entrenched in the AGW- CO2 theory of climate change. Here are some excerpts from the article:

Researchers say they’ve found puzzling correlations between changes in the sun’s output and weather and climate patterns on Earth. These links appear to rise above the level of misinterpreted data or faulty equipment.

“There are some empirical bits of evidence that show interesting relationships we don’t fully understand,” says Drew Shindell, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

puzzling correleation!!??!! LOL I thought they were ‘scientists’ perhaps we should call Mr. Obvious!!

The most controversial claim by the IPCC involves the costs and benefits of climate control. The IPCC claims that stabalising emissions between 450 and 550 ppm (parts per million) would cost from 0.2 per cent to less than 3 per cent of GDP in 2030, or less than 0.1 per cent per year. In addition, the IPCC claims that the cost of doing nothing is 20% in the worst case (I am not sure about the distribution of the costs).

This claim is accepted as gospel by climate control zealots. The idea that we can control climate seems preposterous. The cost predictions seem outrageous also both on the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the costs of doing nothing.

Here is my suggestion. Let’s compare the predictions of these models with reality in 25 years. We should see how outrageous these predictions are. We can at least see the current climate changes. I am not sure how to measure the cost of doing nothing because these costs assume that we can control the climate in the first place.

This global warming stuff is just their latest attempt to raise our taxes for their causes. The socialists / communists will take their piece, too.

Not just Mars :

Pluto is undergoing global warming, as evidenced by a three-fold increase in the planet’s atmospheric pressure during the past 14 years, a team of astronomers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Williams College, the University of Hawaii, Lowell Observatory and Cornell University announced in a press conference today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS) Division for Planetary Sciences in Birmingham, AL.

The team, led by James Elliot, professor of planetary astronomy at MIT and director of MIT’s Wallace Observatory, made this finding by watching the dimming of a star when Pluto...

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2002/pluto.html

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