you would think that people would welcome some global warming.
Posted on 04/08/2002 9:03:07 AM PDT by grundle
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:15 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
(Excerpt) Read more at globalclimate.org ...
Interesting. The folks clamoring about global cooling back in the 70's understood that influencing political leaders was important to their cause just as the democrat party had been duped by the global warming crowd today.
You would think that after 25 years they would come up with a different call to action!
Effects of Climate Warming Already in Evidence
The global temperature cooled off from the 1930s through the 1970s. Archaic climate models in the 1970s overstimated the effects of sulfate aerosols and also didn't figure in as much reduction in sulfate aerosol emissions as occurred (largely to alleviate acid rain problems). So since 1975 we've warmed up quite a bit. Except for the unlikely specter of a shutdown of North Atlantic deep water formation (which would result in a strong hemispheric cooling most drastic in Europe and eastern North America), there aren't any climatologists predicting a significant cooling trend or Ice Age now.
It's interesting to read the history, though. I remember that too.
We need a national program to halt gravitational decline.
The corporations are using up the whole world supply; by the year 2050, poor people will have to be tied to trees and such to keep them from floating up into the poisonous atmosphere.
"Gravity's For Everybody; not just Dead White Males."
Halt the injustice.
So since 1975 we've warmed up quite a bit.
Global Warming Debate Continues. . .
The figure above shows the monthly temperature deviations from a seasonally adjusted average for the lower stratosphere - Earth's atmosphere from 14 to 22 km (9 to 14 miles). Red is an increase in the temperature from the average, and blue is a decrease in temperature. The large increase in 1982 was caused by the volcanic eruption of El Chichon, and the increase in 1991 was caused by the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines. November 2000 was the coldest month on record for stratospheric temperatures.
This chart shows the monthly temperature changes for the lower troposphere - Earth's atmosphere from the surface to 8 km, or 5 miles up. The temperature in this region is more strongly influenced by oceanic activity, particularly the "El Niño" and "La Niña" phenomena, which originate as changes in oceanic and atmospheric circulations in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The overall trend in the tropospheric data is near zero, being +0.04 C/decade through Feb 2002. Click on the charts to get the numerical data.
Particles of Doubt (on sulfur aerosols)
which includes this spectacularly good paragraph:
"Researchers of the 1970s CLIMAP project found strong evidence in deep-ocean sediments of variations in the Earth's global temperature during the past several hundred thousand years of the Earth's history. Other subsequent studies have confirmed these findings and have discovered that these temperature variations were closely correlated to the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and variations in solar radiation received by the planet as controlled by the Milankovitch cycles. Measurements indicated that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were about 30 % lower during colder glacial periods. It was also theorized that the oceans were a major store of carbon dioxide and that they controlled the movement of this gas to and from the atmosphere. The amount of carbon dioxide that can be held in oceans is a function of temperature. Carbon dioxide is released from the oceans when global temperatures become warmer and diffuses into the ocean when temperatures are cooler. Initial changes in global temperature were triggered by changes in received solar radiation by the Earth through the Milankovitch cycles. The increase in carbon dioxide then amplified the global warming by enhancing the greenhouse effect.
A Plain English Guide to the Science of Climate Change
Global warming confirmed: new research
"The research looked at the two hemispheres separately. Pollutants such as carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases last in the atmosphere a long time so they are spread more or less evenly all over the Earth.
"The big difference between the two hemispheres is the emissions from industry, particularly sulphur dioxide," explained Dr Stern.
Sulphur dioxide does not last long in the atmosphere, which means it gathers into clouds and falls back onto the continents in the northern hemisphere where most of the emissions are produced.
"The effect in the southern hemisphere is very little."
The clouds cause a cooling effect in the shorter term, the reason why temperatures cooled in the 1960s and 1970s. The researchers found that this masked the human impact on greenhouse gases to some extent in the northern hemisphere, but warming was easier to detect in the southern hemisphere."
Why, you ask? Well, it's been asked before.
The stratosphere warms and cools radiatively. It cools by radiating heat into space. It warms by receiving longwave radiation from the Earth's surface. If that radiation is trapped near the surface (which is what the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere does) then the radiation doesn't reach the stratosphere and the stratosphere cools. So if an increasing amount of LW radiation is being trapped, there should be a cooling signal in the stratosphere.
And there is. Voila.
There is so much insight to be gained with a historical review. Great post.
You obviously aren't trying to pay attention. It isn't plain and it isn't simple. You can either ignore it or you can actually attempt to start figuring it out. I'm not an expert but I read a lot and I've been trying to sort out these arguments for years. If you'd make an honest attempt, you'd find out that what I say is true: it isn't plain and it isn't simple.
I have one simple link for you, since you seem to enjoy links...
And there is. Voila.
Nice theory, unfortunately the tropospheric data does not support what your attribution of the cause.
Nor does the theory take into account other reasons for global climate changes that overwhelm any manmade influences by more than an order of magnitude.
On those cycles we are due for the onset of another glaciation totally unrelated to any of the "global warming or global cooling" theories of the environmental opportunists.
Submitted to the memory bank, as a corollary to why and how things go wrong.
TESTIMONY
Dr. Edward L. Hudgins
Director of Regulatory Studies
Cato Institute
U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on Science
Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics
March 19, 1997
I appreciate the opportunity to testify today on authorization of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Mission to Planet Earth. I recommend that the program not be reauthorized. I offer three reasons for this recommendation.
First, Mission to Planet Earth is part of NASA's pattern over the past 25 years of running costly, politically popular projects that are supported by powerful clients that receive taxpayer largess. NASA's original mission was space science and exploration. The space program and NASA were born of the Cold War wish to wipe out the embarrassment of early Soviet space successes. While the government has a legitimate defense role in space, commercial ventures, and scientific research and exploratory ventures ideally should be carried out by the private sector. But in the late 1950s many Americans believed that only governments could undertake such endeavors.
The lunar landings forever will be celebrated among mankind's great human and technological achievements. Yet today NASA is wasteful and ineffective, squandering the public's good will, enthusiasm and tens of billions of dollars.
In the early 1970s, as NASA saw Moon landings curtailed and Moon bases ruled out, it sought to preserve its big budgets and staffs with another big project: the Space Shuttle. Sold to policymakers as a reusable and thus cheaper way to put payloads in orbit than expendable launch vehicles, in effect, NASA's mission went from science and exploration to freight hauling.
But rather than proving a way to make space flight as common and inexpensive as air flight, the costs of putting payloads into space with the Shuttle have skyrocketed. It is difficult to get good numbers from impenetrable NASA accounting. David Gump in his book Space Enterprise estimates the cost in constant dollars went from $3,800 per pound under Apollo to $6,000 with the Shuttle. Alex Roland of Duke University estimates that the cost of a Shuttle flight, including development and capital costs, is not the $350 million claimed by NASA but closer to $2 billion, which works out to about $35,000 per pound.
As it became apparent in the early 1980s that the Shuttle was a costly white elephant, NASA needed a mission to justify the Shuttle's continued existence. Aside from any purported commercial or scientific benefits, an orbiting space station seemed to serve this purpose. But the cost of the station went from a promised $8 billion to nearly $40 billion before the current stripped down $30 billion model was redesigned in 1993. (This number certainly underestimates real station development, construction and maintenance costs.)
All along NASA public relations efforts continued to charm the taxpayer with the wonders of space. School children were and are encouraged to think up experiments that can go on the station. And the first teacher was to go into space on the ill-fated Challenger flight. I do not deny the excitement of space exploration. I bemoan the sad spectacle of space enthusiasts defending programs that make space activities more costly and less feasible against critics who denigrate the importance of space science and exploration.
These programs needless to say enjoyed the strong support from the contractors that benefited from them. Indeed, the Station's survival has been a testimony to the practice of giving out corporate pork and the influence the recipients have exercised over policymakers.
NASA in recent years has seen environmental projects as potential cash cows. Mission to Planet Earth is the epitome of such an enterprise. NASA in the late 1980s had to fight turf battles with other agencies for jurisdiction over satellites to monitor the environment. After all, if the Environmental Protection Agency needs data to fulfill its mission, that should be none of NASA's business. NASA in effect muscled in on the territory of EPA and other government agencies. The mindset at NASA still seems to be that any activities that take place in space should be under its jurisdiction and supervision.
Typical of NASA's political tactics, in February, 1992 it made screaming headlines with its announcement that a huge ozone hole could be in the process of opening over the Northern hemisphere. In fine print the data were skimpy at best. Still, the agency got the politically correct headlines as its funding was being debated. There were few headlines months later when no ozone hole developed.
A second reason for not reauthorizing Mission to Planet Earth is that this program continues to cement NASA and the government in exactly the mode of operation that discourages private sector development of space infrastructure, and that in part accounts for the fact that we do not have space stations and Moon bases at this time. If a government agency, say, EPA, needs data, it should purchase the data, not the hardware, from the private sector. Government agencies should not be in the business of launching remote sensing satellites into space nor owning those satellites. There are private sector providers that could collect the data, based on bids submitted to the agency wishing the information. This approach would help in the development of for profit, private sector alternatives to government functions.
Again, consider NASA's history of protecting its budgets by freezing out true private sector alternatives. In the 1970s and early 1980s, has private launch companies were developing and offering creative and innovative services, federal agencies were prohibited from contracting with these enterprises. If in those years NASA had begun to contract out for services, to get out of the freight hauling business and back to science, we likely would have a vibrant private launch sector offering services for much less than NASA's cost for such efforts. In the 1980s Space Industries of Houston offered to launch a mini-station for $750 million that could take government and other payloads a decade before the planned NASA station. The government would not contract with this private supplier.
Mission to Planet Earth is a project that continues this pattern of bypassing private sector providers, in this case, for remote sensing information.
The third reason for not reauthorizing Mission to Planet Earth is that its mission itself is of questionable value, based on political considerations rather than real science. It seems aimed more at selectively acquiring data to push politically correct agendas than to collect information that is urgently needed by policymakers but cannot be acquired by other, less costly means.
Fear of global warming was the major impetus behind Mission to Planet Earth. But each year reveals exactly what junk science this mission is based on. Rather than rehearse in detail the reasons why the global warming ideology is highly suspect and certainly does not deserve its own multi-billion dollar federal program, I will call your attention to the work and statements by Prof. Patrick J Michaels of the University of Virginia who has testified before this body on this issue at various times.
I would note that the computer models used in the mid-1980s to make the original global warming predictions also would have predicted, based on the data, that the atmosphere should have warmed up by 2.0° over the past 100 years. In fact, the real amount of warming seems to be about half a degree.
I also note that using ground-based data we find that much of this warming took place before World War II. Yet only about one-third of the greenhouse gas enhancement that supposedly causes global warming took place before the War. Two-thirds occurred after. You cannot have an effect, the warming, before the cause.
I note in addition that an article in the New York Times of March 18, 1997 on the influence of ocean currents on global climate suggests that oscillating temperatures are not due to manmade greenhouse gases.
NASA and the contractors working on Mission to Planet Earth want to keep the project going. This is hardly surprising. But thisu program is another example of the federal government's misplaced priorities, an example of a program that never should have been started but possibly will continue on, sucking up taxpayers' dollars. I hope you use this opportunity to reevaluate the mission before it becomes yet another unneeded government activity that policymakers are unable to kill because of the industrial and ideological clients it supports and who, in turn, support the policymakers.
"In the actual debate [with Fred Singer] I was able to answer each objection with a mass of evidence from the published literature and from discussions with climate scientists (all of whom were extremely generous with their time in tutoring me on the latest thinking on issues involved in this complicated subject). In fact, Singer had very little to say in rebuttal but went off into policy and politics instead."
Can't reply without further content regarding what you're trying to say.
As for the tropospheric data, the satellite data doesn't tell the whole story:
Global, hemispheric, and zonal temperature deviations derived from radiosonde records
ATMOSPHERE HAS WARMED OVER PAST 40 YEARS, BUT QUESTIONS REMAIN ABOUT MEASUREMENTS.
"Angell JK, Comparison of surface and tropospheric temperature trends estimated from a 63-station radiosonde network, 1958-1998. Journal of Climate 1999;12:2551-2561.
While debate continues to rage over the future impact of climate warming, researchers are continuing to probe what has been happening recently. Much has been made of the surface temperature trends showing rapid warming during the last few decades. However, suspicions linger that some of this warming could be due to increases in the urban heat island effect, which may influence the temperature records at low levels. Therefore, it is important to determine what has been happening at higher elevations, where greater atmospheric mixing diminishes such concerns.
In this article, trends for the last 40 years in radiosonde (instrumentation used to gather and transmit meteorological data) temperatures extending up to 30,000 feet elevation were compared with surface temperature records in similar locations. The surface warmed at 0.14 degrees Centigrade per decade; the atmosphere from 5,000 to 30,000 feet warmed at only a slightly lower rate (0.10 degrees Centigrade per decade). There are hemispheric differences, but it appears that the troposphere as a whole seems to be warming, at least in these locations.
However, radiosonde data used in this analysis is available primarily for land stations in the Northern Hemisphere. Unfortunately, there is no other source for data above the surface extending back as far as 1958. Satellite data, which has the advantage of being global, is more ambiguous about warming at levels above the surface, but this data extends back only 20 years, and its trends may be affected by calibration and orbital changes. Obtaining global records for the atmosphere above the surface, and maintaining the consistency of the recording instruments, will probably continue to be a problem."
Good thing we have highly trained "experts" to keep us informed.
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