Posted on 08/16/2002 1:49:55 PM PDT by The Raven
Last month, the Bush White House, citing a “new” study, revisited its position on global warming. The media went into a feeding frenzy and, like an e-mail scam that won’t die, the global warming debate has again been resuscitated. Unfortunately, the “new” study is based on the same old studies – chief among them the 1996 IPCC ‘s “Summary for Policy Makers” -- whose conclusions rest on three fallacious claims:
1) Based on historical weather data, average global temperatures have risen dramatically in the latter half of the 20th Century.
2) Scientific research indicates that the cause of such rising temperatures is man made.
3) There is a consensus among scientists supporting both claims.
The first claim – that global temperatures have risen dramatically since 1940 – finds its source in the
approximately 100 year-old temperature record of the National Weather Service. According to the NASA report, Global Climate Monitoring: The Accuracy of Satellite Data, though, the NWS record is based strictly on surface temperature readings. When weather balloon and satellite records are examined one finds temperatures either stayed the same or actually declined by as much as 1 degree F during that period.
What if we step outside the NWS box?
Data extrapolated from tree ring, ice core and lake sediment indicate that in the 18th Century the average world sea and surface temperatures were 71 degrees F. Climatologists refer to this period as “The Little Ice Age.” Such data also show that in 1000 BCE the average global temperature was over 25 degrees Celsius or 77 degrees F. By comparison, the average global temperature in 1999 was 73.5 degrees F. The conclusion to reach about the claim of dramatically rising global temperatures in the latter half of the 20th Century is clear. First, it depends on where you stick your thermometer, on the surface, (whose reading will be highly inaccurate due to urban hot spots) or in the atmosphere (the most accurate readings). Second, the significance of the data depend upon the historical climate record of the planet. Here, as with any kind of scientific data, context and perspective is everything.
Of the second claim, that the cause of global warming is man-made, environmental activists point to the correlation between recent global industrialization and the sweltering summers of 1998 and 1999. A correlation, though, is not proof of cause. If global industrialization were the cause of planetary warming, the satellite and balloon temperature record from 1940 to 1980 – a period of far greater worldwide
industrialization – would show a marked increase in average global temperatures, which it does not. Indeed, such data show temperatures declining.
A cause and effect relationship, though, has been discovered between solar activity and global temperatures. Danish climatologists Friis-Christensen and K. Lassen (in the 1991 issue of Science) and Douglas V. Hoyt and Dr. Kenneth H. Schatten (in their book, The Role of the Sun in Climate Change) found that “global temperature variations during the past century are virtually all due to the variations in solar activity.”
What about carbon dioxide levels? Scientists have found that past carbon dioxide levels, based, again, on historical and pre-historical tree ring, ice core and lake sediment samples, have changed significantly without human influence. Note, too, that between 1940 and 1980, when man-made levels of CO2 swelled rapidly, there was a decline in temperatures.
If scientific temperature records belie global warming; if scientists conclude that global temperatures are minimally affected by man; where, then, is scientific consensus – the third claim supporting the notion of global warming? The answer is: there isn’t any.
In 1996 the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the IPCC -- released a document titled, “Summary for Policy Makers,” which supported the notion of global warming. Environmentalists crowed that 15,000 scientists had signed the document.
However, the report was doctored without the knowledge of most of those 15,000 scientists, whose protests became so vocal that the lead authors backed off their conclusions, disavowing the document as “a political tract, not a scientific report.”
In 1998, 17,000 scientists, six of whom are Nobel Laureates, signed the Oregon Petition, which declares, in part: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. ”
In 1999 over ten thousand of the world’s most renowned climatologists, astrophysicists, meteorologists, etc., signed an open letter by Frederick Seitz, NAS Past President, that states, in part: the Kyoto Accord is “based upon flawed ideas.”
Finally, in a paper in June of 2001, aptly titled, GLOBAL WARMING: The Press Gets It Wrong – our report doesn't support the Kyoto treaty, Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: “Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens.”
In light of these facts, if the continual resurrection of the issue of global warming in the media is not a consummate example of the Big Lie, I’d be hard pressed to find a better one.
--Steven Brockerman is an assistant editor for Capitalism Magazine, www.capitalismmagazine.com
For a rebuttal of this theory, see http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1994/vo10no23.htm
If the earth heats up, more water is evaporated, creating clouds and the earth cools.(remember the "nuclear winter" scenario?) Once the temperature reaches some happy medium, the clouds dissipate, and the earth warms. To me, this explains the temperature cycles seen in the small amount of historical data that does exist.
Simple physics will react to any intervention man could create.
But aside from that --- getting back to the sun.....there are obvious cycles in the data......I couldn't find if the climate folks have the sun's cycles in their models. Here's an explanation, however, I found on the sun:
"...The sun experiences magnetic cycles that last 22 years, during which the sun reaches peak brightness and then swings back to a dimmer state. Baliunas also points out that, "The length of the magnetic cycle is closely related to its amplitude; thus the sun should be brightest when the sunspot cycle is short."
According to Baliunas, "Changes in the length of the magnetic cycle and in Northern Hemisphere land temperatures are closely correlated over three centuries." She also argues that if the data are correct, "Changes in the sunspot cycle would explain average temperature change of about 0.5 degrees C in the past 100 years."
A play on words? You can use the mean to 'mean' "pretty much the average". The two terms--mathematically--are not identical, but "close enough". They are using the "mean" temperature.
The mean is that temperature below which 50% of the sampled temperatures will occur and above which 50% of the sampled temperatures will occur.
--Boris
This is true. They used to plot this data against the predictions of the warming doomsayers, using computer programs. The prediction is that we should all be roasting by now. For some reason, they no longer show the prediction alongside the data.
The moderate warming is wholly assignable to an equally-moderate increase in the "Solar Constant", i.e., the output power of the Sun, which has been gently rising for several human lifetimes.
--Boris
enviro- self-ping.
The trouble with their arguments is this: As winds blow
accross the US, they lose carbon dioxide. The air over the
Atlantic contains less carbon dioxide that that over the
Pacific. I found this in a book "The Bottomless Well" by
Huber and Mills who cite a recent article in Science.
Somehow we soak up more carbon dioxide than we emit. We are
the good guys.
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