Who Is In Denial? (Global Warming - whose Fault?)

Tech Central Station ^ | December 12, 2002 | Sallie Baliunas, Tim Patterson, Allan MacRae

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Who Is In Denial?

By Sallie Baliunas, Tim Patterson, Allan MacRae	12/12/2002

TCS

The Bush Administration last week finished a three-day conference on the science and potential risks posed by climate change. The Administration's critics wasted no time. They pounced Monday and called for the U.S. to push ahead with the Kyoto Protocol and condemned the White House for being "in denial on warming" (Boston Globe, 12/9/02), for trying to "stall any meaningful action" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 12/9/02) and saying that the U.S. must stop being "unilateralist" and "must listen to others" (Los Angeles Times, 12/9/02).

What the debate over climate change needs today are fewer uninformed assertions and accusations in major newspapers, and a more sober assessment of the science. Here are just of few of the most relevant facts often ignored by Kyoto's proponents.

The Kyoto Protocol assumes human activities - such as burning fossil fuels to power automobiles or electricity generators - cause global warming. Here are the facts.

Greenhouse gases, clouds and aerosols in the atmosphere trap some of the solar radiation reflected from the Earth's surface. This causes a natural "greenhouse effect" that warms the earth and makes it habitable. Those gases include carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and water vapor (H2O). Water vapor provides most of the greenhouse effect.

During the last 300 years, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have risen from 275 parts per million (ppmv) to around 360 ppmv, a 30% increase. Most of the increase has been recent, caused by fossil fuel burning and deforestation.

Those who fear human-induced global warming believe that unless we curb CO2 emissions, the greenhouse effect will intensify and warm the planet with disastrous consequences.

Contrary to Kyoto rhetoric, the increase in atmospheric CO2 content - while clearly linked to post-WWII industrialization - is not a significant driver of global warming. Here's why.

Over the last 150,000 years, CO2 levels have closely paralleled temperatures. However, detailed analysis indicates that CO2 levels often rose and peaked several hundred years after temperature did. That means climate change drives major changes in CO2, not the reverse.

Climate has been both warmer and colder in the past, before significant fossil fuel use. From about 900 to 1300 AD, for example, the climate was warmer than it is today. A 500-year cooling followed, then a warming trend since the mid-1800's.

The 20th century surface temperature record shows three trends: First, a warming trend of about 0.5 C, peaking around 1940. Next, a cooling trend occurred from 1940 until the late 1970's, followed by the recent warming trend. But 80% of the CO2 from human activities was added to the air after 1940. That means the early 20th Century warming and the mid-century cooling trends were largely natural, not CO2-driven.

Computer simulations of human-made global warming predict significant temperature warming not only near the Earth's surface but also from one to five miles altitude, in a layer called the lower troposphere. But NASA and NOAA records show that the temperature of the lower troposphere varies as a result of natural factors. No meaningful human-caused warming trend - as forecast by the computer simulations - can be found.

Computer simulations all have forecast warming trends much steeper over the last several decades than what was actually seen. The forecasts exaggerate somewhat the warming at the surface, and profoundly in the lower troposphere. Further, computer models that Kyoto's proponents point to predicting catastrophic human-induced global warming have consistently failed to reproduce accurately past and present climate changes. So the100-year forecasts predicting catastrophe are suspect.

There is strong evidence, moreover, that variation in the Sun's energy output is a much more significant driver of surface temperature than human-made greenhouse gases. Temperatures over the past 250 years show a strong correlation to the energy output of the sun (see chart below). The sun's shorter magnetic cycles are more intense, suggesting periods of a brighter sun, then a fainter sun during longer cycles.


Changes in the Sun's magnetism (as evidenced by the changing length of the 22-year, or Hale Polarity Cycle, dotted line) and changes in smoothed Northern Hemisphere land temperature through 1986 (solid line) are closely correlated. The record of reconstructed Northern Hemisphere land temperature substitutes for global temperature, which is unavailable back to 1700 (S. Baliunas and W. Soon, 1995, Astrophysical Journal, 450, 896).


Science and new technology have always provided solutions to problems that mankind has faced. The matter of climate and energy supply will be no different.

For example, a new program - the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) - was recently launched at Stanford University, with the support of several visionary companies. The program seeks to raise efficiency - a laudable goal on its own merits. As energy technologies advance, carbon dioxide emissions per unit of economic output will continue to decline, as history shows it does when technology and economic growth work to advance energy supplies. Powered by the private sector and unfettered by flawed Kyoto-type governmental mandates, the approach is pro-science, pro-technology, pro-environment and pro-people.

Western governments and businesses should continue their leadership positions in studying climate science still further to obtain a better understanding before risking the detrimental economic consequences of a Kyoto Protocol based on incomplete and dubious science. When it to comes to climate change, humans haven't been the culprits. But by using science and technology, humans will develop the ways to best adapt to the world's ever-changing climate.

Dr. Sallie Baliunas is Enviro-Sci host of TCS. Dr. Tim Patterson is a professor of geology (paleoclimatology) in the Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa. Allan M. R. MacRae is a professional engineer, investment banker and environmentalist. Views expressed are not necessarily those of any institution with which the authors are affiliated.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

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[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Perhaps this is the piece you referred to on the other thread!

[Carry_Okie]

Excellent summary.
This piece is a perfect response to one's less informed aquaintances.

[madfly]

Global Warming ping

[madfly]

Global Warming ping.

[headsonpikes]

It was never about science; it's always been about power and control.

Smash the Watermelons!

Heads on Pikes!

[Zon]

Another example of depression-causing dishonesty is global warming:  The poverty-creating Kyoto-Treaty-type laws are fashioned from 1990s-chic pervarications.  Socialist/fascist green armies led by demagogues who politicized spurious global warming are increasingly crippling American business, decaying world economies, and lethally shriveling human standards of living, especially for poverty-stricken underclasses. …Applaud President Bush for withdrawing America from that destructively irrational treaty. 

Dishonesties reign supreme as pseudo-environmentalists use demagoguery, scientisms, and outright lies to 'prove' that humans are the cause of global warming.  For, scientifically-valid, statistical examinations of long-term weather trends show that the combined activities of humans today have little or no measurable effect on nature’s overwhelmingly-massive weather patterns that alternatively produce lethal ice ages and then life-enhancing warm ages.  That fact becomes evident upon analyzing the world climate changes during the past 12,000 years, from the Neolithic Age to the present age. 

Most important, global warming brings the greatest natural benefits to human life.  For, it brings massive increases of free, clean sun energy to this world.  Through the millennia, global warming has been the single greatest factor for increasing human standards of living. …Global warming means huge expansions of arable land yielding more-and-better food with improving living conditions not only for human life, but for plant and animal life as well. 

Of course, long-range climatic changes bring gradual changes in topography and water conditions that can cause inconveniences to some people in certain geographical locations.  But, the huge net benefits that global warming provide life and society vastly surpass such inconveniences -- inconveniences that human adaptability can easily handle, especially with the resulting increases in world wealth combined with modern-day technology. …So, if and when man can noticeably increase global warming, bring him on to do the job!

However, the mounting smog pollution in non-capitalist countries -- especially third-world, totalitarian/socialist countries -- is causing increasingly lethal health problems in those unfree countries. …Free enterprise, science, and capitalism are the resources to overcome such problems. 
Valuable Nuggets

[alaskanfan]

Water vapor provides most of the greenhouse effect.

Maybe we should just quit watering our lawns.

[Congressman Billybob]

Thanks for the ping.

This is the same expert and the same subject. However, the speech I heard her give in Washington was more detailed than this, and included some ten, very precise charts.

This is enough to jog my memory and make my article more accurate than anything currently in the mainstream media.

Congressman Billybob

[cake_crumb]

"There is strong evidence, moreover, that variation in the Sun's energy output is a much more significant driver of surface temperature than human-made greenhouse gases. Temperatures over the past 250 years show a strong correlation to the energy output of the sun (see chart below). The sun's shorter magnetic cycles are more intense, suggesting periods of a brighter sun, then a fainter sun during longer cycles."

Indeed. It was proven - and ignored - in the 1980's that the sun doesn't burn steadily. Rather, it "flickers like a candle" if I remembr the qoute from the paper correctly. If not, it's a close paraphrase.

On top of that, anyone, scientist or not, who has a fair amount of common sense and has has lived for more than two decades, WHO PAYS A LITTLE ATTENTION can tell you that cooling, warming trends and weather patterns within each cycle of 11 to 12 years also changes significantly with the sun's normal cycle of sunspot activity.

Further, the earth's normal geologic cycles, which occur over tens of thousands of years but can be tracked vis core ice samples, must be added in to the equation.

Then again, we all know that Kyoto and all the current environazi movements aren't driven by love or fear for the earth or it's climate. They're driven by MONEY AND THE HUNGER FOR POWER. Period. Every one of these environazi groups can be traced right to the UN. Kyoto is just another way for the UN to impliment it's worldwide, one-world, socialist agenda.

Unilateralize THIS, UN.

[Robert A Cook PE]

What is the relationship between the RECENT and EXTREME change in the magnetic pole movement (now several hundred kilometers from it position only a few years ago!), the simultaneous reduction in earth's magnetic field, and probable/possible/definite changes in the sun's magnetic field intensity?

Is any part of the recent change in temperature due to the earth's (pending/on-going) magnetic pole reversal?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I don't know but I would bet some enterprising scientist is writing a request for a grant right now to do a study to explain what is happening!

[Free the USA]

I was reading the other day about how warming of ocean temperatures leads to the melting of Methane Hydrate Crystals from the ocean floor and the release CO2 into the atmosphere. That would fit nicely with the idea that atmospheric CO2 levels are a lagging indicator of Global Warming, not a cause.

[cake_crumb]

The earth switches magnetic poles regularly...as to whether poll switches are related to weather, that's a question that can never be answered until we STOP combining science and politics.

[cake_crumb]

"Powered by the private sector and unfettered by flawed Kyoto-type governmental mandates, the approach is pro-science, pro-technology, pro-environment and pro-people."

Exactly the opposite of the UN's agenda. The UN can't have supply side capitalism!! No wonder they're turning up the heat in the propaganda war.

[Bernard Marx]

it's always been about power and control.

And U.N./Marxist redistribution of AMERICAN wealth.

[blackie]

Stop the attacks on our Freedoms by the wacko, extreme left-wing, lunatic fringe, dirt worshipping Green Jihadist, enviro-nazis terrorist's and their toadies in the media!

Protect The Forest...Eradicate The Greenies!

Be well - Be armed - Be safe - Molon Labe!

[F.J. Mitchell]

"Maybe we should just quit watering our lawns."

I never started-if the Lord intends for me to spend the summer enhaling lawn mower fumes, he'll send the rain.

It's not healthy for grass to mow it before it gets taller than it can grow during an Alaskan summer anyway-I know gloating when I see it. Shame, shame, shame!

[Iowa Granny]

Thanx, Ernie, for posting this. I heard the presentation by Dr Sallie Baliunas mentioned by Congressman Billy Bob. It was dynamite stuff.

CongressCritter, I'd appreciate a ping to your article once it is up and distributed. Since the Koyoto folks failed so miserably here with the Feds, we are anticipating an attempt to run the CO2 language thru the states. I would like to have your article for distribution at a meeting in Denver in mid January.