Posted on 02/21/2003 8:22:33 AM PST by dalereed
The evidence on global warming
Joseph Perkins
The San Diego Union-Tribune
February 21, 2003
The Northeastern United States was buried this week in the biggest snowstorm in seven years. The blizzard dumped more than two feet of powder in some places, which ranked among the highest accumulations in the region since meteorologists began keeping track in the early 1890s.
Indeed, the National Weather Service said record snowfalls were set for Boston at 27.5 inches and Baltimore at 27 inches. New York's Central Park recorded 19.5 inches of snow – the city's fourth highest accumulation in history – and Washington, D.C., 24 inches.
The Blizzard of 2003 follows the Great April Fool's Day Storm of 1997, which whited out the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Maryland, and the infamous Blizzard of 1996, which left two to three feet of snow over the Northeast.
Taken together, they suggest a climatic trend. Were these politically different times, one could imagine newspaper and magazine articles speculating that these recent and historic snowstorms are a harbinger of global cooling.
Like the Newsweek article, entitled "The Cooling World," that appeared in its April 28, 1975, issue.
"There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically," it warned. It cited several scientific studies that suggested a "little ice age" was under way.
"The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard pressed to keep up with it," the article assured.
Which brings us to the meeting this past week of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The highlight of the annual confab – or, at least, the most newsworthy occurrence – was a prediction by one of the nation's leading climate scientists that average world temperatures will rise by as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century.
Warren Washington, chief of the Climate Change Research Group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said his very long range climate forecast was based on computer models (which, it should be noted, have proven notoriously unreliable in the past).
The climate scientist did not explain how the Blizzard of 2003, the Great April Fool's Day Storm of 1997 and the Blizzard of 1996 fit into the global warming paradigm. But it's just as well.
Because those who are persuaded that rising planetary temperatures are unnatural, are the result of human consumption of fossil fuels, attribute every conceivable climatic and meteorological phenomenon to global warming – snowstorms, heat waves, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornados, you name it.
Just as those who were no less persuaded a quarter-century ago that the world was headed to a little ice age attributed the "increase in extremes of local weather," as Newsweek reported, to global cooling.
And now, as in 1975, scientists insist that the government must act immediately to prevent climatic catastrophe.
Indeed, Warren Washington suggested that U.S. industries ought to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases that have been blamed for global warming. "If we don't deal with it," he warned, "this problem is going to be enormous."
Washington's words were welcomed, no doubt, by environmental activists who have criticized the Bush administration for not acceding to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming. That U.N. pact would have required the United States to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, which would have amounted to a real reduction of 30 percent when taking into account growth in the nation's economy and population.
Harvard economist Robert Stavins took a hard look at the Kyoto mandates. For the United States to comply by the specified deadline, the government would have been forced to increase the cost of energy to the point that it drove down demand by as much as 40 percent.
That would have entailed a doubling of the cost of petroleum and natural gas. It would have required a quadrupling of the cost of coal – which generates two-thirds of the nation's electricity.
All told, Stavins estimated, implementation of the Kyoto Protocol would have cost the U.S. economy $200 billion a year.
Now if Washington and other climate scientists were certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the planet is overheating, that such a development truly is disastrous and that the human population bears much of the blame, then $200 billion a year wouldn't be outrageous.
But the reality is that Washington cannot say, with a high degree of confidence, that the global warming trend his computer model predicts actually will come to pass.
For Mother Earth, quite likely, is far more resilient than Washington and his computer model have taken into account.
Perkins can be reached via e-mail at joseph.perkins@uniontrib.com.
Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
But the reality is that Washington cannot say, with a high degree of confidence, that the global warming trend his computer model predicts actually will come to pass.
5.56mm
Does it ever occur to these highly educated persons that the planet goes through natural climate changes that have absolutely nothing to do with human beings? Why is it that man continues to think he can somehow control nature and this planet on which he standeth? Passing stupid laws isn't going to persuade nature to stop her climate changes, or earthquakes, or erupting volcanoes...
There are a lot of people now whose carreers and reputations are tied to Global Warming. They will do absolutely anything to save themselves.
Work with Chaos Theory has demonstrated anyway, that the long term prediction of climate and weather is simply not possible.
So9
200 billion divided by 300 million people in this country equals $666 per person!
It is EVIL!!!
She has a master's degree in marine biology and is just slightly left of the Kennedys. She is certain that global warming is caused by greedy industrialists and SUVs.
She was incredulous when told of the fact that there were farms in Greenland and that grapes were grown in England 1000 years ago. Greenies never learn, they can only feel.
You can also inform her that not only did they have farms, but grapes were grown in Greenland during the Medieval Thermal Maximum, from about 1000 to 1250 AD. Temperatures then are estimated to be 2-3 degrees F warmer than today. There is an excellent book titled "The Little Ice Age" by Brian Fagan that cites a wealth of data documenting the wild variations in (primarily) European and North Atlantic weather during the last millenium.
It was all the fault of those greedy Norweigan cod fishing captialists who diverted the natural wind patterns of the North Atlantic with all the large sails on their fishing fleets.
Then you have to input accurate data. And the model is also subject to an intrinsic suseptibility toward mathematical chaos, a la the famous "butterfly effect".
Most climate models today have only rough approximations of the effects of clouds and water vapor in the atmosphere, if at all, yet water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas.
An NCAR study published this month revealed wide gaps in our understanding of the basic composition of earth's atmosphere. Here's a couple of the findings in the article posted here on FR under the title "Hidden Clouds May Help Shape Climate".
"It is possible that decades of climate records have underestimated the amount of cirrus clouds in the global atmosphere," Anthes said.In the cold air from about 26,000 to 42,000 feet high, the team found that standard sensors nearly always showed relative humidities ranging from about 10 percent to 30 percent. In contrast, more than half of the Snow White deployments showed areas of moisture at these altitudes with relative humidities from 90 percent to 100 percent - a strong sign of clouds.
Not unlike the last great junk science scam, Cold Fusion. Global Warming is the ultimate junk science. The system being studied is enormous, the effects being measured are so small they are almost immeasurable, and the time frame for taking the measurements is on the order of decades. In that time they can milk research grants for the rest of their lives and never have to worry about showing any meaningful results that can be independently verified.
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