Scientists cooling on the idea of global warming - reprise

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand a reprint of an oldie but a goodie about AGW from 2008.  It is deliciously funny that at least one Global Warming conference has been completely snowed out since  I began blogging on the subject and at least one other rescheduled.   Hey, if Hollywood can remake a John Wayne movie using Jeff Bridges I can copy an old post!  More to come!


Sunday, December 14, 2008

Scientists cooling on the idea of global warming


Snow in N.O.

First, I am going to copy a post that you really should read in it's entirety:

More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims

Over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe challenged man-made global warming claims made by the United Nations Intergovernemntal Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore. This new 231-page U.S. Senate Minority Report report -- updated from 2007’s groundbreaking report of over 400 scientists who voiced skepticism about the so-called global warming “consensus” -- features the skeptical voices of over 650 prominent international scientists, including many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN IPCC. (This entry is a summary of the U. S. Senate Minority Report)

Below is just a small selection of quotes and highlights from the updated 2008 Senate Minority Report featuring over 650 international scientists dissenting from man-made climate fears. The 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers. Note how many of these scientists have peer reviewed and published studies, are former IPCC members, are long term government scientists, there are even a couple of astronauts with scientific backgrounds. So the next time someone tells you that only crackpots deny that man is causing global warming print this out for them:
“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” - Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.
“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical. “The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system” - Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology, and formerly of NASA, who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”
Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” - UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist
“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet
“So far, real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming.” - Scientist Dr. Jarl R. Ahlbeck, a chemical engineer at Abo Akademi University in Finland, author of 200 scientific publications and former Greenpeace member.
“Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our time.” - Solar physicist Dr. Pal Brekke, senior advisor to the Norwegian Space Centre in Oslo. Brekke has published more than 40 peer-reviewed scientific articles on the sun and solar interaction with the Earth.
“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” - U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.
“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.
“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri's asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it's hard to remain quiet.” - Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.
“The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round…A large number of critical documents submitted at the 1995 U.N. conference in Madrid vanished without a trace. As a result, the discussion was one-sided and heavily biased, and the U.N. declared global warming to be a scientific fact,” Andrei Kapitsa, a Russian geographer and Antarctic ice core researcher.
“Nature's regulatory instrument is water vapor: more carbon dioxide leads to less moisture in the air, keeping the overall GHG content in accord with the necessary balance conditions.” – Prominent Hungarian Physicist and environmental researcher Dr. Miklós Zágoni reversed his view of man-made warming and is now a skeptic. Zágoni was once Hungary’s most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol.
“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" - Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.
“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” - Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.
“The quantity of CO2 we produce is insignificant in terms of the natural circulation between air, water and soil... I am doing a detailed assessment of the UN IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science.” - South Afican Nuclear Physicist and Chemical Engineer Dr. Philip Lloyd, a UN IPCC co-coordinating lead author who has authored over 150 refereed publications.
“All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead” - Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut, served as staff physicist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another….Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so…Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.” - Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.
“Whatever the weather, it's not being caused by global warming. If anything, the climate may be starting into a cooling period.” Atmospheric scientist Dr. Art V. Douglas, former Chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and is the author of numerous papers for peer-reviewed publications.
“But there is no falsifiable scientific basis whatever to assert this warming is caused by human-produced greenhouse gasses because current physical theory is too grossly inadequate to establish any cause at all.” - Chemist Dr. Patrick Frank, who has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles.
“The ‘global warming scare’ is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. It has no place in the Society's activities.” - Award-Winning NASA Astronaut/Geologist and Moonwalker Jack Schmitt who flew on the Apollo 17 mission and formerly of the Norwegian Geological Survey and for the U.S. Geological Survey.
“Earth has cooled since 1998 in defiance of the predictions by the UN-IPCC….The global temperature for 2007 was the coldest in a decade and the coldest of the millennium…which is why ‘global warming’ is now called ‘climate change.’” - Climatologist Dr. Richard Keen of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado.
“I have yet to see credible proof of carbon dioxide driving climate change, yet alone man-made CO2 driving it. The atmospheric hot-spot is missing and the ice core data refute this. When will we collectively awake from this deceptive delusion?” - Dr. G LeBlanc Smith, a retired Principal Research Scientist with Australia’s Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Link to the full Senate report - U. S. Senate Minority Report: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims Scientists Continue to Debunk “Consensus” in 2008

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Within the past year, various organizations and scientists have begun to realize that it is pretty likely we are headed for a time of global cooling, not warming.


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On the other hand, there are large numbers of folks who not only hold on tight to the idea of manmade global warming, they will lie to try to support the idea. Here is an article that just came out on the Associated Press:
The article begins thusly: WASHINGTON – When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warmingwas a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can't avoid.
Since Clinton's inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton's second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.
That first sentence is an unverified opinion. The second is now known to be completely false, and since this is supposedly being authored by a "science writer" it makes the statement a flat-out lie.
"According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.
Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900."
In recent years, temperature measuring stations have been placed in locations that are more likely to register higher temperatures, as this blog has illustrated convincingly. It is true that temperatures in suburban areas are rising as farmlands and forest are making way for homes and roads and stores and parking lots.
In fact, snowfalls are coming earlier and are larger than usual this year in Europe.
Houston recorded its earliest snowfall this year.





New Orleans is getting snowed on.
Glaciers and antarctic ice are growing, not melting


If you read this following article, you will likely be convinced that some very good scientific research completely debunks the idea that we are in danger of manmade global warming endangering our way of life. There are some technical sections here, but allow me to give you some excerpts:

We're reminded of an earlier story, which happened back in 1912. This was the amazing discovery of a skull and jawbone in which was quickly named the Piltdown Man and which all the world's archaeologists immediately accepted as a hitherto unknown form of early human. It appears no one bothered to examine it closely, assuming that other scientists had thoroughly investigated and vetted it. The hoax wasn't uncovered until 1953, when it was learned that the skull was that of a modern man and the jaw that of an orangutan. Seems no one had ever bothered to take a really close look at the artifact.
Well, folks, it does appear we have a new, 21st Century Piltdown Man, and this time we know his name.
He's called "Anthropogenic Global Warming"
It's hard to nail down exactly when the sky started falling, but certainly the work of Michael Mann provided its first global exposure. Michael Mann, a paleoclimatologist ( one who attempts to interpret the past climate through certain Paleolithic records, such as ice core samples, sea bed sediments, coral heads, and tree ring growth ), submitted a paper to Nature magazine in 1998 which, unfortunately, was not subjected to peer review before publication. In it, he offered what has now become known as the famous "hockey stick" chart, showing the earth's temperature having been relatively constant for the past thousand years before suddenly skyrocketing upward at the dawn of the 20th century. His interpretation was that man's production of CO2 in the modern age was obviously responsible for the sudden increase. It turned out to be one of the biggest scientific blunders of all time.

AND

Man-made CO2 doesn't appear physically capable of absorbing much more than
two-thousandths of the radiated heat (IR) passing upward through the atmosphere.

And, if all of the available heat in that spectrum is indeed being captured by the current CO2 levels before leaving the atmosphere, then adding more CO2 to the atmosphere won't matter a bit.

In short, the laws of physics don't seem to allow CO2 it's currently assumed place as a significant "greenhouse gas" based on present concentrations. The other "greenhouse gases" such as methane, nitrous oxide, tetrafluoromethane, hexafluoroethane, sulfur hexafluoride, trifluoromethane, 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane, and 1,1-difluoroethane exist only in extraordinarily smaller amounts and aren't even up for serious discussion by any segment of the scientific community. And, since the other components of the atmosphere (oxygen, nitrogen, and water vapor) aren't materially affected by human activity, the "greenhouse effect" is essentially a totally natural phenomenon, unaffected by human activity. We could repeat the spectral analysis and calculations for Oxygen, or O2 ( The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere remains exactly the same at all heights up to about 85 km, and is about 20.9% by volume ) and Nitrogen (N2) which is the whopper at 78.1% - but we won't. We'll leave that as your homework problem now that you know how to do it. Just look up the atomic absorption spectra for both, and do the math. You'll discover that Oxygen and Nitrogen aren't even "greenhouse gases", so that leaves the principal greenhouse gas... you guessed it.... Water Vapor. Curiously enough, the UN IPCC reports don't even mention water vapor, since it is technically not a "gas" in the atmosphere. Dr. Roy W. Spencer has one of the best comments we've read on this subject:

"Al Gore likes to say that mankind puts 70 million tons of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere every day. What he probably doesn't know is that
mother nature puts 24,000 times that amount of our main greenhouse gas
-- water vapor -- into the atmosphere every day, and removes about the
same amount every day. While this does not 'prove' that global warming
is not manmade, it shows that weather systems have by far the greatest
control over the Earth's greenhouse effect, which is dominated by
water vapor and clouds."
We can safely ballpark water vapor as being responsible for more than 95% of all the greenhouse effect, with oxygen and nitrogen playing no role and carbon dioxide being relatively insignificant... particularly the even smaller human-produced part.

Side note: Both Oxygen and Nitrogen don't like to live alone. They prefer to find another and stick together into a diatomic ( 2 atom ) molecule. Thus the molecular weight of atmospheric oxygen or nitrogen is approximately twice that of one of them alone. We say "approximately", because it takes energy to bind them together, and mass and energy are equivalent stuff, as our good friend Dr. Einstein explained with his famous equation E=MC2.
Now, you can sit back and give yourself a pat on the back, because you now know more pure physics of the atmosphere than a lot of so-called "climate scientists", and likely know more than almost all of the non-scientist Popular Journalists and other writers churning out panic-stricken books and newspaper articles on the subject.

And for sure, you now know a lot more than Al Gore.
AND

Canadian climatologist Tim Patterson says the sun drives the earth's climate changes—and Earth's current global warming is a direct result of a long, moderate 1,500-year cycle in the sun's irradiance.

Patterson says he learned of the 1,500-year climate cycle while studying cycles in fish numbers on Canada's West Coast. Since the Canadian West had no long-term written fishery records, Patterson's research team drilled sediment cores in the deep local fjords to get 5,000-year climate profiles from the mud. The mud showed the past climate conditions: Warm summers left layers thick with one-celled fossils and fish scales. Cold, wet periods showed dark sediments, mostly dirt washed from the surrounding land. Patterson's fishing profiles clearly revealed the sun's 87 and 210-year solar cycles—and the longer, 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles found since the 1980s in ice cores, tree rings, and fossil pollen.

AND

Last March, global warming fanatic Al Gore used a picture of two polar bears purportedly stranded on melting ice off the coast of Alaska as a visual aide to support his claim that man-made global warming is doing great harm to Mother Earth. The one he chose, but didn’t offer to pay for right away, turned out to be a photo of a polar bear and her cub out doing what healthy, happy polar bears do on a wave-eroded chunk of ice not all that far from shore in the Beaufort Sea north of Barstow, Alaska.

The picture, wrongly credited to Dan Crosbie, an ice observer specialist for the Canadian Ice Service, was actually taken by Amanda Byrd while she was on a university-related research cruise in August of 2004, a time of year when the fringe of the Arctic ice cap normally melts.
Byrd, a marine biology grad student at the time, was gathering zooplankton for a multi-year study of the Arctic Ocean. Crosbie, who was also on the trip, pilfered the polar bear photo from a shared computer onboard the Canadian icebreaker where Ms. Byrd downloaded her snapshots; he saved it in his personal file. Several months later, Crosbie, who is known as an avid photographer, gave the photo to the Canadian Ice Service, which then allowed Environment Canada to use it as an illustration for an online magazine.
Today that photo, with credit given to photographer Dan Crosbie and the Canadian Ice Service, can be found all over the Internet, generally with the caption “Two polar bears are stranded on a chunk of melting ice”.

It’s a hoax, folks. The bears, which can swim distances of about 100 kilometers (about 60 miles)  and more, weren’t stranded; they were merely taking a break and watching the boat go by when a lady snapped their picture.

AND

Summary - Exactly what have we learned here?
 
1. The "Greenhouse Effect" is a natural and valuable phenomenon, without which, the planet would be uninhabitable.2. Modest Global Warming, at least up until 1998 when a cooling trend began, has been real.
3. CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas; 95% of the contribution is due to Water Vapor.
4. Man's contribution to Greenhouse Gasses is relatively insignificant. We didn't cause the recent Global Warming and we cannot stop it.
5. Solar Activity appears to be the principal driver for Climate Change, accompanied by complex ocean currents which distribute the heat and control local weather systems.
6. CO2 is a useful trace gas in the atmosphere, and the planet would actually benefit by having more, not less of it, because it is not a driver for Global Warming and would enrich our vegetation, yielding better crops to feed the expanding population.
7. CO2 is not causing global warming, in fact, CO2 is lagging temperature change in all reliable datasets. The cart is not pulling the donkey, and the future cannot influence the past.
8. Nothing happening in the climate today is particularly unusual, and in fact has happened many times in the past and will likely happen again in the future.
9. The UN IPCC has corrupted the "reporting process" so badly, it makes the oil-for-food scandal look like someone stole some kid's lunch money. They do not follow the Scientific Method, and modify the science as needed to fit their predetermined conclusions. In empirical science, one does NOT write the conclusion first, then solicit "opinion" on the report, ignoring any opinion which does not fit their predetermined conclusion while falsifying data to support unrealistic models.
10. Polar Bear populations are not endangered, in fact current populations are healthy and at almost historic highs. The push to list them as endangered is an effort to gain political control of their habitat... particularly the North Slope oil fields.
11. There is no demonstrated causal relationship between hurricanes and/or tornadoes and global warming. This is sheer conjecture totally unsupported by any material science.
12. Observed glacial retreats in certain select areas have been going on for hundreds of years, and show no serious correlation to short-term swings in global temperatures.
13. Greenland is shown to be an island completely surrounded by water, not ice, in maps dating to the 14th century. There is active geothermal activity in the currently "melting" sections of Greenland.
14. The Antarctic Ice cover is currently the largest ever observed by satellite, and periodic ice shelf breakups are normal and correlate well with localized tectonic and geothermal activity along the Antarctic Peninsula.
15. The Global Warming Panic was triggered by an artifact of poor mathematics which has been thoroughly disproved. The panic is being deliberately nurtured by those who stand to gain both financially and politically from perpetuation of the hoax.
16. Scientists who "deny" the hoax are often threatened with loss of funding or even their jobs.
17. The correlation between solar activity and climate is now so strong that solar physicists are now seriously discussing the much greater danger of pending global cooling.
18. Biofuel hysteria is already having a disastrous effect on world food supplies and prices, and current technologies for biofuel production consume more energy than the fuels produce.
19. Global Warming Hysteria is potentially linked to a stress-induced mental disorder.
20. In short, there is no "climate crisis" of any kind at work on our planet.



Sorry, folks, but the science is NOT the same as the spin. Global cooling is here and we have to hope that it won't be bad enough to become another mini-ice age. If it really is possible to warm the earth with emissions, we had better ramp up the emitting and now!