Home <>----<> Photography <>----<> Muffins <>----<> Poetry, Prose & Politics <>----<> Purchase from On The Fly
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Why put all these words on paper? Who am I to be putting these words on paper? How should these words be evaluated? Good questions all.
The first thing that must be known, is that unlike most people reading this, I have been on both sides of the issue. I was raised to be, for the most part, what in common language would be called a liberal. Common language is what I call media language. People educated in the history of though will know that a classical liberal is more akin to a libertarian (or not depending on your view) but most assuredly has nothing to do with the political thoughts which we call liberal today. But back on the subject. I was raised believing in all the liberal dogma. Government is good, rich people are bad, overpopulation, save the whales, murder unborn children, collect taxes and redistribute wealth, religion is evil, and along with it all, global warming. So, for those of you who believe in this nonsense, I was once one of you. Based on this I can say with certainty:
First, whatever rational you have to support your belief, I already know it.
Second, whatever rational you have to support your belief, I have already defeated it, otherwise I would still believe in global warming. The fact that my belief has changed was due entirely to my analysis of the available scientific data. This analysis proved capable of converting me at a time that I was a serious leftist; only a few steps away from comunisim with one foot firmly in socialist territory. I have been a supporter of Earth First!, Greenpeace, The Conservation Society and most any other Watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) organisation you can name.
I spend my time writing this because I know there is a chance I can wake up one person. Just one, and maybe that would be a good thing. Unlike the Republicarats I do not believe that I have any duty to convince people that I am right and they are wrong. I make most every effort to avoid political discussion, and before entering one I always warm the other participants that I will be unmerciful and even if they are my friends I will do my best to cut them, destroy them and humiliate them. In addition, to be quite honest, I think that it's good to have sheep around me. Sheep are easier to manipulate and to use. If everyone were smart & free thinking it would be much harder to get what I want. The government certainly agrees with this (as do the media & the corporations). That is the reason education is in the self interest of no one but the individual, and is to the detriment of the government, media and corporations along with most other institutions (Hollywood, organised religion, publik education and universities). Most individuals believe they are educated -- because they are told so by the very institutions which have an interest in keeping them uneducated. Slavery is freedom, freedom is slavery. Knowledge is ignorance, ignorance is knowledge.
I find it interesting how people will attack this work with the very fallacies they accuse me of. Naturally, they believe that when they use a fallacy, it can be over looked. A wonderful example of this can be seen in the current Klinton / Starr affair. The reasoning goes like this. Klinton is just a man, and men make mistakes and do bad things, but they can be forgiven. Starr is doing bad things by pursuing the issues & we should forgive Klinton. The problem with this then becomes thus: If we forgive men for doing bad things, and Starr is doing a bad thing, why don't we just forgive him? After all, he's just trying to do his job. Starr was hired, by your government, to be the special prosecutor of Klinton. Do you see the point? If not, you may as well stop here, because this exercise will just be a waste of your time. We will see more of this type of thinking in the final essay.
I am currently taking a philosophy class here at Aims. While I find that some of the ideas don't seem to be very useful in a practical sense, at least it does force the brain to work a bit. However today the instructor handed us a paper with some interesting information on it which I want to tell you. As you read my essays, as you listen to the media & the government, as you go thru daily life try these rules out. I understand they are hard to apply. It was a process like this that took me from being a liberal to being a conservative to being a libertarian. This process did not occur overnight. In fact the complete voyage took around 4 years. Now that I am a libertarian I find my views change more often than ever as I bring new ideas and evidence into my sphere of influence. Anyhow, I now shut up and give you Descartes' Four Rules:
1. Never accept anything as true which you do not clearly know
to be such; that is, avoid hasty judgments and prejudice.
2. Divide each difficulty under examination into as many parts
as possible, or into as many as necessary for the solution of
the problem.
3. Begin with the things that are simplest and easiest to understand,
and then ascend to knowledge of the more complex.
4. Make enumerations so complete, and reviews so comprehensive,
that you may be assured that nothing is omitted.
from: The Art of Making Sense (a lost art so it seems to me)
by Lionel Ruby & Robert E. Yarber
c 1974 J.B. Lippincott
As I look back on the essay I wrote, in my mind I think that I have done a fair job of adhering to elements 2 and 4. When writing the global warming essay I tried to avoid sinking too deep into scientific and technical details, yet at the same time I wanted to give ample evidence. I hope I have struck a balance between the two. If you are capable of operation the internet (likely) and a library (not so likely any more) you can find further evidence of all the conclusions reached in this essay.
Now I present part two, the essay on global warming.
Contents:
Section I: Impending Doom and Strange Assumptions; or how did we get here, and where is here?
Section II: Temperature and CO2 Records; or what actual data do we have and where does it come from?
Section III: Computer Modelling; or if it comes from a computer it must be true.
Section IV: The Physics of the Greenhouse Effect; or what Timmy didn't learn in science class.
Section V: The Scientific Consensus; or do real scientist believe in global warming?
Section VI: But My Teacher / My Politician / The Media Told Me So; or the lemming like ability of American citizens to believe anything they are told, regardless of how stupid it is.
Section VII: Conclusion; or why don't we all just kill ourselves and save the Earth?
The scene is an Earth Day conference at the University of Missouri in 1989. The speaker, Patrick Michaels, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. The audience, scientist from assorted fields. The question, how far did the temperature in the summer of 1988 deviated from the normal? The audience answers the question individually and Michaels calculates an average answer for the audience as a whole. The resulting answer, an increase of 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.23 degrees Celsius). In fact, the summer of 1988 in Missouri was cooler than average. Patrick Michaels tells the audience they "not only got the magnitude wrong, you got the sign wrong. I have given this talk about 120 times, in places that were colder than normal in 1988, which is most of the United States, and every crowd has estimated it has been warmer than normal. So where did you get this impression? I would like to know?"
Alabama has had a pronounced cooling trend since 1935, yet a poll among professionals in Alabama found that 95% of them believe the local climate had been warming over the last 50 years, and further, this warming was due to global warming. Where did they get this impression? I would like to know? As far back as 1989 there were questions about the global warming scenario. Amazingly enough, this uncertainty has still yet to reach the general public. In the events of my everyday life: interacting with friends, coworkers, instructors and fellow students, and especially when watching the media, I am confronted with people who are certain an increase in greenhouse gases, caused by human activity, is causing global warming and raising the average temperature of the planet. I would like to know - why do they believe this?
I have found that belief in the theory of global warming seems to reside in one or more of the following arguments: the temperature and CO2 records from the past, climate models, greenhouse and atmospheric physics, the scientific consensus, and finally my teacher / my politician / the media told me so.
The Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) is an international organisation assembled under the guidance of the United Nations to investigate the global warming phenomena. Since it's creation the IPCC has released a number of minor reports and two major papers (1990 and 1995). The IPCC is regarded by many as the authority on global warming, and initially was very supportive of global warming. Interestingly, as time has passed the IPCC has become more sceptical of their own findings, in spite of this their results and reports have been twisted and manipulated to show things which are not there.
Overview:
Without getting controversial on the age of the planet, it is safe to say that the Earth has existed for at least 4 million years. The fact is we have no first hand knowledge of what the climate was like for over 99% of that time. We can gather data, and drawn conclusions, but we simply do not know. If we are going to speak of trends in global temperature, we must put the conversation in some frame of reference and find some standard of comparison. We do seem to be seeing a minor warming trend in the earth's average temperature. We must consider however, our hard temperature data spans only about 150 years. These records are in doubt before the last 40 years and only covered a minor portion of the globe until recently. Weather balloons have been used over the last 30 years, satellites only the last 18. So, depending on where you select to be point A on your graph, and where you select to be point B, and which set of data you choose to use, the impression of warming, cooling, or no change at all can be created.
The Temperature Records Show A Warming Trend:
So, if selecting a particular set of data can give a particular impression, what does the total known temperature record tell? What we do know is this. Ground-based temperature stations indicate that there has been a warming of .3 to .6 degrees Celsius since about 1850. Half of this warming occurring since WWII. Most of the warming has occurred over land, not over water. Most of the warming occurs at night. Most of the warming moderates wintertime low temperatures.
What do we know about these ground based measurements however? They are collected at weather stations, over 60,000 per day, and measure temperature, precipitation, and wind speed. These stations, by virtue of being ground based, are only covering 32% of the earth surface. Add to this the location of the ground stations, one region relative another. Weather stations are not evenly distributed across the land masses, and more of them are located in more heavily populated areas. So, we are working with an uneven sample of 32% of the earth surface.
On top of this, we must compensate for the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI). Most weather stations are located in cities, often at airports or downtown areas. Any large concentration of people is going to cause a rise in the ambient temperature. A weather station at an airport, in addition to the actual temperature, is dealing with the heat reflected by miles of pavement and large amounts of jet exhaust. Anytime the natural vegetation and soil is replace by buildings and pavement, you will have ambient heat rise. UHI effect has been detected in cities with populations as small as 300 people. At the airport in Phoenix, the temperature is known to be as much as 10 degrees Celsius hotter than the actual surrounding temperature.
What about other temperature records:
Ships have kept temperature records while at sea for over 130 years. This data is presented in figure 1. The higher line is water temperature, the lower line is air temperature.
We also have temperature data from weather balloons going back to the 1950's. This data shows no net increase in average global temperature. The advantage of the balloon record is that UHI is removed, and the data points are more evenly distributed over the globe.
However, since the 1970's we have acquired an even better tool for measuring global temperature, satellites. (figure 2 and 3) In fact, from 1979 to 1997 (in spite of figure 3 having some years mislabelled, courtesy of my source) the satellite data actually shows a cooling trend of 0.02 degrees Celsius. Naturally, this is not the data the global warming proponents would like to see, so the accuracy of the satellite data has been called into question by a number of papers. However, we have three reasons to believe the satellite data is extremely accurate:
First, the satellite data is highly consistent with thermometer readings taken in the United States, Europe, and eastern Australia. These are the places in the world where the near-surface air temperature data gathered from ground stations is considered to me the most reliable and accurate. If the data is in agreement in these regions, there is no reason to believe that the satellite system suddenly loses its accuracy once it begins to measure the temperature in other parts of the world.
Second, twice each day, the previously mentioned balloons are launched simultaneously throughout the world in a highly coordinated effort. The balloons send back measurements of temperatures, winds, and moisture at selected heights in the atmosphere. During the period of overlapping records (1979-present), the satellite data and the balloon data for the lower troposphere have a high correlation (0.94) and they show nearly identical trends (see figure 2).
The third test of the satellite data involves determining planetary temperature fluctuations throughout the lunar cycle. During a full moon, the moon reflects and radiates a small, but detectable quantity of energy to the earth. During a new moon, no energy is reflected by the moon to the earth, but a trivial amount of energy is emitted by the moon. Therefore, the earth should heat by a few hundredths of a degree during a full moon as compared to a new moon. As expected, the satellite-based temperatures warm by 0.02 C during a full moon over the temperatures experienced during a new moon. Detection of temperature fluctuations this small would only be possible if the satellites are extremely accurate.
We can conclude that the satellite data is accurate and reliable. So what does that data tell us? It tells us that, if the possible effects of volcanism and El Nino / La Nina are taken into account, only a small warming of less that 0.1 degrees Centigrade can be found.
So, the temperature records tell us in fact -- nothing. Dr. Steven Schneider is one of the leading supporters of the global warming scenario. When asked about the discrepancies in the temperature record his reply was, "Trying to mine the record by carefully looking at every bump and wiggle is a waste of time to me. It's like trying to figure out the probability of a pair of dice by looking at the individual roles. You can't look at individual roles, you've got to look at averages, so I don't put very much stock in looking at direct evidence." Note, even a supporter of global warming states you can not put stock in the "direct evidence". Yet if science involves anything other than evidence to support a theory, I am unaware of it.
We also have temperature records from the oceans. Figure 4 shows ocean surface temperatures in the Sargasso Sea. This data has been collected by measuring isotope ratios in the remains of tiny marine organisms that live near the surface, and build up in the sediment on the sea floor after they die. Figure 4 shows the record for the past 3,000 years. Recent data gathered by conventional means are labelled "Station S". It is seen that the temperature in this region is far from being warmer than ever in the past. It has in fact been both warmer and cooler than the current climate.
The actual IPCC report from 1990 presents the charts found in figure 5. Here we see the climate records on three different scales: the past million years, the past 10,000 years, and the past 1,000 years. The dashed line represents conditions near the beginning of the 20th century. Once again, we see the climate has been warmer and cooler than at present.
So There Is Some Warming Occurring:
However, there is still the problem of identifying what type of warming is going on and where it is occurring at. Warming the earth's coldest air masses does little harm. No plant, animal, or even ice for that matter, can tell the difference between -40 degrees and -35 degrees. The global warming theory holds that warming is most likely to occur in the coldest air masses. Indeed there is some evidence that this is happening in Siberia and northwestern North America.
On the other hand, a warm, humid air mass, where things live and grow, doesn't respond as much to greenhouse changes. Therefore, we can expect to see less change in the summer. This is also holding to be true as most of the documented changes in summer climate are small or insignificant, even in Siberia.
What Evidence Have Ice Core Samples Revealed:
Much of our knowledge of past climate conditions comes from ice core samples. These have proven to be generally reliable, so far as we know. The ice core data has been subjected to some "creative interpretation" over the years however. One example being the use of ice core data in three separate reports (published in 1985, 1986, and 1990) which was actually shifted forward in time by 83 years in order give the appearance of agreement with global warming theories. Fudging of the data aside, the reliability of ice core data lies on three assumptions:
First, the entrapment of air in the ice is a mechanical process which occurs with no modifications of the air being entrapped. In addition, once the air is trapped, it remains chemically stable. This means that the ice, with the trapped air, remains a closed system for X number of years in the ice sheets, and that this system is not disturbed during the drilling and transportation process.
Second, no liquid phase occurs in ice at average annual air temperatures of -24 degree Celsius or less.
Third, the trapped air is 80 to 2,800 years younger than the age of the ice in which it is entrapped. This assumption is needed to accommodate the data from the shallow ice cores, as these have shown that air entrapped in 19th century ice exhibits levels of CO2, CH4, and N2O similar to present atmospheric conditions.
These are, as stated, still assumptions. There are some suspicions that the ice core samples are contaminated during collection as ambient atmosphere infiltrates the samples through cracks which are caused by the drilling process.
Therefore, while ice core samples provide valuable data, we can not be certain that the data is completely accurate. What this data has told us is that, concerning the recent past, 1400 to 1650 was warmer than average, 1650 to 1900 was cooler than average, and 1900 to the present day has been warmer than average.
What About Precipitation Trends:
The IPCC has concluded that total global rainfall has increased about 1% during the 20th century, however, the distribution of this change is far from uniform either over time or location. Evidence from snowfall is even more complicated and so far no real conclusions can be drawn. Also to take in account, measuring rain and snow is even more difficult than measuring temperature. The IPCC notes:
"Our ability to determine the current state of global hydrologic cycle, let alone changes in it, is hampered by inadequate spatial coverage, incomplete records, poor data quality, and short record lengths."
Aren't The Northern Glaciers Moving Further North:
Yes, some are, some however are advancing. Again, large amounts of data have been collected recently, but the data is contradictory. Glacial contraction / expansion is a long term phenomenon which we do not fully understand. However, trends in glacial movement do not appear to have changed in the last century.
Isn't There Some Evidence That Sea Levels Are Rising:
Yes, there is some evidence that sea levels have risen 18 cm over the past 100 years (with an uncertainty range of 10-25 cm). Part of the problem with this data is that there is little evidence that the rate of sea level rise has actually increased during the time that global warming is supposedly occurring. Says the IPCC:
"The current estimates of changes in surface water and ground water storage are very uncertain and speculative. There is no compelling recent evidence to alter the conclusion of IPCC (1990) that the most likely net contribution during the past 100 years has been near zero or perhaps slightly positive."
Concerning both ice and sea level trends, the IPCC reports that:
"...in total, based on models and observations, the combined range of uncertainty regarding the contributions of thermal expansion, glaciers, ice sheets, and land water storage to past sea level change is about -19 cm to +37 cm."
This evidence of rising sea levels has many uncertainties, and is questioned by many scientist.. Some of the most extensive sea level research has been performed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. While they have found sea levels rising in some areas, they also find levels falling in others. One of the basic problems with measuring sea level is simply that we have no way to be sure where the movement is actually taking place; in the level of the ocean, or in the level of the land. Says Dr. David Aubrey, "You are measuring the sea level against another level which is moving up and down, and that leaves you with a lot of uncertainty."
In figure 6 we see a chart of vertical earth movements for various locations. These are averages, showing how far it is believed these locations move up or down in a 1,000 year time frame. Figure 7 shows estimations of the sea levels over the past 150,000 years. These estimation are based on carbon-14 dates of coastal fossils and the depths at which these coastal fossils were found on the continental shelves. Naturally, like most scientific data, these records also have distracters.
How About Melting Of The Ice Caps:
This is another of the doomsday scenarios presented. Warming will cause the ice caps to melt and coastal flooding will result. Let's look at the science again. First, floating ice does not raise the level of water when it melts, try this with a glass of water. Second, the ice which actually lays on the land mass of Antarctica is a very cold and thick insulator. It can not melt, even if the temperature increases by many degrees. The temperature in Antarctica will still be far below freezing.
Meanwhile, on the other pole, the satellite records for the Arctic show a cooling of .28 degrees centigrade since 1979. A second study, covering the past four decades, showed no upward trend to be found in weather balloon measurements in the Arctic. A third study showed a warming of 0.03 degrees Centigrade in the Arctic from 1948 to present. While the data gives different conclusions, none of them show any danger of melting ice caps and coastal flooding.
In fact, rising temperatures could actually increase the amount of water locked in the ice caps. An increase in temperature could lead to increased evaporation, leading to increased precipitation. Any net increase in precipitation over the caps will lead to more water being frozen, not more melting.
It's Hotter Now Than It's Even Been, At Least Since Humans Have Been Here:
Really? Let's look at some history lessons.
In mediaeval times Britain was home to vineyards. The Vikings once grew grapes in Labrador (northeastern Canada). Citrus use to grow in the Carolinas, now oranges will not ripen north of Orlando.
The remains of a species of nettlebug currently found in the Mediterranean has been found 1000 miles north of its current habitat, in places too cold for it to survive today.
It was the advance of ice southward which forced the abandonment of the Greenland colony near 1400.
In Florida there have been over 24 killing frosts in the last 35 years, yet only 6 killing frost in the previous 50 years.
The period 850 to 1350 (know as the Little Climate Optimum) experienced a pronounced warming of 2.5 degrees Celsius. There were known climatic disturbances, such as coastal flooding. There were also marked increases in agricultural productivity, trade, and measurable improvements in human mortality.
In the past, it has clearly been warmer than present. The inverse can also be shown. During the "little ice age" (1430 to 1850) trees froze and exploded due to internal ice buildup in southern England and the Thames River froze solid at London in 1814.
The environment is in a constant state of change and flux. Geologically speaking, a trend distributed over 10, 100 or even 1,000 years is simply a statistical blip.
It is also a reasonable question to ask, why is the current temperature on earth being presented as the "perfect" temperature?
Wasn't 19XX The Warmest Year On Record:
Every 2 or 3 years we are treated to this story, the past year was the warmest year in record history. The public was feed a dose of this in 1995, which was proclaimed to be the "warmest year in the instrumental record". In fact, the temperatures used to make this calculation included data from January to November, and the assumption was made that December would continue the trend. Actually, December temperatures that year made the largest single one month drop in the entire record for the Northern Hemisphere, declining by 0.72 from November. When factored in with the measurements from the previous 11 months, 1995 was by no means the warmest year in the instrumental record.
This trick was attempted again in January of 1998, when the federal government pronounced 1997 to be the "warmest ever measured". Something smelled rotten in Denmark, and after the peer review process took place it was found that the National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) chose to adjust sea surface temperature data up by 25% after 1982. No source I have found can explain why the NCDC did this, but it certainly did seem to make 1997 warmer than it actually was.
Maybe So, But Temperature Is Increased By Additional CO2:
To be diplomatic about it, maybe. In figure 8 we see the average temperature record of the 20th century plotted against the temperature increase we should see if rising CO2 levels have a direct and proportional influence on temperature. The calculated increase rises sharply after 1940 because that is when the rise in CO2 levels began to intensify. You will note however, that a large warming trend occurred before the rise in CO2 levels. Since an effect can not precede a cause, the link here is unlikely.
If one looks at CO2 and temperature on a large scale however, they do seem to parallel each other, but neither can be said to lead or lag. At times the temperature increase will occur first, at other times the CO2 increase will occur first. What do the supporters of global warming say to this?
Professor Tom Wigley, University of East Anglia, "Yes, in fact that's a remarkable puzzle. In the first part of the century you see a large natural warming, well natural variability's got to go both ways, so why should it be strange that there is a large natural cooling which offsets the greenhouse effect." Note the use of the words "natural" and "puzzle". Translation, he has no clue.
In figure 9 we see the actual CO2 changes in the atmosphere. At this scale seasonal fluctuations are evident. Plants inhale large quantities of CO2, so naturally the levels will vary from summer to winter. When compared to figure 8 we see still that the increase in temperature does not continuously correspond with the increase in CO2 levels.
Natural Climate Variations:
On this subject the IPCC summary says:
Large and rapid climatic changes occurred during the last ice age and during the transition towards the present Holocene period. Some of these changes may have occurred on time-scales of a few decades, at least in the North Atlantic where they are best documented. They affected atmospheric and oceanic circulation and temperature, and the hydrologic cycle. There are suggestions that similar rapid changes may have also occurred during the last interglacial period (the Eemian), but this requires confirmation. The recent (20th century) warming needs to be considered in the light of evidence that rapid climatic changes can occur naturally in the climate. However, temperatures have been far less variable during the last 10,000 years (i.e., during the Holocene).
Overview:
Everyone has heard the stories of the computer climate models, about how we can predict what the climate will be like in the future with X degree of certainty. One serious deficiency in our day and age, especially prevalent in the developed countries, is the belief that anything which come out of a computer must be gospel, and anything coming from a really, really big computer must be even all the more so. As any good programmer will tell you however, garbage in -- garbage out. No climate modeller wants to admit that his work is purely experimental and still needs to be refined.
Climate Computers vs Weather Computers:
The first misconception in computer Modelling is that climate predictions and weather predictions are the same thing. Not at all. Have you ever wondered why you always see a five day forecast on the weather, in the newspaper, or on the weather channels web site? That is because given our current level of understanding and technology, five days in the future is as far as our weather forecast models can predict with any accuracy. A weather forecasting computer model begins with the current weather situation and projects what will happen from that point.
Climate Modelling is a totally different process. In climate Modelling the computer is given three variables: the amount of heat reaching the earth from the sun, the laws of physics, and the properties of the atmosphere. From these starting points it creates the earth climate from ground level, it does not start with any known climatelogical point.
Do The Climate Models Account For All Variables:
Amazingly enough, there are some important details which have been omitted from the computer models. The most obvious and glaring omission is the lack of clouds. Most of the highly touted computer models either do not take clouds, nor many other negative and positive feedback effects, into account, or the models inaccurately predict cloud cover. Cloud cover accounts for a substantial portion of the earth's reflectivity, approximately 75 watts per square meter. In fact, it has been determined that a 2% increase in the reflectivity of the earth would compensate for a doubling of the CO2 content of the atmosphere.
The climate models must also assume that the actions of the atmosphere and oceans are static and linear, when we know in fact that the actions of atmosphere and ocean are chaotic and nonlinear.
There appear to be carbon sinks which continue to absorb more CO2 than can be explained. In the climate models it is typically assumed that those sinks are presently or nearly beyond their carrying capacity. However, we really have no way of knowing how much CO2 the natural environment will be able to sink.
The models do not accurately reproduce the motions of the atmosphere. Present models have large errors here, on the order of 50%.
The behaviour of water vapour in the environment is another variable which still has many unknowns, and therefore can not be accurately dealt with in the climate Modelling. If you examine the climate models to determine why they link warming to increased CO2, you will find it is due to the effect of water vapour feedback. Current models all predict that warmer climates will be accompanied by increasing humidity. However, such behaviour is purely an artifact of the models, and does not occur in the actual climate.
Due to all of these errors and omissions, the models are unable to calculate correctly either the present average temperature of the earth, or the temperature ranges from the equator to the poles. The models are adjusted, or "tuned", to get those quantities approximately right.
After Tuning Do The Climate Models Accurately Show What Has Happened In The Past And Present:
Certainly some of the models do come close to replicating past and present climactic conditions. Sadly for the global warming supporters, those are also the models which predict the least amount of future warming. Two of the more accurate climate models were created by the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (which predicts a 1.2 degree Celsius warming over the next 50 years) and the U.K. Meteorological organisation (which predicts a 1.3 degree Celsius warming over the next 50 years).
Other models are not so accurate in their ability to show us the current global climate. When questioned on this point our friend Professor Wigley replies, "It's more important to know that a model used for climate study reasonably predicts storm tracks over the northern Atlantic, or shows the Sahara to be a desert." The problem though, is that some of them do not even do that.
The climate model produced by the U.K. Mets Office shows that the Sahara desert receives as much rain and Ireland and Scotland. Hardly an accurate prediction of current climate conditions.
Have the climate models accurately predicted the future:
So far, no. In figures 10 and 11 we see climate simulation predictions for warming plotted against the measured temperature record. There is no correlation at all.
Figure 12 shows climate model predictions vs satellite measurements for the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The climate model predictions (solid black dots) are far higher than the actual satellite measurements. The observed warming is 0.5 degree Centigrade, while the models predicted warming between 1.3 and 2.3 degrees Centigrade.
In the first assessment released by the IPCC (1990) they were supportive of the climate models and the data they produced. Most likely this report is the source of the rumours that these models are accurate. However, in the second (1995) IPCC assessment, they admitted that the distracters of climate Modelling had a point.
"When increases in greenhouse gases only are taken into account .... most Climate models produce a greater mean warning than has been observed to date, unless a lower climate sensitivity [to the greenhouse effect changes] is used .... There is growing evidence that increases in sulfate aerosols are partially counteracting the [warming] due to increases in greenhouse gases."
Note: Sulfate aerosols are tiny bits of dust also emitted during the combustion of fossil fuel that cool global warning by reflecting away the sun's radiation. Just one more of the many variables not taken into account and not fully understood.
So these models are useless:
Not at all, they are simply too unreliable to be used for accurate predictions. We should certainly continue to pursue climate Modelling. Only by investing more research and knowledge in this field will we be able to arrive at models which will give us accurate data. Climate Modelling has incredible potential, but it is still a young field of study.
Overview:
What exactly do we know about the climate? There are an immense number of variables to deal with, many of which are still beyond our understanding. After all, we do not know enough about the climate to predict the weather beyond 5 days, even then, as we all well know, the 5 day forecast is frequently in error.
Does The Greenhouse Effect Exist:
Certainly, without the greenhouse effect there would be no life on earth. The greenhouse effect, very simply stated, takes place when substances in the atmosphere allow more energy to pass into the atmosphere than they allow to pass out of it. CO2 is one of these substances, but certainly not the only one. In fact, the most influential contributor to the green house effect is H2O in the form of water vapour. Without getting too deep into the physics, which constitute a whole paper on their own, some of the things to keep in mind are:
The air temperature over the oceans almost never goes above 32 degrees Celsius. This is because any excess heat in the atmosphere is drawn out of the air to evaporate water.
The effects of greenhouse gasses are not uniform. How a gas will behave depends upon its concentration, the layer of the atmosphere where it is found, and the presence and concentration of other gases.
Natural reservoirs (not including storage in rocks), especially including the oceans, contain more than 50 times as much CO2 as is contained in the atmosphere. These reservoirs can serve as sources as well as sinks for CO2. The exchange between these reservoirs and the atmosphere is currently poorly understood.
What are the greenhouse gases:
Greenhouse gases are those components (not always true gases) of the atmosphere that can lead to additional heat retention by the Earth's atmosphere. Greenhouse gas levels are affected by a variety of human activities, some of which increase certain concentrations, others of which reduce certain concentrations. Some greenhouse gases and their levels are still poorly understood. In addition, all of these gases, in addition to being good absorbers of radiation, are also good emitters of radiation.
Modern, reliable measurements of greenhouse gases are still new, and have produced very limited data. The earliest greenhouse gas data we have, which is considered reliable, originated with carbon dioxide measurements at the South Pole in 1957, and at Mauna Loa in 1958. Later measurements were taken from these stations for methane, nitrous oxides and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
The 6 major greenhouse gases are water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides, ozone, and CFCs. Not all greenhouse gases are alike, however, in terms of either concentration, or "warming potential."
CO2 is less powerful as a warming agent, molecule for molecule, than is methane. Some CFCs, and another class of atmospheric components called aerosols, actually possess cooling potential, and can cause global cooling. Changes in the atmospheric levels of water vapour, the most prevalent and important greenhouse gas, are still not fully understood, and depending on the location in the atmosphere, ozone can be either a warming or a cooling gas. Other greenhouse gas sources and sinks are somewhat more clear.
Burning fossil fuels and deforestation liberate CO2 and some ozone gases into the atmosphere. Such human sources make up only 3.5 - 5.4 percent of the total CO2 which enters the atmosphere in any given year. The majority of CO2 that enters the atmosphere is the bulk of the planet's carbon cycle, and comes from oceanic and terrestrial animals as a by-product of their metabolisms.
Using energy, growing rice, burning crop wastes, and raising meat animals all release methane into the atmosphere. Human sources account for around 70% of the methane that enters the atmosphere each year. The rest comes from natural sources like wetlands, termites, and aquatic life.
Fuel use, soil cultivation, acid production, and combustion of wastes all release nitrous oxides into the environment. Nitrous oxides have about 200 times the warming potential of CO2. Human activity is responsible for approximately one-third of the nitrous oxides released into the atmosphere. The remaining two-thirds is released through the natural biological processes that take place in the oceans, soils, forests, grasslands, and other ecosystems.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are man-made chemicals used largely as refrigerants and cleaning agents. Some CFCs have warming potentials, while others have cooling potentials.
What about the physics of global warming:
A large assumption is being made here, actually, quite a few assumptions are being made. Simply stated we are assuming:
CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas -- which it is not.
A rise in CO2 concentrations will lead to a rise in temperature -- for which we have no evidence.
This rise in temperature will not lead to negative feedback which will in turn lead to a stabilisation of temperature.
The increase in CO2 is due entirely to human activity.
Temperature and climate fluctuations are controlled by greenhouse gasses alone.
As previously stated, the most important greenhouse gas is water vapour. Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT doubts that, since water vapour composes 98% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, a doubling of the other gases would have much climate effect "without a significant change in the concentration of atmospheric water vapour".
A warming planet would probably lead to increased cloud cover, which in turn would have uncertain affects on climate. The IPCC report says:
"The single largest uncertainty in determining the climate sensitivity to either natural or anthropogenic changes are clouds and their effects on radiation and their role in the hydrological cycle ... at the present time, weaknesses in the parameterization of cloud formation and dissipation are probably the main impediment to improvements in the simulation of cloud effects on climate."
Even though we do know a significant amount about the atmosphere, there are still many things we do not know. Professor Lindzen again, "There is no simple uniform relationship between the total amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the temperature at the surface."
Is there anything which does show a relationship with the temperature trends:
Amazingly enough, there is. Not so amazing, no one knows about it because the potential for doomsday scenarios is very limited, therefore resulting in little media coverage outside of scientific circles. Solar activity, in the form of sun spots, and the temperature records show an interesting parallel.
The Contributions Of Solar Activity:
At the front end of the climate cycle is the single largest source of energy which is put into the system, namely, the sun. While great attention has been paid to most other aspects of climate, little attention has been paid to the sun's role in the heating or cooling of the Earth. Several recent studies have highlighted this uncertainty, showing that solar variability may play a far larger role in the Earth's climate than it was previously given credit for by the IPCC. If the sun has been heating up in recent times, researchers observe, the increased solar radiation could be responsible for up to half of the observed climate warming of the past century.
Astrophysicist Sallie L. Baliunas attributes up to 71% of the observed climate warming of the past century to increased solar irradiance. Other researchers such as climatologist and global warming supporter Tom Wigley rank the influence of solar activity on climate warming much lower, at "somewhere between 10 percent and 30 percent of the past warming". But as with satellite measurements of Earth's temperature, the short time line of satellite measurements of solar irradiance introduces significant uncertainty into the picture. Most researchers believe that at least another decade of solar radiation measurement will be needed to clearly define the influence of solar input on the global climate.
We do know some things about the relationship between the earth (and therefore its climate) and the sun. The earth does not maintain a constant distance from the sun. Naturally, when we move closer, we get warmer; further away, we get cooler.
The sun actually flickers. The first actual measurement of solar flicker was on 4 April, 1980. It showed a 0.2% drop in total radiation output of the sun. These flickers are now measured on a regular basis.
The aspect of solar activity which, at present, seems to be most influential on climate change is sunspot activity. Sunspots occur in approximately 11 year cycles (the range so far documented is 7 to 17 years). Other scientist looking at the data have noted a quasi 200 year cycle in temperature on earth which seems to mirror a similar cycle in sunspot activity. This 200 year cycle has been confirmed by a number of other sources as well. Some scientist relate the 200 year sunspot cycle to gravitational variations between the sun, and Jupiter and Saturn. Still, more data is need before any hard conclusions can be drawn regarding this cycle.
The 11 year cycle, however, has more support as an influence on global climate. Dr. John Eddy of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research has found correlation between sunspot activity and temperature. During the "little ice age" there was a virtual absence of sunspot activity. Briefly, he reached these conclusions thus:
Cosmic rays (sun light) split the nuclei of atmospheric gases, this creates (among other things like ozone) carbon-14. Carbon-14 (C-14) has a half life of 5570 years and is constantly absorbed by the tissues of living organisms. Formation of C-14 is currently thought to be constant and steady, but varies with the amount of cosmic radiation to hit the earth, which in turn varies with sunspot activity.
Interestingly, more sunspots produce less C-14 because stronger solar winds compress the earth's magnetic field. This compressed field is more effective in shielding the atmosphere from cosmic rays.
C-14 data gathered from trees show 12 prolonged periods of either reduced or intensified sunspot activity. These measurements match with unusually cold or mild winters over the last 5000 years, to include the winter of 1683 - 1684 when trees exploded in England.
Figure 13 shows a scatter diagram of mean annual temperatures in Central Europe and sunspot numbers; long-term average between 1761 and 1989, in standardised values; the coefficient of correlation between the two variables is r = 0.71.
Figure 14 shows variations of yearly averages in sunspot numbers and tropospheric temperatures over the mid-latitude oceans of the Northern Hemisphere between 1966 and 1990. The coefficient of correlation between the two data sets is r = 0.76.
While we can not yet say for certain solar activity influences climate trends on earth, it appears to be a viable explanation, and at least an influential factor.
Overview:
Of the whole global warming debate, this is the aspect which I personally find to be the silliest. The notion that somehow, every scientist agrees that global warming is a "proven fact", and that those few who do not share this view are crack-pots, is bizarre beyond explanation. We live in an age when science is making new discoveries everyday and each theory put forth has supporters and distracters. Why is it that global warming is the only theory in science that "everyone" agrees on? Why indeed is it so important that there be scientific unanimity on this issue when unanimity is virtually nonexistent on less complex issues? Why are the opinions of scientist sought regardless of field of expertise? Biologist and medical doctors are not asked to endorse theories in physics, yet it seems that any one with a piece of paper can come out in support of global warming and this lends credibility to the theory.
Reality Checks From Supporters:
On 16 May, 1997 Science published an article titled "Greenhouse Forecasting Still Cloudy". The article reads, "Many climate experts caution that it is not at all clear yet that human activities have begun to warm the planet -- or how bad greenhouse warming will be when it arrives."
Dr. Benjamin Santer, a member of the IPCC and author of one chapter of the 1995 IPCC report:
"It's unfortunate that many people read the media hype before they read the chapter [on the detection of greenhouse warming]. I think the caveats are there. We say quite clearly that few scientists would say the attribution is sure [the argument that global warming is caused by human industrial activity] and a done deal."
On 2 June, 1997, during a debate with environmental scientist Fred Singer of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, Bert Bolin, chairman of the IPCC, conceded that "the climate issue is not 'settled'; it is both uncertain and incomplete." Bolin further noted that the small amount of warming during the past century occurred mostly before 1940 and is most likely a natural recovery from previous cooling.
The IPCC Report Supports The Certainty Global Warming:
I let passages from the often thumped, but seldom read, IPCC reports speak for themselves:
"Tides, waves, and storm surges could be affected by regional climate changes, but future projections are, at present, highly uncertain "
-- p. 41 of the 1995 IPCC Science volume
"Confidence is higher in hemispheric to continental scale projections of climate change than at regional scales where confidence remains low."
-- p. 41 of the 1995 IPCC Science volume
"In general, regional projections are also sensitive to model resolution and are affected by large natural variability. Hence confidence in regional projections remains low."
-- p. 43 of the 1995 IPCC Science volume
"Impacts are difficult to quantify, and existing studies are limited in scope. While our knowledge has increased significantly during the last decade and qualitative estimates can be developed, quantitative projections of the impacts of climate change on any particular system at any particular location are difficult because regional scale climate change projections are uncertain; our current understanding of many critical processes is limited; and systems are subject to multiple climatic and non-climatic stresses, the interaction of which are not always linear or additive. Most impact studies have assessed how systems would respond to climate changes resulting from an arbitrary doubling of equivalent atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Furthermore, very few studies have considered greenhouse gas concentrations; fewer still have examined the consequences of increases beyond a doubling of equivalent atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, or assessed the implications of multiple stress factors."
-- p. 346 of the 1995 IPCC Impacts volume
While the IPCC report holds that there is a measurable human influence on climate, this conclusion is not dependent on the evidence of actual changes in the Earth's climate. On that note, the IPCC says:
"Despite this consistency [in the pattern of change], it should be clear from the earlier parts of this chapter that current data and systems are inadequate for the complete description of climate change."
We must also differentiate between the IPCC report, which was prepared by scientists, and the IPCC summation of the report, which was prepared by a small, politically appointed executive committee. In the summation, the phrase "the balance of the evidence suggests [that human influences explain some of the detected warming]" appears. Contrast this with this statement on page 439 of the actual report:
"Finally, we come to the difficult question of when the detection and attribution of human-induced climate change is likely to occur. The answer to this question must be subjective, particularly in the light of the large signal and noise uncertainties discussed in this chapter. Some scientists maintain that these uncertainties currently preclude any answer to the question posed above. Other scientists would and have claimed, on the basis of the statistical results presented in Section 8.4, that confident detection of significant anthropogenic climate change has already occurred."
On p. 411, the statement is even clearer:
"Although these global mean results suggest that there is some anthropogenic component in the observed temperature record, they cannot be considered as compelling evidence of clear cause-and-effect link between anthropogenic forcing and changes in the Earth's surface temperature."
In November of 1995, IPCC was preparing another report to release, however, between the version of the paper prepared by the group, and the version which was printed, certain passages vanished. Among the missing passages are these:
"None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."
"Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variabliliy of the climate system are reduced."
Other Supporters Of Global Warming:
A recent joint statement signed by 2,600 scientists with the environmental group Ozone Action is less than impressive when examined. A survey of those signatories by Citizens for a Sound Economy found that fewer than 10% of them had any expertise at all in any scientific discipline related to climate science.
The activities of the Union of Concerned Scientists deserve special mention. That widely supported organisation was originally devoted to nuclear disarmament. As the cold war began to end, the group began to actively oppose nuclear power generation. This position proved to be unpopular with many physicists. Over the years, the organisation has turned to the battle against global warming in a particularly hysterical manner. In 1989 the group began to circulate a petition urging recognition of global warming as potentially the greatest danger to mankind. Most of the recipients who did not sign the first time were solicited at least twice more. The petition was eventually signed by 700 scientists, including many members of the National Academy of Sciences and Nobel laureates. Only about three or four of the signers, however, had any involvement in climatology.
Interestingly, (predictable, but interesting) the petition had two pages, and on the second page there was a call for renewed consideration of nuclear power. When the petition was published in the New York Times, however, the second page was omitted. In any event, that document helped solidify the public perception that "all scientists'' agreed with the disaster scenario.
Such disturbing abuse of scientific authority did not go unnoticed. At the 1990 annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, Frank Press, the academy's president, warned the membership against lending their credibility to issues about which they had no special knowledge. Special reference was made to the published petition. What the petition did show was that the need to fight "global warming'' has become part of the dogma of the liberal, feel good, do nothing conscience, a dogma to which scientists are not immune.
The notion of "scientific unanimity'' is also tied to the Working Group I report of the IPCC issued in September 1990. Approximately 150 scientists contributed to the report, but university representation from the United States was relatively small and is likely to remain so, since the funds and time needed for participation are not available to most university scientists. Many governments have agreed to use that report as the authoritative basis for climate policy. The report, as such, has both positive and negative features. Methodologically, the report is committed to reliance on large models, and within the report models are largely verified by comparison with other models. Given that models are known to agree more with each other than with nature (even after "tuning''), that approach does not seem promising. In addition, a number of the participants have testified to the pressures placed on them to emphasise results supportive of the current scenario and to suppress other results. That pressure has frequently been effective, and a survey of participants reveals substantial disagreement with the final report. Nonetheless, the body of the report is extremely ambiguous, and the praise is ongoing, in spite of the 1995 IPCC report which countered much of the 1990 report. The report is prefaced by a policymakers' summary written by the editor, Sir John Houghton, director of the United Kingdom Meteorological Office. His summary largely ignores the uncertainty in the report and attempts to present the expectation of substantial warming as firmly based science.
Detractors Of Global Warming:
In addition to IPCC's growing cautious concern are other, far harsher judgments about the scientific evidence for global climate change:
4,000+ scientists (70 of whom are Nobel Prize winners) have signed the so-called Heidelberg Appeal, which warns the industrialised world that no compelling evidence exists to justify controls of anthropogenic (human activity related) greenhouse gas emissions.
A recent survey of state climatologist reveals that a majority of respondents have serious doubts about whether anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases present a serious threat to climate stability.
Of all the academic specialists, climatologists (only about 60 of whom hold Ph.D.'s in the entire U.S.) and atmospheric physicists are those most qualified to examine evidence of climate change. It is those professions that are most heavily populated by the so-called "skeptics."
A 1997 Gallup poll of climate scientists in the American Meteorological Society and in the American Geophysical Union shows that a vast majority doubts that there has been any identifiable man-caused warming to date (49% asserted no, 33% did not know, 18% thought some has occurred; however, among those actively involved in research and publishing frequently in peer-reviewed research journals, none believes that any man-caused global warming has been identified so far). On the whole, the debate within the meteorological community has been relatively healthy and, for the subject of global warming, unusual.
Indeed, the growing skepticism is in many ways remarkable. One of the earliest protagonists of global warming was Roger Revelle (the late professor of ocean sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography) who initiated the direct monitoring of carbon dioxide during the International Geophysical Year (1958), co-authored with S. Fred Singer and Chauncy Starr a paper recommending that action concerning global warming be delayed because current knowledge was totally inadequate. Another active advocate of global warming, Michael McElroy, head of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard, has recently written a paper acknowledging that existing models cannot be used to forecast climate.
Quotes:
Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT):
"I must state at the outset, that, as a scientist, I can find no substantive basis for the warming scenarios being popularly described. Moreover, according to many studies I have read by economists, agronomists, and hydrologists, there would be little difficulty adapting to such warming if it were to occur. Such was also the conclusion of the recent National Research Council's report on adapting to global change. Many aspects of the catastrophic scenario have already been largely discounted by the scientific community. For example, fears of massive sea-level increases accompanied many of the early discussions of global warming, but those estimates have been steadily reduced by orders of magnitude, and now it is widely agreed that even the potential contribution of warming to sea-level rise would be swamped by other more important factors."
Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science by John R Christy, Department of Atmospheric Science and Earth System Science Laboratory, University of Alabama in Huntsville on 6 March 1996.
"While all surface-based global temperature data sets indicated warming of 0.3 to 0.6C since the last century, the complete source of this warming is still unknown. First, the Earth was evidently coming out of a relatively cold period in the 1800's so that warming in the past century may be part of this natural recovery. Data sparseness and reliability are somewhat suspect in the early years of the thermometer climate record and remain a concern even today when the shrinking network of stations is attempting to capture relatively small variations. Local land use changes may also have added additional warming not connected with greenhouse gases.
The temperature of the global atmosphere is shown for the lower troposphere and lower stratosphere in Figure 2. Since we live in the lower troposphere, that time series has received the most attention. You will notice that there are large variations, both month-to-month and year-to-year.
Because these variations are independently observed by two satellites, we know they are real. The trend in the time series is slightly downward (0.05C/decade or -0.09F/decade). It is this relatively flat trend when compared to surface data (which show warming trends since 1979 of +0.09C to +0.19C/decade, depending on which data set is cited) that has attracted attention to the Spencer-Christy MSU data set.
One of the reasons the surface thermometer data have shown greater warming in the past 17 years is due to the fact that in continental regions the surface temperature responds with greater variation than the deep layer of air above. Over oceans (and in the global average), the opposite occurs. In the past 17 years there has been a tendency for the atmosphere over land areas to show warming (which is greater in the surface air response) while the atmosphere over oceans has exhibited cooling (greater effect in the MSU record). This pattern is thought to be due to natural variations. The net effect in the global average is a relative difference in the trends between surface air and the deep atmosphere. Thus, the uneven warming / cooling distribution of the past 17 years accounts for part of the difference."
The Amazing, Changing Data:
Like most statistics and numbers, the data on global warming and the temperature records can be twisted, modified and easily forgotten when necessary.
The actual warming predictions of the IPCC have been steadily going down, as shown in figure 15. As the evidence has failed to come through, and as the temperature has quite stubbornly refused to warm, the IPCC has found it necessary to lower its prediction of how much warming will actually occur each year that it has published predictions. By extending this trend, we find that, if things continue the way they are going, the IPCC will be predicting a cooling trend instead of a warming trend around the year 2003.
On a more frightening note, look at figure 16. Here we see the recent temperature record of the Southern Hemisphere troposphere between 30 and 60 degrees South, with an oval around a certain portion. The selection inside the oval was circulated at a 1997 meeting of the IPCC in the form of a draft paper. When looking at the selected data, there certainly appears to be a warming trend, but when one views all of the data, the perspective is complete. The falsification of this data was not discovered until the IPCC report had been published and it was too late to retract the findings and adjust them accordingly.
Global warming is an arena where the tactics of deceit seem to be acceptable, providing you are on the correct side of the issue.
The Scientist Who Changed His Mind:
In the 1970's Dr. Stephen Schneider (who you may recall as stated previously in this essay puts no faith in evidence) supported the theory of global cooling. In an article he co-authored for the July 9, 1971 issue of Science magazine, Schneider warned that "an increase by a factor of 4 in the equilibrium dust concentration in the global atmosphere, which cannot be ruled out as a possibility within the next century, could decrease the mean surface temperature by as much as 3.5° K [6.3° F]. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!" Schneider found that the warming effect of CO2 was much less significant, since, "as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, the rate of temperature increase is proportionally less and less, and the increase eventually levels off." "[If CO2 is augmented by another 10 percent in the next 30 years, the increase in the global temperature may be as small as 0.1° K [0.18° F]," Schneider calculated. Further, he concluded that doubling CO2 would change global temperature by 0.8° K (1.4° F). Consequently, "the net result" between the sunlight-blocking dust and greenhouse CO2 "will be a cooling of Earth."
In 1976, 13 years before he wrote his book Global Warming, Schneider endorsed Lowell Ponte's book The Cooling, claiming that it "points out in clear language that the climatic threat could be as awesome as any we might face...." U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI) agreed, writing in the foreword that "The Cooling could prove to be the most important and prophetic popular science book of the 1970s."
Section VI: But My Teacher / My Politician / The Media Told Me So:
The notion of a warming, the notion that a warming is catastrophic, is sort of drilled into people. To the point it seems surprising that anyone would question it. Yet underlying it is very little evidence at all.
-- Professor Richard Lindzen, MIT
Education, Or What Passes For It:
In the guise of education, our children are increasingly being fed doses of junk science. From the standpoint of the proponents of global warming and similar junk science issues, this makes perfect sense. Much as Hitler founded the Hitler Youth because he realised the beliefs people are instilled with in their early life will stay with them forever, so do the eco-extremists understand this. By exposing children to global warming, over population, ozone holes, acid rain, and other assorted junk science beliefs with little or no evidence while they are too young to question this information, and being sure they are exposed to none of the contrary data, the end result is a group of obedient serfs who express total disbelief that anyone would dare to question the articles of faith in which they swim so deeply.
Ask any 8th grader what global warming is, you will get an answer about the dangers to the planet. But ask them the difference between surface temperature data versus satellite temperature data, or ask which greenhouse gas is the most important, or ask them to explain why there was a warming trend before the major release of CO2 into the atmosphere, or ask them what is the relation between climate temperature and sun spot activity. In all of these cases you will receive only a blank look.
This is neither science nor education. This is political indoctrination.
Politicians, Leadership Or Cowards:
Like all governments, our government will support those who spread the information the government wants the people to believe, and will oppose those who present data to the contrary.
As most scientists concerned with climate, I was eager to stay out of what seemed like a public circus. But in the summer of 1988 Lester Lave, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote to me about being dismissed from a Senate hearing for suggesting that the issue of global warming was scientifically controversial. I assured him that the issue was not only controversial but also unlikely. In the winter of 1989 Reginald Newell, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lost National Science Foundation funding for data analyses that were failing to show net warming over the past century. Reviewers suggested that his results were dangerous to humanity. In the spring of 1989 I was an invited participant at a global warming symposium at Tufts University. I was the only scientist among a panel of environmentalists. There were strident calls for immediate action and ample expressions of impatience with science. Claudine Schneider, then a congresswoman from Rhode Island, acknowledged that "scientists may disagree, but we can hear Mother Earth, and she is crying." It seemed clear to me that a very dangerous situation was arising, and the danger was not of "global warming" itself.
-- Professor Richard Lindzen, Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus
The government also controls the money. Ross Gelbspan in the Washington Post pointed out in May 1997 that many scientists enjoy government funding. In fact, the government spends $2.1 billion per year on global change research. This money will not be going to scientist who come forward and say there is no problem. Gelbspan found there are approximately 2,000 climate scientists receiving this funding (remember, there are about 60 Ph.D.'s in climatology in the entire United States, so who are these other 1,940 people?) so that comes out to a million dollars per scientist, every year. It's pretty hard to turn down that kind of money. For a million dollars I could be a believer myself.
The influences of government and money run deep. Examine this testimony from Dr. Edward L. Hudgins, Director of Regulatory Studies of the Cato Institute, before the U.S. House of Representative Committee on Science, Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics from 19 March, 1997, regarding NASA and Mission to Planet Earth:
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 this 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.
Furthermore, are politicians really convinced that global warming is occurring? I certainly can not say that for sure, but one thing that can be said is this. Politicians all want to be re-elected. In order to do this, they must give the impression they care about the things their constituents care about. It is safe to say that the public, taken as a whole, believes in global warming disasters. If the politicians did not at least appear to be taking this concern seriously, their chances of re-election would be jeopardised.
On a more sinister note, few governments have ever been known to reduce the amount of power they hold, especially over their citizens. One reason the former Soviet Union was so successful at controlling its population concerned transportation. Since private vehicles were few and far between, people had to use public transportation. This provided a natural and convenient bottleneck where travel permits and identification could be checked. You will note that one of the great contributors, so we are told, to global warming is the automobile. The solution, conviently enough, is public transportation. While the power grabs made by the government make the "X-Files" pale in comparison, this is also another essay which I don't have time for here. What needs to be mentioned here is that global warming is helpful in pushing certain policies which the government might otherwise have a difficult time getting away with, and the intentions the public sees may not be the real motives.
The portions of the media under direct control of the government are only too willing to assist with the facade of no disagreement with global warming. The British documentary "The Greenhouse Conspiracy" (which serves as one of the sources for this essay) was actually banned by PBS, allegedly because it was biased against the global warming theory. Apparently, if a documentary is biased in favour of the global warming theory, this is acceptable to PBS. I am a former avid PBS viewer and I can not recall having ever seen global warming called into question on the network.
Media, All The Lies Fit To Print:
Needless to say, the media is all to happy to print anything favourable to global warming, but go to great lengths to avoid printing the contrary. This is evident simply by the amazement that you dear reader have encountered within yourself while reading this (assuming you are still reading at this point and haven't burned the pages long ago for calling your religion into question). I don't need to document what you can see for yourself by picking up a newspaper.
None the less, some interesting examples:
During a Senate hearing Richard Lindzen was testifying on global warming; as part of the discussion, water vapour, and sources of water vapour were being discussed. There had been considerable advances in our understanding of water vapour sources since Prof. Lindzen has last testified before the Senate and in Lindzen's attempt to clarify this aspect of the issue then Senator Gore became confused and actually thought that Lindzen was retracting his objections to global warming. An argument started, involving the other participants of the panel in which they tried to explain to Gore that he was confusing matters, however it didn't seem to sink in.
Shortly after this, Tom Wicker of the New York Times published an article which claimed Lindzen has retraced his opposition to global warming and in fact had called for immediate action to curb the impending disaster. Lindzen wrote a letter to the Times indicating that his position had been "severely misrepresented". After a delay of over a month, this letter was published. None the less, this did not stop Gore from claiming in his book that Lindzen has retracted his objections to the global warming scenario.
The media has always loved a good scare story. For example, this excerpt from Newsweek:
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 ten years from now.... 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 date is 28 April, 1975. The ominous signs Newsweek sees are signs of global cooling, the next ice age. The article, entitled "The Cooling World" continues:
In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant over-all loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree -- a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in thirteen U.S. states.
. . .these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth's climate seems to be cooling down.
24 June, 1974, Time magazine was also in on the hot new story of the sky falling.
However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades.
Not only did that supposedly alarming trend show "no indication of reversing," but "Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age." The Time article even included a map depicting the "expanding Arctic" and referenced one scientific finding that "the area of the ice and snow cover" in the Northern Hemisphere "had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971" and that this increase "has persisted ever since". "Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic ... were once totally free of any snow in the summer," Time observed. "[N]ow they are covered year round". Are these the same vanishing glaciers of 1998?
Stories in which everyone is going to be happy and healthy and safe do not sell paper, move weekleys, or gather ratings. The media need tragedy to survive and is more than willing to take up which ever doomsday scenario in the fashion of the time.
Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of realising the environmentalist's dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favour of a smaller population's eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.
--Aaron Wildavsky, professor of political science at Berkeley
The reasons various groups push the global warming scenario are many and varied, and far beyond the scope of this essay. Let's just say that it is very bad to believe everything you hear. In regards to global warming, like so many other issues (most recently heath care and amazingly enough, re-electing Bill Clinton) has been linked to saving the children. It's a button often pushed by the powers that be, after all, who wants to kill children? But I believe it's time that we take a few moments to stop worrying about the children and examine the science behind the issues. Having been alive to see the global cooling scare first hand, and the eventual demise of acid rain (remember that one?), I do feel confident that both global warming and the ozone hole are starting to fade away. The scare stories being hoisted on the public are decreasing in frequency and intensity.
On the negative side, we do not yet know what disaster scenario will replace global warming, and soon I expect there will be a new battle for the hearts and minds of the public. In addition, this new public will soon be the droves of adults who, as children, were spoon feed junk science in school, and will no doubt be far more receptive to unsubstantiated theories than their predecessors.
As the American public continues to prove to me each day -- it is far easier to believe someone else than it is to think for yourself.
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
-- Gautama Buddha
Balling, Robert C., 6 March, 1996, Transcript: Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Commitee on Science, F A S, http://www.fas.org/spp/civil/congress/1996_h/h960306b.htm
Balling, Jr., Robert C., 1995, Chapter 3, Global Warming: Messy Models, Decent Data, and Pointless Policy, in Ronald Bailey (editor), The True State of the Planet, The Free Press
Benoit, Gary, 8 December, 1997, Hot and Cold Running Alarmism, The New American, Vol. 13, No. 25, http://jbs.org/vol13no25.htm
Christy, John R., 6 March, 1996, Transcript: Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Commitee on Science, F A S, http://www.fas.org/spp/civil/congress/1996_h/h960306c3.htm
Ellsaesser, Hugh W., What Man-Induced Climate Change?, 21st Century Science, Vol. 10, No. 2, Summer 1997
Green, Kenneth, Questions People As About Climate Change, Part I, Reason Public Policy Institute, http://www.reason.org/climatefaqs.html
Hudgins, Edward L., 19 March 1997, NASA and Mission to Planet Earth, F A S, http://www.fas.org/spp/civil/congress/1997_h/h970319h.htm
Jaworowski, Zbigniew, Another Global Warming Fraud Exposed: Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase, 21st Century Science, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 1997
Kuhn, Gerald G., The Impact of Volcanic Eruptions on Worldwide Weather, 21st Century Science, Vol. 10, No. 4, Winter 1997-1998
Lindzen, Richard S., Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus, The Cato Institue, http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg15n2g.html
Michaels, Patrick J., 6 March, 1996, Transcript: Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Commitee on Science, F A S, http://www.fas.org/spp/civil/congress/1996_h/h960306m_2.htm
Michaels, Patrick J., 1 September, 1998, Hot Air vs. Warm Temperatures, The Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/dailys/9-1-98.html
Michaels, Patrick J., 30 June, 1997, Holes in the Greenhouse Effect?, The Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/dailys/6-30-97.html
Moore, Thomas Gale, 4 June, 1998, Global Warming: Try It, You Might Like It, The Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/dailys/6-04-98.html
Robinson, Arthur B., 8 December, 1997, Laying out the Evidence, The New American, Vol. 13, No. 25, http://jbs.org/vol13no25.htm
staff editorial, Global Warming and Nazi Propaganda, 21st Century Science, Vol. 9, No. 2, Summer 1996
Stevenson, Robert E., An Oceanographer Looks at the Non-Science of Global Warming, 21st Century Science, Vol. 9, No. 4, Winter 1996-1997
Taylor, Jerry, 16 January, 1998, Global Warming: The Anatomy of a Debate, The Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/speeches/sp-jt011698.html
Terry, Richard D., There's No Truth to the Rising Sea Level Scare, 21st Century Science, Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 1998
The Greenhouse Conspiracy, 1989, BBC, broadcast in the USA on the Discovery Channel
Weber, Gerd R., Global Warming - The Rest of the Story, Germany, Dr. Bottiger Verlags-GambH
webmail@204EastSouth.com