Global Warming Hysteria (cooled)

The July 27-29 2007 U.S. Senate trip to Greenland to investigate fears of a glacier meltdown revealed an Arctic land where current climatic conditions are neither alarming nor linked to a rise in man-made carbon dioxide emissions, according to many of the latest peer-reviewed scientific findings. 

Recent research has found that Greenland has been warming since the 1880’s, but since 1955, temperature averages at Greenland stations have been colder than the period between 1881-1955.

A recent study concluded Greenland was as warm or warmer in the 1930’s and 40’s and the rate of warming from 1920-1930 was about 50% higher than the warming from 1995-2005. One 2005 study found Greenland gaining ice in the interior higher elevations and thinning ice at the lower elevations. In addition, the often media promoted fears of Greenland’s ice completely melting and a subsequent catastrophic sea level rise are directly at odds with the latest scientific studies.  These studies suggest that the biggest perceived threat to Greenland’s glaciers may be contained in unproven computer models predicting a future catastrophic melt. 

For more of this article go here. 

Global cooling is , once again, back on the agenda as evidence for a serious cooling period (as per the historic norm) is coming to light as we learn more about sunspot activity. Here is the closing section of an important article written by Professor Timothy Patterson, professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University.

 "The science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that 'the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.' About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all.

"Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

"Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of 'stopping climate change.'

Source: A 'must read' extract from important new article 'Read The Sunspots' in Canada's (excellent) National Post.

With thanks to Laura Curtis & Mitch Persaud for the information. 

NASA chief Michael Griffin commenting in a US radio interview says that "I am not sure that it is fair to say that (global warming) is a problem that we must wrestle with".  NASA is an agency that knows a thing or two about climate change. As Griffin added: "We study global climate change, that is in our authorisation, we think we do it rather well. "I'm proud of that, but NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, battle climate change."

 
Such a clear statement that science accomplishment should carry primacy over policy advice is both welcome and overdue. Nonetheless, there is something worrying about one of Griffin's other statements, which said that "I have no doubt . . . that a trend of global warming exists".

Griffin seems to be referring to human-caused global warming, but irrespective of that his opinion is unsupported by the evidence. The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2.

Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that Earth's current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.

Source: Australia's Courier Mail 

Planet Gore:

Brussels lambasted the US and Australia yesterday for their inaction in cutting carbon dioxide emissions and stressed Europe's leading role in the battle against global warming. What Mr Dimas knew - but did not tell the scientists, apparently - is that the EU's programme for cutting carbon, its two-year-old emissions trading scheme (ETS), remains in disarray. In 2006, industry emitted about 30m tonnes less than permitted. German emissions rose 0.6% while overall EU emissions went up by 1%-1.5% because of resumed growth in the eurozone.
--David Gow, The al-Guardian, 3 April 2007

 Planet Reality:

US carbon-dioxide emissions declined by 1.3 per cent in 2006 even as the world's largest economy expanded by 3.3 per cent, the White House announced late Wednesday. The US Energy Information Administration issued a so-called flash estimate of carbon-dioxide emissions that showed a decline of 78 million metric tons last year in the United States. In a statement, US President George W Bush touted the report as validating his energy and climate-change policies.
--Associated Press, 24 May 2007

In a new scientific paper in the journal Energy and Environment, German researcher Ernst-Georg Beck, shows that the pre-industrial level is some 50 ppm higher than the level used by computer models that produce all future climate predictions.  Completely at odds with the smoothly increasing levels found in the ice core records, Beck concludes, "Since 1812, the CO2 concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated, exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942, the latter showing more than 400 ppm."

In a paper submitted to US Senate Committee hearings, Polish Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, a veteran mountaineer who has excavated ice from 17 glaciers on six continents, stated bluntly, "The basis of most of the IPCC conclusions on anthropogenic [human] causes and on projections of climatic change is the assumption of low level of CO2 in the pre-industrial atmosphere. This assumption, based on glaciological studies, is false."

Source: Canada Free Press 

A new study denies the oft-repeated global warming-hurricane link. Here's a taster from a covering article:

The invitation went to 50 top hurricane scientists: Please attend a seminar to discuss erroneous connections between global warming and hurricanes. And please don't attack the presenter.

"No rotten tomatoes," read the invitation, sent to South Florida colleagues in February by prominent hurricane scientist Chris Landsea.

On Tuesday, Landsea published a study that he believes seals his case and should end one of the hottest debates in all of science: There is no connection, he said, between global warming and increased hurricane activity.

Other researchers who reported such a link made a fundamental mistake, he concluded. They underestimated the number of storms before the age of satellite monitoring -- and before global warming became a concern.

An average of three storms each year were not counted during the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, he said, because they didn't hit land, weren't reported by ships, and they formed, flared and disappeared without anyone noticing.

"When you add those storms back into the record, we don't see any new trend," said Landsea, a scientist at the National Hurricane Center whose peer-reviewed study appeared in the journal EOS, published by the American Geophysical Union. "There's no link to global warming that you can see at all."

Polar bears are the poster animals of global warming. The image of a polar bear floating on an ice floe is one of the most dramatic visual statements in the fight against rising temperatures in the Arctic. But global warming is not killing the polar bears of Canada's eastern Arctic, according to one ongoing study.

Scheduled for release next year, it says the number of polar bears in the Davis Strait area of Canada's eastern Arctic – one of 19 polar bear populations worldwide – has grown to 2,100, up from 850 in the mid-1980s.

"There aren't just a few more bears. There are a ... lot more bears," biologist Mitchell Taylor told the Nunatsiaq News of Iqaluit in the Arctic territory of Nunavut. Earlier, in a long telephone conversation, Dr. Taylor explained his conviction that threats to polar bears from global warming are exaggerated and that their numbers are increasing. He has studied the animals for the Nunavut government for two decades.

Updates from the study by Taylor and his team have received significant media coverage in Canada, shaking the image of the polar bear as endangered.

"I don't think there is any question polar bears are threatened by global warming," responds Andrew Derocher of the World Conservation Union and a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He spoke by phone from Tuktoyaktuk in Canada's Northwest Territories 1,800 miles to the west of Davis Strait.

Source: Christian Science Monitor 

THE United States' leading hurricane forecaster says global ocean currents, not human-produced carbon dioxide, are responsible for global warming.

William Gray, a Colorado State University researcher, also said the Earth may begin to cool on its own in five to 10 years. Speaking to a group of Republican MPs, Dr Gray had harsh words for researchers and politicians who said man-made greenhouse gases were responsible for global warming. "They are blaming it all on humans, which is crazy," he said. "We're not the cause of it."

Dr Gray said in the past 40 years the number of serious hurricanes making landfall on the US Atlantic coast had declined even though carbon dioxide levels had risen.

Source: The Daily Telegraph (Australia). With thanks to Theresa Smyth (Canada) for the story. 

A "fresh assessment" (one that probably didn't just use computer modeling but looked at the actual facts?) has revealed that the glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro are set to be with us for decades to come. It had earlier been reported that the galciers were melting - the result of all those 4x4's driving up and down them. In fact, rather embarassingly for scientist it seems, the glaciers have actually grown over the last year. Oops! Here's what the Innsbruck research team said:

Precipitation and not temperature is the key to the white peak's future, the University of Innsbruck-led team says.

"About five years ago Kilimanjaro was being used as an icon for global warming. We know now that this was far too simplistic a view," said Thomas Moelg.

"We have done different kinds of modelling and we expect the plateau glaciers to be gone roughly within 30 or 40 years from now, but we have a certain expectation that the slope glaciers may last longer," added colleague Georg Kaser.

The research team has been using three automated instrument stations on the top of the mountain to collect continuous data on temperature, pressure, solar radiation, humidity and wind.

The recording effort was in position late last year to witness heavy snowfall, which will have led to a slight increase in Kilimanjaro's overall ice volume.

Well that's a relief anyway. Goodness know what we would have done with all that water...at a time when GW should be causing grave water shortages... 

NB. With thanks to Paul Flett for this story.  

Planting trees to offset carbon emissions could contribute to global warming if they are planted outside the tropics, scientists believe. They argue that most forests do not have any overall effect on global temperature but, by the end of the century, forests in the mid and high latitudes could make their parts of the world more than 3C warmer than would have occurred if the trees did not exist.

-- a quote from The Guardian, April 10, 2007 under "Global Warming: It's the trees, stupid" at  The Brussels Journal blog. 

The temperatures for the first half of April across the USA - with the exception of the south-west - reveals this month is so far tracking as the coldest April for 113 years.

How effective are new trees in offsetting the carbon footprint? A new study suggests that the location of the new trees is an important factor when considering such carbon offset projects. Planting and preserving forests in the tropics is more likely to slow down global warming. But the study concludes that planting new trees in certain parts of the planet may actually warm the Earth.

 
The new study, which combines climate and carbon-cycle effects of large-scale deforestation in a fully interactive three-dimensional climate-carbon model, confirms that planting more tropical rainforests could help slow global warming worldwide.

The research, led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory atmospheric scientist Govindasamy Bala, appears in the April 9-13 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to the study, new forests in mid- to high-latitude locations could actually create a net warming. Specifically, more trees in mid-latitude locations like the United States and most of Europe would only create marginal benefits from a climate perspective. But those extra trees in the boreal forests of Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia could actually be counterproductive, Bala said.

Forests affect climate in three different ways: they absorb the greenhouse gas – carbon dioxide – from the atmosphere and help keep the planet cool; they evaporate water to the atmosphere and increase cloudiness, which also helps keep the planet cool; and they are dark and absorb sunlight (the albedo effect), warming the Earth. Previous climate change mitigation strategies that promote planting trees have taken only the first effect into account.

"Our study shows that only tropical rainforests are strongly beneficial in helping slow down global warming," Bala said. "It is a win-win situation in the tropics because trees in the tropics, in addition to absorbing carbon dioxide, promote convective clouds that help to cool the planet. In other locations, the warming from the albedo effect either cancels or exceeds the net cooling from the other two effects."

Being physically green all Martians are already committed to saving their planet.  Not for them the debate over who is to blame that's raging here - and there alarmism hasn't spread because they can't find a DVD player that'll show An Inconvenient Truth. 

All they know is that global warming appears to be heating Mars at four times the rate its heating earth - due to (don't tell the Greenies here!) sun activity.

The European Union's "world lead" on fighting climate change is clearly going well. The latest published figures indicate that last year European nations successfully pumped an extra 30 million tonnes into the atmosphere. Here's the London Times on the latest EU bureaucratic fiasco:

The amount of greenhouse gas pumped into European skies rose by up to 30 million tonnes last year despite the EU’s pledge to lead the world in tackling climate change.

A much-heralded emissions trading scheme, which is being copied by California and is seen as the market solution to reducing harmful gases, failed to achieve the cuts in industrial pollution needed to hit Kyoto targets, figures from the European Commission showed.

Oops!  Neither is there any truth in the despicable rumor that the increase is due to Al Gore buying a second home in the UK.

A new Canadian study has found that ethanol-blend auto emissions are no greener than gasoline.  Here's an excerpt from an article published in CBC News:

An unpublished federal report appears to undermine the belief that commercially available ethanol-blended fuel produces cleaner emissions than regular gasoline.

Many Canadians believe filling up with ethanol-blended gasoline reduces the emission of greenhouse gases that damage the environment. 

Advertising sponsored by the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association encourages the idea, telling Canadians renewable fuels are "good for the environment," and even some provincial governments, including Manitoba and Saskatchewan, say the fuel "burns cleaner" than gasoline.

The federal Conservative government committed $2 billion in incentives for ethanol, made from wheat and corn, and biodiesel in last week's budget.

But based on Ottawa's own research, critics say the investment is based more on myth than hard science.

Scientists at Environment Canada studied four vehicles of recent makes, testing their emissions in a range for driving conditions and temperatures.

Looking at tailpipe emissions, from a greenhouse gas perspective, there really isn't much difference between ethanol and gasoline," said Greg Rideout, head of Environment Canada's toxic emissions research.

"Our results seemed to indicate that with today's vehicles, there's not a lot of difference at the tailpipe with greenhouse gas emissions."

The study found no statistical difference between the greenhouse gas emissions of regular unleaded fuel and 10 per cent ethanol blended fuel.

Although the study found a reduction in carbon monoxide, a pollutant that forms smog, emissions of some other gases, such as hydrocarbons, actually increased under certain conditions.

Bill Rees, an ecology professor at the University of British Columbia and longtime opponent of ethanol, has read the report and thinks Canadians need to know its conclusions.

"I must say, I'm a little surprised at that, because it seems to fly in the face of current policy initiatives," he said.

 Actually, the link claims to be between cooler temperatures and larger brains - which must mean the reverse link may also be true. Here's an excerpt from this recent article from 'The Register' website.

Humans grew bigger brains as the climate they lived in got cooler, according to researchers at the University at Albany, New York.

The researchers suggest that having to adapt to the impact of lower temperatures could account for as much as 50 per cent of the increase in the size of our skulls.

Well that explains it! This is why global warming hysteria exists today! Too many young activist environmentalists dealing with complex issues but using a smaller brain!  (I should point out that I was born in the fifties...i.e. pre-1970s...when it was, of course, colder...)

(Smaller Brained) Alarmists 0 (Larger Brained) Non-Alarmists 1 

Carbon emissions in China increased by 10% in 2005 - and China is set to take take over as the world's leading emitter of carbon dioxide in 2007, pushing the USA into second place. One wonders that most ideologically leftwing Green environmentalists will say then?

Now here's the question for the day: Will they a) target still-developing socialist China instead? b) begin to lose faith in GW as a vehicle for US bashingl? or c) ignore the facts as usual and continue to bash the USA come what may?

Now I'm not giving you any help on this one...

Yet more historical evidence - actual evidence, not the useless predictive computer model variety - Ancient Egypt via NASA. Of course, the alarmists won't be interested in history - to them history is just bunk. Here's an excerpt from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory article/ site:

 "Scientists have traditionally relied upon indirect data gathering methods to study climate in the Earth's past, such as drilling ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica. Such samples of accumulated snow and ice drilled from deep within ice sheets or glaciers contain trapped air bubbles whose composition can provide a picture of past climate conditions. Now, however, a group of NASA and university scientists has found a convincing link between long-term solar and climate variability in a unique and unexpected source: directly measured ancient water level records of the Nile, Earth's longest river."

The International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska has mooted a further interesting cause/ contributory factor to global warming: that the Earth may still be recovering from the "Little Ice Age" (from 1800 or much earlier to the present day).

Though many of us perceive the science indicates solar activity is the likeliest root cause of the slight global warming we have seen we need not of course exclude other contributory factors (those that eco-warriors refuse even to countenance).

And here is where alarmists don't get it. The rest of us are open to facts, reason and empirical evidence - unlike they who approach the subject with an ideologically anti-human agenda.  It is called reason and rationality - environmentalists might like to try them some time?

CSI Miami's Hummer (background) is greener than the PriusEvery year CNW independent consumer analysts test the greenest of most leading cars. No contest you would think? Wrong. Very wrong. For two years running the Hummer (the US-made vehicle you see driven by Lt Horatio Caine and his team in CSI Miami) when holistic testing (like with like) is taken into account turns out to be more green than the Toyota Prius - the eco-caring symbol of Brad Pitt and all self-respecting Hollywood celebs. And it's not just the Prius either, its all hybrid cars.

Find it hard to believe? Here is an article on the subject and here's the original data its based on.  Fed up with hearing your moralistic pious Prius-driving friends on how green they are? Send them this posting by email.

And, for the record, it doesn't stop there either. You find similar things when it comes to 'Green' light bulbs (did you know they are made with toxins?), the real cost of wind turbine power and other allegedly 'Green' consumer goods. More on this in due course. I will also be putting together some articles for publication elsewhere on each of these subjects.