Global Warming Hysteria (cooled)

The UN's IPCC reports have been the final 'argument' closing off debate for all GW alarmists. Those of us who know who and how it was put together, including the despicable reality of the 'beefing up' of various phrases by administrators after the scientists went home and the inclusion of names of those who did not agree with its findings on the final reports et al, know only too well they represent the epitome of politicization of science. And here's further proof in the form of a new peer review of the reports themselves:

Excerpt: In “Peer Review? What Peer Review?” McLean writes, “The IPCC would have us believe that its reports are diligently reviewed by many hundreds of scientists and that these reviewers endorse the contents of the report. Analyses of reviewer comments show a very different and disturbing story.” In Chapter 9, the key science chapter, the IPCC concludes that "it is very highly likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed global warming over the last 50 years". The IPCC leads us to believe that this statement is very much supported by the majority of reviewers. The reality is that there is surprisingly little explicit support for this key notion. Among the 23 independent reviewers just 4 explicitly endorsed the chapter with its hypothesis, and one other endorsed only a specific section.

Moreover, only 62 of the IPCC’s 308 reviewers commented on this chapter at all. As with other chapters, simple corrections, requests for clarifications or refinements to the text which did not challenge the IPCC’s conclusions are generally treated favourably, but comments which dispute the IPCC’s claims or their certainty are treated with far less indulgence. In a related finding, McLean observes, “The dominance of research presupposing a human influence also means that the IPCC editing teams are likely to consist of people predisposed to view the situation in that light.” Adds McLean, “The problems continue into the authorship of these reports.

According to IPCC documents, scientists are nominated by governments or explicitly invited by scientists already associated with the IPCC. What a wonderful way to position scientists who support a government agenda on climate and then fill out the IPCC with like-minded individuals.” Concludes McLean, “The IPCC reports appear to be largely based on a consensus of scientific papers, but those papers are the product of research for which the funding is strongly influenced by previous IPCC reports. This makes the claim of a human influence self-perpetuating and for a corruption of the normal scientific process.”

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/ipccprocessillusion.html

Here's a key extract from the excellent Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph on the crumbling world of the GW alarmist in 'Retreat of the warmists begins to accelerate':

Just as we begin to see the colossal price we are being asked to pay for measures to combat climate change, ever more of the evidence adduced to support the global warming scare crumbles away.

A key article of faith for the "warmists" is a supposed increase in the incidence of extreme weather events, such as droughts. As Al Gore claimed to a US Senate committee in March, "droughts are becoming longer and more intense".

But US researchers, led by Gemma Narisma, have now shown that, far from becoming more frequent in recent decades, serious droughts have in fact become rarer than they were a century ago.

In a paper (reported on the website CO2Science.org) they identified the 30 most "severe and persistent" drought episodes of the 20th century.

Seven of these occurred before 1920, seven between 1921 and 1940 and eight between 1941 and 1960, dropping to five between 1961 and 1980.

The last two decades of the century, when the world was supposedly hotting up more than ever, saw just three. The worst drought affecting the developed world was the US Dust Bowl disaster of the mid-1930s.

This corresponds with the recently revised figures for US surface temperatures published by Gore's leading scientific ally, James Hansen of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

Last month, when Steve McIntyre, an expert statistical analyst, spotted a fundamental flaw in the method Hansen had used to calculate his figures, GISS was forced to publish a new graph, showing that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998, as generally accepted, but 1934. Of the 10 hottest years since 1880, four were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade.

This in turn followed the latest satellite figures from the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration showing how global temperatures in recent years have flattened out at about 0.2 degrees below their 1998 level, and that this summer's figures have been lower than they were in 1983, despite a continuing rise in CO2.

It is clear that 2007 is proving quite a turning point in the climate change debate.

Now how could I, a science 'expert', have been so wrong??A new comprehensive survey of peer-reviewed published climate research papers reveals less than half support alarmist Global Warming Theory.   This really is devastating stuff for the whole Leonardo di Gore bandwagon.

A forthcoming article, submitted and accepted for publication at the science journal Energy & Environment here and pre-viewed at Daily Tech, reveals that opinions among climate scientists moved steadily away from earlier alarmist Global Warming Theory post-2004. Here is a key passage:

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category  (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis.  This is no "consensus."  The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of  consensus here.  Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming.  In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

These changing viewpoints represent the advances in climate science over the past decade. While today we are even more certain the earth is warming, we are less certain about the root causes. More importantly, research has shown us that -- whatever the cause may be -- the amount of warming is unlikely to cause any great calamity for mankind or the planet itself.

Let joy be unconfined!! Jump into your SUV and spread the good news! The planet is saved (cos the 'experts' have changed their minds) - unless the environMENTALists get their hands on it, that is.  

Savaga deforestation to grow biofuel crops is rampantWill burning biofuels as an alternative fuel save the world? Apparently not, because its "not green" says a new study. Here's the opening section from the New Scientist article 'Forget Biofuels - burn oil and plant forests instead':

It sounds counterintuitive, but burning oil and planting forests to compensate is more environmentally friendly than burning biofuel. So say scientists who have calculated the difference in net emissions between using land to produce biofuel and the alternative: fuelling cars with gasoline and replanting forests on the land instead.

They recommend governments steer away from biofuel and focus on reforestation and maximising the efficiency of fossil fuels instead.

The reason is that producing biofuel is not a "green process". It requires tractors and fertilisers and land, all of which means burning fossil fuels to make "green" fuel. In the case of bioethanol produced from corn – an alternative to oil – "it's essentially a zero-sums game," says Ghislaine Kieffer, programme manager for Latin America at the International Energy Agency in Paris, France (see Complete carbon footprint of biofuel - or is it?).

British-born physicist Freeman Dyson has revealed three "heresies", two of which challenge the current scientific orthodoxy that anthropogenic carbon causes climate change."The fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated," writes Dyson in his new book Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe, published on Wednesday (15 August).

He pours scorn on "the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models". "I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry, and the biology of fields and farms and forests," writes Dyson. Biomass holds the key to carbon, he writes - leaving us to infer that he thinks the human contribution is negligible.

Overall, Dyson issues a plea for more scientific research into the behaviour of the planet's biomass. "Many of the basic processes of planetary ecology are poorly understood. They must be better understood before we can reach an accurate diagnosis of the present condition of our planet," he says.

"We do not know whether intelligent land management could increase the growth of the topsoil reservoir by four billion tons of carbon per year, the amount needed to stop the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. All we can say for sure is that this is a theoretical possibility and ought to be seriously explored." That's the first heresy - and it's not the first time he's made it. For several years, Dyson has argued that the carbon religion is self-indulgent, when there are more urgent, fixable problems to face.

Excerpted from - 'Dyson: Climate Models Are Rubbish', The Register, August 14, 2007. 

Now the received wisdom is that 1998 is the warmest year on record, right? Wrong. NASA, who put this 'fact' into the public arena have now admitted the warmest year on record it turns out was 1934!  And NASA's mistake was outed by...a blogger (one with key experience). 

Here's the full story from Canada's Toronto Star:

In the United States, the calendar year 1998 ranked as the hottest of them all – until someone checked the math.

After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review.

Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. – not 1998.

More significantly, the agency reduced the mean U.S. "temperature anomalies" for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius.

NASA officials have dismissed the changes as trivial. Even the Canadian who spotted the original flaw says the revisions are "not necessarily material to climate policy."

But the revisions have been seized on by conservative Americans, including firebrand radio host Rush Limbaugh, as evidence that climate change science is unsound.

Said Limbaugh last Thursday: "What do we have here? We have proof of man-made global warming. The man-made global warming is inside NASA ... is in the scientific community with false data."

However Stephen McIntyre, who set off the uproar, described his finding as a "a micro-change. But it was kind of fun."

A former mining executive who runs the blog ClimateAudit.org, McIntyre, 59, earned attention in 2003 when he put out data challenging the so-called "hockey stick" graph depicting a spike in global temperatures.

This time, he sifted NASA's use of temperature anomalies, which measure how much warmer or colder a place is at a given time compared with its 30-year average.

Puzzled by a bizarre "jump" in the U.S. anomalies from 1999 to 2000, McIntyre discovered the data after 1999 wasn't being fractionally adjusted to allow for the times of day that readings were taken or the locations of the monitoring stations.

McIntyre emailed his finding to NASA's Goddard Institute, triggering the data review.

"They moved pretty fast on this," McIntyre said. "There must have been some long faces."

Ed. The problem here, as always, is that it is the error that lives long in the public memory, largely because the media does little to correct their complicity in broadcasting that error.  

A new peer-reviewed study published in the American Geophysical Union's "Geophysical Research Letters" finds that climate models fail test against real clouds. Dr Roy Spencer explains:

"To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent," Spencer said. "The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming."

The new results raise questions about some current theories regarding precipitation, clouds and the efficiency with which weather systems convert water vapor into rainfall. These are significant issues in the global warming debate. "Global warming theory says warming will generally be accompanied by more rainfall," Spencer said. "Everyone just assumed that more rainfall means more high altitude clouds. That would be your first guess and, since we didn't have any data to suggest otherwise ..."  There are significant gaps in the scientific understanding of precipitation systems and their interactions with the climate, he said. "At least 80 percent of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems.  "Until we understand how precipitation systems change with warming, I don't believe we can know how much of our current warming is manmade. Without that knowledge, we can't predict future climate change with any degree of certainty." Spencer and his colleagues expect these new findings to be controversial.

"I know some climate modelers will say that these results are interesting but that they probably don't apply to long-term global warming," he said. "But this represents a fundamental natural cooling process in the atmosphere. Let's see if climate models can get this part right before we rely on their long term projections."

Source: The University of Alabama in Huntsville. 

Recent changes to the GISS historical climate data records refute claims by Gore that 9 of the ten hottest years in history occurred since 1995. Yet, these changes went totally unreported. Here is Noel Sheppard:

A change in climate history data at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently occurred which dramatically alters the debate over global warming. Yet, this transpired with no official announcement from GISS head James Hansen, and went unreported until Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit discovered it Wednesday.

For some background, one of the key tenets of the global warming myth being advanced by Hansen and soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore is that nine of the ten warmest years in history have occurred since 1995.

McIntyre has been crunching the numbers used to determine such things as published by GISS, and has identified that the data have recently changed such that four of the top ten warmest years in American history occurred in the 1930s, with the warmest now in 1934 instead of the much-publicized 1998.

As McIntyre wrote Wednesday (emphasis added, h/t NBer dscott):

There has been some turmoil yesterday on the leaderboard of the U.S. (Temperature) Open and there is a new leader.

Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.

Most importantly, according to the GISS, 1998 is no longer the warmest year in American history. That honor once again belongs to 1934.

For more go here.  

Weather station data hidden from public; scientists allege government cover-up
by Michael Asher at Daily Tech.

The theory of global warming began to explain one simple set of facts-- surface temperature monitoring stations have shown a roughly one degree rise over the past century.   But just where does these temperature readings come from? Most are reported by volunteer stations, usually no more than a thermometer inside a small wooden hut or below a roof overhang. In the US, 1,221 such stations exist, all administered by the National Climatic Data Center, a branch of the NOAA.

Two months ago, I reported on an effort to validate this network. A volunteer group headed by meteorologist Anthony Watts had found serious problems. Not only did sites fail to meet the NCDC's  requirements, but encroaching development had put many in ridiculously unsuitable locations -- on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills.

Soon thereafter, a Seattle radio station interviewed the head of the NCDC, Dr. Thomas Peterson, informed him of the effort and quizzed him about the problems. Three days later, the NCDC removed all website access to station site locations, citing "privacy concerns." Without this data (which had been public for years), the validation effort was blocked. No more stations could be located.

Scientists were quick to respond. Climatologist Roger Pielke from the University of Colorado called the act a "coverup" and said it was designed to prevent public scrutiny. More shockingly, he revealed that researchers had been for years pressuring the government to validate the network themselves, and that the NCDC had begun to do so, but cancelled the project and refused to make the data public, presumably to avoid this sort of scandal.  Joined by Watts and others, Pielke called upon the government to recant.

The resulting furor forced the NCDC to again made site locations public. But so far, they've failed to address to root of the problem, which is the wholly unsatisfactory locations of many of their recording sites, locations which make the resulting data unreliable, and compromise a dataset upon which much of US energy and environmental policy is based.

Ed. It seems it is not just the UN's IPCC data that needs far close scrutiny.  

An Interview With Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist and co-author with Physicist Henrik Svensmark of a new 2007 book entitled “The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change”

Excerpt: Q: How do you respond to the paper by Lockwood and Froehlich, which claims to comprehensively 'settle the debate' on the cosmic ray hypothesis (& Solar-climate link) you describe in The Chilling Stars?

NC: How often we've heard it before, that the debate has been settled! But this is an interesting case because these scientists accept that the Sun has played a big part in climate change over hundreds and thousands of years, just as we explain in the book. They even allow that it was involved in the warming in much of the 20th Century. And when Lockwood and Froehlich go on to say that the intensification of solar activity seen in the past hundred years has now ended, we don't disagree with that. We part company only when they say that temperatures have gone on shooting up, so that the recent rise can't have anything to do with the Sun, or with cosmic rays modulated by the Sun. In reality global temperatures have stopped rising.

Data for both the surface and the lower air show no warming since 1999. That makes no sense by the hypothesis of global warming driven mainly by CO2, because the amount of CO2 in the air has gone on increasing. But the fact that the Sun is beginning to neglect its climatic duty -- of batting away the cosmic rays that come from 'the chilling stars' -- fits beautifully with this apparent end of global warming.

Source & full interview at  The London Book Review.com 

 Australian enviro-watcher John Ray debunks the recent 'no solar-link'  study published by the BBC under the title: "Global Warming and the Debunker of Durkin". It runs as follows:

They fail to acknowledge that you cannot detect long term trends with short-term data

Durkin’s “Swindle” film has just been shown nationwide on Australian TV and furious warmists have concentrated their attack on the fact that his graphs of solar effects ended in 1980.

It has been known for some time that solar output has been in decline for the last 20 years or so and this is held to undermine the claim that recent global warming can be explained by variations in output from the sun. Apparently provoked by the Durkin film, Lockwood & Froehlich recently produced a paper (“Recent oppositely-directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature”) that drew further attention to recent solar trends as being inconsistent with the Durkin contentions. They examined a whole range of solar measurements and showed that, by most measures, solar output was falling rather than rising in recent years. And that paper has been widely promoted as “debunking” Durkin’s contention that variations in solar output are the only good long-term explanation of climate change.

I have now had a preliminary look at the Lockwood paper and note that there is a very large dog in it that did not bark. If solar output does not explain recent temperature variations, what does? With the monomania about CO2 among Warmists, one would have expected a graph of CO2 levels plotted against temperature. There is no such graph. In other words, CO2 levels do not explain recent temperature variations very well either. The fact that CO2 levels have continued to rise in recent years while surface temperatures peaked in 1998 would appear to be the elephant in the bedroom. If solar output levels and terrestrial temperature have diverged in recent years, so too have CO2 levels and terrestrial temperature.

The important point in the matter, however, is one that climate skeptics have been making for years: There are MANY variables that affect terrestrial temperature from time to time — not just CO2 and not just the sun. And to tease out the effect of any one variable, you have to look at a fairly long data series — so that fluctuations due to other sources will be smoothed out. It is partly for this reason that most of the plots of climate against temperature extend over many centuries. A period of just 20 years is too short to detect long-term trends. One needs long-term data to detect long-term tends and there are any number of graphs showing a long term relationship between solar output and terrestrial temperature.

Additionally, many effects may be lagged: the influence concerned may take some time to show up. One reason for this is the vast reservoir of heat, CO2 and much else that girdles the earth: The ocean. It takes some time for a surface temperature variation to show up in the amount of heat stored in the ocean. When the recent drop in solar output works its way through all the systems — such as the ocean — that it affects we might therefore expect global COOLING. It is COOLING that the solar data suggests as imminent, not warming.

In the circumstances, one is mildly surprised that Warmists mention solar output at all. Surely even a Warmist realizes that the sun affects terrestrial temperature!

 The above post was published at Bloggers News Network

Naturalist David Bellamy writes:

"I am quite happy to be branded a heretic because throughout history heretics have stood up against dogma based on bigotry.

"I don’t like being called a denier because deniers don’t believe in facts. There are no facts linking the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide with imminent catastrophic global warming there are only predictions based on complex computer models.

Name calling may be acceptable in political circles but it has no place in the language of science, indeed what is happening in the annals of global warming smacks of Macarthyism complete with witch hunts.

Robust science is carried out in a robust way through reasoned argument based on well researched data and although it may dent the ego of the loser it does not smear the name of science."

This excellent article can be found at: The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition website.  

On June 28, in an historic move the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released the expert review comments and responses to its latest assessment of the science of climate change. The IPCC report is the primary source of data for Al Gore's movie and book titled An Inconvenient Truth.

 Many of the comments by the reviewers are strongly critical of claims contained in the final report, and are directly at odds with the so-called "scientific consensus" touted by Gore and others calling for immediate government action. For example, the following comment by Eric Steig appears in Second Order Draft Comments, Chapter 6; section 6-42:

In general, the certainty with which this chapter presents our understanding of abrupt climate change is overstated. There is confusion between hypothesis and evidence throughout the chapter, and a great deal of confusion on the differences between an abrupt "climate change" and possible, hypothetical causes of such climate changes.

Source: Heartland Institute 

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. 

Reid Bryson, known as the father of scientific climatology, considers global warming a bunch of hooey.

The UW-Madison professor emeritus, who stands against the scientific consensus on this issue, is referred to as a global warming skeptic. But he is not skeptical that global warming exists, he is just doubtful that humans are the cause of it.

There is no question the earth has been warming. It is coming out of the "Little Ice Age," he said in an interview this week. "However, there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We've been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It's been warming up for a long time," Bryson said.

The Little Ice Age was driven by volcanic activity. That settled down so it is getting warmer, he said.  Humans are polluting the air and adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but the effect is tiny, Bryson said.

Source & full story: The Capital Times  (with thanks for the tip to Mitch Persaud, Canada)

You mean I gotta get used to this?The recent increase in the number of major Atlantic hurricanes may just be a return to the norm after a period of unusually low storm frequency, say researchers.

Johan Nyberg of the Geological Survey of Sweden and colleagues used marine sediment cores of coral samples from the northeast Caribbean to build a proxy record of wind shear and sea-surface temperatures since 1730, and from this they estimated hurricane activity since that time.

The team found that the frequency of major hurricanes decreased gradually from the 1760s, reaching an all-time low in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, numbers of large hurricanes have started to climb again, leading to several very active hurricane seasons. Most notable amongst these was the summer of 2005, which culminated in the devastation of New Orleans in the US by hurricane Katrina (see Hurricane season refuses to blow over).

In 2005, Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology, US, published a study showing that the frequency of the strongest tropical cyclones has almost doubled globally since the early 1970s (Science, vol 309, p 1844).

Nyberg says that, when considered in the context of the past three centuries, this sudden burst of large hurricanes is simply a return to the norm.

Source: The New Scientist 

“The open admission by a climate scientist of the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), Dr Jim Renwick, that his organisation achieves only 50 per cent accuracy in its climate forecasts, and that this is as good as any other forecaster around the world, should be a wake-up call for world political leaders,” said Rear Admiral Jack Welch, chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.

Yesterday the coalition published an analysis of seasonal climate predictions by NIWA over the past five years which found that the overall accuracy of the predictions was just 48 per cent. Defending the Niwa record, Dr Renwick said his organisation was doing as well as any other weather forecaster around the world. He was quoted
by the country’s leading newspaper, the New Zealand Herald as saying:

“Climate prediction is hard, half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well.” Later on New Zealand radio, Dr Renwick said: “The weather is not predictable beyond
a week or two.”

Source:  The New Zealand Cimate Science Coalition

Climate change will be considered a joke in five years time, meteorologist Augie Auer told the annual meeting of Mid Canterbury Federated Farmers in Ashburton this week.

Man's contribution to the greenhouse gases was so small we couldn't change the climate if we tried, he maintained.
"We're all going to survive this. It's all going to be a joke in five years," he said.

A combination of misinterpreted and misguided science, media hype, and political spin had created the current hysteria and it was time to put a stop to it. "It is time to attack the myth of global warming," he said. Water vapour was responsible for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect, an effect which was vital to keep the world warm, he explained.

"If we didn't have the greenhouse effect the planet would be at minus 18 deg C but because we do have the greenhouse effect it is plus 15 deg C, all the time." The other greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide, and various others including CFCs, contributed only five per cent of the effect, carbon dioxide being by far the greatest contributor at 3.6 per cent.

However, carbon dioxide as a result of man's activities was only 3.2 per cent of that, hence only 0.12 per cent of the greenhouse gases in total. Human-related methane, nitrogen dioxide and CFCs etc made similarly minuscule contributions to the effect: 0.066, 0.047 and 0.046 per cent respectively. "That ought to be the end of the argument, there and then," he said. 

"We couldn't do it (change the climate) even if we wanted to because water vapour dominates." Yet the Greens continued to use phrases such as "The planet is groaning under the weight of CO2" and Government policies were about to hit industries such as farming, he warned.

"The Greens are really going to go after you because you put out 49 per cent of the countries emissions. Does anybody ask 49 per cent of what? Does anybody know how small that number is? "It's become a witch-hunt; a Salem witch-hunt," he said.

Source: Timaru Herald, New Zealand 

Norwegian Arctic climate researchers have recently questioned global warming models.  Geology Professor Morten Hald says:  “The main problem is that these models are often based on relatively new climate data. The thermometer has only been in existence for 150 years and information on temperature which is 150 years old does not capture the large natural changes.”

Source: Innovations Report at EuroPages.com