Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Global Warming or Global Wanking ?





graph: Global Temperature Since 900 AD. Source: UN Panel on Climate Change, 1995
picture: Headlines from the 70s warning of global cooling....

Various cuts and pastes from the net, with my comments sometimes added:

A couple questions... 1. Why were the 1930's a warmer decade that today if the planet is now warming? Might that indicate some sort of natural cycle?2. Why in the 1970's did Time warn us of entering the next ice age? 3. How do we explain previous ice ages and the warming causing the melting of the ice if it's a man-made issue? 4. Can you really call carbon a pollutant being that it's a natural element and the plant life of the earth depend on it for its very survival?!

an interview with a professor emeritus of meteorology, Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin:

Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past. Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, OK?
All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.

British Channel 4 which produced the excellent film, The Global Warming Swindle, which you can view or download . . . here

ISIL's Kenyan Rep James Shikwati was featured in this documentary. He stated that attempts by the West to saddle developing countries with pathetically inadequate "green" technology like solar and wind power amounted to an attempt to block industrialization. The left's mantra he stated is: "Don't touch your oil, don't touch your coal." He went on to say that you can't operate a steel plant with solar collectors. In the same program Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, who resigned because of the outlandish demands and claims of green extremists, said that depriving developing countries of essential energies was "anti-human."

Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park author) - The case for Skeptism on global warming:

http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html


Let's keep it scientific then: Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a theory. It is an unproven theory. What you do with theories is put them to the test with scientific observations. Let's see what data points we now have:

1) Temperatures have not surpassed 1998 (NOAA)
2) Temperatures are now trending downward since 1998 (NOAA)
3) Ocean temperatures have not risen since 2000 when the Argo buoys were launched. The buoys even show a slight decrease in ocean temperatures
4) The Arctic ice froze to February levels by December, there are 1mm more sq km than before (previous was 13mm sq km)
5) The Arctic ice is 20cm thicker than "normal"
6) All polar bear pods are stable or growing (NOAA/PBS)
7) Mount Kilimanjaro is not melting because of global warming, rather "sublimation"
8) The Antarctic is not "melting", it is growing in most places, the sloughing off at the edges is normal as the ice mass grows
9) The majority of the Antarctic is 8 degrees below "normal"
10) The coveted .7 degree rise in temperatures over the last 100 years has been wiped out with last years below "normal" temperatures
11) Al Gores film was just deemed "propaganda" in a court of law in the UK as many points could not be substantiated by scientists
12) It was also just reveled that some of the footage in Al's film was CGI. The ice shelf collapse was from the movie "The Day After" (ABC)
13) One of the scientists that originally thought that CO2 preceded the warming has now found with new data that the CO2 rise follows the warming (Dr David Evans)
(ie Co2 may not be a driving factor of warming).
14) Storms have become less frequent and less severe (many GW alarmists are now backtracking these earlier "theories")
15) Droughts have always happened and always will
16) The greenhouse effect is real, our small contribution to it cannot even be measured
17) Several publications, including those that are "warmist" have recently written that the "natural" cycles of the earth may "mask" AGW. Give me a break.
18) 31,000 scientist have signed a petition against AGW!
With China (1 new coal fired plant coming on line each week) and India spewing millions of tons of CO2 in to the atmosphere, along with the rest of the world increasing their CO2 "production" over the last ten years, these results should be impossible.

My comment: any efforts done in Aus. are a total waste of time and effort - given the scale of aus population compared to the 1.2 billion in China and more in India, and their rise in industrialsation, australia could dissapear of the map and it would have no effect whatsoever on GW. From the data above, all of humanity could go back to the stone age , climate change (up or down , would still occur) . WAter vapor , methane from cows and naturally occuring Co2 (94 % of atmospheric co2) are greenhouse gases.... so man-made co2 at 6% of total co2 levels is almost insignificant, and it is possible co2 isn't even a greenhouse gas (see above).
however, global warming alarmism is not neutral and falls heavily on the poor- in the west, and in developing countries who sell products to us. At one stage new house prices in Sydney were said to be going up 20% if strict legislation re warming was passed.

"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

As a petition signer, I would point out that science is not about debate or consensus, nor is it about provable facts. It is based on a cycle of hypotheses or theories and the experiments designed to test them. Technically, a hypothesis is never "proven" in science, a body of experimental evidence and data accumulates to strongly suggest that it is true, but all hypotheses and theories remain subject to occasional review and revision. In the case of global warming we have an apparent rise in both temperature and carbon dioxide levels, and a hypothesis that connects them. The fact that the two do not correspond well does not seem to bother the adherents of the hypothesis. In fact, they have circularly taken to citing the computer models, which are actually part of the hypothesis, as evidence for the hypothesis. The real science in this farce is scant indeed.

The public has been misled by agenda-driven activists who have helped create an apparent belief that science is like a season of American Idol, with an idea becoming truth because it is popular. Nothing could be further from the truth, and history has shown that false ideas have, on occasion, been very popular and it was due to skepticism, and a persistent lack of consensus, that better ideas eventually emerged. Charlatans have attempted to hijack science to push an agenda in the past, and they were always exposed. Unfortunately, the public's understanding of the nature of science is always a victim in these episodes.

Environmentalist David Bellamy does not believe global warming alarmists:

Ah, ice ages... those absolutely massive changes in global climate that environmentalists don't like to talk about because they provide such strong evidence that climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon.
It was round about the end of the last ice age, some 13,000 years ago, that a global warming process did undoubtedly begin.
Not because of all those Stone age folk roasting mammoth meat on fossil fuel camp fires but because of something called the 'Milankovitch Cycles,' an entirely natural fact of planetary life that depends on the tilt of the Earth's axis and its orbit around the sun.
The glaciers melted, the ice cap retreated and Stone Age man could begin hunting again. But a couple of millennia later, it got very cold again and everyone headed south. Then it warmed up so much that water from melted ice filled the English Channel and we became an island.
The truth is that the climate has been yo-yo-ing up and down ever since. Whereas it was warm enough for Romans to produce good wine in York, on the other hand, King Canute had to dig up peat to warm his people. And then it started getting warm again.
The real truth is that the main greenhouse gas - the one that has the most direct effect on land temperature - is water vapour, 99 per cent of which is entirely natural.
If all the water vapour was removed from the atmosphere, the temperature would fall by 33 degrees Celsius. But, remove all the carbon dioxide and the temperature might fall by just 0.3 per cent.

If we signed up to these scaremongers, we could be about to waste a gargantuan amount of money on a problem that doesn't exist - money that could be used in umpteen better ways: fighting world hunger, providing clean water, developing alternative energy sources, improving our environment, creating jobs.
The link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth. It is time the world's leaders, their scientific advisers and many environmental pressure groups woke up to the fact.
From:

http://www.junkscience.com/july04/Daily_Mail-Bellamy.htm

5 comments:

Marcus said...

I was beginning to think that Bellamy's article was making sense. But he lost me here:

"If all the water vapour was removed from the atmosphere, the temperature would fall by 33 degrees Celsius. But, remove all the carbon dioxide and the temperature might fall by just 0.3 per cent."

If you want to argue the validity of a scientific theory in a written paper, you need to write in a scientific (as in an objective, concise, clear and unambiguous) manner. You DO NOT mix units of measurement (as in mixing degrees Celsius with percentages) and you DO specify what parameter you are referring to when talking about things like percentages (what was his 0.3 per cent referring to: percentage of degrees Celsius, percentage of degrees Fahrenheit or percentage of Kelvins? There is a considerable difference between the three...). What his crime is here is equivalent, from the layman’s point of view, to the typical American news channel’s crime when it quotes today’s closing market values thus: “Today the Dow Jones index fell by nearly 150 points, while the Nasdaq lowered by just under 1.3%...” So, which market index lost more today?? You tell me…

Bellamy’s argument lost a lot of its credibility when I read this section, as far as I am concerned. He suddenly started to sound like a snake-oil salesman.

However I do admit that the whole global warming affair is pretty dubious: since we only have detailed climatic records going back for the last couple of hundred years or so, long-term trends are difficult to identify with any accuracy; so it is quite plausible that the climate phase we are in is simply part of a natural cycle...

Marcus said...

I forgot to mention my opinion of Michael Crichton’s viewpoint. If I remember correctly, he is the author I dropped some years ago after reading the first 10 pages or so of one of his novels when he maintained that releasing the compressed oxygen/air from some bottles housed inside a bathyscaphe (into the bathyscaphe airspace) would lighten the bathyscaphe, making it rise to the surface of the sea faster… For someone who appears to base most of his arguments on scientific principles, that’s pretty damn pathetic…

Jules said...

Hi marcus - Bellamy means 0.3 % of current Ave. Global Temp (over 1 year) , I beleive.
This global average fell in 2008 compared to 2007 (global cooling for that yr).

0.3 % is very little of whatever figure.
I assume global ave temp is 10 degrees c or similar.

The Kyoto protocol, If fully aplied by all western countries is estimated by Lomborg to reduce temps by yr 2100 by 0.15 deg compared to the world without kyoto.
ie kyoto is a joke, and in addition, not a single signatory has been able to meet kyoto levels.

Jules said...

I meant global ave temps fell in 2007 from 2006 levels.

Marcus said...

Jules: to follow-up on Bellamy's 0.3%: if we assume that the average global temp is 10 degrees Celsius, as you say, then a 0.3% variation in temperature would be equivalent to the following absolute temperature variations (all converted to degrees Celsius for comparison), depending on the units chosen for applying the percentage:

degrees Celsius: 0.03
degrees Fahrenheit: 0.083
Kelvins or Rankines: 0.85

There is a variation by a factor of nearly 30 between the values. I agree that an absolute variation of 0.03 degC or 0.083 degC is probably pretty insignificant, but surely 0.85 degC is not...

When arguing on the basis of scientific findings, one must be very careful to specify precisely the units of measurement and, if necessary, the reference point (as in this case: degC, degF and K/R have widely varying zero values in terms of actual temperature - and zero is by default the reference point when using percentages): obviously Bellamy wasn't that careful. Hence my skepticism of his argument.