While I did endorse Global Warming - An Inconvenient Truth in an earlier post, there was considerable dialog to the contrary which I did not publish hence this post...
Let me state on the onset that I am all for energy saving and associated efforts belated being promoted to reduce global warming. However, this is not for the reasons promoted by the mainstream media hype. One needs to conserve, with or without the threat of global warming! Conservation is one way to maintain a sustainable planet. Our lives will depend on it. The current vogue paying for carbon tax and such is nothing but a diversion and an opportunity for the creative entrepreneurs. We need to conserve - no if and or buts!
Several questions have arisen that clearly demonstrate human activities may not be significant in the overall picture. So here goes:
"All the planets in our solar system are presently showing signs of increased temperature."
If the planet is getting steadily warmer due to Industrial Age greenhouse gases, why did it get cooler when industries began belching out carbon dioxide at full tilt at the start of World War II?
The amount of debris spewed into the atmosphere by volcanic activities alone could swamp the effect of greenhouse gases.
Ed's email below has some good fodder for thought and is a must read to balance the current dogma although his comment of on the hidden agenda is a bit suspect and is conjecture for the moment. What he has not addressed is the another view that is presented in some quarters, that of the effect of weather modification. Although this has the potential to damage the atmosphere suspect at the moment rearrangement of some weather patterns is all that has happened in light of what follows...
Chris Guptahttp://tinyurl.com/39n724
Original Message
From: hawkeyetx@sbcglobal.net Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2006 7:06 AM
Subject: Climate Change
Al Gore, and now Bill Clinton, are promoting and hyping global warming as a means to an unstated end. That hidden agenda, as always, has to do with amassing more and more control over people and property. The end purpose, as with everything the economic elite promote, is confiscation of wealth and the enslavement of peoples.
Never mind that the current trends in climate are nothing new to this planet and have been repeated over and over again in a very identifiable cyclic pattern for many many millions of years. What Gore and Clinton are not talking about is the evidence that climate, volcanism, tectonic activity, cratering, and magnetic reversals may all be correlated. The evidence amassed from geological history shows irrefutably that there is a 14.1 million year cycle to the appearance of large craters on this planet, to tectonic movement, to sea level changes, and to magnetic reversals. The magnetic reversals coincide (every 28 million years) with the mass extinctions evidenced in the fossil record of the earth...just like a clicking clock (or bomb). And all of this coincides with the passage of our solar system through the galactic plane and again as we reach the furthest point away from the plane when we reverse direction and head the other way (the 14.1 million year cycle). All the planets in our solar system are presently showing signs of increased temperature. Our solar system (and the earth with it) is presently passing through the galactic plane.
In addition to this factor, the precession of the equinox also drives a shorter cycle of fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field. As the earth's axis of rotation makes its 23,000 year cycle around the North Pole, the magnetic intensity of the planet slowly increases for the first half of the cycle. Then it decreases, every 11,500 years. Up and down it goes, turning in and out of sync with the solar system's magnetic field like a giant rheostat switch in the sky, the same way that a light bulb glows dimmer or brighter as you turn a dimmer switch. Normally, magnetic intensity rises and falls gradually. Sometimes it rises and falls within the 11,500 year cycle itself. But toward the end of each cycle, it drops through the floor. Those kind of magnetic field fluctuations obviously generate massive surges of electricity in and above the earth. How long the process takes, and whether it becomes a full or aborted magnetic reversal, depends on where the earth is in its elliptical orbit around the sun, which in turn determines how strongly its magnetic lines affect us and therefore how destructive the reversal is. This happens twice per rotation: once on "this" side of the precessionary wobble, and once again on the other side, every 11,500 years. It's the same thing that happens to our entire solar system every 14.1 million years in its orbit around the galactic center, but on a much smaller scale. That is why ice ages begin or end abruptly, just like clock work, every 11,500 years. Magnetic reversals always correlate with increased volcanism and glaciation.
Increased subsea volcanic activity is driving the rapid world-wide increase in ocean temperatures we are now seeing. Increased volcanic activity on the scale we are now seeing always portends the advent of a new ice age. It is ocean warming that is driving the changes in climate. Climatic changes always coincide with magnetic reversals. It appears that magnetic forces hold tectonic forces in check. But when the fields weaken during a reversal, that balance disappears. Suddenly unleashed, underwater volcanoes heat the seas and excess moisture rises into the sky. Then the moisture condenses and falls to the earth as giant snowstorms and floods. That is why ice ages always correlate with increased volcanism. Warming seas cause climactic change, they are not the result. We are now precisely positioned at the end of the 11,500 year cycle since the end of the last ice age. See Not By Fire But By Ice by Robert W. Felix for an in depth discussion of this topic that you will not be able to put down until the last page.
Ed Arlt
EARTH IN THE BALANCE
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008597
BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.
Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."
That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.
The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't know."
So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.
They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.
The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.
Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming because he can't think of anything else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.
A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended--at least not in terms of the actual science.
A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.
There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.
Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.
The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."
In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.
So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.
Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.
Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.
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