Bjorn Lomborg: Ignore Al Gore – but not his Nobel friends
While Gore was creating alarm with his belief that a 20-foot-high wall of water would inundate low-lying cities, the IPCC showed us we should realistically prepare for a rise of one foot or so by the end of the century. Beyond the dramatic difference, it is also worth putting that one foot in perspective. Over the last 150 years, sea levels rose about one foot – yet, did we notice?
Icecap: A New Record for Antarctic Total Ice Extent?
While the news focus has been on the lowest ice extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979 for the Arctic, the Southern Hemisphere (Antarctica) has quietly set a new record for most ice extent since 1979.
This can be seen on this graphic from this University of Illinois site The Cryosphere Today, which updated snow and ice extent for both hemispheres daily. The Southern Hemispheric areal coverage is the highest in the satellite record, just beating out 1995, 2001, 2005 and 2006. Since 1979, the trend has been up for the total Antarctic ice extent.
Bret Stephens: Global warming is more alarmist than alarming
I confess: Denial never solves anything. But neither does sensational and deceptive journalism.
Newsweek illustrates this point by its choice of cover art–a picture of the sun, where the surface temperature hovers around 6,000 degrees Celsius. Given that the consensus scientific estimate for average temperature increases over the next century is a comparatively modest 2.6 degrees, this would seem a rather Murdochian way of convincing readers about the gravity of the climate threat. On the inside pages is a photograph of a polar bear stranded on melting ice. But the caption that the bears are “at risk” belies clear evidence that the bear population has risen five-fold since the 1960s. Another series of photographs, of a huge Antarctic ice shelf that quickly disintegrated in 2002, suggests the imminence of doom. But why not also mention that temperatures at the South Pole have been going down for 50 years?
Michael Fumento: James Hansen’s Hacks
If you follow the global warming debate, one thing you “know†is that to even call it a “debate†is to whisk yourself away to the land of the Flat Earth Society and Holocaust deniers and to be on the take from Big Carbon. Another is that nine of the ten warmest years recorded in the U.S. lower 48 since 1880 have occurred since 1995, with the very hottest being 1998.
Regarding the first, all you need to see is the cover of the current Newsweek, promising to expose “the well-funded naysayers.†(Discussed in the Aug. 9 TAS.) I know about such smearing firsthand in that there’s a “fact sheet†on me from a group called EXXONSECRETS.ORG that claims it’s “documenting ExxonMobil’s funding of climate change skeptics.†Yet I’ve never received a petro-penny from ExxonMobil or anybody in the fossil fuel industry.
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies revises US temperature figures
Apparently, a Y2K related bug (discovered by Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre) skewed NASA/GISS Climate Data from the past 100, or so, years. The result:
NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.
Warren Meyer of Coyote Blog, has a detailed, and well documented piece on these developments.
Anyway, McIntyre suspected that one of these adjustments had a bug, and had had this bug for years. Unfortunately, it was hard to prove. Why? Well, that highlights one of the great travesties of climate science. Government scientists using taxpayer money to develop the GISS temperature data base at taxpayer expense refuse to publicly release their temperature adjustment algorithms or software (In much the same way Michael Mann refused to release the details for scrutiny of his methodology behind the hockey stick). Using the data, though, McIntyre made a compelling case that the GISS data base had systematic discontinuities that bore all the hallmarks of a software bug.
Today, the GISS admitted that McIntyre was correct, and has started to republish its data with the bug fixed. And the numbers are changing a lot. Before today, GISS would have said 1998 was the hottest year on record (Mann, remember, said with up to 99% certainty it was the hottest year in 1000 years) and that 2006 was the second hottest. Well, no more. Here are the new rankings for the 10 hottest years in the US, starting with #1:
1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939
Three of the top 10 are in the last decade. Four of the top ten are in the 1930′s, before either the IPCC or the GISS really think man had any discernible impact on temperatures.
Mark Steyn: A Habitable World?
Still, for the brave few who stuck with all 174 hours of Live Al, there was something oddly touching about seeing rock gazillionaires who’d flown in by private jet tell Joe Schmoe all the stuff he doesn’t need. Your own car? A washer and dryer? Ha! Why can’t you take the bus and beat your underwear on the rocks down by the river with the native women all morning long?
As long as we’re making environmentally-friendly lifestyle suggestions, here’s one thing we don’t “need”: Stadium rock. Amplifiers. Electrified instruments. Entourages. Recorded music. They all add up to one helluva carbon footprint. If we must eschew modernity in the interests of saving the planet, why don’t we return to the 19th century and gather round the environmentally-friendly acoustic piano and sing fragrant Victorian parlor ballads of an evening?
Indeed.
Dr. D. Bruce Merrifield: It seems likely that solar radiation, rather than human activity, is the “forcing agent” for global warming
D. Bruce Merrifield, former Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs, and the holder of a Doctoral degree in physical organic chemistry, has written a detailed article on the relationship between solar radiation and global warming: Global Warming and Solar Radiation. Here’s the summary:
The earth has been subjected to many warming and cooling periods over millions of years, none of which were of human origin. Data from many independent sources have mutually corroborated these effects. They include data from coring both the Antarctic ice cap and sediments from the Sargasso Sea, from stalagmites, from tree rings, from up-wellings in the oceans, and from crustaceans trapped in pre-historic rock formations.
The onset of each 100,000-year abrupt warming period has been coincident with emissions into the atmosphere of large amounts of both carbon dioxide and methane greenhouse gases, which absorb additional heat from the sun, a secondary warming effect. Solar radiation would appear to be the initial forcing event in which warming oceans waters release dissolved carbon dioxide, and melt methane hydrates, both of which are present in the oceans in vast quantities. Subsequent declines in radiation are associated with long cooling periods in which the green house gases then gradually disappear (are re-absorbed) into terrestrial and ocean sinks, as reflected in the data from coring the Antarctic Ice Cap and Sargasso Sea.
The current 100 year solar radiation cycle may now have reached its peak, and irradiation intensity has been observed to be declining. This might account for the very recent net cessation of emission of green house gases into the atmosphere starting about 1988, in spite of increasing generation of anthropomorphically-sourced industrial-based green house gases.
While it seems likely that solar radiation, rather than human activity, is the “forcing agent” for global warming, the subject surely needs more study.
Except for all the scientists that disagree, there is a scientific consensus on the causes of climate change / global warming.
Oldest ever recovered DNA suggests much warmer, and greener, Greenland
Here’s another example of evidence refuting the existence of anthropological global warming (i.e. a global rise in temparature caused by man-made CO2 emissions), that will be ignored by the environmental hysterics and carbon credit hucksters: Ancient Greenland was actually green!
The oldest ever recovered DNA samples have been collected from under more than a mile of Greenland ice, and their analysis suggests the island was much warmer during the last Ice Age than previously thought.
The DNA is proof that sometime between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago, much of Greenland was especially green and covered in a boreal forest that was home to alder, spruce and pine trees, as well as insects such as butterflies and beetles.
From the genetic material of these organisms, the researchers infer that Greenland’s temperature once varied from 50 degrees Fahrenheit in summer to 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit in winter — the temperature range that the tree species prefer.
Goracle’s Convenient Untruths
The Heartland Institute‘s senior fellow for environment policy – James M. Taylor – refutes many of the alarmist claims made by Al Gore in his “documentary”, An Inconvenient Truth:
Many of the assertions Gore makes in his movie, ”An Inconvenient Truth,” have been refuted by science, both before and after he made them. Gore can show sincerity in his plea for scientific honesty by publicly acknowledging where science has rebutted his claims.
For example, Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate reported, “Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame.”
UW-Madison professor emeritus Reid Bryson considers global warming a bunch of hooey
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.
Bryson is but one of many, many serious scientists that dispute the existence of Anthropological Global Warming. In fact, there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to listing these skeptics. And, there is also a great series of articles in the National Post, called The Deniers.
Considering just how many qualified scientists dispute the hysterical mainstream opinion on Global Warming, why do we see so little coverage of the other side of the story? Once again, the media’s leftist agenda is illustrated in their skewed coverage of a subject.
