Sh*t...behind the curve ball again....damn!
Posted on 05/01/2007 8:06:36 PM PDT by Valin
In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others less virtuous than themselves.
The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind's sinful contribution--and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed.
Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slow arc. The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. It starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e., 1.1 billion metric tons), and peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, plummets into the Great Depression and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 percent drop. Then, in 1933, the line climbs slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.
And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That's the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it's at 380. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 percent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn't even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere's CO2. It is thus impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil fuels.
I met Martin Hertzberg, PhD, the man who drew that graph and those conclusions, on a Nation cruise back in 2001. He remarked that while he shared many of The Nation's editorial positions, he approved of my reservations on the question of human contributions to global warming, as outlined in columns I wrote around that time. Hertzberg was a meteorologist for three years in the Navy, an occupation that gave him a lifelong mistrust of climate modeling. Trained in chemistry and physics, a combustion research scientist for most of his career, he's retired now in Copper Mountain, Colorado, but still consults from time to time.
Not so long ago, Hertzberg sent me some of his recent papers on the global warming hypothesis, a thesis now accepted by many progressives as infallible as Papal dogma on matters of faith. Among them was the graph described above, so devastating to the hypothesis.
As Hertzberg readily acknowledges, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased about 21 percent in the past century. The world has also been getting just a little warmer. The not-very-reliable data on the world's average temperature (which omit data from most of the world's oceans and remote regions, while overrepresenting urban areas) show about a 0.5 degree Celsius increase between 1880 and 1980, and still rising. But is CO2, at 380 ppm in the atmosphere, playing a significant role in retaining the 94 percent of solar radiation that the atmosphere absorbs, as against water vapor, also a powerful heat absorber, whose content in a humid tropical atmosphere can be as high as 20,000 ppm? As Hertzberg says, water in the form of oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor "is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the Earth and the sun.... Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane." And water is exactly that component of the Earth's heat balance that the global warming computer models fail to account for.
It's a notorious inconvenience for the Greenhousers that data also show CO2 concentrations from the Eocene period, 20 million years before Henry Ford trundled out his first Model T, 300 to 400 percent higher than current concentrations. The Greenhousers deal with other difficulties, like the medieval warming period's higher-than-today temperatures, by straightforward chicanery, misrepresenting tree ring data (themselves an unreliable guide) and claiming the warming was a local European affair.
We're warmer now because today's world is in the thaw following the recent ice age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive, all due to predictable changes in the Earth's elliptical orbit round the sun and in the Earth's tilt. As Hertzberg explains, the clinical heat effect of all of these variables was worked out in great detail between 1915 and 1940 by Milutin Milankovitch, a giant of twentieth-century astrophysics. In past post-glacial cycles, as now, the Earth's orbit and tilt give us more and longer summer days between the equinoxes.
Water covers 71 percent of Earth's surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there's 100 times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. "The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards," Hertzberg concludes. "It is the warming of the Earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse." In vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that for the last 750,000 years, CO2 changes have always lagged behind global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.
It looks like Poseidon should go hunting for carbon credits. The human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces and volumes, not to mention the role of the giant reactor beneath our feet: the Earth's increasingly hot molten core.
Next: Who are the hoaxers, and what are they after?
Ping
Yeah, actually, and sadly, I do believe it.
No, it is not a sin — it is a SCAM. The earth has been changing termperature since its creation and that simple fact is being scammed by filthy politicians, weak-minded liberals and complicit so-called scientists.
It won’t be long before farting is a hate crime.
Did you actually read the article? Notice where it was published, who wrote it!
Wow! First time I’ve enjoyed reading Alexander Cockburn in a long, long time! The Gore-slide-show-worshipping moonbats are going to be in an uproar!
The Nation? The liberal rag’s got something right? You gotta be putting us on — it’s like, like, well, strange...
Alexander Cockburn?
Calling global warming and "carbon credits" a scam?
Is it April Fool's day?
I wonder if he ever, ponders the corner he has painted himself into. Either we are all doomed, or he is the biggest fool to ever live. Nice choice.
Wow, Cockburn actually saying something that doesn’t make you Ralph....he’s got the global warming scam pinned.
yes, this is crazy - I’m sitting here stunned
He's usually wrong but unafraid to be controversial. This time, he probably went too far. Controversy is one thing. Blasphemy is another altogether.
There's not room on the left for that opinion--Global Warming is the cart they are going to ride to worldwide dominion over mankind. Noone, but noone, is permitted to stand in the way of that goal. It has ever been thus. "To make an omlet, you have to break eggs." Lenin.
The Gore-slide-show-worshipping moonbats are going to be in an uproar!
When are they not?
Identity Theft! Who is this guy, and what has he done with Alexander Cockburn?
Or models? :-)
My tagline, uttered in the 1920's, really says it all about today's Democrats.
I’m looking forward to the next issue “Next: Who are the hoaxers, and what are they after?”
The DUer must be coming down with a darn near fatal case of the vapors.
Looks like a sign of the Apocalypse, which puts us back where we started.
bump
Wow! I am glad to see HE wrote that and it’s an excellent piece.
when I read the title I assumed it was another christian group jumping on the global warming bandwagon
No doubt!
PJ, have you been monitoring the DUmmies’ reaction to this piece?
Alexander had better be careful, or the lefties will shun him like they did Chris Hitchens over Iraq.
(I’m surprised The Nation even printed something this anti-dogmatic by one of its long-time contributors.)
I must give credit where it is do. Reverend Bob got it to me. He being my Geology and global warming guy.
Sh*t...behind the curve ball again....damn!
bttt
This is exactly why the Left never has any lasting impact. When something becomes "accepted wisdom," they suddenly rebel against it. Let's remember -- back in the '70s, they rebelled against their '60s selves and became polyestered disco dudes and chicks. Once disco became "old hat," they hung up their dancin' shoes and morphed into Wall Street types. Whenever something of theirs becomes "established," the Left is gone.
Sorry, Al.
I wonder if Algore's name will come up...
Those liberals aren't "weak-minded", they are manipulating this junk science to promote their world socialist agenda and impose control over anyone and everyone.
True, but don’t forget the $$$. There’s a lot of good dough to be made off convincing the public to buy into the “global warming” industry.
Those liberals aren’t “weak-minded”, they are manipulating this junk science to promote their world socialist agenda and impose control over anyone and everyone.
:::
True - it is quite calculated. The reference to “weak minded” reflects on their lack of ability to do anything credible and respectable without turning to this level of sham and deceit.
Shet mah mouf. Cockburn making good skeptical sense. I need a drink.
Shet mah mouf. Cockburn making good skeptical sense. I need a drink.
communism has always been a substitute for religion.
marx’ books are chiliastic.
Silly boy. Indulgences do not forgive sins. Catholics must confess their sins to a priest and be forgiven before they can recieve an Indulgence. The Catholic Church, which I dearly love, believes that even when sin is forgiven the punishment for that sin sometimes remains. So it is the punishment still due for sins committed that an Indulgence can negate, but the Church never, ever taught or believed that indulgences forgave sins. That's just a silly myth perpetuated by the very ignorant.
Have one for me, cuz I can’t drink.
Amazing...good article!
Ping
Teachings versus practice haven’t always been as pure as you seem to be trying to make everything out to be.
“To uproot the evil of simony so prevalent during the Middle Ages, the Church decreed the severest penalties against its perpetrators.”
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14001a.htm
Sandy Koufax rocked.
I don't read anti-Catholic crap, but thanks anyway.
New Advent puts out anti-Catholic crap?
I’ve met Cockburn. I actually worked with him on a story a long, long time ago.
He is definitely a leftist. He is a conspiracy theorist. He is an anarchist of sorts.
But occasionally you can put out the utter fallacy of the opponents arguments and get him riled up about how completely phony it all it. And then you just put him in the direction of the enemy camp and let him go off.
I, too, have met Cockburn and I have discussed environmental issues with him including global warming. To his credit he has been calling bullshit on the global warming alarmists for at least fifteen years.
yeah, I read the column too not believing it was Cockburn who wrote it. But he did. It just proves the old adage about the blind pig I guess.
In this end, people will reject this scam, but it will take a while to beat down the socialists.
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