Posted on 07/23/2003 7:13:18 AM PDT by sjersey
More proof of the causes of climate change came earlier this month when the Geological Society of America's GSA Today published a study by a Canadian geologist and an Israeli astrophysicist which shows conclusively that over the past half-billion years, the interplay between solar activity and cosmic rays from deep space has caused the periodic warming and cooling of the planet, on a fairly predictable cycle of about 135 million years.
Carbon dioxide, the main culprit in the alleged greenhouse-gas warming, is not a "driver" of climate change at all. Indeed, in earlier research Jan Veizer, of the University of Ottawa and one of the co-authors of the GSA Today article, established that rather than forcing climate change, CO2 levels actually lag behind climatic temperatures, suggesting that global warming may cause carbon dioxide rather than the other way around.
(This may help explain why the planet's temperature began to rise about a century and a half ago, but CO2 levels have only begun to rise noticeably in the past 50 or 60 years.)
What Veizer and his co-author Nir Shaviv, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discovered is that when cosmic rays strike Earth in abnormally high concentrations, their highly charged particles cause aerosols in our atmosphere to pick up electrical charges, too. These energized aerosols then attract water vapor causing low-level cloud cover to increase.
But when our sun is particularly active, the solar wind it produces "blows" these cosmic ray particles away before they can charge up the atmospheric aerosols, diminishing cloud formation.
This is significant because clouds in the lower atmosphere shield the Earth from solar radiation. They bounce this "insolation" (incoming solar radiation) back into space before it can cause the planet to warm. Thus when cosmic rays are plentiful, so are clouds, and our planet cools.
The reverse is true when our sun is at its most active. Its solar winds keep clouds from forming, thereby allowing more solar radiation to reach Earth and warm it.
Global cooling is greatest typically when Earth is passing through one of the luminescent arms of our Milky Way galaxy. There, new stars are born, mature, and die with stunning rapidity. These unstable stars' lifecycles are often only a million years, rather than a few billion for the average planetary sun. Still, the supernovas they produce when they die propel billions upon billions of high-energy rays into space. When the Earth is anywhere near these stellar fireworks, it picks up added doses of cloud-making cosmic rays -- and cools dramatically.
Veizer and Shaviv calculated that the solar brightening of the past 150 years by itself might account for one-third of the warming during that time. But add to that their new discovery that solar wind gusts prevent the formation of cooling clouds by blocking cosmic rays, and the effects of brightening alone are greatly magnified. (Solar winds were unusually strong during the 20th century.)
So how great is the magnification of solar brightening caused by solar winds' effects on cosmic rays and clouds? Veizer thinks it is enough to explain away all of the warming since the end of the Little Ice Age, without any contribution by carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gasses. Shaviv worries anthropogenic CO2 may have some fractional effect.
It should have been impossible for over a decade now for the main greenhouse scientists and politicians -- such as the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Canadian Environment Minister David Anderson -- to dismiss the impact the sun has on climate change. Heck, it is impossible for my son to ignore. He recently completed first grade, where he learned that day is usually warmer than night, direct sunlight warmer than shade, and summer warmer than winter, and all thanks to "Mr. Golden Sun."
So how have the pushers of global warming theory gotten away with pretending the sun has no impact at all (or a negligible one), especially when such internationally renowned scientists as TechCentralStation's own Enviro-Sci Host Sallie Baliunas and her colleague Willie Soon have been convincingly demonstrating for years that solar brightening and other solar activity have a profound, if not the principal effect on climate?
The greenhouse chorus has been able to say that solar activity and carbon dioxide have both been increasing in lockstep with global temperatures, so there is no way to prove one is a "driver" and the other not.
Veizer and Shaviv's greatest contribution is their time scale. They have examined the relationship of cosmic rays, solar activity and CO2, and climate change going back through thousands of major and minor coolings and warmings. They found a strong -- very strong -- correlation between cosmic rays, solar activity and climate change, but almost none between carbon dioxide and global temperature increases.
In an article in the July 14 issue of Canada's National Post newspaper, Tim Patterson, a respected Canadian paleoclimatologist, explains that Veizer and Shaviv "have now provided the missing data." No longer can the pro-Kyoto types in their legislatures or laboratories take cover behind the lockstep excuse.
What adds extra credibility to Veizer's and Shaviv's results is the fact that neither knew the other until after each had reached the same conclusions independently! Veizer was finishing off his research last September, when he received an e-mail from Shaviv suggesting they compare notes. When they met in Toronto last October, they were staggered by the similarities.
This should be good news on two fronts. First, a great mystery has been solved, which is always satisfying. Second, far from being a manmade disaster, the warming we have experienced to date is entirely natural. It is, therefore, unlikely to continue to the point at which it will destroy us. After all, it has been ebbing and flowing every 135 million years for the past 500+ million years. There is also nothing we could do to stop it, even if we tried.
But this will hardly be welcomed. Too many people have too much riding on greenhouse global warming -- research grants, business subsidies, personal prestige, bureaucratic power and political agendas -- to permit another theory to supplant it.
I wouldn't place any strong bets on THIS possibility. The socialist Greenies can and will ignore any science that doesn't fit their preconceptions and their lust to establish global socialism and control over EVERY aspect of our lives.
However, the 135 million year cycle is obviously not very relevant to the changes over the past couple centuries. (A wave function with a period of 135 million years will have no noticeable variation over the course of a few centuries.)
Consider this site for a collection of greenhouse skeptic articles:
http://www.vision.net.au/~daly
Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this list.
Carefully acquired insights about the world's climate gave Dr. Jan Veizer a crash course on how provocative the media can be when it tackles a science news story.
"It's not that I'm afraid to die," said comedian Woody Allen, "I just don't want to be there when it happens."
Earth Sciences professor Jan Veizer felt much the same way about joining the scientific debate over the world's changing climate. Nevertheless, he found himself thrust into the fray following the publication of his work in Nature, a prominent science journal.
In a paper published in December, Dr. Veizer gave a detailed perspective on how climate change has occurred in cycles throughout the last 550 million years. In contrast to the widely touted argument that carbon dioxide "drives" the climate, he suggested that it is just one of several gases amplifying the effects of a much more complicated system that is driven in entirely different ways.
The controversy began when Nature did not tell Dr. Veizer that his article would be published with a commentary by Pennsylvania State University geoscientist Dr. Lee Kump. Aside: I've met him; he's worked with one of the Cal-Berkeley professors that I took classes from when I toyed with geoscience as a career.
Dr. Kump argued that Dr. Veizer's observations had significant economic and political implications. He pointed out that if CO2 is no more than an amplifier, then costly international efforts -- such as those proposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the Kyoto Accord -- could well be scrapped.
Dr. Veizer knew his research findings were contrary to some of the most popular positions on this subject and were not politically welcome. But he concluded that it was scientifically correct to say so, and his 30 years of acclaimed research supported his opinion. Regardless, he was not spoiling for a fight over the matter. Within days however, the attention of the world's media was on him. What astonished Dr. Veizer the most was that much of the coverage, such as a story by the American network CNN, was assembled only from the Nature articles without any attempt to contact him.
Likely because of Dr. Kump's related comments, some reporters asked Dr. Veizer if he favoured letting industries pollute as much as they want, since he was implying that industries' CO2 emissions would not cause climate change.
"I never said CO2 was not a greenhouse gas," he says. "But there is this one political dogma: CO2 equals global warming equals climate change equals disaster. Now, the further you go along this equation, the iffier it is scientifically. But the moment you step away from the dogma you are excommunicated. You are undermining the environmental agenda." In fact, Dr. Veizer has no problem with the environmental agenda, which stems from a desire to reduce the amount of pollution produced by our industrial civilization. However, he points out that many people confuse this goal with reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to prevent global warming. He makes no apologies for challenging the science behind that agenda.
"Climate is much more than just carbon dioxide or temperature," he says, insisting that water vapour plays a much larger part in this process than a gas like CO2, not least of all because there is a lot more of it in the atmosphere.
Some observers were pleased to see his findings surface in as definitive a forum as Nature.
"It is an important article," says Dr. Philippe Crabbé, director of the University's Institute for Research in Environment and Economics (IREE). "This points out that even though CO2 may be a driver of global warming, it is certainly not the only one, and there may be others which are relevant, and possibly more relevant."
Meanwhile, climatologists such as Dr. Konrad Gajewski of the Department of Geography are prepared to challenge Dr. Veizer over the application of ancient, long-term geological data to today's short-term climatic shifts.
For his part, Dr. Veizer is more than happy to deal with criticism at a technical level. But he worries about the eagerness of many environmental lobbyists to insist on a model of climate change that depends solely on a link with CO2, which ultimately may not be proven. That possibility could do serious harm to what he regards as a worthwhile goal -- cleaning up the only planet where we can live.
"It will not just be support for the climate change model that is discarded, but support for the environmental agenda too," he says. "If you yell fire too many times, eventually the science you use will be discarded."
Final aside: darn good comments from Dr. Veizer. I think this lends perspective to what he's researching, and what he thinks.
Force of change not necessarily CO2
Illuminating excerpt:
"Currently, our best explanation for the climatic changes in the absence of greenhouse forcing is changes in the distribution of continents and the positions of mountain belts. Such a different configuration of land and ocean influences the cycle of water on Earth. And changes in cloudiness or in the extent of the ice caps at the poles are powerful agents of climate change.
But over the short time span of the 20th century, the drift of continents is clearly far too small to have played any such role. So the results from Veizer's team do not absolve us from trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
Illuminating excerpt:
An article by German geoscientist Jan Veizer and Canadian colleagues published in this week's Nature has found that there were periods during the Phanerozoic era (up to 570 million years ago) when atmospheric CO2 levels did not accord with climate change, suggesting CO2 may not be the problem it has been made out to be.
"Such a conclusion deserves close scrutiny, because the policy implications are huge," writes Lee R. Kump in an accompanying commentary.
"The geological record is our best hope of establishing a correspondence between atmospheric levels of CO2 and climate and understanding the likely consequences of fossil-fuel burning. If large changes in atmospheric CO2 in the past have not produced the climate response we thought they had, that undermines the case for reducing fossil-fuel emissions."
OK, BUT THEN...
However, Kump isn't so convinced, pointing out that it may not be appropriate to draw such a conclusion based on the methods used - something the authors themselves admit."
and further down:
"So the lack of close correspondence between climate change and proxy indicators of atmospheric CO2, may force us to re-evaluate the proxies rather than disavow the notion that substantially increased atmospheric CO2 will indeed lead to marked warming in the future."
I.e., don't be too hasty jumping off the CO2-causes-warming bandwagon.
Why? Because the people who fund the environmental movemint want to make money playing with funds confiscated under the Kyoto protocol. It is a massive misallocation of capital that itself has very serious environmental consequences.
(Please read my entire reply before responding.)
How would they make money playing with funds "confiscated" under the Kyoto Protocol? I.e., how are the people who fund the environmental movement going to get that money?
I ask because I don't know. I am FULLY in agreement with you that excess atmospheric CO2 has adverse environmmental consequences that are under-researched and perhaps unreported; the deleterious effect on coral calcification rate being one such effect.
Furthermore, I am also FULLY in agreement that the emphasis on CO2 and global warming in the public mind (partly due to the uncertainty of the science) substantially detracts from vital environmental issues. Two such issues that deeply concern me are coastal zone degradation (living in the NE metroplex near the Chesapeake Bay underscores why) and the heavily stressed state of many of the world's economically important fisheries. There may not be much we can do about atmospheric CO2 concentrations in the next 50 years, and whatever temperature increase results from them, but I think there is a lot we can/should/must do about the degradation of the coastal zone and the state of the world's fisheries. If we don't start doing something with regard to those sooner than later, they will be in a sorry state in 50 years.
Second answer: Bankers make money on currency transactions and capital loans to build infratructure in the developing world. Carbon credits provide the puddle of money that is being used to fund such investments while hindering competitors in the developed world to make larger profits for that investor class.
Third answer: The real environmental problems we have are manifestations of a structural problem: political control of environmental investment, regulation, and remediation. If you want to see something substantive done about destruction of coastal zones, especially by exotic species, overfishing, and development of estuaries, read the book. The answers start with marketing environmental uses of private property and slowly privatizing control of public access.
I'd rather not read the book if I could actually spend the time more productively by doing something. Would you join me in co-authoring a letter that we could post on FR for people to send to their congressional representatives advocating the use of ITQs (as described by Jonathan Adler) for fisheries management purposes?
It's interesting that I clearly disagree with some of your opinions yet I clearly agree with others. I doubt reading your book would change that substantively; you are a better advocate of your ideas than I could ever be.
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