Rushing to Judgment (Global Warming Questioned - Long but Good)

Wilson Quarterly ^ | Autumn 2003 | Jack M. Hollander

[jcb8199]

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[jcb8199]

I think that, instead of worrying about silly things like pollution and all that, scientists should be trying to stop volcanic eruptions. Talk about spewing pollution straight into the atmosphere!

[dirtboy]

globaloney warming ping

[SAJ]

Exactly what the discussion needs -- more light, less heat.

[dirtboy]

Political economists Henry Jacoby, Ronald Prinn, and Richard Schmalensee put the matter bluntly: “It will be nearly impossible to slow climate warming appreciably without condemning much of the world to poverty, unless energy sources that emit little or no carbon dioxide become competitive with conventional fossil fuels.”

This is exactly what the enviro-whackos want - to use Kyoto to force their vision of sustainable (i.e., severely diminished) development upon the First World.

[Carry_Okie]

Poing.

dirtboy, about that tagline... Conan meets Medusa?

[dirtboy]

dirtboy, about that tagline... Conan meets Medusa?

Nah, Conan meets Sasquatch. I wouldn't want to turn the governor-elect of California into a statue by tossing him into a closet with Helen Thomas, although even a statue of Conan would have been an improvement over Gray Davis.

[SAJ]

Sure is. Which is why we should cut them zero slack and need to, and frequently, every day.

They won't change, of course -- Marxists almost never do -- but those who are not ideologues and/or who have some rudimentary concept of empirical science and methods will sooner or later see the light of day, and it is these two groups who are and will continue to be the ''swing voters'' on the subject.

[cogitator]

Thanks.

Earth’s cooling trend did not continue beyond 1980, but neither has there been an unambiguous warming trend. Since 1980, precise temperature measurements have been made in Earth’s atmosphere and on its surface, but the results do not agree. The surface air measurements indicate significant warming (0.25 to 0.4ºC), but the atmospheric measurements show very little, if any, warming... Briefly, then, the record is this: From 1860 to 1940, Earth’s surface warmed about 0.4ºC. Then Earth’s surface cooled about 0.1ºC in the first four decades after 1940 and warmed about 0.3ºC in the next two. For those two most recent decades, temperature measurements of the atmosphere have also been available, and, while these measurements are subject to significant uncertainty, they indicate that the atmosphere’s temperature has remained essentially unchanged.

My schedule is getting better, but I still need a little more time to get everything together. Nonetheless, it bugs me that skeptics continue to repeat the mantra that "atmospheric [meaning lower troposphere] temperatures are not changing" when in fact the NASA group most widely quoted now finds about a +0.07 C /decade warming trend in the lower atmosphere -- and two other groups analyzing the same data find a trend that's about double that. And since they're analyzing a data record that's about 23 years long now, this record is now also showing a warming trend during the short period when the surface record shows a pretty dramatic 0.3 C increase. Note that if the alternate groups to NASA are believed, and they're some pretty sharp folks, their trend essentially matches the surface trend.

The post-1970s warming is the one most oft-cited as due primarily to human causes. The 1900s-1940s warming is usually at least partly attributed to solar forcing.

[swilhelm73]

Keep in mind what Gorbachev is doing now...

With the failure of his communist empire he is now running an environmental organization.

The enviros - generally watermelons - figure if they can't delude you into obeying them with promises of a socialist utopia will try to frighten you into obeying them with incessant scare mongering. We've gone through how many environmental catastrophes that never actually happened now? Resource depletion, Malthusian starvation, global cooling, and now we are on global warming...

I wonder what will be next after global warming...maybe global superstorms? A failing sky? Mutant angry wolves attacking boys named Peter? Tinfoil hat shortages?

[Old Professer]

The upcoming water-wars will make the global-warming business look like chid's play.

[ancient_geezer]

NASA group most widely quoted now finds about a +0.07 C /decade warming trend in the lower atmosphere

A statistical regression of a mere thirty years of raw data does not consitute a climate trend, especially concidering that data set spans several el-nino/el-nina events as well as volcanic events inducing error in regression measurements that would supposedly be attributable to a longterm "Global Warming".

Note the following data that until Feb 2002 exhibited a .04C/decade, only one additional el-nino event doubled the "trend" measure to that 0.07C/decade regression you are quoting.

 

Globally Averaged Atmospheric Temperatures
(NASA)

This chart shows the monthly temperature changes for the lower troposphere - Earth's atmosphere from the surface to 8 km, or 5 miles up. The temperature in this region is more strongly influenced by oceanic activity, particularly the "El Niño" and "La Niña" phenomena, which originate as changes in oceanic and atmospheric circulations in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The overall trend in the tropospheric data is near zero, being +0.04 C/decade through Feb 2002. Click on the chart to get the numerical data.

 

Such instability in regression measurement is a result of the more than 0.2C stand deviation noise in a short term measurement, not the effect of a secular change in Climate do to any effect of mankind.

 

Mankind's impact is only 0.28% of Total Greenhouse effect

" There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, (the Kyoto Protocol) would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures -- one-twentieth of a degree by 2050. "

Dr. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia,
and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service;
in a Sept. 10, 2001 Letter to Editor, Wall Street Journal

 

Anthropogenic (man-made) Contribution to the "Greenhouse
Effect," expressed as % of Total (water vapor INCLUDED)

Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics	% of All Greenhouse Gases	% Natural	% Man-made
Water vapor	95.000%	94.999%	0.001%
Carbon Dioxide (CO2)	3.618%	3.502%	0.117%
Methane (CH4)	0.360%	0.294%	0.066%
Nitrous Oxide (N2O)	0.950%	0.903%	0.047%
Misc. gases ( CFC's, etc.)	0.072%	0.025%	0.047%
Total	100.00%	99.72	0.28%

 

Even if one were so foolish as to accept such a raw statistic as representative, the change in temperature acoss a century of time would still amount to only 0.7^oC(far less than the IPPC's model projections) with no causual connection with CO2(natural or manmade).

 

CO2-Temperature Correlations

• "(1) correlation does not prove causation, (2) cause must precede effect, and (3) when attempting to evaluate claims of causal relationships between different parameters, it is important to have as much data as possible in order to weed out spurious correlations.
  
  ***
  
  Consider, for example, the study of Fischer et al. (1999), who examined trends of atmospheric CO2 and air temperature derived from Antarctic ice core data that extended back in time a quarter of a million years.  Over this extended period, the three most dramatic warming events experienced on earth were those associated with the terminations of the last three ice ages; and for each of these climatic transitions, earth's air temperature rose well in advance of any increase in atmospheric CO2.  In fact, the air's CO2 content did not begin to rise until 400 to 1,000 years after the planet began to warm.  Such findings have been corroborated by Mudelsee (2001), who examined the leads/lags of atmospheric CO2 concentration and air temperature over an even longer time period, finding that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lagged behind variations in air temperature by 1,300 to 5,000 years over the past 420,000 years."

[ see also: Indermuhle et al. (2000), Monnin et al. (2001), Yokoyama et al. (2000), Clark and Mix (2000) ]

• "Other studies periodically demonstrate a complete uncoupling of CO2 and temperature "

[see: Petit et al. (1999), Staufer et al. (1998), Cheddadi et al., (1998), Raymo et al., 1998, Pagani et al. (1999), Pearson and Palmer (1999), Pearson and Palmer, (2000) ]

• "Considered in their entirety, these several results present a truly chaotic picture with respect to any possible effect that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration may have on global temperature.  Clearly, atmospheric CO2 is not the all-important driver of global climate change the climate alarmists make it out to be."

 

Global warming and global dioxide emission and concentration:
a Granger causality analysis

http://isi-eh.usc.es/trabajos/122_41_fullpaper.pdf

•  "We find, in opposition to previous studies, that there is no evidence of Granger causality from global carbon dioxide emission to global surface temperature. Further, we could not find robust empirical evidence for the causal nexus from global carbon dioxide concentration to global surface temperature."

---

Here Comes the Sun

"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."

***

"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."

[SAJ]

Exactly so, but don't forget to include in your list the unfortunately prosperous health-(s)care industry, most of whose ''practitioners'' have the identical mindset.

They know perfectly well that no nationalised medical scheme ever even can work, and none would ever be chosen by the populace in a democratic fashion, and so they creep it up on the nation via the diktat of unelected regulators and equally unelected activist alleged ''judges''.

This past January and February, I happened to have both of my lenses replaced (due to rapidly advancing cataracts) with silicon-polymer prosthetic lenses, the procedure called intraocular phaco-emulsification. Completely routine, 26 minutes per eye, local anaesthesia (which makes for a very neat and fascinating slow-motion 60s-style light show, too, because the eye, obviously, is open during the procedure), time from making the appointment to the surgery -- 11 days. Later, I asked an old friend in the UK to see how long the wait would be under their vaunted National Plan. Are you ready -- better sit down -- from 2 1/2 to 3 YEARS!

I didn't HAVE 2 1/2 years, I'd have been stone blind by then; hell's bells, I was legally blind as it was (20/2800), thank you, but am now back to 20/30, just -1.5 diopters in each eye. And yet, these nationalisation advocates would INSIST that I, and hundreds of thousands of others, wait around on THEIR pleasure, because the surgery was ''elective''.

Bleep them and the Marxist mule they rode in on.

FReegards!

[SAJ]

Right you are, professor! And we'll have at least one energy war within the next few decades, too -- unless, of course, we can manage to get the envirogorks and the no-nuke nuts off our backs and build a sufficient quantity of nuclear plants.

FReegards!

[cogitator]

A statistical regression of a mere thirty years of raw data does not consitute a climate trend, especially concidering that data set spans several el-nino/el-nina events as well as volcanic events inducing error in regression measurements that would supposedly be attributable to a longterm "Global Warming". Note the following data that until Feb 2002 exhibited a .04C/decade, only one additional el-nino event doubled the "trend" measure to that 0.07C/decade regression you are quoting.

Acceleration, AG, acceleration is the key that is the concern of climate scientists. The trend since 1975 is about 4x faster than the accepted warming of 0.6 C during the 20th century. Perhaps it's not a "climate trend", which is why a wait-and -see attitude is advisable. How long would you like to wait? 2010? 2015? And the atmospheric trend is not exactly zero or negligible. When the Spencer and Christy MSU data was flat due to erroneous analysis, the 22-year flat trend was widely touted by skeptics like Singer and Michaels as evidence that nothing significant was going on. Now that the trend is definitely upward, we hear that the record isn't long enough to be significant or that it's less than expected. That's a big change in tune, if you're listening.

Regarding that 0.28% contribution; the article cited is either being disingenuous or erroneous. Everybody knows that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas; if it wasn't the Earth would be an uninhabitable -40 C world. BFD. The key is the forcing effect of the CO2 being added to the atmosphere, which in turn increases relative humidity (water vapor, of course) and has additional positive feedback effects. The climate sensitivity to increasing CO2 is the important factor, not the direct heating contribution of CO2. We've been over this before and I've posted the Hansen forcing diagram in response, but you keep regurgiposting the same stuff. It's somewhat pointless to try and discuss this with you when you post outdated information (such as the 0.04C/decade caption to your first figure) and you continue posting propaganda pieces.

Next: Regarding the time lag between warming and CO2 levels. I think we've been over this before, but due to the reservoir of dissolved CO2 in the surface ocean, there's no doubt that warming due to astronomical factors would definitely cause a CO2 increase. It's also a positive feedback mechanism: once higher C02 concentrations are in place, they contribute to the maintenance of a warmer climate, DUE to their radiative forcing contribution.

Next: The problem is, we're in a relatively stable climate regime, with no indications of astronomical warming/cooling factors (and anyway, they act on a much longer time scale than one or two centuries). So the increasing concentration of CO2 is hard to model in terms of climate effect, because it's the primary changing forcing factor. As Pat Michaels noted very recently (in an editorial in the Washington Times published today) there has been some convergence on the likelihood of a 0.75-1.0 C temperature increase over the next 50 years -- he quotes James Hansen on this and belittles the high-end IPCC projections, which are derived from model modifications designed to DETERMINE the potential maximums. What he doesn't point out is that Hansen also advocates a range of 2.0 - 3.0 for the entire next century (while admitting that the longer range is harder to predict due to the uncertainty of non-climate factors). If he thinks so highly of Hansen, why only push the lower 50-year prediction and not the accelerating (due to higher CO2 concentrations) century prediction? Partly because more significant detrimental ecosystem effects are expected to happen when global temperature rises more than about 2.5 C.

Plus, I think Michaels is misleading, based on this article:

Climate Change: 50 Years Past and Possible Futures

Quoting from introduction: "A new NASA-funded study used a computer climate model to simulate the last 50 years of climate changes, projects warming over the next 50 years regardless of whether or not nations curb their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions soon. If no emission reductions are made and they continue to increase at the current rate, global temperatures may increase by 1-2º Celsius (1.8º-3.6º Fahrenheit). But if the growth rate of carbon dioxide does not exceed its current rate and if the growth of true air pollutants (things that are harmful to human health) is reversed, temperatures may rise by only 0.75C (1.35F)."

Michaels is very consistent in always emphasizing the lower-bound estimates of future warming. So do we really expect that the growth rate of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere won't increase?

Next: with regard to the Veizer article, I'm going to save time and refer to my own earlier discussion of it here on FR:

Here Comes the Sun Refer in particular to comments 12, 14, and 16. I will supply this quote from Dr. Kump in evaluation of Veizer's research. However, this is the full quote, not the excerpt from the FR thread I posted earlier:

"When we put everything we know into models of the carbon cycle", Lee Kump writes, "we predict changes in atmospheric CO2 that largely parallel inferred climate shifts. 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."

You also might like to read this letter to the editor from the magazine New Scientist from noted climate modeler Stefan Rahmstorf, which I provide in its entirety:

"Stott claims that the paper by Shaviv and Veizer is important science that did not get enough attention from media and policy makers. The opposite is true: it received a disproportionate amount of media coverage due to the strong but unfounded claims the authors made in their press releases.

Shaviv and Veizer claim to have found a correlation between cosmic ray flux and temperature. Even if we accept their (questionable) data, it should be noted that this correlation was constructed by arbitrarily stretching the timescale to shift the maxima of cosmic ray flux by up to 20 million years, to make them coincide with temperature minima. The unadulterated data show no significant correlation - we have checked this. Shaviv and Veizer then proceed to estimate the climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentration through regression analysis, which for a number of reasons is not possible.

If it were, far better data is available for this analysis: the Antarctic ice core data. It is much more accurate, shows variations on more relevant timescales and closer to present CO2 levels, and applies to the present-day configuration of continents. Such an analysis would yield a climate sensitivity exceeding 10 °C, but no climatologist would suggest this is a viable method."

(Not exactly a ringing endorsement.)

That's about enough for today, and probably this week. I can probably manage one or two extended responses like this a week now. It takes time and I always do Web searches to back up my statements. So go ahead and respond to this, and you'll have to wait until next week for me to take it up again.

[farmfriend]

Rights, farms, environment ping.

Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this list.
I don't get offended if you want to be removed.

[ancient_geezer]

The climate sensitivity to increasing CO2 is the important factor, not the direct heating contribution of CO2.

There is no measurable climate sensitivity to increasing CO2 if there were, the average surface temperature of the earth in the following graphical presentation would have a curve similar to the CO2 curve.

Global Surface Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time 

Late Carboniferous to Early Permian time (315 mya -- 270 mya) is the only time period in the last 600 million years when both atmospheric CO2 and temperatures were as low as they are today (Quaternary Period ).

Temperature after C.R. Scotese
CO2 after R.A. Berner, 1994

•     There has historically been much more CO2 in our atmosphere than exists today. For example, during the Jurassic Period (200 mya), average CO2 concentrations were about 900 ppm or about 2.5 times higher than today. The highest concentrations of CO2 during all of the Paleozoic Era occurred during the Ordovician Period, exceeding 6000 ppm -- more than 16 times higher than today.

•     The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today.
  
  To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age, with CO2 concentrations nearly 15 times higher than today-- 5500 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming.

We've been over this before

Yep, and I sure we will go over it again.

 

and I've posted the Hansen forcing diagram in response, but you keep regurgiposting the same stuff.

Why should the information change? What exists in the paleoclimatic record doesn't change merely for ones convenience or Hansen's forcing diagram; nor do the studies on CO2/Temp correlation and causality change from one month to the next. They are as applicable today as they have always been in defeating the base presumption built into the IPPC's models of CO2 "forcing" (i.e driving) atmospheric temperature.

The same stuff, is applicable, Hansens forcing curve is based in the same erroneaous presumptions of a "runaway" greenhouse, for which there is no basis as can be seen in the prior chart. The earth's temperature across the last billion or more years is self limiting and is clearly not a a function of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

It's somewhat pointless to try and discuss this with you when you post outdated information (such as the 0.04C/decade caption to your first figure)

Not outdated at all, the link is current and the data set is complete to 2003, anyone may run the regressions on the data set to compute the results of 0.04C/decade through Feb 2002, with 0.07C/decade by adding in the data including the final el-nino even after Feb 2002. The web page linked by the way is the Current NASA page for the MSU graphic, and links to current dataset.

and you continue posting propaganda pieces.

So data contrary to your view of things is characterised by you as propoganda. Sorry, doesn't fly.

Now that the trend is definitely upward, we hear that the record isn't long enough to be significant or that it's less than expected.

What trend? There is no more than a short term raw dataset with a regression which is just as likely to change the other way in another 10-20 years data input.

The only upward overall trend on multi century basis is that of a natural tendency to the mean of the current era, not one measurably driven by any activity of mankind.

It is also abundantly clear we are in a multi-millenial down trend from somewhat higher temperatures earlier in a much older glacial cycle.

. Everybody knows that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas; if it wasn't the Earth would be an uninhabitable -40 C world. BFD.

Casual dismissal of the variation in water vapor as a contributor of climate variation is hardly useful to the discussion, considering the fact that loss of water vapor in the atmosphere is one of the primary factors in deepening the earth's glacial cycle. "BFD" indeed.

The key is the forcing effect of the CO2 being added to the atmosphere,

Tch,tch, from whence this CO2 being added? warming of the oceans by solar activity, changes in earths orbit increasing bio activity and biomass, as well as release from CO2 trapped in ice, & solution in oceans. But more importantly increases in water vapor in much higher measure as a concequence of ocean warming.

which in turn increases relative humidity (water vapor, of course) and has additional positive feedback effects.

Kind backward in your causation I do believe.

Global warming and global dioxide emission and concentration:
a Granger causality analysis

http://isi-eh.usc.es/trabajos/122_41_fullpaper.pdf

•  "We find, in opposition to previous studies, that there is no evidence of Granger causality from global carbon dioxide emission to global surface temperature. Further, we could not find robust empirical evidence for the causal nexus from global carbon dioxide concentration to global surface temperature."

---

Regarding the time lag between warming and CO2 levels. I think we've been over this before, but due to the reservoir of dissolved CO2 in the surface ocean, there's no doubt that warming due to astronomical factors would definitely cause a CO2 increase.

 

It's also a positive feedback mechanism:

There is no "positive feedback" the only energy input is solar, change in concentration of atmospheric gasses can only shift the absorption spectum but cannot create heat where there is none to begin with.

There is no runnaway effect whatsoever, in fact the effectiveness of atmospheric heat retention decreases exponentially with increasing concentration of water vapor and lesser greenhouse gasses, that is why the earth's surface temperature limits out at approximately 22^oC of solar input instead of continual rise above that level that a supposed positive feedback, "runnaway" greenhouse scenario demands.

once higher C02 concentrations are in place, they contribute to the maintenance of a warmer climate, DUE to their radiative forcing contribution.

A presumption unsupported in paleoclimatic studies of causality.

Here Comes the Sun

"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."

***

"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."

Nor is positive feedback/ runnaway greenhouse supported by the paleoclimatic record of CO2 concentration vs temperature represented in the first graphic above.

The problem is, we're in a relatively stable climate regime, with no indications of astronomical warming/cooling factors

Sorry, bad assumption:

Red Planet Warming;

Global Warming on Triton (Neptune's moon)

(and anyway, they act on a much longer time scale than one or two centuries).

Your opinion is not support by the paleoclimatic data, nor by correlations with known astrophysical perturbations of solar irradiation of the earth on millenial scales, as the actual changes from iceage to interglacial period and back are quite swift due to the actual external factors impacting the absorption of solar energy by the earth.

 

 

The issue is not so much one of variation of solar output, as it is the variation of the earth's ability to reflect solar radiation; mainly affected by reflection of high altitude cloud formations impacted by astrophysical effects of earth's path through space(both orbital)

 

Origin of the 100 kyr Glacial Cycle
by Richard A. Muller

Figure 2. Spectral fingerprints in the vicinity of the 100 kyr peak: (a) for data from Site 607; (b) for data of the SPECMAP stack; (c) for a model with linear response to eccentricity, calculated from the results of Quinn et al. (ref 6); (d) for the nonlinear ice-sheet model of Imbrie and Imbrie (ref 22); and (e) for a model with linear response to the inclination of the Earth's orbit (measured with respect to the invariable plane). All calculations are for the period 0-600 ka. The 100 kyr peak in the data in (a) and (b) do not fit the fingerprints from the theories (c) and (d), but are a good match to the prediction from inclination in (e). return to beginning


Far more important to our present analysis, however, is the fact that the predicted 100 kyr "eccentricity line" is actually split into 95 and 125 kyr components, in serious conflict with the single narrow line seen in the climate data. The splitting of this peak into a doublet is well known theoretically (see, e.g., ref 5), but in comparisons with data the two peaks in the eccentricity were merged into a single broad peak by the poor resolution of the Blackman-Tukey algorithm (as was done, for example, in ref 8). The single narrow peak in the climate data was likewise broadened, and it appeared to match the broad eccentricity feature.

***

Figure 3. Variations of the inclination vector of the Earth's orbit. The inclination i is the angle between this vector and the vector of the reference frame; Omega is the azimuthal angle = the angle of the ascending node (in astronomical jargon).. In (A), (B), and (C) the measurements are made with respect to the zodiacal (or ecliptic) frame, i.e. the frame of the current orbit of the Earth. In (D), (E), and (F) the motion has been trasformed to the invariable frame, i.e. the frame of the total angular momentum of the solar system. Note that the primary period of oscillation in the zodiacal frame (A) is 70 kyr, but in the invariable plane (D) it is 100 kyr.

 

---

 

(and through dust of the galactic spiral)

Shaviv and climatologist Ján Veizer of Ruhr University, Germany, reckon that the spiral arms of our galaxy hold the secret to the Earth's see-sawing climate. Every 150 million years, blasts of cosmic rays cool the planet on its stately passage through the cosmos, they argue₂.

Cosmic rays thrown out by dying stars in the dust-rich arms of the Milky Way increase the number of charged particles in our atmosphere. There is some evidence that these may encourage low-level clouds to form, which cool the Earth.

Shaviv and Veizer have created a mathematical model of the number of cosmic rays hitting our atmosphere. They compared its predictions with other researchers' estimates of global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels over the past 500 million years.

They conclude that cosmic rays alone can account for 75% of the change in global climate during that period, and that less than half of the global warming seen since the beginning of the twentieth century is due to greenhouse gases.

 

Partly because more significant detrimental ecosystem effects are expected to happen when global temperature rises more than about 2.5 C.

Fortunately there is no substantive basis to presume that we are headed for 2.5^oC. The IPPC's modelling is based in fallacious presumptions,

 

http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/cap/2003/cap_03-02-20.html

"The Economist, which provides the best environmental reporting of any major news source, carried a small story last week about a simple methodological error in the latest U.N. global warming report that has huge implications. The article, "Hot Potato: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Had Better Check Its Calculations" (February 15 print edition), reviews the work of two Australian statisticians who note an anomaly in the way the IPCC estimated world carbon dioxide emissions for the 21st century."

......

"The IPCC's method has the effect of vastly overestimating future economic growth (and, therefore, CO2 emissions) by developing nations. The fine print of the IPCC's projections, for example, calls for the real per-capita incomes of Argentina, South Africa, Algeria, Turkey, and even North Korea to surpass real per-capita income in the United States by the end of the century. Algeria? North Korea? The IPCC must be inhaling its own emissions to believe this."

and the models themselves cannot even predict actual measurements. Looking outside the computer models for confirmation of their inputs & output, confirmation fails.

Global Warming Score Card

There is more than sufficient room for doubt as to any negative effect human created CO2, may have on our Climate future.

[ancient_geezer]

Quoting from introduction: "A new NASA-funded study used a computer climate model to simulate the last 50 years of climate changes, projects warming over the next 50 years regardless of whether or not nations curb their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions soon. If no emission reductions are made and they continue to increase at the current rate, global temperatures may increase by 1-2º Celsius (1.8º-3.6º Fahrenheit).

If & mays based on a computer model that cannot predict measured weather factors, is a valueless exercise for the purposes of setting economic policy.

But if the growth rate of carbon dioxide does not exceed its current rate and if the growth of true air pollutants (things that are harmful to human health) is reversed, temperatures may rise by only 0.75C (1.35F)."

"true air pollutants" are now major GHG's? LOL kinda pushing the political envelope I see.

But then again 0.7^oC is predictable without any regard to CO2 concentrations as a natural course of events and remains within the nominal variation of the current interglacial climate we now enjoy.

Let this model accurately predict mean monthly tropospheric temperatures over the next five years as measured by MSU, without tampering from current state then I might pay a little bit of attention. Until then don't bother to quote a paper based on a "computer climate model" that pretends to compute the earth's temperature for decades to come.

You want to get rid of air polutants that's fine, but don't try to tie them in to global warming. Some of the most obnoxious forms actually act to induce cooling of the earth, not warming it.

"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,"

LOL, reality don't fit "computer model" presumptions so we'll just fudge the physical measurements to make em fit the model. Seems to be a pretty standard gambit among the global warming bunch so far.

 

Global Warming Score Card

[E.G.C.]

Oklahoma agriculture bump.