Posted on 05/03/2004 6:26:56 AM PDT by presidio9
Environmental activists from Pacific nations threatened by rising sea levels have called on Australia to recognise "environmental refugees" who try to escape the effects of global warming.
The conservationists currently visiting Australia say climate change is raising sea levels and increasing the frequency of events like cyclones which will one day make some low-lying Pacific island nations uninhabitable.
Fiu Mataese Elisara-Laulu of Samoa said Australia, as the region's biggest producer of the greenhouse gases which cause global warming, has a special responsibility for the environmental damage caused.
"We have a genuine case for being affected as environmental refugees if they don't do anything," he said on Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.
"But unfortunately Australia seems to be a very poor leader in the Pacific," he said. "From our point of view, they want to assume leadership but they don't want to take responsibility."
The conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard joined the United States in 2002 in refusing to ratify a UN treaty on lowering the production of greenhouse gases, saying the pact, known as the Kyoto Protocol (news - web sites) was flawed.
Five weeks ago a group of Australian government researchers reported an alarming increase in global greenhouse gas emissions since 2002, due almost entirely to the burning of fossil fuels.
Greenhouse gases have been blamed for a steady warming of the earth's atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
If left unchecked, global warming is projected to cause a significant rise in sea levels over the next century through the melting of polar ice caps and thermal expansion.
It is also blamed for an increase in extreme weather events like floods, droughts and storms and damage to coral reefs and other sensitive ecosystems.
Elisara-Laulu was in Australia along with Siuila Toloa of Tuvalu's Island Care group on a "climate justice tour" to lobby Australia to take a more active role in tackling climate change.
The tour was sponsored by charity Oxfam, AID/WATCH and Friends of the Earth
China apparently has coal seam fires that produce more CO2 in a year than do all of the US cars and light duty trucks.
You can look it up.
Greenhouse gases have been blamed for a steady warming of the earth's atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
ROTFLM( | )O
Human Contribution to Climate Change Remains Questionable
S. Fred Singer
EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Society, Vol 80, page 183-187, April 20, 1999
http://www.sepp.org/scirsrch/EOS1999.html
" 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%
The reality is a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration over current levels, that the UN/IPCC "story line" pretends, even if were true, could not induce significant temperature change whatever its source.
Climate Catastrophe, A spectroscopic Artifact?
"It is hardly to be expected that for CO2 doubling an increment of IR absorption at the 15 µm edges by 0.17% can cause any significant global warming or even a climate catastrophe.
The radiative forcing for doubling can be calculated by using this figure. If we allocate an absorption of 32 W/m2 [14] over 180º steradiant to the total integral (area) of the n3 band as observed from satellite measurements (Hanel et al., 1971) and applied to a standard atmosphere, and take an increment of 0.17%, the absorption is 0.054 W/m2 - and not 4.3 W/m2.
This is roughly 80 times less than IPCC's radiative forcing.
If we allocate 7.2 degC as greenhouse effect for the present CO2 (as asserted by Kondratjew and Moskalenko in J.T. Houghton's book The Global Climate [14]), the doubling effect should be 0.17% which is 0.012 degC only. If we take 1/80 of the 1.2 degC that result from Stefan-Boltzmann's law with a radiative forcing of 4.3 W/m2, we get a similar value of 0.015 degC."
The basis of global warming models:
Ramanthan (Journal of Geophysical Review, vol. 84, pp. 4949-4958) states:
"the direct radiative effects of doubled CO2 can cause a maximum surface warming [at the equator] of about 0.2 K, and hence roughly 90% of the 2.0-2.5 K surface warming obtained by the GCM is caused by atmospheric feedback processes described above."
A Lukewarm Greenhouse
"The average warming predicted by the six methods for a doubling of CO2, is only +0.2 degC."
In otherwords, CHAOS, butterflies create hurricanes but dragonflies can't.
The UN/IPCC models achieve their results by selectively multiplying changes in heat balance for changes in CO2 concentration 10 times and more over that of any other mechanism of thermal variation. Where radiative forcing of CO2 is selectively multiplied by 10, other mechanisms of similar magnitude are not allowed to be enhanced by the same thermally driven "atmospheric feedback processes described".
The atmospheric "feedback processes described" are those implemented into UN/IPCC climate models. They constitute speculative and inadequate mechanisms at best, presumptive at worst, by which the atmosphere might respond to changes in radiative heat balance.
None of the "feedback processes" are based in any measured direct or parametric relationship selectively coupled to CO2 concentrations alone. This selective sensitivity (i.e. instability in the model) is inferred to be a cause of greater change than the initiating power input to the system.
A good read:
The Non-Science
of Global Warming
By Robert E. Stevenson, Ph.D. *
Published in 21 st Century Science & Technology magazine
(Winter 1996-97 edition, Vol. 9 No. 4, pp. 51-59)
http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/INGLES/ocean-1.html
Along with the Douglas V. Hoyt's(Senior Scientist with Raytheon/ITSS) essay on the subject:
http://users.erols.com/dhoyt1/
(never mind)
Well, global warming may be a fact, the best science is expecting about 100 years of data collection to determine if this is true or not. You see the oceans act as a huge damper on the warming of the atmosphere, which does not hold as much heat as the oceans. Scientific American, (Mar of Apr 04)
So don't go off and stipulate that warming is a fact. I agreee that the effect of burning fossil fuels is also a concern, but there is a fact that the concentration of some gases in the atmosphere is higher than it was 50 years ago. But you have to take a long view. Biology is taking these gases out of the atmosphere faster than this used to happen too. The point is it is very complex and the best idea is to study the conditions and make plans to cover the events in the future. (An example is the switch to nuclear power, that will take lots of time, but could be started now. And design more efficient cars, we are doing that. But running around telling people we are doomed? Not a good plan.
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