Posted on 09/20/2004 11:45:29 AM PDT by UnklGene
Afraid of global warming? Chill out -
By Neil Collins (Filed: 20/09/2004)
First there was Frances, then came Ivan, and now Jeanne is stirring herself to do her worst. They are, of course, the hurricanes that are promising to make it the windiest season ever recorded in the Caribbean. Who knows, as we grind through the alphabet, we may even get to Hurricane Tony, named after the man who last week set out on a new mission to save the planet.
Even by his own low standards, the Prime Minister's speech marked a deep meteorological depression. To maintain, as he did, that climate change is the gravest threat we face, is arrant nonsense. Compared with, say, an atomic bomb in Piccadilly Circus or Times Square, it's almost benign.
But surely, you protest, we're squandering the Earth's scarce resources, pouring poisonous gases into the atmosphere as never before and stand, as a particularly unctuous Thought for the Day put it last week, "on the edge of environmental catastrophe"?
Everyone, from St Tony and his chief scientific adviser, David King, to (regrettably) Michael Howard and (inevitably) the sandals brigade of the Lib Dems, is agreed: global warming is a terrible thing, and it's all our own fault.
The only path to redemption is to cut our output of carbon dioxide, before the Earth cooks and we drown under the melted ice caps.
All these hurricanes merely ram home the point; global warming isn't going to mean vineyards in the Scottish lowlands, but more storms, floods and pestilence.
Just look at those vast swarms of locusts that are eating Africa, following the unusual weather of last year. Oh, and don't forget Boscastle, the Cornish village that was almost buried under the weight of BBC reporters and cameramen that swept down the main street after the flood.
Next week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meets in Vienna. The IPCC is a particularly smug body, with much to be smug about. The Kyoto accord is based on its findings, and since science is not John Prescott's strong suit, he could hardly question whether it made sense for Britain when he signed up to it. Besides, in the Year Zero of 1997, he'd have claimed that New Labour could walk on water by 2012.
Kyoto ranks as the most expensive confidence trick pulled on the world since Yalta in 1945. The IPCC's science is nothing of the kind, being merely a series of "scenarios" of what the weather might be like at the end of the century. Since it's hard enough to predict it for the middle of next week, to say that there are difficulties in long-term projections is putting it mildly.
As Martin Ågerup, president of the Danish Academy for Futures Studies, has said: "We simply do not know how much warmer the climate will be in 2100. In fact, the degree of (compound) uncertainty is so large that the mere exercise by the IPCC of providing temperature intervals is highly misleading and provides phoney confidence."*
The evidence that the world is warming is now pretty conclusive, but it's far from clear why, and the consequences are not obvious, either. Kyoto fingered CO2, perhaps because burning all that fossil fuel must surely do something bad, and every schoolboy knows about the greenhouse effect.
A warming world will melt the icecaps, and raise sea level, won't it? Well, not so far. Nils-Axel Mörner, head of paleo-geophysics at Stockholm University, has been studying the subject for 35 years. As he puts it: "No one in the world beats me on sea level."
He's been to the Maldives, often tipped as the first place to disappear under the waves, and can find no evidence that it's doing so. Satellite altimetry has only been going for 14 years, but it tells the same story.
If man-made CO2 was causing a rise in sea levels, we'd surely notice some effect over the past decade and a half. His best guess is for a rise of a couple of inches in sea level by the end of this century, which hardly threatens life as we know it.
Ah, but surely the weather is getting more violent? Barely a day goes by without more dramatic pictures of extreme conditions.
Madhav Khandekar has been studying weather patterns for 47 years, mostly for Environment Canada, and his conclusion is that it's the perception that has changed. More people and global television mean that freak events are less likely to escape detection, and do more damage because of the higher value of what's in their path. The weather itself isn't getting any worse.
The central mystery is why our politicians are so blinkered on this subject when, as Ruth Lea argues on the back page of today's paper, the policies we are following are clearly going to make us poorer, with slower growth and lost manufacturing jobs.
The scientists have been trying to get their message across, but at the last boondoggle on this subject, in Moscow in July, Prof King infuriated them by refusing to let them contribute.
The meeting mattered because, unless either Russia or the United States signs, the Kyoto treaty won't come into force. The Americans have no intention of doing so, and the Russians have resisted tremendous political pressure; even though they would get a multi-billion dollar windfall from selling the right to excess carbon emissions, President Putin's chief economic adviser believes that bad science is bad economics.
Forecasting is always difficult, especially for the future, as the old saw goes, and we love to spook ourselves with projections of doom and disaster. Here's one.
The last 600 years have seen a series of mini ice ages, well documented by those who shivered through them. They coincide with periods of low solar activity, and the next one is due in the middle of this century. So perhaps, instead of prostrating ourselves on the altar of global warming, we should be worrying about global cooling.
I've never bought global warming--one volcanic eruption pollutes more than the Industrial Revolution.
Ping
You can't point to human activity as the cause of global warming, when it occurs elsewhere in the solar system where human beings don't even exist.
He forgot Charley and Lisa (not to mention Alex, Bonnie and Gaston...forgot who D and E were).
ping
Not to mention that "The Hole" in the ozone layer SHRUNK last year...
CA keeps tells us the east coast will slide into the ocean.
Lets say man is creating enough stuff that ...Comparared to: volcanic eruptions, choking dustsorms kicked up by nature, steaming vents in the oceans depths churning out poisonous, toxic fumes, surface vents around active 'sores' in the earth's land surface churing out poisonous, toxic fumes, escaping hydrocarbons from the interior of the earth, naturally occurring forest fires?
I think jcb8199 pretty well summed it up:
one volcanic eruption pollutes more than the Industrial Revolution.
and
Globally-Averaged Atmospheric Temperatures
and
Greenhouse Warming: Fact, Hypothesis, or Myth? - Comparison of Satellite data and surface data
Thnx...bookmark bump!
...doesn't gain market share, fund special committees, fertilize grass root social(ism) activists, or pad grant funded long term studies with slack jawed children of former associates for services rendered.
GREAT sites! Thanks for posting them!
Doesn't matter if it's true or not - the planet is going to do what it's going to do, and there's nothing a few piddly humans can do that'll change that.
When comparing the force of nature to the force of man, there's just no contest - nature will kick our butt every time.
Quick excerpt:
The Urban Heat Island Effect [13] is the first major source of error. This effect is caused by the tendency of concrete, roads, and buildings to heat up to high temperatures in the daytime and slowly release that heat during the night, resulting in a higher daytime and even higher nighttime temperature than would exist in a nearby rural area....
To be completely free of this urbanization problem, a site needs to be strictly greenfield. A greenfield site is a rural site where there is no urbanization whatsoever. Such sites are few and far between, but they do exist. Most of them do not show warming, or they manifest weaker trends than are claimed for the globe as a whole, as shown in the station records in the Appendix.
...
In addition to heat islands, there are also environmental errors created by the micro-environment in the immediate vicinity of the box itself. Where there are boxes - even under greenfield circumstances - there also are people. People typically alter their micro-environment to suit their own preferences. They grow bushes and trees, erect sheds and fences, or turn a bare patch of ground into a garden. Most of these kinds of changes occur over time (such as the growth of trees or bushes growth), but they have two effects. One of is to reduce the visible skyline of the box (a problem highlighted by radiation expert Dr Doug Hoyt). This reduces the ability of the box to radiate its heat to space. Instead it becomes subject to increased infra-red radiation from the growing obstructions. The shrinking skyline effect as Hoyt dubs it, is a "warming creep error" in the measured temperatures.
As the famous astronomer whose ashes fly the black skies of the endless universe once said, "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."
Don't reply to me with this crap.
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