Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming – Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics.

Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming – Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics

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Washington DC - One of the most decorated French geophysicists has converted from a believer in manmade catastrophic global warming to a climate skeptic. This latest defector from the global warming camp caps a year in which numerous scientific studies have bolstered the claims of climate skeptics. Scientific studies that debunk the dire predictions of human-caused global warming have continued to accumulate and many believe the new science is shattering the media-promoted scientific “consensus” on climate alarmism.

Claude Allegre, a former government official and an active member of France’s Socialist Party, wrote an editorial on September 21, 2006 in the French newspaper L'Express titled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (For English Translation, click here: http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=264835 ) detailing his newfound skepticism about manmade global warming. See: http://www.lexpress.fr/idees/tribunes/dossier/allegre/dossier.asp?ida=451670 Allegre wrote that the “cause of climate change remains unknown” and pointed out that Kilimanjaro is not losing snow due to global warming, but to local land use and precipitation changes. Allegre also pointed out that studies show that Antarctic snowfall rate has been stable over the past 30 years and the continent is actually gaining ice.

“Following the month of August experienced by the northern half of France, the prophets of doom of global warming will have a lot on their plate in order to make our fellow countrymen swallow their certitudes,” Allegre wrote. He also accused proponents of manmade catastrophic global warming of being motivated by money, noting that “the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!”

Allegre, a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, had previously expressed concern about manmade global warming. "By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Allegre wrote 20 years ago. In addition, Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992 letter titled “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity” in which the scientists warned that global warming’s “potential risks are very great.” See: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~sai/sciwarn.html

Allegre has authored more than 100 scientific articles, written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States.

Allegre's conversion to a climate skeptic comes at a time when global warming alarmists have insisted that there is a “consensus” about manmade global warming. Proponents of global warming have ratcheted up the level of rhetoric on climate skeptics recently. An environmental magazine in September called for Nuremberg-style trials for global warming skeptics and CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley compared skeptics to “Holocaust deniers.” See: http://www.epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=264568 & http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2006/03/22/publiceye/entry1431768.shtml In addition, former Vice President Al Gore has repeatedly referred to skeptics as "global warming deniers."

This increase in rhetorical flourish comes at a time when new climate science research continues to unravel the global warming alarmists’ computer model predictions of future climatic doom and vindicate skeptics.

Earlier this year, a group of prominent scientists came forward to question the so-called “consensus” that the Earth faces a “climate emergency.” On April 6, 2006, 60 scientists wrote a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister asserting that the science is deteriorating from underneath global warming alarmists.

“Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future…Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary,” the 60 scientists wrote. See: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=3711460e-bd5a-475d-a6be-4db87559d605

“It was only 30 years ago that many of today's global-warming alarmists were telling us that the world was in the midst of a global-cooling catastrophe. But the science continued to evolve, and still does, even though so many choose to ignore it when it does not fit with predetermined political agendas,” the 60 scientists concluded.

In addition, an October 16, 2006 Washington Post article titled “Climate Change is Nothing New” echoed the sentiments of the 60 scientists as it detailed a new study of the earth’s climate history. The Washington Post article by reporter Christopher Lee noted that Indiana University geologist Simon Brassell found climate change occurred during the age of dinosaurs and quoted Brassell questioning the accuracy of computer climate model predictions.

“If there are big, inherent fluctuations in the system, as paleoclimate studies are showing, it could make determining the Earth’s climatic future even harder than it is,” Brassell said. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/15/AR2006101500672.html

In August, Khabibullo Abdusamatov, a scientist who heads the space research sector for the Russian Academy of Sciences, predicted long-term global cooling may be on the horizon due to a projected decrease in the sun’s output. See: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20060825/53143686.html

There have also been recent findings in peer-reviewed literature over the last few years showing that the Antarctic is getting colder and the ice is growing and a new 2006 study in Geophysical Research Letters found that the sun was responsible for up to 50% of 20th-century warming. See: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL027142.shtml

Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter has noted that there is indeed a problem with global warming – it stopped in 1998. “According to official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, the global average temperature did not increase between 1998-2005. “…this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” noted paleoclimate researcher and geologist Bob Carter of James Cook University in Australia in an April 2006 article titled “There is a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998.” See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html

In addition, new NASA satellite tropospheric temperature data reveals that the Southern Hemisphere has not warmed in the past 25 years contrary to “global warming theory” and modeling. This new Southern Hemisphere data raises the specter that the use of the word “global” in “global warming” may not be accurate. A more apt moniker for the past 25 years may be “Northern Hemisphere” warming. See: http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/09/southern-hemisphere-ignores-global.html

According to data released on July 14, 2006 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the January through June Alaska statewide average temperature was “0.55F (0.30C) cooler than the 1971-2000 average.” See: http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/releases2006/jul06/noaa06-065.html

Another bombshell to hit the global warming alarmists and their speculative climate modeling came in a September article in the Geophysical Research Letters which found that over 20% of the heat gained in the oceans since the mid-1950s was lost in just two years. The former climatologist for the state of Colorado, Roger Pielke, Sr., noted that the sudden cooling of the oceans “certainly indicates that the multi-decadal global climate models have serious issues with their ability to accurately simulate the response of the climate system to human- and natural-climate forcings.“ See: http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/09/

Despite predictions that 2006 would bring numerous tropical storms, 2006’s surprisingly light hurricane season and the record early start of this year’s winter in many parts of the U.S. have further put a damper on the constant doomsaying of the global warming alarmists and their media allies.

Other new studies have debunked many of the dubious claims made by the global warming alarmists. For example, the claim that droughts would be more frequent, severe and wide ranging during global warming, has now being exposed as fallacious. A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters authored by Konstantinos Andreadis and Dennis Lettenmaier finds droughts in the U.S. becoming “shorter, less frequent and cover a small portion of the country over the last century.” http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/10/13/where-are-the-droughts

Furthermore, recent research has shown that fears that global warming could lead to the next ice age, as promoted in the 2004 Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” are also unsupportable. A 2005 media hyped study “claimed to have found a 30 percent slowdown in the thermohaline circulation, the results are published in the very prestigious Nature magazine, and the story was carried breathlessly by the media in outlets around the world…Less than a year later, two different research teams present convincing evidence [ in Geophysical Research Letters ] that no slowdown is occurring whatsoever,” according to Virginia State Climatologist Patrick Michaels, editor of the website World Climate Report. See: http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/10/13/overturning-ocean-hype

The “Hockey Stick” temperature graph’s claim that the 1990’s was the hottest decade of the last 1000 years was found to be unsupportable by the National Academy of Sciences and many independent experts in 2006. See: http://www.epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=257697

A 2005 study by a scientist named Ola Johannessen and his colleagues showed that the interior of Greenland is gaining ice mass. See: http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V8/N44/C1.jsp Also, according to the International Arctic Research Institute, despite all of the media hype, the Arctic was warmer in the 1930’s than today.

Despite Time Magazine and the rest of the media’s unfounded hype, polar bears are not facing a crisis, according to biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the Arctic government of Nunavut. “Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present,” Taylor wrote on May 1, 2006. See: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1146433819696&call_pageid=970599119419

As all of this new data debunking climate alarmism mounts, the mainstream media chooses to ignore it and instead focus on the dire predictions of the number-one global warming media darling, NASA’s James Hansen. The increasingly alarmist Hansen is featured frequently in the media to bolster sky-is-falling climate scare reports. His recent claim that the Earth is nearing its hottest point in one million years has been challenged by many scientists. See: http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V9/N39/EDITB.jsp Hansen’s increasingly frightening climate predictions follow his 2003 concession that the use of “extreme scenarios” was an appropriate tactic to drive the public’s attention to the urgency of global warming. See: http://naturalscience.com/ns/articles/01-16/ns_jeh6.html Hansen also received a $250,000 grant form Teresa Heinz’s Foundation and then subsequently endorsed her husband John Kerry for President and worked closely with Al Gore to promote his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” See: http://www.heinzawards.net/speechDetail.asp?speechID=6 & http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/dai_complete.pdf

The global warming alarmists may have significantly overplayed their hand in the climate debate. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll this August found that most Americans do not attribute the cause of any recent severe weather events to global warming, and the portion of Americans who believe that climate change is due to natural variability has increased over 50% in the last five years.

Senator Inhofe Chastises Media For Unscientific & Unprincipled Climate Reporting

Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, commented last week on the media’s unfounded global warming hype and some of the recent scientific research that is shattering the so-called “consensus” that human greenhouse gas emissions have doomed the planet.

“The American people are fed up with media for promoting the idea that former Vice President Al Gore represents the scientific ‘consensus’ that SUV’s and the modern American way of life have somehow created a ‘climate emergency’ that only United Nations bureaucrats and wealthy Hollywood liberals can solve. It is the publicity and grant seeking global warming alarmists and their advocates in the media who have finally realized that the only “emergency” confronting them is their rapidly crumbling credibility, audience and bottom line. The global warming alarmists know their science is speculative at best and their desperation grows each day as it becomes more and more obvious that many of the nations that ratified the woeful Kyoto Protocol are failing to comply,” Senator Inhofe said last week. See: http://www.epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264616

“The mainstream media needs to follow the money: The further you get from scientists who conduct these alarmist global warming studies, and the further you get from the financial grants and the institutions that they serve the more the climate alarmism fades and the skepticism grows,” Senator Inhofe explained.

In a speech on the Senate floor on September 25, 2006, Senator Inhofe pointed out the abject failure of past predictions of ecological disaster made by environmental alarmists.

“The history of the modern environmental movement is chock-full of predictions of doom that never came true. We have all heard the dire predictions about the threat of overpopulation, resource scarcity, mass starvation, and the projected death of our oceans. None of these predictions came true, yet it never stopped the doomsayers from continuing to predict a dire environmental future. The more the eco-doomsayers’ predictions fail, the more the eco-doomsayers predict,” Senator Inhofe said on September 25th. See: http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id=263759

For a comprehensive review of the media’s embarrassing 100-year history of alternating between promoting fears of a coming ice age and global warming, see Environment & Public Works Chairman James Inhofe’s September 25, 2006 Senate floor speech debunking the media and climate alarmism. Go to: (epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id=263759)

To read and watch Senator Inhofe on CNN discuss global warming go to: (http://www.epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264308 )

To Read all of Senator Inhofe’s Speeches on global warming go to: (http://epw.senate.gov/speeches.cfm?party=rep)

“Inhofe Correct On Global Warming,” by David Deming geophysicist, an adjunct scholar with the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (ocpathink.org), and an associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma. (http://epw.senate.gov/fact.cfm?party=rep&id=264537)

a.. Carbon dioxide changes over millions of years do not correlate with temperature increases, even though CO2 has been 20 times higher than today in the past. "On the time-scale of hundreds of millions of years, carbon dioxide has sharply declined; its concentration was as much as 20 times the present value at the beginning of the Cambrian Period, 600 million years ago [Berner, 1997]. Yet the climate has not varied all that much and glaciations have occurred throughout geologic time even when CO2 concentrations were high." S. Fred Singer, "Human Contribution to Climate Change Remains Questionable," EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Society, Vol 80, page 183-187, April 20, 1999. Only recently has it been possible to obtain sufficient resolution to demonstrate that the increase in CO2 lags by about 600 years behind the rapid warming that signals deglaciation, the end of an ice age and the beginning of an interglacial warm period [Fischer et al., 1999]. Id. Citing Fischer's study, CO2 Magazine noted: "Over this immense time span, the three most dramatic warming events experienced on earth were those associated with the terminations of the last three ice ages; and for each and every one of these tremendous global warmings, earth's air temperature rose well before there was 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."

http://www.co2science.org/edit/v2_edit/v2n7edit.htm (1999). In summary, "major past climate changes were either uncorrelated with changes in CO2 or were characterized by temperature changes that preceded changes in CO2 by hundreds to thousands of years." Testimony of Richard S. Lindzen, MIT, former chairman of NAS Climate Change Panel, before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on May 2. 2001.References: "[C]hanges in CO2 concentration cannot be claimed to be the cause of changes in air temperature, for the appropriate sequence of events (temperature change following CO2 change) is not only never present, it is actually violated in [at least] half of the record." (Idso, S.B. 1998. Carbon dioxide and climate in the Vostok ice core, Atmospheric Environment 22: 2341-2342.) Petit et al. reconstructed histories of surface air temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration from data obtained from a Vostok ice core that covered the prior 420,000 years, determining that during glacial inception "the CO2 decrease lags the temperature decrease by several thousand years" and that "the same sequence of climate forcing operated during each termination."
Petit, J.R., Jouzel, J., Raynaud, D.,
Barkov, N.I., Barnola, J.-M., Basile, I., Bender, M., Chappellaz, J., Davis,
M., Delaygue, G., Delmotte, M., Kotlyakov, V.M., Legrand, M., Lipenkov,
V.Y., Lorius, C., Pepin, L., Ritz, C., Saltzman, E., and Stievenard, M.
1999.

Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica. Nature 399: 429-436. Fischer et al. (1999) found that "the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years during all three glacial-interglacial transitions." Fischer, H., Wahlen, M., Smith, J., Mastroianni, D. and Deck B. 1999. Ice core records of atmospheric CO2 around the last three glacial terminations. Science 283: 1712-1714. The latest
study concluded: "the CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ± 200 years." Caillon, N., Severinghaus, J.P., Jouzel, J., Barnola, J.-M., Kang, J. and Lipenkov, V.Y. 2003. Timing of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature changes across Termination III. Science 299: 1728-1731. The CO2 history over 500 million years in one study "exhibits no systematic correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at tectonic time scales." Rothman, D.H. 2002. "Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 99: 4167-4171. The "comparison with the geologic record of climatic variations reveals no obvious correspondence." Rothman (2002). Data from other sources - besides ice cores - supports the same conclusion: the rapid rise in sea level caused by the melting of land-based ice that began approximately 19,000 years ago preceded the post-glacial rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration by about 3,000 years. Clark, P.U. and Mix, A.C. 2000. Ice sheets by volume. Nature 406: 689-690.

A new study of ice core samples from above the Arctic circle in Norway shows that - while the Twentieth Century was the warmest in 600 years - the warmest decade of the century was the 1930s, before the buildup of GHGs. Isaksson, E., Hermanson, M., Hicks, S., Igarashi, M., Kamiyama, K., Moore, J., Motoyama, H., Muir, D., Pohjola, V., Vaikmae, R., van de Wal, R.S.W. and Watanabe, O. 2003. Ice cores from Svalbard - useful archives of past climate and pollution history. Physics and Chemistry of the Earth 28: 1217-1228 ["as on Svalbard, the 1930s were the warmest decade in the Trondheim record"].

Another new, very thorough analysis of historical data throws a lot of cold water on the GHG hypothesis. Sixteen authors from six different countries looked at fifty globally distributed paleoclimate records to ascertain probable causes of what they dsecribed as rapid climate change (RCC) over the Holocene. Mayewski, P.A., Rohling, E.E., Stager, J.C., Karlen, W., Maasch, K.A., Meeker, L.D., Meyerson, E.A., Gasse, F., van Kreveld, S., Holmgren, K., Lee-Thorp, J., Rosqvist, G. Rack, F., Staubwasser, M., Schneider, R.R. and Steig, E.J. 2004. Holocene climate variability. Quaternary Research 62: 243-255. With respect to the causes of Holocene RCCs, the international team of scientists says that "of all the potential climate forcing mechanisms, solar variability superimposed on long-term changes in insolation (Bond et al., 2001; Denton and Karlen, 1973; Mayewski et al., 1997; O'Brien et al., 1995) seems to be the most likely important forcing mechanism." In addition, they note that "negligible forcing roles are played by CH4 and CO2," and that "changes in the concentrations of CO2 and CH4 appear to have been more the result than the
cause of the RCCs."

b.. Warmer temperatures do not form any pattern related to industrial activity. The slight warming in the Twentieth Century largely "takes place... long before we see the biggest buildup of the greenhouse gases." [Dr. Robert Balling, National Center for Public Analysis, "Global Warming - Program Agenda," June 13, 1997, press conference]. In fact, during the last two decades when "greenhouse gases" have increased significantly, surface temperature measurements have been flat and both atmospheric types of measurement (satellite and weather balloon) have shown cooling. Id. "Since approximately 80% of the rise in levels of carbon dioxide during the
twentieth century occurred after the initial major rise in temperature, the increase in carbon dioxide cannot have caused the bulk of the past century's
rise in temperature. Most of the warming must have been natural...." Dr. Sallie Baliunas, astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and Deputy Director at the Mount Wilson Observatory, E/Wire, November 1, 2001. "Getting the vertical distribution of temperature wrong means that everything dependent upon that -- precipitation and cloudiness, as examples -- must be wrong. Patrick J. Michaels, S. Fred Singer and David H. Douglass,"Settling Global Warming Science," Washington Times, Aug 16, 2004 [referring to the weather baloon and satellite data that show no warming]. Their recent technical report indicates that the atmosphere is not acting like it is assumed to act in the global warming models.

http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0407/0407075.pdf. The study looked at satellite and weather balloon data compared to surface temperatures: " the models generally predict an increased warming rate with height (outside of local polar regions). Neither the satellite nor the balloon records can find it." "Meltdown for Global Warming Science," by Patrick J. Michaels, S. Fred Singer and David H. Douglass, August 19, 2004, Cato Institute, online. These results are not unusual to anyone who has studied the global warming "greenhouse gas" theory. See also Dr. John Christy & Dr. Roy Spencer, Earth
System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, "Global Temperature Report: 1978 - 2003" (December 8, 2003):

http://www.uah.edu/News/climate/25years.pdf.

c.. Carbon dioxide levels have been rising for many years unrelated to human activity. "CO2 in our atmosphere has been increasing steadily for the last 18,000 years-long before humans invented smokestacks." Monte Hieb and Harrison Hieb, "Global Warming: A Chilling
Perspective," [http://www. geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html].

Nor are recent temperatures really the 'hottest on record" as often claimed by the popular press. "And a recent Harvard-Smithsonian study of more than 240 paleoclimate research papers published in the past four decades concluded that the 20th century was neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather of the past 1,000 years for specific regions," Christy and Spencer (2003) citing Soon, W. and S. Baliunas, "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years." Climate Research, 2003, 23: 89-110. In fact, ".a graph of mean value of atmospheric carbon dioxide measured in Europe, North America and Peru shows that in the period 1820 to 1880 levels between 350ppmv and 550 ppmv were relatively common place."

http://mclean.ch/climate/Disputing_Kyoto.pdf, citing "Climate Change: Incorrect information on pre-industrial CO2 " at http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/

"Each year the natural emissions of carbon dioxide are far greater than the anthropogenic emissions and many researchers accept that anthropogenic emissions are only about 3% of the total. Given that current levels of carbon dioxide might contribute about 3% of the total warming (see reference 9.1 and 9.2), the anthropogenic carbon dioxide contribution to total warming is, at most, about 0.1%, or in other words, one one-thousandth." Id., citing http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils...house_data.html.

".earth's temperature and CO2 levels today have reached levels similar to a previous interglacial cycle of 120,000 - 140,000 years ago. From beginning to end this cycle lasted about 20,000 years. This is known as the Eemian Interglacial Period and the earth returned to a full-fledged ice age immediately afterward." GLOBAL WARMING: A CHILLING PERSPECTIVE:
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils...l#anchor2108263.

d.. The Southern polar region is actually getting colder. "The latest measurements of Antarctic climate show that the main part of the continent is cooling, and has been for some time (Doran et al, 2002). Changes in Antarctic ice that we do observe are part of the normal post-Wisconsin interglacial process, not a recent artifact of human influence on climate (Conway et al, 1999)." Lee C. Gerhard, Principal Geologist, Kansas Geological Survey, Letter to The Professional Geologist August 2002. " Our
14-year continuous weather station record from the shore of Lake Hoare reveals that seasonally averaged surface air temperature has decreased by 0.7 degrees Celsius per decade....The temperature decrease is most pronounced in summer and autumn. Continental cooling, especially the seasonality of cooling, poses challenges to models of climate and ecosystem change." National Science Foundation Study, cited at Nature.com
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf...ture710_fs.html ].

The newest study is more conclusive: "overall, the total Antarctic sea ice extent (the cumulative area of grid boxes covering at least 15% ice concentrations) has shown an increasing trend (~4,801 km2/yr)." In addition, they find that "the total Antarctic sea ice area (the cumulative area of the ocean actually covered by at least 15% ice concentrations) has increased significantly by ~13,295 km2/yr, exceeding the 95% confidence level," noting that "the upward trends in the total ice extent and area are robust for different cutoffs of 15, 20, and 30% ice concentrations (used to define the ice extent and area)." Liu, J., Curry, J.A. and Martinson, D.G. 2004. Interpretation of recent Antarctic sea ice variability. Geophysical Research Letters 31: 10.1029/2003GL018732.

References: Cavalieri, D.J., Parkinson, C.L. and Vinnikov, K.Y. 2003. 30-Year satellite record reveals contrasting Arctic and Antarctic decadal sea ice variability. Geophysical Research Letters 30: 10.1029/2003GL018031.

e.. Data from the Arctic region is much more equivocal than the popular press accounts. One study shows no changes in Arctic ice thickness in the 1990s. Winsor, P. 2001. "Arctic sea ice thickness remained constant during the 1990s." Geophysical Research Letters 28: 1039-1041."Temperature anomalies also exist in Greenland, the largest ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere, with cooling in the interior concurrent with warming at the coast." [http://www.sepp.org//weekwas/2002/Jan26.html]. "Direct temperature measurements on Greenland ice cores show a cooling trend between 1940 and 1995 [Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998]." Singer, "Human Contribution to Climate
Change Remains Questionable," supra. Finally, "the Northern Hemisphere would appear to be not much warmer now (and the extent of Barents sea-ice cover not much less now) than it was sometime during the 1700s, when the air's CO2 concentration was on the order of 90-100 ppm less than it is now." CO2 Magazine, citing data from Vinje, T. 2001. Anomalies and trends of sea-ice extent and atmospheric circulation in the Nordic Seas during the period 1864-1998. Journal of Climate 14: 255-267. Baffin Bay in Northern Canada has not displayed lower spring sea-ice levels over the last 70 years, but increases similar to ice age conditions. Grumet, N.S., Wake, C.P., Mayewski, P.A., Zielinski, G.A., Whitlow, S.I., Koerner, R.M., Fisher, D.A. and Woollett, J.M. 2001. Variability of sea-ice extent in Baffin Bay over the last millennium. Climatic Change 49: 129-145. "Reports based on submarine sonar data have suggested Arctic sea ice has thinned nearly by half in only recent decades. Such rapid thinning is a concern for detection of global change and for Arctic regional impacts. Re-examining the inferred thinning while including atmospheric timeseries, ocean currents, rivers runoff, and modelled physics of ocean-ice-snow, we find that inferred rapid thinning was unlikely. Varying winds, which rapidly redistribute Arctic ice, create a difficult sampling problem, dominated by a recurring pattern where ice is expelled from the central Arctic while thickening in the Canadian sector." IS ARCTIC SEA ICE RAPIDLY THINNING? Greg Holloway and Tessa Sou, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Sidney BC, Canada,

http://adaptation.nrcan.gc.ca/app/filerepo...226\FD.pdf
"Analysis of records (Figures 2, 3) also shows that long-term ice trends are small and generally not statistically significant." I. Polyakov, G. V. Alekseev, R. V. Bekryaev, U. Bhatt, R. Colony, M. Johnson, V. P. Karklin, D. Walsh, and A. V. Yulin , "Long-term ice variability in arctic marginal seas," International Arctic research
Center (2003
)[ http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~igor/res...h/ice/index.php]. They conclude that variability is caused by observed wind circulation changes, not recorded temperature changes: "Previous studies showed that at time scales of up to decades sea-ice conditions are controlled by changes in the atmospheric circulation pattern. Our study extends this result, suggesting that even at interdecadal time scales winds remain the major contributor to ice-extent variation in
the Siberian marginal-ice zone." Id. "Recent studies show sea conditions in the Arctic today are similar to conditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while average Arctic temperatures are rising almost to their levels of the 1930s." Christy and Spencer, Global temperature Report (2003) citing Przbylak, R., "Temporal and spatial variation of surface air temperature over the period of instrumental observations in the Arctic."International Journal of Climatology, 2000. 20: 587-614. Some Arctic Ocean conditions are now favoring the development of more ice. Windsor, "Variability of the Cold Halocline Layer of the Arctic Ocean: Implications for the Sea Ice Mass Balance,"

[http://www.agu.org/meetings/cc02eabstracts/winsor.pdf].

6. Glaciers are not melting due to elevated greenhouse gases. "During the 15th through 19th centuries, widespread and major glacier advances occurred during a period of colder global temperature known as the Little Ice Age (Broecker, 2001; Grove, 2001). Following the peak of Little Ice Age coldness, it should come as no surprise that many records indicate widespread glacial retreat, as temperatures began to rise in the mid- to late-1800s and many glaciers returned to positions characteristic of
pre-Little Ice Age times. What people may find surprising, however, is that in many instances the rate of glacier retreat has not increased over the past 70 years; and in some cases glacier mass balance has actually increased, all during a time when the atmosphere experienced the bulk of the increase in its CO2 content." "Reality Check: Are The World's Glaciers Really Melting Away?" CO2 Science Magazine, March 2003, [http://www.co2science.org/subject/ g/summaries/glaciers.htm].

"Within Europe, for example, he notes that "Alpine glaciers are generally shrinking, Scandinavian glaciers are growing, and glaciers in the Caucasus are close to
equilibrium for 1980-95." And when results for the whole world are combined for this most recent period of time, Braithwaite notes that "there is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years." Id. See Braithwaite. (2002) "Glacier mass balance: the first 50 years of international monitoring." Progress in Physical Geography 26: 76-95. In Mackintosh, A.N., Dugmore, A.J. and Hubbard, A.L. 2002. Holocene climatic changes in Iceland: evidence from modeling glacier length fluctuations at Solheimajokull. Quaternary International 91: 39-52, the authors report what is known about the history of the Solheimajokull outlet glacier of the
Myrdalsjokull ice cap located on the southern coast of Iceland. In 1705, the glacier had a length of approximately 14.8 km; and by 1740, its length had grown to 15.2 km. Thereafter, however, the glacier began to shrink, exhibiting a length of only 13.2 km in 1783. Rebounding rapidly, the glacier returned to its 1705 position by 1794; and by 1820 it equaled its 1740 length. This maximum length was maintained for about the next half-century, after which the glacier began a slow retreat that continued to about 1932, when its length was approximately 14.75 km. The glacier then wasted away more rapidly, reaching a second minimum-length value of approximately 13.8 km at about 1970, whereupon it began to rapidly expand once again, growing to about 14.3 km in length by 1995. The current position of the outlet glacier terminus is by no means unusual. In fact, it is about midway between its maximum and minimum positions of the past three centuries. It is also interesting to note that the glacier has been growing in length since about 1970 and that, in the words of the authors, "the recent advance (1970-1995) resulted from a combination of cooling and enhancement of precipitation."

Another study of 18 Arctic glaciers questions whether the net decrease in their ice volume is related to 20th Century CO2 changes after 1950. Dowdeswell, J.A., Hagen, J.O., Bjornsson, H., Glazovsky, A.F., Harrison, W.D., Holmlund, P. Jania, J., Koerner, R.M., Lefauconnier, B., Ommanney, C.S.L. and Thomas, R.H. 1997. The mass balance of circum-Arctic glaciers and recent climate change. Quaternary Research 48: 1-14. The authors note that "ice-core records from the Canadian High Arctic islands indicate that the generally negative glacier mass balances observed over the past 50 years have probably been typical of Arctic glaciers since the end of the Little
Ice Age," and that "Arctic glaciers may have responded to a step-like warming in the early twentieth century [our italics] associated with the end of the Little Ice Age." In fact, in the words of the authors, "there is no compelling indication of increasingly negative balance conditions which might, a priori, be expected from anthropogenically induced global warming." Quite to the contrary, they report that "almost 80% of the mass balance time series also have a positive trend, toward a less negative mass balance." Note on Kilimanjaro: The melting of the ice on Kilimanjaro is often used in global warming discussions. But the theory is totally devoid of factual support at every level. The temperature data for East Africa support no inference of GHG warming: The National Academy of Sciences published a report* last year that defines the geographic regions of warming and cooling during the last 20 years. Surface measurements of East Africa show no warming trend (Fig. 6.2, p. 34). Weather satellites show a pronounced cooling trend of the atmosphere there (Fig. 7.1, p.43). No one has questioned these data. National Research Council.

"Reconciling Observations
of Global Temperature Change," National Academy Press, Washington, DC. January 2000. The implication that the rate of decline at Kilimanjaro is increasing is a lie. "Kilimanjaro's glaciers lost 45 percent of their real extent in that era of non-human warming. If the glaciers had continued on their merry way at the pace established in that period, they would be gone by now." October 26, 2002 "The Snow Jobs of Kilimanjaro," by Patrick J. Michaels, u. of Virginia, Cato Institute,
http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-26-02.html [note: Michaels uses the author of the Kilimanjaro study's own data, Thompson et al, OSU, 2002]

Another glaring gap in Thompson theory on Kilimanjaro is that snow there declined during periods of temperature cooling: "From 1953 through 1976, another 21 percent of the original area was uncovered. This was during a period of global cooling-yes, cooling--of 0.13ºF. Ohio State could have accurately written the following hype at that time: "Kilimanjaro's glaciers will completely disappear by 2015 if this cooling trend continues". Michaels, supra. Kaser et al. demonstrate that all relevant 'observations and facts' clearly indicate that 'climatological processes other than air temperature control the ice recession in a direct manner' on Kilimanjaro, and that 'positive air
temperatures have not contributed to the recession process on the summit...'" Kaser, G. and B. Noggler (1996): Glacier fluctuations in the Rwenzori Range (East Africa) during the 20th century - a preliminary report. Zeitschrift für Gletscherkunde und Glazialgeologie, 32, 109-117. See also Kaser, G., D.R. Hardy, T. Mölg, R.S. Bradley, and T.M. Hyera (2004): Modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro as evidence of climate change: Observations and facts. International Journal of Climatology, 24, 329-339, doi:
10.1002/joc.1008 ["climatological processes other than air temperature control the ice recession in a direct manner"]. Link:

http://geowww.uibk.ac.at/glacio/LITERATUR/...IJC24(2004).pdf

Nor are the oceans rapidly rising. "Although the long-term average GSL rise for the past few millennia has been stable at a level near zero, there is reliable evidence from coastal land records,1 lake and river ice cover,2 and water level measurements3 that GSL abruptly began to rise near the mid-19th century. "No studies, however, have detected any significant acceleration of GSL rise during the 20th century." Bruce C. Douglas and W. Richard Peltier,

"The Puzzle of Global Sea-Level Rise: Measuring the rate of sea level rise over the past century requires modeling the behavior of Earth's crust over the past 20 000 years," Physics Today 2002. 55:35-40.[ http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-55/iss-3/p35.html]. The upper limit of melting ice to sea-level increases is 0.3 mm a year according to new research by Mark Meier of the University of Colorado, out of an estimated 2 mm a year rise. Id.

Question: If the atmosphere was causing major general warming, wouldn't there be more consistency in the glacier studies?

f.. There is no correlation between temperature changes and more sever weather. Nothing in the peer-reviewed research in the field supports this popular myth. The IPCC Report (2001) does not make the claim: "Severe storms are often rare, so the analysis of large areas and long lengths of homo-geneous storm records are required to assess changes. So far this combination of data is not available." [sec.2.7.3]. IPCC notes,or instance, that "the trend in intense tropical cyclones (minimum central pressure below 970 hPa) is not significantly different from zero." Id. "The United States record of landfall frequency and intensity of hurricanes is very reliable . but [show] no significant long-term trends." Id. Free et al (2004) tried the extreme weather hypothesis, expecting to find a correlation. This effort, however, yielded "no significant trend in potential intensity from 1980 to 1995 and no consistent trend from 1975 to 1995." What is more, they report that between 1975 and 1980, "while SSTs [sea surface temperatures] rose, PI [hurricane potential intensity] decreased, illustrating the hazards of predicting changes in hurricane intensity from projected SST changes alone." Balling and Cerveny (2003)could find no associations between timing and duration of the hurricane season and geographic position of storms and either local, hemispheric or global temperature using a database of all tropical storms that occurred within the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the western North Atlantic Ocean over the period 1950-2002. Landsea et al. (1998) report that "Atlantic hurricane activity has actually decreased significantly in both frequency of intense hurricanes and mean intensity of all named storms over the past few decades..." See Balling Jr., R.C. and Cerveny, R.S. 2003. Analysis of the duration, seasonal timing, and location of North Atlantic tropical cyclones: 1950-2002. Geophysical Research Letters 30: 10.1029/2003GL018404; Bister, M. and Emanuel, K. 2002.

Low frequency variability of tropical cyclone potential intensity. 1. Interannual to interdecadal variability. Journal of Geophysical Research 107: 0.1029/2001 JD000776; Boose, E.R., Chamberlin, K.E. and Foster, D.R. 2001. Landscape and regional impacts of hurricanes in New England. Ecological Monographs 71: 27-48; Bove, M.C., Zierden, D.F. and O'Brien, J.J. 1998. Are gulf landfalling hurricanes getting stronger? Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 79: 1327-1328; Easterling, D.R., Evans, J.L.,
Groisman, P.Ya., Karl, T.R., Kunkel, K.E. and Ambenje, P. 2000. Observed variability and trends in extreme climate events: A brief review. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 81: 417-425; Elsner, J.B., Liu, K.-b. and Kocher, B. 2000. Spatial variations in major U.S. hurricane activity: Statistics and a physical mechanism. Journal of Climate 13: 2293-2305; Elsner, J.B., Niu, X. and Jagger, T.H. 2004. Detecting shifts in hurricane rates using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach. Journal of Climate 17: 2652-2666. This issue came to a dramatic moment in early 2005. One of the IPCC scientific team members just quit over the obvious lack of ethics by the
IPCC Panel. In an open letter, Chris Landsea, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said:

"I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound."

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/promethe...sea_leaves.html

Landsea is one of the world's top hurricane experts, who was asked by a lead author of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, to develop a segment on the impact of global warming on the future intensity of hurricanes. Lead Author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, participated in a press conference that proclaimed: "Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity." Landsea had told Trenberth that the science did not support such claims. When he was ignored, he quit.

8. The human impact on global climate change is not universally or even substantially supported by the majority of scientific specialists in the relevant fields. Objective science has motivated thousands of geo-physicists, climatologists and other experts to sign several petitions protesting the Kyoto Protocol. "Since the climate treaty was hatched in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, scientists have shown their dissent with four petitions: the 1992 "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," with
more than 100 signatures; the 1992 "Heidelberg Appeal," with more than 4,000 signatures; the 1996 "Leipzig Declaration," signed by some 130 prominent U.S. climate scientists, including several who participated in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); and, this year, the "Oregon Petition" which has been signed thus far by 17,000 U.S. scientists." Candace Crandall , "The number of scientists refuting global warming is growing," Washington Times, November 20, 1998. "[T]here is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them." Richard Lintzen, Wall Street Journal , June 11, 2001.

9. Full implementation of Kyoto, even with U.S. participation, will achieve nothing. "The Kyoto treaty would not make a measurable difference in the climate by 2050, a temperature reduction of maybe two-hundredths of a degree Celsius, or at most six-hundredths of a degree." Thomas Sieger Derr, "Strange Science : Reflections on Global Warming" (2004)[this conclusion is not controversial or contradicted by Kyoto advocates]. "A fundamental point that needs to be understood is that if any of these proposals (including the Kyoto protocol) are implemented, they will have an effect on the climate so small that it cannot be detected." Dr. John Christy & Dr. Roy Spencer, Earth System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, "Global Temperature Report: 1978 - 2003" (December 8, 2003):

http://www.uah.edu/News/climate/25years.pdf.

NOTE: Most CO2 does not come from human activities:

"At least 96% of the current atmospheric CO2 comes from non-fossil fuel sources; that is, natural marine and juvenile [volcanic] sources. Hence for the atmosphere CO2 budget, marine degassing and juvenile degassing (from volcanic eruptions) are far more important, and the burning of fossil-fuel and biogenic materials much less important, than hitherto assumed." T.V. Segalstad,``Climate and Volcanic Aerosols.'' University of Oslo, paper at 1992 Chapman Conference,

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