Posted on 11/21/2006 6:09:56 AM PST by presidio9
There are signs that key U.S. officials are ready to take on global warming, even as much of the world community failed to show its will to deal with the impending threat at a recent global conference.
Despite intense calls for new and radical actions, last week delegates at the UN-sponsored meeting in Kenya agreed on many outstanding issues, but not on further cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Environmental groups widely described the outcome as a failure, but not all were expressing despair. Though equally unhappy with the results, some believe that meaningful global action on climate change is not a distant possibility.
Come January, those in the world who are concerned about the slow pace of climate action could see the global response get a boost with the United States becoming a significant part of it, according to an environmental group that is part of the global campaign for a swift response to global warming.
"With Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, changes in the federal policy are to be expected," said Gary Cook, director of the Climate Action Network, an umbrella organization representing over 350 environmental organizations worldwide.
Cook and his colleagues hope that with environmentally conscious Democratic lawmakers holding key positions in the Senate, the United States will soon be making real progress in reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, as well as moving the global agenda on climate change forward.
The 1997 Kyoto treaty requires as many as 35 industrialized countries to cut emissions by an average of 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States is not obligated to abide by the treaty because the George W. Bush administration does not recognize it.
The Bush administration rejected Kyoto in 2001, arguing that it would harm the U.S. economy and that it should have also required reductions by poor but fast growing economies, such as India and China. Bush also repeatedly has said that more research was needed into the science of climate change.
The United States is responsible for about 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, although its share in the global population is just 5 percent.
Recent statements from Democratic Party leaders regarding appointments of lawmakers in the House and Senate bodies suggest that the analysis by environmentalists such as Cook could prove correct.
Last week, for example, three Democratic senators who are likely to head committees dealing with environmental issues wrote to Bush urging him to push for mandatory federal limits on greenhouse gases.
"The recent elections have signaled a need to change direction in many areas including global warming," they said in a letter telling the U.S. president that voters want the government to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Those who signed the letter included Barbara Boxer of California, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. The three are likely to head the Senate's environment, energy, and homeland security bodies, respectively, when Democrats assume leadership positions in January.
Boxer, who has introduced legislation that would mandate an 80-percent cut in U.S. emissions by 2050, has publicly declared that her committee's first hearing will be focused on global warming.
Like Boxer, Bingaman is considered a staunch supporter of action on climate change. In fact, he was the only member of Congress to attend last year's UN climate negotiations in Montreal.
"We pledge to work to pass an effective system of mandatory limits on greenhouses gases," Boxer and her colleagues told Bush in their letter. "We urge you to work with us...to signal to the world that global warming legislation is on the way."
Supporters for action on climate change say that since the November 7 elections new opportunities have arisen for Democratic politicians to take effective actions on the state level, and that in many areas, indications are that they are willing to do so.
While the most populous state of California has already embraced a climate action plan, Massachusetts' Democratic governor-elect Duval Patrick has expressed his willingness to align his state with a regional greenhouse gas initiative comprising seven other northeastern U.S. states.
Moreover, in recent polls, voters in Washington state joined more than 20 other pro-alternative energy states by approving a ballot initiative requiring 15 percent of the state's electricity to come from renewable sources.
In Nairobi, while delegates failed to set a deadline for concluding international negotiations on further cuts in emissions beyond 2012, they did agree to continue their discussions in the future.
As the next round of international talks takes place in Bali, Indonesia, in 2008, proponents of strong action against global warming say they hope that by then the United States may be in position to play an effective role in taking the world in a more positive direction.
On the domestic front, when the new Congress assumes its responsibility in January, it will have to deal with a number of ambitious bills to support alternative energy production and limit greenhouse gas emissions that were introduced this year.
Activists say they want the new Congress to adopt these and other aggressive measures on climate change proposals without any delay.
"That is the way the U.S. can begin to make real progress in reducing its emissions," said Cook.
Do you know what Milankovitch cycles are? Does Felix?
Most efforts to detect signs of global warming have been directed to signals in the air temperature field.
Breaking research conducted by Tim Barnett and David Pierce of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, has shown preliminary evidence of human-produced warming in the upper 3,000 meters of the world's oceans.
Their findings are published in the April 13 edition of the journal Science.
Barnett and Pierce, with colleague Reiner Schnur, cross-referenced data from the U.S.-developed Parallel Climate Model (sponsored by the Department of Energy and the National Center for Atmospheric Research), which factors in the influence of greenhouse gases and direct sulfate aerosols over the last 50 years, and direct observations of heat content change in the ocean over the same period.
They found that as the climate model ocean temperature rose and penetrated into the depths of the oceans, the observed global ocean temperature down to 3,000 meters rose right along with it.
They note that the agreement between the model and the observations is remarkably similar in all the oceans.
"The initial results are certainly compatible at the 95 percent confidence level with the hypothesis that the warming observed in the global oceans has been caused by anthropogenic sources," said Barnett, a research marine physicist in the Climate Research Division at Scripps.
"Our results provide a broader foundation for claims that global warming has been observed and attributed to human activities."
Pierce notes: "This work also provides a new criterion for measuring the realism of computer climate models. As models are improved to better match ocean warming seen over the last fifty years, they should give better estimates of future climate change as well."
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Wigley Testimony (PDF)
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Hearing on ‘The Case for Climate Change Action’
October 1, 2003
Tom M.L. Wigley,
Senior Scientist,
National Center for Atmospheric Research,
Boulder, CO.
"The most recent climate models are able to simulate present-day climate remarkably well – with errors often less than the uncertainties in observational data sets. Here, however, I will not dwell on this aspect of model validation, but concentrate on the second method – comparison of observed and model-simulated changes. I will show that models simulate temperature changes over the past 100+ years with considerable fidelity provided they are driven (or ‘forced’) by observed changes in both natural forcing agents (such as variations in the output of the Sun) and anthropogenic factors (such as changes in greenhouse gas concentrations and aerosol particle changes). Natural forcing factors alone cannot explain the past record."
...
"The simpler model has the advantage that it can be used to examine the effects of uncertainties in the parameters that control the response of the climate system to external forcing. The primary source of uncertainty is the ‘climate sensitivity’ parameter (designated by ‘S’ below). This is usually characterized by the eventual (or ‘equilibrium’) global-mean warming that would occur if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It has an uncertainty range of 1.5oC to 4.5oC with about 90% confidence. I will give results for sensitivity values of 2oC and 4oC to show the importance of this factor. For more information on sources of modeling uncertainty, see Wigley and Raper (2001)."
"The key to understanding what is really occurring on Earth is to understand that there are known cycles. As Felix notes, ‘there is an ice-age cycle known as the Milankovitch cycle; one that returns like clockwork. I believe it is now time for the next beat of that cycle.’"
"“It was round about the end of the last ice age, some 13,000 years ago, that a global warming process did undoubtedly begin. Not because of all those Stone age folk roasting mammoth meat on fossil fuel camp fires but because of something called the 'Milankovitch Cycles,' an entirely natural fact of planetary life that depends on the tilt of the Earth's axis and its orbit around the sun."
Global Warming? What a load of poppycock!
"Ice ages correlate with our galactic orbit · So do peaks in strontium and lead · Ice ages correlate with our celestial orbit · Copernicus · Adhémar · Leverrier · Croll · Milankovitch · Precession: "Pacemaker of the Ice ages"
"This cycle appears to match the 100,000-year ice-age cycle first theorized by Milutin Milankovitch, which suggests that ice ages correspond to the cyclical varations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun. (Earth & Planetary Science Ltrs, Vol. 199, issues 3-4, June 10, 2002)"
Magnetic Reversals and Glaciation
So what's your point? I have read Felix's book and suggest you read it. Felix is not a kook nor is Professor Lindzen. Human caused global warming and the inherent hubris that man can control the earth's natural climate cycles have become the tenets of an environmental religion. You beliefs are based on a selected set of "facts" and any data that contradict this belief are considered irrelevant or erroneous. The reality is that no consensus exists on global warming and what to do about it. There is no good basis to expend billions of dollars on treaties like Kyoto. It is not good public policy and it is akin to tilting at windmills.
Good. So does Felix think that the next Milankovitch-forced cooling trend into the next glacial period is due to begin now?
Dr. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, on CO2 and global warming in his WSJ article dated July 2, 2006.
"There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.
Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.
The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."
In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.
So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points. First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.
Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky."
However, if you account for the consumption of CO2 by trees, the US produces about 0% of the world's NET CO2.
Yes, among other factors. Again, take a look at the site and form your own opinions.
you sir don't have your facts stright- CO2 isn't even the polutant that doesn the most damage- CO2 is infact insignificant compared to emisions of polutants from natural sources- You've been fed a line of bull on the CO2 issue and it's been proven scientifically Sulfer agents breaking down cause ozone depletion- not CO2- not nearly the extent of sulpher and other agents- but nice try- Perhaps read the links that person gave you a few posts back- they have the facts- if you need more- my site has plenty of links- As I stated correctly- human involvement is near ZERO percent, so infetesimally small as to be a non issue.
cogitator is correct. Global warming has nothing to do with ozone depletion. They are two seperate things.
Propagandists tip themselves off by offering only one solution. Leftists promote austerity as the only solution, an anti-technology approach. If a problem really exists there are thousands of viable solutions. Most engineers are conservative males and are the ones that actually solve this type of problem.
But that has very little bearing on recent warming. The warming that led us out of the last glacial period 13,000 years ago has not occured gradually over the last 13,000 years - it pretty much all happened by 8,000 years ago. That is all the 6C warming that led us out of the last glacial period occured between about 13,000-8,000 years ago. Since then there have been temperature ups and downs, but those are different patterns.
Personally, i'm enjoying and will continue to enjoy making all the "greenhouse gas" that I do now!
I've consumed over 400k gallons of engine fuel so far and expect to be able to consume another 100k before I croak.
When all the gas is gone, burn an environmentalist!
ozone depletion aside- the output of greenhouse gases by natural causes far outweighs human causes- The l inks listed both in this thread and the ones on my site make this abundantly clear Human cuases of greenhouse gases are- once again, insignificantly small- so small as to be a non issue- 98% of greenhouse gases are emitted naturally and are no cause for alarm- as has been mentioned repeatedly- htis is nothing morethan a cyclical warming trend & this world has experienced MUCH worse warming trends in the past and survived- every species of animal and human has survived them just fine- heck- theyve even survived the cold snaps during the cyclical cooling periods-- if people want to buy into the gloom and doom mentality of global warming, have at it, but don't expect others to buy into junk science that Continuously has to keep changing their model in an effort to explain the facts agsainst it. Global warming nutjobs have to keep molding evidences to fit a convoluted hypothesis & even then, the distorted facts they come up with are nothing but dishonest twisted notions that feed the gloom and doom scenario. Folks- Christ WILL coem back and Rapture His own LONG before anythign bad happens to htis planet- Relax- seriously-
I've done that. Mr. Felix needs to address this in his future research work:
Berger A, Loutre MF (2002). "Climate: An exceptionally long interglacial ahead?". Science 297 (5585): 1287-1288.DOI:10.1126/science.1076120
"As for the prospects of the end of the current interglacial (again, valid only in the absence of human perturbations): it isn't true that interglacials have previously only lasted about 10,000 years; and Milankovitch-type calculations indicate that the present interglacial would probably continue for tens of thousands of years naturally [17]. Other estimates (Loutre and Berger, based on orbital calculations) put the unperturbed length of the present interglacial at 50,000 years. Berger (EGU 2005 presentation) believes that the present CO2 perturbation will last long enough to suppress the next glacial cycle entirely."
If Mr. Felix responds, in print, to Berger and Loutre 2002, then I'll pay more attention to him and his theory.
You may, of course, continue to think what you think about CO2, human activities, and climate. Your viewpoint, however, is incorrect.
let me get this straight- you first complain that human production of CO2 is the cause of all our woes concerning warming- then you say CO2 is not invovled? You're losing me here. SO2 'can' affect- No, SO2 DOES affect ozone much more so than CO2 as the environuts claim- SO2 is not the only source of pollutants emitted by volcanos, it's one of many that contribute to greenhouse effects.- And furhter- CO2Science.com has been monitoring supposed global temperature 'rises' for decades and there is NO clear evidence for a consistent rise in temperature DESPITE what you've been told- infact, there is more evidence for cooling
There are several sites that expose te fallicy of global warming
http://www.warwickhughes.com/climate/index.htm
http://www.mydutchroots.com/windmill/newsitem.asp?id=474
[Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic).
Human activites contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate.]
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
If you want to be nerved up about global dissaster, be my guest- I'll be watching the clouds for the Son myself.
Human emissions of greenhouse gases are small compared to nature. But then natures absorbsion is massive, and ours is zero. Without human activity the atmospheric co2 level is in relative balance. With human activity adding a small amount of co2 this balance is tipped and the co2 level rises.
They disregard the facts about which frequencies of EM radiation are capable of penetrating more than a few microns of seawater.
Greenhouse gases are gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect (ie absorb infrared light), not gases that destroy ozone. so2 is not a greenhouse gas and neither are most of the "pollutants" emitted by volcanoes. Volcanoes really don't contribute much to greenhouse gas levels at all.
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