Global Warming Summary Article
Tuesday 10 July 2012 at 11:29 am.
[Work in Progress...] buildup
AGW = ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING; anthropogenic means "man made"
the burning (no pun intended) issue is: "how much of global warming/cooling is natural (i.e. cyclical or milankovichian) and/or how much is man-made through carbon emissions." This is an important and "meaty" scientific question that deserves our best critical thiking. There are good arguments on both sides of the issue. A corollary question is how much control should the governement exercise, assuming they can control and fix carbon emissions. There has been a great deal of political shouting and name calling on the issue without advancing our knowledge. To the contrary the public, for the most part seems abivalent or "turned off" on the issue.
Carole and I took a 6 week safari voyage on the National Geographic Explorer along the east coast of Africa recently to study Africa in preparation for a class we are teaching at Dartmouth in the fall of 2013: namely the quadrennial report: published by the NIC: Global Trends 2030.
During one of the lectures on GW by chief scientist, Dr. Jim Kelley, he said: "The peak of the last ice age was about 20,000 years ago. The earth has been warming ever since. Humans did not start it, and humans cannot fix it." Cyclical climate change is a natural phenomenon.
An example of Natural Phenomena include the Milankovich Cycle, [or Milankovic or Milankovitch] which is only a theory. The Astrophysics of Milankovich are universally accepted but it may not explain global warming. Milankovich's theory on global warming explanation does contain flaws but it is gaining in scientific credibility. An example of anthropogenic (man made) effects are "the increasing particles of CO2 or Greenhouse Gases in the atmosphere" which surprisingly both activists and skeptics actually agree on. In 1999, Michael Mann published his famous hockey stick projection showing a rapidly escalating increase in global temperatures followed by polar ice melt and rising sea levels supposedly (but only conjecture) because of increased carbon emissions. These forecasts were extrapolated to include an irreversible "tipping point." The heat buildup athmospheric projection is also a theory and not supported by any peer reviewed science. In the ensuing years, a serious (some say ugly) disagreement developed between activists and skeptics as to whether the buildup of carbon particle emissions or Greenhouse Gases (such as methane) really traps heat in the atmosphere and causes global warming.
Most of us folk on the sidelines have green thumbs and want to preserve and improve the environment. Yet, 41% of Americans have not bought into Global Warming - there is a lingering skepticism. The reason for the lack of support is the politicization of Global Warming and media exaggeration, accordng to Gallup. Many people are skeptical of politics. Global Warming Political Activists want more Government Regulation and Control over carbon, while skeptics see the regulation as More Big Government. In addition, there are huge multi-billion dollar research projects and expenditures involved with the issue, and a good deal of the expenditures would be controlled through the UN and the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change)
The intellectual battle has raged for more than a decade, but recently, environmental activists and supporters of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) have taken a bruising from new findings: firstly as a result of new peer reviewed scientific findings reported in highly reputable journals; secondly by the failure of Global Warming Predictions (i.e. the hockey stick projections) to transpire as highly advertised in the Gore report and documentaries; and thirdly by malfeasance of key AGW advocates caught lying by officials, or caught lying or "fudging numbers" found in email expositions.
Consider the following: One of the major theories involves the variability of the Sun's output. Is the Sun the driving force in climate change? for example, why is the planet Mars warming as well? Back in 1986, a Danish scientist named, Henrik Svensmark suggested something outrageous — that the interaction of cosmic rays and the sun might seed cloud formations. The implications, if true, had potentially enormous implications for the debate about natural causes of warming. When the sun is very active, it can be thought of as pushing cosmic rays away from the Earth, reducing their incidence. When the sun is less active, more cosmic rays are recorded. This is fairly well understood. But if Svensmark was correct, it would mean that periods of high solar output should coincide with reduced cloud formation (due to reduced cosmic ray incidence), which in turn would have a warming effect on the Earth, since less sunlight would be reflected back into space by clouds. GUESS WHAT WAS PUBLISHED IN THE PRESTIGIOUS "NATURE" JOURNAL ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2011?
Surprisingly, 15 years later, in the September 2011 issue of Nature: the prestigious publication features Svensmark's CLOUD phenomenon indicating that it seems to have been verified. The studies were undertaken at the CERN high particle physics laboratory and have been peer reviewed. This is crippling news for Anthropogenic Activists. See the Youtube videos attached to this article under the More tab. These findings are indeed profound and surely will earn Svensmark the Noble Prize if he survives the political naysayers.
Also recently published: In August 2011, the FBI and IG announced, after a long investigation, that the two government scientists, (Charles Monnett and Jeffrey Gleason) were suspended for making false reports about polar bear drownings. In 2000, the rallying cry for AGW activists was the scientific report stating that Polar Bears were drowning because of polar ice melt; and that the polar bear population was decreasing and faced extinction These assertions were also mentioned in Al Gore’s Academy Award winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. See the full stories immediately below by clicking on the More tab. People love their Polar Bears; ranked as the most resourceful animal on the planet.
More punishing news was delivered in July 2011, when a NASA sponsored peer reviewed report by Dr. Roy Spencer confirmed that the Greenhouse Effect was overstated and that the IPCC global warming models were incorrect. The peer reviewed scientific report which used data from satellite readings for 11 years, since 2000, showing that the Earth was more efficient in dissipating heat than expected. See the full stories immediately below by clicking on the More tab. It is worth noting the report under the green tab that criticizes Dr Spencer because he is a Christian. It is silly to make such claims, but i mentioned that the disagreements (on both sides) are ugly.
Several other research papers published in early 2011 undermine, if not prove, that the tipping point hypothesis is not correct. Very disturbing news for Global Warming Activists. Click on the More tab below.
FORECASTS of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. We could be about to enter one or even two decades of cooler temperatures, according to one of the world's top climate modelers. "People will say this is global warming disappearing," Mojib Latif told more than 1500 climate scientists gathered at the UN's World Climate Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, last week (as reported in January 2009). "I am not one of the skeptics," said Latif, "however, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it."
Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, the principal author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a climate physicist at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel, Germany. Yet many now agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is less certain than once thought. This is bad timing. The UN's World Meteorological Organization had called the conference in order to draft a global plan on how to produce useful short-term climate predictions for different groups of people worldwide, from farmers worried about the next rainy season to doctors trying to predict malaria epidemics. But while discussing how this might be done, some of the climate scientists admitted that, on such timescales, natural variability is at least as important as the long-term changes from global warming. "In many ways we know more about what will happen in the 2050s than next year," said Vicky Pope at the UK's Met Office.
Latif predicts that in the next few years a natural cooling trend will dominate the warming caused by humans. The cooling would be down to cyclical changes in the atmosphere and ocean currents in the North Atlantic, known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation (AMO).
Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, Latif said the NAO was probably responsible for some of the strong warming seen around the globe in the past three decades. "But how much? The jury is still out," he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a phase that will cool the planet.
Latif says the NAO also explained the recent recovery of the Sahel region of Africa from the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. James Murphy, head of climate prediction at the Met Office, agrees and also links the AMO to Indian monsoons, Atlantic hurricanes and sea ice loss in the Arctic. "The oceans are key to decadal natural variability," he says.