Global-warming myth
May 16, 2008
By Patrick J. Michaels -
http://www.wa****ngtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080516/EDITORIAL/8210510/-1/RSS_EDITORIAL&template=printart
On May Day, Noah Keenlyside of Germany's Leipzig Institute of Marine
Science, published a paper in Nature forecasting no additional global
warming "over the next decade."
Al Gore and his minions continue to chant that "the science is
settled" on global warming, but the only thing settled is that there
has not been any since 1998. Critics of this view (rightfully) argue
that 1998 was the warmest year in modern record, due to a huge El Nino
event in the Pacific Ocean, and that it is unfair to start any
analysis at a high (or a low) point in a longer history. But starting
in 2001 or 1998 yields the same result: no warming.
The Keenlyside team found that natural variability in the Earth's
oceans will "tem****arily offset" global warming from carbon dioxide.
Seventy percent of the Earth's surface is oceanic; hence, what happens
there greatly influences global temperature. It is now known that both
Atlantic and Pacific temperatures can get "stuck," for a decade or
longer, in relatively warm or cool patterns. The North Atlantic is now
forecast to be in a cold stage for a decade, which will help put the
damper on global warming. Another Pacific temperature pattern is
forecast not to push warming, either.
Science no longer provides justification for any rush to pass drastic
global warming legislation. The Climate Security Act, sponsored by Joe
Lieberman and John Warner, would cut emissions of carbon dioxide — the
main "global warming" gas — by 66 percent over the next 42 years. With
expected population growth, this means about a 90 percent drop in
emissions per capita, to 19th-century levels.
Other regulatory dictates are similarly unjustified. The Justice
Department has ruled that the Interior Department has until May 15 to
decide whether or not to list the polar bear as an endangered species.
Pressure to pass impossible-to-achieve legislation, like
Lieberman-Warner, or grandstanding political stunts, like calling
polar bears an "endangered species" even when they are at near
record-high population levels, are based upon projections of rapid and
persistent global warming.
Proponents of wild legislation like to point to the 2007 science
compendium from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
deemed so authoritative it was awarded half of last year's Nobel Peace
Prize. (The other half went to Al Gore.) In it there are dozens of
computer-driven projections for 21st-century warming. Not one of them
projects that the earth's natural climate variability will shut down
global warming from carbon dioxide for two decades. Yet, that is just
what has happened.
If you think about it, all we possess to project the future of complex
systems are computer models. Therefore, if the models that serve as
the basis for policy do not work — and that must be the conclusion if
indeed we are at the midpoint of a two-decade hiatus in global warming
— then there is no verifiable science behind the current legislative
hysteria.
What does this mean for the future? If warming is "tem****arily offset"
for two decades, does all the "offset" warming suddenly appear with a
vengeance, or is it delayed?
Computer models, like the one used by Keenlyside, et al., rely on
"positive feedbacks" to generate much of their warming. First,
atmospheric carbon dioxide warms things up a bit. Then the ocean
follows, raising the amount of atmospheric water va****, which is a
greater source of global warming than carbon dioxide. When the ocean
does not warm up, it seems that the additional warming is also
delayed.
All of this may mean that we have simply overestimated the amount of
warming that results from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
That final point has been a subject of debate for a long time. Several
recent publications in the peer-reviewed literature argue that
observed changes in temperature show the "sensitivity" of temperature
to increasing carbon dioxide is lower than earlier estimates.
All of this suggests a 21st-century warming trend that will be lower
than the average value calculated by the climate models in the IPCC
compendium.
But who really knows? Before Keenlyside dropped his bombshell, few
scientists would have said publicly that global warming could stop for
two decades. Anyone raising that possibility would doubtlessly have
been treated to the smug reply that "the science is settled," and that
only the most bumptious ignoramus could raise such a question.
One final prediction: The teeming polar bear population will be listed
as "endangered," and in the next year or two, Congress will pass a
bill mandating large and impossible cuts in carbon dioxide.
What is "settled" is the politics, not the science.
--
If you disagree with the theories and dogmas of Marxism or Scientific
Socialism
then you are a tool of Capitalist interests. If you disagree with the
theories
or dogmas of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming then you are a tool
of
Capitalistic interests. Notice a pattern here? -- Captain Compassion
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to
escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius
"...the whole world, including the United States, including all that
we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark
Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights
of perverted science." -- Sir Winston Churchill
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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