SCIENCE CONTRADICTS THE U.N. ON GLOBAL WARMING (SURPRISE!)

"How many times have we heard from Al Gore and assorted European politicians that 'the science is settled' on global warming? In other words, it's 'time for action.' Climate change is, as recently stated by Hans Blix, former U.N. Chief for weapons detection in Iraq, the most important issue of our time, far more dangerous than people flying fuel-laden aircraft into skyscrapers or possibly detonating backpack nukes in Baltimore Harbor.

Well, the science may now be settled, but not in the way Gore and Blix would have us believe. Three bombshell papers have just hit the refereed literature that knock the stuffing out of Blix's position and that of the United Nations and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC claims to have carefully corrected the temperature records for the well-known problem of local ("urban," as opposed to global) warming. But this has always troubled serious scientists, because the way the U.N. checks for artificial warming makes it virtually impossible to detect in recent decades -- the same period in which our cities have undergone the most growth and sprawl.

The surface temperature record shows a warming rate of about 0.17?C (0.31?F) per decade since 1979. However, there are two other records, one from satellites, and one from weather balloons that tell a different story. Neither annual satellite nor balloon trends differ significantly from zero since the start of the satellite record in 1979. These records reflect temperatures in what is called the lower atmosphere, or the region between roughly 5,000 and 30,000 feet.

Four years ago, a distinguished panel of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that a real disparity exists between the reported surface warming and the temperature trends measured in the atmosphere above. Since then, many investigators have tried to explain the cause of the disparity while others have denied its existence.

So, which record is right, the U.N. surface record showing the larger warming or the other two? There's another record, from seven feet above the ground, derived from balloon data that has recently been released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In two research papers in the July 9 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, two of us (Douglass and Singer) compared it for correspondence with the surface record and the lower atmosphere histories. The odd-record-out turns out to be the U.N.'s hot surface history.

This is a double kill, both on the U.N.'s temperature records and its vaunted climate models. That's because 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. When this was noted in the first satellite paper published in 1990, some scientists objected that the record, which began in 1979, was too short. Now we have a quarter-century of concurrent balloon and satellite data, both screaming that the UN's climate models have failed, as well as indicating that its surface record is simply too hot."

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GREEN OR TERRACOTTA?

"I'm indebted to Prof Parth Shah from New Delhi, for explaining to me that I'm a Terracotta.

If you're a green, you believe in wildlife (without humans) and wilderness, you want to change attitudes, you believe in communal ownership.

If you're a Teracotta - a material which comes from the earth, but only through the medium of human agency, you believe that humans are part of the world ecology, that you want to see wise use of environmental resources rather than mere wilderness, that you want to change incentives (rather than the minds of politicians) and that private ownership and property rights are probably the best way to protect scarce things, like the environment. Makes sense to me."

(From the Adam Smith blog.)

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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