METHANE A MUCH MORE LIKELY CULPRIT THAN CO2

Very few people now argue that there has been NO global warming in recent decades. The actual evidence (as distinct from "models") suggests a much more minor and manageable rise than what the Greenies trumpet but the really important question is what is causing the warming. If we get the cause wrong we will be running around the racetrack in the wrong direction if we try to do anything about it. And, unsurprisingly, that seems to be exactly what the Greenies are doing. They blame the rise in temperature on the Greenhouse effect -- which is a simple hypothesis with some attractions. But for some reason way outside logic they focus solely on just one of the many gases that produce the greenhouse effect and say that it alone is the cause of all our woes. They say that an increase in carbon dioxide output is the culprit -- even though carbon dioxide is one of the most minor contributors to the greenhouse effect. Other gases such as water vapour and methane are far more potent in keeping the earth warm and cosy. So wouldn't it make more sense to look at what the major gases are doing?

And if you do look at the major greenhouse gases there are plenty of of other potential culprits to be found. One of the most obvious is methane -- a common byproduct of all sorts of primary (food) production. A recent paper, for instance, has shown that rice-growing produces huge amounts of methane. Most of Asia lives on rice and there are a heck of a lot more Asians now than there used to be 100 years ago so it is pretty obvious that a lot more rice is being grown these days than there used to be. So on the balance of probabilities it is those busy Asian farmers who are heating us all up by producing heaps of extra methane!

But nobody mentions that. Why? The answer has to be politics. Forcing a reduction of CO2 production would deal a great blow to the American economy whereas focusing on poor Asian farmers would be reprehensible. Pity about the science, though! If it was reality (instead of hurting the USA) that the Greenies were mainly concerned about, they would be focusing on how to make Asians more prosperous and thus less dependant on rice. But the best way to do that would be to encourage capitalism! Horrors!




WOT?? NO HOCKEY STICK?

I suppose it's a bit like beating a dead horse now but I would like to point that one of the better pieces of data we have on the global warming panic shows nothing like the famous "hockey-stick" shape (with its recent steep upturn) that the Greenies have long hung their hats on. We know now that the hockey stick was a data-processing artifact from the devious Prof. Michael Mann but that still leaves open the question of what is REALLY happening. So let us look at the record of sea-levels in the San Francisco area. I like the record so much that I am actually putting up the graph concerned below. As readers of my blogs know, I tend to like words a lot better than pictures but sometimes ....

(Sea-level measurements collected at Fort Point in San Francisco since before 1900 form the longest continuous sea-level record for any site on the west coast of North America. This record was recently analyzed by U.S. Geological Survey scientists, who found that four major factors influence sea level at Fort Point-daily tides, annual sea-level cycles, a long-term trend of slowly rising sea level (red line), and the occurrence of atmospheric events such as El Ninos and La Ninas)

You could hardly get a better example of a straight-line trend, could you? From 1900 on, the sea level rise has been slow but steady. No sudden lasting upturns and no steep trend of any kind. So the data are consistent with some sort of slowly changing natural process -- such as slowly rising solar output, steadily-rising rice production (which produces heaps of methane) or -- wait for it: the inexorable creep of plate tectonics. Any schoolboy used to know that coastal California is geologically unstable. Don't they have earthquakes there or something? And San Francisco had a "great fire" in 1906 did it not? And the graph does show a big blip in sea level about then. So it could be sinking land as much as rising seas that have produced the effect.

So nobody really knows what this record tells us except that it is not some sudden sin of Western man that has brought it on.

More here

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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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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