NIGHT FLIGHTS NOW IN THE GUN

But apparently daytime aircraft flights are now good!

Restrictions on night flights could ease the aviation industry's fast-growing contribution to global warming, a study says. At certain altitudes, aircraft produce contrails, the vapour wake caused when water in the chilly atmosphere is condensed by the plane's hot exhaust. These contrails have a surprisingly big but also complex effect on the climate. Because they are clouds, they trap heat that is emitted by the Earth's surface, creating a "greenhouse effect" that adds to warming. Yet during daytime, these clouds have a cooling effect because they are white and reflect some of the Sun's energy back into space. In certain conditions, contrails can exist for several hours.

Meteorologists at the University of Reading in southern England estimated the radiation caused by contrails at a busy flight corridor in south-east England. Using high-resolution aircraft flight data and routine weather balloon data, they looked at "persistent" contrails: wakes that remained for an hour or more after the aircraft had flown over. Night flights account for only 22 per cent of Britain's annual air traffic but contribute between 60 to 80 per cent of the greenhouse effect from contrails, the scientists found. "We also found that flights between December and February contribute half of the annual mean climate warming, even though they account for less than a quarter of annual air traffic," lead researcher Nicola Stuber said. The study appears in the weekly British science journal Nature....

Environmentalists are angry, complaining that airlines get a free ride when it comes to environmental taxes. In addition to rescheduling night flights for the daytime, planes could diminish their contribution to global warming by changing their altitude. A study published last year in the journal Transportation Research suggests that the regions of "ice-supersaturated" air where contrails form is only about 500 metres thick. The goal would be to fit sensors on aircraft that could inform pilots where this layer lies, thus enabling them to shift altitude accordingly.

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IS MODERN CIVILISATION FRAGILE?

Nutty anthropologist disproves his own claims -- Proves that it is primitive society that is fragile

Our ancestors made themselves and us more vulnerable to the vagaries of nature and the weather once they switched from hunting and gathering to farming. So says Brian Fagan, emeritus professor of anthropology from University of California at Santa Barbara, who spoke on the impact of climate change on ancient societies at the Environmental Wars conference of the Skeptics Society last weekend. Fagan's chief claim is that Farming in this case stands for the advent of more complex and interconnected societies. Fagan argues that nimble hunter/gatherers could respond to environmental changes faster than farmers and urbanites who are tied to their land and their cities.

Fagan began his talk by describing his sojourn as a young man in a village of subsistence farmers in the Zambezi Valley in Africa. These farmers lived on the edge. In September and October, the farmers cleared and burnt the land in preparation for planting. Once the land was ready, they waited for the rain and when it came they hurried to plant their crops. The year Fagan lived in that village, the rain failed after the crops were planted and the village granaries emptied and the villagers suffered starvation. He noted in passing that he did not have any trouble getting food. "I have never forgotten what I learned about vulnerability," declared Fagan.

Fagan posits that human societies increased their vulnerability to natural catastrophes over the past 10,000 years (evidently more fully described in his book, The Long Summer: How climate changed civilization). Thus, climate change is responsible for humanity's shift to farming. Farming, according to Fagan, began in the Fertile Crescent after temperatures plunged during a global cold snap known as the Younger Dryas period. People living off abundant forests of pistachio nut trees and other plant foods had actually settled into permanent villages. As temperatures fell, the forest began to disappear and Neolithic people could no longer depend on its bounty. But instead of moving on, people in the area began the deliberate cultivation of wild plants; in other words, they became farmers. Fagan argues that farming led to "radically enhanced vulnerability," even though the new economy "spread like wildfire" and dominated the region by 8000 BC.

Fagan turns next to ancient Egypt where the Pharaonic system was established on the basis of abundant grain harvests. The Pharaohs claimed authority based on their ability to intercede with the gods to supply the annual Nile River floods that nourished Egypt's bountiful grain fields. Fagan notes that a good flood was a mere nine feet. However, a 60 year period of gradual drying began around 2180 BC as an El Nino drought struck the Ethiopian headwaters of the Nile. In fact the river became so dry that people could walk across it. In the face of these grain shortages, Egypt fell apart and local warlords seized control. It took 100 years for Egypt to reunify and later Pharaohs massively invested in irrigation and grain storage in order to avoid the fate of their improvident predecessors.

Fagan then considers the rise and fall of the Moche on the north coast of Peru between 200 and 600 AD. Northern Peru is one of the driest areas on earth, but the Moche thrived by settling in river valleys that laced the region. These irrigation societies were headed by a caste of warrior priests who were treated by their people as infallible gods, according to Fagan. However, around 600 AD a major earthquake wiped out the Moche's irrigation systems. After the earthquake an intense El Nino drought finished off the Moche, and the culture's rigid, inflexible leaders were overthrown.

Fagan's final dolorous example of human vulnerability to climatic events is Europe in the year 1315. Medieval life was set by the passage of seasons and never seemed to change. Ninety percent of Europeans lived from one harvest to the next. The only noises heard in this bucolic world were those made by the wind, birds, and church bells. Then one day it started to rain and rain and rain. The fields turned to mud and marginal soils washed away. By Christmas people were hungry. The stormy period lasted for seven years and by 1321 one and half million Europeans had died of starvation.

Fagan argues that modern human societies are as vulnerable as the earlier ones. But is that so? Let's go back to his account of the invention of agriculture. What happened is that our ancestors exchanged one set of vulnerabilities for another when they switched from gathering wild nuts and berries to farming.

Of course, there are always tradeoffs. Some archaeologists argue that early farmers were in general less healthy than their hunter/gatherer ancestors resulting lower life expectancies. They claim that farmers suffered more epidemic diseases from living in close quarters with others and that their limited grain-based diets fostered malnutrition. However, these claims are disputed, and in any case, even if ancient farmers experienced lower life expectancies than hunter/gatherers, they must have also experienced higher fertility rates because human populations began to grow after the invention of agriculture.

Farming produced storable food surpluses that freed some portion of the population from having to spend every day all day scrounging for their subsistence. True, many of these people wasted a lot of effort on religious mumbo jumbo, but some spent their time inventing pottery, writing, weaving, metal working and so forth. Rather than increasing vulnerability these new arts and technologies helped make people more resilient rather than more vulnerable. On balance, the switch made humanity less vulnerable to the vagaries of nature. Farming increased the security of food supplies, and allowed the creation of larger scale societies in which people could trade surpluses. Dynasties and even cultures pass into history, but farmers and farming remain.

As evidence of our increased modern vulnerability to nature's whims, Fagan cites the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Katrina proves many things-among them, don't trust governments to build levees or organize effective emergency responses-but does it demonstrat increased overall vulnerability? Hardly. Katrina killed more than 1,800 people (there are hundreds more still missing), destroyed billions of dollars of property, and disrupted energy supplies, yet the American economy shrugged off the blow and continued to expand. Our elaborate globe-spanning networks of energy supplies, computers and trade actually buffer us against the effects of natural disasters.

Look back at Fagan's experience living in a village in the Zambezi Valley, where the anthropologist actually missed the lesson he should have learned. Recall that Fagan said that he never lacked for food. Didn't he ask himself: Why are the villagers starving while I'm not? Unlike the Zambezi villagers, Fagan had access to the outside modern world that could supply him Nestle chocolate, canned Spam, rolled oatmeal, powdered milk and whatever else he needed. He was less vulnerable to starvation because he did not depend on the rains falling at a specific time in a specific place.

The good news is that when the rains fail in southern Africa today, the villagers have greater access food and other supplies from across the globe-much as Fagan had five decades ago. For example, four years ago, when famine threatened (due to drought and unbelievably stupid government policies) grain was rushed to Zambia and Zimbabwe and starvation mostly averted. It is very unlikely that droughts or floods will devastate every agricultural region across the globe all at once. Mother Nature can still be a bitch, but Fagan is simply wrong when he claims that modern societies are more and more vulnerable to her caprices. Our interconnected and globalized world provides more and more of humanity with radically enhanced security rather than increased vulnerability.

Reason Online, 9 June 2006






Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe

"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists

"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie? Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites? No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.

Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies." This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts. So we have a smaller fraction.

But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."

We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest. Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:

Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?" Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.

Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier," says Winterhalter. "In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form."

Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems." But Karlen clarifies that the 'mass balance' of Antarctica is positive - more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the 'calving' of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans. When Greenland and Antarctica are assessed together, "their mass balance is considered to possibly increase the sea level by 0.03 mm/year - not much of an effect," Karlen concludes.

The Antarctica has survived warm and cold events over millions of years. A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future. Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."

Karlen explains that a paper published in 2003 by University of Alaska professor Igor Polyakov shows that, the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise. "For several published records it is a decrease for the last 50 years," says Karlen

Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down. The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. A sharp drop of 30% occurred again 1996-1998 and since then there has been a steady increase to reach near normal conditions since 2001."

Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."

Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records," he says. "The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual."

Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

In April sixty of the world's leading experts in the field asked Prime Minister Harper to order a thorough public review of the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Canada. Considering what's at stake - either the end of civilization, if you believe Gore, or a waste of billions of dollars, if you believe his opponents - it seems like a reasonable request.

Source






SCIENTISTS CRITICISE HAWKING 'HYPE'



Professor Stephen Hawking's latest fears for the future of humanity have been criticised by academics for being contradictory and little more than hype for his forthcoming book. The famous physicist said that the human race was likely to be wiped out by a manmade, doomsday virus before the millennium was out, unless we set up colonies in space. He told a UK national newspaper that genetic engineering could be used to "improve" human beings to meet the challenges of long-duration space travel. Professor Hawking's comments came in advance of his new publication entitled The Universe in a Nutshell.

But Dr Benny Peiser, from Liverpool John Moores University, UK, was highly critical of the reported remarks. He told BBC News Online that Hawking's predictions of terrestrial disaster had become increasingly wide-ranging and unreasonable in recent years.

And space visionary Sir Arthur C Clarke told BBC News Online: "I am surprised Professor Hawking didn't mention the danger of an asteroid impact which is inevitable sooner or later. Admittedly, this is most unlikely to wipe out the human race, but it could send us back to the Stone Age."

Leading British anthropologist Dr Benny Peiser described the comments in the Daily Telegraph newspaper as "regrettable hype". "Over a year ago, he warned that the Earth was likely to get hotter and hotter as a result of manmade CO2 emissions 'until it will be like Venus with boiling sulphuric acid'... Now, drawing on the dread of bioterrorism, his latest doomsday prophecy foretells our certain self-destruction as a result of biological research." He added: "Apocalyptics typically exaggerate the possible dangers we may face in the future while ignoring or underestimating the probability of finding a social, technological or medical remedy for the predicament."

Dr Peiser said that humans and our hominid ancestors had survived more than five million years of recurring onslaughts from ice ages, impacts from space, and global plague epidemics. "Technological and societal evolution has now reached a level of complexity that renders the probability of human survival for the next 1,000 years drastically higher than at any previous stage of our long history. "There is no reason to believe that our generation or [any in this] millennium will be the last one on Earth," he added.

BBC News Online

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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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