Some journalists are so confident that we're already cooked by global warming that they're scolding ignorant Americans in advance for all the now-unpreventable doom that's coming our way. Newsweek's Sharon Begley rings in the new year by shaking her head at the Stupid, Soon to Be Overheated Majority and how we'll have to adapt to being cooked:
As scientists and policy types figure out what changes will be necessary to cope with global warming, it's obvious that massive sea walls will be required to hold back rising oceans, that enormous new reservoirs will be needed to cope with the alternating droughts and deluges that many regions will suffer and that a crash program to develop heat- and drought-resistant crops would be a good idea if people are to keep eating.... It's such a polite, unthreatening word: "adapt."
The kind of thing you do as you roll with the punches or keep a stiff upper lip, modifying your behavior to a new situation. But as it will be used in 2008, adaptation is a euphemism for widespread, expensive changes that will be needed to cope with climate change. Although some adaptations will be modest and low tech, such as cities' establishing cooling centers to shelter residents during heat waves, others will require such herculean efforts and be so costly that we'll look back on the era beginning in 1988, when credible warnings of climate change reached critical mass, and wonder why we were so stupid as to blow the chance to keep global warming to nothing more extreme than a few more mild days in March.
I'd love to see Begley face the idea that news magazines and other scientific sages saw the opposite weather threat in the 1970s. As R. Warren Anderson and Dan Gainor laid out in the Business and Media Institute report Fire and Ice:
Weather warnings in the '70s from "reputable researchers" worried policy-makers so much that scientists at a National Academy of Sciences meeting "proposed the evacuation of some six million people" from parts of Africa, reported the Times on Dec. 29, 1974.
That article went on to tell of the costly and unnecessary plans of the old Soviet Union. It diverted time from Cold War activities to scheme about diverting the coming cold front. It had plans to reroute "large Siberian rivers, melting Arctic ice and damming the Bering Strait" to help warm the "frigid fringes of the Soviet Union."
Newsweek's 1975 article "The Cooling World" noted climatologists' admission that "solutions" to global cooling "such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers," could result in more problems than they would solve.
Source
Cause Versus Effect In Feedback Diagnosis
Greenies need feedbacks in their models to magnify the small warming observed in the late 20th century into something big enough to be threatening in the future. Article below by Roy W. Spencer notes some problems in quantifying actual feedbacks
On August 8, 2007, I posted on the possibility that our observational estimates of feedbacks might be biased in the positive direction. Danny Braswell and I built a simple time-dependent energy balance model to demonstrate the effect and its possible magnitude, and submitted a paper to the Journal of Climate for publication.
The two reviewers of the manuscript (rather uncharacteristically) signed their names to their reviews. To my surprise, both of them (Isaac Held and Piers Forster) agreed that we had raised a legitimate issue. While both reviewers suggested changes in the (conditionally accepted) manuscript, they even took the time to develop their own simple models to demonstrate the effect to themselves.
Of special note is the intellectual honesty shown by Piers Forster. Our paper directly challenges an assumption made by Forster in his 2005 J. Climate paper, which provided a nice theoretical treatment of feedback diagnosis from observational data. Forster admitted in his review that they had erred in this part of their analysis, and encouraged us to get the paper published so that others could be made aware of the issue, too.
And the fundamental issue can be demonstrated with this simple example: When we analyze interannual variations in, say, surface temperature and clouds, and we diagnose what we believe to be a positive feedback (say, low cloud coverage decreasing with increasing surface temperature), we are implicitly assuming that the surface temperature change caused the cloud change - and not the other way around.
This issue is critical because, to the extent that non-feedback sources of cloud variability cause surface temperature change, it will always look like a positive feedback using the conventional diagnostic approach. It is even possible to diagnose a positive feedback when, in fact, a negative feedback really exists.
I hope you can see from this that the separation of cause from effect in the climate system is absolutely critical. The widespread use of seasonally-averaged or yearly-averaged quantities for climate model validation is NOT sufficient to validate model feedbacks! This is because the time averaging actually destroys most, if not all, evidence (e.g. time lags) of what caused the observed relationship in the first place.
Since both feedbacks and non-feedback forcings will typically be intermingled in real climate data, it is not a trivial effort to determine the relative sizes of each. While we used the example of random daily low cloud variations over the ocean in our simple model (which were then combined with specified negative or positive cloud feedbacks), the same issue can be raised about any kind of feedback.
Notice that the potential positive bias in model feedbacks can, in some sense, be attributed to a lack of model "complexity" compared to the real climate system. By "complexity" here I mean cloud variability which is not simply the result of a cloud feedback on surface temperature. This lack of complexity in the model then requires the model to have positive feedback built into it (explicitly or implicitly) in order for the model to agree with what looks like positive feedback in the observations.
Also note that the non-feedback cloud variability can even be caused by .(gasp). the cloud feedback itself! Let's say there is a weak negative cloud feedback in nature. But superimposed upon this feedback is noise. For instance, warm SST pulses cause corresponding increases in low cloud coverage, but superimposed upon those cloud pulses are random cloud noise. That cloud noise will then cause some amount of SST variability that then looks like positive cloud feedback, even though the real cloud feedback is negative.
I don't think I can over-emphasize the potential importance of this issue. It has been largely ignored - although Bill Rossow has been preaching on this same issue for years, but phrasing it in terms of the potential nonlinearity of, and interactions between, feedbacks. Similarly, Stephen's 2005 J. Climate review paper on cloud feedbacks spent quite a bit of time emphasizing the problems with conventional cloud feedback diagnosis.
I don't have an answer to the question of how to separate out cause and effect quantitatively from observations. But I do know that any progress will depend on high time resolution data, rather than monthly, seasonal, or annual averaging. (For instance, our August 9, 2007 GRL paper on tropical intraseasonal cloud variability showed a very strong negative cloud "feedback" signal.) Until that progress is made, I consider the existence of positive cloud feedback in nature to be more a matter of faith than of science.
Source
Anthropogenic Global Warming is Nonsense
These days it is well nigh impossible to not be aware of the 'Global Warming' hysteria. From the doomsday movies, to alarming media headlines, to politicians scrambling over each other to get on the green bandwagon, one thing is clear - it's not politically correct to question it. When I first decided to look into what all the fuss was about on climate change, I was not opinionated on the subject at all. From what I understood then, the only difference between the global warming alarmists and me was a difference in opinion on the economics involved. That has now completely changed.
They have engaged in exaggeration and deception on just about every single last aspect of climate change. In fact, the only thing I can really confirm for you is that carbon dioxide has a 'greenhouse effect' in our atmosphere, and we are responsible for 0.28% of it [6]. Actually, even the word "greenhouse" is misleading because that implies a restriction on convection currents, which is not physically accurate. The moon doesn't have an atmosphere and experiences an average surface temperature of 107øC and -153øC for day and night respectively, which is obviously a much larger range compared to Earth's. The best explanation for how an atmosphere's "greenhouse" effect acts, is it increases the planet's heat capacity (i.e. it holds more energy and thus takes longer to heat up and cool down) and thus makes the climate more gentle and hospitable.
But let's step back for a moment from the atmosphere and talk about Earth's historical and current temperatures. Global warming alarmists would have us believe that we are now seeing a global temperature at a height not achieved for a very long time. This is simply not true. We have seen temperatures even within the last 1,000 years higher than our present, which is not even a blip in Earth's history.
Possibly the most infamous display of this garbage is the "hockey-stick graph". Although Mann et al compiled it in 1998, it was not until 2003 that the first independent person was able to look at the algorithms used in the graph, because they refused to release it. It turned out that, even using completely randomized data, one could create a graph that looked exactly the same because the algorithms had a bias to exaggerate the last century!
Not only that, but it should be obvious from the fact that the Vikings were settling and farming Greenland from the 9th to the 13th century, in places now covered with permafrost and ice, that this graph is just total nonsense! Of course, this was not before the graph had been used as the backdrop for the 2001 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You would have thought that was a pretty good indication of their scientific integrity, but I promise you it gets much, much worse.
Perhaps even more interesting than the inability of the IPCC to verify its data before using it at all, let alone as a centerpiece, or subsequently apologising after it became public how fraudulent the graph was, is the fact that environmentalists to this day still use this graph to illustrate their points. Al Gore's entire sensationalist "documentary" (boy is that charitable) revolves around this widely discredited graph and others like it. It should honestly occur to us that anyone who continues to use this graph to support their arguements has little interest in actually presenting reality. The IPCC used to publish the real temperature data on the past millennium in its earlier reports, but not anymore because it's an inconvenient truth to their agenda.
What about recent temperature rises in the last century? Surely it is impossible to deny that we are seeing warming now at an unusual and alarming rate? Well, you'd be surprised. Measuring Earth's average temperature to any interesting degree of precision is a considerably complex task. Even defining exactly what the absolute surface air temperature means is challenging, giving plenty of room for pursuing an agenda.
The vast majority of graphs you've seen on this subject will have come from data using land-based measurements, as these allow the graph to continue back beyond the 1970s. There are numerous problems with land-based measurements, ranging from the fact that land only accounts for 30% of the planet's surface, to urban heat islands and other effects from changes in local land use.
Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. says, [7] "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (the 2D representation of a sphere which exaggerates the polar area) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."
However, in the last 30 years we've had consistent measurements from weather balloons and satellites, which produce much more reliable results for obvious reasons, and what we've observed from this equipment is a only a very slight warming trend. This data should be puzzling to the people who built the climate models for the IPCC, because they actually predicted the reverse - the troposphere should be warming faster than the surface if the current warming is due to the 'greenhouse effect'.
While we're on the subject of climate models, I'd like to say a few things. Climate models are in their infancy. They are highly dependent on the assumptions that go into them, and there are a lot of them. In fact, there are so many assumptions and parameters that it is genuinely possible to create any relationship you like. Climate models are made fun by the inclusion of "positive feed-backs" (multiplier effects) so that a small temperature increment expected from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide invokes large increases in water vapor, which seem to produce exponential rather than logarithmic temperature response to CO2.
It seems to have become somewhat of a game to see who can add in the most creative feedback mechanisms to produce the scariest warming scenarios from their models, but there remains no evidence that the planet behaves in such a manner. Not only is it highly debatable as to whether water vapour acts as a positive or negative feed-back, but what has been observed in laboratories is that CO2 actually has a logarithmic relationship with temperature [i.e. it takes a big increase in of CO2 to produce a small rise in temperature]. The IPCC literally made its entire conclusion from the results of 6 models. Three of these were extreme scenarios with numbers like a global population of 15 billion by 2100 (almost all demographers expect our population to level at 9 billion), and even the 3 that were `moderate' were predicting things like the annual rainfall in Ireland should be equivalent to the Sahara's. Today. The unreliable nature of these models probably helps to explain why the IPCC cut almost of all its predictions by a third from 2001 to its most recent report.
They also failed to predict the fall in methane levels we've seen since 2002, and their predictions for sea temperatures have been halved due to "incorrectly calibrated instrumentation". As the saying in computer programming goes; "Garbage in, garbage out".
There is an erroneous assumption flying around these days that CO2 is somehow an important forcing factor on the global climate, when every last piece of empirical evidence shows otherwise. Al Gore, and I'm positive he's not the only one, has a graph with 500,000 years of ice core samples showing their chronological temperature and respective CO2 levels. There is a nice correlation, and the two are definitely linked, but he lies and pretends the relationship is the other way around.
In every single time period it is clear that CO2 levels always trail temperature changes by 500-800 years. Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia had the following to say about this; [8] "Al Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak, that they are pathetic. 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." The historical evidence consistently shows temperature is independent of CO2. In fact, 450 million years ago when we were in the depths of the coldest period the Earth has had in half a billion years, CO2 levels were 10 times above today's! Even using the last century as evidence for a dependent relationship is meaningless. 65% of the warming this century occurred in the first three decades, and then, while CO2 levels continued to rise, temperatures fell for four decades in a row.
Another misconception that seems to be rife at the moment is that somehow CO2 is a pollutant. I'm sure that you've all learned that this gas is actually fundamental to our existence, but this seems to be as good a time as any to re-cap. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 15% seems to be the common number cited for the increase in global food crop yields due to increased carbon dioxide since 1950. This increase has both helped avoid a Malthusian disaster and preserved or returned enormous tracts of marginal land as wildlife habitat that would otherwise have had to be put under the plow in an attempt to feed the growing global population.
Commercial growers deliberately generate CO2 and increase its levels in agricultural greenhouses to between 700ppmv and 1,000ppmv to increase productivity and improve the water efficiency of food crops far beyond those in the somewhat carbon-starved open atmosphere. CO2 feeds the forests, grows more usable lumber in timber lots, meaning there is less pressure to cut old growth or push into "natural" wildlife habitat, makes plants more water efficient, helping to beat back the encroaching deserts in Africa and Asia and generally increases bio-productivity. If it's "pollution," then it's pollution the natural world exploits extremely well and to great profit. What should be obvious is that increases in CO2 directly increase the vitality of the bio-world. It is no wonder that the Sahara has shrunk 300,000 km^2 in the last couple decades, or that the dinosaurs managed to find the sustenance to survive, despite their size, in an era with 5 times our current CO2 levels.
The last myth I'd like to debunk is the idea that global warming is necessarily a bad thing, regardless of whether we have any significant control over it, or that historically warm periods have been the most prosperous for humans. By far the most hyped consequences are increasing intensities of weather storms, and rising sea levels. Global storm intensities are dominated by the temperature difference between the equator and the poles, and it really is that simple. Even by the IPCC's own admission, in manipulating the area of the poles using the Mercator system to distort the global temperature, the poles must be warming at a rate faster than the equator and this subsequently leads to gentler storms, despite the media explicitly or implicitly making an attempt to blame every last weather anomaly on "climate change".
Ah yes, you say, but that would imply that we are in danger of rising sea levels because the warming would melt the ice at the poles. Well, consider this. Since the last ice age 18,000 years ago the global sea level has risen by 130 meters, and is still doing so at a current rate of around 20cm per century, which is dwarfed by local tectonic movements. This will obviously displace people, but it will pale in insignificance when compared to the migrations over the next century caused by other factors such as geographical changes in important resources, fresh water locations, industrialization, etc.
Dramatic pictures of breaking seasonal ice is just patent propaganda, the reality is that Antarctica's ice mass has now been growing for the last 30 years against a 6,000 year trend of melting, and it contains over 90% of the world's land ice (sea ice, by Archimedes's principle, does not affect sea levels). Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, [9] "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."
Our climate is changing, just as it has always done, and always will. In fact, the only constant about our climate is that it changes, which makes you realise the term "climate change" is at best meaningless, and at worst intentionally ambiguous. It feels silly that I need to say this, but clearly it has to be done. The main determinant of our climate is not some gas, which comprises 0.038% of the atmosphere, but the Sun, the planet's orbital eccentricities and axial wobble, cosmic ray flux, and other celestial factors. Greenhouse gases play an important role, but a passive one.
It should not come as a surprise that our entire solar system has been warming for the last quarter century, or that the most accurate weather forecasts come from algorithms that concentrate on solar fluctuations and cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are responsible for cloud formations, which are central to the overwhelmingly most important greenhouse gas. Water vapour accounts for 95% of the `greenhouse effect' and, apart from the elaborate positive feed-back systems in their models that have no actual basis with reality, the global warming alarmists have completely ignored it. This is staggering because H20, by a country mile, in its gas, liquid, and solid form dominates all other terrestrial climate factors.
More here
LET THEM EAT CAKE! CLIMATE CONFERENCE FORGETS THE WORLD'S POOR
Some development organisations, journalists and government officials celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol with a giant birthday cake. Spirits were high as many seemed content with the progress made since COP-12, and the potential for a post-2012 treaty.
But though the cake may have been sweet for COP-13 attendants, life will remain bitter for the majority of the world's poor who are set to lose heavily from a post-2012 deal. As Barun Mitra of India's Liberty Institute, one of the 42 members of the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, explains:
"The problem facing hundreds of millions of poor people throughout the world is not that they consume too much, but that they hardly have any reliable and efficient sources of energy, clean water or a secure supply of food. All of these will be jeopardized in a world that is made much poorer through a post-2012 agreement which essentially inhibits economic growth.
To expect or ask that the poor sacrifice today for the sake of the rich tomorrow is not only immoral, but it also ignores the plight of poverty faced by millions today".
Though activists claim to be acting on behalf of the poor, the measures they propose would only cause harm. Instead of such hyperbole, we need to consider why countries like India have created abundance from scarcity and have adapted to changing circumstances. After the major famine of 1965-66 which killed 1.5 million people, India was considered a basket case. Today, India is poised to become a net food exporter. The improvement in India's agriculture was due to a number of factors, including:
* access to new technologies such as hybrid seeds, agro-chemicals, and irrigation
* relatively greater market access
* secure land tenure
* vibrant democracy.
The situation is no different globally. Worldwide, in the past 50 years, agricultural yields have improved year on year. Fundamentally, this demonstrates that activists utterly fail to understand that given the chance, people are able to raise themselves out of poverty.
If governments really care about the present and future of the world's 800 million undernourished people, they would take the costless and effective steps of removing trade and regulatory barriers that only serve to make food and associated technologies far more costly. Tragically for their poorest citizens, Sub-Saharan African countries worry about the impact of climate change - but continue to apply an average import tariff of 33.6% on agricultural imports.
The cake and policies wheeled out in Bali will hardly help the hungry or the poor. The way forwards is home-grown adaptation through technology and trade, which will allow people to raise themselves out of poverty.
Source
A backpacker's guide to eco-death
"Into the Wild", Sean Penn's film about the anti-materialist Christopher McCandless, reminds us why being 'one with nature' is no picnic
Christopher McCandless could in many ways be seen as a misanthropic environmentalist's messiah. The inspiration behind Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild, McCandless' story was recently turned into a film by Sean Penn. After graduating from college in 1990, he renounces his family and material goods, donates his life savings to charity and wanders round America preaching against human relationships before going off to eat berries and roots in the Alaskan wilderness. And to top it all off, he ends up doing his bit to prevent overpopulation, finding inner peace whilst starving to death.
Since Krakauer's account of the sad death of McCandless was published in 1995, it has intrigued countless backpackers travelling the world. Several folk songs have been written about him. With the release of Penn's film, which unlike its counterpart The Beach does justice to the book, it looks like the legend of McCandless will grow further.
In many ways McCandless has become the Kurt Cobain of the travelling world. Clearly a man who had the potential to do something important with his life, the only thing really remarkable about McCandless compared to his peers is that he ended up dying young in mysterious enough circumstances to allow everyone to have an opinion about how it happened. McCandless did little of significance in life, but was fortunate to have inspired a Krakauer, an impressive investigative journalist with a passion for the outdoors and a flair for storytelling.
A few years ago, after announcing ambitious plans to trek in the Himalayas, I recall being begged to read Into the Wild by a fellow traveller on a Thai beach. She thought I could learn much from his experiences: the subtext being that I should water down my plans or end up dead. Being 22 and, like McCandless, feeling pretty much invincible, it did nothing to temper my risk-taking.
I found that there is typically at least one Chris McCandless-type skulking in the shadows of almost every youth hostel in the world. His background was pretty normal. Raised in a middle-class family, he graduated from Emory University with flying colours and decided to `live like common people', exploring America on a shoestring budget instead of following the carefully laid path towards becoming a wealthy lawyer laid out for him by his unhappily married parents.
The film is split into various `chapters' representing McCandless' `rebirth' upon setting out on his travels, through adolescence and eventually to wisdom. It's wrong to structure the story in this way - after all, the film is solely about a young man coming of age. There is little wisdom in McCandless' utterings, which are often quotes from Thoreau, Tolstoy or Jack London that he's trying on for size, or adolescent fantasies about becoming an `aesthetic voyager', aiming to `kill the false being within'. When asked what his problem is over a beer with a farmer, the best McCandless can do is to angrily chant `society, society' over and over again, feebly elaborating on this by naming `parents, politicians and pricks'.
While it would be easy to jeer at such statements, McCandless simply wasn't yet adult enough to effectively articulate what his concerns were. (A problem that the aging Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder, who performs the film soundtrack, remains afflicted with: the best he can do is whinge that `society you're a crazy breed'.)
The greatest wisdom McCandless seems to have attained by the end of the film is that if you live in the wild for any sustained period of time, it stops becoming a game and becomes a deeply unpleasant experience. His comments on day 100 of his `great Alaskan adventure' captures this well: `Made it! But in weakest condition of life. Death looms as serious threat. Too weak to walk out, have literally become trapped in the wild - no game.'
The tragedy is that McCandless wasn't able to escape from the wild and rejoin society with his realisation that `happiness is only real when shared'. Instead he had to stoically resign himself to his fate. As the traveller I met on the Thai beach understood, the main lesson you would derive from McCandless's experience in the wild is that the Scouting motto `be prepared' has a lot going for it. However, actor-turned-director Sean Penn seems to think otherwise, saying he believes we can learn much from McCandless' `lack of addiction to comfort, that is so uncommon and is so necessary to become common, or humankind doesn't survive the next century'.
Leaving aside Penn's ill-founded pessimism, surely we can find better models for survival than Chris McCandless! One of his final notes strongly suggests that, had he survived, even the wild man himself would be deeply cynical of someone attempting to idealise his trip into the wilderness: `I am all alone. This is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me.'
Despite the director's intentions, the film remains deeply moving. Although the images of nature and the American landscape are indeed awe-inspiring, the most beautiful parts of the film are in the human interactions. McCandless seems to have left an impression on many people on the road, not due to his patronising, half-baked anti-materialist ranting, but due to the fact that he had a vision for what he wanted to do and was doing it with immense energy and enthusiasm.
The great shame is that he didn't have the chance to direct this energy into a greater project than a badly conceived trip into the wilderness.
Source
***************************************
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment