Greenhouse gases account for only 5-10 per cent of global warming

Professor Jyrki Kauppinen built in the 1970s an infrared spectrometer, which measured nearly all the greenhouse gases

From the University of Turku, Department of Physics, a study shows that carbon dioxide has a significantly smaller impact on global warming than previously thought. Results are based on, inter alia, spectrum analysis.

According to research led by Professor Jyrki Kauppinen increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide accounts for only a 5-10 per cent of observed warming of the Earth. "The climate is warming yes, but not because of greenhouse gases," says Kauppinen.

According to him, the UN climate panel, namely the IPCC, projection, has made a magnitude error. The International Panel on Climate Change calculated value is more than ten times larger than our calculated result, Kauppinen says.

He intends to publish research results in Nature magazine June issue.

The Climate Panel understands that climate warming is almost entirely the result of man-made carbon dioxide emissions -- much higher emissions than reality have been implied in the IPCC reports.

I think it is such a blatant falsification, Kauppinen says.

He is not the first IPCC critic. The Panel has had to admit itself to be incorrect, including the forecasts on the melting of Himalayan glaciers

Climategate also known as hacking, caused a stir last year which led back to the IPCC's key researchers in e-mails leaked to the public. Some think the aim of the release of the letters, was to isolate and stigmatize climate change, scientists think otherwise.

SOURCE. (Rough translation above from the original Finnish)




Warmists admit to "missing" heat (CO2 has risen but temperatures have not)

And they are speculatingly wildly about where it has "gone". Perhaps it has sunk deep, deep down in the ocean!

Current observational tools cannot account for roughly half of the heat that is believed to have built up on Earth in recent years, according to a "Perspectives" article in this week's issue of the journal Science.

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., warn that satellite sensors, ocean floats, and other instruments are inadequate to track this "missing" heat, which may be building up in the deep oceans or elsewhere in the climate system.

"The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later," says NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, the article's lead author.

"The reprieve we've had from warming temperatures in the last few years will not continue. It is critical to track the build-up of energy in our climate system so we can understand what is happening and predict our future climate."

The authors suggest that last year's rapid onset of El Niño, the periodic event in which upper ocean waters across much of the tropical Pacific Ocean become significantly warmer, may be one way in which the solar energy has reappeared.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's sponsor, and by NASA.

"The flow of energy through the climate system is a key issue in understanding climate change," says Eric DeWeaver, program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funds NCAR. "It poses a major challenge to our observing systems."

Trenberth and his co-author, NCAR scientist John Fasullo, focused on a central mystery of climate change. Whereas satellite instruments indicate that greenhouse gases are continuing to trap more solar energy, or heat, scientists since 2003 have been unable to determine where much of that heat is going.

Either the satellite observations are incorrect, says Trenberth, or, more likely, large amounts of heat are penetrating to regions that are not adequately measured, such as the deepest parts of the oceans. [It couldn't be that the theory is incorrect, could it?]

Compounding the problem, Earth's surface temperatures have largely leveled off in recent years. Yet melting glaciers and Arctic sea ice, [Really? Sea ice exctent has RISEN in the last 2 years] along with rising sea levels [Not recently], indicate that heat is continuing to have profound effects on the planet.

Trenberth and Fasullo explain that it is imperative to better measure the flow of energy through Earth's climate system.

For example, any geoengineering plan to artificially alter the world's climate to counter global warming could have inadvertent consequences, which may be difficult to analyze unless scientists can track heat around the globe.

Improved analysis of energy in the atmosphere and oceans can also help researchers better understand and possibly even anticipate unusual weather patterns, such as the cold outbreaks across much of the United States, Europe, and Asia over the past winter.

As greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, satellite instruments show a growing imbalance between energy entering the atmosphere from the sun and energy leaving from Earth's surface. This imbalance is the source of long-term global warming.

But tracking the growing amount of heat on Earth is far more complicated than measuring temperatures at the planet's surface.

The oceans absorb about 90 percent of the solar energy that is trapped by greenhouse gases. Additional amounts of heat go toward melting glaciers and sea ice, as well as warming the land and parts of the atmosphere.

Only a tiny fraction warms the air at the planet's surface.

Satellite measurements indicate that the amount of greenhouse-trapped solar energy has risen over recent years while the increase in heat measured in the top 3,000 feet of the ocean has stalled. [How pesky!]

Although it is difficult to quantify the amount of solar energy with precision, Trenberth and Fasullo estimate that, based on satellite data, the amount of energy build-up appears to be about 1.0 watts per square meter or higher, while ocean instruments indicate a build-up of about 0.5 watts per square meter.

That means about half the total amount of heat is unaccounted for.

A percentage of the missing heat could be illusory, the result of imprecise measurements by satellites and surface sensors or incorrect processing of data from those sensors, the authors say.

Until 2003, the measured heat increase was consistent with computer model expectations. But a new set of ocean monitors since then has shown a steady decrease in the rate of oceanic heating, even as the satellite-measured imbalance between incoming and outgoing energy continues to grow.

Some of the missing heat appears to be going into the observed melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, as well as Arctic sea ice.

Much of the missing heat may be in the ocean. Some heat increase can be detected between depths of 3,000 and 6,500 feet (about 1,000 to 2,000 meters), but more heat may be deeper still beyond the reach of ocean sensors.

Trenberth and Fasullo call for additional ocean sensors, along with more systematic data analysis and new approaches to calibrating satellite instruments, to help resolve the mystery.

The Argo profiling floats that researchers began deploying in 2000 to measure ocean temperatures, for example, are separated by about 185 miles (300 kilometers) and take readings only about once every 10 days from a depth of about 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) up to the surface.

Plans are underway to have a subset of these floats go to greater depths.

"Global warming at its heart is driven by an imbalance of energy: more solar energy is entering the atmosphere than leaving it," Fasullo says.

"Our concern is that we aren't able to entirely monitor or understand the imbalance. This reveals a glaring hole in our ability to observe the build-up of heat in our climate system."

SOURCE




Climategate whitewash

CRU scientists who removed caveats from IPCC reports are praised for warning of uncertainties in their published work!

"Climategate scientists cleared of wrongdoing” read the headline in yesterday’s Post. Who expected anything else? The two self-inquiries launched by the University of East Anglia into its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were always destined to produce whitewashes, as did a recent UK parliamentary inquiry, and as will an “independent” review by the UN.

The first of the UEA reports, from a committee headed by ardent warmist and anti-carbon profiteer Lord Oxburgh, appeared this week. As Lawrence Solomon points out elsewhere on this page, the choice of Lord Oxburgh indicated that the fix was always in for an inquiry which fails to address, let alone probe, most of the major issues. And yet there is a mountain of condemnation-by-faint-exoneration between the lines of the report’s ridiculously slim five pages.

Its attempt to present CRU head Phil Jones, and his beleaguered band, as unworldly boffins who were blindsided by all this attention is ridiculous. The report claims that it found a “small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers.” The key question is: dedicated to what? Certainly, they weren’t expecting to be outed quite so spectacularly, but to paint them as innocents in the big bad world of climate realpolitik is nonsense.

After reviewing a cherry-picked group of eleven CRU studies, the report gently raps the knuckles of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, for failing to note the reservations that CRU researchers so assiduously attached to their peer-reviewed work. “All of the published work was accompanied by detailed descriptions of uncertainties and accompanied by appropriate caveats,” notes the report.

Global warming alarmists relentlessly chant that there is scientific “consensus” that the “science is settled.” Yet now we are told that somehow the main body for promoting the climate change agenda “neglected” to tell the world that the science wasn’t settled. What we are not told is that the scientists who removed the caveats in the IPCC reports were lead IPCC authors Mr. Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa!

The CRU is concerned with temperature data. Indeed it is one of the principal sources for claims that the earth warmed alarmingly in the 20th century after 900 years of alleged climatic calm (Medieval Warm Period? Little Ice Age? Never happened).

Data from the distant past is reconstructed from problematic “proxies” such as tree rings; but even assembling readings for more recent periods is difficult due to the thin coverage of weather stations and, more seriously, to the impact of the “urban heat island effect” on readings from stations where development has encroached. There, temperature increases may be due to traffic, tarmac and local barbecues rather than global climate.

The CRU’s data has appeared in two forms: raw and cooked. Much of the raw variety, unfortunately, has been “lost.” This is treated by the review as infinitely excusable due to the pressures of the academic life. You know, tedious admin meetings, the pressure to publish, the need to get in those applications for multi-million dollar grants attached to proving man-made global warming. But how can ditching the fundamental data on which your science depends be dubbed mere carelessness with “non-essential record keeping?”

As for the cooked data, the CRU has been accused of “manipulation” not in the legitimate statistical sense, so that different data sets may be comparable, but in support of the results required by government-funded, highly politicized science. Without data suggesting rising temperatures due to anthropogenic emissions, there would be no justification for massive global programs such as cap-and-trade, redistributionist “clean development,” or the hefty subsidization of alternative energy.

The CRU is also gently fingered for its lack of statistical sophistication. As the report admits, “It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work because it is fundamentally statistical.”

But hang on. Draconian global policies have been made on the basis of dodgy data handled by those who are less than expert? This is surely a little more than “regrettable.” If statistics are so important, why didn’t the IPCC make sure the CRU, and itself, had the world’s greatest statistical minds on tap? Could that be because the data and science are there to support the political position rather than guiding it?

The report does dish out some harsh criticisms, but only to the unnamed CRU critics whose “tone” it “deplores.” They presumably refer to the likes of Canadians Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, whom Lord Oxburgh and his team assiduously avoided. Meanwhile the emphasis on “tone” is farcical, particularly when compared with the kind of anti-skeptic vitriol exposed in the Climategate emails.

According to the report “some of these criticisms show a rather selective and uncharitable approach to information made available by CRU.” So skeptics such as Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick might have been stonewalled, insulted, undermined and threatened by the CRU cabal, but apparently it was they who should have been more “charitable.”

Lord Oxburgh suggested this week that attacks on the CRU had come from people who do not like the “implications” of their conclusions. If by “implications” he means suicidal and pointless policies, then that might have been the one thing he got right. Otherwise, his report is a travesty.

SOURCE





Seek and ye might be arrested

Rather Orwellian

Police are investigating anyone who requested information from the university department at the centre of the ‘climategate’ scandal.

Norfolk Constabulary is trying to work out who stole thousands of emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia at the end of last year.

The emails, that were posted on the internet, appear to show scientists were unwilling to reveal data on global warming and led to an international scandal known as ‘climategate’.

Already prominent climate change sceptics around the world have been questioned and members of staff at the university, but is has now emerged that ordinary members of the public who did nothing more than request information are also being targeted.

Sebastian Nokes, a businessman and climate change sceptic, wrote to a national newspaper to complain. He said all he had done was request information on the CRU’s disclosure rules and he was questioned on his political and scientific beliefs.

Detective Superintendent Julian Gregory, who is leading the investigation, said his unit is looking into anyone who could give clues to who stole the emails and working with experts in "extremism". “As with any investigation we will interview anyone who may have information which is of relevance to the enquiry,” he said.

The university was cleared of scientific malpractice recently. There is separate ongoing investigation by academics into whether Freedom of Information requests were dealt with correctly.

SOURCE




High-speed folly

President Obama’s decision to travel to Florida to announce federal grants to the states for high-speed trains on the day after his State of the Union address is laden with irony. He claims that high-speed rail is good for the environment, but he apparently failed to read the 2005 environmental impact statement for Florida’s high-speed rail, which concluded that the environmental costs of building it are greater than the benefits.

This conclusion (plus the outrageously high cost) convinced Florida not to build it. But when Obama offered to have federal taxpayers cover half the cost, Florida’s Republican governor said, “to heck with the environment — take the money!” Or maybe he never read the environmental impact statement either; in any case, he strongarmed a special session of the legislature to approve matching funds.

Autos can be more efficient than trains because even lightweight trains like the French TGV typically weigh three times as much per passenger as a typical automobile. Accelerating that extra weight to high speeds requires tremendous amounts of energy, which can generate tremendous amounts of pollution. Considering anticipated improvements in fuel economies, by 2025 the average car on the road will use less energy and emit less pollution per passenger mile than high-speed trains.

The second irony is that Obama announced the high-speed rail grants a day after proposing a spending freeze to reduce federal deficits. The more than $8 billion in stimulus funds for high-speed rail is hardly a spending freeze, as it will mainly stimulate a high-speed rail lobby to promote a national rail network....

Most recently, Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio, chair of the House Transit and Highways Subcommittee, offered an estimate of $700 billion for a national system of true high-speed rail. While he called this “unimaginably expensive,” he added that it was “the same amount of money that Congress gave in one day to Wall Street.” Trying to make it sound affordable, he hopes you won’t remember that Congress never gave Wall Street anything; it was almost all loans, and most, if not all, will be repaid.

There is further irony in Obama’s claims that he wants to protect the middle class and soak the rich. Middle-class taxpayers will get to pay for high-speed rail, yet few of them will ever use it.

The week before Obama’s announcement, I made a trip from New York to Washington. When I purchased my ticket, the fare on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela was $155. I choose instead to take Megabus, which charged only $15.50. Megabus and other bus companies offer free WiFi; Amtrak has NoFi. To be fair, Amtrak fares start at $133 with enough of an advance purchase, but Megabus fares start at $1 (yes, $1). Few members of the middle class who have to pay for their own tickets will part with more than $100 to save 90 minutes on the high-speed train.

The final irony is that Obama’s rail announcement came the day after Steve Jobs presented Apple’s iPad to the public amid a wave of almost hysterical publicity. Apple thrives on producing innovative products that do things few had thought of doing. Obama’s high-speed trains are essentially a 1930s technology that will contribute little to American mobility....

Obama says that we need to catch up with countries whose trains are faster than ours. If French horses and buggies were faster than ours, would he want to spend billions of dollars on a buggy-whip technology race? We already have a technology twice as fast as the fastest high-speed trains: it is called the jet airliner.

Unlike high-speed rail, the airlines don’t require huge subsidies. While subsidies to high-speed train riders will exceed 30 cents per passenger mile, federal, state, and local subsidies to air travelers average around a penny per passenger mile — and much of that goes to out-of-the-way airports where local officials fleece taxpayers in usually ill-fated efforts to promote economic development.

Rail advocates point out that high-speed trains can compete with airlines in downtown-to-downtown service. But central-city downtowns host fewer than 8% of American workers — mainly bankers, lawyers, and government bureaucrats. These people, whose incomes tend to be higher than average, hardly need a high-speed subsidy at everyone else’s expense.

Obama has touted high-speed rail as the next Interstate Highway System. But the interstates paid for themselves out of gas taxes and other user fees; subsidies to other highways total less than a penny per passenger mile. The average American travels 4,000 miles and ships 2,000 ton-miles per year over the interstates, vastly more than the use we will ever put to high-speed rail.

The interstates have succeeded because they enable people to go where they want to go, when they want to go there. High-speed rail will reach far fewer destinations and will only go when some government agency decides to run the trains.

Finally, Obama emphasized the jobs that rail construction will create. But considering how much engineering work is needed before construction can actually begin on any of these rail lines, most of those jobs will arrive too late to stimulate the economy out of the current recession. And considering how few people will ride the trains, he might as well spend tax dollars on digging holes and filling them up.

At a time of rising deficits, America can’t afford to dedicate tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to an obsolete technology that is good for neither the environment nor personal mobility. Congress should put an immediate freeze on any further spending on high-speed rail.

More here




Some history: The Amazing Story Behind the Global Warming Scam

By meteorologist John Coleman (Founder of The Weather Channel)

The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax us citizens for our carbon footprints. Only two details stand in the way: the faltering economic times and a dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have led to a rise in public awareness that there is no runaway global warming. A majority of American citizens are now becoming skeptical of the claim that our carbon footprints, resulting from our use of fossil fuels, are going to lead to climatic calamities. But governments are not yet listening to the citizens.

How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving big government to punish the citizens for living the good life that fossil fuels provide for us?

The story begins with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle. He served with the Navy in World War II. After the war he became the Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla in San Diego, California. Revelle obtained major funding from the Navy to do measurements and research on the ocean around the Pacific Atolls where the US military was conducting post war atomic bomb tests. He greatly expanded the Institute's areas of interest and among others hired Hans Suess, a noted Chemist from the University of Chicago. Suess was very interested in the traces of carbon in the environment from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle co-authored a scientific paper with Suess in 1957—a paper that raised the possibility that the atmospheric carbon dioxide might be creating a greenhouse effect and causing atmospheric warming. The thrust of the paper was a plea for funding for more studies. Funding, frankly, is where Revelle's mind was most of the time.

Next Revelle hired a Geochemist named David Keeling to devise a way to measure the atmospheric content of Carbon dioxide. In 1958 Keeling published his first paper showing the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and linking the increase to the burning of fossil fuels. These two research papers became the bedrock of the science of global warming, even though they offered no proof that carbon dioxide was in fact a greenhouse gas. In addition they failed to explain how this trace gas, only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, could have any significant impact on temperatures.

Back in the1950s, when this was going on, our cities were entrapped in a pall of pollution left by the crude internal combustion engines and poorly refined gasoline that powered cars and trucks back then, and from the uncontrolled emissions from power plants and factories. There was a valid and serious concern about the health consequences of this pollution. As a result a strong environmental movement was developing to demand action.

Government heard that outcry and set new environmental standards. Scientists and engineers came to the rescue. New reformulated fuels were developed, as were new high tech, computer controlled, fuel injection engines and catalytic converters. By the mid seventies cars were no longer significant polluters, emitting only some carbon dioxide and water vapor from their tail pipes. New fuel processing and smoke stack scrubbers were added to industrial and power plants and their emissions were greatly reduced as well.

But an environmental movement had been established and its funding and very existence depended on having a continuing crisis issue. Roger Revelle’s research at the Scripps Institute had tricked a wave of scientific inquiry. So the concept of uncontrollable atmospheric warming from the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels became the cornerstone issue of the environmental movement. Automobiles and power plants became the prime targets.

Revelle and Keeling used this new alarmism to keep their funding growing. Other researchers with environmental motivations and a hunger for funding saw this developing and climbed aboard as well. The research grants flowed and alarming hypotheses began to show up everywhere.

The Keeling curve continues to show a steady rise in CO2 in the atmosphere during the period since oil and coal were discovered and used by man. Carbon dioxide has increased from the 1958 reading of 315 to 385 parts per million in 2008. But, despite the increases, it is still only a trace gas in the atmosphere. The percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 remains tiny, about 3.8 hundredths of one percent by volume and 41 hundredths of one percent by weight. And, by the way, only a fraction of that fraction is from mankind’s use of fossil fuels. The best estimate is that atmospheric CO2 is 75 percent natural and 25 percent the result of civilization.

Several hypotheses emerged in the 70s and 80s about how this tiny atmospheric component of CO2 might cause a significant warming. But they remained unproven. As years have passed, the scientists have kept reaching out for evidence of the warming and proof of their theories. And, the money and environmental claims kept on building up.

Back in the 1960s, this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian born United Nation's bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. From this he developed a committee of scientists, environmentalists and political operatives from the UN to continue a series of meetings.

Strong developed the concept that the UN could demand payments from the advanced nations for the climatic damage from their burning of fossil fuels to benefit the underdeveloped nations—a sort of CO2 tax that would be the funding for his one-world government. But he needed more scientific evidence to support his primary thesis. So Strong championed the establishment of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC). This was not a pure, “climate study” scientific organization, as we have been led to believe. It was an organization of one-world government UN bureaucrats, environmental activists and environmentalist scientists who craved UN funding so they could produce the science they needed to stop the burning of fossil fuels.

Over the last 25 years the IPCC has been very effective. Hundreds of scientific papers, four major international meetings and reams of news stories about climatic Armageddon later, it has made its points to the satisfaction of most governments and even shared in a Nobel Peace Prize.

At the same time Maurice Strong was busy at the UN, things were getting a bit out of hand for the man who is now called the grandfather of global warming, Roger Revelle. He had been very politically active in the late 1950's as he worked to have the University of California locate a San Diego campus adjacent to Scripps Institute in La Jolla. He won that major war, but lost an all important battle afterward when he was passed over in the selection of the first Chancellor of the new campus.

He left Scripps finally in 1963 and moved to Harvard University to establish a Center for Population Studies. It was there that Revelle inspired one of his students. This student would say later, "It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates. Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!" The student described him as "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming." That student was Al Gore. He thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book “Earth in the Balance,” published in 1992.

So there it is. Roger Revelle was indeed the grandfather of global warming. His work had laid the foundation for the UN IPCC, provided the anti-fossil fuel ammunition to the environmental movement and sent Al Gore on his road to his books, his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” his Nobel Peace Prize and a hundred million dollars from the carbon credits business.

The global warming frenzy was becoming the cause célèbre of the media. After all, the media is mostly liberal, loves Al Gore, loves to warn us of impending disasters and tell us "the sky is falling, the sky is falling." The politicians and the environmentalist loved it, too.

But the tide was turning with Roger Revelle. He was forced out at Harvard at 65 and returned to California and a semi retirement position at UCSD. There he had time to rethink Carbon Dioxide and the greenhouse effect. The man who had inspired Al Gore and given the UN the basic research it needed to launch its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was having second thoughts. In 1988 he wrote two cautionary letters to members of Congress. He wrote, "My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways." He added, "…we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer."

And in 1991 Revelle teamed up with Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, to write an article for Cosmos magazine. They urged more research and begged scientists and governments not to move too fast to curb greenhouse CO2 emissions because the true impact of carbon dioxide was not at all certain, and curbing the use of fossil fuels could have a huge, negative impact on the economy, jobs, and our standard of living. Considerable controversy still surrounds the authorship of this article. However, I have discussed this collaboration with Dr. Singer and he assures me that Revelle was considerably more certain than he was at the time that carbon dioxide was not a problem.

Did Roger Revelle attend the summer enclave at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California in 1990 while working on that article? Did he deliver a lakeside speech there to the assembled movers and shakers from Washington and Wall Street in which he apologized for sending the UN IPCC and Al Gore on this wild goose chase about global warming? Did he say that the key scientific conjecture of his lifetime had turned out wrong? The answer to those questions is, "Apparently.” People who were there have told me about that afternoon, but I have not located a transcript or a recording. People continue to share their memories with me on an informal basis. More evidence may be forthcoming.

Roger Revelle died of a heart attack three months after the Cosmos story was printed. Oh, how I wish he were still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam. He might well stand beside me as a global warming denier.

Al Gore has dismissed Roger Revelle’s mea culpa as the actions of a senile old man. The next year, while running for Vice President, he said the science behind global warming is settled and there will be no more debate. From 1992 until today, he and most of his cohorts have refused to debate global warming and when asked about us skeptics, they insult us and call us names.

As the science now stands, the global warming alarmist scientists say the climate is sensitive to a “radiative forcing” effect from atmospheric carbon dioxide which greatly magnifies its greenhouse effect on atmospheric warming. The only proof they can provide of this complex hypothesis is by running it in climate computer models. By starting the models in about 1980 they showed how the continuing increase in CO2 was step with a steady increase in average global temperatures in the 1980s and 1990’s and claim cause and effect. But, in fact, those last two decades of the 20th century were at the peak of a strong 24 year solar cycle, and the temperature increases actually may have been a result of the solar cycle together with related warm cycle ocean current patterns during that period.

That warming ended in 1998 and global temperatures (as measured by satellites) leveled off. Starting in 2002, computer models and reality have dramatically parted company. The models predicted temperatures and carbon dioxide would continue to rise in lock step, but in fact while the CO2 continues to rise, temperatures are in decline. Now global temperatures are in such a nose dive there is wide spread talk from climatologists about an impending ice age. In any case, the UN’s computer model “proof” has gone up in a poof.

Nonetheless, today we have the continued claim that carbon dioxide is the culprit of an uncontrollable, runaway man-made global warming. We are told that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon footprint. And, we are told we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists for this sinful footprint. Our governments on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels. The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and the US Congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course.

We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by the prohibiting of new refineries and of drilling for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time we buy gas. On top of that, the whole issue of corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies, which also has driven up food prices. All of this is a long way from over.

Yet I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it. Global Warming: It is a hoax. It is bad science. It is high-jacking public policy. It is the greatest scam in history.

SOURCE

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