Another Warmist fantasy that ignores the facts

"Earth Could Become Too Hot for Humans" under "worst case scenario". But what are the "too hot" temperatures he lists below? Temperatures in the 90+ (F) range. He says that humans can endure such temperatues only in areas of low humidity. But my memory of a NYC summer is of temperatures in that range and it seemed pretty humid too.

I was born and bred in a place in the Australian tropics where we had such temperatures for most of the year. And the fact that we measured our annual rainfall in YARDS tells you how humid it is there. And, far from fleeing, people are moving there at a steady rate. It is even an international tourist destination. You have to get used to such a climate but once you do it is perfectly pleasant -- certainly not "Too Hot for Humans"!

A new study that looked at reasonable worst-case scenarios for global warming found that if greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at their current rate, temperatures could become deadly in coming centuries.

Researchers calculated the highest tolerable "wet-bulb" temperature - equivalent to what is felt when wet skin is exposed to moving air - and found that this temperature could be exceeded for the first time in human history if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate and future climate models are correct. Temperatures this unbearable for humans haven't been seen during the existence of hominids - the primate family that includes ancient humans - but they did occur about 50 million years ago.

Exposure to wet-bulb temperatures above 95 degrees for six hours or more will create lethal stress levels in humans and other mammals, said study team member Matthew Huber of Purdue University's earth and atmospheric sciences.

Huber said that while areas of the world regularly see temperatures above 100 degrees, really high wet-bulb temperatures are rare because the hottest areas of the planet normally have low humidity - think Arizona's dry heat. Areas of the world such as Saudi Arabia have the highest wet-bulb temperatures near the coast where winds occasionally bring extremely hot, humid ocean air over hot land leading to unbearably stifling conditions.

"The wet-bulb limit is basically the point at which one would overheat even if they were naked in the shade, soaking wet and standing in front of a large fan," said Steven Sherwood of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Australia and the study's lead author. "Although we are very unlikely to reach such temperatures this century, they could happen in the next."

The study did not address how likely this worst-case scenario is, only that it is possible based on so-called business-as-usual warming models, which make projections assuming that greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at the rate they are today.

"We found that a warming of 12 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 7 degrees Celsius) would cause some areas of the world to surpass the wet-bulb temperature limit, and a 21-degree warming would put half of the world's population in an uninhabitable environment," Huber said.

"Whole countries would intermittently be subject to severe heat stress requiring large-scale adaptation efforts," Huber added. "One can imagine that such efforts, for example the wider adoption of air conditioning, would cause the power requirements to soar, and the affordability of such approaches is in question for much of the Third World that would bear the brunt of these impacts. In addition, the livestock on which we rely would still be exposed, and it would make any form of outside work hazardous."

The results of the study are detailed in the May 6 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

SOURCE





Global Warming Alarm Based on Faulty Forecasting Procedures

Comments on the United States Department of State's U.S. Climate Action Report 2010. 5th ed.

Submitted by:

J. Scott Armstrong (Ph.D., MIT, 1968), a Professor at the Wharton School of Management, University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Long-range Forecasting, the creator of forecastingprinciples.com, and editor of Principles of Forecasting (Kluwer 2001), an evidence-based summary of knowledge on forecasting methods. He is a founder of the Journal of Forecasting, the International Journal of Forecasting, and the International Symposium on Forecasting, and he has spent 50 years doing research and consulting on forecasting. (Armstrong@wharton.upenn.edu)

Kesten C. Green of the International Graduate School of Business at the University of South Australia is a Director of the International Institute of Forecasters and is co-director with Scott Armstrong of the Forecasting Principles public service Internet site (ForPrin.com). He has been responsible for the development of two forecasting methods that provide forecasts that are substantially more accurate than commonly used methods. (Kesten.Green@unisa.edu.au)

Willie Soon is an astrophysicist and a geoscientist at the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is also the receiving editor in the area of solar and stellar physics for the journal New Astronomy. He has 20 years of active researching and publishing in the area of climate change and all views expressed are strictly his own. (vanlien@earthlink.net)

Statement

Our research findings challenge the basic assumptions of the State Department's Fifth U.S. Climate Action Report (CAR 2010). The alarming forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming are not the product of proper scientific evidence-based forecasting methods. Furthermore, there have been no validation studies to support a belief that the forecasting procedures used were nevertheless appropriate for the situation. As a consequence, alarming forecasts of global warming are merely the opinions of some scientists and, for a situation as complicated and poorly understood as global climate, such opinions are unlikely to be as accurate as forecasts that global temperatures will remain much the same as they have been over recent years. Using proper forecasting procedures we predict that the global warming alarm will prove false and that government actions in response to the alarm will be shown to have been harmful.

Whether climate will change over the 21st Century, by how much, in what direction, to what effect, and what if anything people could and should do about any changes are all forecasting problems. Given that policy makers currently do not have access to scientific forecasts for any of these, the policies that have been proposed with the avowed purpose of reducing dangerous manmade global warming—such as are described in CAR 2010 Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7—are likely to cause serious and unnecessary harm.

In this comment on CAR 2010, we summarize findings from our research on forecasting climate. Most of our findings have been published in the peer-reviewed literature and all have been presented at scientific meetings. They are easily accessible on the Internet and we provide links to them.

1. There are no scientific forecasts to support claims that there will be dangerous global warming over the 21st Century.

a) Faulty selection of forecasting methods

Based on scientific research on forecasting, the most appropriate method for forecasting climate over the 21st Century would be a naïve no-trend extrapolation. Due to the substantial uncertainty about climate, it is not possible to forecast even the direction of change and one should not, therefore, forecast changes. As with many conclusions from scientific research on forecasting, this conclusion derives from a finding that is not intuitive: in complex situations with high uncertainty, one should use methods that are conservative and simple (Armstrong 1985; Armstrong 2001).

While much has been made of the climate models used to support forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming, these were used in effect only as tools to present forecasts. The actual forecasts were made by unaided judgment; that is, by judgment unaided by forecasting principles. A substantial body of research has shown that unaided judgment cannot provide useful forecasts in complex situations with high uncertainty (Armstrong 1980; Tetlock 2005), such as is the case with climate.

In other words, if one were to recruit the cleverest climate scientists in the world and give them access to all of the available facts about climate, and ensured that all facts were true and all data were valid and accurate, the experts could do no better at forecasting climate than people with only minimal expertise. And their forecasts would even be less accurate than those from a simple heuristic. This finding is astonishing to those who are not familiar with the eight decades of evidence in the peer-reviewed research literature, and nearly all who learn of it believe that while the finding might apply to others, it does not apply to them.

b) Errors in implementation of forecasting methods

The forecasting procedures described in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report violated 81% of the 89 principles relevant to climate forecasting. For example, the methods and data were neither fully disclosed nor were they easy for independent researcher to access, no reasonable alternative forecasting methods were assessed, and prediction intervals were not assessed objectively (see “Global warming: Forecasts by scientists versus scientific forecasts”).

Those who were responsible for making the forecasts had no training or experience in the proper use of scientific forecasting methods. Furthermore, we were unable to find any indication that they made an effort to look for evidence from scientific research on forecasting. It is perhaps not surprising then that their implementation of their forecasting method was inappropriate.

c) Failure in validation testing

The forecasting procedures used by global warming alarmists were not validated for the situation. To address this oversight, we conducted an ex ante forecasting simulation of the IPCC forecasts (from the organization's 1992 report) of a .03°C per year increase in global average temperature.

We used the period from 1850 through 2007, a period of industrialization and exponential growth in human emissions of carbon dioxide. In a head-to-head competition involving 10,750 forecasts, the forecast errors from the IPCC model were more than 7 times larger than the errors from a model more appropriate to the situation, the aforementioned naïve extrapolation. More importantly, the errors were 12.6 times larger for the long-term (91 to 100-year forecast horizons). (See “Validity of climate change forecasting for public policy decision making.”)

2. There are no scientific forecasts to support the actions advocated by global warming alarmists.

a) Our findings apply not only to the alarming forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming, but also to the unsupported claims that various actions (e.g., “buying local,” carbon taxes, subsidies for alternative sources of energy) would be beneficial

To assess actions properly, one would need to forecast all the costs and benefits. For example, we examined the procedures used to support the claim that polar bears are in danger of extinction and should therefore be listed as an endangered species. The claim was made in the face of evidence that the polar bear population has been growing in recent decades. (See “Polar bear population forecasts: A public-policy forecasting audit.”) As with the IPCC's climate forecasts, we found faulty forecasting procedures. Indeed, only 15% of relevant forecasting principles were properly applied. An example of a faulty procedure is the construction of 45-, 75-, and 100-year forecasts based on an analysis that used only 5 years (2001-2005) of calibration data on polar bears and ice.

We judged that the polar bear population forecasting process to have been affected by political biases. See also Dr. Armstrong's testimony on this issue to a U.S. Senate Committee in January 2008.

b) A failure to consider the costs and benefits of reasonable alternatives

For responsible and rational policy making, it is necessary to obtain forecasts for a set of alternative decisions. One alternative would be to take no action, and another would be to monitor the situation until there is scientific evidence on actions that would lead to beneficial outcomes. On this matter, basic economic rationality in the form of cost/benefit analysis aligns with basic science: reasonable alternative hypotheses must be tested in order to have a good chance of identifying the truth.

More HERE





Californians will vote on suspending economy-crippling junk science carbon rationing law

We’ll find out in November whether enough voters in über-liberal California have been deprogrammed from the carbon cult:

“Leaders of a drive to suspend California’s … greenhouse gas emissions law claim they will submit enough voter signatures Monday to place the issue before voters.

The California Jobs Initiative Campaign will submit more than the required 435,000 voter signatures to qualify for the November ballot, spokeswoman Anita Mangels said.

“We’re headed to the ballot,” she said.

The campaign targets Assembly Bill 32, pushed four years ago by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic legislative leaders to require California to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

The proposed initiative would suspend AB 32 until the state’s unemployment level drops to 5.5 percent for at least a year. …

“Voters have a right to have a say in whether the the state is going to risk a million jobs, or more, and to spend billions of dollars on programs that will not have any impact on global warming,” Mangels said.” “Drive to Suspend AB32 will submit voter signatures Monday“

SOURCE





Eliminating all Man-Made CO2 -- Earth gets Warmer?

By chemical engineer Bob Ashworth

Do you realize that CO2 emissions created by man's activities, combustion of fuels, etc. (called anthropogenic emissions) is miniscule compared to the emissions of CO2 from nature? Table 1 was developed by the IPCC. It shows annual CO2 emissions to the atmosphere from both nature and man and how much of the CO2 emitted is re-absorbed by nature.



Using the table above in combination with a total concentration of 385 ppmv of CO2 seen in the atmosphere in January 2008, one sees that the increase in CO2 caused by all of man's activities amounted to only 11.5 ppmv. The amount of CO2 from man is a mouse milk quantity compared to nature's emissions. If we eliminated all anthropogenic CO2 emissions, we would go back to the level we had in January 2003. Oh yes, when it was warmer then than it is now. Isn't this the first thing one would look at when evaluating the effect of man-made CO2; that is if they had any common sense? It is clear that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has nothing to do with the earth temperature. If there is an effect it is so small it is not worthy of discussion.

Global warming advocates say that CO2 builds up in the atmosphere over a 50 to 250 year period, but this is not true. Figure 1 below shows that the CO2 concentration oscillates based on the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The ratio of land to ocean in the Northern Hemisphere is about 1 to 1.5 and in the Southern Hemisphere is 1 to 4. Therefore, the Northern Hemisphere with much more land mass has a growing season that dominates the Southern Hemisphere growing season with respect to absorption of CO2.

Does a correlation exist between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the earth's temperature? No! Does an increase in CO2 cause the earth's temperature to increase? No! Figure 1 below was developed by Joseph D'Aleo, certified meteorologist. Even a non-scientist can see there is absolutely no correlation between CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and the earth's temperature. If there were a correlation, they both would rise and fall together. The CO2 has been on a continuous upward trend - not true for the earth's temperature.

In Figure 1, each year around April, increased CO2 absorption by plants in the Northern Hemisphere starts reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere and the reduction continues until around mid to late August when plants start to go dormant. The cycles occur on a regular yearly basis and the swing in CO2 concentration is in the 5 to 8 ppmv range. If CO2 stayed in the atmosphere for long periods before being consumed, the season to season cyclic effect would not be seen. It is clear that nature reacts very fast in its consumption of carbon dioxide.



The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Two sets of temperature measurements are shown, one set by NASA's Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) for the troposphere and the other by the UK's Hadley Climate Research Unit for the land and sea. Both show declining temperatures over time even as CO2 has increased from 366 ppmv in January 1998 to 385 ppmv by January 2008. Note that the land-sea and lower troposphere temperatures in January 2008 were some 0.7 Degrees C cooler than in January 1998.

SOURCE






Real Toxin is Runaway Government

Climate zealots, Ivy League-led panel, will now publicly whitewash the IPCC for us

After six months of uninterrupted bad news, a logical person would seek compromise with their opponents. Not so the climate zealots. It has just been announced that a newly formed, Ivy League-led panel, will now publicly whitewash the IPCC for us. These disoriented warmists must be first pointed and then chased to the tall grass.

History is again repeating itself. Prior to the last peoples’ uprising, the masses were ruled over by an unelected group of tone deaf czars. Surprise, our fearless/clueless leader has surrounded himself with equally impaired czars, who intend an end run on the democratic process. Currently pending is implementation of Climate Czar Carol Browner’s 18,000-page long manifesto to eliminate a large portion of your rights.
Julius Genachowski, the FCC Czar, ‘free’ speech is a ‘right’ only if it is limited to ‘left’ speech

To insure that you can no longer be informed or organize against state control of everything, that Czar’s efforts are now joined with Julius Genachowski, the FCC Czar, who intends to place his boot on the throat of the internet. Apparently, ‘free’ speech is a ‘right’ only if it is limited to ‘left’ speech, viewed through the ‘left’ portal. Ignorance is bliss and tyranny is peace. New think always takes time to absorb.

Large portions of the masses have finally awakened and the roll back has begun. In the greenest of greenest land, California, there is a ballot initiative to rescind AB 32, the Golden State Cap and Trade bill passed in 2006. To be placed on the ballot required just 435,000 signatures. Proponents easily got over 800,000 and a left coast reality check appears imminent.
Effort to derail Czar Browner’s power grab

There is also an effort to derail Czar Browner’s power grab. Due for a vote in May, 2010 (like NOW) is a Senate action, S. J. Res 26, which would prohibit the EPA’s draconian actions. The IPCC whitewash is not due until August, 2010, but the maxim is one that every card-buff knows. When your house of cards starts falling, you gotta’ play the hand that you’ve got.

The IPCC Whitewash Committee has the international gravitas, Ivy League pedigree and limited climate science knowledge to perform flawlessly. The chairman is Harold T Shapiro, an economist from Princeton. The twelve member committee, from twelve countries, actually includes ten members with SCIENTIFIC background. The two economists are there to emphasize the ‘economic’ impact of a carbon laden atmosphere.
Dr Roy Spencer, The Great Global Warming Blunder

Former NASA scientist, Dr Roy Spencer has a new book titled, The Great Global Warming Blunder, in which he states that “CO2 has almost nothing to do with global warming”. ‘Blunder’ is in this case, a euphemism for FRAUD. This is a century old con game that has been intentionally resurrected and intentionally promoted, to create a new, false commodity market. When you are NOT a government payroll scientist, you need not be so polite.

The reason that science and scientists have enjoyed such a high level of respect from the public is from required empirical purity. Even the most difficult of ‘real’ science can be explained to the average layman. The ‘Moment of Inertia’ may not mean much to a carpenter, but intuitively he knows that a floor joist can bear more weight standing on edge than lying on its side.

A layman also knows something about heat transfer. It is obvious that you will get cold standing in just your shorts in 60 F temperature air. It is obvious that you will get cold a lot quicker, if you jump into 60 F water in just those same shorts. Water transfers heat, or energy, faster than air.

Training for a degree in Meteorology or Climatology does not require study of this basic phenomena, called Thermodynamics. Students at Dr. Mann’s, Penn State, are required to have 8 semester hours of lecture/lab in chemistry and 8 semester hours of calculus based physics. The required Thermodynamic concept should be easy for them to understand.

The entire Earth is an energy transfer system. Heat flows through the land, oceans and atmosphere, from a core of at least 8,000 F to outer space with a temperature of -270 F. It is alternatively heated by radiant energy from the sun and cooled as that energy is re-radiated back into space at night. The atmosphere is just a heat transfer media composed mainly of four simple gas molecules.

Those gases are the two atom Oxygen and Nitrogen molecules and the three atom Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen Dioxide (water vapor) molecules. These molecules have limited mass and limited thermal storage capacity. That storage capacity is further limited by their concentrations in the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide is only 380 parts per million of that mix and the human contribution is 10 to 20 parts per million of that.

Relative to the rest of the atmosphere, that small amount of human caused CO2 has no heat storage capacity. Relative to the oceans, the atmosphere has no heat storage capacity. Relative to the mass of the Earth, the atmosphere and the oceans combined have only a negligible amount of heat storage capacity. Any layman understands that there is a lot more rock on this planet than water. There is more weight in the water of the oceans than in the weight of the atmosphere. The exact relationship is based on ‘Specific Heat’ factors, but gross volume and gross density convey the general concept.
The real ‘toxin’ in our environment is not coming from exhaled breath, our tailpipes or our smokestacks.

President Obama is standing on his magic Kenyan birth certificate trap door. If he becomes totally unpopular, or fails to deliver the maximum state controlled society, then he’s off to Tahiti. If you’ve had enough of Obamacare, Obamamotors, Obamabank and Obama wins American Idol, then here is your chance for ‘real’ change. Hone your long knives on your Rolodex of congressional phone numbers. Do all that you can to promote S.J. Res 26 in Washington, and in California, to overturn AB 26. The real ‘toxin’ in our environment is not coming from exhaled breath, our tailpipes or our smokestacks. The real toxin is runaway government. It is time to demand the constitutional balance of power government that we have fought and paid for.

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here

*****************************************