Is going green always good? This article from the Washington Post, (not noted for being paid stooges of the oil industry) points out one of the many negative consequences of taking a knee-jerk, poorly thought-out reaction to global warming.
There is so much pressure to limit carbon dioxide emissions and control global warming, that grave mistakes are bound to happen. Growing corn to produce ethanol, which supposedly produces less "greenhouse gas" than burning gasoline, is a prime example of global warming hysteria gone mad.
This example relates to the Chesapeake Bay, but the same consequences lie in store for every drainage area, river, and lake in areas where more corn is being grown. Of course this applies to almost every State in the lower 48 United States. Some farmers, mostly large corporate farmers are going to benefit, so too are the ethanol producers who already receive an approximate 50 cent per gallon subsidy to make the fuel competitive with gasoline.
Now we have laws, and we're locked in to spending billions on a scientifically and economically unsound attempt to curb global warming and "reduce our dependence" on foreign oil. This one action alone, producing fuel from corn, is going to cost everyone dearly. We have ourselves to blame for listening to the global warming alarmists. The cost in terms of money and damage to the environment will only worsen.
Peter
'Green' Fuel May Damage The Bay
Ethanol Study Has Dire Prediction for The Chesapeake
By David A. Fahrenthold Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 17, 2007; Page B01
A surge in the demand for ethanol -- touted as a greener alternative to gasoline -- could have a serious environmental downside for the Chesapeake Bay, because more farmers growing corn could mean more pollution washing off farm fields, a new study warned yesterday.
The study, whose sponsors included the U.S. government and an environmental group, predicted that farmers in the bay watershed will plant 500,000 or more new acres of corn in the next five years. Because fields of corn generally produce more polluted runoff than those of other crops, that's a problem.
"It's going in the opposite direction from where we want to go," said Jim Pease, a professor at Virginia Tech and one of the study's authors.
Ethanol, a fuel made from processed and fermented plant matter, is an old invention with enormous new cachet. Proponents say that it offers an alternative to oil imported from overseas and that it emits fewer greenhouse gases than fossil fuels. In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush called for its use in motor fuels to be increased sevenfold by 2017. Already, 15 ethanol facilities are either planned or under construction in the mid-Atlantic, according to yesterday's report.
But ethanol's boom has also produced a variety of unintended, and unwanted, consequences. Because the primary ingredient at U.S. ethanol plants is corn, the price of that grain has shot up, making everything from tortillas to beef to chocolate more expensive.
In the Chesapeake area, according to the study, the drawback to ethanol's boom is that more farmers have planted cornfields to take advantage of the prices. Corn harvests are expected to increase 12 percent in Maryland this year and 8 percent in Virginia, according to a forecast in March from the U.S. Agriculture Department.
Although the spike is expected to be greater in Mississippi, where forecasters predict a 179 percent jump, across the vast Chesapeake watershed -- extending from southern Virginia to Cooperstown, N.Y. -- smaller shifts can add up. The authors of the study released yesterday forecast that over the next five years, the area of land newly planted with corn could be as much as 1 million acres, four times the size of Fairfax County.
Those shifting to corn production included Craig Giese, a farmer with 600 acres on Virginia's Northern Neck. Giese said in a telephone interview yesterday that he planted 50 new acres of corn after prices climbed from about $2.30 per 56-pound bushel last year to about $3.40 this year.
But Giese said he left many of his acres planted with soybeans to ensure against a disaster if corn prices drop or a drought makes the plants wither.
"If you put in all corn, you could hit a home run, with the prices we have now," said Giese, whose farm is near Lancaster, about 120 miles from Washington. "But . . . you could also go belly up."
More cornfields could be trouble, the study warned, because corn generally requires more fertilizer than such crops as soybeans or hay. When it rains, some of this fertilizer washes downstream, and it brings such pollutants as nitrogen and phosphorus, which feed unnatural algae blooms in the bay. These algae consume the oxygen that fish, crabs and other creatures need to breathe, creating the Chesapeake's infamous dead zones.
Governments around the bay have pledged to cut their output of nitrogen by 110 million pounds by 2010. But the study estimated that an ethanol-driven increase in cornfields could add 8 million to 16 million pounds of pollution.
"We've made it that much harder to meet our bay restoration goals," said Beth McGee, a senior water quality specialist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group based in Annapolis. McGee helped compile the study released yesterday.
The impact could be lessened, McGee said, by measures that trap farm pollution before it can reach a stream. These include forested "buffers" along rivers, where plants can filter runoff, or "cover crops" that soak up fertilizer after the main harvest.
U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has pushed for such measures to get federal funding from the 2007 farm bill, which is scheduled for a markup in a House committee this week. McGee said yesterday's report was timed to show the need for those funds.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
On The Front Lines Of Global Warming: Measuring Melting Himalyan Glaciers
Here is an excellent article about work being done in India's Himalayan Mountains to study the effects of global warming on mountain glaciers. As we all know, the world's mountain glaciers and continental ice sheets have been melting and retreating for approximately the last 18,000 years, or since the end of the last ice age. The concern now is that the rate of melting is faster than "normal", or is increasing at an accelerating rate.
The whole idea of course, is that man's activities (mainly the burning of coal, oil, and gas) are adding carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse effect, causing more warming, and leading us down the road to global catastrophe.
This article clearly shows the difficulty of obtaining accurate data. The work detailed here is remarkably primitive, however well-intended. The glacier is retreating, but is this abnormal? There is much similar work being done in mountains all over the planet, reaching similar conclusions.
The article is simple but informative. I especially noted the official response from the Indian Government, blaming industrialized nations, (mainly the US) for causing global warming. It is not difficult to see why the issue of global warming is a political, social, economic, and even an emotional, and passionate issue. It has gone beyond science.
This article just illustrates how some of the scientific data is obtained. Do you want to assist in the fight against global warming? Take a trek to the Himalayas and help this glaciologist in his front line battle against global warming.
Peter
The Chorabari glacier sweeps down from the Kedarnath mountain peak. It has retreated 29.5 feet every year for the past three years.from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/science/earth/17glacier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Glaciers in Retreat
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: July 17, 2007
ON CHORABARI GLACIER, India — This is how a glacier retreats.
Tomas Munita for The New York Times
Ramesh Bandhari, a worker with the Indian Institute of Himalayan Geology, uses a chronometer to clock water flow. At nearly 13,000 feet above sea level, in the shadow of a sharp Himalayan peak, a wall of black ice oozes in the sunshine. A tumbling stone breaks the silence of the mountains, or water gurgles under the ground, a sign that the glacier is melting from inside. Where it empties out — scientists call it the snout — a noisy, frothy stream rushes down to meet the river Ganges.
D.P. Dobhal, a glaciologist who has spent the last three years climbing and poking the Chorabari glacier, stands at the edge of the snout and points ahead. Three years ago, the snout was roughly 90 feet farther away. On a map drawn in 1962, it was plotted 860 feet from here. Mr. Dobhal marked the spot with a Stonehenge-like pile of rocks.Mr. Dobhal’s steep and solitary quest — to measure the changes in the glacier’s size and volume — points to a looming worldwide concern, with particularly serious repercussions for India and its neighbors. The thousands of glaciers studded across 1,500 miles of the Himalayas make up the savings account of South Asia’s water supply, feeding more than a dozen major rivers and sustaining a billion people downstream. Their apparent retreat threatens to bear heavily on everything from the region’s drinking water supply to agricultural production to disease and floods.
Researchers led by glaciologist D.P. Dobhal of the Indian Institute of Himalayan Geology are measuring changes in the glacier's size and volume.
Indian glaciers are among the least studied in the world, lacking the decades of data that scientists need to deduce trends. Nevertheless, the nascent research offers a snapshot of the consequences of global warming for this country and raises vital questions about how India will respond to them.
According to Mr. Dobhal’s measurements, the Chorabari’s snout has retreated 29.5 feet every year for the last three years, and while that is too short a time to draw scientific conclusions about the glacier’s health, it conforms to a disquieting pattern of glacial retreat across the Himalayas.
A recent study by the Indian Space Research Organization, using satellite imaging to gauge the changes to 466 glaciers, has found more than a 20 percent reduction in size from 1962 to 2001, with bigger glaciers breaking into smaller pieces, each one retreating faster than its parent. A separate study found the Parbati glacier, one of the largest in the area, to be retreating by 170 feet a year during the 1990s. Another glacier that Mr. Dobhal has tracked, known as Dokriani, lost 20 percent of its size in three decades. Between 1991 and 1995, its snout inched back 55 feet each year.
Similar losses are being seen around the world. Lonnie G. Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, found a 22 percent loss of ice on the Qori Kalis glacier in Peru between 1963 and 2002. He called it “a repeating theme whether you are in tropical Andes, the Himalayas or Kilimanjaro in Africa.”
A thermometer at the foot of the Kedarnath glacier. The movement of glaciers worldwide serves as a barometer for global warming.The Chorabari, sweeping down from Kedarnath peak across 2.3 square miles, is relatively lucky. It is blessed with a thick cover of rocks and boulders, which acts as a sort of insulation and slows the melting. Since Mr. Dobhal began collecting data here in 2003, the Chorabari has been shedding its weight — that is to say, melting faster than the rate at which snow and ice accumulates, and as a result, thinning out by roughly five feet each year. The snow line, in addition, is gradually moving higher.
A vast and ancient sheet of ice, a glacier is in effect the planet’s most sensitive organ, like an aging knee that feels the onset of winter. Its upper reaches accumulate snow and ice when it is cold; its lower reaches melt when it is warm. Its long-term survival depends on the balance between the buildup and the melting. Glaciers worldwide serve as a barometer for global warming, which has, according to a report this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, been spurred in recent decades by rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
Even the Himalayas have grown measurably warmer. A recent study found that mean air temperature in the northwestern Himalayan range had risen by 2.2 degrees Celsius in the last two decades, a rate considerably higher than the rate of increase over the last 100 years.
In its report, the international panel predicted that as these glaciers melt, they would increase the likelihood of flooding over the next three decades and then, as they recede, dry up the rivers that they feed. “In the course of the century,” it warned darkly, “water supply stored in glaciers and snow cover are projected to decline, reducing water availability in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges, where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives.”
The work of Mr. Dobhal and his team is lonely and time-consuming but the data will help scientists better deduce trends in what is happening to the glaciers.
India’s public response so far has been to blame the industrialized world for rising emissions and resist any mandatory caps of its own. India’s per capita share of emissions is one-twentieth that of industrialized countries, the government points out, going on to argue that any restrictions on emissions would stunt its economic growth.
And yet, as critics say, India’s rapid economic advance, combined with a population of more than a billion people, will soon make it a far bigger contributor to greenhouse gases. More to the point, India stands to bear some of the most devastating consequences of human-induced climate change.
The dearth of scientific knowledge adds to the alarm. River flow data is so scant and recent that it is impossible for scientists to predict how the current rates of glacial retreat will affect river volume.
To spend a couple of days with Mr. Dobhal, 44, a glaciologist with the Wadia Institute for Himalayan Geology, a government-sponsored research institution based in the North Indian city of Dehradun, is to understand why there is not more research on these glaciers. It is lonely, time-consuming work, equally demanding of body and mind.
Mr. Dobhal’s days begin inside a tent, not particularly well-suited for such chilly heights, usually around 5:30, with prayers and a cup of hot tea.
This morning’s journey is just above the base camp, to about 12,800 feet, where Mr. Dobhal must install a set of crude bamboo rulers to measure the undulations of the ice. The drilling machine in this case is a steady hiss of steam that comes out of a steam machine carried on the back and inserted into the glacier through a long, narrow pipe. Mr. Dobhal drives it slowly, expertly through the solid black ice, taking care to drill an absolutely straight 13-foot-long hole.
When it is done, the bamboo pole slides in effortlessly. When he is finished, there will be 40 such stakes up and down the Chorabari, in the upper reaches where the ice accumulates in winter, all the way down to where the snout spills its meltwaters. Over the next months, the stakes will record the rise and fall of the ice — in other words, changes in the glacier’s total mass.
Downstream, where the glacier’s meltwater becomes what is known as the Mandakini River, comes another set of crucial measurements. Six times a day, Mr. Dobhal and his aides, all ethnic gurkhas from Nepal, measure the depth of the water and the speed at which it flows. It is a remarkably simple experiment, like one you might do for a high school science fair. A square wooden paddle, attached to a string, is floated down the channel. A stopwatch measures how long it takes to travel 23 feet. “This will tell me how much water we are getting from one glacier and at different seasons — how much in summer, how much in winter, how much in the rainy season,” was Mr. Dobhal’s explanation.
Think of the glacier as a bank account, Mr. Dobhal offered. If its total volume — as measured by the stakes installed in the ice — is “how much we have in the bank,” then the flow of the Mandakini is like the dividends being released for everyday use.
Mr. Dobhal’s days follow a relentlessly measured pattern. Every day, he is back at the base camp no later than 2 p.m., which is when the risk of an avalanche grows. Even in summer, there are fluke snowstorms; one in late May kept Mr. Dobhal and his crew up all night, brushing snow off the tops of their tents. Tourists and trekkers rarely venture up to these heights. Every once in a while, a Hindu monk can be seen foraging for firewood. Mr. Dobhal met one last year, meditating inside a cave. Even the wildlife is limited to bears and mountain rats.
Most evenings are spent listening to a transistor radio broadcast around a campfire. Financing, too, is limited. This year, Mr. Dobhal said he dug in his own pockets to buy winter socks for his aides.
Over the coming months, barring an avalanche that could tear them down, the stakes will chronicle the changes in the glacier. At the end of summer, Mr. Dobhal will return to the base camp to see how far the ice has shrunk, and again, he will come when winter sets in, for another set of measurements. The fate of the Chorabari glacier will slowly, painstakingly be revealed.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Can Increasing Carbon Dioxide Cause Climate Change?
The following paper by Richard S. Lindzen, Professor and Climate Scientist at MIT quite clearly states that he sees no connection between increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and global warming. The article, although now ten years old, still reflects his current position on the subject.
Prof. Lindzen is denounced as a global warming "skeptic", but it is difficult to argue with his credentials and his experience.
Peter
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA
Vol. 94, pp. 8335–8342, August 1997
Colloquium Paper
This paper was presented at a colloquium entitled “Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change,” organized by Charles D.
Keeling, held November 13–15, 1995, at the National Academy of Sciences, Irvine, CA.
Can increasing carbon dioxide cause climate change?
RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Building 54, Room 1720, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139
ABSTRACT
The title suggested for this paper (by Dave Keeling) is tantalizing for its ambiguity. At some level, the answer is philosophically trivial. After all, our knowledge is rarely so perfect
that we can say anything is absolutely impossible. In connection with this question we can go a bit further, and state that increasing CO2 is likely to cause some climate change, and that
the resulting change will involve average warming of the earth. However, this answer is almost as trivial as the first.
Conclusion
The brief conclusion of this paper is that current GCMs are inadequate for the purpose of convincingly determining whether the small changes in TOA flux associated with an
increase in CO2 are capable of producing significant climate change. However, we may not be dependent on uncertain models to ascertain climate sensitivity. Observations can potentially
directly and indirectly be used to evaluate climate sensitivity to forcing of the sort produced by increasing CO2 even without improved GCMs.
Prof. Lindzen is denounced as a global warming "skeptic", but it is difficult to argue with his credentials and his experience.
Peter
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA
Vol. 94, pp. 8335–8342, August 1997
Colloquium Paper
This paper was presented at a colloquium entitled “Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change,” organized by Charles D.
Keeling, held November 13–15, 1995, at the National Academy of Sciences, Irvine, CA.
Can increasing carbon dioxide cause climate change?
RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Building 54, Room 1720, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139
ABSTRACT
The realistic physical functioning of the greenhouse effect is reviewed, and the role of dynamic transport and water vapor is identified. Model errors and uncertainties are quantitatively compared with the forcing due to doubling CO2, and they are shown to be too large for reliable
model evaluations of climate sensitivities. The possibility of directly measuring climate sensitivity is reviewed.
model evaluations of climate sensitivities. The possibility of directly measuring climate sensitivity is reviewed.
A direct approach using satellite data to relate changes in globally averaged radiative flux changes at the top of the atmosphere to naturally occurring changes in global mean temperature is described. Indirect approaches to evaluating climate sensitivity involving the response to volcanic eruptions and Eocene climate change are also described. Finally, it is explained how,
in principle, a climate that is insensitive to gross radiative forcing as produced by doubling CO2 might still be able to undergo major changes of the sort associated with ice ages and
equable climates.
in principle, a climate that is insensitive to gross radiative forcing as produced by doubling CO2 might still be able to undergo major changes of the sort associated with ice ages and
equable climates.
The title suggested for this paper (by Dave Keeling) is tantalizing for its ambiguity. At some level, the answer is philosophically trivial. After all, our knowledge is rarely so perfect
that we can say anything is absolutely impossible. In connection with this question we can go a bit further, and state that increasing CO2 is likely to cause some climate change, and that
the resulting change will involve average warming of the earth. However, this answer is almost as trivial as the first.
The climate is always undergoing change, and if the changes due to increasing CO2 are smaller than the natural variability, then these changes will be of only modest concern except as an
exercise in weak signal detection. The more serious question then is do we expect increasing CO2 to produce sufficiently large changes in climate so as to be clearly discernible and of
consequence for the affairs of humans and the ecosystem of which we are part. This is the question I propose to approach in this paper.
exercise in weak signal detection. The more serious question then is do we expect increasing CO2 to produce sufficiently large changes in climate so as to be clearly discernible and of
consequence for the affairs of humans and the ecosystem of which we are part. This is the question I propose to approach in this paper.
I will first consider the question of whether current model predictions are likely to be credible. We will see why this is unlikely at best. I will then show how we might estimate and bound climate sensitivity both directly and indirectly from existing data. Finally, I will consider the relationship of changes in mean temperature to changes in the structure of climate. It has been suggested that small changes in mean temperature are important because major changes in
past climate were associated with major changes in the equator-to-pole temperature difference, but only small changes in the mean temperature. I will argue that the changes in mean
temperature may be only residuals of the changes in the meridional temperature distribution rather than the cause.
past climate were associated with major changes in the equator-to-pole temperature difference, but only small changes in the mean temperature. I will argue that the changes in mean
temperature may be only residuals of the changes in the meridional temperature distribution rather than the cause.
(continued)...........................
Conclusion
The brief conclusion of this paper is that current GCMs are inadequate for the purpose of convincingly determining whether the small changes in TOA flux associated with an
increase in CO2 are capable of producing significant climate change. However, we may not be dependent on uncertain models to ascertain climate sensitivity. Observations can potentially
directly and indirectly be used to evaluate climate sensitivity to forcing of the sort produced by increasing CO2 even without improved GCMs.
The observations needed for direct assessment are, indeed, observations that we are currently capable of making, and it is possible that the necessary observations may already be in hand, though the accuracy requirements may be greater than current data provide. Still,the importance of the question suggests that such avenues be adequately explored. Since the feedbacks involved in climate sensitivity are atmospheric, they are associated with short time scales. Oceanic delays are irrelevant, since observed surface temperatures are forcing the flux changes we are concerned with. The needed length of record must be determined empirically.
Indirect estimates, based on response to volcanos, suggest sensitivity may be as small as 0.3–0.5°C for a doubling of CO2, which is well within the range of natural variability. This is not to suggest that such change cannot be detected; rather, it is a statement that the anticipated change is well within the range of what the earth regularly deals with. It is further noted that the common assertion that even small changes in mean temperature can lead to major changes in climate distribution is ill-founded and, likely, wrong.
Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels For The Last 500 Million Years: No Correlation With Climate
In this article the author concludes that he can not detect any relationship between past atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and climate variations. Note that he attributes varying carbon dioxide levels to the completely natural geologic processes of weathering of rocks, magmatism (volcanism) and the burial of organic carbon.
This raises the obvious question, (again) if there is no correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and climate change for the past 500 million years of Earth history, how can a sudden, yet minor (the past 100 years), increase of man-caused carbon dioxide emissions be causing global warming?
Something tells me this scientist was not consulted by the United Nations, the IPCC, and of course not by Al Gore.
Peter
From: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/99/7/4167?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=carbon+dioxide&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last
500 million years
Daniel H. Rothman†
Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139
Communicated by Paul F. Hoffman, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, January 30, 2002 (received for review October 9, 2001)
The last 500 million years of the strontium-isotope record are
shown to correlate significantly with the concurrent record of
isotopic fractionation between inorganic and organic carbon after
the effects of recycled sediment are removed from the strontium
signal. The correlation is shown to result from the common dependence
of both signals on weathering and magmatic processes.
Because the long-term evolution of carbon dioxide levels depends
similarly on weathering and magmatism, the relative fluctuations
of CO2 levels are inferred from the shared fluctuations of the
isotopic records. The resulting CO2 signal exhibits no systematic
correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at
tectonic time scales.
The long-term carbon cycle is controlled by chemical weathering,
volcanic and metamorphic degassing, and the burial of
organic carbon (1, 2). Ancient atmospheric carbon dioxide levels
are reflected in the isotopic content of organic carbon (3) and,
less directly, strontium (4) in marine sedimentary rocks; the
former because photosynthetic carbon isotope fractionation is
sensitive to CO2 levels, and the latter because weathering and
degassing are associated with extreme values of the abundance
ratio 87Sr86Sr.
However, attempts to use these geochemical
signals to estimate past CO2 levels (5–8) are hindered by the
signals’ additional relationships to various tectonic (9, 10) and
biological (11) effects. Moreover, the strontium signal has
proven especially difficult to parse (12–15).
Here, I attempt to resolve these ambiguities in the isotopic
signals of carbon and strontium. First, it is shown that the last
500 million years of the strontium signal, after transformation
to remove the effects of recycled sediment (16, 17), correlate
significantly with the concurrent record of isotopic fractionation
between inorganic and organic carbon (3). This empirical
result is supplemented by the theoretical deduction that the
two records are linked by their common dependence on rates
of continental weathering and magmatic activity.
The assumption that CO2 levels fall with the former and rise with the latter
then indicates that an appropriate average of the two records
should ref lect the long-term fluctuations of the partial pressure
of atmospheric CO2. The CO2 signal derived from this
analysis represents fluctuations at time scales greater than
about 10 million years (My). Comparison with the geologic
record of climatic variations (18) reveals no obvious
correspondence.
(Continued)
This raises the obvious question, (again) if there is no correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and climate change for the past 500 million years of Earth history, how can a sudden, yet minor (the past 100 years), increase of man-caused carbon dioxide emissions be causing global warming?
Something tells me this scientist was not consulted by the United Nations, the IPCC, and of course not by Al Gore.
Peter
From: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/99/7/4167?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=carbon+dioxide&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last
500 million years
Daniel H. Rothman†
Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139
Communicated by Paul F. Hoffman, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, January 30, 2002 (received for review October 9, 2001)
The last 500 million years of the strontium-isotope record are
shown to correlate significantly with the concurrent record of
isotopic fractionation between inorganic and organic carbon after
the effects of recycled sediment are removed from the strontium
signal. The correlation is shown to result from the common dependence
of both signals on weathering and magmatic processes.
Because the long-term evolution of carbon dioxide levels depends
similarly on weathering and magmatism, the relative fluctuations
of CO2 levels are inferred from the shared fluctuations of the
isotopic records. The resulting CO2 signal exhibits no systematic
correspondence with the geologic record of climatic variations at
tectonic time scales.
The long-term carbon cycle is controlled by chemical weathering,
volcanic and metamorphic degassing, and the burial of
organic carbon (1, 2). Ancient atmospheric carbon dioxide levels
are reflected in the isotopic content of organic carbon (3) and,
less directly, strontium (4) in marine sedimentary rocks; the
former because photosynthetic carbon isotope fractionation is
sensitive to CO2 levels, and the latter because weathering and
degassing are associated with extreme values of the abundance
ratio 87Sr86Sr.
However, attempts to use these geochemical
signals to estimate past CO2 levels (5–8) are hindered by the
signals’ additional relationships to various tectonic (9, 10) and
biological (11) effects. Moreover, the strontium signal has
proven especially difficult to parse (12–15).
Here, I attempt to resolve these ambiguities in the isotopic
signals of carbon and strontium. First, it is shown that the last
500 million years of the strontium signal, after transformation
to remove the effects of recycled sediment (16, 17), correlate
significantly with the concurrent record of isotopic fractionation
between inorganic and organic carbon (3). This empirical
result is supplemented by the theoretical deduction that the
two records are linked by their common dependence on rates
of continental weathering and magmatic activity.
The assumption that CO2 levels fall with the former and rise with the latter
then indicates that an appropriate average of the two records
should ref lect the long-term fluctuations of the partial pressure
of atmospheric CO2. The CO2 signal derived from this
analysis represents fluctuations at time scales greater than
about 10 million years (My). Comparison with the geologic
record of climatic variations (18) reveals no obvious
correspondence.
(Continued)
Friday, July 13, 2007
Stop Global Warming, Become A Vegetarian
This is a bit hard to swallow......
Peter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwkbDubF2qM&mode=related&search=
Peter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwkbDubF2qM&mode=related&search=
Al Gore Being Made Fun Of Again......
They just won't lay off poor Al Gore........another clever video.
Peter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZrhG2iT3H0&mode=related&search=
Peter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZrhG2iT3H0&mode=related&search=
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
It amazes me how Prof. Lindzen is ignored and effectively silenced by those who believe man is causing global warming. This article was in the Wall Street Journal, so some people are listening.
Peter
EARTH IN THE BALANCE
Don't Believe the Hype Al Gore is wrong. There's no "consensus" on global warming.
BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.
Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."
That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.
The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't know."
So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie.
In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.
They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.
The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.
Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming because he can't think of anything else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.
A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended--at least not in terms of the actual science.
A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.
There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.
Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.
The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."
In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed."
What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.
So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.
Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.
Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.
Peter
EARTH IN THE BALANCE
Don't Believe the Hype Al Gore is wrong. There's no "consensus" on global warming.
BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.
Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."
That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.
The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't know."
So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie.
In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.
They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.
The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.
Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming because he can't think of anything else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.
A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended--at least not in terms of the actual science.
A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.
There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.
Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.
The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."
In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.
Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed."
What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.
So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.
Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.
Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.
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