Congress Finally Hearing Truth About Myth Of Man-Caused Global Warming

It is nice to see some historical scientifically verifiable facts laid out for all to see which clearly destroy the myth of man-caused global warming. There is an abundance of this kind geologic information that has been ignored by the global warming alarmists and so called "climate scientists". Al Gore? As always, he is a hypocrite, fraud and a buffoon.....albeit a wealthy one.
Peter

Testimony of The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Before Congress, 6 May 2010

The Select Committee, in its letter inviting testimony for the present hearing, cites

various scientific bodies as having concluded that –

1. The global climate has warmed;

2. Human activities account for most of the warming since the mid-20

th

century;

3. Climate change is already causing a broad range of impacts in the United States;

4. The impacts of climate change are expected to grow in the coming decades.

The first statement requires heavy qualification and, since the second is wrong, the third

and fourth are without foundation and must fall.

The Select Committee has requested answers to the following questions:

1. What are the observed changes to the climate system?

Carbon dioxide concentration:

In the Neoproterozoic Era, ~750 million years ago,

dolomitic rocks, containing ~40% CO2 bonded not only with calcium ions but also with

magnesium, were precipitated from the oceans worldwide by a reaction that could not

have occurred unless the atmospheric concentration of CO2 had been ~300,000 parts

per million by volume. Yet in that era equatorial glaciers came and went twice at sea

level.

Today, the concentration is ~773 times less, at ~388 ppmv: yet there are no equatorial

glaciers at sea level. If the warming effect of CO2 were anything like as great as the

vested-interest groups now seek to maintain, then, even after allowing for greater

surface albedo and 5% less solar radiation, those glaciers could not possibly have existed

(personal communication from Professor Ian Plimer, confirmed by on-site inspection of

dolomitic and tillite deposits at Arkaroola Northern Flinders Ranges, South Australia).

In the Cambrian Era, ~550 million years ago, limestones, containing some 44% CO2

bonded with calcium ions, were precipitated from the oceans. At that time, atmospheric

CO2 concentration was ~7000 ppmv, or ~18 times today’s (IPCC, 2001): yet it was at

that time that the calcite corals first achieved algal symbiosis. In the Jurassic era, ~175

million years ago, atmospheric CO2 concentration was ~6000 ppmv, or ~15 times

today’s (IPCC, 2001): yet it was then that the delicate aragonite corals came into being.

Therefore, today’s CO2 concentration, though perhaps the highest in 20 million years, is

by no means exceptional or damaging. Indeed, it has been argued that trees and plants

have been part-starved of CO2 throughout that period (Senate testimony of Professor

Will Happer, Princeton University, 2009). It is also known that a doubling of today’s

CO2 concentration, projected to occur later this century (IPCC, 2007), would increase

the yield of some staple crops by up to 40% (lecture by Dr. Leighton Steward,

Parliament Chamber, Copenhagen, December 2009).

Global mean surface temperature:

Throughout most of the past 550 million years,

global temperatures were ~7 K (13 F°) warmer than the present. In each of the past four

interglacial warm periods over the past 650,000 years, temperatures were warmer than

the present by several degrees (A.A. Gore,

An Inconvenient Truth

, 2006).

In the current or Holocene warm period, which began 11,400 years ago at the abrupt

termination of the Younger Dryas cooling event, some 7500 years were warmer than the

present (Cuffey & Clow, 1997), and, in particular, the medieval, Roman, Minoan, and

Holocene Climate Optima were warmer than the present (Cuffey & Clow, 1997).

The “global warming” that ceased late in 2001 (since when there has been a global

cooling trend for eight full years) had begun in 1695, towards the end of the Maunder

Minimum, a period of 70 years from 1645-1715 when the Sun was less active than at any

time in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004). Solar activity increased with a rapidity

unprecedented in the Holocene, reaching a Grand Solar Maximum during a period of 70

years from 1925-1995 when the Sun was very nearly as active as it had been at any time

in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004; Usoskin, 2003; Solanki, 2005).

The first instrumental record of global temperatures was kept in Central England from

1659. From 1695-1735, a period of 40 years preceding the onset of the Industrial

Revolution in 1750, temperatures in central England, which are a respectable proxy for

global temperatures, rose by 2.2 K (4 F°). Yet global temperatures have risen by only

0.65 K (1.2 F°) since 1950, and 0.7 K (1.3 F°) in the whole of the 20

th

century.

Throughout the 21

st

century, global temperatures have followed a declining trend.

Accordingly, neither global mean surface temperature nor its rates of change in recent

decades have been exceptional, unusual, inexplicable, or unprecedented.

Ocean “acidification”:

It has been suggested that the oceans have “acidified” – or,

more correctly, become less alkaline – by 0.1 acid-base units in recent decades.

However, the fact of a movement towards neutrality in ocean chemistry, if such a

movement has occurred, tells us nothing of the cause, which cannot be attributed to

increases in CO2 concentration. There is 70 times as much CO2 dissolved in the oceans

as there is in the atmosphere, and some 30% of any CO2 we add to the atmosphere will

eventually dissolve into the oceans. Accordingly, a doubling of CO2 concentration,

expected later this century, would raise the oceanic partial pressure of CO2 by 30% of

one-seventieth of what is already there. And that is an increase of 0.4% at most. Even

this minuscule and chemically-irrelevant perturbation is probably overstated, since any

“global warming” that resulted from the doubling of CO2 concentration would warm the

oceans and cause them to outgas CO2, reducing the oceanic partial pressure.

Seawater is a highly buffered solution – it can take up a huge amount of dissolved

inorganic carbon without significant effect on pH. There is not the slightest possibility

that the oceans could approach the neutral pH of pure water (pH 7.0), even if all the

fossil fuel reserves in the world were burned. A change in pH of 0.2 units this century,

from its present 8.2 to 8.0, even if it were possible, would leave the sea containing no

more than 10% of the “acidic” positively-charged hydrogen ions that occur in pure

water. If ocean “acidification” is happening, then CO2 is not and will not be the culprit.

2. What evidence provides attribution of these changes to human

activities?

In the global instrumental record, which commenced in 1850, the three supradecadal

periods of most rapid warming were 1860-1880, 1910-1940, and 1975-2001. Warming

rates in all three periods were identical at ~0.16 K (0.3 F°) per decade.

During the first two of these three periods, observations were insufficient to establish

the causes of the warming: however, the principal cause cannot have been atmospheric

CO2 enrichment, because, on any view, mankind’s emissions of CO2 had not increased

enough to cause any measurable warming on a global scale during those short periods.

In fact, the third period of rapid global warming, 1975-2001, was the only period of

warming since 1950. From 1950-1975, and again from 2001-2010, global temperatures

fell slightly (HadCRUTv3, cited in IPCC, 2007).

What, then, caused the third period of warming? Most of that third and most recent

period of rapid warming fell within the satellite era, and the satellites confirmed

measurements from ground stations showing a considerable, and naturally-occurring,

global brightening from 1983-2001 (Pinker

et al.,

2005).

Allowing for the fact that Dr. Pinker’s result depended in part on the datasets of

outgoing radiative flux from the ERBE satellite that had not been corrected at that time

for orbital decay, it is possible to infer a net increase in surface radiative flux amounting

to 0.106 W m

–2 year–1 over the period, compared with the 0.16 W m–2 year–1

found by

Dr. Pinker.

Elementary radiative-transfer calculations demonstrate that a natural surface global

brightening amounting to ~1.9 W m

–2

over the 18-year period of study would be

expected – using the IPCC’s own methodology – to have caused a transient warming of 1

K (1.8 F°). To put this naturally-occurring global brightening into perspective, the

IPCC’s estimated total of all the anthropogenic influences on climate combined in the

256 years 1750-2005 is only 1.6 W m

–2

.

Taking into account a further projected warming, using IPCC methods, of ~0.5 K (0.9

F°) from CO2 and other anthropogenic sources, projected warming of 1.5 K (2.7 F°)

should have occurred.

However, only a quarter of this projected warming was observed, suggesting the

possibility that the IPCC may have overestimated the warming effect of greenhouse

gases fourfold. This result is in line with similar result obtained by other methods: for

instance, Lindzen & Choi (2009, 2010 submitted) find that the warming rate to be

expected as a result of anthropogenic activities is one-quarter to one-fifth of the IPCC’s

central estimate.

There is no consensus on how much warming a given increase in CO2 will cause.

3. Assuming ad argumentum that the IPCC’s projections of future

warming are correct, what policy measures should be taken?

Warming at the very much reduced rate that measured (as opposed to merely modeled)

results suggest would be 0.7-0.8 K (1.3-1.4 F°) at CO2 doubling. That would be harmless

and beneficial – a doubling of CO2 concentration would increase yields of some staple

crops by 40%. Therefore, one need not anticipate any significant adverse impact from

CO2-induced “global warming”. “Global warming” is a non-problem, and the correct

policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.

However,

ad argumentum,

let us assume that the IPCC is correct in finding that a

warming of 3.26 ± 0.69 K (5.9 ± 1.2 F°: IPCC, 2007, ch.10, box 10.2) might occur at CO2

doubling. We generalize this central prediction, deriving a simple equation to tell us how

much warming the IPCC would predict for any given change in CO2 concentration –

ΔTS

≈ (8.5 ± 1.8) ln(C/C

o) F°

Thus, the change in surface temperature in Fahrenheit degrees, as predicted by the

IPCC, would be 6.7 to 10.3 (with a central estimate of 8.5) times the logarithm of the

proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. We check the equation by using it to work

out the warming the IPCC would predict at CO2 doubling: 8.5 ln 2

≈

5.9 F°.

Using this equation, we can determine just how much “global warming” would be

forestalled if the entire world were to shut down its economies and emit no carbon

dioxide at all for an entire year. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 is 388 parts per

million by volume. Our emissions of 30 bn tons of CO2 a year are causing this

concentration to rise at 2 ppmv/year, and this ratio of 15 bn tons of emissions to each

additional ppmv of CO2 concentration has remained constant for 30 years.

Then the “global warming” that we might forestall if we shut down the entire global

carbon economy for a full year would be 8.5 ln[(388+2)/388] = 0.044 F°. At that rate,

almost a quarter of a century of global zero-carbon activity would be needed in order to

forestall just one Fahrenheit degree of “global warming”.

Two conclusions ineluctably follow. First, it would be orders of magnitude more costeffective

to adapt to any “global warming” that might occur than to try to prevent it from

occurring by trying to tax or regulate emissions of carbon dioxide in any way.

Secondly, there is no hurry. Even after 23 years doing nothing to address the imagined

problem, and even if the IPCC has not exaggerated CO2’s warming effect fourfold, the

world will be just 1 F° warmer than it is today. If the IPCC has exaggerated fourfold, the

world can do nothing for almost a century before global temperature rises by 1 F°.

There are many urgent priorities that need the attention of Congress, and it is not for me

as an invited guest in your country to say what they are. Yet I can say this much: on any

view, “global warming” is not one of them.

Let's Not Lose Our Cool About Global Warming......

Here is a thoughtful article about global warming from the perspective of a Professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, a scientist with decades of experience studying the climate history of the Arctic. He is a rare voice of reason in a sea of hype and hysteria over the dire warnings of the non-scientific global warming alarmists. He makes many common sense observations that need to be remembered.
Peter

from: http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/passionate_subject.php


Syun Akasofu
International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Printable version (PDF)

The new IPCC Report (2007) states, on page 10, “Most observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. " Their great effort in making progress in climate change science is certainly commended.

The media in the world is paying great attention mostly to the term “very likely,” meaning the confidence level of more than 90%. However, I, as a scientist, am more concerned about the term “most,” because the IPCC Report does not demonstrate the basis for the term “most.”
There seems to be a roughly linear increase of the temperature from about 1800, or even much earlier, to the present. This trend should be subtracted from the temperature data during the last 100 years. Thus, there is a possibility that only a fraction of the present warming trend may be attributed to the greenhouse effect resulting from human activities. One possible cause of the linear increase may be that the Earth is still recovering from the Little Ice Age.

Thus, natural causes cannot be ignored in the present warming trend, in addition to the greenhouse effect. This short article is my criticism on the report from the point of an arctic researcher. The Arctic is the place where climate change is most prominently in progress, compared with the rest of the world.

Before critically examining the new IPCC Report, it is of interest to review why global warming has become such a passionate subject. In order to find the reasons for the present rampant reaction to global warming, it is necessary to think back to the Cold War period. At that time in history, both the United States and the Soviet Union had a large arsenal of atomic bombs, which could have eliminated all living creatures on Earth many times over. Therefore, scientists and the general public alike urged both governments to abolish their nuclear armaments, signing statements urging this action. There was broad consensus, both amongst the public and in the scientific community, on this issue.

The fear of nuclear war subsided as the Soviet Union began to collapse. It so happened that just before the collapse of the USSR, some groups of US scientists, using supercomputers, were studying future trends in the earth’s climate. They announced in 1988 that increasing levels of CO2, if unchecked, would cause substantial warming of the earth’s temperature, resulting in various disasters. It is easy to understand why some advocative scientists, who were searching for new, significant themes, took up the grand subject of global warming as their new area of focus. This theme was successfully presented to the United Nations and an organization called the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988. Suddenly, the quiet scientific backwater of “climate research” was in the world spotlight. Perhaps, the initial motivation should not necessarily be faulted.

At the same time, many environmental protection organizations and advocacy groups were anxious; it was proving difficult to attract the attention of the general public. In addition, some government officials were also searching for new, globally significant problems to tackle, avoiding more urgent problems of African poverty and other critical problems. It is not too great a leap to infer that at least some of these groups seized the opportunity to make global warming their main theme in the hopes of attracting public interest.

Meanwhile, the IPCC mobilized a large number of climatologists and meteorologists and published several impressive, voluminous publications, one after the other. In one of them, “Climate Change 2001,” for example, a figure that became known as “the hockey stick,” was used prominently in the “Summary for Policy Makers,” in which the temperature shows a dramatic increase during the most recent 100 years, after a slow decrease in temperature over the first 900 years. The nickname “hockey stick” was coined because the temperature-time curve had this sudden, upward kink near the end, like a hockey stick. (Since then, this particular figure has been discredited; the new IPCC Report (2007) does not include the figure.)

With voluminous publications participated by hundreds of scientists, it is therefore understandable that policy makers would trust the “summary,” providing them the confidence to base major policy-making decisions on the “summary,” as indicated by the “hockey stick” figure.

Indeed, many policy makers, environmental protection groups, the press, and even some scientists took the IPCC reports to mean that all the participating scientists had come to a shared broad consensus that global warming is a very serious issue facing mankind. It is important to recognize that this consensus is of quite a different nature from the one reached on nuclear disarmament. A large number of atomic bombs did, in fact, exist; there was no uncertainty, compared with global warming, which requires much more efforts to understand for the causes.

The reason for emphasizing this point is that whenever someone says there is some uncertainty in projections of future temperature increase, someone else will assert that the danger of global warming has been accurately predicted to be 3°C, as shown in the IPCC Reports, and agreed upon by hundreds of top researchers. Do all the participating scientists agree on the term “most?” If they do, what are their scientific bases?

A supercomputer, as complex and powerful as it may be, is a far cry from the complexity of our real earth! It is simply a very poor virtual earth. Actually, the modelers themselves should know best the limitations of their results as they continue to improve their models, and perhaps modelers should, at times, be a little more cautious about their findings. In any case, modeling is nothing more than an academic exercise, at least at this stage. There is a considerable difference among results obtained by different researchers. To give just one example, the predicted year when Arctic Ocean sea ice would disappear entirely in the summer months spans a range from 2040 to at least 2300. This shows the uncertainty in modeling studies. Since sea ice plays the role of the lid in warming water in a pan, it plays a significant role in climate change and future prediction.

To exacerbate this situation, the media, by and large, tend to report worst-case scenarios and disasters, for example using only the 2040 story. It is understandable that disaster stories draw more readers than stories about the benefits of global warming. Unfortunately, most reporters have little or no background in understanding debates on the simulation results. For these reasons, the initial effort of IPCC has gotten out of control.

It is also a serious problem that global warming can so easily be blamed for everything bad that happens, such as floods (which often result instead from massive deforestation or from loss of wetlands) or extinction of some species (which may result from over-harvesting, loss of habitat, invasion of exotics, pollution problems), etc. In the meantime, those who are really responsible for these calamities can easily hide under the umbrella of global warming.

Most reporters, who come to Alaska to try to find the greenhouse disasters, have little knowledge of the Arctic. They take photographs of large blocks of ice falling from glaciers at their termini and report that global warming is in progress before their very eyes. However, glaciers are not static piles of ice, but instead are constantly flowing rivers of ice. It is normal for tidewater glaciers to calve large blocks of ice from the face as they reach the sea, and they will do so regardless of how warm or cold it is. Most glaciers in the world have been receding since 1800 or earlier, well before 1940, when CO2 began to increase significantly.

Why do major media of the world flock all the way to Alaska, if global warming is a global phenomenon? So far, what they would find is broken houses in Shishmaref, a little island in the Bering Sea coast, because of coastal erosion that is difficult to relate to a direct result of global warming. Some of the current global warming stories, including “The Day after Tomorrow,” are based on science fiction, not science.

Some of the weak points in the present IPCC Report are:
There has recently been so much attention focused on the CO2 effect, the Little Ice age has been forgotten. The recovery rate from the Little Ice Age may be as much as 0.5°C/100 years, comparable to the present warming trend of 0.6°C/100 years. The warming caused by the linear change must be carefully evaluated and subtracted in determining the greenhouse effect.
There was no critical analysis of the mid-century change; the temperature rose between 1910 and 1940, similar in magnitude and rate to the present rise after 1975.

Further, the temperature decreased from 1940 to 1975, in spite of the fact that the release of CO2 increased rapidly. At that time, we had similar debates about imminent “global cooling” (the coming of a new ice age) in the 1970s.

It is crucial to investigate any difference between the 1910-40 increase and the increase after 1975, since the former is likely to be due to natural causes, rather than the greenhouse effect.
The most prominent warming (twice the global average) took place in the Arctic, particularly in the continental arctic, during the last half of the 20th century, as stated in the IPCC Report, but it disappeared during the last decade or so. Further, the IPCC models cannot reproduce the prominent continental warming, in spite of the fact that the measured amount of CO2 was considered. This particular warming is likely to be part of multi-decadal oscillations, a natural cause.

It is also important to know that the temperature has been increasing almost linearly from about 1750, or earlier, to the present, in addition to multi-decadal oscillations, such as the familiar El Niño. These are natural changes.
Both changes are significant. Until they can be quantitatively more carefully examined and subtracted from the present trend, it is not possible to determine the manmade greenhouse effect. Therefore, there is no firm basis to claim “most” in the IPCC Report.

The IPCC should have paid more attention to climate change in the Arctic.
The mid-century (1940-1975) alarm of a coming Ice Age teaches a very important lesson to all of us, including climate researchers. It is not possible to forecast climate change (warming or cooling) in the year 2100 based on a few decades of data alone.

Further, it is very confusing that some members of the media and some scientific experts blame “global warming” for every “anomalous” weather change, including big snowfalls, droughts, floods, ice storms, and hurricanes. This only confuses the issue.

At the International Arctic Research Center, which was established under the auspices of the “US-Japan Common Agenda” in 1999, our researchers are working on the arctic climate change issues mentioned in the above, in particular, in distinguishing natural changes and the manmade greenhouse effects in the Arctic. The term “most” is very inaccurate.

We must restore respectability – by that I mean scientific rigor - to the basic science of climatology. We must also stop “tabloid” publications in science. Only then, can we make real progress in projecting future temperature change. Although I have been “designated” by the news media as “Alaska’s best known climate change skeptic,” I am a critic, not a skeptic. Science without criticism could go astray.

In the meantime, environmental protection advocates might consider a return to their original important themes of protecting the environment from destruction, pollution, over-harvesting, massive deforestation, and habitat destruction. All these processes of environmental degradation are taking place right now before our very eyes, and they are not all related to global warming.

People who are concerned about protecting the earth might also turn their attention to this question - Why has so little concrete effort been made to reduce the release of CO2, compared to such a great outcry and hysteria about global warming?

A Quick Summary of Ice Ages and Warming

This is an excellent summary of the most recent ice age and subsequent warming period, leading up to where we are today. It graphically helps put things in perspective.
Peter

from: http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/ice_ages.html

A Brief History of Ice Ages and Warming

Global warming started long before the "Industrial Revolution" and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Global warming began 18,000 years ago as the earth started warming its way out of the Pleistocene Ice Age-- a time when much of North America, Europe, and Asia lay buried beneath great sheets of glacial ice.

Earth's climate and the biosphere have been in constant flux, dominated by ice ages and glaciers for the past several million years. We are currently enjoying a temporary reprieve from the deep freeze.

Approximately every 100,000 years Earth's climate warms up temporarily. These warm periods, called interglacial periods, appear to last approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years before regressing back to a cold ice age climate. At year 18,000 and counting our current interglacial vacation from the Ice Age is much nearer its end than its beginning.
Global warming during Earth's current interglacial warm period has greatly altered our environment and the distribution and diversity of all life. For example:

Approximately 15,000 years ago the earth had warmed sufficiently to halt the advance of glaciers, and sea levels worldwide began to rise.
By 8,000 years ago the land bridge across the Bering Strait was drowned, cutting off the migration of men and animals to North America.
Since the end of the Ice Age, Earth's temperature has risen approximately 16 degrees F and sea levels have risen a total of 300 feet! Forests have returned where once there was only ice.



Over the past 750,000 years of Earth's history, Ice Ages have occurred at regular intervals, of approximately 100,000 years each.Courtesy of Illinois State Museum

During ice ages our planet is cold, dry, and inhospitable-- supporting few forests but plenty of glaciers and deserts. Like a spread of collosal bulldozers, glaciers have scraped and pulverized vast stretches of Earth's surface and completely destroyed entire regional ecosystems not once, but several times. During Ice Ages winters were longer and more severe and ice sheets grew to tremendous size, accumulating to thicknesses of up to 8,000 feet!. They moved slowly from higher elevations to lower-- driven by gravity and their tremendous weight. They left in their wake altered river courses, flattened landscapes, and along the margins of their farthest advance, great piles of glacial debris.

During the last 3 million years glaciers have at one time or another covered about 29% of Earth's land surface or about 17.14 million square miles (44.38 million sq. km.) . What did not lay beneath ice was a largely cold and desolate desert landscape, due in large part to the colder, less-humid atmospheric conditions that prevailed.
During the Ice Age summers were short and winters were brutal. Animal life and especially plant life had a very tough time of it. Thanks to global warming, that has all now changed, at least temporarily.

( view full size map)
The World 18,000 Years Ago
Before "global warming" started 18,000 years ago most of the earth was a frozen and arid wasteland. Over half of earth 's surface was covered by glaciers or extreme desert. Forests were rare.
Not a very fun place to live.

(view full size map)

Our Present World
"Global warming" over the last 15,000 years has changed our world from an ice box to a garden. Today extreme deserts and glaciers have largely given way to grasslands, woodlands, and forests.
Wish it could last forever, but . . . .

In the 1970s concerned environmentalists like Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado feared a return to another ice age due to manmade atmospheric pollution blocking out the sun.
Since about 1940 the global climate did in fact appear to be cooling. Then a funny thing happened-- sometime in the late 1970s temperature declines slowed to a halt and ground-based recording stations during the 1980s and 1990s began reading small but steady increases in near-surface temperatures. Fears of "global cooling" then changed suddenly to "global warming,"-- the cited cause:
manmade atmospheric pollution causing a runaway greenhouse effect.

What does geologic history have to offer in sorting through the confusion?
Quite a bit, actually.

"If 'ice age' is used to refer to long, generally cool, intervals during which glaciers advance and retreat, we are still in one today. Our modern climate represents a very short, warm period between glacial advances." Illinois State Museum

Periods of Earth warming and cooling occur in cycles. This is well understood, as is the fact that small-scale cycles of about 40 years exist within larger-scale cycles of 400 years, which in turn exist inside still larger scale cycles of 20,000 years, and so on.

Example of regional variations in surface air temperature for the last 1000 years, estimated from a variety of sources, including temperature-sensitive tree growth indices and written records of various kinds, largely from western Europe and eastern North America. Shown are changes in regional temperature in ° C, from the baseline value for 1900. Compiled by R. S. Bradley and J. A. Eddy based on J. T. Houghton et al., Climate Change: The IPCC Assessment, Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge, 1990 and published in EarthQuest, vol 5, no 1, 1991. Courtesy of Thomas Crowley, Remembrance of Things Past: Greenhouse Lessons from the Geologic Record

Earth's climate was in a cool period from A.D. 1400 to about A.D. 1860, dubbed the "Little Ice Age." This period was characterized by harsh winters, shorter growing seasons, and a drier climate. The decline in global temperatures was a modest 1/2° C, but the effects of this global cooling cycle were more pronounced in the higher latitudes. The Little Ice Age has been blamed for a host of human suffering including crop failures like the "Irish Potato Famine" and the demise of the medieval Viking colonies in Greenland.

Today we enjoy global temperatures which have warmed back to levels of the so called "Medieval Warm Period," which existed from approximately A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1350.
"...the Earth was evidently coming out of a relatively cold period in the 1800s so that warming in the past century may be part of this natural recovery."
Dr. John R. Christy (leading climate and atmospheric science expert- U. of Alabama in Huntsville) (5)

Global warming alarmists maintain that global temperatures have increased since about A.D. 1860 to the present as the result of the so-called "Industrial Revolution,"-- caused by releases of large amounts of greenhouse gases (principally carbon dioxide) from manmade sources into the atmosphere causing a runaway "Greenhouse Effect."

Was man really responsible for pulling the Earth out of the Little Ice Age with his industrial pollution? If so, this may be one of the greatest unheralded achievements of the Industrial Age!
Unfortunately, we tend to overestimate our actual impact on the planet. In this case the magnitude of the gas emissions involved, even by the most aggressive estimates of atmospheric warming by greenhouse gases, is inadequate to account for the magnitude of temperature increases. So what causes the up and down cycles of global climate change?

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 87Sr
86Sr.

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)