Global Forces of Nature Driving Earth's Climate.....Are Humans Involved?

The author of this review of an article questioning the role mankind is presumed to be playing in global warming and climate change, is in my opinion, far too timid. However, his review makes it clear that many highly reputable scientists are very doubtful that man is causing global warming and climate change. The debate is far from over. Meanwhile these silly politicians are in Bali arguing over who is going to control carbon dioxide emissions and how much.
Peter

source:

December 1, 2006
Are Humans Involved in Global Warming?
Filed under: Climate History, Temperature History —
A recent issue of Environmental Geology contains an article entitled “On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved?” by two scientists at the University of Southern California. Before we examine the article, let’s get a few things on the table. First of all, the two authors (Khilyuk and Chilingar) are faculty members at what most would agree is a world-class academic institution. If their work was not up to the standards of the University of Southern California, they wouldn’t be there for long.

Second, Environmental Geology is an international multidisciplinary journal concerned with all aspects of interactions between humans, ecosystems, and the earth. It is published by Springer which is one of the leading academic publishing companies in the world. The editorial board of Environmental Geology includes 53 leading scientists from every corner of the planet; US institutions listed as primary affiliations of board members include the US Geological Survey, the University of New Orleans, the University of Missouri, the University of Kansas, the University of Oklahoma, Temple University, Wesleyan University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and so on.

The point is that Environmental Geology is a first-class journal, papers submitted to the journal are peer-reviewed by scientists at major institutions, and the journal is certainly not part of any industry-funded conspiracy to undermine actions on global warming. Submitting a paper to any journal in which you question whether humans are involved in global warming will assure a more stringent review than normal.

OK – what on earth is this paper all about? How in 2006 could credible scientists seriously question whether humans are involved in global warming? Recall that Khilyuk and Chilingar are writing for a professional journal in geology, not climatology, and it is only natural to expect geologists to look at trends in the context of very long periods of time. Their perspective on climate change would be quite naturally different from someone trained in looking at annual, decadal, or 100 year changes in climate.

The authors begin the article with the sentence “Identification and understanding of global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate is crucial for developing adequate relationship between people and nature, and for developing and implementing a sound course of action aimed at survival and welfare of the human race.” Now who would argue with that statement?

From there, they review the literature on solar output variations and earth’s temperature and show that a “one percent increase in current solar radiation reaching the Earth’s body translates directly into approximately 0.86 K increase in the Earth’s global temperature.” They show that the earth’s orbit about the sun changes over long periods of time resulting in up to a 7.5 K (1 K = 1°C = 1.8°F) modulation of the earth’s temperature. They describe how outgassing alters the composition of the atmosphere over long periods thereby altering the temperature of the earth over by over 50 K. They finally review microbial activities at the interface of the lithosphere and atmosphere that also substantially alter the composition and temperature of the global atmosphere at geological time frames. Initially, the article seems fairly tame, but as one reads more, the article becomes quite controversial.

Khilyuk and Chilingar repeatedly quantify the effect of the various processes that alter global temperature and conclude “The scope and extent of these processes are 4–5 orders of magnitude greater than the corresponding anthropogenic impacts on the Earth’s climate (such as heating and emission of the greenhouse gases).” This seems fair enough given the geological time scales considered by the authors, but you can see where the global warming crowd would be getting more uncomfortable.

The authors place the recent warming into an interesting perspective noting “the global warming observed during the latest 150 years is just a short episode in the geologic history. The current global warming is most likely a combined effect of increased solar and tectonic activities and cannot be attributed to the increased anthropogenic impact on the atmosphere. Humans may be responsible for less than 0.01°C (of approximately 0.56°C (1°F) total average atmospheric heating during the last century)”. Holy cow, can you imagine the letters and e-mails they must have received in response to that conclusion? They even show that over the last 3,000 years, the earth has cooled, or if you look just at the last 1,000 years, the earth has been cooling as well (the earth was in the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago).

Their conclusions with respect to potential policy will more than raise some eyebrows as well as they write “Any attempts to mitigate undesirable climatic changes using restrictive regulations are condemned to failure, because the global natural forces are at least 4–5 orders of magnitude greater than available human controls.” They show that the climatic effects of the Kyoto Protocol would be negligible, leading them to state “Thus, the Kyoto Protocol is a good example of how to achieve the minimum results with the maximum efforts (and sacrifices). Impact of available human controls will be negligible in comparison with the global forces of nature. Thus, the attempts to alter the occurring global climatic changes (and drastic measures prescribed by the Kyoto Protocol) have to be abandoned as meaningless and harmful.”

Our World Climate Reports uncover and present interesting results we find in the peer-reviewed professional scientific journals, and as we have seen over and over, there are many absolutely amazing papers published regularly in outstanding journals. The global warming crusade would denounce this paper as outrageous, but it survived rigorous peer-review, the editor elected to publish it, and like it or not, this paper is part of the serious science literature. Dismissing the paper is made more difficult given the affiliation of the authors and the prestige of the journal.

The debate on climate change is never boring, the debate is full of surprises, and anyone claiming the debate is over is simply dismissing a significant number of papers that appear regularly in the major journals.
Reference:
Khilyuk, L.F., and G. V. Chilingar. 2006. On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved? Environmental Geology, 50, 899–910.

Quotes From The Green Community About Humanity

Some of the following comments are pretty horrible. Consider the contempt for other human beings these people must feel. These are people who want the power to control the world. Be afraid; be very afraid.
Peter


DocNavy
Message #2 - 09/20/07 02:19 PM
Here's a QUOTABLE QUOTES section on what The Green Movement says about:
Humankind

"Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs." - John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal

"In order to stabilize world population, it is necessary to eliminate 350,000 people a day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it." - Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, as quoted in the Courier, a publication of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

"A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal." - Ted Turner (speaking about world population levels)- CNN founder and AGW supporter - quoted in the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, June '96

"Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license ... All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing." - David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club; founder of Friends of the Earth; and founder of the Earth Island Institute - quoted by Dixie Lee Ray, Trashing the Planet, p.166

"The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state." - Kenneth Boulding, originator of the "Spaceship Earth" concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)

"The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world" -John Shuttleworth, founder of The Mother Earth News magazine.

"The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans." -- Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project

"If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels." -- Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund

"We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels." -- Carl Amery, Writer and celebrated environmental activist.

"To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem" -- Lamont Cole, an ecologist at Cornell University, reviewed Silent Spring in Scientific American. (There is now an award named after him for an outstanding paper by a graduate student in ecology at Cornell.)

"The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can't let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don't suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them." -- Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund

Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.”—Lyall Watson, The Financial Times 15 July, 1995

Human Evolution and Climate Change: We Will Survive

There is a lot of fear being spread around the world about global warming and catastrophic climate change. Some fools are even promoting a series of music events on all seven continents to promote their message that we must act now. They say the crises is upon us and the need is urgent to stop global warming.

Unfortunately these people always seem to ignore science, history, and even simple common sense. They rely on their feelings rather than reason and logical thought. Read this article about human evolution. Modern humans evolved, spread and thrived through ice ages, and every kind of natural disaster and climate changes, more severe than we are experiencing now. This is not mere speculation, but fact based on the study of written history and archaeology, (ancient Egyptians, Mayans, Aztecs, etc.). That is not all.

Now, as the following article explains, DNA evidence in human genes is showing how remarkably adaptable human beings are to changes in climate, diet, exposure to diseases, and probably everything else in our environment. Are we being unnecessarily frightened by current weather events and global warming? Only you can answer that question for yourself. Maybe it is just human nature to be afraid, to be cautious. Maybe that helps our survival. My advice is to not believe everything you are told or hear.
Peter

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26human.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th

Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: June 26, 2007

Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA.

People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.

A striking feature of many of these changes is that they are local. The genes under selective pressure found in one continent-based population or race are mostly different from those that occur in the others. These genes so far make up a small fraction of all human genes.

A notable instance of recent natural selection is the emergence of lactose tolerance — the ability to digest lactose in adulthood — among the cattle-herding people of northern Europe some 5,000 years ago. Lactase, the enzyme that digests the principal sugar of milk, is usually switched off after weaning. But because of the great nutritional benefit for cattle herders of being able to digest lactose in adulthood, a genetic change that keeps the lactase gene switched on spread through the population.

Lactose tolerance is not confined to Europeans. Last year, Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland and colleagues tested 43 ethnic groups in East Africa and found three separate mutations, all different from the European one, that keep the lactase gene switched on in adulthood. One of the mutations, found in peoples of Kenya and Tanzania, may have arisen as recently as 3,000 years ago.

That lactose tolerance has evolved independently four times is an instance of convergent evolution. Natural selection has used the different mutations available in European and East African populations to make each develop lactose tolerance. In Africa, those who carried the mutation were able to leave 10 times more progeny, creating a strong selective advantage.

Researchers studying other single genes have found evidence for recent evolutionary change in the genes that mediate conditions like skin color, resistance to malaria and salt retention.
The most striking instances of recent human evolution have emerged from a new kind of study, one in which the genome is scanned for evidence of selective pressures by looking at a few hundred thousand specific sites where variation is common.

Last year Benjamin Voight, Jonathan Pritchard and colleagues at the University of Chicago searched for genes under natural selection in Africans, Europeans and East Asians. In each race, some 200 genes showed signals of selection, but without much overlap, suggesting that the populations on each continent were adapting to local challenges.

Another study, by Scott Williamson of Cornell University and colleagues, published in PLoS Genetics this month, found 100 genes under selection in Chinese, African-Americans and European-Americans.
In most cases, the source of selective pressure is unknown. But many genes associated with resistance to disease emerge from the scans, confirming that disease is a powerful selective force. Another category of genes under selective pressure covers those involved in metabolism, suggesting that people were responding to changes in diet, perhaps associated with the switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
(the article is continued at the original source)