Seattle Times: "The truth about global warming"

Seems the CSU folks aren't the only ones who aren't ready to ascribe near term storm intensity to global warming with any certainty, per this LA Times article .<br><br>So what that's saying is that scientists are acknowledging that they can't be certain what's causing the near term storm intensity increases. On a related note, though, many scientists do predict an increase in storm intensity would be one effect of an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere .<br><br>So it nets out to suggest it's hard to say precisely what is causing current events, and I suspect that will be true for a long time. Our ancestors may finally know for sure well after some big changes have happened. Or not.

Study Shows Forests Thrive With Increased Carbon Dioxide Levels<br><br>Forest productivity may be significantly greater in an atmosphere enriched with carbon dioxide, according to findings released today that challenge recent reports that question the importance of carbon dioxide fertilization.<br><br>The study, funded primarily the DOE's Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research and the National Science Foundation, was performed by researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and 10 other institutions in the United States and Europe. Their work revealed a strong relationship between productivity of forest plots in the current atmosphere and productivity in plots experimentally enriched with carbon dioxide.<br><br>

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<br><br>co2 (aka- the evil Global Warming Gasses) is not all bad.

So if we can increase C02 to the trees w/o increasing temperatures beyond their range and w/o diminishing rain/snowfall beneath their requirements, then forests shall thrive! Gosh that's comforting news.

Something I have not seen anyone mention is Pacific Decadal Oscillation -PDO. Here is a link explaining a little about it:

jisao.washington.edu/pdo/

Very interesting theory that shows the Pacific goes through warm and cool periods that roughly last 30-years. Some scientist studying this oscillation beleive that the Pacific is moving from a warm to a cool period and predict colder winters with more precip...bring it on!

The Atlantic also goes through a similar process and recently it has been reported that the northern Atlantic is cooling, possible due to the polar ice caps melting, and some scientists point to this as a reason behind the harsh winter that much of northern Europe experienced this year....who knows, still too early to tell but some are predicting another "little Ice Age".....bring that on too!1

There is a very interesting theory that North America has largely been a beer drinking continent (until recently) due to the little ice age. Before the little ice age most of Europe drank wine. It is thought that some of the best grapes and wine were grown and produced in England which infuriated the French at the time. Then the little ice age hit and northern Europe had to abandon wine because the grape could not withstand the harsh climate and so began brewing beer which comes from grain and is a heartier crop in harsher climates. The colonization of North America was largey a result of Northern Europeans escaping the harsh climate of the little ice age which made food production and life in general very difficult. With them they brought their beer.

It is intersting that in present times wine production has boomed in North America with wine being produced in places like Oregon, Washington, BC, and New York. The growth of the industry and the popularity of wine has generally coincied with the warming of our climate.

There has been a lot of discussion on this thread about the politcal perpectives on this issue. In my view what it comes down to is economics. Oil is the most versitile and most abundant fuel ever discovered and we will continue to burn it until it is no longer economically viable to do so. We are only now just in the early stages of developing alternate energy and the reason it is happening is because of economics. Wind energy is something that has been in the local news a lot lately and it is an industry I'm deeply involved in right now. With the current tax credits given to wind developers its cost of generation is competative with gas and coal so utiities are buying wind because it makes sense economically. If a gigantic natual gas field gets discovered and brings the price of natural gas generation down you will see more natural gas power plants built. My point is that when it is no longer econmomically viable to put all sorts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is the point at which we will change and we are now in the infancy of this process with the establishment of the CO2 trading markets. In many cases companies are realizing that it makes economic sense to make changes in their buisness models.

I used to get all worked up about global warming but to me it's just too complex to make a determination as to what the cause is. We had a great snow year this year and I have had so much good skiing that I just feel blessed. But has anyone noticed that the snow-line, the elevation at which the snowpack starts is actually pretty high this year? I don't know about all of you but I'm hoping for that swing in the PDO. If it lasts 30-years that will get me to Age 70 which will be good enough.

I ran across this interesting commentary on the Kyoto Protocol.  Admittedly, the article was written by a rabble rouser, not a scientist, but interesting that someone is challenging the common wisdom on global warming.  Even though this article is not supported with footnotes, and cites, neither are the junk articles in the magazines and newspapers.  So the crap can fly in both directions. 


www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,185171,00.html

Kyoto's Quiet Anniversary

Thursday , February 16, 2006

By Steven Milloy
www.junkscience.com/

 
Global warming alarmists marked the Kyoto Protocol’s first anniversary in subdued fashion this week. The treaty so far has been a failure and its future doesn’t appear much brighter.

As tallied up at JunkScience.com courtesy of the global warmers’ own data, Kyoto is estimated to have cost about $150 billion so far, while only hypothetically reducing the average global temperature by 0.0015 degrees Centigrade.

At that rate, it would take 667 years and cost $100 trillion to hypothetically avert just 1 degree Centigrade of global warming.

But such infinitesimal estimates of averted global warming would only apply, of course, if Kyoto’s signatories actually complied with its provisions. They are finding it virtually impossible to even do that.

Kyoto obligates the European Union to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8 percent from 1990-levels by 2012. But the European Environmental Agency projects that EU greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 will be 7 percent above the 1990 levels.

The Russian news agency Novosti took a charitably long-term view of Kyoto noting, “Many people question the effect of the measures outlined by the Kyoto Protocol on the climate. Today, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is approximately 370 PPM (units of these gases per million units of the air).

"In 2012, as compared with the base year of 1990, their concentration will increase by 18 PPM, if the Kyoto measures are not carried out, or by 16-17 PPM, if they are implemented. It transpires that the effect of these measures on the climate is a mere 1-2 PPM. This fact allows the critics of the Kyoto Protocol to describe it as ineffective. But experts maintain that a reduction by even 1 PPM is quite good, considering that the task of stabilizing greenhouse emissions in the atmosphere has been set for a hundred years, not for five.”

I doubt that world leaders, however, will perpetually sacrifice 2 percent or more of their nations’ annual economic growth, year after year, for no tangible benefits.

While Kyoto’s failure may be news to the public, it’s not to former vice president and global-warmer-in-chief Al Gore, who smugly admitted on Jan. 4 at a political gathering that included yours truly, “Did we think Kyoto would work when we signed it [in 1997]?... Hell no!”

Gore explained that the actual point of Kyoto was to demonstrate that international support could be mustered for action on the environment – quite an expensive political exercise.

A year into Kyoto, global warmers seem to be focusing more on melodrama than science.

There’s NASA scientist Jim Hansen’s claim, first reported in the New York Times, that the agency is trying to “silence” him by asking to preview his lectures, papers and Internet postings before he goes public. To Hansen, this “seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States.”

Hyperbole aside, Hansen cannot credibly claim to have been censored on global warming. He first sounded the climate alarm in 1988 congressional testimony and has since been quite outspoken on the topic. He gives more speeches than the agency’s head, according to NASA.

Hansen’s problem isn’t that anyone is trying to silence him; it’s that he has a track record of being wrong – for example, overestimating 1990s warming by 200 percent.

Then there’s the new Al Gore movie – a documentary production of his global warming lecture and slide show – that was recently screened at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie’s promotional material features penguins trekking as in the hit documentary “March of the Penguins” – but across a desert rather than Antarctic ice.

To those unfamiliar with the global warming controversy, Gore’s one-sided movie may appear compelling. Pictures of melting glaciers, ominous temperature graphs and cartoons for the science-impaired – one features Mister Sunbeam trapped by the Greenhouse Gas bullies – give the impression that the planet is doomed unless we cede control to global warming alarmists.

“We are recklessly, mindlessly destroying the Earth. As Lincoln said, ‘We must disenthrall ourselves. And then we will save our country.’ And our planet,” Gore said in a statement.

“Reckless” and “mindless” are certainly some of the terms that occurred to me after watching Gore’s slide show. Some glaciers are receding, but others (omitted from his slides) are advancing. No one knows what causes glaciers to advance and retreat – the physics are complex and much more is involved than simply air temperature.

University of Virginia climatologist Pat Michaels points out, for example, that, “Glaciers [in Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska] have been receding ever since John Muir first publicized them in the 19th century” – well before the advent of significant manmade greenhouse gas emissions.

Gore’s graphs imply that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide historically have preceded increases in global temperature. But a 2005 study in the journal Science reported that higher temperatures may actually have preceded increased carbon dioxide levels in the past – the opposite of the global warming hypothesis.

Were that fact mentioned in Al Gore’s movie, the Kyoto Protocol might not survive its second anniversary.


Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience .com and CSRWatch .com. He is a junk science expert, an advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Another global warming thread is just about dead on TAY:

Last night on NOVA there was a remarkable show on GLOBAL DIMMING, which is even more scary than global warming.  There seems to be evidence that many airborne pollutants have actually been altering weather patterns and helping to mask the effects of global warming.  The catch 22 is that as we clean up air pollution we have actually been accelerating global warming.

check this out from a BBC website on Global Dimming:

Burning of fossil fuels is creating two effectsTwo effects of fossil fuel productions are:

Greenhouse gases that cause global warming
By-products which are pollutants that cause global dimming
What is global dimming?Fossil fuel use, as well as producing greenhouse gases, creates other by-products. These by-products are also pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, soot, and ash. These pollutants however, also change the properties of clouds.

Clouds are formed when water droplets are seeded by air-borne particles, such as pollen. Polluted air results in clouds with larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds. This then makes those clouds more reflexsive. More of the sun's heat and energy is therefore reflected back into space.

This reduction of heat reaching the earth is known as Global Dimming.

Impacts of global dimming: millions already killed by it?Global warming results from the greenhouse effect caused by, amongst other things, excessive amounts of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. It would seem then, that the other by-products which cause global dimming may be an ironic saviour.

A deeper look at this, however, shows that unfortunately this is not the case.

Health and environmental effects
The pollutants that lead to global dimming also lead to various human and environmental problems, such as smog, respiratory problems, and acid rain.

The impacts of global dimming itself, however, can be devastating.

Millions from Famines in the Sahel in the 70s and 80s
The death toll that global dimming may have already caused is thought to be massive.

Climatologists studying this phenomenon believe that the reflection of heat have made waters in the northern hemisphere cooler. As a result, less rain has formed in key areas and crucial rainfall has failed to arrive over the Sahel in Northern Africa.

In the 1970s and 1980s, massive famines were caused by failed rains which climatologists had never quite understood why they had failed.

The answers that global dimming models seemed to provide, the documentary noted, has led to a chilling conclusion: “what came out of our exhaust pipes and power stations [from Europe and North America] contributed to the deaths of a million people in Africa, and afflicted 50 million more” with hunger and starvation.

Billions are likely to be affected in Asia from similar effects
Scientists said that the impact of global dimming might not be in the millions, but billions. The Asian monsoons bring rainfall to half the world's population. If this air pollution and global dimming has a detrimental impact on the Asian monsoons some 3 billion people could be affected.

As well as fossil fuel burning, contrails is another source
Contrails (the vapour from planes flying high in the sky) were seen as another significant cause of heat reflection.

During the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, all commercial flights were grounded for the next three days.

This allowed climate scientists to look at the effect on the climate when there were no contrails and no heat reflection.

What scientists found was that the temperature rose by some 1 degree centigrade in that period of 3 days.

Global Dimming is hiding the true power of Global WarmingThe above impacts of global dimming have led to fears that global dimming has been hiding the true power of global warming.

Currently, most climate change models predict a 5 degrees increase in temperature over the next century, which is already considered extremely grave. However, global dimming has led to an underestimation of the power of global warming.

Addressing global dimming only will lead to massive global warming
Global dimming can be dealt with by cleaning up emissions.

However, if global dimming problems are only addressed, then the effects of global warming will increase even more. This may be what happened to Europe in 2003.

In Europe, various measures have been taken in recent years to clean up the emissions to reduce pollutants that create smog and other problems, but without reducing the greenhouse gas emissions in parallel. This seems to have had a few effects:

This may have already lessened the severity of droughts and failed rains in the Sahel.
However, it seems that it may have caused, or contributed to, the European heat wave in 2003 that killed thousands in France, saw forest fires in Portugal, and caused many other problems throughout the continent.
The documentary noted that the impacts of addressing global dimming only would increase global warming more rapidly. Irreversible damage would be only about 30 years away. Global level impacts would include:

The melting of ice in Greenland, which would lead to more rising sea levels. This in turn would impact many of our major world cities
Drying tropical rain forests would increase the risk of burning. This would release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further increasing global warming effects. (Some countries have pushed for using “carbon sinks” to count as part of their emission targets. This has already been controversial because these store carbon dioxide that can be released into the atmosphere when burnt. Global dimming worries increase these concerns even more.)
These and other effects could combine to lead to an increase of 10 degrees centigrade in temperature over the next 100 years, not the standard 5 degrees which most models currently predict.

This would be a more rapid warming than any other time in history, the documentary noted. With such an increase,

Vegetation will die off even more quickly
Soil erosion will increase and food production will fail
A Sahara type of climate could be possible in places such as England, while other parts of the world would fare even worse.
Such an increase in temperature would also release one of the biggest stores of greenhouse gases on earth, methane hydrate, currently contained at the bottom of the earth's oceans and known to destabilize with warming. This gas is eight times stronger than carbon dioxide in its greenhouse effect. As the documentary also added, due to the sheer amounts that would be released, by this time, whatever we would try to curb emissions, it would be too late.
“This is not a prediction,” the documentary said, “it is a warning of what will happen if we clean up the pollution while doing nothing about greenhouse gases.”

Root causes of global warming also must be addressedIf we were to use global dimming pollutants to stave off the effects of global warming, we would still face many problems, such as:

Human health problems from the soot/smog
Environmental problems such as acid rain
Ecological problems such as changes in rainfall patterns (as the Ethiopian famine example above reminds us) which can kill millions, if not billions.
Climatologists are stressing that the roots of both global dimming causing pollutants and global warming causing greenhouse gases have to be dealt with together and soon.

We may have to change our way of life, the documentary warned. While this has been a message for over 20 years, as part of the climate change concerns, little has actually been done. “Rapidly,” the documentary concluded, “we are running out of time.”