Ecoterrorism at work
Friday's Dodge City Daily Global editorial column ran an op-ed piece on "Global Warming" attributed to the Hays Daily News with no author's name given. After reading it, I saw why the author declined to be identified. It was fraught with error, misinformation, innuendo, and personal agenda.
The writer begins with the widely accepted fact that the earth's atmosphere is undergoing warming and provides a very short paragraph of actual "numbers" to "prove" that global warming is occurring when, in fact, no one with any knowledge about the earth-atmosphere ecosystem today contests that it is occurring.
The writer claims that Scientists (What scientists? Climatologists? Physicists? Medical researchers?) predict that global temperatures (What "global temperature"? Average daily? Average Annual? Average decadal?) will rise by 2 to 10 degrees (Degrees what? F or C?) by the end of this century.
This is pure environment terrorism meant only to scare you into swallowing the writers agenda which appears to be: Bush is bad. Big business is bad. Let's do some feel good environmental stuff even if we don't know what it will do to the earth's climate. Furthermore, no source for these "numbers" is given leaving us to assume they are correct based upon the fact that anyone able to write an op-ed on global warming must, per force, be an expert in the field.
At this point the writer obviously feels that no one needs to question exactly "why" global warming is occurring. Instead, this pundit immediately leaps to the conclusion that the whole problem is somehow the fault of corporate greed, bureaucratic incompetence, and the Bush administration.
As an atmospheric scientist of nearly 40 years, let me set the record straight. Is global warming occurring? Yes. Is it caused by greenhouse gasses like carbondioxide (only one of the greenhouse gasses involved, by the way)? Yes. Is there irrefutable evidence that humans are causing the problem. No.
Consider the following points from the National Center for Policy Analysis.
A Gallup poll found that only 17 percent of the members of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Society think that the warming of the 20th century has been a result of greenhouse gas emissions - principally CO2 from burning fossil fuels.
Only 13 percent of the scientists responding to a survey conducted by the environmental organization Greenpeace believe catastrophic climate change will result from continuing current patterns of energy use.
More than 100 noted scientists, including the former president of the National Academy of Sciences, signed a letter declaring that costly actions to reduce greenhouse gases are not justified by the best available evidence.
Here's the SOURCE for this information. I'll let you read it and decide for yourself.
There are two more things you should think about insofar as "global warming" is concerned.
Paleoclimatologists are quick to point out that the earth's climate is a long term affair while the alarm over global warming is based entirely on extremely short term data sets. That is to say, there have been other periods of both global warming and global cooling throughout the existence of the earth's climate. In short, there were periods of global warming in between each of the major ice ages. How do we know that we aren't just experiencing another of these? The answer is, we don't - so don't panic.
Finally, if we are going to blame global warming on carbondioxide emissions, we had better have another think. Mark Bahner has posted an excellent website that covers the global warming topic quite nicely. Go and look at
This AUTHOR is happy to provide additional supporting data and research to anyone who is seriously interested in the topic. As always, name callers and crack-pots will be ignored.
posted by VOF Johnson at Sunday, June 19, 2005
2 Comments:
It is interesting to note that toward the end of the last stadial (Pinedale), meltwaters from the Laurentide ice sheet began flowing down the St. Lawrence into the north Atlantic as opposed to down the Missouri/Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico. The massive amounts of freshwater influx into the north Atlantic severely disrupted the thermohaline structure of this region, and consequently the "global oceanic conveyor belt" -- including the Gulf Stream -- was disrupted for a millenium. The result of the global warming that precipitated the freshwater surge into the north Atlantic? The "younger dryas", a rather rapid period of global cooling that saw a return to stadial conditions in Europe.
Global warming is a fact. Paleoclimatological records suggest that the Earth is nearly as cold as it was during "icebox Earth" events in the Cambrian and again in the Permian. It wasn't that long ago, geologically, that mangrove swamps and crocodiles thrived in Great Britian! The question is whether there is an anthropomorphic contribution to global warming.
That's an easy one to answer. On a nice summer night in Arizona go out to Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. Temperatures there may still be in triple digits after midnight. Get into your air conditioned car and drive north to near the Mogollon Rim. Temperatures may be in the 50s or less. Ah, the heat island! These heat islands are observed everywhere. While some may say that the heat islands bias observations (since observations are made near cities, and anywhere where there is a WalMart a heat island is present) and thus are the true source of "global warming", this argument is specious. Simple thermodynamics, folks -- anytime you dump heat into the atmosphere, you warm the atmosphere. Anytime you dump gases that are opaque to longwave radiation into the atmosphere, you warm the atmosphere.
It's a shame that the Rush Limbaugh's of the world (who, incidentally, commented on global warming on his pulpit last week) fail to understand thermodynamics. While we humans may have a small, and perhaps a minute, contribution to global warming, we do contribute to global warming. Is the threat of rising sea levels and population displacements sufficient to warrant Kyoto-like protocols? No, they are not. We have no control over an inconstant sun or Milankovitch cycles or continental drift or CO2 absorption into the oceans. But does that give us an excuse to dump megatons of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere each day and destroy carbon sinks such as the equatorial rainforests?
It's a pity the politicans responsible for "shaping" scientific policy can't pull their heads out of their collective asses and realize that while Man can adapt to changing climate, Man doesn't need to unnecessarily help climate change. And if Taliban Christianity stopped burning books and liberals in effigy and if talking heads like Limbaugh spoke less and listened more, hell, we'd have another ice age!
While we are both meteorologists, neither Jim nor I are specialists in global climate change research. Our comments might carry more weight than someone without any meteorology background, but they are not so informed as those of the scientific consensus represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). At this point, I'm much more inclined to accept the consensus from the IPCC than to try to dispute it without having done significant research on the subject.
Although "irrefutable evidence" that humans are "causing" the problem is indeed not available, the IPCC concludes that there is now pretty convincing evidence that human-produced greenhouse gas emissions are contributing in a significant way. The physics of how CO2 works as a greenhouse gas are pretty solid, and rising CO2 as a result of human activity is also thoroughly established.
What is said in the media, an example of which has triggered Jim's response, is rarely correct scientifically. Everyone, it seems, has an agenda, so having one does not, by itself, preclude one from saying something. I've had my say at:
http://www.flame.org/~cdoswell/Global_Climate_Change.html
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