Couple good articles for you to peruse about the Global Warming scaremongering going on. The first is by Bill Steigerwald:
We’ve had the official Gospel of Catastrophic Global Climate Change preached at us so often by the mainstream media our pets have it memorized.
All together now: The planet is getting hotter. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. Fragile species are disappearing. Coral reefs are dying. Hurricanes are more powerful. Droughts are more prolonged. Floods and heavy rainstorms are more numerous.
According to Al Gore and a chorus of the planet’s top climate scientists, blame for all of the above — plus every bad, annoying or odd natural event that happens on Earth from now until the Sun implodes — can be pinned with certainty on global warming caused by 200 years of mankind spewing excess CO2 into the air.
But is it really true that New York City will be two-stories deep in ocean water in a century or two?
No one knows. Despite what Professor Gore says, the science of climate change is still far too complex and uncertain for most scientists to understand the present, much less predict the distant future.
It is indeed far too complex for ANYONE to say the "debate is over".
But most people would stop their global worrying if they looked at the big picture and long run. For starters, we are at the tail end of an ice age that began about 40 million years ago. Ice sheets like the one that covered most of the Northern Hemisphere until about 20,000 years ago have come and gone in 40,000- and 100,000-year cycles.
Unless man-spewn greenhouse gases do raise Earth’s temperature and keep it there permanently, or unless Mother Earth fixes her own wobbly axis or smooths out her eccentric orbit around the sun, we have a rendezvous with a future ice age no matter how many carbon taxes we implement or SUVs we drive.
Also, please stop worrying about the planet’s 67,000-plus glaciers melting. Glaciers have retreated and advanced for eons. If every glacier not on Greenland or Antarctica disappeared in 1,000 years — and no one is saying they will — sea level would rise about 18 inches. By the way, about 90 percent of all of Earth’s ice is in Antarctica — and it’s not shrinking.
But those poor widdle polar bears….oh what will they do?
The second article is by J.R. Dunn writing about a few foreign glaciologists:
Dr. V.K. Raina is a leading Indian glaciologist, a scientist who has devoted half a century to the glaciers of the Himalayas, the man to see concerning South Asian glacier studies. Which raises the question of why no one has come around to see him.
Dr. Raina undercuts contentions by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers have retreated due to global warming.
"Claims of global warming causing glacial melt in the Himalayas are based on wrong assumptions," he says.
These include the fact that American and European glaciers are situated at much lower altitudes, and are less dusty, which, if my truncated scientific education isn’t leading me wrong, suggests that they would melt much less quickly than Himalayan glaciers. Raina’s statements imply that observations at only a handful of sites are being applied worldwide without any kind of local confirmation, a serious lapse of scientific procedure, if true.
Like any scientist anywhere, Raina spends much of the interview bemoaning levels of funding. But he has a point – of the 9,575 glaciers in India, only fifty, or a little over half of one percent, are currently under study. One somehow expects more, particularly considering all the rhetoric about glaciers being a key element in the case for global warming.
Dr. Raina is backed up by at least two other glaciologists, Dr. R.K. Ganjoo, director of a glacial study center, and geologist M.N. Koul. Neither sees any evidence of glacial retreat in any of the sites they’ve studied.
Can you hear the cries yet? "We are causing the demise of our world". Myth’s abound, and much of our MSM, and politicians, fall for it hook, line and sinker. Well, maybe they are not falling for it rather then believing in something they can profit from Lets take a look at a few of those myths:
MYTH 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.
FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased. The RATE of growth during this period has also increased from about 0.2% per year to the present rate of about 0.4% per year,which growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years. However, there is no proof that CO2 is the main driver of global warming. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth’s oceans expel more CO2 as a result.
MYTH 5: Computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming.
FACT: Computer models can be made to "verify" anything by changing some of the 5 million input parameters or any of a multitude of negative and positive feedbacks in the program used.. They do not "prove" anything. Also, computer models predicting global warming are incapable of properly including the effects of the sun, cosmic rays and the clouds. The sun is a major cause of temperature variation on the earth surface as its received radiation changes all the time, This happens largely in cyclical fashion. The number and the lengths in time of sunspots can be correlated very closely with average temperatures on earth, e.g. the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. Varying intensity of solar heat radiation affects the surface temperature of the oceans and the currents. Warmer ocean water expels gases, some of which are CO2. Solar radiation interferes with the cosmic ray flux, thus influencing the amount ionized nuclei which control cloud cover.
MYTH 6: The UN proved that man–made CO2 causes global warming.
FACT: In a 1996 report by the UN on global warming, two statements were deleted from the final draft. Here they are:
1) “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases.”
2) “No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to man–made causes”
To the present day there is still no scientific proof that man-made CO2 causes significant global warming.
But hey, all those scientists who disagree with the scaremongers are just puppets for the oil companies right?
We need to take a deep breath. Acknowledge that the Kyoto Protocol and proposed "climate protection" laws will not stabilize the climate, even if CO2 is to blame. And recognize that there are reasons more people now support climate "consensus" — other than concern over climate disasters created by deficient computer models and Hollywood special effects.
In accusing ExxonMobil of giving "more than $19 million since the late 1990s" to public policy institutes that promote climate holocaust "denial," Senate Inquisitors Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller slandered both the donor and recipients. Moreover, this is less than half of what Pew Charitable Trusts and allied foundations contributed to the Pew Center on Climate Change alone over the same period.
It’s a pittance compared to what U.S. environmental groups spent propagating climate chaos scares. It amounts to 30 cents for every $1,000 the United States, European Union and United Nations spent since 1993 (some $80 billion in all) on global warming catastrophe research. And it ignores the fact Exxon’s grants also supported malaria control, Third World economic development and other efforts.
And we get to the crux of the matter. The scaremongering is being done by people who have an obvious political agenda. It’s well known that if a scientist agrees with the political groups philosophy they stand a much better chance of getting the billions upon billions spent by the US every year on global warming. Think that may cause someone to spin their research a certain way?
Activists get money from those they scare the bejesus out of and in so doing their bills and paychecks get paid so they too can buy gas for their SUV and corporate jets.
But I have a solution
See author page
As if they myths don’t keep on multiplying, Al Gore is going to become a legend in his own mind (though he probably already has reached that status and among those of the fawning left that believes this nonsense). The University of Minnesota is considering issuing him an honorary doctorate for climatology work.
Funny thing is, most of the folks pushing the global warming meme are not climatologists and haven’t the foggiest clue about the science involved – Gore included.
Curt – Glad you liked the ‘BreathholdCat’ image, above. You can find that image, as well as others relating to the general topic of ‘global warming’, at http://www.seadogbytes.com.
Please do not hesitate to use any others there, which you happen to like, to help ‘educate’ others. A link to your blog has been added to the Seadog Bytes main page. A reciprocal addition of ‘Seadog Bytes’ to your blogroll would certainly be appreciated.
Thank you for your continuing efforts to shine a bright light upon those who shamelessly abuse ‘science’ for their own political purposes.