Lots of new studies being published, and ignored by the MSM, that underline just how much we do not know about our environment and the weather, much to the chagrin of the global warming zealots. Nature writes about a new study that questions the holes in the ozone layer:
As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.
Long-lived chloride compounds from anthropogenic emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are the main cause of worrying seasonal ozone losses in both hemispheres. In 1985, researchers discovered a hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic, after atmospheric chloride levels built up. The Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1987 and ratified two years later, stopped the production and consumption of most ozone-destroying chemicals. But many will linger on in the atmosphere for decades to come. How and on what timescales they will break down depend on the molecules’ ultraviolet absorption spectrum (the wavelength of light a molecule can absorb), as the energy for the process comes from sunlight. Molecules break down and react at different speeds according to the wavelength available and the temperature, both of which are factored into the protocol.
So Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere – almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.
"This must have far-reaching consequences," Rex says. "If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being." What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.
~~~"Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart," says John Crowley, an ozone researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.
This one questions the studies done that reconstructs temperatures from the past:
In 2006, an article appeared in Science magazine reconstructing the temperature of the Northern Hemisphere back to 800 AD based on 14 smoothed and normalized temperature proxies (e.g., tree ring records). Osborn and Briffa proclaimed at the time that “the 20th century is the most anomalous interval in the entire analysis period, with highly significant occurrences of positive anomalies and positive extremes in the proxy records.” Obviously, concluding that the Northern Hemisphere has entered a period of unprecedented warmth is sure to make the news, and indeed, Osborn and Briffa’s work was carried in papers throughout the world and was loudly trumpeted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that publishes the journal Science.
A recent issue of Science contains an article not likely to receive any press coverage at all. Gerd Bürger of Berlin’s Institut für Meteorologie decided to revisit the work of Osborn and Briffa, and his results raise serious questions about the claim that the 20th century has been unusually warm. Bürger argues that Osborn and Briffa did not apply the appropriate statistical tests that link the proxy records to observational data, and as such, Osborn and Briffa did not properly quantify the statistical uncertainties in their analyses. Bürger repeated all analyses with the appropriate adjustments and concluded “As a result, the ‘highly significant’ occurrences of positive anomalies during the 20th century disappear.” Further, he reports that “The 95th percentile is exceeded mostly in the early 20th century, but also about the year 1000.” Needless to say, Gerd Bürger is not going to win any awards from the champions of global warming – nothing is more sacred than 20th century warming!
This one questions the constantly harped on mantra from the environazi’s that CO2 is the be all and end all of global warming:
Carbon dioxide did not cause the end of the last ice age, a new study in Science suggests, contrary to past inferences from ice core records.
"There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change," said USC geologist Lowell Stott, lead author of the study, slated for advance online publication Sept. 27 in Science Express.
"You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages."
Deep-sea temperatures warmed about 1,300 years before the tropical surface ocean and well before the rise in atmospheric CO2, the study found. The finding suggests the rise in greenhouse gas was likely a result of warming and may have accelerated the meltdown — but was not its main cause.
The study does not question the fact that CO2 plays a key role in climate.
"I don’t want anyone to leave thinking that this is evidence that CO2 doesn’t affect climate," Stott cautioned. "It does, but the important point is that CO2 is not the beginning and end of climate change."
And Joel Schwartz refutes a recent study that alleges smog levels will continue to rise in the future:
A couple of weeks ago I showed how the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) worked with a group of university and government scientists to mislead Americans into thinking that ozone smog levels will rise in the future. The report, Heat Advisory: How Global Warming Causes More Bad Air Days, is an update of a report NRDC first released in 2004. Dan Lashof, the Science Director of NRDC’s Climate Center, responded to my critique last Friday. Here are my comments on Lashof’s response. You can scroll to the bottom to see Lashof’s response in its entirety.
The central point of my original critique is that NRDC and its team of outside climate and health scientists misled reporters and the public by claiming that ozone levels will be higher in the 2050s than they are today and that climate change will be the cause of this increase in ozone. I showed that in reality NRDC generated an appearance of increasing ozone by assuming higher emissions of ozone-forming pollutants in the future. Climate change is a minor factor compared to assumptions about ozone-forming emissions, but NRDC and its scientists obscured this fact. Dan Lashof doesn’t dispute this central conclusion, but he does continue NRDC’s history of evasive and misleading claims about Heat Advisory’s assumptions and about future ozone-forming emissions.
Rather than acknowledge that NRDC vastly exaggerated future ozone-forming emissions, Lashof equivocates: “While we would expect significant reductions in precursor emissions over the next decade there are no reliable estimates of precursor emissions extending to the mid 21st century. Thus different research projects use different sets of assumptions to project future precursor emissions. The project on which Heat Advisory is based kept anthropogenic ozone precursor emission levels constant as a way of evaluating the effect that climate change alone could have on ozone concentrations.”
~~~In reality, ozone-forming emissions will continue to drop and most will be eliminated long before 2050. A couple of EPA news items provide additional evidence on how much emissions have dropped and will continue to drop due to existing regulations. First, the NOx Budget Trading Program has eliminated most NOx emissions from industry and power plants during the last few years.
~~~EPA has for years been issuing and implementing a steady stream of regulations like these—regulations that cover everything from power plants, to motor vehicles, industrials facilities, consumer products, and just about everything else you can imagine. These regulations will eliminate the vast majority of remaining air pollution emissions during the next two decades or so.
Environmental groups closely follow, comment on, and lobby over the development, adoption, and implementation of these regulations, and know that they have been eliminating large amounts of air pollution emissions and will continue to do so. Nevertheless, these same environmental groups routinely tell Americans that air pollution is worsening, that the Clean Air Act has been "gutted" and "rolled back", and that emissions are rising.
~~~Despite the large declines in air pollutant emissions during the last few decades and the large declines coming over the next couple of decades, NRDC assumed that ozone-forming emissions in the 2050s will be the same as they were back in 1996 (more than 30% greater than current emissions). When challenged on this, NRDC’s Dan Lashof lamely asserted "While we would expect significant reductions in precursor emissions over the next decade there are no reliable estimates of precursor emissions extending to the mid 21st century."
What does all this mean? It means that no matter what the environazi’s try to tell us, the debate is NOT OVER. 30 years ago it was global cooling, now its global warming. I question the motives of people who try to get people hysterical over a science that is not complete. What is the purpose of this whole cottage industry of global warming zealots trying to sell a incomplete science to the average joe and call it proven fact. Is it to enrich companies that come up with "new and improved" energy sources? Is it to get more grants to specific schools and think tanks?
The debate is not over yet these people try to tell us it is.
Somehow I don’t believe they have the planets well being at heart here.
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You’re right, people shouldn’t worry about science. It’s a fools game and anything but 100% certainty and complete consensus should never be accepted. That’s why I don’t get in boats: I know they may fall of the face of the Earth.
Stop being an idiot. Why would you WORRY about science exactly? You study science, read and listen to science, but worry?
You environazi’s listen to one segment of the science (the sky is falling science) but dismiss the science which refutes and/or shows that the debate is not over. Plain and simple.
A minor nit and some more info:
1. Ozone depletion is not in any way related to “global warming”. It is a completely separate issue and has no impact whatsoever on global temperatures nor is it in any way modified by global climate change. The fact is that the “ozone hole” was seen the first time it was looked for. We have no idea how it has existed or changed before 1985 because we never looked at it before then.
2. It turns out that there is some severe bias introduced in “global” temperatures in areas outside of the US. It appears that programs designed to consolidate several different local records in Russia (which covers a very large amount of the Earth’s land surface in the Northern Hemisphere) introduce a “cooling” bias in records before the 1980s and slightly warm temperatures afterward, and in quite a sharp jump. The end result is to make the past look cooler than the actual records indicate and make the present slightly warmer. This introduces and artificial warming “trend” in these data.
More here.
What an unbelievable ignorant.
As in your comments on Che Guevara.
Do you have more of those?
I can’t wait, Curt. Do you wear
the swastika these days?
Oh hell, this is just the latest in a long series of set-backs suffered by the scientific case for anthropogenic global warming.
Problem is, it’s not a scientific debate, it’s a political debate. The noble left is looking, as it eternally does, for some reason to impose their intellectually superior prejudices on the mooing masses.
That’s why evidence that doesn’t fit the preconception is edited out of their consciousness and history, leaving only certainty. When you’re sure, and you’re sure you’re smart, evidence is superfluous.
When talking about global warming, there are a few questions that must be dealt with.
First, is climate warming? The answer, though not definitive yet, is probably yes. We can readily see some evidence of that happening.
The Earth is a dynamic system, which means it is constantly in flux. Average temperatures are continually moving up or down. Equilibrium would mean that the system was dead. In spite of what Al Gore says, there never has been a time of equilibrium in the system, and that’s a good thing.
Second, if temps are going up, what is the cause? Is it Man’s contribution of greenhouse gases? Conventional wisdom (as portrayed in most of the media, anyway) says ‘yes’. But the truth is that that is a hypothesis, not even a full-fledged theory yet, and certainly not an established scientific fact. Let me explain:
Obviously we can’t put the Earth into a laboratory and experiment on it. Experiments must be done on climate models. Scientists formulate a hypothesis, plug their assumptions into the model, and then see if the model can predict reality.
Even the best climate models don’t predict reality very well. Thirty-five years ago NASA’s James Hansen was designing climate models that showed an ice age was imminent; today he designs models that show the climate is heating up. But the track record of the models is just as dismal. Heck, the Old Farmer’s Almanac does a better job of predicting weather patterns and climate trends. The assumptions that are programmed into the model must be incredibly complex. In fact, more complex than our understanding of climate at this point. It’s really no big surprise that the models don’t have a great track record. It’s not something to feel too bad about or be embarrassed about. It’s just the way it is.
So what’s going on? Why all the hysteria? Some say that the “reality of global warming” is even worse than predicted. Could that be?
That’s one explanation offered by the manmade global warming enthusiasts, but a simpler, scientific, and less hysterical explanation is simply that one or more of the assumptions programmed into the models are incorrect. That just means the hypothesis is flawed. Perhaps something else is going on than the researcher expected. It does not prove or disprove the scientists’ opinions, or establish cause and effect. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes.
But is there a “consensus”?
I love to point out the fact that there are still scientists studying gravity, and that’s one area most people thought was settled long ago, right? Can I see a show of hands? And another thing to think about is that ‘consensus’ really isn’t a scientific term. It’s more of a political term.
So how do we get from a flawed hypothesis to a sound scientific theory? The short answer is: we don’t. The hysteria is due to politics and propaganda.
How do we get from politics and propaganda to an established scientific fact? Again, we don’t, obviously. What we get is more politics and perhaps public policy.
Why? In two words: money and power.
More taxes. Higher prices on energy (and everything that uses energy to make or transport – Have you noticed what has happened to the price of grain, for instance? Stop and think about the effect of higher food and heating costs on the world’s poor.) Control of energy sources. Sales of books, ‘carbon offsets’, and myriad ‘green’ merchandise.
Does it bother the True Believer that Al Gore has 200 million dollars in the bank from selling carbon offsets, which do nothing to actually help the environment? That his prediction of a 10-foot rise in sea level is echoed by not one scientist anywhere? No, of course not. Some people want to be scared. Impending catastophe is supremely sexy.
Does it bother the True Believer to learn that many of the scientists involved in the IPCC project sued to have their names removed from the report?
Does it bother the True Believer that the grandfather of global warming politics is a man named Maurice Strong, a big UN muckety-muck who happens to be a communist, eugenicist and de-populationist? No, of course not. Those same people craving catastrophe probably don’t understand the implications of those words.
It is an understatement to say there is disinformation and subterfuge coming from all sides on this issue. This very piece you are reading could be chock-full of disinformation, so it’s imperative that you do your own research.
An example of disinformation is Greenpeace members protesting, calling for President Bush to sign Kyoto, when they know full well that the US signed Kyoto way back in 1998 under Clinton/Gore! The fact is, Bush CAN’T sign it, since it’s already signed, but that doesn’t stop the protesting and name-calling does it? And apparently not one journalist has noticed the disparity. (and Bush has never mentioned it, either. Go figure.)
That is disinformation in a nutshell. Watch for it.
Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace and current board member of the Sierra Club, once said “If you don’t know an answer, a fact, a statistic, then … make it up on the spot.”
Al Gore once said something similar: “When you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. When you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have neither, holler.”
Carl Amery, a founder of the German green movement, has said “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.” Read that sentence again and let it sink in. It would take a LOT of propaganda and programming to pull that off, wouldn’t it?
Paul Watson again, says “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.” He doesn’t say exactly how he would like to accomplish that, but disposing of 6 billion people would be problematic. Doesn’t he know that rotting corpses give off greenhouse gases?
Lyall Watson (no relation, other than their faith), biologist and author, says that “Cannibalism is a radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.” Yes, he really said that.
I’m sure the majority of environmentalists aren’t this far off their rockers, but these are some of the leaders of the movement. And think again about those higher food and energy costs and billions of poor folks struggling to make ends meet.
Maurice Strong (mentioned above), a senior UN advisor and director of the Temple of Understanding, is a little more laid back: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring about?”
But politics and global evil aside, should we be concerned about climate change? The answer to that is an unqualified ‘maybe’. So wouldn’t it be nice to just let the scientists work without all the propaganda and hysteria?
Bottom line: Don’t let anybody take your money or freedom based on a hypothesis. Real science is not done by a show of hands. Recognize the doomsayers, propagandists, and slanted journalists (and bloggers) for who they are and get on with life.
And think carefully about the people who tell you “the science is settled and it’s time for action”. Please don’t perpetuate the politics and the disinformation at the expense of the science. As Lenin famously pointed out: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”.
Also, don’t twist anything I’ve said to mean that I’m some sort of anti-conservationist. I’m all for conservation (as we all should be), whether we are talking about energy, or species, or habitat, or preserving air or water quality, or other ‘green’ technologies, or whatever. That’s not really what this argument is about. It’s about controlling energy use, and robbing people to pay for it (okay, TAXING for the ‘progressives’ and other business-as-usual-types) – to create a ‘solution’ to a ‘problem’ that is still in the hypothesis stage scientifically.