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ICECAP in the News
Sep 27, 2011
Expert: Cold winters “a consequence of global warming”

Nostradamus of the North

Weather forecastera are predicting another cold winter. But believers in global warming caused by humans need not despair. Physical Oceanographer Tom Rippeth of Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences “knows” that it is all “a consequence of global warming”:

“Whilst at first sight the recent spate of cold winters might be interpreted as not fitting the picture of a warming planet, they do in fact appear to be a consequence of global warming”

The secrets behind the new findings are - you guessed it - “complex computer models”:

“Using complex computer models scientists have found that, as the ice cap over the ocean disappeared, this allows the heat of the relatively warm seawater (0 degrees C) to escape into the much colder atmosphere above, creating an area of high pressure surrounded by clockwise-moving winds that sweep down from the Arctic over northern Europe.”

“The result here in the UK is that instead of our normal winter conditions, which are dominated by warm and wet winds blowing in off the Atlantic, we experience much colder winds coming in from the North and the East.”

Read the entire article here

PS

The climate alarmists really know how make it easy for themselves: Whatever happens, it is always a result of global warming. No wonder there has been an huge erosion of credibility for the warmist type of climate science.

Icecap Note: Ah then since cold in winter kills more people than heat in summer, global warming would be a good thing.

By the ay the winters are cooling in the United States the last decade at a rather significant rate (for the US as a whole 4.13F cooling in the last decade)

image
Enlarged.

Sep 21, 2011
Claims that the deep oceans absorb the missing heat are an admission that temperatures have stalled

Peter Foster

A study from the Boulder, Colo.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) claims to have found all that missing heat from global warming’s “lost decade” It’s lurking in Davy Jones’s locker.

According to official science, global temperatures were meant to rise this century in line with increasing levels of man-made carbon dioxide, but didn’t. Now the puzzle has allegedly been solved: the heat is more than 300 metres below the world’s oceans, where it appears conveniently safe from physical verification.

According to the study’s official press release “deep oceans may absorb enough heat at times to flatten the rate of global warming for periods of as long as a decade - even in the midst of longer-term warming.”

Note “may” and “at times.” Note also how “periods as long as a decade” matches nicely with the (most recent) period of no warming that has to be explained (away).

The report, which claims that we should be prepared for several similar periods of non-warming in the coming century, “even as the trend toward overall warming continues,” is revealing on several counts. It amounts to a reluctant admission that global temperatures have indeed stalled. This fact has so far either been denied, ignored or buried beneath the claim that the past decade was still the hottest in the past 100 years (even if not by much).

Also, this newly identified mechanism, or at least hypothesis - by which greater depths heat up faster than the ocean surface - should, whatever its merits, confirm that climate science is far from “settled.” This comes on top of recent intense debate over the role of the Sun and clouds in Earth’s climate.

Meanwhile the suspicion that politics continues to rule science is aroused by the identity of one of the authors of the NCAR study, Kevin Trenberth. Followers of the Climategate scandal - in which a series of internal emails to and from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia clearly demonstrated that research results had been falsified and peer-review perverted - may remember Dr. Trenberth’s 2009 lament that: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t....Our observing system is inadequate.”

Note that Dr. Trenberth doesn’t seem to countenance the possibility that the whole anthropogenic thesis - that the climate is driven by man-made industrial emissions - might be wrong. It is the absence of the real world to follow the models that is the alleged “travesty.”

Dr. Trenberth, it seems, has now found the explanation he needs in the NCAR study, but it doesn’t come from advances in the “observing system.” There is major controversy over measurement of surface temperatures - with monitoring stations being found near heat ducts and on hot tarmac - so you can imagine how difficult it would be to track ocean temperatures below 300 meters. The conclusion that the heat has been deep-sixed comes entirely from computer models.

According to the report, “simulations ... indicated that temperatures would rise by several degrees during this century. But each simulation also showed periods in which temperatures would stabilize for about a decade before climbing again.” Apparently, the claim that the deep ocean is warming faster than the upper ocean is explained by the fact that “surface waters converge to push heat into deeper oceanic layers.”

Interesting hypothesis, but it should be remembered that there is another aspect of Dr. Trenberth’s record that casts an even longer shadow not just over his objectivity but that of all official climate science. That revolves around the resignation from the IPCC in 2005 of hurricane expert Chris Landsea. Dr. Landsea quit because of flagrant misrepresentation of hurricane science by Dr. Trenberth, with the apparent backing of the IPCC’s highest authorities.

Dr. Landsea had been asked by Dr. Trenberth, an IPCC “Lead Author,” to write a section on Atlantic hurricanes for the Fourth Assessment Report. Shortly afterwards, Dr. Landsea was “perplexed” to see that Dr. Trenberth was to participate in a press conference to peddle the notion that global warming was “likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity.” Dr. Landsea noted that none of those participating were hurricane experts. Moreover, their alarmist conclusions - which were widely reported - clashed with the fact that no reliable, long-term upward trend in hurricane activity had been identified. Nor did Dr. Landsea and other experts project that global warming’s impact on hurricane activity would be significant.

When Dr. Landsea took his concerns to the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, Mr. Pachauri tried to brush him off by suggesting that Dr. Trenberth was somehow speaking in a personal capacity, and/or that he had been misquoted by the media. Neither claim was true. Dr. Landsea wrote in his letter of resignation, “It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming.” The perception that Dr. Trenberth was speaking for the IPCC could, in Dr. Landsea’s view, only undermine the institution’s credibility. Dr. Landsea concluded that “Because of Dr. Trenberth’s pronouncements, the IPCC process ... has been subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost.”

Dr. Landsea’s complaints were swamped by Hurricane Katrina.

This latest study may thus have resolved Dr. Trenberth’s “travesty,” at least to his own satisfaction, but the travesty of the IPCC process - and the economic policy destruction for which it provides the justification - remains outstanding.

Sep 19, 2011
New paper shows clouds have a large negative-feedback cooling effect

Hockey Schtick

A paper published last week in the journal Meteorological Applications undermines a key assumption of the theory of man-made global warming, finding that the cooling effect of clouds far outweighs a supposed ‘greenhouse’ warming effect. Alarmists claim clouds have an overall ‘positive-feedback’ warming effect upon climate due to ‘back-radiation’ of the ‘greenhouse’ gas water vapor. This new paper based on satellite measurements finds instead that clouds have a large net cooling effect by blocking solar radiation and increasing radiative cooling outside the tropics. The cooling effect is found to be -21 Watts per meter squared, more than 17 times the supposed warming effect from a doubling of CO2 concentrations [1.2 W/m2]. Another key assumption of the AGW theory topples in the face of real-world data showing the net feedback from clouds is strongly negative.

image

Combining satellite data and models to estimate cloud radiative effect at the surface and in the atmosphere

Richard P. Allan

Abstract: Satellite measurements and numerical forecast model reanalysis data are used to compute an updated estimate of the cloud radiative effect on the global multi-annual mean radiative energy budget of the atmosphere and surface. The cloud radiative cooling effect through reflection of short wave radiation dominates over the long wave heating effect, resulting in a net cooling of the climate system of -21 Wm-2. The short wave radiative effect of cloud is primarily manifest as a reduction in the solar radiation absorbed at the surface of -53 Wm-2. Clouds impact long wave radiation by heating the moist tropical atmosphere (up to around 40 Wm-2 for global annual means) while enhancing the radiative cooling of the atmosphere over other regions, in particular higher latitudes and sub-tropical marine stratocumulus regimes. While clouds act to cool the climate system during the daytime, the cloud greenhouse effect heats the climate system at night. The influence of cloud radiative effect on determining cloud feedbacks and changes in the water cycle are discussed.

This is sharp contrast to the claims of Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M here but is in good agreement with Spencer and Braswell

Sep 16, 2011
Riding to the Defense of Climate Models

World Climate Report

As the observed rate of rise in the global average temperature continues to be much less than climate models project, there are a growing number of knights in shining armor, riding to the rescue of the damsel in distress (the damsel, of course, being the climate models). The rescue attempt generally employs two strategies, namely that 1) there is a bunch of stuff that has going on that the models couldn’t possibly have known about (so it is unfair to hold this against them), and 2) the climate models aren’t really doing that badly anyway.

The list of things proffered that the models couldn’t have known about that have led to slower-than-expected warming over the past 10-15 years includes declines in solar radiation, declines in stratospheric water vapor, increases in stratospheric aerosols, increases in tropospheric aerosols, the timing of El Nino/La Nina cycles, the timing of multi-decadal ocean circulation oscillations, and probably ultimately, the kitchen sink followed by the commode. What’s interesting is that the white knights never really mention these very same influences when they are acting in the opposite sense - that is, when they are acting to speed up the warming (which many were during the 1990s). But now that warming has considerably slowed, these mechanisms seem to have taken on cosmic significance.

What also seems to be conveniently overlooked in the list are changes that the models couldn’t have known about that are currently acting to enhance the observed warming in recent years - these include the recovery from the effects of Pinatubo and the reduction in summer Arctic sea ice (both of these mechanisms are explained in detail in our World Climate Report posts here and here).

But even while raising these excuses, the models’ champions are claiming success nonetheless. Nowhere better is this epitomized than in a forthcoming paper by Ben Santer and a long list of colleagues. Santer et al. have used a familiar procedure (familiar to us at least since we have oft-presented similar work, see here and here for example) to try to demonstrate that the observed trends over different timescales fall comfortably within the range of model expectations. Setting aside some methodological differences of opinion that we have with the analysis, there are still some interesting results to be found.

For instance, Figure 1 taken from the new Santer et al. paper, shows the average of the observed trend set against the distribution of model trends (by the way, this is not really an apples-to-apples comparison; more on this at a later date) for periods of time from 10 to 32 years. The model average projected trend for the lower atmosphere is about 0.25C/decade over all time scales (from 1979 through 2010) (green line in Figure 1). The 5%-95% spread of model projections is in yellow. The various averages of the observed trends over the different time scale (from several different observational datasets) are in red and blue and range from about 0.14 to 0.21C/decade. It is obvious that for the longest trends - which is what people should really care about - that observed temperatures are perilously close to falling beneath the 95% confidence limits of the models (right side of the illustration).

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Figure 1. A comparison between modeled and observed trends in the average temperature of the lower atmosphere, for periods ranging from 10 to 32 years (during the period 1979 through 2010). The yellow is the 5-95 percentile range of individual model projections, the green is the model average, the red and blue are the average of the observations, as compiled by RSS and UAH respectively (adapted from Santer et al., 2011).

Santer et al. take comfort in this Figure that the average of the observed trends falls within the spread of individual model projected trends of similar length - and are further comforted when considering the myriad influences listed above.

We, however, interpret it to show that over all time-scales from 10 to 32 years, the observed trends in the lower atmosphere consistently fall beneath the model projected trends. And that as the length of the observed trend increases, the consistency with the climate model projections decreases.

Just how much more evidence do you need that climate models are projecting too much warming? Give us all the excuses that you want, but if the excuses are real, then they are important drivers of the climate and need to be considered when offering up future climate projections (and quite possibly have an important impact in climate sensitivity determinations).

The fact of the matter is, that the climate projections offered up thus far, have been, and continue to be, sizeable overestimates of reality.

Consequently, we see no compelling reason why we should bank on scenarios for the future that have been produced from the same set of climate models.

At some point, chivalry becomes chicanery.

Reference:

Santer, B.D., et al., 2011. Separating Signal and Noise in Atmospheric Temperature Changes: The Importance of Timescale. Journal of Geophysical Research, in press.

Sep 14, 2011
Mann Acts

By Paul Chesser

Dr. Michael Mann seeks the help of other Climategate players to prevent access to his University of Virginia emails.

Dr. Michael Mann, who under a lesser title at University of Virginia created the famed “hockey stick” chart of 20th-century temperature escalations while leveling the Medieval Warm Period, has enlisted a Climategate Cavalcade of Stars to help him enter as an interested party in a lawsuit in which my organization, American Tradition Institute, seeks to get his old UVA emails and data.

Early this month Mann, who is now at Pennsylvania State University, had his lawyers ask for permission to intervene in ATI’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against UVA. Our request seeks correspondence between Mann and 30-plus other global warming activist scientists who form much of the cabal that created the various predictive reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The university, buttressed by the urgings of groups including ACLU, People for the American Way, Union of Concerned Scientists, and American Association of University Professors, is withholding the meaningful documents ATI seeks. Mann himself said the few thousand documents UVA turned over so far were, more or less, meaningless “boilerplate.” ATI lawyers David Schnare and Chris Horner (also an AmSpec contributor), under a court-order, will be allowed to identify some of the remaining emails the university believes should be kept from public view so as to reduce the number the judge will have to examine, and then ATI and UVA will argue which ones should be disclosed in a court hearing this fall. Dr. Schnare and Mr. Horner are under clear orders that whatever they see they must forever keep confidential unless the court later orders those emails released.

In his attempt to intervene, Mann has called upon friends in academe to bolster his claim that, despite using a taxpayer-funded email system at UVA, that he has the right to prevent the public from seeing what he says are “private” emails. The concept that government-owned, or “public,” does not mean “private” is inconceivable to him (see Exhibit 2, here).

His appeal to the Prince William County court where ATI’s case is being heard included supportive letters (Exhibit 6, here) to UVA president Teresa Sullivan from four of his cohorts in Climategate or hockey stick creation fame. Each pleader registers objection to UVA providing “personal” or “private” emails to ATI under its existing court-authorized agreement. And amusingly enough, each of his four backers has his or her own credibility problems.

The first complainant is Rosanne D’Arrigo, a tree-ring reconstructor at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, who told Sullivan in her letter that “these are personal emails not relevant to valid scientific concerns.” Plucky, D’Arrigo is famous for explaining to the National Academy of Sciences that “cherry picking” is necessary if you want to make cherry pie. And as for what she thought of that “divergence problem” with tree-ring proxies: Pshaw! (see pages 11 & 12).

Next standing behind Mann is Dr. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who when last we checked was still on the outside looking in at the National Academy of Sciences “Fight Club,” despite his Climategate-revealed plans to “beat the crap out of” somewhat skeptical fellow climatologist Pat Michaels. Those sentiments ran afoul of LLNL’s “missions and values” which required their publicly funded employees to show “respect for individuals” and “treat each other with dignity.” He also had erased statements that stated global warming was not attributable to human activities from the eighth chapter of the 1995 UN IPCC report, which also set off the integrity alarms.

Santer also fails to give up the idea that his government-funded email communications belong to taxpayers, not himself. His letter to UVA’s Sullivan (of course) does not note his IPCC deletions as he explains the integrity of his and Mann’s “science,” but it does characterize their emails as “personal.” “Professor Mann’s only ‘transgression’ is that he has performed cutting-edge research in the public and national interest (emphasis mine),” Santer wrote to Sullivan. Yep, that’s “personal” all right!

The third prestigious scientist (just ask him) supporting Mann is Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His Climategate fame is derived from his concern about a “travesty” that “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment,” in addition to his other failed predictions such as future hurricane horrors while administering discipline as one of the scientific journal brown shirts. In writing to Sullivan, Trenberth makes sure she knows how “distinguished” and “prominent” he is while he urges her to hide Mann’s emails from public scrutiny, citing “academic freedom.” We ask, can there be “taxpayer freedom” to opt out of the financing of secretive scientists’ research?

The final alarmist to push for Sullivan to keep Mann’s work under wraps is University of Massachusetts scientist Raymond Bradley, who co-authored the “hockey stick”, which should suffice in explanation of his support for Mann. But just for amusement it’s also noteworthy that Bradley’s letter to Sullivan refers her to his new book “Global Warming and Political Intimidation,” in which he cites Ben Santer as a victim!

But that’s not all. Bradley, so outraged by intrusion on to principles of academic secrecy when exercised by ATI, was unhindered by such sentiments in his own inquiry (with USA Today reporter Dan Vergano) of Professor Edward Wegman at George Mason University, another Virginia state educational institution. Bradley had accused Wegman of plagiarizing his work (more meaningless “boilerplate,” according to Climate Audit, irrelevant to Wegman’s findings) in his 2006 report that exposed statistical problems with Mann’s work. While George Mason investigated his allegation, Bradley violated a confidentiality requirement about forwarding Wegman’s work to third parties. And as Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre has shown, Bradley is selective in who he gets mad at for plagiarism (friends are okay), and of course, self-examination of his own reproduction of others’ work is non-existent.

In his attempt to intervene in the ATI/UVA case, Mann also makes his own plea to Sullivan and the university lawyers. “Allowing the indiscriminate release of these materials will cause damage to reputations and harm principles of academic freedom,” he wrote.

Fortunately neither side—ATI nor UVA—believes in an “indiscriminate” release. But in that one statement Mann provides reason enough for the records about his work and the company he keeps to be made public.

Sep 12, 2011
More Gore Hot Air

IBD

Science: Al Gore’s Current TV will use 24 straight hours of airtime this week to try to convert global warming skeptics. Will he mention a recent report that shows the climate change scare is grossly overblown?

And we also doubt that anyone else connected with the sympathetic media will. The CERN report, which we covered on this page two weeks ago, has been largely ignored by the mainstream press.

Had the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known by its French acronym, CERN) report bolstered the conjecture that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet, the story would have gone above the fold in newspapers and led the network TV news. The tone of the stories would have been dire.

Instead, a report that casts more doubt on the accuracy of the models that the activists and the media use to incite global warming hysteria gets as much attention as a postman’s dog bite.

The CERN report is not a trivial matter. It indicates that the sun’s magnetic field has some impact on creating cloud cover, which has its own effect on temperatures. Cloud cover is a phenomena the computer models that have been predicting global warming have not adequately accounted for.

While the CERN study doesn’t disprove the speculation that fuels the climate change religion, it does show that science still has a long way to go on climate science. It clearly demonstrates that claims saying the science is settled and the debate is over are both exaggerated and premature.

For that sin, the report is relegated to media obscurity.

Meanwhile, Gore will, according to Reuters, “renew his 30-year campaign to convince skeptics of the link between climate change and extreme weather events this week in a 24-hour global multimedia event.”

Subscribe to the IBD Editorials Podcast This don’t-miss hectoring will appear on Current TV - a cable network co-founded by Gore - beginning Wednesday. The Big Brother marathon ends Thursday at 7 p.m. ET with a live broadcast of Gore offering, we imagine, his usual litany of exaggerations.

Read much more here.

Instead of listening to another hour of mistruths as was established in his last production, see some alternatives below. Encourage their use in schools as an alternative to the Gorathon.

See the Heartlands collection of links to stories and videos that show how bankrupt Gore and the alarmists science is here.
Bob Carter 5 part series here.

Also Global warming Swindle 8 part series. Part 1 of 8. Others on the page.

Lord Monckton and Vaclac Klaus in Australia are linked to here followed by Marusek’s list of early extremes.

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“The Changing Climate of Global Warming” - FREE all day Wednesday

Reminder: “The Changing Climate of Global Warming” is screening FREE over the Internet on September 14th

Click on this link anytime on September 14th to watch the Documentary. See the Documentary Trailer. The documentary website. The Facebook Page for the documentary.

Also more dynamic Lord Monckton in Minnesota.

Coleman’s corner - easy to understand video for the non scientist.

Minnesotans for Global Warming classic song

Sep 07, 2011
Goddard: Dessler should have listened to Hansen: C3: Dessler’s shoddy rush job

By Steve Goddard, Real Science

Hansen Says Clouds Are A “Substantial Forcing”

Dessler should have read Hansen’s paper before rushing to press. So should JGR’s editor. He should do the honorable thing and resign like Wagner.

Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications
James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha

Aerosol climate forcing today is inferred to be -1.6 plus/minus 0.3 W/m^2, implying substantial aerosol indirect climate forcing via cloud changes.

http://www.columbia.edu/

Every time I read one of these papers, it strikes me as a bunch of clueless children playing half-assed mathematics games, and trying to make it sound like they know what they are talking about. Their time would be better spent playing WOW or Battlefield 3.

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And C3 makes a case for Trenberth to resign and retire here. And they defend the Spencer work and challenge the data Dessler used:

Spencer Cloud Research Uses IPCC Gold-Standard HadCRUT Data, But New Dessler Study Avoids Gold-Standard Benchmark

Read here. New research published today by Andy Dessler, an IPCC Climategate scientist, appears to have major shortcomings. His new study was greased, like goose leavings, through the peer reviewed process in just a few weeks, which may have contributed to the work’s shoddiness.

Supposedly, Dessler’s new research was to be a refutation of the Spencer and Braswell 2011 study that revealed clouds were likely to be a negative climate feedback. Instead of doing an apple-to-apple comparison though, Dessler chose a different temperature dataset (a non-consensus dataset avoided by the IPCC) than the Spencer research.

Unfortunately, the choice of non-HadCRUT, non-IPCC dataset, reflects the unbridled cherry-picking temptation that the Dessler research fell victim to. If the HadCRUT dataset is the IPCC benchmark that Spencer research followed, then Dessler should have met the scientific challenge by using the same best-of-breed data that the IPCC demands.

It now seems obvious that Dessler knew his research would falter if based on the gold-standard of the IPCC. If this wasn’t the case, why not use the gold-standard?

Even with his cherry-picking of the dataset, Dessler research does not hold up to the statistical scrutiny that Steve McIntyre brings to the table. It didn’t take long for Steve to ascertain that the positive cloud feedback that Dessler claims might not be so “positive.”

“Doing the same regression with 4-month lagged relationships (which both Dessler and SB agree to be more significant than the instantaneous relationship), the sign of the slope is reversed. Whereas Dessler 2010 had reported a slope of 0.54 +- 0.72 w/m2/K, the regression with lagged variables is -0.90 +- 0.95 w/m2/K and has better diagnostics...Given that the even the lagged relationship is weak, I’m reluctant to say that analysis using the methods of Dessler 2010 established a negative feedback, but it does seem to me that they cannot be said to have established the claimed positive feedback...Perhaps the editor of Science will send a written apology to Kevin Trenberth.”

Objectively, if the Dessler rushed peer reviewed research is the best that mainstream climate scientists can deliver against the Spencer and Braswell study, then it’s a case closed. Clouds do appear to be a negative feedback mechanism within the climate system as the Spencer 2011 work suggests.

Sep 03, 2011
Lung disease from carbon dioxide? Stop exhaling

By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger The Star-Ledger

It’s hard to believe the Blue Jersey people are this dumb. Alas, they are!

How many people in New Jersey will die of lung disease because of Chris Christie’s withdrawal from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative consortium?

Does this deep thinker honestly believe that carbon dioxide harms the lungs? Somebody’s got to inform him (or her; I can’t tell from the name) that he’s expelling CO-2 with every breath (40,000 ppm versus 390 ppm in the air) - and therefore poisoning himself.

The great mass of true believers in the carbon cult seem to be under the impression that greenhouse gases are pollutants. Nothing could be further from the truth. Carbon dioxide is essential to life.

All I can say in this guy’s defense is that the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen is just as clueless on scientific matters. In this piece on Rick Perry’s assertions on global warming, Cohen makes the same mistake, conflating actual pollutants which harm lungs with a substance that is emitted by lungs.

“He rejected the notion that it is at least partially a product of industrialization, asserting that “a substantial number of scientists have manipulated data” to make it appear that mankind — our cars, trains, automobiles, not to mention China’s belching steel mills - is the culprit."”

I don’t know if China’s steel mills do indeed “belch,” but if they do what they belch would be conventional pollutants. They would also emit some CO-2, but that CO-2 is no different in its effect on the atmosphere than the CO-2 emitted by dolphins, polar bears, or any of the other creatures the tree-huggers wish to hug.

In accusing Perry of ignorance on the issue, Cohen goes on to show he make the same mistake as that Blue Jersey blogger:

Perry’s quaint belief in the utter innocence of mankind when it comes to polluting our precious atmosphere might seem like an innocuous tick, a conviction without consequence...

“Polluting our precious atmosphere” with greenhouse gases? Not quite.

Let’s consider the emissions of his despised “cars, trains, automobiles.” (By the way, Dickie boy, that’s redundant: Cars are automobiles.) They do indeed emit some true pollutants that contribute to bad air quality. But those pollutants are not connected to global warming in the minds of even the most fevered Al Gore fans.

Again, it’s the CO-2 that is alleged to cause all that environmental damage. And humans emit CO-2 whether they walk, jog, ride bikes or travel in cars. Are bicycles polluting? Evidently so, if you follow Cohen’s logic.

There are indeed some interesting issues in the debate over anthropogenic global warming. but that debate is going on far over the heads of people like the Blue Jersey crowd and Cohen.

If you’re interested in the actual debate, check this study about the effect of CO-2 on the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.  The entire premise of the alarmist crowd is that the relatively tiny effect of CO-2 on temperatures will be magnified through what is known as “forcing” of water vapor into the atmosphere.

The problem with this theory is that could formation is an extremely complex topic that cannot be easily studied. Until you examine this issue, you should not form an opinion on global warming.

And then there’s this:

The first results from the lab’s CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets") experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth’s clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

And that in turn means the entire anthropogenic theory of global warming is in doubt.

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