Posted by reasonmclucus on blog town hall

The dumbest criticism the Democrats’ media sheep make of Tea Party members is that Tea Partiers don’t accept the global warming nonsense that most Democrats and their media sheep have fallen for. 

Most Tea Party members aren’t climate experts, but they are smart enough to recognize a political con when they see one.  In business cons, police warn that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is.  In political cons, if something sounds too bad to be true it probably is too bad to be true.

Like most con artists, the people attempting to continue Enron’s global warming scam try to oversell their claims.  The global warming scammers are essentially saying that if we don’t stop producing the “evil” gas carbon dioxide God will flood the world like he did in the time of Noah.

Supporters of Enron’s global warming scam falsely claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) possesses some magical power to increase the temperature of the atmosphere by interacting with low energy infrared radiation (IR).

In the 90’s Enron paid scientists and so called environmental groups to claim that an increase in atmospheric CO2 would cause significant temperature changes even though CO2 comprises less than 0.04% of the atmosphere. Enron even wrote the Kyoto Accords for the Clinton administration.

Enron wanted the opportunity to make a fortune by trading what the company called “carbon credits”. Enron had previously made a fortune trading sulfur dioxide credits under a program set up to allow northeastern power plants to continue producing the pollution associated with acid rain. 

People who are unfamiliar with science don’t understand that western science has long been infected with con artists. In the Middle Ages “Alchemists” obtained money from wealthy nobles by claiming to be working on a method of turning a base metal like lead into gold.

Some of the more popular science scams today involve miraculous medical treatments and machines that use little or no energy.

Today’s scientists don’t trust each other to be truthful.  Science journals require “peer review” of articles to discourage writers from publishing phony results that seem to support their theories.  Attorneys in court often question whether a scientist witness has been paid to testify a certain way.

Scientists who have trouble getting money for legitimate research may feel they have no choice but to adjust their research and statements to conform to the desires of the businesses or political organizations that offer them money.

Many of the global warming “scientists” who call themselves “climatologists” lack the qualifications for making such claims.  The only qualifications most of them have are for predicting short term weather.

Understanding the way climate changes over time requires a background in astrophysics and the operation of earth’s complex energy system as well as an understanding of weather patterns.

The Milankovich cycles are the primary factors causing climate.  Changes in the earth’s tilt on its axis determine how temperatures change from one season to another.  Changes in the sun’s output affect short term changes in air temperature. 

Those familiar with thermodynamics know that physicist R.W. Wood disproved the claim that greenhouses and the atmosphere stayed warm by reflecting IR.

Those who support the claim if global warming don’t talk like scientists. 

Real scientists don’t use terms like “settled science” or “consensus” when talking about their theories. “Consensus” is a political term not a scientific term Scientists don’t rely on consensus because the consensus view has been wrong before.  In 1895 the consensus among physicists was that atoms were the smallest particles of matter. The consensus was proved wrong when Sir J.J.Thomson reported his discovery of the electron.

Priests suggest their statements represent matters that are “settled”. Real scientists qualify their claims and look for additional tests to make to see if they have missed something. Scientists who believe they may have an accurate model of the nucleus of atoms are using the Hadron Collider to determine if they might have missed something. 

I learned in high school that when scientists conduct experiments, they should mention conditions that could reduce the accuracy of results. Those who claim global warming ignore the likelihood that the 0.25% change in temperature during the 20th Century might indicates nothing more than the use of different equipment. 

Real scientists use mathematically rigorous methods.  The people who claim global warming rely on the mathematically meaningless term called “average global temperature”. 

Priests use terms similar to “denier” and “contrarian” to describe heretics who question their statements.  Scientists provide.the results of experiments and observations to refute critics.

Contrary to the statements of President Barack Obama and various energy companies, there is no such thing as clean energy.  Large wind generators kill birds and many believe they are visual pollution.  The companies that produce solar cells in China are heavy polluters.  Using solar energy to heat water to produce electricity requires large amounts of water. 

Carbon dioxide is the most essential molecule in the atmosphere.  Plants need it to convert solar energy into the bonds that hold complex carbon molecules together.  Humans and other animals then use those carbon molecules for food.

Animals than return part of the carbon to the atmosphere as CO2 to be used by plants to complete the carbon cycle.  Unfortunately, humans remove large amounts of plant carbon from the cycle by using plant products for items like clothing and paper in which the carbon isn’t returned to the atmosphere.  Some unused portions of food products are put in landfills instead of the carbon being returned to the atmosphere. We actually need to use fossil fuels to replace the carbon that we remove from the carbon cycle. 

I have various posts on this blog exposing flaws in the global warming scam.  I also have a Global Warming, Not Blog that primarily only has global warming type posts. See post here.

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Unusual cold hits Korea; CO2 blamed

Cold spell grips country

An unusually cold spell gripped the nation, Tuesday, with the mercury falling by more than 10 degrees Celsius from a day earlier to form ice in mountainous areas and even in Seoul.

It is the first time in seven years that ice has formed in October in Seoul, according to the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA).
...
Weather experts do not rule out the possibility that the earlier-than-expected cold results from global climate change.

“Climate change used to be criticized for ushering in the unusual heat in summer. But it’ to blame for the unusual cold in winter as well,"a KMA spokesman said. Read more here.

By Art Horn, Meteorologist

On October 21st the Associated Press came out with a story entitled ”Sea Ice Melting as Arctic Temperatures Rise.”

The gulp in my throat I felt after reading this ominous analysis was brought on by the implication that it’s all over for the Arctic. The fat lady is belting out an apocalyptic version of “Hot Town Summer in the City.” The ice will be gone before you can say Igloo! Polar bears will be stalking large refrigerated fishing vessels, eating the crew and taking over the ship in a last ditch effort to stay cool. The impression one gets after reading the story is that something new is happening in the Arctic.

If you live in the real world you know that this story is another attempt to keep the global warming momentum alive. It’s a bit like trying to salvage any sitting Democrats congressional seat. There’s been no global warming in a decade. The climate change fire is running out of fuel. Stories like this one are equivalent to tossing another twig on the dying embers.

The climate of this planet is always doing something, either warming or cooling. This change happens on time scales that make it difficult for humans to appreciate due to our brief 70 to 100 year visit here. The earth has been warming unevenly for about 300 years. You’re telling me that “global warming” is old news? The short answer is yes. Three hundred years ago we were at the bottom of the “Little Ice Age”. This little ice age was a 450 to 500 year cold spell that in part prompted people to get out of frozen Europe and find something better. Columbus went south not north! If one examines temperature data derived from oxygen isotopes in ice cores drilled in places like Greenland, you find that today’s temperature is, get ready for this, unremarkable! In fact the data shows us that today’s temperature is actually significantly cooler than most of the last 10,000 years (fig. 1). We live in the interglacial, the warm time between the ice ages. The Greenland ice core data also show a rather disturbing temperature trend. It’s been getting colder for 3,000 years. There have been 17 ice ages in the last two million years of the earth’s history. Eventually history will repeat itself and another ice with grip the planet.

The story from the AP seems to indicate that the warming of the Arctic is unprecedented and that global warming (caused by our way of building civilization) is the root evil causing it. The reality check in the Arctic is that it’s all happened before. The simple truth is that the sun warms the earth unevenly. The poles get the least amount of sunlight annually and the equatorial regions get the most. This makes it hot in the tropics and cold at the poles. In some years the forces of nature get a little out of balance and the areas of cold and warm are displaced. This is what happened this year and it is not unusual.

The winter of 1978 was a good example of this. Warmer air aloft was displaced into the Arctic (fig. 2).  This warmer air piled up on top of the colder air below and produced large areas of higher atmospheric pressure. These massive, heavy “blocks” in the atmosphere re-arranged the global temperature patterns, pushing colder air farther south in some regions. This resulted in a very cold and severe winter in the middle latitudes that year. Record breaking blizzards shut down the Midwest and east coast of the United States. But nobody was talking about global warming back then, they were worried about the coming of the next ice age! Earth’s temperature had been falling for more than three decades. All the stories you read about global warming today were about global cooling then, go figure!

Another example of Arctic warming producing cold mid-latitude winters was 1936. Once again warmer air aloft pushed the cold air southward resulting in bitterly cold weather across almost all of North America and a large portion of Asia (fig. 3). Niagara Falls in Western New York state froze solid that winter.

The bitter winter of 1917 came at a very bad time for soldiers fighting in the First World War in Europe. A massive, warm blocking high pressure area over northern Canada and Greenland forced arctic air southward into all of Europe and most of Asia (fig. 4).

The winter of 2010 was another example of this same weather pattern. A large blocking high pressure area over the Arctic diverting colder air farther south, not new and not unusual (fig. 5).  The AP story talks about the record breaking snows in the Middle Atlantic States. All that snow was from three slow moving storms. In most winters these would have been farther north where people are more accustomed to them. Last winter the blocking Arctic high pressure pushed the cold air southward and with it the paths of the winter storms.

As they say records were made to be broken. Our historical temperature and snowfall record are but a tiny blip in the context of the last 10,000 years. When it comes to nature and weather records expect the unexpected.

See PDF here.

ICECAP NOTE: Note some of the apparent warming in recent years is due to the many issues in the global data bases that exaggerate recent warmth (PDF). Also this like most all the stories on the arctic don’t have any sense of history. A cyclical pattern of temperatures and ice extent has been observed for centuries in the arctic as shown here by Leonid Klashtorin (PDF). See also this P Gosselin Not Trick Zone post Rahmstorf/Schellnhuber Confirm No Anthropogenic Climate Change!

by Geraldo Luis Lino

The Anthropogenic Global Warming Hypothesis (AGWH, for short) is simple, direct and appealing; the only problem is that it flunks the scientific method test, and I challenge any of its proponents - whether they are scientists or laymen - to prove otherwise.

In the most simple terms, the scientific method comprises basically: 1) the formulation of a hypothesis; and 2) the confirmation of the hypothesis by means of data observed in the real world. If the observed data do not fit the hypothesis, it must be reformulated or, eventually, abandoned. However, even when it is confirmed by a certain data set it is not uncommon that new ones fail to match it, resulting in the need of formulating a new hypothesis to account for them.

This is how science advances - and also the reason why scientists must remain permanently “skeptical” concerning the prevailing body of knowledge (so, every scientist worth of their salt is a skeptical, not only those who criticize the AGWH, as the “warmists” seem to think).

With that in mind, let’s examine the AGWH:

1) The hypothesis:

Mankind would be affecting (dangerously) the climate dynamics with its carbon emissions - specially CO2 - since the 18th century Industrial Revolution.

2) The needed proof:

In order to substantiate the AGWH, there would have to be some perceivable variations in the evolution patterns of climatic parameters, such as the temperature, or climate-influenced ones like the sea level, as compared to their behavior before the Industrial Revolution. That in such a way that the human influence after the 18th century could be clearly discerned. Such interference would reveal itself by means of unprecedented temperatures and sea levels and a positive acceleration of their variation rates, as compared to their patterns in the historical and geological past. These would be unquestionable “fingerprints”, as the “warmists” like to say.

3) The evidences:

According to the 2007 IPCC report (AR4), the global average atmospheric temperatures have risen 0.8C and the global average sea levels have risen 0.2 m (about 8 inches) since the late 19th century. It turns out that during the Holocene, the 12,000 year-old geological epoch in which Civilization has been existing, there have been several periods with temperatures and sea levels higher than the present ones. For instance, in the Middle Holocene, around 5,000-6,000 years ago, the sea levels were up to 3 meters higher and the average atmospheric temperatures were 2-4C higher than the current ones.

Also, the so called Medieval Warming Period occurred between the 10th and 13th centuries A.D., when temperatures were 1-2C higher than the current ones.

As to the variation rate of those indicators, the temperature rise since 1870 means an average rate of less than 0.6C per century. Well, just before the beginning of the Holocene 12,900 years ago, when the Earth was recovering from the last Ice Age, the temperatures fell again suddenly and a very cold period (called the Younger Dryas) ensued and lasted for some 1,300 years before the temperatures rose again to reach the levels prevailing during the Holocene. In both transitions from warming to cooling and from cooling to warming conditions, the temperatures fell and rose between 6-8C in just a few decades, a rate one full order of magnitude faster than the one of the latest 140 years (it clearly indicates that the Earth can go without the contribution of the human carbon emissions in order to produce such extreme climatic oscillations).

The same can be observed in the sea level, which rose 130 meters since the peak of the last glaciation 22,000 years ago. Most of this elevation occurred between 18,000 and 6,000 years ago, when there was a rise of 120 meters - an average rate of one meter per century, seven times faster than the recent rising rate and fast enough to make quite an impression on all the ancient peoples who inhabited the continental shores (it is not a coincidence that many of them had legends about a world deluge).

All this can be inferred from geological, geomorphologic, glaciological, oceanographic, biological, archeological and historical evidences from all continents (the excellent www.co2science.org website provides an easy access to hundreds of such studies).

Hence, the big question: if in the Middle Holocene, when dung and firewood were the only fuels used by Mankind and the world population was at least two orders of magnitude smaller than today’s, there were temperatures and sea levels considerably higher than the present ones; if the atmospheric warming at the end of the Younger Dryas 11,600 years ago and the sea level rise between 18,000 and 6,000 years ago were much faster than the observed since the 19th century; so, where are the evidences that would allow us to point to the “human fingerprint” in the small variations of the latest 140 years, against the background of the much wider and faster natural oscillations of the historical and geological past?

The answer is: there aren’t any (for evidences I mean, obviously, hard facts observed in the physical world, not mathematical concoctions extracted from the climate models).

4) Corollary:

The AGWH has no support in the real world evidences. Hence, the political agenda of changing the entire energy basis of the world economy, which is 80%-plus dependent on fossil fuels, is misguided, to say the least, and misanthropic at the worst. So, its real motivations must be looked for in quarters other than real science.

Geraldo Luis Lino is a Brazilian geologist and author of the book “The Global Warming Fraud: How a Natural Phenomenon was Converted into a False World Emergency” (published in 2009 in Portuguese, with over 5,000 copies sold so far, and soon to be published in Spanish in Mexico)

See post here.

See comments on Global Warming: Facts and Factoids here