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| Will Media Expose Global Warming Con Job? |
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| Written by Jerry Carlson | ||||
| Thursday, 31 January 2008 | ||||
Page 2 of 2 Some background: The trendline level of CO2 in the air measured at Mona Loa, Hawaii, was 385 parts per million (ppm) in January 2008. When observations began at Mona Loa in 1958, the level was 315 parts per million. Since 1990, annual increases of CO2 have ranged from 0.5 to 2.6 ppm. At a trendline rise of about 1.8 ppm per year, it will take 35 years to increase atmospheric CO2 to 450 ppm. CO2-control advocates claim this high a level has never occurred in 650,000 years, and would force devastating global warming. However, the dominant "greenhouse effect" comes from water vapor in the atmosphere. CO2 causes only 3% of infrared heat blocking, and the physics of CO2 are such that the greenhouse effect of each added increment of CO2 shrinks on a logarithmic scale. An analogy: If one layer of insulation in your ceiling traps half of the roof's energy loss, adding an identical second layer traps only half the loss escaping the first layer. Each added increment of CO2 in the atmosphere has a logarithmically diminishing greenhouse effect. Although physicists proved this years ago, you won't see it in the dramatic graphs of Al Gore's slide show, An Inconvenient Truth. It projects a nearly parabolic soaring of global temperature from a linear rise in CO2. Advocates of man-caused global warming defend their case by saying that although CO2 itself has only a 3% role, it amplifies warming by various feedback mechanisms. "This is a hypothesis, not a proven fact," counters Dr. John Christy, Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Other scientists argue that current climate models underestimate the cooling influence of cloud cover. 3. Over long epochs revealed in ice cores, why have CO2 uptrends often followed new cyclical temperature uptrends, rather than leading them? Temperature and CO2 cycles deciphered from Antarctic ice cores reveal that new temperature uptrends in CO2 levels have typically followed new temperature uptrends by 600 to 1,200 years. If that has been the case historically, it's hard to claim that CO2 caused those temperature uptrends to begin. One of the most dramatic screens in Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, shows a chart where temperature and CO2 levels wriggle through thousands of years in apparent synch with each other. Flashed on a wide screen for moments, the long series of cycles appear tightly coupled. Audiences gasp. Gore declares that to deny this linkage is the "silliest thing I've ever heard." But the statistical correlations of these measurements derived from ice cores are highest when temperature data is mathematically lagged about 800 years after CO2 data. This indicates that temperatures rise first, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere follows. If you look closely at a section of Gore's chart, you can see in the red and white lines that the new temperature uptrends (white line on the bottom) begin many years before a new uptrend in carbon dioxide (red line). This relationship makes sense. Warming oceans release CO2. It takes decades for the world's oceans to warm after a long cooling cycle. University of Colorado research indicates that as Earth started to warm after the most recent Ice Age, the oceans have released some 600 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere as CO2. Also, why do ancient climate records extracted from ice cores show global cooling cycles in the wake of CO2 increases? Some scientists argue that the world's vegetation increased, locking CO2 into "carbon sinks." That simply helps make my agriculturist case that a world richer in CO2 could be a greener world. Even in recent years, climate variations have occurred over decades, despite a steady rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Radiosonde data revealed wide annual temperature swings in the troposphere, including drops of 0.8 degree below average after 1930. In the mid-1970s, I was writing newsletters for farmers when this "global cooling" fanned media stories of coming climate disaster. Our farm news and advisory organization, Professional Farmers of America, held "World Food Crisis" conferences to study how global agriculture might cope with a potential worldwide cooling. Today, global-warming activists shrug off the fact that during the 1930-80 cooling in North America, CO2 was probably rising at 1 to 2 parts per million annually - close to the annual rate it is rising today. In fact, the long glacial cycles suggest we're coming due for a cooling. Tim Patterson, director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, says: "It is global cooling, not warming, which is the major climate threat to the world." The dip in lower-latitude temperatures in the past few years might be an early clue to such a cooling. I anticipate that if it does occur, Kyoto Protocol enthusiasts will claim credit for rescuing the planet. 4. Are we farming in a relatively CO2-deprived epoch? The plant kingdom metabolizes carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. The animal kingdom metabolizes oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. Nice design. Some climatologists claim that the current 385 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere is "unprecedented" in 650,000 years of proxy data from Antarctic ice cores. But other scientists say those estimates from isotopes underestimate the amplitude of CO2 variation. Still other research, such as fossil analysis, indicate that the atmosphere has exceeded 2,000 ppm of CO2 repeatedly over the past 300 million years, fueling abundant plant growth resulting in today's strata of carbon stored as coal. Crops grown in air with enriched CO2 content make more efficient use of water and nutrients. Growing up on a farm, I've seen how young crops surge with fresh vigor after cultivation stirs the soil under a crop canopy. Mixing oxygen into the soil triggers a burst of underground biological activity. That causes a faster release of CO2, which is quickly metabolized by the fast-growing crop. 5. How can CO2 "coupling" explain global temperature drops in 1965-77, and a sharp rise after that? I assembled the accompanying global temperature chart covering 1946-2007 using data from Britain's Met Office Hadley Center, with special help from an astute researcher, Holly Titchner. The chart includes monthly smoothed data from ground stations back to 1945. It includes weather balloon data, which became reliable enough to include starting in 1958. Beginning in late 1978, it shows data from satellites. This is one of the most comprehensive estimates of long-term global temperature I could find. A straight linear trend of global surface and troposphere temperature would show a rise of about 0.6 degree Celsius during 1945-2007. However, Britain's Hadley Center researcher Peter Thorne and six colleagues cautioned in a 2005 Journal of Geophysical Research paper "This linear trend agreement is misleading. Almost all of the tropospheric warming is the result of a step-like change in the mid to late 1970s which has been ascribed to a ‘regime shift,' particularly in the tropics." I asked the Hadley Center to describe "regime shift." Manager David Parker replied: "The regime change around 1976 was probably connected with changes of atmospheric and oceanic circulation and heat transports in the Pacific. These changes are somewhat similar to those experienced with El Nino and La Nina but are less focused on the equator and occur on time-scales of several decades. There was a warming regime-change in the 1920s and a cooling regime-change in the 1940s. There may have been a cooling regime-change in the late 1990s, partly obscured by global warming." This quote from Parker, a participant in the IPCC, emphasizes the complexity facing researchers who write computer models of global climate change. I translate it as: "There's an awful lot we don't know about climate change." Let's look at some of the promises and pitfalls of climate models, which are the primary basis for carbon taxes and the CO2 theory of climatic forcing. 6. What justifies such extreme confidence in long-term computer models of projected climate? One poster-child controversy is the "Hockey Stick" computer model of past and future climate, developed primarily by Michael Mann, Associate Professor in Pennsylvania State University's Department of Meteorology. His team used a statistical technique called "principal component analysis" (PCA) to simplify the large array of variables. Mann's model result was published by the IPCC as proof of unprecedented, man-made global warming. The model flattens the temperature changes of the well-documented Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age. The model generates a dramatic uptrend in recent years, then a parabolic rise in global temperatures over the next few decades. Several statistical experts have declared Mann's study invalid, and went on to point out the "peer review" involved was primarily among Mann's mutually supportive colleagues. Mann and fellow researchers still use the same statistical approach, and the hockey-stick formation remains in IPCC-published charts as evidence for man-caused world warming. A friend of mine who teaches graduate-level statistics uses Mann's climate model as an example of how not to apply principle component analysis. As used in the climate model, "it will generate a hockey-stick projection 99% of the time when applied to purely random data over time," says my friend. This misuse of statistics was verified by Canadian researchers Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who offer a rich array of other evidence at this web address: http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html Also, see Steven McIntyre's website at: http://www.climateaudit.org/ Incidentally, my college-professor friend asked to remain anonymous, saying: "If I became branded on this campus as opposing man-made global warming, I'm afraid it would be used against me-to deny tenure." Another long-time skeptic of the UN's global climate models is Dr. Reid Bryson, who at age 87 still works daily on his own, unpaid, at the Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin. His sixth book is just off the press. It's written to help researchers build models of regional climate history. Colleagues often cite him as the "father of scientific climatology." Our acquaintance with his work goes back 30 years, when his book Climates of Hunger alerted us to the Northern Hemisphere cooling episodes leading into the 1970s. At the time, Bryson's book expressed a hope that this cooling might reverse, which would rescue agriculture from disasters like those during the Little Ice Age. Fortunately, Northern Hemisphere temperatures did rise again, during and after the 1970s. But Bryson reasons that the upturn was caused by natural cycles such as varying transparency of the earth's atmosphere, not by CO2 from hydrocarbon fuels. He sticks with a conclusion of his 1977 book: "We can't expect to control the forces that affect climate." Bryson points out that most computer simulations of climate are designed like short-term weather models. He says: "Impossible. You cannot do that." The reason: Interactions of our planetary circulation and solar system are unknown, complex, unpredictable - and interwoven with feedback. Wrong assumptions propagate with each computer-simulated cycle of global circulation. After a few iterations, "you're down to zero accuracy," says Bryson. "Who even believes a 10-day forecast?" But the weather-model approach to general-circulation climate models persists because many of today's climatologists were trained as meteorologists. These models have generally predicted more warming than has actually occurred, says Bryson. For more than 60 years, Bryson and a wide array of colleagues searched for causes of climate change. They found signals in Earth's orbital changes and the slight wobble on its rotational axis. They studied a natural influence largely ignored by other climatologists: variations in transparency of Earth's atmosphere, caused primarily by sulfur dioxide and other aerosols emitted by volcanic activity. The transparency data correlate with Earth's temperature variations in the past 100 years. 7. What is the real, long-term cost in lost production and human well-being worldwide from distorting energy markets and creating global mandates against hydrocarbon fuels? In the summer of 2007, I cited an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chart showing that their lowest-cost projection of stabilizing atmospheric CO2 at 450 parts per million would be $350 trillion in 1990 dollars. That chart came from the IPPC's Climate Change 2001 : Synthesis Report, Figure 7-3. When I asked the IPPC for a current verification, their message to me on Jan. 18, 2008 pointed out that the data had been "corrected." The original chart, which had apparently been on the IPPC website since 2001, was mistakenly high by a factor of 100. The lowest-cost assumption for achieving stability at 450 ppm was now corrected, six years later, to just over $3.5 trillion in 1990 U.S. dollars. The highest estimate now is about $17 trillion, or almost 500% higher than the lowest estimate. Here's the current IPCC chart, also available at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/climate-changes-2001/correctionfig73.pdf Yet there are presumptions that the U.S. can cut its use of CO2-emitting fuels by 80% for only a slight reduction in gross national product over the next several decades. It's doubtful that China and India will do likewise. One certainty about this "crisis:" It's the scientific debate of the century. It's far from being scientifically resolved, even though world policymakers will persist in making far-reaching energy-rationing rules based on unproven theories. Threat to Freedom Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, says that using global warming hysteria to justify global governance and energy-taxing schemes is today's biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity. It has, he says, "become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem." If policymakers plow ahead with capturing carbon, I'd like to see them place much more emphasis on how agriculture and all of humanity can benefit by converting CO2 into food and building humus. This is a beneficial and stable carbon reserve in the soil. It's a waste to simply bury carbon. Carbon is the cornerstone of biological life, and the "carbon is pollution" presumption leads toward bizarre proposals like pumping CO2 deep underground. In fact, a recent scientific proclamation claims that reducing CO2 emissions to zero would not stabilize climate change. The scientist says it will be necessary to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it. If the regulators do enforce carbon sequestration, they might review how ancient tribes in South America's tropics applied one of the most simple and beneficial ways to convert carbon stored in tropical forests into greater food production. Using earthen firepits to create charcoal from jungle trees and undergrowth, they mixed raw charcoal into their tropical soils. This "biochar" provided microscopic niches for microbes and fungi, touching off a bloom of soil biological life which supported food crops for centuries. This "Terra Preta" or "dark soil" has been rediscovered by ecologists in the past couple of decades. Terra Preta soils remain productive despite the heat and moisture of the tropics, which otherwise oxidize organic matter and leach away crop nutrients from tropical clay and sand. The low-tech building of biochar almost vanished after 1491, when European diseases arrived in South America and killed most of the indigenous population. Helping people adapt to inevitable, natural climate change, in ecologically sound ways, would be much more productive and beneficial to humanity than building a global-governance bureaucracy financed by taxing hydrocarbon energy and run by top-down regulations. Jerry Carlson, Pro Farmer Editor Emeritus, holds a Master’s degree in journalism from Iowa State University. After starting a journalism career as an Air Force officer, he became Managing Editor of Farm Journal magazine in Philadelphia. In 1972 he and a colleague, Merrill Oster, founded Professional Farmers of America, a national news and advisory service for leading farmers and ranchers. Jerry started several newsletters and Internet services within this company. He retired from Pro Farmer in 2001, but remains active in writing about farmland investments and restoring biological health in America’s cropland. Jerry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |
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