Alphecca

Clear Thinker of the Day

Actually, an email to me in rebuttle to this post of mine on global warming. He wishes to remain anonymous so we'll just refer to him as "TB from the frozen north". Here is his response in it's entirety:

While only a humble mechanical engineer (with 25+ years of experience in heat transfer and thermogoddamics…thermodynamics, sorry) I still must express my opinion that you have been seriously misled by the government/media hype of their crisis-de-jour, "global warming". Also referred to as GHG/AGW ("greenhouse gas/anthropogenic global warming").

Before I'll listen to anyone express their (usually woefully uninformed) opinion on GHG/AGW, I'll pose to them three questions, the Bezat Basic AGW Quiz. Please don't cheat by skipping down to the answers first.

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1. What gas is responsible for 95% of the greenhouse warming effect on Earth?
Enviro-twit answer: Carbon dioxide, of course.

2. Is the United States a net A) absorber, or B) emitter of carbon dioxide?
Enviro-twit answer: Net emitter, of course.

3. Is the global climate today A) cooler, or B) warmer than it was about 1,100 years ago?
Enviro-twit answer: Warmer, of course.

Anyone who responds with those answers, and yet still has (and is willing to voice) an opinion about anthropogenic warming, should simply be taken out and shot ignored. The real answers are:

1. Water vapor is the gas responsible for 95% of the greenhouse effect on Earth. While part of that is clouds, the majority of the effect is the simple water vapor content (expressed as pounds of water per pound of dry air, as in a psychrometric chart) in the air around us. CO2 is responsible for only about 1% to 1-/1/2% (depending on whose model you use) of the greenhouse effect on Earth. Methane has a far higher effect.

2. The US absorbs far more CO2 than we produce, largely through the effects of huge areas of croplands and forest. Did you know that the US now has MORE forested area than it did pre-Columbian? Another number that the enviro-twits love to trot out is that with only (x)% of the worlds population, we use 25% of the world's energy. The number they DON'T add behind that is that the US also PRODUCES about 30% of the world's GNP. We use more, but we're FAR more efficient at using it, and produce FAR more with it than anybody else.

As a bonus question, ask whether this same is true of 1) Germany, 2) France, 3) Japan? And then ask if there's maybe just the teeny-tiny possibility of a political/economic agenda going on?

3. It's cooler now. Remember, in 900 AD the Norsemen were raising trees and crops (!!!) of oats in Greenland, and had probably colonized Newfoundland ("Vinland", with the grapes), which at the time was fecund. The era is referred to in climatology texts (but only those written prior to the 1980's) as the "Medieval Climate Optimum". It was followed by the period referred to as the "Little Ice Age", from the 1,300's to the late 1,700's. We're still emerging from that era, so an overall warming trend (globally, and of minor import) is expected.

- Bonus question: What was the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in 1000 AD?
There's a huge amount of speculation among climatologists about the strong correlation between the MCO and a period of almost zero sunspots referred to as the "Maunder Minimum", but as of now it's only a correlation, and not proof of causation.

For a while the GHG/Anthro-GW crowd was trying to claim that "Well, the Medieval Climate Optimum was limited to only the tiny part of the western side of the Northern Hemisphere", but they've pretty much given even that up now, with huge amounts of evidence that it was global. Unless, of course, the following areas are considered to be within the western part of the Northern Hemisphere:

Africa:
Tyson, P.D., Karlen, W., Holmgren, K. and Heiss, G.A. 2000. The Little Ice Age and medieval warming in South Africa. South African Journal of Science 96: 121-126.

Huffman, T.N. 1996. Archaeological evidence for climatic change during the last 2000 years in southern Africa. Quaternary International 33: 55-60.

Holmgren, K., Lee-Thorp, J.A., Cooper, G.R.J., Lundblad, K., Partridge, T.C., Scott, L., Sithaldeen, R., Talma, A.S. and Tyson, P.D. 2003. Persistent millennial-scale climatic variability over the past 25,000 years in Southern Africa. Quaternary Science Reviews 22: 2311-2326

Lamb, H., Darbyshire, I. and Verschuren, D. 2003. Vegetation response to rainfall variation and human impact in central Kenya during the past 1100 years. The Holocene 13: 285-292

I can cite studies like this for Antarctica, Asia, North America, Australia/New Zealand, and South America…but you get the point.

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The evidence is that the solar cycles, both long- and short-term cycles, have a bigger influence on the global temperature than does GHG concentrations. Example:

- There's a planet in the Solar System that is currently suffering an apparent global warming. It's weather patterns are changing, and long-term patterns show that the polar caps appear to be shrinking.

- Only one problem: The planet is Mars, and we haven't got our fleets of SUV's emitting CO2 there yet.

The IPCC has systematically drummed out (or have had resign on them) anyone who dares to disagree with their orthodoxy. Since anthropogenic global warming is based purely on faith, it is essentially a religion, with adherents who cling tenaciously to it's tenets, regardless of what facts might step in their way. The IPCC is an almost purely political group, with an extremely strong collectivist agenda. Their program to control the worlds economy through coercion is simply using the excuse of GHG's to drive through their control agenda. Now, this probably doesn't bother your average sKerry/Gore worshippers, since their collectivist ethos fit right in with that world view Example:

- The IPCC's early report, 694 pages long, contained within the body of the report the comment (from memory, don't have time to go home and track it down): "No correlation could be found between global temperature increases and greenhouse gas concentrations". Did you read that report? I did, and have a hard-copy of it somewhere at home. What's difficult to understand about "no correlation"?

- But the 25-page political summary stated just exactly the opposite of what the scientific report said, and claimed that there WAS a correlation…which led to the mass resignations from the IPCC of hundreds of climatologists, who put their honesty and honor above the politically-motivated grant-withdrawal penalty. And they've been penalized.

- Guess which one the scientifically-illiterate reporters bothered to read?
- Guess which portion of which report got all the publicity?

Let's ignore the fact, as admitted by even the IPCC, that FULL and COMPLETE implementation would have, as it's BEST possible outcome, according to their (shitty) models, a reduction in global temperatures of only 0.1 degrees C over the next 100 years…and that the Kyoto Protocols aren't even going to be considered to be signed by China and India, whose energy growth is (to say the least) prodigious. Or the FACT that they hypocritical assholes in the EU have missed their GHG emissions targets…and have actually INCREASED their CO2 emissions in the past year. So we'll cripple the global economy (and coincidentally, simultaneously condemn billions to death, and take control of what's left) for a literally unmeasurable difference. Hey, makes sense to me.

The latest release is a simple recycling of garbage from bad sources.

-------------It's utter and complete bullshit...to quote:
Climate scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes had concluded the Northern Hemisphere was the warmest it has been in 2,000 years. Their research was known as the "hockey-stick" graphic because it compared the sharp curve of the hockey blade to the recent uptick in temperatures and the stick's long shaft to centuries of previous climate stability.

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The "hockey stick" graph has been thoroughly debunked, and not even the IPCC is willing to stand behind it anymore. The statistical methodology used to create it by Mann et. al. has been demonstrated to take ANY data set, regardless of actual trends, and create the same shape. NO respectable climatologist even references it anymore, other than out of derision for the political science (as opposed to atmospheric science) that created it. As noted above, the current period of "global warming" started back in the middle-1600's or thereabouts. If you carefully pick a starting point for your data of around 1650 AD, you can safely say that it's the warmest it's been in about 350 to 400 years...but if you go farther back than that, the theory falls completely apart.

As for claims of consensus, a petition is circulating with more than 19,00 signatures of scientist and engineers (and more than 2,600 climatologists) which decries the current GHG/AGW pseudo-science. It's available on-line at OISM.org.

I apologize for the length of this e-mail, but I guess I just got on a roll. I'd hate to see someone that I regard as generally sensible accepting the Chicken Little "sky is falling" stuff. Many of the things proposed to help fight AGW, particularly things like conserving resources and improving efficiencies, are near and dear to an engineer's heart. But doing the right things for the wrong reasons generally leads to doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. We should be improving things and reducing pollution of all kinds because it's good to do so, not because we're terrified of an artificial bogeyman.
--TB from the frozen north