The hits just keep on comin'

jimpeel

jimpeel

Well-Known Member
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080103/94768732.html

A cold spell soon to replace global warming
13:54 | 03/ 01/ 2008

MOSCOW. (Oleg Sorokhtin for RIA Novosti) – Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.

It determines decisions and instruments of major international organizations—in particular, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signed by 150 countries, it exemplifies the impact of scientific delusion on big politics and economics. The authors and enthusiasts of the Kyoto Protocol based their assumptions on an erroneous idea. As a result, developed countries waste huge amounts of money to fight industrial pollution of the atmosphere. What if it is a Don Quixote’s duel with the windmill?

Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt. The classic hothouse effect scenario is too simple to be true. As things really are, much more sophisticated processes are on in the atmosphere, especially in its dense layer. For instance, heat is not so much radiated in space as carried by air currents—an entirely different mechanism, which cannot cause global warming.

The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions—a point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.

Temperature fluctuations always run somewhat ahead of carbon dioxide concentration changes. This means that warming is primary. The ocean is the greatest carbon dioxide depository, with concentrations 60-90 times larger than in the atmosphere. When the ocean’s surface warms up, it produces the “champagne effect.” Compare a foamy spurt out of a warm bottle with wine pouring smoothly when served properly cold.

Likewise, warm ocean water exudes greater amounts of carbonic acid, which evaporates to add to industrial pollution—a factor we cannot deny. However, man-caused pollution is negligible here. If industrial pollution with carbon dioxide keeps at its present-day 5-7 billion metric tons a year, it will not change global temperatures up to the year 2100. The change will be too small for humans to feel even if the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions doubles.

Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolution—the phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.

Carbon dioxide has quite a different pernicious influence—not on the climate but on synoptic activity. It absorbs infrared radiation. When tropospheric air is warm enough for complete absorption, radiation energy passes into gas fluctuations. Gas expands and dissolves to send warm air up to the stratosphere, where it clashes with cold currents coming down. With no noticeable temperature changes, synoptic activity skyrockets to whip up cyclones and anticyclones. Hence we get hurricanes, storms, tornados and other natural disasters, whose intensity largely depends on carbon dioxide concentration. In this sense, reducing its concentration in the air will have a positive effect.

Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man’s influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.


Earth is unlikely to ever face a temperature disaster. Of all the planets in the solar system, only Earth has an atmosphere beneficial to life. There are many factors that account for development of life on Earth: Sun is a calm star, Earth is located an optimum distance from it, it has the Moon as a massive satellite, and many others. Earth owes its friendly climate also to dynamic feedback between biotic and atmospheric evolution.

The principal among those diverse links is Earth’s reflective power, which regulates its temperature. A warm period, as the present, increases oceanic evaporation to produce a great amount of clouds, which filter solar radiation and so bring heat down. Things take the contrary turn in a cold period.

What can’t be cured must be endured. It is wise to accept the natural course of things. We have no reason to panic about allegations that ice in the Arctic Ocean is thawing rapidly and will soon vanish altogether. As it really is, scientists say the Arctic and Antarctic ice shields are growing. Physical and mathematical calculations predict a new Ice Age. It will come in 100,000 years, at the earliest, and will be much worse than the previous. Europe will be ice-bound, with glaciers reaching south of Moscow.

Meanwhile, Europeans can rest assured. The Gulf Stream will change its course only if some evil magic robs it of power to reach the north—but Mother Nature is unlikely to do that.

Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, is staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute.
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And this from Duke University

January 3, 2008

North Atlantic warming tied to natural variability, study says - A Duke University-led analysis of available records shows that while the North Atlantic Ocean’s surface waters warmed in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, the change was not uniform. In fact, the subpolar regions cooled at the same time that subtropical and tropical waters warmed.

This striking pattern can be explained largely by the influence of a natural and cyclical wind circulation pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), wrote authors of a study published Thursday, Jan. 3, in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

Winds that power the NAO are driven by atmospheric pressure differences between areas around Iceland and the Azores. “The winds have a tremendous impact on the underlying ocean,” said Susan Lozier, a professor of physical oceanography at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences who is the study’s first author.

Other studies cited in the Science Express report suggest human-caused global warming may be affecting recent ocean heating trends. But Lozier and her coauthors found their data can’t support that view for the North Atlantic. “It is premature to conclusively attribute these regional patterns of heat gain to greenhouse warming,” they wrote.

“The take-home message is that the NAO produces strong natural variability,” said Lozier in an interview. “The simplistic view of global warming is that everything forward in time will warm uniformly. But this very strong natural variability is superimposed on human-caused warming. So researchers will need to unravel that natural variability to get at the part humans are responsible for.”

In research supported by the National Science Foundation in the United States and the Natural Environment Research Council in the United Kingdom, her international team analyzed 50 years of North Atlantic temperature records collected at the National Oceanic Data Center in Washington, D.C.

To piece together the mechanisms involved in the observed changes, their analysis employed an ocean circulation model that predicts how winds, evaporation, precipitation and the exchange of heat with the atmosphere influences the North Atlantic’s heat content over time. They also compared those computer predictions to real observations “to test the model’s skill,” the authors wrote.

Her group’s analysis showed that water in the sub-polar ocean –- roughly between 45 degrees North latitude and the Arctic Circle –- became cooler as the water directly exchanged heat with the air above it.

By contrast, NOA-driven winds served to “pile up” sun-warmed waters in parts of the subtropical and tropical North Atlantic south of 45 degrees, Lozier said. That retained and distributed heat at the surface while pushing underlying cooler water further down.

The group’s computer model predicted warmer sea surfaces in the tropics and subtropics and colder readings within the sub-polar zone whenever the NAO is in an elevated state of activity. Such a high NAO has been the case during the years 1980 to 2000, the scientists reported. “We suggest that the large-scale, decadal changes...associated with the NAO are primarily responsible for the ocean heat content changes in the North Atlantic over the past 50 years,” the authors concluded.

However, the researchers also noted that this study should not be viewed in isolation. Given reported heat content gains in other oceans basins, and rising air temperatures, the authors surmised that other parts of the world's ocean systems may have taken up the excess heat produced by global warming.

“But in the North Atlantic, any anthropogenic (human-caused) warming would presently be masked by such strong natural variability,” they wrote.
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And NOAA

What sea ice loss? - We've all heard that the much-dreaded global warming is melting the polar ice caps, but is there actually a net loss of sea ice?

According to NOAA data presented on the web site of Bill Chapman of the Polar Research Group at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), the level of sea ice has reached about the same level as it was in 2003.

Check out the red line at the bottom of this graph.

The current change in global sea ice coverage is a positive 1 million square kilometers -- a gain of 1.8 million square kilometers in the Southern Hemisphere netted against a loss of 800,000 square kilometers in the Northern Hemisphere.
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Natural causes may be partially causing Arctic thaw: study
By Seth Borenstein, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS




WASHINGTON - A new study suggests there's more to the recent dramatic and alarming thawing of the Arctic region than can be explained by man-made global warming alone.

Nature may also be pushing the Arctic to the edge. A study being published in the journal Nature says there's a natural cause that may account for much of the Arctic warming, which has melted sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers.

New research points a finger at a natural and cyclical increase in the amount of energy in the atmosphere that moves from south to north around the Arctic Circle.

But scientists say that energy transfer, which comes with storms that head north because of ocean currents, is not acting alone either.

Another upcoming study concludes that the combination of both that natural energy transfer increase and man-made global warming serve as a one-two punch that is pushing the Arctic over the edge.

Scientists are trying to figure out why the Arctic is warming and melting faster than computer models predict.

The summer of 2007, like the summer of 2005, smashed all records for loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and ice sheet in Greenland. In September, the Arctic Ocean had 23 per cent less sea ice than the previous record low. Greenland's ice sheet melted 17 billion tonnes more than its previous record.

The Nature study suggests there's more behind it than global warming because the air a few kilometres above the ground is warming more than calculated by the climate models.

Climate change theory concentrates on warming of surface temperatures and explains an Arctic that is warming faster than the rest of the world as mostly because reduced sea ice and ice sheets means less reflecting solar rays.

Rune Graversen, the Nature study co-author and a meteorology researcher at Stockholm University in Sweden, said a shift in energy transfer explains the thawing more, including what's happening in the atmosphere, but does not contradict consensus global warming science.

Oceanographer James Overland, who reviewed Graversen's study for Nature, said the research dovetails with an upcoming article of his which concludes that the Arctic thawing is a combination of the two.

"If we didn't have the little extra kick from global warming then we wouldn't have gone past the threshold for the change in sea ice," said Overland, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's lab in Seattle.

Other researchers said Graversen's study underestimates the effect of global warming because it relied on older data that stopped at 2001 and wasn't the most accurate.

Overland and scientist Mark Serreze disagree over which effect - man-made or natural - was the big shove that pushed the Arctic over the edge, but they agreed that overall it's a combined effort.

"Think of it as a boxer that's almost going down for the count ... and that one blow to the noggin comes and he's down for the count," said Serreze, a senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data centre in Boulder, Colo.
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Source
http://www.nature.com/nature

It seems to me that someone here mentioned this earlier;)
 
Professur said:
Is it just me, or does the year 2012 keep cropping up for everyone?
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Nope. There are so many things that are supposed to happen in 2012 including the ban on incandescent lightbulbs.

Any conspiracy theories you would care to share? I don't have any ... well, I do have one ...
 
Now dig this unmitigated load of crap ...

January 4, 2008

The latest in junk science... killer carbon dioxide! First-ever study to link increased mortality specifically to carbon dioxide emissions - "A Stanford scientist has spelled out for the first time the direct links (Tit --j) between increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increases in human mortality, using a state-of-the-art computer model of the atmosphere that incorporates scores of physical and chemical environmental processes. The new findings, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, come to light just after the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent ruling against states setting specific emission standards for this greenhouse gas based in part on the lack of data (Tat --j) showing the link between carbon dioxide emissions and their health effects. WOW! Is that a cowinkydink or what? -- j)

While it has long been known that carbon dioxide emissions contribute to climate change, the new study details how for each increase of one degree Celsius caused by carbon dioxide, the resulting air pollution would lead annually to about a thousand additional deaths and many more cases of respiratory illness and asthma in the United States, according to the paper by Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. Worldwide, upward of 20,000 air-pollution-related deaths per year per degree Celsius may be due to this greenhouse gas. (So now that photochemical smog -- caused by those evil cars -- is under control we need a new culprit on which to blame atmospheric environmental deaths. -- j)

“This is a cause and effect relationship, not just a correlation,” said Jacobson of his study, which on Dec. 24 was accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.

Contrary to Jacobson's claim, however, mathematical models alone can't prove cause-and-effect relationships. Robust real-world data backed by demonstrated biological plausibility would be required for that -- both of which are absent in this study. Jacobson appears to be more of an "imagineer" than an engineer.
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What a fuckin' moron.
 
Even the New York Times is starting to jump on the skeptic express.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=284168050767489&kw=Tierney

The Times — They Are A-Changin'
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, January 02, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: Skepticism about man-induced global warming has reached the science pages of the newspaper of record. This suggests the debate not only isn't over, but that it's also finally newsworthy.

Some warming deniers must have slipped a body-snatching pod under the bed of New York Times columnist John Tierney. Or at the very least the accountants at Exxon Mobil must have put more than a lump of coal in the stocking hanging over Tierney's fossil fuel-burning fireplace.

In his first column of the new year, Tierney writes that the deniers of truth are in fact Nobel Laureate Al Gore and those who ignore both scientific evidence and the historical record in their prophecies of doom. 2008, says Tierney, will be no exception.

In a column titled "In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm," he exposes the Chicken Littles for what they are — opportunists and alarmists who in this new year "will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming." Inconvenient truths and scientific fact will be ignored.

A case in point cited by Tierney was when Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites. It was hardly a blip in Earth's geological history, but Tierney noted how "it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming."

Less dramatic and newsworthy was the announcement that the same satellites also recorded that the Antarctic sea ice had reached the highest level ever. But then, polar bears allegedly drowning and icebergs breaking away are good theater.

We're told the Larsen B ice shelf on the western side of Antarctica is collapsing. It is warming and has been for decades. But it comprises just 2% of a continent that otherwise is cooling.

In the same week Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize, the respected scientific journal Nature published a paper you probably didn't hear much about. It concluded that global warming had a minimal effect on hurricanes.

In fact, after Katrina, hurricane watchers have had trouble getting as far as the letter "K".

"The last couple of years have humbled the seasonal hurricane forecasters," says Max Mayfield, a former director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. The 2007 season was the third calmest since 1966. In 2006 not a single hurricane made landfall in the U.S.

As for temperature, Tierney reports how British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would make 2007 the hottest year on record. After 2007 was actually lower than any year since 2001, the BBC still proclaimed: "2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend."

That must be why in January 2007 some $1.42 billion worth of California produce was lost to a disastrous five-day freeze. A few months earlier Gov. Schwarzenegger signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 designed to, uh, help cool the climate.

In 2007, Australia experienced its coolest June ever. The city of Townsville underwent its longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in a quarter-century.

But for greenies, it doesn't matter what the weather actually is or what the data actually show. It's all caused by global warming. As Canadian Greenpeace rep Steven Guilbeault explained in 2005: "Global warming can mean colder; it can mean drier; it can mean wetter; that's what we're dealing with." Oh.

We hope Tierney's piece signals the beginning of a fair and balanced debate on the Earth's climate and man's impact on it in the mainstream media, including all the inconvenient truths that are fit to print.

Copyright (c) 2008, Investor's Business Daily, Inc. All rights reserved.
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