Resisting Climate Hysteria

[wayneL]

FYI - http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/04/07/climate-models-go-cold/

Carbon warming too minor to be worth worrying about

By David Evans

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools out of our politicians.

Let’s set a few things straight.

The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.

Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.

 

[Garpal Gumnut]

It is near nigh impossible to stop a gravy train.

Absolutely impossible if it is driven by the New Class.

gg

 

[sails]

It is near nigh impossible to stop a gravy train.

Absolutely impossible if it is driven by the New Class.

gg

That depends on how hard voters apply the brakes.

People who initially had an open mind seem to be deciding that this is ridiculous for Australia with our incredibly low world emissions. I think the powerful silent majority will do their job at the next election.

 

[Garpal Gumnut]

That depends on how hard voters apply the brakes.

People who initially had an open mind seem to be deciding that this is ridiculous for Australia with our incredibly low world emissions. I think the powerful silent majority will do their job at the next election.

I wish I had your confidence, the electorate have swallowed this Watermelon Green/ALP lie, hook line and sinker.

When it comes to a vote, the left meeja and the left parties will get it up.

Common sense is absent many years on Climate Hysteria.

gg

 

[Julia]

That depends on how hard voters apply the brakes.

People who initially had an open mind seem to be deciding that this is ridiculous for Australia with our incredibly low world emissions. I think the powerful silent majority will do their job at the next election.

Agree, Sails. gg, I'm surprised you are so ready to accept apathy by the electorate.
It seems to me that more and more people are becoming aware of the great con job that has been done on them thus far, and as the reality of a carbon tax on their cost of living hits home (they are not deluded that any compensation will be ongoing or adequate), they are prepared to be a lot more interested and will be making their views known to their local MP's.

WayneL, interesting remarks from ex warmist.

 

[drsmith]

It will be interesting to follow global satellite measured temperature as the debate goes on.

http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/climatechange/story/48140/coolest-march-since-1994.asp

 

[DB008]

It will be interesting to follow global satellite measured temperature as the debate goes on.

http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/climatechange/story/48140/coolest-march-since-1994.asp

Despite the recent cooling, the decadal temperature trend for the lower troposphere remains upward at + .145 C.

+0.145 in a decade? Am l reading that statement correctly? I thought that there were larger figures being tossed around by the "pro-climate" camp?

Data Page for Accuweather.com



Something from the Anti-Camp (Check out the website address, iceagenow.com, LOL!

So where do the 1934/1998/2010 warm years rank in the long-term list of warm years? Of the past 10,500 years, 9,100 were warmer than 1934/1998/2010. Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.

The climate has been warming slowly since the Little Ice Age (Fig. 5), but it has quite a ways to go yet before reaching the temperature levels that persisted for nearly all of the past 10,500 years.

It’s really much to do about nothing.

Dr. Don Easterbrook is a Professor of Geology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.

 

[tothemax6]

+0.145 in a decade? Am l reading that statement correctly? I thought that there were larger figures being tossed around by the "pro-climate" camp?

But didn't you know? 0.145/decade means the sky will fall and we are all doomed.

 

[white_goodman]

But didn't you know? 0.145/decade means the sky will fall and we are all doomed.

we didnt listen!

 

[orr]

The socio-political reasons for why you have come to the conclusions you have;

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/taking-on-climate-skepticism-as-a-field-of-study/?hpw

But do the math on the split and for the Skeptics, read major polluters, there's a worrying majority.

 

[tothemax6]

The socio-political reasons for why you have come to the conclusions you have;

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/taking-on-climate-skepticism-as-a-field-of-study/?hpw

But do the math on the split and for the Skeptics, read major polluters, there's a worrying majority.

Or you could just ask people to state their position. Takes a certain kind of unfounded arrogance to think of people as though they were a group that needed to be studied as to why they incorrectly don't think the same as you.

Climate change hysteria (as this thread is titled), and its potential effects are far worse that the potential effects of CO2 heating. It would be far better for everyone if they believed that climate change science was based on nothing, regardless of how correct/incorrect this belief was, simply because it would prevent the political actions that would occur otherwise (carbon emission clamping/taxing).

 

[Smurf1976]

The reason we are in this situation now is due to things like being told that the drought would never end.

The science has absolutely been handed over to politics, to the point that for practical purposes this is no longer a scientific issue but rather, a political one. Scientists themselves are partly to blame with their calls for specific political actions and so on.

Personally, I do think there's probably at least some truth in it all. Global warming, and the theory very clearly requires that it is a warming not a cooling of average temperatures, is quite likely valid to some extent. It certainly does work as expected in a lab. But any hope of doing anything about it has become totally lost amongst what has become effectively an economic treaty with the outcome of wealth redistributionm and consequent higher rates of global economic growth (and thus even higher greenhouse gas emissions).

Look at what's actually happened in recent times whilst many countries supposedly prepare for, or actually implement, emissions cuts. Global emissions have soared like never before - precisely the outcome one would expect from the measures being implemented and a point conveniently ignored by many.

 

[macca]

Interesting article serving to highlight how little we actually know and are how much we are yet to discover about the earth and out weather patterns

''While the ozone hole has been considered a solved problem, we're now finding it has caused a great deal of the climate change that has been observed, the report's co-author, Lorenzo Polvani, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, said.

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/c...ked-to-east-coast-weather-20110422-1drht.html

If only we could get real facts reported as news not opinions, instead of exaggerations and wild claims I am sure there would be a better result.

Much the same as racism claims, people switch off when it becomes obvious that the other side is telling lies.

 

[drsmith]

Interesting article serving to highlight how little we actually know and are how much we are yet to discover about the earth and out weather patterns.

The movement of the jet stream south and subsequent expansion of subtropical dry zones would explain the decline in rainfall over the southwest corner of Western Australia in recent decades.

 

[Logique]

Whatever the truth,
the hype, over-reaction, opportunism of governments, and the politicization of science - these have become the problem. More than any fractional rise or fall in temperature.

All that this ever needed was:
- an expanded, ongoing and internationally co-ordinated research program into more efficient renewables,
- research into cleaner and safer nuclear power,
- last but not least, speeding up the development of nuclear fusion, which is the real medium term hope.

Instead we have this political and economic fiasco, brought to us by scheming opportunists and their sycophantic co-conspirators. [/RANT]

 

[Smurf1976]

The movement of the jet stream south and subsequent expansion of subtropical dry zones would explain the decline in rainfall over the southwest corner of Western Australia in recent decades.

The situation has also affected Tasmania and the attempts at finding the cause are worth noting in the overall context of climate research.

In Tas, the primary observed effect has been the emergence of a rainfall "hole" during Autumn which seemed to progressively worsen from 1975 (no observed effect) until the past few years (virtually zero runnoff into water storages during Autumn).

The Hydro is by far the largest water manager in Tas and they've done rather a lot of research into it. And it's no secret that they've also lost rather a lot of money because of the rainfall decline.

Bottom line is that the research assumed that the underlying cause must have something to do with either temperature change (ie global warming) or land use change either in Tas or somewhere up wind (eg WA or perhaps even South America).

Nobody ever thought of looking at ozone. And now that's been mentioned, my casual look at the evidence does show a pretty strong correlation between declining ozone and declining rainfall.

Lots of money spent on research. An outright fortune spent on all sorts of measures to deal with the rainfall decline without the lights going out. And nobody thought about the ozone hole...

It seems perfectly reasonable to assume this is not an isolated case and that a few people looking at stream flows in Tas aren't the only ones who have wrongly assumed the cause of a change to be something other than what it actually is. Those fancy computer models are prone to exactly the same type of wrong assumptions, as is the entire climate change debate.

 

[ghotib]

If "nobody ever thought of looking at ozone", what's the basis for this newspaper report?

People are indeed looking at ozone, and have been for decades. The earliest reference I found in a 10 minute Google is a 1993 paper in Nature, called Subtropical stratospheric mixing linked to disturbances on the polar vortices (I'm reasonably confident that's talking about the same mechanisms as the present article. There might well be others that I can't identify from the titles.)

Complicated and difficult subjects take a bit of work to understand, from readers as well as from journalists. Many "exaggerations and wild claims" come from bad publicising and superficial reading, not from the original sources. The sort of misunderstandings that have arisen from this 250-word press agency report happen all the time:

1. It was taken to show the unreliability of computer modelling, but look at what it actually says:

The scientists added the ozone hole's effects into Canadian and US global climate models to investigate how it might have affected winds and rains. Their experiments compared data on sea ice, surface temperatures, rain and ozone.

IOW these experiments are runs of climate models using different parameters to isolate effects. Just out of interest, can anyone think of any other way to run controlled experiments on a planet?

2. It's been taken to mean that greenhouse gases had nothing to do with the poleward movement of the jet stream that has led to climate changes such as our recent droughts. That's not what the scientific papers say. The SMH article is prompted by a paper in Science which is paywalled. However Dr Polvani helpfully provides a linked list of his papers. I didn't go behind the paywall to read the Science paper but I did look at the next two in the list, which report aspects of the same work. To demonstrate the kind of nuance and qualification that gets lost in the general media, I quote from the conclusion of the paper in Journal of Climate:

Finally, we return to the effects of stratospheric ozone on the SH circulation. To quantify the relative impor- tance of ozone depletion and increasing greenhouse gases, we have focused in this study on the period 1960– 2000, for which all the key forcings are known (to some degree) from observations. Over that period, as pointed out by Shindell and Schmidt (2004), the effects of ozone depletion and increasing greenhouse gases have added constructively and conspired to yield a relatively large poleward shift of the overall atmospheric circulation.

The key finding of this study has been to show that ozone depletion appears to have been the dominant factor in the recent SH atmospheric circulation changes.

In the twenty-first century, however, as stratospheric ozone recovers to pre-1960 levels, the effects of ozone recovery will oppose those resulting from increasing greenhouse gases. The key question, of course, is: Which of these two will dominate? Simulations conducted by the recent CCMVal2 intercomparison indicate a near-total cancellation of the effects of greenhouse gas increases by the recovery of stratospheric ozone (Son et al. 2010), yielding insignificant trends in the latitudinal position of the midlatitude jet and the edge of the Hadley cell be- tween 2000 and 2100. Such projections, however, are founded on incomplete knowledge of SSTs and radiative forcings. Furthermore, there is some evidence that model simulations that prescribe monthly mean zonal-mean ozone fields, as we have done here, might underestimate the tropospheric response to changes in polar ozone (Gillett et al. 2009; Waugh et al. 2009). Whether the recovery of stratospheric ozone will be able to cancel the effects of greenhouse gas increases remains an open question. Time will tell.

Points to note:
The work deals with the Southern Hemisphere only, not the whole planet.
The object is to quantify the effects of changing stratospheric ozone in order to distinguish them from the effects of increasing greenhouse gases and then to work out how (or if) the two effects interact.
Some simulations suggest that recovery in ozone will counteract the effects of increasing greenhouse gases so that southern hemisphere atmospheric circulation will stay roughly as it was in 2000.
There are known questions whose answers will improve these projections.

Ghoti

 

[derty]

A good explanation of the "Trick to hide the decline" email that was the core to Climategate with a segue into Dr Mullers BEST program. Some annoying use of imagery in here but it is well explained in layman's terms.

 

[basilio]

That was a really excellent video Derty. Quite fascinating to see at the end how Dr Mullers Berkley project which has been funded by the Koch brothers is now appearing to confirm what climate scientists have been saying all along.

 

[OzWaveGuy]

A good explanation of the "Trick to hide the decline" email that was the core to Climategate with a segue into Dr Mullers BEST program. Some annoying use of imagery in here but it is well explained in layman's terms.

The use of terms like Deniers, Anti-science, skeptics etc is another attempt to bring credibility back to the discredited climate establishment. Didn't watch the entire propaganda but did they cover the discredited hockey stick and why it was quickly pushed to the sidelines after prominently using it to drive the AGW agenda in the lead up to Copenhagen.

The anti-science term was laughable - I've seen more analysis and questions by real scientists from numerous fields to the climate establishment and have subsequently uncovered more lies, misleading headlines, misleading and inaccurate data etc etc in the last 2 yrs alone. The AGW alarmist's world is fast unraveling