A CLOSER LOOK AT CLIMATE CHANGE (PART 3)

SOME CONTRARIAN VIEWS

Here’s my personal belief – Dr. Hansen means well. In his own mind, he’s convinced he’s right about catastrophic climate change, and he may very well be right on some points of the debate. Hansen has some luminaries in his corner, to be sure. That great, internationally renowned scientist Osama bin Laden has taken up the cause – pontificating from his hideout in Pakistan about the evil West’s involvement in the destruction of Muslim lands with its wanton disregard for the global environment. He was talking about the Pakistani floods earlier this year. Why did the floods happen? According to Osama, global warming caused by the Infidel West was a direct causation of the flooding that killed more than 1,500 Muslims, upended the lives of over 30 million more, and ruined 20% of Pakistan’s countryside.
There was another flood several millennia ago, according to the Bible. That flood was supposedly caused by God to destroy the people who were sinning profligately and were living in the area that sustained the flood. The big difference: That flood was caused by God to punish the sinners and infidels who lived where the flood happened, whereas the recent floods in Pakistan resulting in such devastation to the Muslims who were living there were caused by infidels living on the other side of the world.


Seriously, the proponents of man-made global warming have a very large soapbox from which to render their verdicts against mankind and its culpability in this ongoing, accelerating destruction of Mother Earth. Further, they have a large megaphone through which to amplify their message - it's called The Media. Then, in 2006, less than a year after Hurricane Katrina, that noted American scientist - Al Gore, appeared on the scene with his movie. And How! No soapbox was bigger than Al Gore’s Hollywood podium. And no megaphone was bigger and louder than Hollywood’s slick production apparatus through which Gore was able to promulgate his political and worldviews. The outcome of this collaboration was the Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth – a quite convincing and well made production that made a huge splash on public awareness. It got the people on the street’s attention. It got everybody’s attention, including members of the scientific community who don’t agree with the viewpoints of Al Gore, James Hansen, and even Osama bin Laden. And that’s when some of these previously silent contrarian voices began to speak up.


Critics of the man-made global warming movement were very quick to cite errors and misstatements of fact in the movie and elsewhere. There was a lawsuit filed in the UK - Dimmock v. the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, where the plaintiff wanted to bar the film from being shown in an educational context. The plaintiff won the case – the verdict in favor of the plaintiff cited nine specific examples in the film that weren’t accepted as factual by a “scientific consensus”. These specifics came to be known as “the nine errors”. To give just a few examples:


1. The film says Hurricane Katrina was caused by man-made global warming.
       The scientific consensus says no. Global warming didn’t cause Katrina


2. According to the movie, coastal regions would be inundated by glacier-melt from Greenland and Antarctica making refugees out of a hundred million people.
       Scientific consensus holds that such glacier-melt, if it would ever happen, would take millennia and allow people living in low lying coastal areas plenty of time to relocate – plenty of time as in several hundred generations


3. The movie says there are polar bears in the arctic drowning because of the scarcity of ice due to excessive ice melt
      What really happened was four polar bears had recently been found drowned after a ferocious winter storm, not because of disappearing ice

And there are six more "errors" along the same lines cited in the verdict. As H. L. Mencken would probably have said: "Nine Convenient Un-truths.

But it doesn’t stop there. Here’s John Coleman, co-founder of the Weather Channel in an interview:



Well, when I looked at the hockey stick graph that was produced in Manning’s (Mann's) original report, and it showed a steady-line temperature through the millenniums (sic), and then it showed a sudden rise, I knew that was incorrect, I knew that couldn’t possibly be, and I started asking experts about it and I started digging into how that was produced, and I found out it was bogus science, it wasn’t real, the numbers had been massaged, the whole thing had been created. What bothered me was, the other scientists had accepted it, and why did they possibly do that? And I think the real answer to that question is, they all have an agenda, an environmental and political agenda that said “let’s pile on here, we’re all gonna make a lot of money, we’re gonna get research grants, we’re gonna get awards, we’re all gonna become famous, and I guess that’s what happened”.

The "Hockey Stick" graph came up again in an interview with Canadian climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball, who believes, as do many others, that the Earth is getting warmer, but natural causes are mostly to blame. The release of thousands of hacked emails between researchers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK opened up a real can of worms for the apocalyptos.
Dr. Ball on the emails: I saw the hijacking of climate science, particularly by computer modelers…and by a small group of people associated with the (UN’s) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)...
...But now, suddenly, with the exposure of these files, it’s …not only  a smoking gun but a battery of machine guns that has been exposed, and, uh, it really is deeply disturbing, because what you’ve got here is confirmation this small group of scientists, who, by the way, Professor Wegman, who was asked to arbitrate about the Hockey Stick…he identifies 42 people, and said 'look, these people are all publishing together, and they’re also peer reviewing each others’ literature…'

So Dr. Ball gleaned from the leaked emails from East Anglia a pattern of collusion by climate researchers, particularly on the “Hockey Stick” graph showing a dramatic, unnatural spike in global temperatures in recent years. Dr. Ball further described how the leaked emails show clear evidence of data culling and omission and collaborating on publishing fudged data. He cites a cabal of climate researchers who peer-review each other’s papers so they’ll be published in prestigious scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and be accepted by the world as scientific fact.

Dr. Hansen's boss at NASA, Dr. John S. Theon, now retired, wrote the following in a communiqué to the (Congressional) Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works committee dated January 15, 2009:
“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man-made,”. His major concern was the computer modeling... “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” He made a disturbing comment about the data, which beyond the models is at the very heart of the climate problem. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,”



Claude Allegre, a former French government official and member of France's Socialist Party who was at one time a proponent of man-made climate change, converted to the other side. He wrote that "the cause of climate change is unknown" and pointed out that Kilimanjaro is not losing snow due to global warming, but to local land use and precipitation changes. Allegre also pointed out that studies show that Antarctic snowfall has been stable over the last 30 years and the continent is actually gaining ice.

And then there's the late Dr. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI, who was considered by many to be one of the world's most astute climatologists. Dr. Bryson famously said on CNBC"...you could spit and do more damage to the environment than doubling CO2 in the atmosphere".
 
And finally, there's Canadian paleoclimatologist Dr. Tim Patterson, who says this:

• “There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"[31][32]

Drs. Patterson and Ball were signatories, along with 58 other climate scientists from all over the world, on an open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper appealing for alternative or additional points of view to be considered in a debate on the Kyoto Protocol. On a broader scale, some 900 climate scientists throughout the world signed a document opposing and disputing the "overwhelming consensus" that the earth is warming due entirely to human activities.   
On the matter of high CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere 450 million years ago, Dr. Patterson is correct - paleogeologic evidence suggests that the CO2 count was of the order of 4200-4500 ppmv in the late Ordovician Period, which would make it eleven times higher than it is today. The Ordovician Period ended around 438 million years ago with glaciers covering much of the planet for a million years or more and causing a mass extinction. An ice age lasting over a million years with a CO2 count eleven times higher than it is now! But, there's a fly in the soup...it's just a question of whether that fly is microscopic or if it's as big as a pterodactyl. And that fly in the soup is this - the sun shone with only about 97% of its current intensity during the Ordovician. How relevant is that? I'll publish some calculations where I plug numbers into a formula in a day or so, although whether anything meaningful will come out of these calculations is uncertain to me at this point. Stay tuned.