Reid Bryson, Father of Modern Climatology

This article provides a profile of a long-tenured authority on the hot topic (no pun intended) of global warming and presents a few of his very logical arguments (which have unsurprisingly been overlooked by mainstream media). A few excerpts follow:

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.

We ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.

This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50 or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day forecast?”

Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies, published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006. The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up—or down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

China tops CO2 emissions

EU & UN do-gooders worried about global warming? Tell it to the Chinese.

 

 

China tops CO2 emissions

via news@nature.com Physical Sciences channel by Nicola Jones on Jun 20, 2007

Developing nation overtakes America, and is set to rise.

 

 

UN SG blames Darfur on–what else?– Global Warming

Hopefully Mr. Moon is going to finally take leadership on an issue that has long needed leadership. As I mentioned in a previous post, the former Secretary General was very good about providing benefits for his continent of Africa, but was lacking in his ability to accomplish anything of substance in Darfur.

Apparently, Mr. Moon (Mr. Ki Moon?), after only five months in office, is finally getting peacekeeping forces in Darfur via a joint agreement with the African Union.

Despite that he manages to blame it all on global warming:

Two decades ago, the rains in southern Sudan began to fail. According to U.N. statistics, average precipitation has declined some 40 percent since the early 1980s. Scientists at first considered this to be an unfortunate quirk of nature. But subsequent investigation found that it coincided with a rise in temperatures of the Indian Ocean, disrupting seasonal monsoons. This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming.

Seems a stretch to me, particularly because there are at least 16 countries that border the Indian Ocean, neither of which have been doing quite the degree of ethnic cleansing that the Sudan has. Conflict almost always occurs over resources and indeed it’s no surprise that a drought spurred the conflict, but many countries have gone through longer droughts without mindless genocide.

washingtonpost.com

Alarm raised over Kyoto in Canada

It seems the Canadians are saying what everyone already knew:

John Baird claimed petrol prices would leap and thousands of jobs would vanish if Canada tried to reduce greenhouse gases by 6% from 1990 levels by 2012.

No. Really?

It seems at least someone in the rest of the world is beginning to agree with this position. Including the Turkish:

In the last century the primary energy source was petrol but in this century it would be natural gas, said Guler In response to a question over signing of the Kyoto Protocol Guker responded by saying, “We do not want the world to get polluted either.

But in the protocol there are views that even object to building of dams. This is important in respect to our national interests.”

This is what happens when only environmentalists try to structure environmental reform. Water power is forbidden because it might upset some fish. Thus the real goal of reducing air pollutants and dependence on fossil fuels is usurped.

Thus the environmentalists in Canada who are taking advantage of the Earth Day to push for…guess what…the Kyoto Treaty:

International Earth Day will be celebrated Sunday in Montreal by a march condemning what environmental groups see as the federal government’s inaction over the Kyoto Protocol…”We want people to go into the streets to send a message to the government of Canada: You must act now,” said Jocelyn Higginson of Greenpeace Quebec.

And the Australian Labor Party seems to feel that the economics are apparently not important:

Mr Rudd, who is on his first visit to the US since becoming Opposition Leader late last year, has told an American research institute that Australia, China and the US must work together to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

…“On this question, our respective national positions are compromised by our refusal so far to ratify the Kyoto protocol,” Mr Rudd said.

“Given that it is projected that China’s greenhouse gas emissions will exceed those of the US by 2009, the planet demands that all three of us engage in the necessary international governance arrangements to cap greenhouse gas emissions before it is too late.”

Apparently, Mr Rudd has not even glanced at the Kyoto Treaty which clearly relieves China of any financial responsiblity for their soon-to-be leading CO2 emissions. The way it works is a “all have to play but not all have to pay” set up where developing countries (like India and China) really don’t have to do anything at all except beg developed countries for money to help them solve their emissions problems. This is an excerpt of a publication by a Stanford Climatologist, that was sent to me by a “Kyoto apologist” a year ago:

Delay in LDC participation in decarbonizing protocols could lock in many dozens of inefficient coal burning power plants, each with four decades of economic life in, say, India or China or Indonesia, which would not allow global warming solutions to be very cost-effective, I argued. Not unexpectedly, I noticed frowns from the Africans and Asians present. But their faces changed when I added: “But just because protecting nature and the global commons requires that all countries must play, fairness suggests that not all should have to pay!

“We have responsibilities, too…” AWWWWWW. “But the West is going to pay for it all” YAAAAAYYYYY!!!!

The logic of course is that you get more “bang for the buck” (reduction in emissions/$) if the US, for instance, invests in developing countries to improve their emissions than it is to invest in advancing already advanced US technologies. One problem with that logic is that it doesn’t improve the air quality in the US which honestly should be a major motivator for reducing emissions, thus the investment has no economic return for the investor.

This is where I just go nuts. Let’s forget about global warming for a second. Who doesn’t want cleaner air? I mean really. Has anyone been to L.A. lately? Not pleasant. What about Jakarta? Isn’t it simply easier to talk in terms of improving the quality of the air so that those living in those cities have better living conditions. Nope. One must make the whole world (the U.S.) responsible for the whole world (Asia and Africa). Whatever happened to think globally, act locally?

Yes, the US (and Canada, et al) should take a leadership role in attempting to reducing emissions (global warming or not), but by the VERY DEFINITION of the Kyoto Treaty, they already HAVE taken a leadership role in reducing carbon emissions. If the US is so advanced that it’s cheaper to pay for some else’s advancements, in what way have we not already taken a leadership role? Obviously, though, the West has to be punished for being more advanced, their economic strength sacrificed for the “greater good.” Thus results global distribution of wealth.

Any “Global” treaty that relieves the biggest violators (East Asia) free from responsibility to reduce emissions is not a treaty that a developed country would do well to sign on to.

A better approach in my opinion is for cities and states to develop their own individual plans to reduce emissions in their own locales; plans that fit with their own current levels of technology, emissions levels, economic strength, etc, and work from the bottom up:

“California is doing everything we can to tip the balance on the environment,” Schwarzenegger said, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “We are not waiting for the federal government. We are not waiting for Washington.”

Federal policymakers may be pressured to enact nationwide limits on greenhouse gas emissions in light of a U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier this month. In a case involving states and environmental groups seeking stricter federal emissions mandates, the high court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate carbon emissions from vehicles and must offer a reasonable explanation if it decides not to impose more stringent restrictions.

That last is because Kennedy sure wouldn’t have states make any decisions for themselves.

But even better, iff Michigan, New Jersey, California, etc…add “we have the cleanest air of all the Metropolitan centers in the country” to their commercials touting business-friendliness, etc, wouldn’t they attract more people, businesses, and income. Wouldn’t your average American (voter) be even MORE concerned about the air that their children breathe, that we obviously DO have ultimate control over, than some long term, unclear, nefarious “climate change” that we may or may not have any control over?

BBC News

Global Ice Age Warming

Once all this snow melts our asses are in a sling!

Global Warming

Happy Valentines Day Y’all. My thoughts on Global Warming after 27 minutes of clearing ice off my car.
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Methane levels

A quick take of the map shows that a good bit of surface methane (above) comes from Europe and Asia. Forgive me if my geography is wrong but is the red spot Baghdad? If so can we blame global warming on sunni insurgents? Looks like America, which produces a lot of beef, has much lower levels of methane. The bottom graph is stratospheric levels of methane. From Wikipedia.

The real cause for global warming?

This is just great. Apparently the culprit responsible for more greenhouse gases than any other source is not cars, factories, planes, even right-wing capitalists.

This is an interesting twist, in that it is apparently a man-made phenomenon. The replacing of forests with cattle farms and the wastes that it produces (methane has 20 times more warming power than carbon dioxide) could double this damage by 2050.

All this according to our good friends at the UN.

So we don’t need to search for alternative energy sources, but instead need to genetically engineer a cow with less flatulence. Call your Senators and get us back to the table at Kyoto.

Independent Online Edition > Environment

Dissent on Global Warming

Thoughtful and important piece from the foremost “Skeptical Environmentalist” and author of the book of the same name (also recommended), Bjorn Lomberg.

The closer:

Last weekend in New York, I asked 24 U.N. ambassadors–from nations including China, India and the U.S.–to prioritize the best solutions for the world’s greatest challenges, in a project known as Copenhagen Consensus. They looked at what spending money to combat climate change and other major problems could achieve. They found that the world should prioritize the need for better health, nutrition, water, sanitation and education, long before we turn our attention to the costly mitigation of global warning.

We all want a better world. But we must not let ourselves be swept up in making a bad investment, simply because we have been scared by sensationalist headlines.

Global Warming rebuttal

Before I address my nameless critic, a recap:

1. I am idiotic for ignoring evidence about global warming.
2. Me and my horse…well, one can read the comments themselves.
3. Whether or not global warming exists, big oil companies don’t want it to exist, and since big oil companies run the American government, the globe shall warm. (Take note that the article linked in the opening statement discussed the lack of economic feasibility for the Europeans in following the Kyoto treaty).

My verbose critic does not deny that climate science, in modern terms, is in it’s infancy, a statement which is fairly value neutral, but central to my argument. Every science starts somewhere, and every scientist gravitates to his field for some reason. The eugenics movement was an influence on Nazisms ethnic cleansing policy doesn’t mean that Gregor Mendel was anti-semitic or a “doo-doo head”. However, ivy league scientists used the science of eugenics to force sterilization in blacks, in Appalachia, etc. My main point there is that sometimes the federal government can use scientific findings as leverage for horrible policy.

Which brings me to my second point. These days, scientists are under a lot of pressure to produce, and to produce quickly. Sometimes this leads to academic fraud, as was the case in South Korea recently. More often it simply requires a reader to read 4 or 5 papers to get the gist of a scientists work, as opposed to 1 paper back in the 70s.

That’s why the review process is so integral to good research. If a spectacular finding is run up the flagpole without critical review, bad research is disseminated throughout the public. If the right people pick up on it, then bad research can lead to horrible public policy. Consider Michael Mann ,(not the guy who created Miami Vice), who I’m sure is a nice guy. In 1998, not long after the introduction of the Kyoto protocol, Mann, as an adjunct faculty member and PhD candidate published an article in Nature claiming that the world was on an incredible warming trend in the last hundred years. Mann’s Hockey Stick had become a rallying point for environmentalists , and the IPCC, an intergovernmental agency devoted to studying climate change, had pointed to his work as definitive. Before his work was published, many climate scientists believed there were variations in the global warming and cooling periods in the last 1000 years. The Hockey Stick was a good story, however, and the fact that those cycles hadn’t shown up in his model didn’t stop the reviewers at Nature from publishing.

There are some problems with Mann’s findings however. Most glaringly, Mann spliced two data sets into his principle components analysis , and failed to run control data. He relied on tree ring data for the first 900 years worth of data, and then added in surface temperature for the last 100 years. If tree rings are such good indicators of temperature, why mess with the PCA? Wouldn’t adding factors into your data set need to be carefully controlled, and certainly not represented in a single figure? Speaking of which, a simple control proposed by critics of Mann points out the main methodological flaw , namely, random noise thrown into the PCA produces the same results as Mann’s (primary literature here).

In a serious review process, editors would note that work in this manner would need to be controlled, which it obviously wasn’t. Mann issued a retraction, but his academic post is still nice and cozy.

Certainly oil companies have money and power, but just because they disagree with a policy doesn’t make it right. People may not like the fact that other people drive big cars and live in big houses, but before we decide to impose energy rations, the science should be airtight. Scientists have agendas, too.

I didn’t mean to trash climate science. But the media really trumpeted this story, and I think once scientists stray too far into activism, their science suffers (baloney science). There is plenty of this in drug research too, by academics and drug companies. A recent article on heat islands caused by pavement provides some insight on the warming phenomena.

More links:

The Opinion Journal’s take on the issue

Mother Jones take on the issue

Posted at 08:27 pm by Johnny B