Thursday, April 10, 2008

BBC now a laughing stock

The BBC's retreat from balance in their global cooling story is now being laughed at all over the place -- e.g. here and here. One lot of mockers even squeezed a brief comment about it out of the BBC -- in which the Beeb calls balance "ambiguous". And we can't tolerate ambiguity, can we? According to received wisdom among psychologists, intolerance of ambiguity is a sign of narrow-mindedness, bigotry and dogmatism -- so who am I to argue with that?




THE 'NEW AGE OF UNREASON'

An email from Michael Martin-Smith [lagrangia@lagrangia.karoo.co.uk]. Dr Michael Martin-Smith, BSc MRCGP FBIS, physician, amateur astronomer, and writer, is author of "Man Medicine and Space"

For those of us with a historical perspective, it is interesting, if somewhat chilling, to reflect that the idea that the Natural Order, or, in today's parlance, the Climate, requires great human sacrifice for its maintainance, is not unique to our climate activists. Human original sin is clearly raising its head again, and is being invoked to instil guilt all round.

There are, however, old and darker traditions which have laid upon humans the need to offer up sacrifices to keep the natural show on the road. It is not politically correct to remember that the Conquistadors, in imposing the joys of the Inquisition on Mesoamerica, were to a degree an improvement on their predecessors. The blood drenched temples of the Aztec Ahuitzotl and the earlier Mayan Yikin Can Kaw'ill were built to preserve the Order of Nature, and, if Unreason prevails, will doubtless return in modern PC guise. Evil is not unique to modern civilisation or the free globalised market, as the Environmental cultists tend to suggest. The ideological bureaucrat can be as deadly, if not as colourful, as the bejewelled and befeathered priest.

It has to be said that neither the Aztecs nor the Mayas benefited from their orgies of human sacrifice. Their gods remained coldly indifferent.





THE BBC, CLIMATE HYSTERIA AND THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY

An email from John A [johna.sci@googlemail.com] of Climate Audit

Can it be any more apparent that the BBC is actively engaged in laundering environmental reports especially on climate to satisfy a few extremists? That what we read about climate history changes faster and more efficiently than even Winston Smith could have managed with his Speakwrite? Witness the constant changing of historical temperature data by James Hansen now being dissected on Climate Audit.

This is not simply a scandal, it is a crisis reaching to the foundations of our democracy - that news and information be disseminated by a Free Press without fear or favour to the Powers that be, nor to extremists and radicals seeking the overthrow of democracy by stealth through a crisis which bears all the hallmarks of being manufactured?

Just imagine, for a moment, what a global emissions trading scheme would look like: no Western democracy would have any control over the price of energy even in its local markets, its entire economy being subject to minute bureaucratic control of everything from the gas heater in the house to energy required to produce steel. Without any control of the cost of energy, food prices would inevitably rise and a black market in basic foodstuffs would appear (this is what happened during the fall of the Soviet Union) including a resurgent Mafia-style criminal underclass.

What then, would be the point of voting for any party? Or of democracy itself? What state could withstand the inevitable social turmoil when basic foodstuffs become more expensive than the poor can afford because the market has been rigged?

It is axiomatic that any State, no matter how brutal, must eventually fall when it has lost control of the price of food - witness Zimbabwe right now, or the fall of the Soviet Union, or the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, or the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s.

Make no mistake, and speaking as a classical liberal, we are looking at the most serious attempt to collectivize the world economy since the fall of Communism in the 20th Century and to render democracy moot in the Western World and beyond. Who speaks for the farmers of Kenya whose exports into the EU and beyond are the only thing between themselves and starvation and whose products are now being labelled with airmiles by Western environmental extremists?

Did any of us vote for the imposition of world energy cartel? I can't remember such a proposition being on any manifesto. But that's what it is.

All of this makes the betrayal of the BBC even to its own charter that much more dangerous to all of us who hold liberal democracy so dear. In the "Green Room" we see academics and activists talk blandly about population control (really? how?), the marginalization of democracy through a consensus of self-appointed "experts" and the need to somehow control the absolutely uncontrollable (the Earth's climate) via trying to moderate a single variable, carbon dioxide concentration, whose ability to control climate in any meaningful way is entirely absent from any paleoclimatic proxy?

Yet the opinions given by academics on subjects well away from their areas of specialization are published as if those opinions are unquestionable truths. Comments are censored prior to publication to prevent serious criticisms being made, and a false impression of support for the ludicrous and dangerous propositions is thereby created.

No right of reply is ever allowed except by that favourite abuse of propagandists - the "skeptic sandwich". Note that twice now, the BBC has announced that the work of Svensmark has been debunked, and twice Svensmark has replied showing that the studies are flawed and the BBC has refused to publish those replies.







NIGEL LAWSON IS NOT ALONE!

An email from David Lord Howell [howelld@parliament.uk]

Many commentators on Lawson have obviously not read the book I published last summer, in my capacity as deputy leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords, which warned against climate and green hysteria and pointed to a more balanced way forward. The book, 'Out of the Energy Labyrinth' is published by I.B. Tauris. I am in Tokyo today, launching the Japanese edition. Lord Lawson is definitely not alone!

Lord Howell of Guildford, Energy Secretary under Margaret Thatcher




CUTTING CARBON EMISSIONS IS FUTILE

Will cutting our carbon emissions really make any difference to the planet? The answer is a definite no, and most of the proposals to do so are ludicrously inadequate anyway. Take Australia, for example, where about 135 million incandescent light bulbs are in use. The Government wants to ban them by 2010 to cut the nation's greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 800,000 tonnes a year by 2012. If this sounds a lot, bear in mind that it represents a reduction of just 0.14 per cent.

American journalist Robert Samuelson derides such tiny cuts as part of a feel-good political culture that is mostly about showing off, not curbing greenhouse gas emissions, and is made worse by politicians who pander to green constituents who want to feel good about themselves. Grandiose goals are declared, he writes, but measures to achieve them are deferred or don't exist. He adds that it's all just a delusional exercise in public relations that, while not helping the environment, might hurt the economy.

Samuelson is right that such puny cuts are ludicrous as a means of preventing global warming. Why? Just take a look at China, which is scheduled to build 562 coal-fired power plants over the next five years. That's more than two a week. China's annual carbon emissions of 1.3 billion tonnes have already overtaken those of Europe and will exceed those of the United States this year. This will make China the biggest emitter on the globe. China, in fact, accounts for half the rise in the world's CO2 emissions since 1992, and Chinese pollution affects the entire Northern Hemisphere, including significant amounts of smog over the western United States.

China is, in fact, doubly responsible for emissions, since it drives much of the world's deforestation. According to the Washington Post, large swathes of the globe's forests are being cut at an alarming pace to feed a global wood-processing industry centred in coastal China. Mountains of logs, many of them harvested in excess of legal limits aimed at preserving forests, are streaming towards Chinese factories where workers churn out such products as furniture and floorboards.

At the current pace of cutting, natural forests in Indonesia and Burma will be exhausted within a decade, writes the Post, while forests in Papua New Guinea will be consumed in as little as 13 years, and those in the Russian Far East within two decades. These forests are a bulwark against global warming, capturing carbon dioxide that would otherwise contribute to heating the planet.

Chinese gangs bribe local officials, who look the other way. In the process, whole ecosystems are being wiped out. If we were to calculate China's total contribution to global warming, it would far exceed that of any other country on earth. This is the most troubling aspect of the entire global warming issue: why should the rest of the world go out of its way to reduce greenhouses gases, when China belches out fumes and tears down forests with impunity? The relatively trivial savings the rest of us make in greenhouse gas emissions are more than offset by China's determination to pollute as much as it wants.

How can greenhouse gas emissions possibly be curtailed when such global population growth and high emissions rates in China (and India) are undoing whatever cuts the rest of the world makes?

Source






World Health Organization joins the panic -- and ignores the facts

In reply to the nonsense below, I will simply quote Lord Lawson: "As to health, in its most recent report, the IPCC found only one outcome which they ranked as "virtually certain" to happen - and that was "reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure". This echoes a study done by our own Department of Health which predicted that by the 2050s, the UK would suffer an increase in heat-related deaths by 2,000 a year, and a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 deaths a year - something that ministers have been curiously silent about."

Millions of people could face poverty, disease and hunger as a result of rising temperatures and changing rainfall expected to hit poor countries the hardest, the World Health Organization warned Monday. Malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition and floods cause an estimated 150,000 deaths annually, with Asia accounting for more than half, said regional WHO Director Shigeru Omi. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes represent the clearest sign that global warming has begun to impact human health, he said, adding they are now found in cooler climates such as South Korea and the highlands of Papua New Guinea.Warmer weather means that mosquitoes' breeding cycles are shortening, allowing them to multiply at a much faster rate, posing an even greater threat of disease, he told reporters in Manila. [Looks like we had better start using DDT again, then. That's VERY effective against mosquitoes in any climate]

The exceptionally high number cases in Asia of dengue fever, which is also spread by mosquitoes, could be due to rising temperatures and rainfall, but Omi said more study is needed to establish the connection between climate change and that disease. "Without urgent action through changes in human lifestyle, the effects of this phenomenon on the global climate system could be abrupt or even irreversible, sparing no country and causing more frequent and more intense heat waves, rain storms, tropical cyclones and surges in sea level," he said.

In the Marshall Islands and South Pacific island nations, rising sea levels have already penetrated low-lying areas, submerging arable land and causing migrations to New Zealand or Australia, he said. [Name one! It's a myth]

Omi said poorer countries with meager resources and weak health systems will be hit hardest because malnutrition is already widespread, with the young, women and the elderly at particular risk. He said unusual, unexpected climate patterns - too much rain or too little - will have an impact on food production, especially irrigated crops such as rice, and can cause unemployment, economic upheavals and political unrest.

Dr. John Ehrenberg, WHO adviser on malaria and other parasitic diseases, said unchecked human development has contributed to the problem. That includes deforestation and an unprecedented level of human migration. As people move, so do diseases. Omi said governments need to strengthen current systems providing clean water, immunizations, disease surveillance, mosquito control and disaster preparedness.

Source





Good science isn't about consensus

Below is an edited extract from a paper recently presented to the Planning Institute of Australia by Professor Don Aitkin, a historian and political scientist. Don is a very smart guy. He has navigated his way to the top of the Australian academic tree (He has been a university President) yet even in my discussions with him when we both at Macquarie univerity many years ago, I was impressed by his realism and honesty -- neither of which are conspicuous academic virtues in my experience, with notable exceptions, of course



AUSTRALIA is faced, over the next generation at least and almost certainly much longer, with two environmental problems of great significance. They are, first, how to manage water and, second, how to find acceptable alternatives to oil-based energy. Global warming is not one of those two issues, at least for me, and I see it as a distraction.

I am going against conventional wisdom in doing so. But Western societies have the standard of living, the longevity and the creativity we have because we have learned that conventional wisdom has no absolute status and that progress often comes when it is successfully challenged. If you listen hard to the global warming debate you will hear people at every level tell us that they don't want to hear any more talk, they want action. I feel that the actions I have seen proposed, such as carbon caps and carbon trading, are likely to be unnecessary, expensive and futile unless there is much stronger evidence that we are facing a global environmental crisis, whether or not we have brought it about ourselves.

The story about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) doesn't seem to stack up as the best science, despite the supposed consensus about it among "thousands of scientists". Indeed, the insistent use of the word consensus should cause those who are knowledgeable about research to raise their eyebrows, because research and science aren't about consensus, they are about testing theories against data.

In any case, there exists vigorous debate throughout the climate change domain. For example, there is disagreement about whether 2007 was a notably warm year (it had a hot start but a downward cool trend). And all that is simply about measurement. In climate science I see no consensus, only a pretence at a contrived one.

Despite all the hype and the models and the catastrophic predictions, it seems to me that we human beings barely understand climate. It is too vast a domain. Though satellites have given us a sense of the movement of weather systems across the planet, portrayed every night on television, we still know little about the oceans, one of the crucial elements in climate processes, not much more about the atmosphere, another such element, a little about solar energy and the effect of the sun's magnetic field on Earth, and only a little about the land. The Earth is a big place.

One of the yardsticks of the debate is average global temperature. We can all imagine what it might mean: an average of the temperatures taken in a multitude of carefully plotted points across the globe, measured the same way, providing a single figure that could be measured over time to show trends. The actuality is much less. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science, the National Climate Data Centre and the Hadley Climate Research Centre in Britain produce the data. All use temperature data recorded 1.3m to 2m above Earth's surface and obtain an arithmetic average of the maximum and minimum temperatures over 24 hours. None covers the entire planet, and the southern hemisphere is not as well measured as the northern.

A recent study of one-third of the sites in what is arguably the best temperature measuring system, that of the US, showed that in a majority of the sites surveyed the instruments were inappropriately located: close to buildings, on asphalt or concrete, next to parking areas, on top of roofs, and so on. Common sense tells us that if our knowledge of climate and weather cannot provide forecasts with much accuracy past 24 hours, we don't know enough about the inter-relationships inside the model, no matter how much data we have, even supposing it to be perfect data. Models are models: they are highly simplified versions of reality and cannot provide evidence of anything.

What I see, rather, is something that political theorist Paul Feyerabend wrote about a long time ago in Against Method (1975): the tendency of scholars to protect their theories by building defences around them, rather than being the first to try to demolish their own proposition. We seem to be caught up in what a pair of social scientists has called an "availability cascade": we judge whether or not something is true by how many examples of it we see reported. Fires, storms, apparently trapped polar bears, floods, cold, undue heat: if these are authoritatively linked to a single attributed cause, then almost anything in that domain will seem to be an example of the cause, and we become worried. I should say at once that climate change has become the offered cause of so many diverse incidents that, for me at any rate, it ceases to be a likely cause of any.

Greens and environmentalists generally welcome the AGW proposition because it fits in with their own world-view, and they have helped to popularise it. Governments that depend on green support have found themselves, however willingly or unwillingly, trapped in AGW policies, as is plainly the case with the Rudd Government. The hardheads may not buy the story, but they do want to be elected or re-elected. In short, AGW is now orthodoxy, and orthodoxy always has strong latent support. Because AGW is supposedly science, even well-educated people think it will be too hard for them.

David Henderson, a respected British economist and former Treasury official, has called the orthodoxy in climate change a case of "heightened milieu consensus", in which prime ministers and other leaders tell us that nothing could be more serious than this issue. These are not statements of fact; they are no more than conjecture. But they have become, in his phrase, "widely accepted presuppositions of policy". Intellectually, AGW is what is known in politics as a done deal. But on the evidence that is available, I think it has to be said that the assertion that the increase in carbon dioxide has caused the temperature to rise is no more than an assertion, however attractive or worrying the association may be. There is simply no evidence that this causal relationship exists.

Earth's atmosphere may be warming but, if so, not by much and not in an alarming or unprecedented way. It is possible that the warming has a "significant human influence", to use the term of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and I do not dismiss the possibility. But there are other powerful possible causes that have nothing to do with us. If this were simply an example of scientists arguing among themselves, we might recognise that this is how science proceeds and move on.

But if there is no true causal link between CO2 and rising temperatures, then all the talk about carbon caps and carbon trading is simply futile. But it is worse than futile, because one consequence of developing policies in this area will be to reduce not only our own standard of living, but the standard of living of the world's poorest countries. As someone who has worked closely with ministers in the past, I cannot imagine that I could have advised a minister to go down the AGW path on the evidence available, given the expense involved, the burden on everyone and the possible futility of the outcome.

Some readers of drafts of this paper have raised the precautionary principle as an indication that we should, even in the face of the uncertainty about the science, take AGW seriously. Unfortunately, as I see it, the precautionary principle here is very similar to Pascal's wager. Pascal argued that it made good sense to believe in God: if God existed you could gain an eternity of bliss, and if he didn't exist you were no worse off. Alas, Pascal didn't allow for the possibility that God was in fact Allah, and you had opted for belief in the wrong religion.

The IPCC's account of things seems to me only one possibility, and the evidence for it is not very strong. For that reason, I would counsel that we accept that climate changes, and learn, as indeed human beings have learned for thousands of years, to adapt to that change as rationally and sensibly as we can.

Source





Ethanol politics: update

Paul Krugman, who wrote in Jan 2007 that "There is a place for ethanol in the world's energy future - but that place is in the tropics" today tells his readers that even Brazilian ethanol is contributing to food shortages worldwide. Hmm, maybe ethanol is not such a great idea - who knew? So how does this affect our assessment of the Presidential candidates? Here is Krugman:
Oh, and in case you're wondering: all the remaining presidential contenders are terrible on this issue.

Oh, and in case you are wondering - Krugman is lying. Obama has consistently supported ethanol subsidies and voted in favor of those subsidies in a 2005 energy bill. Hillary favors some subsidies but opposed the relevant 2005 amendment. And John Sidney McCain has consistently opposed ethanol subsidies and voted on Hillary's (losing) side in 2005.

Yet they are "all terrible"? Or when Krugman refers to "all of the remaining Presidential contenders", does he expect us to understand that only Democrats are in contention? Details after the break, including McCain's 2006 "flip" in which he declared support for ethanol as long as it is not subsidized. Strong support indeed! (But do notice that MSNBC hides his "no subsidies" position; who could have predicted that?). I mocked other portions of the Krugman column here.

MORE: I am now on message with the Weekly Standard. On ethanol Barack Obama is probably the worst of the three remaining candidates since he has supported subsidies and lauds corn-based ethanol in his current energy plan:
Develop the Next Generation of Biofuels: Barack Obama will work to ensure that advanced biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol, are developed and incorporated into our national supply as soon as possible. Corn ethanol is the most successful alternative fuel commercially available in the U.S. today, and we should fight the efforts of big oil and big agri-business to undermine this emerging industry.

Right, "big agri-business", as represented by Archer-Daniels-Midland, has been ruthlessly suppressing ethanol for years. Hillary is not a star, but she at least voted against the ethanol subsidies in the 2005 energy bill (Barack favored it). And McCain is in a category of his own. In the 2000 Presidential race he was vocally opposed to ethanol subsidies (and skipped the Iowa caucuses). He also was on Hillary's side in opposing the 2005 ethanol subsidies. However, in what was reported as a flip-flop, McCain told an Iowa audience in 2006 that:
"I support ethanol and I think it is a vital, a vital alternative energy source not only because of our dependency on foreign oil but its greenhouse gas reduction effects."

However, there is support and there is support, as the Fortune piece goes on to explain:
In Grinnell, McCain said he still opposes subsidies but indicated his attitude softened after oil prices crossed $40 a barrel.

So, he supports unsubsidized ethanol. Surely that is not as dreadful as the Obama or Clinton position. McCain explained this to Tim Russert on Nov 12, 2006:
MR. RUSSERT: And now John McCain is embracing ethanol.

SEN. McCAIN: I'm not embracing ethanol. I said when oil is $10 a barrel, ethanol doesn't make much sense. When it's $40 a barrel, it does make sense. I do not support subsidies for ethanol and I have not supported it and I will not. But ethanol makes a lot of sense, particularly our dependence on foreign oil, and my believe that-my belief that climate change is real and is part of the solution to this climate greenhouse gas emissions problem.

MR. RUSSERT: But that is a profound change, senator. You did say here-I'll read it to you. "`Ethanol is a product that would not exist if Congress didn't create an artificial market for it. No one would be willing to buy it,' McCain said in November 2003. ... `Ethanol does nothing to reduce fuel consumption, nothing to increase our energy independence, nothing to improve our air quality.'" And when oil was $60 a barrel, you issued a press release saying that ethanol would result in higher gasoline prices for your constituents. You've changed your mind, which...

SEN. McCAIN: No, I, I, I don't, I don't think I said that at $60 a barrel. I said it when it was $10 a barrel or $9 a barrel. But I think it has a profound influence when, when oil is as high as it is.

Let's say that McCain may have flipped (probably without much conviction or knowledge) on the science by declaring that ethanol "is part of the solution to this climate greenhouse gas emissions problem" but he has been consistently opposed to subsidies, which means that in terms of policy he is miles ahead of Obama.

Source

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

These are some thoughts on "global warming" written by a PhD chemist in layman's language (I hope) on the topic of INFRARED RADIATION and its interaction with the atmosphere. My other hope is that speed-readers will discover an idea or two that helps them understand technical jargon and curiously over-confident scientific claims.

That the indirect effect of the sun's moods and orbits, along with galactic cosmic ray storms effect on cloud cover, and just generally getting back to normal after a long ice age that we evolved during seems to explain warming just fine puts me in the historically honorable role of skeptic, except that even warming *itself* is questionable, so I'm skeptical even about that (!) for I cannot find even a single rural temperature station that records warming instead of cooling. Global Warming seems to be double junk-science obfuscation, created for political reasons, mainly to mask other agendas (power, money, religious worship of Earth, socialism via carbon credit trading with other countries, neuroticism, boredom, fear of being envied, or just plain evil).

What seems to be true is that the Earth is greening due to CO2 fertilization of plant and green microbes, but natural processes are causing the Earth to cool in most rural places along with a cooling ocean (fact!). The increase in CO2, on average, helps plants deal with this cooler world, as well as makes them grow twice as fast with twice as much CO2 being around since CO2 is SCARCE AS HELL in the air, AS IS HEAT. Why do you think they grow flowers in HOT GREENHOUSES with ARTIFICIALLY HIGH LEVELS OF CO2? Why is blistering hot Equator dotted by tropical rainforests?

Global Warming theory was a wonderful hypothesis in that a mechanism of infrared (hot) light was being captured by carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air and causing the Earth to get hotter, and various "runaway" mechanisms were hand-waved around too. It is a good hypothesis since it is falsifiable, so represents science at its best.

To begin, I ask: so what IS the infrared spectrum of the air we breath? The major components of air are Nitrogen and Oxygen, both multiply-bonded pairs of identical atoms. Since they are so STRONGLY held together they don't absorb low energy ("near", meaning near to the visible color red) infrared light. Thus N2 and O2 are not greenhouse gases.

CO2 has a very simple IR spectrum, being a simple straight line of three atoms and it happens to have only three vibrational motions too, analogous to a those of a the breasts of a dancing girl: symmetrical separation (13 microns), paired swaying (24 microns), and the flopping up and down (7 microns). Microns are micrometers, namely the distance between the peaks of the VERY SPECIFIC light waves the molecule will absorb. In CO2, all vibrational excited states are of equal intensity but of different energy, and one is twice as fat as the others. It's only the fat one that absorbs some IR light that would otherwise spill out into space, and so heats the atmosphere up, since it corresponds quite nicely to the curve of outgoing radiation:
http://www.te-software.co.nz/blog/auer_files/image001.gif

The infrared spectrum (the light that heats things up instead of making them bright etc.) starts just "above" red at under 1 micron and continues up to 1000 microns where it becomes radio waves, which ROTATE instead of vibrate molecules and can heat food by putting out kilowatts of the exact frequency that WATER rotates at, thus creating a microwave oven. Electric stove tops glow red since they are giving off mainly IR (literally heat rays) but some red comes out too. Our bodies and sun-warmed Earth areas water give off 10 micron radiation, so it's the low numbers that count as "heat" and beyond that you are pushing into the radio spectrum. Molecules act much like radio antennas, but being so small, they require extremely short wavelengths of radiation to absorb it like an antenna does, electronically. You can see how long the wavelength of radio waves are: they are about 4 times the length of a typical car radio antenna (so they call those 1/4 wavelength antennas). Since cell phones use MUCH higher frequencies than car radios, their antennas can be very short.

CO2 absorbs IR light not as an antenna though (it only does that in the ultraviolet), but more like a tuned guitar string or a wine glass being shattered by the specific frequency it rings at when tapped. Being a trace gas, what in the infrared spectrum of air could cause a Greenhouse Effect? The idea that gases REFLECTS heat back to the ground, like a mirror, is simply false, for there is no directionality to it. Heat, in the form electromagnetic waves is absorbed, which makes the molecule wiggle violently and bump into other molecules, so the atmosphere heats up.

Then it's up to the thermal conductivity of air to transfer that heat down to land or sea. Air isn't very good at this. Note how a mere few inches between your finger and a candle causes no pain, and THIS is in a case of heat rising (hot air is less dense so it floats upwards), whereas the an air-movement greenhouse effect would require hot air to fall to earth, which would be bad for balloonists. That's not how the greenhouse effect works though. It's HOT LIGHT, not hot air that gets trapped.

Note a few things. First, CO2, being a truly trace gas (less than 0.1% since plants keep sucking it out of the atmosphere (and the ocean, soil and even many rocks do too) and plants and photosynthetic microorganisms make up the BULK of the biosphere (ever lifted a mature tree or a whole bale of hay?), so us oxygen breathers can't deplete O2 into being a trace gas like plants can do with CO2, so O2 is not a trace gas, though there are major O2 sinks (mineralization and fires) that stops it from raising, and there is a healthy N2 sink too (ocean solubility, along with "nitrogen fixing" bacteria that turn it into fertilizer for plant roots).

The CO2 molecule, being of such low concentration simply means that most rays of heat never encounter one, and so can escape into space unscathed, except for a bigger problem, that being that the air has a LOT of water in it, most of it in opaque liquid form (just look up and see floating white bunnies and dragons) so doesn't get counted as a "% of the atmosphere" on the pie charts, but THERE IS 30 TIMES AS MANY WATER MOLECULES IN VAPOR DROPLETS IN THE ATMOSPHERE AS THERE IS CO2. Water, because it is a bent molecule instead of straight, and exists on earth in three states (gas, liquid and solid cloud droplets, lakes, rivers, oceans), also has a much greater greenhouse effect than CO2, having a HUGE infrared spectral signature, ALL ACROSS THE BOARD, instead of just one relevant peak. It is a trace gas but a major NON gas component of the atmosphere, so much so that it often falls out of the sky while making thunder and lightening, or as snowflakes. Human activity is NOT increasing water vapor in the air. If it did, it would simply self-correct by raining more, which would be good for plants, just as CO2 is.

As we all know, water does not absorb visible light, being "water clear" to the eye. But steam or snowstorms do obscure vision, by acting as a lens or a scratched-up mirror. Can you see through a glass full of perfectly clear ice cubes, even if you top it off with liquid water? No. But adding water or not, it will absorb IR light like crazy, and the ice will melt. That's why visible light doesn't do anything to water but a hot pan will boil it and a sunlamp will make it evaporate much faster.

That a tiny amount of CO2 (99% of the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen), by mere fact of being so dilute (0.037%, or 1 in 3000 molecules of gas) cannot possibly capture much heat energy, means that doubling CO2 in the air is to double a very tiny number, resulting in another very tiny number. The bulk of heat energy from the sun is captured by the relatively warm oceans, not the thin atmosphere, anyway, and carbonated water doesn't get any hotter in the sun than tap water so the greenhouse effect does NOT effect ocean temperatures efficiently at ALL. Variations in the output of the sun are VERY effective at heating up water, yet the OCEAN is literally MILES deep and water has one of the largest heat capacities of any liquid, which is why water boils so slowly. Oceans do NOT heat up, no matter what, except on a scale of many hundreds of years.

The top mile of Earth's solid surface doesn't heat up at all. Caves, worldwide, are all a chilly 13 degrees Celsius. You are called an Astronaut if you travel 50 miles up into the air, whereas the Earth is 1800 miles wide, so if the Earth was a foot-wide Basketball, the ATMOSPHERE would be the thickness of a pencil, with most of it being too thin to breath. 75% of the atmosphere is within only 7 miles of the ground, which is more like the lead of the pencil. To breath without passing out, you can only fly your balloon to a height of about 2 miles, about the thickness of the paint on a good pencil. Asking how much heat the atmosphere can hold in is like hoping a butane lighter wont set your pencil on fire, because it's painted white instead of black. Now try to use the burning pencil as a torch to heat a brick or boil a quart of water. That's like wondering if the sun will heat up the Earth's crust and oceans because the atmosphere is a bit "blacker" than it was before.

Also, CO2 and water vapor act in BOTH directions, so as much as they might keep heat in, they also block it from coming in, in the first place! Especially clouds, which are NOT INCLUDED in climate models since they are not theoretically understood (and would ruin the frightening predictions too).

Doubling CO2 in the air is like adding a second drop of the world's most potent poison to a swimming pool. To pull off an effective murder, you'd need a gallon, and even then make sure the sun and chlorination don't destroy your poison, which it will likely do since the most potent poisons are not very stable molecules (an analog to CO2 sinks in the biosphere such as forest cover increasing 1% a year for the last 40 years in the USA, or most wood eventually becoming recyclable paper or permanent houses or furniture). Much better would be to add a disease vector, but alas the chorine defeats that idea. See, it really hard to murder someone by using their swimming pool. Analogously, it is very hard to come up with ideas why CO2 in the air will bury NYC in water in a mere 100 years.

Want to sequester CO2? Vastly increase the cutting down and replanting of trees! How many MILLION TONS of wood and paper are permanently stored in documents and products instead of burned up? For paper, a must more productive crop is hemp, being what the original USA flag was made of and what the Constitution was written on.

Also, there is a curve of diminishing and eventual no return upon increasing CO2 as far as it acting as a greenhouse gas goes. One is that an in initial rise causes the most effect, whereas another doubling or two has less than additional doubling greenhouse effects. How can this be?! Because water vapor dominates, so if you count the area under the IR spectrum of water vapor plus CO2, and you double the CO2, you do not double the greenhouse effect, you just do the equivalent of doubling the height of the Empire State Building, without by a measurable percentage, doubling the weight of Manhattan Island.

Finally, no matter how much CO2 there is in the air, since it is a weak absorber of Earthly infrared frequencies (similarly to how O2 and N2 are too, since they are such SIMPLE molecules, unlike water which has SIX ways to vibrate over a VERY broad range of the IR spectrum, though methane is ironically simpler since it is more symmetrical, and only has two main vibration bands), it can become SATURATED, especially in the thinner upper atmosphere which approaches being a vacuum (notice how the best INSULATOR is a VACUUM and so is used in vacuum thermos bottles to keep coffee hot all day). Air is rather thin as you might notice if you try to fly by waving your arms up and down. Still air is also a poor conductor of heat because it's so thin that there's almost nothing there (!), which explains why we can see right through it. This is how "down insulation" works: the feathers stop the cold air from moving through the body of the jacket. That's also why when it *does* get hot or cold, winds can maintain huge masses of cold or hot air, as seen on weather maps, and so indeed our weather is rather interesting instead of dull as it would be if air was a good conductor of heat.

CO2 can become saturated (meaning all the CO2 around is already carrying a stored photon of heat) because reflected sunlight is quite abundant. The only sunlight it absorbs, unlike light directly from the sun which, being a very large hydrogen bomb, shines mostly in much higher energies than what reflects or radiates back skyward from the Earth, because instead of being a hydrogen bomb, the Earth is a wet rock with a uranium reactor around its iron core that is insulated from the surface by miles of rock. If the sun's output extended much further into the IR range we would catch on fire when we walked outside in an oxygen-rich atmosphere, like a window curtain will do if it blows on top of a halogen lamp; the lamp being of much lower energy than a hydrogen bomb, puts out a lot of IR. Also notice that since the sun doesn't put out a lot of radio waves (way lower energy than even IR), so we can have...radio!

What saturation means though is that CO2 can absorb a single photon of heat energy, and vibrate like crazy, but the transparently thin atmosphere (due to the Earth being a tiny planet as planets go so doesn't have a lot of gravity), not able to find another molecule to transfer it's vibratory energy to before it spontaneously releases that exact photon of IR energy in a random direction, usually out into space given that the sky above is bigger target than the earth below, especially since other molecules (due to quantum mechanics) can't absorb the exact size package of heat CO2 is holding onto. It's all or nothing. Of all gasses in the air, only water can accept a heat photon from CO2. This is complex, and would take me many hours of research to pin down, so I'll leave this as mere food for thought.

The sun heats the earth mainly by its small output of IR, and somewhat by ultraviolet, but UV is mostly blocked by ozone. The X-rays and cosmic rays from space are routed AROUND our planet by it's magnetic field (which flips every hundred thousand years, going dead for a few hundred...which would be very scary!) as well as swept away by the ionized particles that the sun gives off act like a fan blowing cosmic rays away from reaching us on the ground. Ultraviolet is absorbed by ozone, which the sun converts oxygen into. Liquid water and plants and land are all MUCH more dense than gases (the atmosphere) so absorb a lot of heat and this heat is what makes the air warm enough to breath, unlike the deadly cold air jets fly at through, above the clouds.

The Holy Grail is the IR spectrum of both the whole atmosphere and it's components:
http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/gccourse/forcing/images/image7.gif

As you can see, although CO2 INDEED shows up in the total spectrum of the atmosphere, water vapor utterly dominates the IR spectrum of the atmosphere, not CO2.

Still looks bad for us skeptics, eh? CO2 really DOES seem to be a significant "greenhouse gas."

Except for two crucial points:

(1) The FIRST graph I linked to, which showed that both incoming sunlight and Earth-reflected infrared (IR) light has a frequency distribution that UTTERLY SKIPS two of the three IR absorption bands of CO2, whereas WATER catches MOST incoming AND outgoing (greenhouse effect) types of hot light. Thank God too, for without that water vapor, the surface of the Earth would be as cold as the Moon or Mars, meaning -270 degrees Celsius. So there is indeed a greenhouse effect. It makes life possible on our planet, just as does the blind luck that oxygen is converted to ozone by the sun's UV light, and then acts as a sunblock that allows organisms to avoid mutated DNA. UV light makes cheaply printed posters and old photos fade, since UV light basically rips all organic molecules (including cheap dyes) essentially explode. Dark or tanned skin ACTIVELY blocks UV in the DEAD layer of our surface skin because otherwise UV light chops our DNA up, including the DNA that programs damaged cells to commit suicide, and all it takes is one cell with about five mutations to begin a tumor.

(2) This type of spectral chart IGNORES CLOUDS. They are FULL of liquid and solid water!!! The spectra for water in the "atmospheric absorption spectrum" is for water as a GAS, not as an opaque clouds. Liquid or solid water is about 2000 times as dense as water vapor. Since most of the atmosphere is VERY cold, water exists mainly as highly variable low level surface humidity and higher clouds. That clouds are not actually very high is well known to any mountain climber or frequent flier. That summers in Florida are horribly humid (water as a gas), but not summers in Colorado, says that humidity can vary by location, unlike CO2. That warming is not global but localized to a small area of northern Europe and surrounding seas along with a microscopically small area of Antarctica that has active volcanoes, while the rest of non-urban areas of the globe show a hundred year cooling trend means that humidity is likely falling everywhere else.

The idea that a SINGLE band of the CO2 spectrum (which overlaps a much wider band of water) will have a large effect when water vapor is really what's keeping us warm is a very radical theory, and radical theories require extreme evidence to support them, especially when you have water dominating the amount of heat that is reflected (by clouds and ice) back to space, and yet acting as a heat blanket and absorber too.

Here's the clincher though: That temperature in almost ALL rural areas on Earth has been LINEARLY and leisurely COOLING for the past 100 years (the South and North Pole, rural Australia, rural USA, the Himalayas, Greenland, etc.) means that not only does "warming" not correlate with the rapid rise in CO2 that ONLY BEGAN in 1940, but that "Global Warming" DOES NOT EXIST AT ALL. It seems that the global average temperature so often quoted has included data from university towns which over the last 100 years have grown into cities, and cities get hot, the bunch of boxy buildings sticking into the air acting just like the spiky heat sink on your computer CPU acts as a high surface area heat transfer object. Now remove the box from your computer and run it in direct sunlight, with all the black parking-lots of computer chips no longer having a fan to cool them. Good luck. I call this the Runaway Computer Frying Effect, and theorize that the big hydrogen bomb in the sky causes the chips to explode as the electrical power acts as a positive feedback mechanism, not the puny CO2 molecule, since exhaling CO2 onto the CPU it doesn't make the explosions any faster.

See: http://www.john-daly.com/stations/stations.htm for hard data on dozens of rural temperature stations, many going back 50-100 years. Be sure to check out the South Pole. I once printed that graph, wallet-sized, and showed it to a girl or two when they started liking me enough to ask me about my politics, but then both suddenly stopped chatting nicely and looked at me like I was the devil.

Finally, look at an up-to-date graph of "global" temperature, whose source I assume includes URBAN heat stations which makes the initial warming trend must more prominent, and the last DECADE of cooling much less so:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/rss_msu_mar2008_520.png?w=500&h=277

The way I interpret this graph is that the Earth has been cooling for a century, but that local heat island effects in urban areas created a "global average" increase in the data, but the cooling has gotten so bad recently that it has overwhelmed even this artifact.

To close, I present the hypothesis that atmospheric CO2 causes Global Cooling, by decreasing cloud cover. My correlation-based evidence is that as CO2 has increased, rural temperature stations all show a cooling trend, as do the army of ocean diving robots. That this cooling began before CO2 rose much was due to early burning of wood, and the smog it created where people lived who owned thermometers. Oceans will indeed rise a bit, as Antarctica gets heavier as it grows, putting pressure on the liquid mantle, which will thus push the crust up elsewhere. Another, run-away effect is that with more CO2, plant life, like in an old horror film, will grow to take over the planet more and more each year, and more plants decrease low altitude CO2 so there is less greenhouse effect to help warm the Earth. I will publish this in an online journal and put out press releases as soon as I find someone who knows how to program computer models "correctly". Fourier transformations (addition of sine waves) will recreate both historical data perfectly, as well as let me make the future do anything I want it to, including having temperature follow predictable sun cycles. Under a pseudonym I will also have my programmer do the same thing for the stock market and sell the program for thousands of dollars. Once global warming is debunked in the public eye, model-making programmers will be cheaper. This will allow me to hire the 100 people needed to paint rural temperature stations with invisible infrared reflecting paint, which the currently used dirty white paint absorbs instead.

-=DrNikFromNYC=-

Anonymous said...

The BAN ON DDT was lifted in 2007!

I found a few back issues of 'New Scientist' that I had not read yet. In between sob stories of reindeer no longer being able to cross frozen rivers in Siberia and a return to 1970s polyester shirts since they are recyclable, I note that the World Health Organization has pulled rank on the World Wildlife Federation, so the world is now free to spray DDT in their dwellings. Lots of factoids I was not aware of, such as not only was it banned, but truly demonized as one of the 12 worst chemicals in the world, so was INDEED utterly banned for ALL use, unlike I have heard activists lying about a couple years ago, online.

The article actually puts the blood of 2 million dead a year at the hands of fanatical "environmentalists." They don't mention the fact that that many healthier people suffer massive medical damage if they don't die from it.

http://s68.photobucket.com/albums/i14/SnickSnack/Environmentalism/?action=view¤t=DDTBanLifted.jpg

Click on "full size" to make it readable.