Kowabunga

Global Warming: Natural Causes #4

The Senate EPW runs a good website on global warming that I don’t read anywhere often enough. This week they have an article on a paper being published that shows that “man-made global warming” is NOT a scientific consensus. In fact, the article points out that less than half of all peer reviewed publications support the U.N.-Al Gore position that it is our fault that the Earth is getting warmer.

From Michael Asher’s piece on Daily Tech:

In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus.”

According to the piece, there is a very small margin between those papers that explicitly accept and those that explicitly reject the Al Gore position on global warming. Even playing loosy-goosy by claiming the middle ground implicitly supports “man-made global warming” you still don’t get anything resembling a consensus on global warming.

The article also points out that of all of the published papers in the last several years there is only one that claims that there will be catastrophic consequences due to “man-made global warming.” That’s probably the paper the social engineers who brought us the IPCC report read.

Schulte’s survey contradicts the United Nation IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which gave a figure of “90% likely” man was having an impact on world temperatures. But does the IPCC represent a consensus view of world scientists? Despite media claims of “thousands of scientists” involved in the report, the actual text is written by a much smaller number of “lead authors.” The introductory “Summary for Policymakers” — the only portion usually quoted in the media — is written not by scientists at all, but by politicians, and approved, word-by-word, by political representatives from member nations. By IPCC policy, the individual report chapters — the only text actually written by scientists — are edited to “ensure compliance” with the summary, which is typically published months before the actual report itself.

I think that this last is something many people are unaware of: that the reports quoted as touring the “consensus” and the “90% likely” claim were not written by climate scientists but by politicians. In other words, the “Summary for Policy Makers” was written by and for policy makers. This is also pointed out in the Avery/Singer book, as well as other shortcomings to the IPCC reports, such as charts of scientific data modified in a way to so as to support the climate alarmist viewpoint.

On the EPW site there is another article posted last week on new peer-reviewed publications that shoots down the “man-made” global warming madness.

“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing the new study which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Another scientist said the peer-reviewed study overturned “in one fell swoop” the climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore. The study entitled “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System,” was authored by Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz. (LINK)

“Effectively, this (new study) means that the global economy will spend trillions of dollars trying to avoid a warming of ~ 1.0 K by 2100 A.D.” Dr. Wilson wrote in a note to the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee on August 19, 2007. Wilson, a former operations astronomer at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore MD, was referring to the trillions of dollars that would be spent under such international global warming treaties like the Kyoto Protocol.

“Previously, I have indicated that the widely accepted values for temperature increase associated with a doubling of CO2 were far too high i.e. 2 - 4.5 Kelvin. This new peer-reviewed paper claims a value of 1.1 +/- 0.5 K increase for a doubling of CO2,” he added.

It goes on to point out that0.7K of that warming has already taken place, thus leaving a mere 0.4K of warming that can be predicted from CO2 forcing, providing that CO2 levels continue to increase to the point where it has doubled to roughly 560 parts per million, That’s a very small fraction of a percent of the atmosphere. This is in keeping with scientific understanding that CO2 loses its capacity to force temperature increases as it grows in abundance in the atmosphere.

This second article on the EPW website goes into a lot of other material that proves that the current warming trend ain’t our fault, including a little talked about fact that of the 0.038% of the atmosphere that is CO2, only 2.75% is derived from human activity. That means of the 383 ppm of atmospheric CO2, only 10.5ppm is caused by man. Talk about insignificant!

One more quote from the article, and I would encourage reading the entire piece:

In May 2007, the “father of meteorology” Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin, dismissed fears of increased man-made CO2 in the atmosphere.

“You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide,” Bryson, who has been identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world, said. (LINK) “All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air,” Bryson added.

Bryson is right on the money. Just as the Earth cooled down after the Medieval Warming Period (Viking Age) as it entered the Little Ice Age, so it is with the Modern Warming Period. Solar activity, sunspot cycles, the Earth’s tilt and variations in its orbit, and so many other factors, all play a role in the ongoing changes in climate, and all are ignored by the global warming fear mongers.

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