China To US: Pay Up

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Drop Your Trousers

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A Historic Moment

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Fight Club: Is Man largely responsible for global warming?

The Times:

YES, says Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum and Professor of Climate Science at University College London

Human beings have shaped the world to suit their needs. Through agriculture and engineering we have assured our supplies of food and water, and many of us enjoy lives of unprecedented richness and security. Two key factors have underpinned this success — the recent unusual stability of the global climate system and our exploitation of cheap and convenient energy from coal, oil and natural gas.

Early in the industrial age, such scientist-thinkers as Joseph Fourier and John Tyndall pondered the consequences of the massive burning of carbon-based fuels. They understood that water vapour, carbon dioxide and other minor constituents of the atmosphere warm the surface of the Earth, allowing life to exist and prosper. They reasoned that by increasing the atmospheric concentration of these greenhouse gases, we would increase the warming effect.

Analysis of air trapped for millennia in Antarctic ice shows that the growth in atmospheric CO2 between the last Ice Age and the Industrial Revolution has already been matched by what we have generated since. And we can detect the resultant gradual warming. Eleven of the past 13 years have been the hottest since records began, with measurable impacts on the distribution of vegetation and ice cover. The global mean sea level, stable for several thousand years, has begun to rise as seawater warms and expands, and because of the melting of ice on land…

NO, says Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Or rather, we can’t tell. “Global warming” refers to changes in an index known as the global mean temperature anomaly. This index has increased irregularly by about 0.75C since the Industrial Revolution began, but it always shows some warming or cooling, and fluctuations of 0.5C are common. Claims of record-breaking years hinge on fluctuations of tenths of a degree. Such changes go unnoticed because local fluctuations are much larger and significantly uncorrelated with the global index. Nevertheless, when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its statement that man was likely responsible for most of the warming since 1957, it was essentially referring to this index. The statement was hardly alarming and was consistent with Man having a small impact.

So how was the claim arrived at? It was argued that climate models could not account for this slight warming unless forced to do so, and the only “forcing” the modellers could think of was Man. Making this assertion assumed that their models already represented a major natural source of variability — the atmosphere-ocean system, manifested in phenomena such as El Niño, the Pacific decadal oscillation and the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation.

Within a year of the 2007 IPCC report, scientists from modelling centres in the UK and Germany acknowledged that the failure of the models to predict the relatively static temperatures of recent years was due precisely to the models’ failure to adequately display natural variability. This hardly proves that Man made no contribution, but it certainly does invalidate the claimed attribution.

In any case, are variations of tenths of a degree in global mean temperature what people are worried about? Not likely. The concern is with larger warming in the future as well as melting Arctic sea ice, rising sea levels, suffering polar bears etc. For the first item, one might ask how models predicting large warming were made consistent with the modest warming of the past 52 years. The answer from scientists at the US National

Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado is that each model was separately “adjusted” by a cooling caused by largely unknown aerosols — the aerosols being considered part of Man’s contribution…

Read it all.

Sneak Attack!

Via IBD

Another Teachable Moment

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