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Still More on Global Warming
hype7 writes "The Daily Telegraph is running a piece on the world's temperature. Apparently, it was a lot hotter in the middle ages: "A review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.""
The telegraph article is a pretty lousy article, and gives few details. A bettle article is available at Space Flight Now. Apparently, the study was partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute so I would be especially wary of bias.
There isn't enough evidence in the articles to understand what the study actually found. They published some of their findings in the Climate Research journal, which only gives an abstract without a subscription. However, they haven't even published their full findings which are supposed to be published in Energy and Environment which appears to be more of a policy journal than a scientific journal.
I think it is very hard to evaluate the credibility of these claims without seeing the actual journal article that explains them. Another thing is that according to Space Flight Now article, is that the study is actually "A review of more than 200 climate studies," and we need to look at the authenticity of these studies. However, maybe it will help us look at global warming from a new perspective.
Secondly, the US didn't ratify Kyoto for economic reasons, not scientific ones - the US Govt's own sceintists confirmed that global warming exists and is caused by a boatload of human activites - though no doubt some ignorant Congressmen voted against it because they bought the bull from phoney science. It was the protection of major US interests that drove them to not sign it... that, and ignorance and stupidity.
That's not completely true, or at least there's more to it. The Kyoto treaty was meant to cut down on emissions and to reduce possible sources of greenhouse gasses. It was supposed to be binding to all signers. Sounds great, right? But think about the full story -- especially with regard to the two most populous countries: China (~1.5 billion) and India (~1 billion). Conveniently, they were both exempted from the Kyoto accord because the benevolent governments of the world did not want to impact their economic growth potential. So why would the US, a country with less than a 5th of the combined population of those countries, saddle itself with a policy that will not touch those countries? BTW, those two countries are also the largest producers of greenhouse gasses with Mexico and Brazil following way behind them.
everything in moderation
"Despite the fact that land sinks help remove carbon from the atmosphere, the U.S. continues to emit more carbon than it removes. In 1990, for example, the country released 1.337 billion tons from fossil fuel emissions, making it a net source of between two-thirds and 1 billion tons of carbon per year."
Got a reference for your statement?