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Global Warming Debunker Debunked
Earlier this month we ran an article linking Christopher Monckton's attempt to discredit global warming. The submitter asked plaintively, "Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?" George Monbiot has now done so. From the article: "This is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong... In keeping with most of the articles about climate change in [the Sunday Telegraph], it is a mixture of cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation, and pseudo-scientific gibberish. But it has the virtue of being incomprehensible to anyone who is not an atmospheric physicist... As for James Hansen, he did not tell the US Congress that temperatures would rise by 0.3C by the end of the past century. He presented three possible scenarios to the US Senate — high, medium, and low. Both the high and low scenarios, he explained, were unlikely to materialise. The middle one was 'the most plausible.' As it happens, the middle scenario was almost exactly right. He did not claim, under any scenario, that sea levels would rise by several feet by 2000." And on the political front, the only major ally for Pres. Bush's stand on global warming, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, is now willing to look at carbon trading.
If you'd like to run a global climate model (GCM) yourself, you can now do so. The NASA GISS Model II GCM has been ported to run on Mac/Win computers and wrapped in a point-and-click interface. GISS, the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, is the lab that Hansen (mentioned in the summary) runs.
The EdGCM project provides this free GCM wrapped in a GUI. If you want to add CO2 or turn down the sun or whatever, you may now do so with some checkboxes and sliders.
Space and Computers.
From the Financial Times, July 7 2006:
"I recognise the surface of the earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem," he said during a visit to Denmark en route to Gleneagles.
>Effect, not cause.
Both. One of the reasons we need computer models. Especially since warmer climates speed up some processes that *absorb* CO2 as well as speeding up processes that release CO2.
CO2's causal role is simple phsyics. The numbers on feedback have been hard to pin down. But there's not any question that *other things being equal* more CO2 means a warmer planet on average.
>Humans are unlikely to be the cause:
We are, indeed, responsible for only a small percentage of the CO2 in the atmosphere. The amount that was there before we started is responsible for keeping the oceans from freezing. A small change to that large an effect is worth thinking about.
A 22.5% increase over 2 centuries, 19.4% in 45 years, is a small percentage?
[ http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/siple.htm ]
>>
An atmospheric CO2 record for the past 200 years was obtained from the
Siple Station ice core.
[...]
Neftel et al. (1985) concluded that the atmospheric CO2 concentration
ca. 1750 was 280±5 parts per million by volume (ppmv) and that it
increased by 22.5% to 345 ppmv in 1984 essentially because of human
factors.
>>
[ http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.htm ]
>>
The Mauna Loa record shows a 19.4% increase in the mean annual
concentration, from 315.98 parts per million by volume (ppmv) of dry
air in 1959 to 377.38 ppmv in 2004.
>>
Well, there's what Hansen said, and there's what got reported. The meta-debunker went back to primary sources and found:
1) This is why people prefer global climate change rather than global warming, because it gives people who read only headlines the wrong idea. What that article refers to is thermohaline inversion and the stopping of the Atlantic conveyor belt, which is responsible for a good chunk of the nice coastal temperatures in Europe. For more details, and just because I can, I'll point you to alink that is in the same article you just quoted.
2) The Clean Air act is supposedly responsible for this nice little event. As for whether this would be able to affect the global climate in the level that we're seeing it, I'll refer you to this link.
3) Nice little effort at cherry-picking your events. For an actual event, you can go to Greenland and see how their farming efforts are a little easier now. However, the bad events far outweigh any positives we've gotten so far, primarily because it takes time to profit from change. Until we learn to take advantage of what Global Climate Change can do for us, we'll have seniors dying in droves from heat waves, pipelines and houses buckling due to vanishing permafrost and crops dying in areas that are getting too hot for comfort.
4) Since this is the same exact point as in 2) (complete with link to article that has the same quote), I'll refer you to the link I posted there. Besides, that article is a complete light weight when it comes to determining how much more light has reached the earth, its causes (which, btw, include reduced albedo, which is a side-effect of Global Climate Change) or its impact on what we're seeing.
Try again.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
John Howard is a very accomplished politician. He's making "climate change" noises now purely to distance himself from the US election results. This is the man who claimed that the Boat People refugees were "throwing their children overboard" even though the military told his people that wasn't true within 24 hours after the alleged event. He continued to support the Children Overboard story for over a month, until after the Federal Election. See http://www.alp.org.au/features/lies.php for a breakdown of some of his side-stepping and double dealing. Or even better try http://www.google.com.au/search?q=john+howard+lies for a wider view.
John Howard has been using his absolute majority in both Houses to force all sorts of ideologically motivated laws through, regardless of how they may change Australian Culture. He seems to be intent on making us a new state of the USA. He is the person responsible for ensuring that the USA is not alone in its' Kyoto stance. He is responsible for a "Free Trade" agreement which is dismantling our fair-use provisions under copyright, is introducing DMCA legislation, is changing our patents office to be in line with the US model, is diluting our PBS (the Government sponsored sale of pharmaceuticals, all of which must happen before 2010, yet the USA is under no obligations under this agreement until 2022.
He is responsible for setting up concentration camps for refugees (more precisely, for illegal immigrants who are requesting refugee status). Most of these camps are in the back of beyond. There are children who have liven for most of their lives behind the razor wire, and there is a horrific incidence of mental illness associated with this detention in sub-human conditions.
Now that public opinion can be shown to be swinging against the US Republican approach to the Middle East and "The War on Terror" he's simply waving an extremely large, colourful and exciting flag (climate change acceptance) to distract people from his complete failure to interface with the Democrats. The news is now that the Democrats are going to demand a US inquiry into the AWB scandal (The AWB, run by Howard's mates, was busted paying hundreds of millions of dollars to Saddam Hussein to get around the trade sanctions, abusing the UN "Oil for Food" program).
I, along with many other informed Australians, do not believe there is any change of heart in Howard's new "Climate friendly" position. It's all just an attempt at distraction from the real issues.