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In the early nineties, some scientists were saying that carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emissions were causing global warming. This was disturbing to the author; a chemical engineer who has worked on coal conversion processes his whole life. Before it was investigated as to whether or not this was really true, the author developed a scheme to remove CO2 from power plant flue gas by bubbling it through a pond of water to form algae, then skimming it off, drying it and feeding it back to the power plant as a fuel to be blended with the coal. This would do two things, reduce the overall CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, and conserve our coal reserves. After investigating CO2 as a cause of global warming, it appeared at that time to be false.
In the late 1990's it was brought up again and in 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that CO2 was causing the earth to warm and developed computer models to predict how much the earth would warm in the future. In 2006-2007, the author evaluated this again in depth and found the premise was clearly false. IPCC scientists did not relay that, during the time from the mid 1960's to 1998, the stratosphere cooled almost three times as much as the earth warmed. From this input, the author could prove that CFC destruction of ozone, not CO2, was the cause of the abnormal warming over that period. He wrote a paper on his CFC destruction of ozone findings. However, putting this aside, does any evidence exist to support the premise that increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere have caused the earth to warm?
Do Scientists Support Global Warming?
First, most scientists do not agree with the CO2 global warming premise! In the United States 31,478 scientists, including the author, have signed a petition rejecting the Kyoto global warming agreement (see Figure 1) and of these, 9,029 have PhDs, including Dr. Edward Teller.
Figure 1. Rejection of Kyoto Global Warming Agreement 1.
In addition, U.S. Senator James Inhofe 2 (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, recently delivered a global warming speech entitled: "Global Warming Consensus in Freefall: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims." Inhofe also detailed the growing number of left of center scientists and environmental activists who are speaking out to reject man-made climate fears.
Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT Professor of Atmospheric Science and past UN IPCC contributor, explained that only a few scientists were involved in writing the IPCC 2001 Third Assessment Report 3. Although purported to speak for thousands of scientists, it was not thousands offering their consensus. Dr. Lindzen participated in that and said, "Each person who was an author wrote one or two pages in conjunction with someone else. They traveled around the world several times a year for several years to write it, and the summary for policymakers had the input of about 13 of the scientists. Ultimately, it was written by representatives of governments, of environmental organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists, and industrial organizations, each seeking their own benefit."
Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" Documentary has Cause and Effect Reversed
In the documentary "Inconvenient Truth", Al Gore conveniently separated the Vostok Ice core temperature and CO2 graphs so you could not see which came first, a warming spike or a CO2 spike. He said that a CO2 spike came first but alas, it was the just the opposite! When the graphs are combined, it is clearly seen that a global warming spike always comes first (blue line). This warms the oceans, which reduces the solubility of CO2 in water and results in the liberation of CO2 from the oceans. He also gave no explanation what would cause a CO2 spike to occur in the first place. What is so disturbing is that climatologists, like Al Gore, seem to have a problem discerning cause and effect. It is very simple and does not require a rocket scientist. If what you call an effect comes first, you have it backwards; the cause comes first to produce the effect.
Figure 2. Vostok, Antarctica Ice Core Data 4.
Does Atmospheric CO2 Change Correlate with Earth Temperature Change?
Does a correlation exist between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the earth's temperature? No, that does not exist. Does an increase in CO2 cause the earth's temperature to increase? No, look at Figure 3 below developed by Joseph D'Aleo, certified meteorologist. Even a non-scientist can see there is absolutely no correlation between CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and the earth's temperature. If there were a correlation, they both would rise and fall together. The CO2 has been on a continuous upward trend -- not true for the earth's temperature.
The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Two sets of temperature measurements are shown, one set by NASA's Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) for the troposphere and the other by the UK's Hadley Climate Research Unit for the land and sea. Both show declining temperatures over time even as CO2 has increased from 366 ppmv in January 1998 to 385 ppmv by January 2008. Note that the earth surface temperature (pink line) in January 2008 was some 0.48 oC cooler than it was in January 2003.
Figure 3. Earth Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 Concentration 5.
Global warming advocates also say that CO2 builds up in the atmosphere over a 50 to 250 year period, but this cannot be true either. Figure 3 above shows that the CO2 concentration oscillates based on the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The ratio of land to ocean in the Northern Hemisphere is about 1 to 1.5 and in the Southern Hemisphere is 1 to 4. Therefore, the Northern Hemisphere with much more land mass has a growing season that dominates the Southern Hemisphere growing season with respect to absorption of CO2.
As shown in Figure 3 above, each year around April, increased CO2 absorption by plants in the Northern Hemisphere starts reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere and the reduction continues until around mid to late August when plants start to go dormant. The cycles occur on a regular yearly basis and the swing in CO2 concentration is in the 5 to 8 ppmv range. If CO2 stayed in the atmosphere for long periods before being consumed, the season to season cyclic effect would not be seen. It is clear that nature reacts very fast in its consumption of carbon dioxide.
The graph in Figure 4 shows the IPPC computer modeling projections from the year 2000 to 2100 based on various assumptions of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. The black line from 1998 to 2008 was added by the author to the IPCC graph; it shows the actual measured surface temperatures.
Figure 4. IPPC Predictions compared to Actual Surface Temperature Measurements 6.
The actual temperature for 2008 was some 0.43 Degrees C cooler than the IPCC projection based on the assumption that atmospheric CO2 concentration remained constant with time. On an actual temperature basis, one sees that the IPCC models predict temperatures that are not even close to actual measurements. The temperature in 2008 was the same as in 1982. To this old chemical engineer, the predictions represent the classic "garbage in -- garbage out" analysis for computer models. It reminds me of the computer models used to predict where Hurricane Ike would hit the U. S. in 2008. Five meteorological models all predicted the hurricane would hit the west coast of Florida, then changed it to New Orleans, then to Galveston, down to Corpus Christi and then back up to Galveston, where it finally hit, all of this over a five day period. Here again, meteorological models are not trustworthy.
Human Made Emissions of Carbon Dioxide (CO2)
Do you realize that CO2 emissions created by man's activities, combustion of fuels, etc. (called Anthropogenic emissions) is miniscule compared to the emissions of CO2 from nature? Table 1 was developed by the IPCC. It shows annual CO2 emissions to the atmosphere from both nature and man and how much of the CO2 emitted is re-absorbed by nature.
|Carbon Dioxide
|Human Made
|Annual Million Metric Tons
|% of Total
Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis
(Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press, 2001), Figure 3.1, p. 188.
Using the table above in combination with a total concentration of 385 ppmv of CO2 seen in the atmosphere in January 2008, one sees that the increase in CO2 caused by all of man's activities amounted to only 11.5 ppmv. The amount of CO2 from man is a mouse milk quantity compared to nature's emissions. If we eliminated all anthropogenic CO2 emissions, we would go back to the level we had in 2001-2002 when it was warmer than it is now.
Nature absorbs 98.5% of the CO2 that is emitted by nature and man. As CO2 increases in the atmosphere, nature's controlling mechanism causes plant growth to increase via photosynthesis; CO2 is absorbed, and oxygen is liberated. Photosynthesis is an endothermic (cooling) reaction. Further, a doubling of CO2 will increase the photosynthesis rate by 30 to 100%, depending on other environmental conditions such as temperature and available moisture 7. More CO2 is absorbed by the plants due to the increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere available for conversion to carbohydrates. Nature therefore has in place a built-in mechanism to regulate the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that will always completely dwarf man's feeble attempts to regulate it. Further, no regulation by man is necessary because CO2 is not a pollutant; it is part of the animal-plant life cycle. Without it, life would not exist on earth. Increased CO2 in the atmosphere increases plant growth, which is a very good thing during a period of world population growth and an increasing demand for food.
No Greenhouse Signature in Atmosphere
There are several possible causes of global warming, and each warms the atmosphere at different latitudes and altitudes. Each cause will produce a distinct pattern of hot spots in the atmosphere and will leave its "signature". The greenhouse signature is very distinct -- see Figure 5. If this signature were present, warming would be concentrated in a distinct "hot spot" about 8 to 12 km up over the tropics, with less warming further away, turning to cooling above 18 km. Actual measurements have been taken where the warming is occurring using satellites and balloons.
The observed signature is shown in Figure 6. As one can clearly see, the actual signature is nothing like the predicted IPCC "Greenhouse" signature. The greenhouse signature is not seen -- no "hot spot" exists! Although not shown here, the actual signature is most like the one the IPCC developed for ozone depletion.
Figure 5. Theoretical Greenhouse Signature (UN climate models) 8.
Figure 6. Actual Observed Signature 9.
IPCC Greenhouse Effect is Impossible
The IPCC (Figure 7) analysis shows 390 watts/m2 being radiated from the earth (right side of graph) to the atmosphere, excluding thermals and water evaporation from plant leaves (evapo-transpiration) for simplicity, when only 168 watts/m2 is absorbed by the earth (left side of graph) in the first place. This graphic violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics, which in essence state that you cannot get more energy out of a system than you put into that system.
Figure 7. IPCC Greenhouse Effect 10.
If what the IPCC is presenting were true, for every unit of energy in, one would get back (390/168) = 2.32 units of energy. The U.S. Patent Office never awards a patent for a process that claims it gets more energy out than it puts in because thermodynamically it is quite impossible. Strangely, the IPCC promotes such nonsense to the people of the world and is not soundly rebuked for it!
A friend of mine, an analytical chemist 11, correctly writes, "As a further rebuttal of the influence of carbon dioxide over the climate, the alleged IPCC greenhouse effect is a non-existent effect. No greenhouse, whether made from glass, plastic, cardboard or steel will reach a higher inside temperature due to the magic of re-radiated IR energy. If it did, engineers would have long ago been able to design power stations made from air, mirrors and glass, extracting more energy out of it than was put into it -- if only!"
Carbon Tax Effect on the Average American
Taxing carbon would do absolutely nothing to improve the climate but would be a devastating economic hardship to the people in the world. Following is a summary of the U.S. carbon tax legislation 12 proposed by Michigan Representative John Dingell:
Tax on carbon content:
$50 / ton of carbon (phased in over 5 years and then adjusted for inflation)
Let us complete a ballpark analysis of the impact of a carbon tax on the cost of electricity. In the United States, 50% of our electricity comes from coal-fired power plants. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), the average open-market selling price in 2007 was $40.80/ton for bituminous coal (12,500 Btu/lb and 70- wt% carbon). Therefore, the tax on bituminous coal would be around $35/ton (~86% of its open market selling price).
The average selling price of electricity to residential users in 2007 was $0.1061/kWhr. Assuming a heat rate of 10,000 Btu/kWhr of electricity generated for bituminous coal, the carbon tax would add $0.014/kWhr of electricity, a 13% increase.
Tax on gasoline:
$0.50/gallon of gasoline, jet fuel, kerosene (petroleum based), added to current gasoline tax phased in over 5 years and adjusted for inflation. This $0.50/gallon gas tax is in addition to what is derived from the per ton carbon tax in the previous section.
Consider gasoline contains 86-wt % carbon and weighs 6.5 lb/gal. Dingell's carbon tax would add $43/ton of gasoline or $0.14/gallon. When added to the $0.50/gal tax will equate to $0.64/gal. Based on an initial gasoline selling price of $2.00/gallon with the added carbon taxes, the price would increase to $2.64/gal, a 32% increase.
Based on actual data, CO2 causing global warming is clearly a figment of the IPCC's imagination. The lesson to the world here is, when it comes to science, never blindly accept an explanation from a politician or scientists who have turned political for their own private gain. Taxing carbon will have absolutely no beneficial effect on our climate, will hurt the economies of the world, and will be harmful to the production of food because less carbon dioxide means reduced plant growth. Many scientists, including the author, see global warming from CO2 as a cruel global swindle, so that a few, at the expense of the many, can reap huge profits from carbon taxes.
1. Global Warming Petition Project, Click Here
2. Click Here
3. Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT Climate Scientist Calls Fears of Global Warming 'Silly' - Equates Concerns to Little Kids
Attempting to "Scare Each Other", February 1, 2007 U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works,
Click Here
4. Petit, J.R., et. al., "Climate and Atmospheric History of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok Ice Core, Antarctica", Nature 399: 429-436, June 3, 1999.
5. D'Aleo, J. S., "Correlation Last Decade and This Century CO2 and Global Temperatures Not There"
Click Here
6. NASA Earth Observatory, based on IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (2007)
(Click Here) and Hadley Climate Research Unit, Global Temperature Record, Phil Jones, Click Here
7. Pearch, R.W. and Bjorkman, O., "Physiological effects", in Lemon, E.R. (ed.), CO 2 and Plants: The Response of Plants to Rising Levels of Atmospheric CO2 (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983), pp 65-105
8. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2007, p. 675, based on Santer et al, 2003. See also IPCC, 2007, Appendix 9C).
9. "Carbon Emissions Don't Cause Global Warming, November 28, 2007", Dr. David Evans,
Click Here
10. J. T. Kiehl and Kevin E. Trenberth, Earth's Annual Global Mean Energy Budget, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 78, No. 2, page 206, February 1997 (adopted by IPCC 2007)
11. Comments to U. S. EPA on Global Warming, Hans Schreuder, November 15, 2008
Click Here
12. Carbon Tax Summary, Click Here
1. Global Warming Petition Project, Click Here
But let's face it. Where most of what is called economics is concerned, I'm strictly a babe in the woods. Sure, I know a lot, but a lot may not be enough if I stepped into the ring with the real heavyweights. The present boss of the Federal Reserve made some statements about oil that I consider nonsense, but where the rest of the show is concerned he's one of the main men.
Now, about these scientists you mentioned who put the bad mouth on warming. I haven't seen that particular list, and I'm not sure that I want to see it, but I have seen several 'lists', and some of the people called scientists probably have about the same scientific qualifications that I had when I was expelled from Illinois Institute of Technology for poor scholarship. In fact I think that I was last in the class. If you want to convince my humble self, then you have to show me a list with all the top climate scientists on it, and proof that the majority on that list say that AGW idoesn't exist. Merely mentioning that a top climate scientist who also believes that smoking is good for your health (or maybe image) - Richard Lindzen - would be on such a list doesn't cut any ice with me.
And of course, those top climate scientists could be wrong. Their cause is hardly strengthened by the endorsement they received from Nobel Laureate Gore, and in addition their star Dr Hansen is a little too soft spoken for my taste, but even so I'm really and truly and completely and overwhelmingly glad that the movers and shakers are prepared to treat AGW as a clear and almost present danger.
Such a waste of time. I MAY read further later if this debate EVER gets interesting.
I do believe that climate change is taking place, in one way or another, but this headlong rush into eliminating CO2 , with a minimum of supporting evidence, flies in the face of sound scientific and engineering practice. And, I might add, sound business practice.
Please note that I am using the term CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) which serves as a "yardstick" (unit = 1) against which we can measure all GHGs.
Also, I have used an empirical 20%, dragged out of thin air (no pun intended), but Bob Ashworth cites a mere 2.9% attributable to anthropogenic activity.
What should we do?
But as someone has noted in one of the discussions/debates about nuclear in this forum, an almost psycopathic hatred of nuclear prevails that, as far as I can tell, threatens to overwhelm the laws of economics. Therefore, If governments and financial markets will not take their responsibility where the future supply of energy is concerned, then it is just as well for almost everybody if the next generation of nuclear technology is hurried into existence with the aid of a light panic about global warming.
Len Gould has identified some inaccuracies in Mr Ashworth's presentation, and it is here that we have the problem with issues of this nature. What's the point in claiming that AWG is bunkum, and filling your argument with mistakes - especially mistakes that can be easily identified? The point of course is to impress persons as dumb as my good self in these matters, however in THIS forum there are contributors who know how to deal with spurious hypotheses And not just here. A gentleman on one of the lists mentioned above, who poses as some kind of scientist here in Sweden, had the gall to go to California Institute of Technology and claim that AGW was a fraud, following which he was ridiculed by real scientists in the audience.
And finally, I notice that Dr Edward Teller was cited in this article. I really dont understand how anybody who is familiar with Teller's behavior in the Robert Oppenheimer affair would be interested in a petition or anything else signed by that gentleman.
Alan: Look at Table 1 again, the IPCC who is touting the CO2 global warming nonsense shows in their table that man only contributes 2.9% of the CO2 that goes to the environment. If you eliminated worldwide, all of the athropogenic CO2 we would go back to the concentration we had in 2001- 2003. It was warmer then than now.
Ferdinand: I forgot about the Oppenheimer controversy but Teller was a smart guy. It is funny that the IPCC never presents a list of scientists that are backing them. I signed that petition as well, a long time ago. In the 1990s I think.
No science backs up the IPCC. They made computer models that predict rises in temperature but never check it against actual measurements. Charlatans of science really make me mad because it is clear they are doing this for their own financial gain at the xpense of the many.
This does leave open several questions. Have temperatures indeed been rising? If so, why? Why are CO2 levels rising? ...
There was a slight abnormal warming from the mid sixties to 1998. This was caused by CFC destruction of ozone that cooled the stratosphere off some three times more than the earth warmed. I wrote a paper on that first. I have a version of that paper on my website. It is the same website address as above: http://omsriram.com/GlobalWarming.htm.
I believe the CO2 levels are rising because of the massive amount of methane being liberated from the permafrost in Siberia. I write about this in the paper referenced. Researcher's estimated the methane being released there at some 100 times as much carbon as man emits. CH4 slowly converts to CO2 in the atmosphere. The Arctic and Anarctic areas have warmed over twice as much as the average earth temperature rise because less ozone exists in those cold climes. We really need to remove the chlorine from the stratosphere that is destroying the ozone.
Hope this is helpful.
Both believers and sceptics can correlate their arguments with historical events, but correlation is not causation. Proof is still pending. And I believe both sides have to play a part. The "signature" can still possibly be found, and if it is, how significant is it?
Unfortunately global warming is no longer about playing the ball. Although sceptics have their ear biters and kidney punchers eg his lordship Mr Monckton, the alarmists seem to have an army of Mike Tysons eg Tamino.
The tactics of some are even more insidious.
1. Some prominent scientists/researchers don't release their raw data eg Michael Mann.
2. Some researchers get smeared and have their career nearly destroyed for trying to bring order to the chaos eg Bjorn Lomborg.
3. Some publishers are lobbied to prevent publication of selective scientific material, or have biased editors eg as what happened to former IPCC lead author Roy Spencer with his recent attempts at publication.
4. Some prominent persons hoping to join the global warming bandwagon get impunity from their ridiculous claims eg prominent Australian head of World Vision Tim Costello claims that Tsunamis are caused by global warming.
5. Some scientists who spend a lifetime focussing on science get pack attacked and smeared if they release something against the "consenus of global warming" eg Ian Pilmer after releasing Heaven and Earth.
6. Some researchers are rewarded for thuggery eg John Holdren rising to prominence in the Obama Admin after his smear attacks on other researchers eg Lomborg.
7. And most importantly the gradual disappearance of former easy to obtain research papers on the global climate that contradict the IPCC agenda eg Shaopang Huang's global Ice core study that proved the MWP and LIA were largely global events. Instead we get the very contradictory Mann Hockey Stick that doesn't highlight these events, and does not release the data to the public.
So knowing all this, where should we go, and what as a society should we do? I personally think the answer is very simple in many cases. As there are plenty of other real environmental problems, we should be focussing on those. Incidently many strategies that combat other environmental problems may also reduce CO2 emissions eg revegetation programs in addition to providing habitats and reducing erosion would also provide carbon capture.
It is unfortunate that those who shout the loudest about global warming are not genuinely interested in the environment. It is a smokescreen to bring down successful market economies. It is utterly foolish to propose closing down a coal power station, and replace it with a series of wind farms thus reducing cheap reliable energy with land intensive intermittant energy. However this is what the extreme alarmists propose, and bombard society with constantly.
It is a shame that there are many scientists and researchers who believe in global warming and have honourable intentions for society. Their mistake is that they have not disowned the "Chicken Little Alarmists" from among their ranks. Even "couch potatoes" will only put up with "wolf criers" for so long.
It is time to get back to science, rational, sustainable and sensible environmental solutions, and most importantly it is time to restore some maturity to the debate of man made global warming.
For if we don't we will punish the innocent, we will increase poverty, we will introduce costly and largely redundant "solutions". And ironically considering that besides global warming, global populations seem to be a major global threat, it is the prosperity level of a nation that seems to most influence its native population growth. And if there was ever a reason to kick these mischievous anti capitalist, pro socialist, wolf crier activists to the curb, this is it.
How does CO2 increase if there is an increase in methane?
Noted the Arctic hs warmed (as the top 3rd of the globe has been where most of the natural and/or man made "global warming" has been. I would like to observe what happens over the next 30 years as the pacific decadal oscillation has started to commence its cooler phase.
The Antarctic however has not warmed, at least not substantially. In fact the continent's land and sea ice levels are quite impressive.
Lomborg is some kind of statistician, but note, he is NOT represented in the scientific literature. When I gave a talk on oil in the Danish Parliament, Lomborg was expected to come there and tell me that there was 100 years of oil remaining, but apparently he had other commitments. Actually, for what it is worth, there might be thousands of years, but so what. If the oil price goes back to $147/b and keeps moving up, the number of years of oil remaining is completely uninteresting.
Bob Ashworth, Teller was a brilliant guy, and his name definitely would mean more on any kind of climate warming petition than e.g. mine, but since he had other things to do in his life than studying climate science, I think it best not to pay any attention to what he believed or didn't believe about climate warming.
So John Holdren smeared Bjorn Lomborg, did he. Well Teller smeared Robert Oppenheimer. The smearing of Bjorn Lomborg doesn't bother me at all because it has no real significance given Lomborg's attraction for the media, but the smearing of Oppenheimer is a sorry chapter in American history.
And Mathew, the environmentalists don't want to close down coal burning power stations. I know this from looking at the situation in Germany. What they really want to do is not just to stop the building of new nuclear plants, but to close down ALL the existing nuclear plants, and prohibit the building of more. And you know something, if governments are really so dumb as to go along with replacing nuclear with intermittant power, then they and their supporters deserve what they will get.
Errr yes I knew he was a statistician and not a scientist. I called him a "researcher" based on the number of footnotes/references (approx 2900 in The Skeptical Environmentalist) he uses in his published work. Using the term "researcher" was meant to be a broad positive. I'm open to a suggestion on a better word.
I don't agree with everything the man says, but while activists and reactionaries try to create anarchy, Lomborg made a great effort to rationally bring order from the chaos on a macro level which is a damn sight better than what just about anyone else has done.
I am also unaware what Lomborg says on a daily basis, him being in Europe and all. But I do know the guy has a lot of enemies including parts of the media. But hey if Patrick Moore defends the guy (and I admire Patrick Moore) and risks himself copyright infringements, then that is good enough for me.
In Australia activists are trying to stop new hydro dams, coal power stations, and any thought of going nuclear. To them it is wind and solar (and other rarely used renewables eg geothermal/tidal/biomass) or nothing. Our new mildly socialist govt is accelerating clean coal and carbon storage pursuits, as well as introducing new solar power plants (introduced in the 2009/2010 Federal Budget just last night).
eg. "man only contributes 2.9% of the CO2 that goes to the environment." -- wrong. Just because man's additions amount to only 2.9% of the ocean's emissions is meaningless. The oceans DO contribute 90 gt C/yr to the atmosphere, BUT they also remove 92 gt C/yr. Man does nothing comparable to mitigate his 5.5 gt C/yr. Also see data from Woods Hole website that of ALL the EXCESS CO2 that goes to the environment and makes up the 1.8 ppmv/yr annual increase, man contributes about 100% and in fact some as yet poorly understood benefactor in Nature is still sinking a lot of it (about 45% of the annual atmospheric increase) somewhere we haven't found yet. Will that continue? For how long? How about putting some of your "scientists" from the denier crowd onto that question?
Atmospheric increase = Emissions from fossil fuels + Net emissions from changes in land use - Oceanic uptake - Missing carbon sink
3.2 (±0.2) = 6.3 (±0.4) + 2.2 (±0.8) - 2.4 (±0.7) - 2.9 (±1.1)
http://omsriram.com/GlobalWarming.htm (same reference I gave before) The temperature of the rest of Antarctica shows no current indications of rising. I think this is because of an elevation effect. the peninsula varies from around 0 to 5000 ft. and the rest is in the range of 10,000 to 13,000 ft. I believe that the radiant heat loss at those high elevations counters the loss of ozone effect. I say this because Vostok even cooled (no warming) over the same period that stratospheric ozone destruction took place. At night or during the periods of the year when darkness prevails, reduced ozone yields high radiant energy loss to outer space.
Regarding how CO2 increases from methane release, CH4 slowly converts to CO2 in the atmosphere: CH4 + 2O2 = CO2 + 2H2O
Len: I always hear it is riduclous when I say there is no science attached to CO2 causing global warming. I have never found any from real measurements. CO2 concentration does not correlate with temperature at all. There is no greenhouse signature in the atmosphere as the IPCC predicted. Further the IPCC greenhouse effect is bogus from the getgo because it violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics which in essence state you cannot get more energy out of a system than you put into it.
Further, and this comes from an IPCC report, man contributes only 2.9% of the CO2 that is admitted to the atmosphere each year and of that nature absorbs (through photosynthesis) 98.5%. Man's contribution then to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is only 0.0435%. Since man's contribution is so small if all of man's CO2 emissions globally were eliminated we would go back to the concetration we had in the early 2000's when the earth was warmer than it is now. What data can you cite that refutes what I have relayed above. To me this CO2 warming pseudo-science is the greatest scam ever attempeted to be imposed on We the People. Gore started his Generation Investment Management LLC (UK)firm that only invests in green technologies in 2004 and in four years (2008) he had raised $5 billion dollars to invest. Pretty good for a startup company. Pelosi invested in T. Boone Pickens windfarms and of course is pushing cap and trade. I hope the people of the world wake up soon, the burden of any tax imposed for anything whatsoever is never paid by corporations or any other entity, it is always just passed on to We The People.
Thanks for the chemistry explanation.
The Antarctic peninsula is not the whole Antarctic. As a whole Antarctica has remained pretty constant, and currently has near record levels of sea and land ice (admittedly with some big chunks of sea ice about to break away).
I did see a new study from Michael Mann claiming the Antarctic Peninsula had a recent radical warming period which was much stronger than the mild cooling on other parts of the continent. However as no other study (to my knowledge) has claimed such strong warming on the Peninsula, as Michael Mann has earlier controversies and as Michael Mann does not publicly release his data (to explain such controversies), I am unsure how to accept his claims.
I do agree that if global warming is real and becomes significant, consequential events in permafrosted areas of the globe could be severe.
But apparently, he seems to be back. He again mentions his problems with the Figure 7. picture. His concerns can be easily resolved by noting that those are average energy transfers over the course of a day or year. Some of the element have the ability to store some amounts of energy for a period of time. There is no violation of thermodynamics.
I didn't run away.
In neo-classical economics a determined effort by e.g. Australia would be observed by e.g. Sweden, and this would increase the knowledge of both countries in environmental matters. If I require a reference to neo-classical economics in order to make a debating point, I might use one, but otherwise I stay as far away from it as possible. I can mention though that if things do not work out for Australia, perhaps...perhaps the Swedes will get the message, and I will gain a few dollars.
In the strange case of Bjorn Lomborg, please don't talk about order being obtained from chaos due to the efforts of a gentleman who assembles a posse of academic hustlers and busybodies, calls them the Copenhagen Consensus, and then takes them down to the Tivoli to drink beer. BESIDES, WHY WASN'T I CONSIDERED WHEN THE INVITATIONS WERE BEING PASSED OUT? I DRINK BEER TOO.
So if I toss you a red-hot rivet, you'd have no trouble holding it in your bare hand, as the radiant energy transfer is instantaneous? Radiant transfer is proportional to k(T^4) so yes, there is TIME involved in the energy transfer, it is not 'pretty much instantaneous'. Any body warmer than another will transfer heat to that other body, whether its 100 degrees warmer or 2 degrees warmer. Note that energy transfer from only slightly warmer bodies is at a very low rate, but it does occur.
As Roger Arnold patiently tried to explain to you and Alan, the IPCC is not going to make the sophomoric mistakes that you suggest. Someone else would have noticed them. This is not to say that one shouldn't be prudent and vigilant with their (or anyone else's) claims, but it also means simply denying thoughtful counter-claims to your assertions is a waste of both of our time.
By accusing IPCC of these simplistic mistakes, you are in effect making an extraordinary claim. I think you'd at least agree to that. I agree with the late Carl Sagan when he said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (from Hume's Maxim).
At this point, you are providing no such evidence that would be convincing to anyone skilled in this field.
I do have a technical background, and have even taken graduate level courses in heat transfer. But the claims you are making can be dismissed by a freshman physics student.
"I didn't run away, just got tired of beating a dead horse." -- You should stop beating that horse, Bob. Given your (obviously absent) powers of observation, I'd say its likely you may be charged with cruelty to a live horse.
As I said previously some physicists have finally awakened from their slumber; they recognize what I and many many others recognize, see below:
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics Authors: Gerhard Gerlich, Ralf D. Tscheuschner (Submitted on 8 Jul 2007 (v1), last revised 4 Mar 2009 (this version, v4))
Abstract: The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that many authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896), and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist.
Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.
Comments: 115 pages, 32 figures, 13 tables (some typos corrected) Subjects: Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph) Journal reference: Int.J.Mod.Phys.B23:275-364,2009 DOI: 10.1142/S021797920904984X Cite as: arXiv:0707.1161v4 [physics.ao-ph]
Did you know Mrs has four times the CO2 concentration in its atmosphere as earth does but the day and night temperatures differ by 100C. How can that happen, Len?
Also I bet there is a 50/50 chance that the IPCC scientists do not know that greenhouses are heated. Why would you have to heat them with all of that re-radiation bouncing around and lasting for up to a year or so?
I have found during my life that all of the answers you have about life and the universe are very simple and staring you in the face. Have you ever heard of Occam's razor? The Monk stated that the simplest answer is most likely correct. A wise man. Another wise man said, simplicity and profundity are one!
Let me say this, I consulted to a group who had a metal carbide process they claimed was getting more energy out than they put in. I told them that was impossible, you might approach 100% but you cannot exceed 100% unless you are converting mass to energy like in a nuclear reaction. The engineer working on the project said, "If that is the case there is no reason to pursue the technology!" They didn't invite me back, didn't pay me, and needless to say the technology was never commercialized. Sounds crazy but this happened.
The two physicists who wrote their paper in 2007, published in 2009, recognized what Hans and I recognize. People like to jabber about stuff but very few really take the time to analyze things for themselves and use an open mind doing it.
If you disagree with the status quo, they call you names and try to crush you so you rarely hear the other side of the story (I think Paul Harvey is dead now). My CFC destruction of ozone paper had been peer reviewed and accepted for publishing in Chemical Engineering Progress in June. Not long ago they told me they changed their mind about publishing the paper because they had not taken a position on global warming (don't offend anyone). So science, like everything else is becoming very political.
The DOE and EPA were completely politicized during the Bush administration and Obama is impeccably following that lead.
You are correct that clen coal will not be soon available. According to the recently released Garnaut Report, Clean Coal Technology is still approx 20 years away. However that has not stopped the Australian Federal Govt from planning ahead eg looking for a carbon storage site.
In the early to mid 90's it was trendy for (moderate) socialists to claim "Well Sweden does it, why can't we?". Now that the (moderate) socialists are in power again, the trendoids in Sweden may yet again gain some influence.
I don't know how to respond to your angst with Bjorn Lomborg. I do see groupthink as a bane of civilisation. Perhaps write him a letter explaining your credentials, your interest in the Copenhagen consensus and your love of beer. I must admit I am totally naive to the environmental politics in your side of the world.
It is indeed frightening to know that almost our entire federal government has become metastasized by such closed-minded psuedo-scientific AGW zombies. No wonder most Average Americans have given up on our so-called representative republic and have resorted to stocking up on guns and ammo.
FYI - Bob is not the first person on this site to point out that AGW theory violates the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics. I made that point over a year ago, so those horses have been beaten into micronized decay by now.
Or is this the oater version of "Night of the Living Dead" (horse).......'cause them zombies just keep popping up!
David Smith Moscow ID USA
What about the extreme anti-AGW promoters (like Bob Ashworth) , and the anti-nuclear people? The truth is that they have an important part to play in the scheme of things, because they are needed to keep the AGW people and the nuclear shills - like me, according to Tam Hunt - honest. I have a guy on my case now in this nuclear thing, and his assuring me that I am a lightweight makes me a better...middleweight (?).
Where the US government is concerned, I figure the president and his team are smart enough to know that their announced energy policy is for the birds, but this is precisely what cannot be said. (There is a similar situation in Australia and, probably, New Zealand.) Of course, the so-called energy appointments of President Obama were wrong, but so what. Corrections can be made later - or perhaps I should say, they should be made before the voters wise up.
As for what is happening in Sweden at the present time, the important thing to know is that Sweden is a member of the European Union, and for the politicians and up-market bureaucrats THAT MEANS EVERYTHING. The would sell this country out in a heartbeat for a plane ticket to Brussels ,a chance to strut through EU headquarters, and maybe cop some free beer at some point in the evening..
The IPCC process was flawed from the start, but just try going up against an organisation showering money around to get something started, even if it smells a bit. One hopes that the science will prevail. By the time of the first report, the flaws were obvious. And then of course, there was Mann who retroactively changed the climate history of the last 1,000 years, and few noticed. Then they started to flex their muscle, and adopt this attitude that if the science disagrees with the political summary we will edit what the scientists say. Even many of their scientists now disagree openly.
There always were an army of scientists who did not like the process or its outcome, and who eventually realised that good science would not prevail. By then the political machine was talking 'concensus' and 'all scientists agree'' even though there had been no poll and to disagree was to see one's job disappear. Science is, however, beginning to prevail and raise its head above the noise.
And Ferdinand 'where is the harm'? After seeing the utter social destruction that is facing Europe and the US, because the EU and Obama bought into this scam of Gore and Hansen (near the top of Obama's Gilbert and Sullivan's 'list' of things to do), I cannot believe you said that.
The cost of sequestration of carbon dioxide adds another 30% (knocks the working energy output down by 30%). Environmentalists love it as it makes their unworkable renewables seem more workable.
The ratio of heat to light emanating from this comment thread appears to be rising exponentially. Therefore, allow me to jump on board with a few tangential thoughts, intended merely to "stir the pot".
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that global climate is changing as the direct result of the accumulation of carbon emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels and the emissions of methane from a variety of sources. The current warming trend, which arguably began in ~1650 (the trough of the "Little Ice Age", for the non-Mannians in the group) and apparently went "on vacation" in ~1998, produced a peak warming of ~0.8 C above a reasonably accepted long term average temperature and of ~2.3 C from the trough of the Little Ice Age. Since 1998, the warming above the reasonably accepted long term average temperature has declined to ~0.1-0.2 C (UAH MSU / RAH MSU).
NOTE: I have not used GISS above because the warming being discussed is less than 1 C and the average GISS measurement station is prone to errors in excess of 2 C (www.surfacestations.org) based on the NCDC evaluation criteria. Therefore, the GISS reporting of temperature anomalies to 2 decimal place "accuracy" is highly problematic.
It is as yet uncertain whether the current warming trend, which arguably began in ~1650, is still "on vacation", or whether it has been replaced by a cooling trend indicative of the onset of a Dalton or Maunder Minimum on the part of our currently somnolent sun.
However, assuming that the current climate change scenario is the result of anthropogenic carbon emissions, which began to manifest as increasing atmospheric carbon concentrations in ~1750 (~100 years after the temperature rise began), we can posit that halting the increase in atmospheric carbon concentrations would require reducing annual anthropogenic carbon emissions to some rate less than the rate of emissions at which the atmospheric carbon concentration began to increase. That would require a decrease of ~99.95% in GLOBAL anthropogenic carbon emissions from current emissions rates.
Also note that UN FAO estimates that ~18% of annual GHG emissions are the result, not of fossil fuel combustion, but rather of domesticated animal husbandry. Eliminating that contribution to anthropogenic climate change would require the GLOBAL adoption of a vegan diet. (I will not attempt to estimate the impact of a GLOBAL switch from animal protein to legume-sourced protein on human methane emissions.)
Therefore, if one accepts the concept of anthropogenic climate change, it is quite obvious that none of the "solutions" proposed to date is, in fact, a solution to the issue. It is also obvious that the US alone, or in cooperation with the other developed countries, is not capable of halting anthropogenic climate change, even ignoring the stated intent of the developing nations to continue increasing their carbon emissions for the forseeable future. The currently projected increases in China's carbon emissions over the next 10 years would "swamp" any reasonably achievable reductions by the developed countries.
I have suggested here previously that the path to some increase in energy independence and the path to some reduction in anthropogenic carbon emissions would likely be different. I still suggest that it would be handy if we agreed on where we intended to go before we began the journey. I know we're all guys (with the possible exception of the "lurkers") and thus are averse to asking for directions, but this would be a very good time to break out of that mold.
My estimate of the US investment required to achieve the Waxman-Markey "wish" of an 83% reduction in US carbon emissions by 2050 is ~$700 billion per year, or nearly $30 trillion over the period. This does not include any carbon tax or allowance auction revenues intended to flow through the US federal government into a group of as yet unidentified "rat holes".
Here are the problems with the AGW agenda. First of all the Cap and Trade bill being proposed by Waxman and Markey will cost every family in the US some $3100/year in increased energy costs and this is probably on the low side. This affects retired people living on fixed incomes, the poor and unemployed the most.
The increased energy costs will drive more businesses overseas and decrease our ability to survive financially. All of us know we are in deep trouble and printing more money may work for the US government for a short time, but like Swartzeneger said, "The State of California is not like the US government, we can't just print money." We can't either!
We should not live in a virtual world like the AGW promoters want us to so they can line their pockets at the expense of the rest of us. If we live in the real world and use real science we can survive but we won't if everyone lies about everything for their own hidden agendas.
David and John:
Thanks for not remianing silent. Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the greatest patriot the US has ever known, once said, "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent!" John: Rattie's adress was a good one.
I, like the two of you, analyzed global warming without any preconceived ideas going in. There is absolutely no truth to CO2 causing warming as you both know. The AGW agenda will devastate many people but the promoters don't care. If a country can keep its people poor and destroy their morals then they will have total control over them. That is going on in the world big time these days and they keep coming up with new ways to accomplish their goals (like this AGW legislation).
An ex-VP of a major utility company recently relayed to me that a US Senator told him 12 years ago that the Democrats are going to implement carbon taxes not because of the climate but because it is a new way of taxing and the American people are too stupid to realize what is being done to them. Nice!
Please allow me to nitpick your first paragraph immediately above.
The estimated $3100 annual cost of W-M is not energy cost; it is tax, pure and simple, no matter how it is collected.
Also, a reasonable estimate of the return on the $700 billion which would have to be invested each year to actually reduce carbon emissions is ~10%, or about $70 billion, roughly equivalent to the projected average annual tax "take" from W-M. However, in year two, the cumulative investment would increase to $1.4 trillion and the annual return on investment would increase to slightly less than $140 billion, depending on the depreciation rate applied to the investments. In year three, add another $700 billion and another increment of return on investment.
Pretty soon, the tax "take" from W-M pales into insignificance. Interestingly, virtually nobody is focused on the investment requirements. Must be because of all of the extra money floating around in the world economy today.
And Bob, I doubt whether anybody has ridiculed cap-and-trade more than I have, and here I'm thinking of my new energy economics textbook, my articles, and especially my lectures. In Bangkok, when the teacher before me left something on the blackboard about cap-and-trade, I immediately went into a half-hour rant against it. For all I know, he was against it too.
As I see things, intelligent movers and shakers should be working overtime now to make sure the the nuclear sector is not diminished, which is what those other people really want. Eventually a reasonable energy strategy will be found, and it will be roses all the way. Of course it won't be the optimal energy strategy, but that is only found in Econ 101.
Perhaps we can ALL take some solace in noting that DOE Secretary Chu has chosen to eliminate the pointless hydrogen energy research by the Federal government. That seemed very unlikely to be productive anytime soon. (Apparently, they are still doing some fuel cell research).
Quite a few emerging energy technologies incidently have lower carbon emissions. CO2 does not necessarily have to be argued to improve Energy Infrastructure and supply etc.
I think governments globally are failing with strategic energy planning for their economies eg by including unnecessary redundancy and intermittant sources.
To John http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/14/now-thats-a-commencement-speech/#more-7841
Yes I read that in full yesterday. A very good article, and more than a few nails were hit on the head.
Absolutely brilliant.
I am convinced the AGW agenda is all about politics and control of the many by the elite few. Trying to actually better the lives of the masses is not even a consideration. Reasonably affordable energy is what is needed if lives are to be improved. That is where the emphasis should be placed. Do that and the "AGW" phantom will take care of itself as a happy by-product.
The staggering sums of money being squandered by the current "climate change" exercise are hardly helpful.
As for bettering the lives of the masses Mike, the masses should have voted Mr Bush and his team out when they had the chance. Now all of us are in trouble.
"As for bettering the lives of the masses Mike, the masses should have voted Mr Bush and his team out when they had the chance."
Let's see. That would probably put us in the second term of John F. Kerry and whoever replaced the now-disgraced John Edwards. Hmmm.
Kerry left a soft job to become a Swift Boat captain, and when Bush was asked if he wanted to go to Vietnam he answered in the negative. Of course it might be possible to say that Kerry doesn't have it because he didn't do what he should have done to win - whatever that was.
Let me also affirm that to my humble way of thinking, the man responsible for our/my troubles is the gorgeous William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton. If, upon becoming president, he had announced that no child (and perhaps also elderly person) in Iraq would suffer because of a lack of medicine, and kept every hospital in Iraq supplied, then the second Iraq war might not have taken place, while the US could have had its 'splendid little war' in Afghanistan - you know, the one that was won 5 years ago, but which Senator McCain is willing to keep going for a hundred years.
This is not the venue to discuss US politics or your mental state. :-)
The American people are too busy watching Entertainment Tonight and trying to program their DVRs to record American Idol to worry about trivial issues such as energy supply and climate change. They will focus on those issues when there is no fuel available at local gas stations, or when the lights don't turn on when they flip the switch.
I suspect you are amused, as I am, that the current discussion of Waxman-Markey is focused totally on the relative merits of "Cap & Tax" vs. a carbon tax; and, the impact of the federal "take" on energy bills; and, the multiple "rat holes" down which the resulting funds might be poured, mostly ineffectually.
There has, so far, been no public discussion of the out-year investments which would be required to actually reduce carbon emissions by 83% by 2050. I have estimated those investments at ~$700 billion per year, or a total of ~$30 trillion over the period, as I mentioned above. The potential tax take rapidly pales into insignificance compared to those investments and the necessary returns on them.
I believe the lack of discussion of the investments is intentional misdirection on the part of our legislators. I suspect the lack of media coverage is the result of collusion, or ignorance, or a particularly dangerous combination of both. I am totally mystified by the silence of the "loyal opposition".
Instead of living in the IPCC virtual world let us move over to the real world. No then, if we were to completely eliminate ALL man-made CO2 emissions throughout the whole world tomorrow, the CO2 concentration would go back to the 2001-2002 level we had. And, oh yes, it was warmer then than it was in 2008. (The information to make this assessment comes from an IPCC report, Table 1 in the text above).
CO2 causing global warming isn't worth discussing, but because of charlatans we are forced to do it. No science involved here, only computer programs with hidden agenda input created so We the People could be taxed more.
Obama on the one hand says he wants to give married persons that in total make under $150,000/year an $800/year tax break, but on the other hand he wants to tax them $3,100/year through Cap (Tax) and Trade. In reality he wants to increase their taxes by $2300/year. Wow he is really taking care of us. Soprry I meant to say really taking us to the cleaners. He and Gore are Masters of a full gamut of Smoke and Mirrors techniques.
Correct on both counts; US anthropogenic only.
Waxman-Markey is a "unilateral" US declaration of an "unwinnable" war, to be embarked upon based on "questionable intelligence" and a "tortured" definition of science, without a "broad coalition" of support, to be waged with "inadequate equipment" at a tremendous cost of "talent and treasure". "This war is lost" before it begins.
As some of us are well aware, it may take a hundred years of war to wise up. Or maybe a silver bible or two. But are you sure you didn't mix up the desire to build one hundred new U.S. nuclear power plants with that for one hundred years of war?
About the Waxman-Markey suggestions. Frankly I don't know anything about them, but it seems to me that the big industry people favor a carbon tax over cap-and-trade. I favor a carbon tax too because I want the tax revenues returned to the people who pay it, although I haven't worked out the details, nor do I intend to try to do so. But as somebody said to me - and he was NOT a democrat - people like the big boss of Exxon don't want cap and trade or carbon taxes, but if they have to choose it will be carbon taxes. Lord Browne (of BP) said the same thing. I dont guess then that I will be persecuted for favoring carbon taxes, because if that decisive margin of voters get their way, it's going to be one or the other.
Ed, you said that the American people are heavily involved with entertainment of one type or another. That's true everywhere, isn't it, and it's economics: It has to do with competition - in the broadest possible sense - and finite life spans. Things are of course complicated by the movers-and-shakers, the shot callers, and their greed and enormous ignorance. Of course I'm probably wrong here, because everything seems to be reduced to politics these days, and these phonies know infinitely more where politics is concerned than I do.
This is simply too frustrating. What is incredible is that ANYONE thinks this makes any sense.
I think Bob meant the radiation from cooler temps to warmer ones, for which there is indeed no net energy transfer. But he's still wrong because the atmosphere at some points is still warmer than the ground, so radiative energy transfer can still occur.
We should remember that the basic currency we are working with is the radiation spectrum from a 5500 C heat source, namely, the sun.
I am very frustrated by this kind of debate as well. Both sides seem to think the other has the burden of proof (look at the title of Bob's paper) when in fact both sides are burdened, We should stop acting like children about this. It's not about 'winning', it's about finding the truth, however hard that might be.
AGW skeptics might argue they should have no such burden, as they don't believe in global warming in the first place. But the fact remains that CO2 levels HAVE been rising steadily since the 1750s, higher than they've been in 600,000 years, so that enough (in my opinion) is a concern to verify what is or is not going on.
There are two ugly truths in this debate, one is that CO2 remediation would be incredibly expensive. The AGW believers don't want to acknowledge that. The other is that we clearly have too many people on the planet for the resources we have and how we are currently using them. And to paraphrase Ed Reid, we also have no "plan" on how we manage these resources as our numbers rise from 6.5 Billion to 9 Billion souls over the next 30 years. The AGW skeptics, or status quo folks, are loathe to acknowledge that as well.
The word "pandemic" comes to mind. An unfortunate reality in an overcrowded world.
Jim, to me science is a search for truth and truth only. If you find where I have erred and you are correct I will change my position immediately. Engineers have to design things that work, we can't afford to use play station science, if we want to keep our jobs. No real data confirms anything the IPCC made up; at least I could not find any. I often tell my wife i should have been a meteorologist because you never have to account for your mistakes, you just leave that behind and predict the weather for the next day and if wrong again on to the next day, etc,, etc.. maybe that was one of the problems here.
I think you should back off on your complaints about the IPCC Figure 7. The diagram shows energy stasis, so I don't even know what your concern about it is in the first place. One just needs a body of air (like a cloud) to be heated by a warm surface region (like a desert) and then drift over to a cooler surface region (like a lake or ocean). QED. I really don't see what the big deal is.
The relevance to GW is that CO2 molecules are better at trapping heat than O2 or N2.
Find yourself a boiler designer where he takes into consideration radiant energy from CO2 and water vapor in the furnace and ask him how does he account for the great amount of added energy in the system he will get from the IPCC greenhouse effect? I would like to hear his response.
If that doesn't satisfy you, if a greenhouse effect exists then why is there no greenhouse signature in the atmosphere as they claim has to be there. You think someone stole it while they weren't watching?
Further, if CO2 is a pollutant then so is water vapor. Haven't heard the IPCC talk about that have you?
As a lay "denier", I would like to offer my humble support Dr. Ashworth's essay. The "hole in the bucket" explains the short CO2 lifetime too.
The so called GHGs don't add energy to the system so they can't increase the energy available in the system or the amount emitted at the top of the atmosphere, but there is nothing wrong with the idea that they can delay the passage of IR out of the system by a volume increase. That cannot raise temperatures, but does extend the duration of their action on heat present. Is my interpretation correct? Nature absorbs 98.5% of emitted CO2. It doesn't play favorites. The IPCC plays kidology with their stats and blame game.
The IPCC science bloc, in apparent desperation due to the tiny warming ability of CO2, claim an H2O feedback. Latest info, courtesy of Dr. Spencer and others, strongly implies their speculation is far adrift from reality there too.
Last century's warming, if UHI corrections by various parties hold, is reduced below half a degree. Temperature already trended close to or below, depending on the stats used, Dr. Hansen and others' safe, expected natural increase as the cooling factors that caused the LIA reduce or vanish. That would appear to be around half a degree per century. The rest is political hot air IMO.
Oceans have proven a false saviour of the GHG warming myth as Dr. Pielke elucidated, there has been 0 warming of oceans for a decade.
Dr. Mann was mentioned above. His hockey stick "science" was found incompetent at best. The Antarctic study he was involved in was debunked as a product of statistical manipulation using data from a handful of stations. Sea ice has trended up since the early fifties. Large chunks of ice are wholly irrelevant except as photographic opportunities. Winter temperatures for East Antarctic have trended down in recent decades. Even the IPCC isn't disputing that. West Antarctic can be considered a different temperature zone. Arctic sea ice is recovering and glaciers, as expected following their spurt due to the reduction of blocking sea ice, are slowing down to a rate commensurate with their mass additions. NASA found up to 45% of warming was due to aerosols. If that is the penalty for cleaner air, I can live with that. On aerosols, another variable not accounted for in models, the ~0.33% pa biomass increase due to CO2 (to a large extent) must have a consequential pollen and spore increase (aerosols). Drs Phil Jones of CRU and Wang of a perhaps poorly administered uni have a problem with sharing info too. Strangely enough it relates to UHI.
Dr. Ashworth, thanks for your essay. Certainly ozone depletion must add energy because it blocks UV B and C and reducing the gas volume increases UV penetration. I hesitate to blame CFCs for the leading role in destruction, it is controversial as the trivial warming of last century had the knock-on effect of increasing stratospheric WV and we have little idea how the role of incoming UV above the stratosphere and solar proton emissions have varied as a consequence of the changing layer composition. There is also the unexpected recovery that shouldn't be happening with the lifetime of CFCs. Other variables may come in to play too, the highly variable temperatures of the upper layers (>1500 C) about which we know little for example.
Also, in Nature, http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070924/full/449382a.html "Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere - almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate. "This must have far-reaching consequences," Rex says. "If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being."
I think ozone has played a far greater role than science allows and I'm doing what I can to advance my knowledge in that area. Seeking such is how I arrived here and the reason for my post is mainly to seek assistance with my understanding. My main question is have there been developments as a result of the Nature article mentioned in the previous paragraph?
The Real History of Carbon Dioxide Levels.
The composition of air
The tradegy of science education and policy analysis today is that policy makers do not have people on their staffs who have the education and experience to distinguish between junk science and legitimate science. Political science and english majors are poorly equiped to deal with real science; for that matter so are a lot of engineers.
My CFC destruction of ozone paper can be found at
I found that the lower stratosphere-upper troposhpere had cooled almost three times as much as the earth and lower troposphere warmed from the mid sixties to 1998. From this, it was an easy matter to complete mass and energy balances that showed the cooling was great enough to account for the total earth warming over that time frame. The IPCC wants to include CFCs as greenhouse gases but that is not the problem. They destroy ozone and one CFC molecule, it is estimated, can destroy 100,000 molecules of ozone during its life up there.
Loss of ozone can account for all of the anomalies seen in the environment over that time frame. The CFC concentrations in the stratosphere have stopped rising now (Montreal Protocol) but haven't dropped much.
Hope this is helpful. After you read the paper I would be happy to provide any more info you might need if I can.
Scientists on neither side of the global warming debate has recognized the ozone effect except for Dr. David Evans. He used to do carbon accounting for Australia, originally believed in AGW from CO2 but changed his mind as new data came in. I sent him my paper and he replied I was more right than I knew. He sent me the IPCC greenhouse signature verus actual signature which is most like the loss of ozone effect.
These projects have had money pumped into them over and over again and just as always, when the money runs out, the debate starts over again. Here's a refresher of the projects here in California that have had billions of dollars passed to activists and fill thousands of bookshelves with useless info.
Coolwater Coal Gasification Project- present state- dismantled. Coolwater Solar One- present - disabled equipment in place. California Biomass to Energy grants- used up DOE -Ethanol grants -used up .
There is a surplus of used equipment scattered across the state on projects that once the (taxpayer's) money ran out the project shut down.
The only "GREEN" jobs they have left in their wake are scrap metal recycling.
I read your comments. I didn't overlook the back radiation. i didn't include it because it is thermodynamically impossible. Gore getting the cause and effect reversed is also true. The blue line is the temperature and the red line is the CO2 concentration in case you were confused by that. I think the ones who drew that graph may have switched the colors on purpose. Gore separated the lines so you could not see what happened first. Another commenter also did not look at the graph close enough and was confused by it. Nasif Nahle has analyzed this data over shorter time periods and one can easily see a global spike comes first followed by some 800 years before the CO2 concentration starts to increase as the solubility in the warmer sea water deceases and emits more CO2 into the atmopshere. The website I show in response to Ian is where you can find Nasif' Nahle's graph (Figure 2).
All I show is actual data. For you non-engineers, It doesn't matter how small or large a system is that you are analyzing. You draw a cirlce or sphere around it and energy in must equal energy out. I don't care if it is a planetary system or a universe thermodynamics still apply. That is the basis mass and energy balances in case you didn't know that.
If you think real data is ridiculous I think maybe you, Jim and Len should consider working on your "play station" perpetual motion machines - ONE UNIT OF ENERGY IN, 6 UNITS OR MORE OUT. Maybeyou can sell the deal to Gore.
Thus, I am at a loss at understanding how the heck mankind can put a stop to something that is bigger than mankind (i.e., normal Earth dynamics) and that he did not "cause" (but only contribute to in some small part), much less how it could ever be done unless ALL of mankind (can you say China and India?) participate, much less how it would be successful at ANY cost, mush less justifying the US to finish destroying its fragile economy in a global marketplace with an very unlevel playing field by footing a globally disproportionate share of the money down the drain in vain.
What disappoints me the most is the knowledge that many of my professional peers know fully well that mankind is NOT the root cause of what is being observed by our all-too-recent modern technologies of measurement and garbage in/garbage out computer models, and that the forces at work are beyond our ability to control realistically, yet they either remain silent for fear of being shouted down by the left-wing elite or, worse, they self-servingly preach the GHG partyline and drink the "Gore coolaid" because that is where the grant money is today, not to mention the popularity poles and invitations to those elite cocktail parties with misguided Hollywood celebrities.
Having said all of that, I am fully supportive of mankind (especially Americans) becoming less wasteful in their energy lifestyles, more conservative in their carbon footprints and more responsible in general for their environment and that of the rest of our planet. Just do it sensibly based on sound reason and not bad science committed in the name of political correctness.
It is so low that you should spend more time worrying about a bolt falling from an airplane and killing you.
It takes a real egocentric to decide we can control the planet's climate, and a real imbecile not to recognize the ploy has everything to do with political control of energy . . . and life itself.
Achtung, America. Get back to your roots - schnell!
However, suppose that you are skeptical about the importance of man's contribution to climate change or perhaps even do not believe that climate change is happening. It may not matter. If you examine what must be done to deal with global energy shortages, principally the disappearance of oil, then gas, and eventually coal, many of the actions that would have to be taken to deal with the threat of insufficient energy are precisely the same as what we would have to do with dealing with climate change. There is a huge amount of work-good science and great engineering- that needs to be done in any case and we have to move on beyond this particular argument about greenhouse gases and whether or not their effect is real. Will we have sufficient energy in the future? One place to look is what is practical for renewable energy a this time. I examined Mr.Gore's Repower proposal where he is basically calling for an all renewable electricity energy future just ten years from now. This proposal lets the remaining nuclear plants wither on the vine (no support for new plants) and calls for the rapid phasing out of present coal fired electricity and no mention of continuing gas fired electricity either. In their place would be wind turbines, solar electric plants in Henry Waxman's back yard, a national grid at huge expense that will not solve basic problems like grid stability or the intermittent nature of renewable energy.Even without the grid instability issue the Repower proposal won't come close to working. In a few words, the Repower proposal, in my view, borders on an abuse of power (pun intended). Yet it seems to be the mantra of many in Washington today. If you wish to get a copy of my analysis of Repower's proposed energy future and a discription of an alternative energy future where there is a mix of energy sources and strong energy conservation ( I call it an "Energy Family") write to me at firstname.lastname@example.com.
These are dangerous times as politicians dismantel the very heart of the nation's productivity. So forget the debate about greenouse gases for now and concentrate on the sufficiency issue and write to me for your copy of my analysis. Herschel Specter
The statement by Mr Specter is interesting in that he is in favor of exactly what I have been preaching for the last four or five years. An optimal energy policy will probably be an optimal environmental policy. Of course here in Sweden the ignoramuses can't spell optimal, and the energy policy they support is economically destructive. To use the terminology of Mr Specter, what they want is to dismantle this countries productivity, and the politicians are prepared to help them if it means a win on election day.
And Mr Bruderly, I seem to have run into the argument in favor of natural gas as a motor fuel somewhere else, but it doesn't sit too well with my economics. The price of natural gas has only one way to go, and that is up, where by up I don't mean twice the present price.
There are plenty of other reasons to get rid of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels became fossil fuels because certain conditions in their formation lead to toxins that killed off the bacteria that would have allowed bacteria to decompose them normally. When we dig up fossil fuels and burn them, we release those toxins back into the atmosphere from which they were separated deep underground for millions of years. Coal produces creosote, a witches brew of toxins including heavy metals that deposits on flues as a thick tarry mass that has to be cleaned out to prevent chimney fires. So what is done with it? It is used to coat telephone and utility poles, and railroad ties because it kills insects it comes in contact with---because it is poison. And the poison is spread far and wide. Burning coal produces mountains of ash and cinders. Also full of toxins. Like the huge spill in Tennessee recently.
No matter how you clean up the smokestacks----coal STILL comes from strip mines. Strip mines destroy the earth and its ability to sustain life. Strip mines pollute surface watersheds. It also destroys underground aquifers. It kills fish, and all other riparian life it comes into contact with. Nothing will grow back on strip mined land for hundreds or thousands of years. And we are destroying our land and waters at an ever increasing rate.
And now petroleum is being strip mined as well as coal. With the same results.
If we continue to use fossil fuels, we will become the fossils.
Peter Platell
The bad thing about this is that these arguments are often entertained by persons with high quality technical educations. Of course that is true everywhere: how can the energy minister in the US tolerate the presence of some of the persons working for him?
Also, let me repeat for the 1000th time, in this country - Sweden - they have been talking about renewables for as long as I can remember, and despite what you read in your favorite newspaper or see on your favorite TV station, things are moving as slowly as ever. Why is this? It's because as corrupt and greedy as many Swedish engineers and managers seem to have become, they do not want to be made fools of by accepting preposterous beliefs about what you call renewables. Unlike the environmentalists, they also know - as YOU know - that Sweden is one of the cleanest countries in the world, and almost all the talk about an environmental cleanup has to do with careers, money, and plane tickets.
As far as I am concerned, a scientist without a PhD is MOST LIKELY not a scientist, while on the other hand there are persons with less - and perhaps much less - than a PhD who have every right to call themselves a scientist, or just as important to think of themselves as a scientist. Therefore, I think that when he rewrites this article he should replace that 30,000 with a scientifically credible number.
Those of you who think there has been no measurable effect of adding GHG's (NOT PRIMARILY CFCs, but CO2 and CH4) need only follow the dance of US,Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway in sorting out ownership of the artic continental shelves, as I do. At the present rate, the artic is scheduled to start having ice-free summers within about 20 years. US Bush administration loudly denied global warming, but cynically had absolutely no problem claiming Canada has no jurisdiction over the inside passage across N America, which is very shortly going to become an important shipping route due to reduced ice.
Those of you crying about "money wasted on development of alternative energy systems" should investigate the history of nuclear energy development. Solar (both thermal baseload and PV peaking) is REAL, and available NOW. It only need to achieve a net installation of between 2.8 and 8.2 GW quickly to become cost competitive with fossil.
Assessment of Parabolic Trough and Power Tower Solar Technology - Cost and Performance Forecasts - Sargent & Lundy LLC Engineering Group Chicago, Illinois
[QUOTE]For the more technically aggressive low-cost case, S&L found the National Laboratories' "SunLab" methodology and analysis to be credible. The projections by SunLab, developed in conjunction with industry, are considered by S&L to represent a "best-case analysis" in which the technology is optimized and a high deployment rate is achieved. The two sets of estimates, by SunLab and S&L, provide a band within which the costs can be expected to fall. The figure and table below highlight these results, with initial electricity costs in the range of 10 to 12.6 ¢/kWh and eventually achieving costs in the range of 3.5 to 6.2 ¢/kWh. The specific values will depend on total capacity of various technologies deployed and the extent of R&D program success. In the technically aggressive cases for troughs / towers, the S&L analysis found that cost reductions were due to volume production (26%/28%), plant scale-up (20%/48%), and technological advance (54%/24%).[/QUOTE]
Given Sargent & Lundy Engineering's worst case scenario provides peak time solar electricity at $0.062/kwh by only building 2.8 GW and doing a few minor and definitely achievable R&D improvements, plus transmission, and a clear path is provided to offering 83% capacity factor using cheap sand and gravel tanks for thermal storage with 3x collector area and no additional central plant, which should make the installation no more expensive PER KWH if only the industry can get to 2.8 GW installed, I don;t see what we are waiting for.
It also appears to me that the more agressive forecasts of NREL / SunLab of $0.035 / kwh if we can get to 8.2 GW installed quite quickly is entirely within reach.
Personally, I don't see that AGW gases have much effect on the earth's temperature at all. For example, T.M.L. Wigley, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, calculated the cooling that would accrue if every nation met its Kyoto Protocol obligations (U.S. reduction of 43%). By 2050, the earth's temperature would reduce by 0.07 oC - a change so small it could not be reliably measured.
God has in place, a CO2 absorption system which is very good so runaway CO2 concentrations should never happen. The recent anomaly that I have seen caused by man is the destruction of ozone in the stratosphere by man's production of chlorofluorocarbons (Freon etc.) This destruction decreased the amount of UV light absorbed in the stratosphere and the radiant energy not absorbed up there is hitting earth and warming it up. The stratosphere cooled some 1.3C while the earth warmed around 0.5C. So man screwed up that one. Stratosphere cooling has stabilized but hasn't warmed up to what it used to be.
2) What about the rising levels of dissolved CO2 in oceans? Regardless of climate change, is the resulting environmental damage not sufficient to warrant reduction?
As the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere increases the algae in the oceans absorb more CO2; around 50% of what is emitted. As you say nature has been around a lot longer than man and it is under its own control. There has been no environmental damage, nature changes with time. Every 80,000 to 120,000 years we get a large burst of energy from the sun, other times the amount of radiation hitting us cycles from high to low over an 11 year period.
The Chinese say" E Ching" which means the world is always in constant change. However, man can screw it up and his ability to screw things is great.
Ferdinand: A PHD doesn't make you a scientist. In fact many of them I know are not very innovative. I worked with a guy who had a PHD in Physics and was a seismic expert. He told me if he had it to do over gain he would not get a PHD because the paradigms imposed on you limit your thinking.
Fred: With such strong convictions, do you use fossil fuels? If so why? Nuclear power only worries me for one reason, "Familiarity breeds contempt!" So as not to lose production and get blamed or fired, managers take chances on safety. I have worked in production and know that for a fact.
Much of what you have written in your last post is incorrect.
CO2 absorption by plants, at any level, is usually a temporary event. The winter die-off causes the plant matter grown to decompose and re-release the CO2 into the air. You can see that in the annual CO2 fluctuations. The only way that CO2 is withdrawn from the system by plants is if the material is locked away into something more durable, like cellulose or lignin, and then the plant matter is covered to remove exposure to atmosphere. Think peat bogs. Peat eventually transforms into lignite, which then can become coal. It takes millions of years, far longer then the few hundred its taken us to release it.
It is true that 50% of the CO2 is absorbed by the oceans, but the algae do not make much use of it. Instead, it remains dissolved in the sea water. This is why the ocean has dropped in pH value over the last few hundred years (become more acidic, or less basic).
I also don't think you'd be happy with the IPCC if they cited God and the E Ching in their analyses, so I don't think it's comforting that you use them to defend your position.
If one accepts that the world simply changes, that's fine. But if that means abandoning and moving most of our coastal cities, then CO2 mitigation might actually prove to be the more economical approach. You can't have it both ways.
The world's largest ever review of evidence on climate change, involving thousands of the world's best climate scientists and many thousands of reviewed primary scientific papers, concluded that climate change is real and that it is very likely to be due to human emissions (90% or greater probability). The IPCC report is available for free download at www.ipcc.ch
The scientific and meteorological bodies of the major countries have spoken up and said that global warming and climate change are real, human-induced and a serious threat to humanity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
The journal Science, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, published a review in 2004 (December 2004, Vol 306, p. 1686) that examined 928 papers from refereed scientific journals on climate change. Of these 928 papers, 25% dealt with methodology and did not comment on climate change either way, the other 75% all supported the scientific view that human-induced climate change is real. Zero % supported the view that human-induced climate change is not real. The paper is available here: www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
How much more proof do you need?
On the climate denier side, you have massive funding from a few irresponsible fossil fuel companies, a group of lawyers and marketing experts and a few hired scientists that engage in astroturfing, cherry-picking, half-truths and deceit, even going so far as to create fake journal papers (see e.g. the "petition project"). Incidentally, many of the well-funded climate deniers are the same people that were hired 20 years ago to tell us that smoking is good for us. More details on the backgrounds of specific climate deniers can be found at www.desmogblog.com
Godo Stoyke
Again I ask, why is there no "Greenhouse Signature"????. Why was the earth's average temperature last year the same as it was in 1982? Why can't you calculate the effect of removing all man-made CO2 and then know if we removed it all we would be back to the 2001-2002 level we had when it was warmer than it is now.
I love science and philosophy because both are searches for truth and both should always abide in nothing but Truth. If the IPCC mentioned God I would have more respect for them not less. I could never be a member of the National Academy of Sciences because 90+ % don't believe in God. I agree with Sir Isaac Newton, who to me is probably the greatest scientist ever. Someone sarcastically asked him to prove God exists! His respond was immediate, "Look at your thumbs, that should be proof enough!" From my perspective, a great response from a very very wise man!
Again like I asked Jim, why is there no "Greenhouse Signature"????.
Why was the earth's average temperature last year the same as it was in 1982?
Why can't you calculate the effect of removing all man-made CO2 and then know if we removed it all we would be back to the 2001-2002 level we had when it was warmer than it is now.
Never before in my life have I analyzed a sceintific premise where I could find no science to back it up. Are you depending on the play station computer models that predict warming but it isn't there. i guess you could say it is real because you trust computer models more than thermometers, but not me!
CFC destruction of ozone accounts for all of the global temperature anomalies we saw:
CFCs destroyed ozone in the lower stratosphere/upper troposphere causing these zones in the atmosphere to cool 1.37 oC from 1966 to 1998. This time span was selected to eliminate the effect of the natural 11 yaer solar irradiance (cooling-warming) cycle effect on the earth's temperature.
The loss of ozone allowed more UV light to pass through the stratosphere at a sufficient rate to warm the lower troposphere plus 8-3/4" of the earth by 0.48 oC (1966 to 1998).
Mass and energy balances show that the energy that was absorbed in the lower stratosphere /upper troposphere hit the lower troposphere/earth at a sustainable level of 1.69 x 10^18 Btu more in 1998 than it did in 1966. Greater ozone depletion in the Polar Regions has caused these areas to warm some two and one-half (2 ½) times that of the average earth temperature (1.2 oC vs. 0.48 oC). This has caused permafrost to melt, which is releasing copious quantities of methane taht researchers estimated at 100 times that of manmade CO2 release, to the atmosphere. Methane in the atmosphere slowly converts to CO2 and water vapor and its release has contributed to higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
There is a temperature anomaly in Antarctica. The Signey Island landmass further north, warmed like the rest of the Polar Regions; but south at Vostok, there has been a cooling effect. Although the cooling at Vostok needs to be analyzed in more detail, because of the large ozone hole there, black body radiation from Vostok (some 11,400 feet above sea level) to outer space is most likely the cause. Especially, since this phenomenon occurred over the same period that stratospheric ozone destruction took place.
Why didn't these so-called IPCC scientists recognize this. Is it mentioned in the IPCC report? Did they know it but blamed CO2 so they could cash in on the carbon scam?
Thank you for your comments. "Godo: You cite all of these references. Probably they are peer reviewed but reviewed by who - ones who agree with them? There is just no real science to back up what they are saying."
All of the scientific references cited are peer reviewed. Otherwise, they are not considered a primary scientific source. Peer review consists of sending them to other climate scientists who are experts in the author's field. Plus the data presented have to meet scientific standards.
So if you take issue with data or interpretations (as you do above), your first step is to list your scientific references for your data and your interpretations. The next step is to submit your data and interpretations to a scientific journal. Everything else is just hand-waving.
The problem is that virtually all of the "climate denier" so-called "data" can be traced back to the marketing arm (third party) that is funded by ExxonMobil, the Western Coal Association, the three US major car companies and a few others. It has no scientific standing.
For example, the so-called "petition project" you mention above, is based on a fake "paper" created do delude people (for more details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition ).
So, if you want to make any claims, the first step is to list your (believable) scientific sources.
I am not saying that you are paid by irresponsible segments of the fossil fuel industry (I have no idea who pays you). All I am saying is that the people who create these false and misleading arguments definitely are.
Bob----Ultraviolet wavelength wavelength light does not cause warming. Infrared wavelength light causes thermal transfer.
That is why infrared cameras can "see" in the dark. They "see" the heat given off the subject in the form of infrared wavelength light.
We cann't "see" infrared wavelength light---you can however feel it. It transfers heat to your skin when where it strikes it.
At the same time I know that working at your trade (or your interests) many hours every day is - ceteris paribus and on the average - the wrong way to do things if you want to make an impression. What you have got to do is to work at it and also find some way to cut the ground out from under the amateurs. People like Lomborg can get away with contradicting real scientists because the real scientists are afraid to go to the mat with him. But I'll give Lomborg credit for one thing: when I was giving a talk in the Danish parliament, he didn't make the mistake of coming there and in order to dispense some of his so-called wisdom.
Bob Ashworth also seems to have some problems with the Obama government. He doesn't have as many as I do, but unfortunately the electoral system in the US only gave us two choices, and I saw no point in voting for a man who was prepared to continue for 100 years to fight a war that was won 5 years ago, and chose Ms Palin as his vice presidential candidate. Incidentally, 3 PhDs, one in physics and another from MIT told me that they would feel safer with Ms Palin than Mr Obama, which was enough to dilute any respect that I have for PhDs in general.
From the site - Signatories for the Oregon Petition are approved for inclusion in the Petition Project list if they have obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher in appropriate scientific fields. The petition has been circulated only in the United States.
Note: Although some charlatans could probably get on the list I believe that most are who they say they are.
1. Atmospheric, environmental, and Earth sciences includes 3,803 scientists trained in specialties directly related to the physical environment of the Earth and the past and current phenomena that affect that environment.
2. Computer and mathematical sciences includes 935 scientists trained in computer and mathematical methods. Since the human-caused global warming hypothesis rests entirely upon mathematical computer projections and not upon experimental observations, these sciences are especially important in evaluating this hypothesis.
3. Physics and aerospace sciences include 5,810 scientists trained in the fundamental physical and molecular properties of gases, liquids, and solids, which are essential to understanding the physical properties of the atmosphere and Earth.
4. Chemistry includes 4,818 scientists trained in the molecular interactions and behaviors of the substances of which the atmosphere and Earth are composed.
5. Biology and agriculture includes 2,964 scientists trained in the functional and environmental requirements of living things on the Earth.
6. Medicine includes 3,046 scientists trained in the functional and environmental requirements of human beings on the Earth.
7. Engineering and general science includes 10,102 scientists trained primarily in the many engineering specialties required to maintain modern civilization and the prosperity required for all human actions, including environmental programs.
Godo: The reference you gave shows no greenhouse signature. Figure 8 above shows the signature the IPCC developed. Figure 9 shows the actual measured temperatures. No hot spot there as they predict as you can plainly see.
Concerning peer review, my CFC paper was peer reviewed twice and accepted for publication by Chemical Engineering Progress. It was supposed to be published in June of this year. I recently got an email from the editor and they changed their mind because they have taken no position on Global Warming. That was pathetic. Also I filled out information to submit my paper to another science publication and I had to give five names of people I would recommend to review it (required) and five names of people I thought would be biased and not for them to review it. So much for the validity of the peer review process.
Fred: UV light has much more energy than lower frequency infrared. Did you forget about Planck's correlation. E =hf. Normal light (red through violet) has more energy than infrared as well. UV light is what gives you a tan when you are in the sun and if you have fair skin you burn. I wrote a paper on the helical tavel of light wherein i prove that radiant energy particles are just small particles of mass traveling in helical trajectories. The larger the particle the greater the frequency and the smaller the helical diameter. That is why you don't want to get hit by too many X-rays. For Godos benefit it was peer reviewed many many times before it was published in Physics Essays, an International Physics journal.
Data is data guys, you analyze it and see what it is telling you. Preconceived ideas going in is bogus. If I had found CO2 was causing global warming I would be one of the first ones to figure out how to control it. As a matter of fact, I did conceive one way to do that back in the nineties before I found out it was bogus.
I like renewable energy because it will increase the life of fossil fuels for future generations, but don't lie about carbon for some hidden agenda you may have. Without CO2 we would not exist, nor would plants. It is critical to the plant-animal life cycle.
When the IPCC says global warming is real, the deniers rail that "consensus is not proof" and "science is not a democracy".
But then they have no problem bringing out the Oregon petition which was signed by people who merely read a paragraph or two that was mostly critical of the Kyoto plan, rather than global warming per se.
But that's A-OK with me, because I don't know anything, and have no intention of trying to obtain even a drop of knowledge on that subject. On the other hand, I am satisfied that - on the average - these chemists, biologists and engineers that you refer to know less than legitimate climate scientists who spend their precious time studying climate science instead of signing documents or petitions unrelated to their expertise - such as it might be.
At the same time I can understand your dissatisfaction with peer review, because like your good self I happen to believe that this topic has been politicized to the point where the top scientific journals are afraid to publish materials that e.g. express a disbelief in AGW. That's what some of the hypocritical editors of these publications call honesty, and it is one of the reasons why so much has gone wrong in this old world of ours, and it's going to get much worse.
Einstein said a photon has zero mass and the rest of the scientific community supported this premise for decades. I proved it did have mass, but no physicist has called me up and said Bob you are right. Others have developed correlations identical to mine but do it differently and as far as I know never say photons have mass. They could make such progress in physics if they only recognized that.
Ferdinand, I agree completely that science has been politicized and we are in deep trouble for it and I also agree it will get much worse.
I think I'll get my science elsewhere, thanks.
The AGW religionists are very quick to attribute every hot or violent weather event to global climate change; and, equally quick to respond to any indication of cooling by pointing out the weather is not climate.
Global warming and global cooling have occurred numerous times in our history, as most non-Mannians would agree. The current cooling phase is both unpredicted and inexplicable using the models for AGW.
I would agree that the politics is settled. The science is another matter entirely.
I have been fascinated to note that the "convinced" politicians have been loathe to include circuit breakers in Waxman Markey. They apparently lack the courage of their "convictions" with regard to the cost and the economic pain which would result.
Further, it was peer reviewed by many reviewers before it was published, so it has to be correct, right? Sorry for the diversion guys.
Further, it was peer reviewed by many reviewers before it was published, so it has to be correct, right? Sorry for the diversion guys.
If the charts were accurate, then I've avoided a catastrophe. If the charts are not accurate, or I was further from the shoals than I thought, I've lost nothing.
Publication of a paper in a refereed scientific journal does not guarantee that its data or conclusions are the best possible representation of physical reality, but it does provide reasonable assurance of valid scientific methodology and some check by experts in the field for obvious errors or flaws, as a minimum level of entry.
It is telling that once you subtract internet chatter and self-proclaimed experts on the matter, you are left with thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers that provide support for the reality of human-induced climate change, and very few papers that do not.
PS: You label Fig. 7 as an IPCC figure, but the reference does not refer to an IPCC publication.
The problem you see is that reviewers are human. We need our work reviewed by excellently programed robots. I have been engaged in a slanging match on nuclear in this forum, which greatly surprised poor me, but I am not surprised any longer. Word is out that nuclear is politically and career-wise wrong, and so the hypocrites in many countries are doing everything possible to keep it at arms length. This won't work however, because e.g. the Chinese and the Russians are much more realistic on this topic, and in the long run it is going to pay off for them in a world where energy might be more important than ever..
Here is one neat thing. A photon travels in a helical trajectory and always hits the surface, incident to its travel at a 45 degree angle. That is why we can observe things without a distorted view. If it hit at any other angle it would like be living in a funhouse mirror world. You would reach out for something you saw and it wouldn't be at the spot you thought it was. That 45 degree angle hit is also why they are easily reflected.
The smaller the particle, the larger the helical diameter and the less helical turns per unit of travel. This is why radio waves (small particles with large helical diameters) can pass through your house but light waves (larger particles with smaller helical diameters) are stopped except for the windows. Yet X-Rays will pass through walls. They are large particles but the helical diameters are so small the helical travel effect is pretty much negated and it travels pretty much in a straight line. X-Ray rooms should always be lead lined. It has to be due only to laws of probability of whether a photon will pass through something or be absorbed/reflected by it. Godo: I realize what you are saying should be true but with AGW I could find no empirical data to support it. The ones that support AGW to me must either be doing it for some hidden agenda or relying only on unreliable computer models.
Hans Schreuder who gave a presentation to the Northern Ireland Climate Change Committee yesterday, realyed this to them. "Computer simulations regard the earth as a flat disk, without North or South Pole, without the Tropics, without clouds and bathed in a 24 hour haze of sunshine. The reality is two icy poles and a tropical equatorial zone, with each and every square metre of our earth receiving an ever varying and different amount of energy from the sun, season to season and day to day. This reality is too difficult to input to a computer. Did you realise that?" If this is the case you can see that the computer models are pretty much worthless as real measurements glaringly show!
[QUOTE]The current norm for a climate system model is to include a full suite of physical representations for air, water, land, and ice with a geographic resolution scale of typically about 250 km. Model solutions match the primary planetary-scale circulation, seasonal variability, and temperature structures with qualitative validity but still some remaining discrepancies. They show forced responses of the global-mean temperature that corresponds roughly with its measured history over the past century, though this requires model adjustments. They achieve a stable equilibrium over millennial intervals with free exchanges of heat, water, and stress across the land and water surfaces. They also exhibit plausible analogues for the dominant modes of intrinsic variability, such as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), although some important discrepancies still remain. At present, climate system models specify solar luminosity, atmospheric composition, and other agents of radiative forcing. A frontier for climate models is the incorporation of more complete biogeochemical cycles (for example, for carbon dioxide). The greater the sophistication and complexity of an atmospheric model, the greater the need for detailed multiple measurements, which test whether the model continues to mimic observational reality.[/QUOTE]
There is just one problem. It is all happening much faster than predicted by the computer models. The north pole was not supposed to be ice free until mid century. It came close to happening this summer.
So, I suppose Bob is right about the computer models. They do not seem to be too accurate.
One of mine - a simple model dealing with the copper market - managed to almost predict the price of copper one glorious year, but between you and me that success was probably due to luck. Here we have a phenomenon that can be truly characterized by the words MORE IS LESS, and often a great deal less. Of course, some people/firms/institutions are willing to pay a lot for that 'less'.
For instance, sea level has been rising for the last 18,000 years; and it has risen over 300 feet in that time. In the 19th century, sea level rose about 8 inches. In the 20th century it rose another 8 inches.
There are many good reasons for humanity to pursue energy efficiency – and it is being achieved in the design of more efficient machines, more efficient buildings and more efficient processes. Remember though that there is a one hundred year lag in the time that it takes for old equipment to be phased out and the average level of efficiency to rise.
It is worth noting that there is a close relationship between energy consumption and GDP. It is difficult to imagine a world where the average GDP per person per year could be anything like the Euro 30,000 that currently exists in a number of developed countries. Planet earth probably could not support the footprint of 6.7 billion people living to that standard. (Energy and fish from the sea being just two resources that could be difficult to stretch that far).
Many of the proposed climate change monetary mechanisms are fabricated methods to distribute wealth -- to transfer funds to developing nations on the pretext of climate.
While carbon emissions trading is an unforgivable con, a carbon tax could be acceptable if it was used within a country to improve the efficiency of infrastructure -- but a global wealth distribution plan is not acceptable or sustainable.
If you are going to call yourself a scientist use real science to analyze a problem. CO2 is our friend. Plants absorb it and give off oxygen so we can breathe. It is also an endothermic reaction (absorbs heat). One person correctly pointed out that if you sequester CO2, you also sequester Oxygen. Two molecules of oxygen (O2) for every one molecule of C sequestered. You don't like yourself or your children? You want them to be deprived of oxygen? Hello? We have an ozone hole!!!! What caused that? CFCs. When you have less ozone in the stratosphere more UVB and C light pass through to heat up the earth. If it wasn't absorbed in the stratosphere where do you think it went? Pretty basic stuff this, but climatologosts categorize CFCs only as greenhouse gases.
We could remove the chlorine and CFCs from the stratosphere fairly easily to get us back to normal. Remember it has been estimated that one CFC during its lifetime in the stratosphere will destroy 100,000 molecules of ozone. If we don't remove CFCs we will have to live with this for at least the next 50 years.
I really question what kind of scientific training the people studying climate have. To me it looks like smoke and mirror science and the ones applying it do not have a clue as to what they are doing scientifically. They arrogantly say, "The science is settled!" I came up with a saying in my sixties, "A man's arrogance is directly proportional to his ignorance!"
You might say I am being arrogant, but not here. It is so easy to see from simple observation and simple data analysis that CFCs caused the recent abnormal warming. Blame DuPont if you must blame someone but not CO2.
Len: Hans Schreuder response on the IPCC compouter models: "The original climate alarm was based on a flat earth computer model, as (He) described. Since then, computer power has increased substantially, but there is still no relation with reality."
Whatever concerns you may have with IPCC being too political and not scientific enough are not strengthened by your equally unscientific counter arguments.
However, CO2 going to the atmosphere is converted back to oxygen by plants, what is stored underground is not. CO2 is not the problem Jim. Never has been, never will! I hope you will wake up to that fact some day. Who knows when some other "crazy train" scientist will start classifying oxygen as a pollutant. After all it makes steel rust.
The fear of carbon is the fear of life. The love of carbon is the love of life. Humans are animated carbon. Everything we consume and emit is carbon-based. Everything we make or purchase causes carbon emissions. It is not possible to control and regulate carbon without controlling and regulating every aspect of human existence. To be anti-carbon is to be anti-human freedom.
The war on carbon is an ill-disguised war on humanity, a war on human freedom. Carbon and carbon emissions are simply a proxy for human activity. This whole movement to demonize carbon is driven by a world-denying, man-hating worldview. It is time to rip away the mask and expose the movement whose real aim is to put the human race in chains to a system that controls every aspect of human existence. It is time to stand up and say, "You take your jackboots off my carbon and off my life."
It is heartening to see that more and more scientists are waking up to the junk science of man-made global warming alarmism and that they are now coming out of the woodwork to say so. The movement to shut down our energy sources by a beat-up against CO2, if successful, would turn off the lights of civilization. It is fitting that the symbolism of the recent Earth Hour was darkness rather than light.
There has never been more than a small coterie of pseudo-science activists and social engineers driving this global warming alarmism cart. They have been remarkably successful in closing down the debate and silencing opposition by their big lie about their enjoying an overwhelming scientific consensus. They have intimidated a lot of scientists with the fear of losing academic funding if they should open their mouths with a contrary opinion.
As for the Media that refused to obey their own credo of rigorous investigative journalism, that ducked from asking the hard questions, that forgot they were supposed to be independent journalists instead of advocates for the popular hysteria, its integrity and credibility has been trashed by its own hand. Long live the free spirits of the Internet, the indefatigable bloggers who would not be silenced. *Robert D. Brinsmead is a Horticulturist and a free-lance Writer.
1,358 GT (gigatons) of CO2 have been emitted by humanity since 1750. The current mass of CO2 in the atmosphere is 3,088 GT. So, again, Mr. Ashworth is mistaken.
You last post is simply a pseudo-rant on the virtues of CO2 (even though it makes people drowsy at 2% and can be toxic at 5%).
I'm all for self-reliance and keeping gov't off people's backs. If you want all of that, then don't add more CO2 to everyone else's atmosphere. If you are so self-reliant, then you shouldn't need an atmosphere to unsustainably (rising CO2) dump your wastes.
[QUOTE]According to an unpublished survey by Potsdam University researchers Kirsten Zickfeld and Anders Levermann, expert scientific opinion varies widely on the likelihood that excess freshwater runoff from the Arctic will alter the North Atlantic conveyor belt in this century.
Some scientists consulted for the survey said there is no chance that the current will break down. Others estimated that the chance of a complete shutdown exceeds 50 percent if global warming climbs by 7.2° to 9° Fahrenheit (4° to 5° Celsius) by 2100.
Rahmstorf believes the chance of a circulation shutdown is as high as 30 percent. He said any possibility of such a scenario, even if slight, is cause for concern.
"Nobody would accept expanding nuclear power if there was a 5 percent risk of a major accident," he said. "Why would we accept expanding oil and coal power if there is a 5 percent risk of a major climate accident?"
Source: National Geographic [/QUOTE]
On the other hand, the experience of Hans-Ulrich Rudel (German Stuka Dive Bomber Pilot) contributed immensely to the design and success of the A-10 Warthog.
It seems that experience is quite helpful when there is no major paradigm shift, but actually can be injurious when there is. The trick to to figure out whether a paradigm is indeed shifting. Not always so easy to do.....
Len: God takes care of the long term, not Al Gore. The rise in CO2 looks to be starting to level off. Concentration of CFCs in the stratosphere and methane in the atmosphere appear in lock step with one another. The Montreal Protocol restrictions on CFCs caused the methane to stop rising but it leveled off and is not dropping yet. In 2010 they will stop production of CFCs in China, Mexico, etc so CFC concentration should start dropping and so should CO2 concentration sometime after that.
If the Montreal Protocol had not been implemented we would be in deep do-do right now. The researchers from the University of Florida in combination with other University researchers estimated the methane being released from the Siberian permafrost due to increased warming there was 100 times the Anthropogenic carbon being released.
If you want to do something helpful for the environment put your energies into fighting to remove CFCs from the stratosphere.
Climate Depot May 27, 2009 Washington, DC
French President Nicolas Sarkozy's appears ready to appoint renowned geophysicist and former socialist party leader Dr. Claude Allegre – France's most outspoken global warming skeptic -- as the new super-ministry of industry and innovation.
Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992, letter titled "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" in which the scientists warned that global warming's "potential risks are very great." But Allegre now believes the global warming hysteria is motivated by money. (Many of us agree on this point)
Allegre mocked former Vice President Al Gore's Nobel Prize in 2007, calling it "a political gimmick." Allegre said on October 14, 2007, "The amount of nonsense in Al Gore's film! It's all politics; it's designed to intervene in American politics. It's scandalous."
He finally woke up to the Truth. He is a good scientist because he had the integrity to admit he was wrong and cared not about saving face. Dr. David Evans did the same thing. He first supported AGW but investigated it further and joined the ranks of the skeptics. It cost him his carbon accounting job for the Australian government but it didn't matter.
I don't know what this means. No one is saying that the CO2 has built up in just a few years. It's been going on since the industrial revolution.
I am not sure why Nasif has two different scales on the CO2 axis, maybe to amplify the more recent effect for better visualization.
If you look at the temperature profile, there is a large solar spike that occurred some 800 years before CO2 started to increase that would have caused the oceans to warm up and liberate CO2. i haven't analyzed why it would take 800 years to liberate more CO2 but the Viostok Ice Core data shows repeated cycles like this. The earth warms then CO2 increase follows later
This is the first time I became aware that UV radiation had a measurable effect on GW. I too just don't find the evidence that the IPCC or other AGW belivers claim exists.
I have found two references that show CO2 forcing is limited. They show that the forcing of CO2 stops at 325 ppm.
The first one is a dated study done by a group of scientists at Goddard:
Journal of Geophysical Research
Vol. 93, No. D8, Pages 9341~9364, August 20, 1988
Global Climate Changes as Forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies Three Dimensional Model
J. Hansen, I. Fung, A. Lacis, D. Rind, S. Lebedeff, R. Ruedy and G. Russell NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NY
P. Stone
MIT, Cambridge
HANSEN MARS CHALLENGE A challenge to Hansen et al 1988:
Another significant piece of evidence was found on a blog site concerning a scientist who worked for NASA who claimed that Hansen, and other involved department heads, were deliberately misrepresenting the forcing of CO2 in regards to climate change warming.
Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations "Totally Wrong"
Michael Asher (Blog) - March 6, 2008 11:02 AM
The scientist was a Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Langley Research Center. Some excerpts:
"Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations," Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount." "Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution, originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today, ignored boundary conditions by assuming an "infinitely thick" atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always."
NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. "Money", he tells DailyTech. Miskolczi resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, "Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results."
That's the nut shell of it and you will have to go to the link to read the rest of the story with the equations as well. I am interested in your comments about these sources and if you have been aware of them.
So I find this AGW claim appears to have lead to runaway funding by politico's and other groups in response to whipped up public fear mongering. It's similar to the nuclear scare. Both of my own senators stands by the cap and trade bill as if we don't take action the temperatures in the state will increase by 3 to 6 degrees F with all the associated environmental disasters that are linked to GW. I wish I had one of those gongs to wack over their heads for being such enviro policy wonks.
I have read of numerous such bureaucratic methods to support this climate bogeyman called AGW, now referred to as climate change. What a scam. Various industries are taking the ENRON approach and hopping on board the green energy train in anticipation of the greening of their own industrial pockets.
But I recognize that alternative energy research much go one when the oil production rates start decreasing, I just don't think that mandated use of the so called renewable energy alternatives is the wrong approach. I also agree that the Cap & Trade proposal is just another political tax scam to fund 'governmint' hog programs along with social programs pushed by the present Democratic Administration and Congress. Not good.
I can see where a fossil fuel tax could be used to fund research for not just renewable energy but better nuclear energy usage plus better use of coal. In Germany I've read where the government is moving whole towns so they can dig up lignite to fuel their coal fueled power plants thank's to the efforts of the green parties demonizing nuclear energy. The coal companies along with the power fueled plants don't mind as they know that the wind and solar energy returns are so meager and volatile that their futures are secure as long as the coal is there to mine. And so the enviro green wheel turns.
Scott "lead to runaway funding by politico's and other groups in response to whipped up public fear mongering." -- could you provide any evicence of any specific grants to researchers by political entities? I think you'll liokely find only coal and oil companies there.
Thanks. I have done mass and energy balances most of my working life. The premise of a mass and energy balance is that energy in must equal energy out. The US patent office will not award a patent to anyone claiming a process that gets more energy out than is put in. This is so fundamental you wonder what technical training the AGW promoters have had. I completely agree with the statement below by Miscolczi.
"Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations," Miskolczi states.
Regarding UV light, if these AGW promoters have degrees in physics why don't they realize that the total energy spectrum has energy in accord with Planck's correlation E = hf where f is frequency and h is Planck's constant. Therefore more energy hitting earth, no matter what frequency it has warms up the earth. UV light carries more energy than the visible spectrum or infrared because it has a higher frequency.
I agree we should develop economic renewable energy because it will make our fossil fuels last longer. We should however not give tax incentives for processes like making ethanol from corn when it takes as much energy to make a gallon of ethanol than you get out. It may help farmers but it increases our food costs by increasing the demand for corn and increases energy consumption.
The AGW promoters think we are stupid. They present their pseudo-science, repeat it over and over and denigrate those that point out they are wrong. A former VP of a large utility relayed to me recently that a US Senator told him 12 years ago that the Democrats would eventually tax carbon because it was another way of taxing us and the American people are too stupid to realize what they are doing. (They may be right on that but I hope not) This is not a party issue on my part. I was a Republican, switched to being a Democrat, now I think of myself as a moderate Independent.
The politicos in my opinion don't care much about the ones they represent, they just care about themselves. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates recognized this when he said " (Washington) Where you can see prominent people walking down lover's lane holding their own hands."
Len: Gore singlehandedly created AGW through his "Convenient Lie" documentary. Convenient Lie for him because his Generation Investment Management, LLC went from zero to $5 billion in investments in four years. He is by far the greatest scam artist this world has ever seen. Coal and oil companies don't care if you tax carbon, those costs are passed directly on to We the People! I didn't see them fighting this scam at all. I finally realized why!
{Scott "lead to runaway funding by politico's and other groups in response to whipped up public fear mongering." -- could you provide any evidence of any specific grants to researchers by political entities? I think you'll likely find only coal and oil companies there.}
Oh really Len! Thie oil and coal industry mantra is getting old. If you had bothered to read the article I linked to concerning Ferenc Miskolczi, you would have found why he got ostracized by NASA program directors, FUNDING!
These links to articles will show that it defiantly goes beyond oil and coal lobbies.
'Stimulating' Scientists Into Proving Global Warming
The new bill will spend billions to adjust data to "prove" the fallacy that humans are responsible for global warming. February 27, 2009 - by Frank J. Tipler
The Trouble With Government Grants
by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD
A scientist who writes a grant proposal that dissents from the ruling paradigm will be left without a grant. Speaking for his fellow scientists Pollack writes, "We have evolved into a culture of obedient sycophants, bowing politely to the high priests of orthodoxy."
Global Warming Greatest Scam In History!
John Coleman argues against global warming
Any person who spends a decade at a university obtaining a PHD in Meteorology and become a research scientist, more likely than not, becomes a part of that single minded culture.
And, there is something else. These scientists know that if they do research and results are in no way alarming, their research will gather dust on the shelf and their research careers will languish. But if they do research that sounds alarms, they will become well known and respected and receive scholarly awards and, very importantly, more research dollars will come flooding their way.
Does that answer your question Len? You just follow the money trail for the MO! But I do not include scientists like Bob Ashworth. There are still honest scientists out there and many are of the counter 'consensus'. They are the modern day Galileo's who buck the religious high priests of pseudo science orthodoxy'
I value your honesty and objectivity, I cannot help but concur with you. We have too many opportunists who are too eager to jump on some money gravy train. I at least wanted to expose you to some other facts concerning global warming.
This controversy reminds me of at least one false consensus of a century ago. Back in the early part of the 20th century demonic possession was blamed for a fungus called wheat rust. People who ate the contaminated wheat by products where diagnosed as being victims of witchcraft by high priests of 'orthodoxy' back then. It took real scientists to show that it was the 'fungus amongus' that was the source. But up until then many innocent people got either branded, ostracized or burned at the stake for religious hysteria. The same hysteria has morphed into environmentalism extremists who falsely blame technology for many of todays ills. They push their green agendas to the point of religious enviro rants and scare mongering.
Someone previously mentioned that there are more skeptics over the age of 50. Well that's because they have increasingly become aware of the sexed up pseudo science and are realizing the real science. But some people never become aware or are just stubborn diehards. There's just too much bad science and hype muddying the science waters for common folks to see the truth. But more seemed to becoming aware thanks to guy's like you Bob along with recent seasonal trends.
I personally think that the real problem is population numbers, with-out real sustainable energy like nuclear, people will see regressive economic conditions along with all the social ills that follow. Right now it's a lobbyist ENRON shell game of alternative energy proposals for funding rights. Our governments has overstepped it bounds of regulatory fugalness. They are mandating economic fiascoes in the name of public good. About as cheesy as pure spring water in plastic bottles.
One of the few commonalities we all have is the certainty of death. Me I am relatively certain this planet will remain reasonably similar to is current state for the remainder of the time that I will need it. However, I am both a father and a grandfather. I have a grandson whose age is still measured in months and an adopted son (mi corazon) that moved into his 4th year of life in April. I would like their and my other children and grandchildren's standards of living to be near my own consistently throughout their lives. So I have no desire for my generation to make errors that they will have to suffer and pay for.
I know a lot about the energy business due to a rather mixed background. I easily know more than Steve Chu as do many thousands of others of course it could have been much worse he is at least analytical but should avoid bike shorts. I assume everyone here knows his position on global warming. To move back to making errors that will affect the things I prize most my children and grandchildren. I hope these can be avoided or minimized. One of the epiphanies of my life came as a result of my time spent as a control room operator at an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plant.
It is bragging but I was a gifted operator. My peers had varying degrees of success in the role. I wanted to understand why individuals equally trained and just as bright as or even brighter than me often hated the role and a few those really sucked at it. The plant is so complex it takes two control room operators to run it which made it easy to observe my peers to try to resolve this mystery in my on mind. What it boiled down to is making errors. In the control room there were two fundamental types of errors, errors of commission and errors of omission. The mediocre persons tended to make errors of omission they did nothing but gather information and the control system either reined the process back or shut it down; however, they could rarely be blamed which served to preserve their reputations. The ones that stunk the place up made errors of commission, their actions made matters worse and were less effective than doing nothing. Their errors were generally obvious and traceable and served to degrade their reputations. The group that was most effective made both types of errors based on the information available. They generally used a strategy of risk reduction. They took actions that would predictably slow the rate at which the situation decayed while they gathered more information and continued to take more mitigating actions until true cause could be identified and rectified or they could consciously decide a controlled crash landing was called for. I think a similar strategy is called for in protecting the future well being of those we will leave behind. I do not believe we are to the point a controlled crash is called for. I fear we are vacillating between two possible errors doing nothing or making matters worse by making the wrong decisions. Luckily we have time to gather enough information to make the best possible choices. Of course my measure of success is standard of living we will leave those the follow us not CO2 ppm or even global temperature. I fear a lot of the actions we will take will be a massive waste of resources that the next generation will pay in the form of a much lower standard of living. I guess it would be to much to ask to try sound logical judgements like one would make in the operation of a machine.
If you want to leave a world for your grandchildren, you'd better take a look at what the world we are making right now will look like. The polar ice caps are melting right before our eyes----we can see it in satellite photos. I don't even need that. I spend a lot of time in the mountains. Everywhere I go I see glaciers melting and retreating. Some have disappeared entirely. Right here in the continental US. I have concluded that it is CO2 we are releasing from fossil fuels that is the cause. Perhaps you don't think so/ OK/ BUT SOMETHING is the cause. So, what to do. If we switch to renewable energy sources and biofuels----and CO2 is not the cause, nothing is lost, we've just switched fuels. If we do not switch fuels, and CO2 IS the cause----then it is too late and we've destroyed the only place we have to live. We will have long since passed the point of a "controlled crash landing ".
Fred, from the data I have obtained and analyzed there is no connection between the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the earth's temperature. If you legislate carbon taxes, here in the US under the cap and trade legislation by Waxman and Markey, each family will pay more taxes to the tune of some $3,100/year. This is a huge consequence, all done for nothing except to have another way to tax us.
I already told you it was CFC destruction of ozone that caused the warming from the mid sixties to 1998. The Montreal Protocol had CFC production stopped in developed countries and around 1998 its concentration in the stratosphere stopped rising and so did the temperature. That correlates.
Carbon dioxide concentration is still going up but it appears to be leveling off now. The reason for the rise was two-fold, 1) solar spikes from the sun that warmed up the oceans and caused more CO2 to be liberated from the water and 2) CFC emissions that destroyed ozone and allowed the polar regions (ozone destruction greater in cold climates) to warm and release methane to the atmosphere estimated at 100 times that of man-made carbon emissions. This is why both methane and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increased. Methane is coverted to CO2 through oxidation in the atmosphere.
I am fighting this scam created by Gore not so much for myself but for my children and grandchildren and everyone elses. We know politicans lie but it is disheartening to see scientists doing the same thing for the same reason (to make more money).
Sorry Bob---but you are dead completely wrong. Once topsoil is lost---it is gone. Thousands of years in the making, and gone in one dig. You cann't restore topsoil once it is lost. What is being done is trying to cover up and hide the damage.
------" The mining company uses bulldozers to flatten raised mining strips until they are all even. "---------
Where there used to be mountains, it is all even. Where there used to be toxin barren soils hundreds of feet below ground----they are now on the surface---leaching toxins into our water supplies. Coal produces millions of tons of cinders and ash. All those toxins absorbed and cooked into the coal that made it fossils are being dug up and released into the biospere at an ever increasing rate. Fossil fuels are fossils BECAUSE something killed the organisms that would ordinarily have decomposed them. Digging up and burning fossil fuels releases those toxins back into the environment to kill again.
I thought the comment by the coal association representative was telling, "....nature has a remarkable way of healing itself over time......" as if everything will be OK tomorrow morning. He is talking about thousands upon thousands of years.
---------" We know politicans lie but it is disheartening to see scientists doing the same thing for the same reason (to make more money)."----------
-----------" In the early nineties, some scientists were saying that carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emissions were causing global warming. This was disturbing to the author; a chemical engineer who has worked on coal conversion processes his whole life."-------------------
Why not use your scientific background to come up with energy sources that do not destroy the earth instead of trying to defend fossil fuels?
Is this the Earth you want to leave to your children and grandchildren?
-------"one-third of all Pennsylvania water bodies still fall well below Clean Water Act standards (Penn Future 2001)."-------------
-------"Acid mine drainage was a significant stressor to streams in both EPA and DEP sampling. Pennsylvania DEP sampling suggests that nearly 10% of stream miles are degraded or imperiled. EPA sampling suggests stream degradation caused by riparian habitat loss, degradation for 21% of stream miles and channelization for 19%. Mine drainage, acidic deposition, and contaminants in fish tissue were associated with 15% of PA stream miles (EPA 2000). Pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorus were found in 10% of stream miles. Non-native fishes were found in 44% to 47% of stream miles (DEP, EPA respectively).
If you put in a coal mine you should use the environmental controls required so as not to harm the environment long term. We need to have energy and coal is the most abundant form. What happened in PA was caused by not having environmental controls in place on mining back in time. When i went to school at WVU in the late fifties I remember that Cheat Lake near Morgantown had a pH of 4.0. I agree that that was not good.
I am an environmentalist. I developed a slagging coal gasifier that reduces SO2 emissions by 70+%, NOx emissions to below 0.10 lb/miilion Btu, mercury by 90 to 100% and other heavy metals by 80 to 100%. The energy demand is too great to have wind and solar provide us with energy and it is more costly than fossil fuels.
What worries me about nuclear is not the technology so much as it is, "Familiarity breeds contempt!" If someone screws up a coal fired power plant we can recover without long term damage but with a nuclear power plant screw up the area could be contaminated for many many years with a lot of associated deaths(Chernobyl).
"If someone screws up a coal fired power plant we can recover without long term damage but with a nuclear power plant screw up the area could be contaminated for many many years with a lot of associated deaths(Chernobyl)."
You seem to be one who values facts and independent analyses. A hackneyed old bromide like "Familiarity breeds contempt!" doesn't do justice to such a POV. Do you have any concrete comparative analyses or even facts that support the advantage of coal-fired power over nuclear power w.r.t. long term contamination and associated deaths for normal operation of such technologies as well as for accident situations?
I agree. I do not not see any way that coal can be mined without damaging the earth permanently(at least in human time frame terms----the coal rep in the video is right, nature will heal itself---unfortunately, that is in terms of hundreds to thousands of years---scores of human generations.)
-------" I am an environmentalist. I developed a slagging coal gasifier that reduces SO2 emissions by 70+%, NOx emissions to below 0.10 lb/miilion Btu, mercury by 90 to 100% and other heavy metals by 80 to 100%. "--------------
That is commendable. Cleaning up smoke stack emissions will help somewhat avoid more Denora PA or London smogs----but only up to a point. So what if you reduce the percentage of stack emissions 70%, then triple the number of stacks? That is what we have done in the last 50 years. That is not an acceptable solution.
--------"If you put in a coal mine you should use the environmental controls required so as not to harm the environment long term."-------------
That is not being done. We still have air pollution. When I first went to the Grand Canyon and 4 Corners area 40 years ago---you could see 250 miles into 4 states. Today, you cann't. Some days, you cann't even see 50 miles. When the wind is right from the power plants in the desert from Navajo Nation, you can hardly see the far wall of the canyon----let alone the entire 125 mile reach of the river you should be able to see from there. Not to mention strip mines. In the desert environment of the southwest----it will NEVER be possible to reclaim the land. It can take hundreds of years to grow a small cactus in desert conditions. It takes a crust of cryptospora to hold soil and moisture in place to even allow plants a foothold to grow at all. Acid subsoils brought to the surface by strip mines do not support the crytospora bacteria life that forms a biological safety net to hold soil and moisture in place to make plant life possible. No plants, no animals----no life possible.
--------"Grand Canyon National Park was designated a Class I area by the Clean Air Act as amended in 1977 (Public Law 95-217)."----------
Guess what. Bush and company decided to ignore the Clean Air Act and allow unrestricted coal mining and coal burning plants in the area.
The Colorado Plauteau consists of everything west of the Rocky Mountains and east of the Sierra Nevada. It comprises about 1/3 of the continental US. Every drop of water that falls on the Colorado Plataeau drainage ends up in the Colorado River---the only source of water for any human activity from drinking to agriculture for the entire area, and southern California and northern Mexico. From Albequerue to Los Angeles. Humans have survived and thrived on the Colorado Plateau for thousands of years without coal. But you would not survive two days on the Colorado Plateau without water.
The Anasazi and Sinagua Indians lived in caves. They selected caves that faced south to build thier villages in----to make use of solar power. Warm in the winter, cool in the summer. They built extensive catchment, drainage and cistern systems to catch, store and manage water for human and agricultural needs using nothing but stones and tools made from the materials available from the environment around them. These water systems still work today, and would be a technological feat even with our technology. They lived in caves, but they were NOT stupid. They recognized the importance of protecting and adapting to thier environment. We live in cities, drive cars, and talk on blackberries----but we are stupid by comparison.
------" Look what is happening to California, because of their not this, not that environmental policies. Not many can afford to live there anymore because of less jobs and high prices. "-------------
Not many WANT to live there because of the environmental problems. I don't. That is why I left.
--------" I am an environmentalist."----------
Then why are you ignoring and making excuses for environmental damage caused by using coal to generate power? If you were an environmentalist, you would be looking for ways to create the energy needed without using coal.
You may know something about chemistry. But I'm not very impressed with your knowledge of climate, geography, biology, agriculture, history or survival.
So you have given us a long winded diatribe about how CO2 in the atmosphere does not contribute to climate change by warming the atmosphere by absorbing infrared radiation. Well, here is a question for you that maybe your chemistry background can help with. If I have an unknown gas sample, and I want to find out how much CO2 is in that gas, how do I do it?
I measure how much infrared radiation it absorbs. The amount of infrared absorbed from a beam through the gas corresponds to the amount of CO2 in the gas. I know----that is how I adjust a ventilator on my patients who cann't breath on their own. By measuring end tidal CO2 with an infrared beam.
I can also tell you that deaths from asthma are around 5,000 per year in the US now. That is up more than 300% in the last 30 years. In spite of great advances in technology and pharmacueticals.
Bob------- I am not belittleing you, or your accomplishments. But it seems to me that you are deluding yourself about what you are doing and why. You are not convinced that climate change/global warming is real, or else has a different cause than CO2----OK, I can go along with that. I'm convinced it is real because everywhere I look there are signs of warming and climate change----both physically and biologically. I also know that for the last eight years, the Bush conservative agenda has tried its best to change or distort or withhold scientific information on the subject. But when I look at everything as a whole-----I find PLENTY of reasons we should not be using coal and petroleum that have nothing to do with CO2.
There is MORE THAN plenty of room for good chemists to do good work finding a better way. Fischer-Tropsch can still use work to make it more productive and efficient. We need more and better ways to produce algae oil. Solar PV will always be a work in progress. Maybe you have ideas I cann't even imagine. Energy storage. Modulation. I cann't see what you might have hidden in all those boxes in the back of your mind.
Why not rummage through them and see what you can find. It might be something even better than "Antiques Road Show".
BTW---I totally agree with you about nuclear.
This is an energy balance diagram! All inputs and outputs are in balance. The earth does not reradiate 3 times as much energy as it gets from solar insolation - DUH! It radiates off exactly what it takes in from net surface insolation from direct sunlight, and from the IR it gets as energy cycled from the atmosphere. Total solar insolation (342) at top of atmosphere is equal to amount reflected (107) plus reradiated (235). Everything else going on down below is in balance as well.
Now Bob, here is some more analysis for you...
Total atmospheric load (currently) of CO2 is a little over 2 Trillion tonnes. Manking ADDS to this load about 1.3% every recently, and that grow to 1.5% by 2030, according to Exxon Mobil. Yes, all of this CO2 is cycling into, AND OUT OF, the oceans, vegetation, and animal life forms. The idea is to stop ADDING to the buildup - it has no place to go. Nature will not just turn on some mechanism short term to make up for our dumping tens of billions of tonnes every year into the atmosphere.
All forms of energy generation have their costs - we have to rely on the ones with the absolute least impact, and get off the ones that are just plain old cheap and dirty. No need to live in caves, just need to live with a high level view towards minimizing our collective impact on a system of finite size and capacity to sustain.
Nuclear, sun, wind, geothermal, biomethane - these are the answers...
Regards, RWVesel
Blowing smoke up our collective keisters like "Cap & Trade will cost every American Family $3100 a year" - yeah if CO2 credits go to $200+ a ton it will, but we will change many things long before THAT happens...
My three car, gas heated, coal electrified, jet travelling family of five lifestyle emits about 40 tons of CO2 per year, according to a few calculators. At $20 a ton, that's $800, which I am happy to pay via ten cents more per gallon of gas, and $50 a month more in my utility bills...especially if it makes alternative non-fossil energy that much more accessible.
PLEASE - DO THE #$!@#& NUMBERS instead of spouting nonsensical rubbish ad nauseum.
http://www.chernobyllegacy.com/index.php?cat=3&sub=2 http://www.world-nuclear.org
The Chernobyl Reactor, 1 of 3, blewup because it was mismanaged by the then- Soviet handlers. Nuclear power has got a bad name through Chernobyl. Chernobyl reactors are of the RBMK design, a rudimentary graphite moderated steam cooled plant with no containment vessel, indeed, it was no better that the original 'graphite pile' in the Manhattan Project (circa 1943). Remember that graphite and steam are an explosive combination if they get hot enough, and that's exactly what happened at Chernobyl (this was NOT a 'nuclear' explosion). RBMK's are not being built anywhere else. The Soviets used this type because it was good for producing plutonium and uranium for weapon use. Modern LWR use uranium enriched no more then 4% from bomb grade. The Three Mile Island mishap occurred because of lack of sensor monitors. That has since been remedied and that is why you have not heard of any more major reactor disasters.
The Russian RBMKs are the equivalent of a model T Ford, the USAs PWRs represent auto technology from the '60s, but we are now capable of producing Lexus and Mercedes type reactor technology, which provide a quantum leap in terms of safety and efficiency. The point is that there are methods of reducing nuclear risks if we put our minds to it. The latest design from Westinghouse the AP1000, LWR will be able to deliver 10 times the efficiency of the reactors in current use. They use passive cooling technology over the maze of coolant plumbing of TMI type reactors. The USAs PWRs (Pressurized Water Reactors) are naturally fission-stable, and their very nature will resist and counter a runaway thermic event like that which occurred at Chernobyl.
In addition there are High Temperature Gas Cooled reactors that use helium as a coolant. HTGRs are very thermal efficient and use fuel that not enriched enough to melt down like other designs. There is also the thorium reactors where thorium is abundant. Used spent fuel from LWR can be reprocessed for extraction of usable fuel. More fuel can be created with the fast breeder reactor designs. They can extend the nuclear fuel out to 10,000 years. There is all kinds of safe and new nuclear technology being pioneered under generation IV reactor technology. There is a reactor design called the TVR prototype. Unlike today's reactors, a traveling-wave reactor requires very little enriched uranium, reducing the risk of weapons proliferation. The reactor uses depleted-uranium fuel packed inside hundreds of hexagonal pillars.
The US needs to ramp up research on this now instead of blowing stimulus money on dubious bailouts, renewable fiascoes and infrastructure upgrades along with numerous pork earmarks.
So if you compare so called renewable to nuclear it's like comparing ant power to elephant power. Lookup this article to see what I mean:
Renewable energy our downfall?
The antinuclear fanatics have done their damage, they have demonized nuclear beyond realities of todays technology just like they have done with spotted owls and polar bears. It's the same type of fear mongering with guns and CO2. And this is coming from someone who use to think renewables were the energy saviors, it will take decades of development before they could possibly compete with fossil or nuclear today for our present lifestyle expectations. Renewables are just not really sustainable in their present states of technology or even foreseable when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it. It's become a revenue/power shell game and green energy shill.
And Fred, if you had bothered to look up the recent facts on polar icecaps, the Antarctic ice overall has been increasing on the East side while the Arctic ice has been expanding since 2007. True, the glaciers have been melting, but not at an accelerated rate and some are now reversing. Land ice has been melting at a constant rate since the Little Ice Age and greatly since the last ice age. The Oceans have been reportedly rising at a constant rate of about 10~15cm per century. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/24/disproving-the-anthropogenic-global-warming-agw-problem/
Disproving The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) Problem
The AGWer claims are mostly smoke and mirrors based on questionable computer models and paleontology proxie data. It boils down to qualifying for research grants.
And to further the AGW fraud there's this article that can be found on the icecap.us site I call the Gore- ENRON connection:
May 30, 2009 Larry Solomon: ENRON'S Other Secret
Technically, we are still at war with North Korea. We only have a truce agreement-----the war has never been officially ended.
North Korea is planning to test long range ballistic missles (and has already tested missles capable of ranges that can reach the US) very soon.
Iran is not very friendly to us either. Iran wants to destroy Isreal, and destroy us for being friends with Isreal.
There are terrorists out there that would LOVE to get their hands on radioactive materials---either to build a nuclear bomb---or make dirty bombs to spread radiation---or even just dump into water supplies or some similar type of covert attack. You cann't see, hear, smell,taste or feel ionizing radiation. It could just be hidden in some public place or put into water, food, air or some similar medium that people come into close contact with-----no one would know the difference until it was too late. What if they put radioactive contaminants into coal waiting to be burned in power plants. For the last 40 years, utilities have been busy trying to spread combustion pollutants over an area as far and wide as possible in order to "dilute" the pollution as much as possible. Exactly what the terrorists would want to do.
I don't think we need nuclear power creating more and more radioactive materials by the minute----I think there is way too much of that now.
Fred: The other choices to coal for power generation are not that vast. Why do we have to have the same topography that we were given anyway? It doesn't stop airport construction, roads or anything else that causes as much if not more havoc with the topography than a mine. It is noble to want a pristine environment but you also need to provide for your family.
Concerning the Grand Canyon visibility, I don't think coal fired power plants are to blame for that. You might want to look into the covert geoengineering (spraying of fine bauxite particles and other minerals into our atmosphere) that is implemented in our country and others, that can explain the increase in asthma and poor visibility. I have started to write a book on this.
Data analysis is the same no matter what field of endeavor you choose. You collect the data then analyze it without trying to spin it to your preconceived notions and see what it is telling you. This was one of the simpler systems I have analyzed.
Richard: To make a mass and energy balance around a system, here is what you do for the earth. Draw a sphere around it. Whatever energy goes into the earth from an outside source like radiation from the sun goes into that sphere. The energy leaving that sphere can never be greater than 100% as the pseudo-scientists from Colorado show. Energy and mass can never be created nor destroyed it just goes from one form to another. So in their graph if the only energy they have hitting the earth is 168 watts/sq. meter; this is the maximum energy available. They also show 122 watts/sq. meter going to the atmosphere from thermals and evapotranspiration (moisture evaporating from plants). Now they only have 46 watts/sq. meter left to fiddle with. Yet on the right side of the graph they have 390 watts/sq. meter being radiated from the earth. Here is where they start violating the laws of thermodynamics. Many scientists besides me have pointed this out to the AGW proponents but I guess they don't have the thermodynamic background to understand it. If this phenomenon existed, which it clearly does not (no greenhouse signature found in the atmosphere) we would only need the energy of the sun and the magic of re-radiation to supply us with all of our energy needs. Solar cells could be put on cars that have 10% efficiency that would be raised to (390/46) x10 or almost 85% efficiency.
"Nature will not just turn on some mechanism short term to make up for our dumping tens of billions of tones". This mechanism has been in place since the beginning of man, it is called photosynthesis and you would be hard pressed to find a mechanism longer term than this. Even the misguided IPCC admit that 98.5% of the CO2 that is emitted to the atmosphere is absorbed by nature.
Scott: "In addition there are High Temperature Gas Cooled reactors that use helium as a coolant. HTGRs are very thermal efficient and use fuel that not enriched enough to melt down like other designs. There are also the thorium reactors where thorium is abundant. Used spent fuel from LWR can be reprocessed for extraction of usable fuel. More fuel can be created with the fast breeder reactor designs. They can extend the nuclear fuel out to 10,000 years. There are all kinds of safe and new nuclear technology being pioneered under generation IV reactor technology. There is a reactor design called the TVR prototype. Unlike today's reactors, a traveling-wave reactor requires very little enriched uranium, reducing the risk of weapons proliferation. The reactor uses depleted-uranium fuel packed inside hundreds of hexagonal pillars. The US needs to ramp up research on this now instead of blowing stimulus money on dubious bailouts, renewable fiascoes and infrastructure upgrades along with numerous pork earmarks."
I agree with your statements. If you can make nuclear power safe and find how to store the waste so man cannot screw it up, nuclear power is okay with me.
I didn't calculate it but researched it.
NY Times Wednesday, June 3, 2009
How Much Will 'Cap and Trade' Cost? By Casey B. Mulligan Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.
" Some estimates suggest that the amount at stake for the taxpayers is over $3,000 per person (not per family as i relayed from another source i read)." Sorry for the low ball estimate.
Here is another one. "Cap-and-Trade Could Cost Average Family $10,800 in Lost Income, Says Economist Arthur Laffer; Proposed Global Warming Policy Likened to 1970s-Era Energy Crunch"
If they do this crap and for no good purpose, you must know more jobs will go to Mexico, China, Russia and others who would never tax carbon.
A common argument. It is like saying that you can't make a pile of dirt when it is spread over a large area. The problem is, that you are trying to sweep a floor, not dig a hole. Try using a broom instead of a shovel. Shovels don't sweep very well.
------' Why do we have to have the same topography that we were given anyway? "----------
Watersheds. Change the topography, you change the watersheds. Toxins leached from abandoned mines can end up anywhere. Watersheds are where your drinking water comes from. Watersheds are where your water to take a bath or a shower comes from. Watersheds are where the irrigation water to grow the food you need comes from. It doesn't take a PhD and 500 scientific studies to figure out that if you destroy the land and water---you will have nothing to eat or drink. My 7 year old girl who is not in second grade yet figured that out all by herself even before the end of the video.
-------"It doesn't stop airport construction, roads or anything else that causes as much if not more havoc with the topography than a mine."-----------
It does stop airport, roads and other construction. We can put those somewhere else. Sites are evaluated first for possible environmental damage---if a problem is foreseen, it becomes necessary to select another site----or else cancel the project entirely. Mines can't be moved to a more advantageous site---mines are limited to where the minerals are. And the toxins are part of the minerals----they are dug up at the same time no matter where it is. The minerals ARE the toxins.
--------" It is noble to want a pristine environment but you also need to provide for your family. "----------
People have to live in their environment, the same as fish, birds, mice or any other living organisms. Do enough damage to the environment, and you will not have a family to provide for. You will die. Your family will die. Everything will die.
------" Concerning the Grand Canyon visibility, I don't think coal fired power plants are to blame for that. You might want to look into the covert geoengineering (spraying of fine bauxite particles and other minerals into our atmosphere) that is implemented in our country and others, that can explain the increase in asthma and poor visibility. I have started to write a book on this. "---------------
I'll look for it in the fiction section.
If you can see it in the air----you have to breathe it in the air. ------"...........that can explain the increase in asthma and poor visibility. "-----------
Shouldn't be too hard to figure out.
One mine. Environmental damage 12,000 acres. Amount of energy produced----maybe one day's worth of US use. Damage lasts for hundreds or maybe thousands of years. 12,000 X 365 = 4, 380,000 acres in one year.
You can't drink water from it. You can't grow food on it. You can't grow trees on it. You can't raise sheep or cotton on it. You can't breathe air after burning the coal that you mined out of it. All you can do is run an air conditioner and play video games for one day.
Tell me again how burning coal is so smart.
How are where are you and your family going to live?
I'll look for it in the fiction section. (Already have made up your mind before you analyzed it for yourself. That seems to be the modus operandum for the AGW crowd.)
Type in chemtrails in Google search. The pictures are similar to ones I have taken over my home. Observation Fred, observation! You can't walk around all of the time with your eyes wide shut.
In your responses you seem to have gievn up on CO2 casuing global warming and now you just want to bash coal, the greenest fuel we can use.
Given up? No, not at all. Like I said before---everywhere I look I see physical and biological signs of a warming climate, and I'm convinced that global warming is the cause. It is true that there are other causes besides just CO2 at work, and that is a basis of what I want to see done.
-------" In your responses you seem to have gievn up on CO2 casuing global warming and now you just want to bash coal, the greenest fuel we can use."------- Given up? Not in the least. Just pointing out that there are plenty of other reasons we should not be using coal, CO2 is one of them, but not the most important by far-----coal destroys the earth, pollutes the waters, and pollutes the air.
The greenest fuel we can use? You are mad as a hatter. Coal is black. There is no such thing as "Clean Coal", and there never can be. No matter HOW you try to clean up smokestacks---coal still comes from strip mines.
Mad as a hatter eh! A reviewer of my paper on the Helical Travel of Light called me that when I proved photons have mass. Oh yes, even after his diatribe the paper was published. Coal use makes CO2 which causes plants to grow faster; it is the greenest fossil fuel we have. Wiith your reasoning you pollute the air everytime you breathe out, CO2, bacteria, particulate etc. Should people lbe banned from the earth?
You hate coal. Gore does too, that is why he lost to Bush in his home state of Tennesee. The people who live in coal producing states love coal. It provides them a good living. Have you ever lived in a state that mines coal? I would guess not. Would rather live by a coal mine or by commercial chicken houses?
My native state is West Virginia and a lot of coal is mined there. John Denver called it, "Almost heaven! I agree with him. Everything in live has risks asscoaited with it. You could get hit by a car anytime. Why not ban automobiles and every other form of travel, they are much more devastating to society than coal.
The conservative Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis used an econometric model of the U.S. economy to measure the projected impact of Waxman-Markey (Cap and Trade bill) and found that by 2035, it would: § Reduce aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) by $7.4 trillion, § Destroy 844,000 jobs on average, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by over 1,900,000 jobs, § Raise electricity rates 90 percent after adjusting for inflation, § Raise inflation-adjusted gasoline prices by 74 percent, § Raise residential natural gas prices by 55 percent, § Raise an average family's annual energy bill by $1,500, and § Increase inflation-adjusted federal debt by 29 percent, or $33,400 additional federal debt per person, again after adjusting for inflation. That is a prescription for wrecking American prosperity for decades to come.
I am from Missouri----and there were plenty of coal mines where I grew up. Not now of coarse. They are still there. Many of them are filled in, but they are still clearly visible. They are dead zones. Scars on the land where nothing or very little grows. Abrupt boundaries where lush prairie or forests suddenly give way barren deserts where life can barely survive.
It seems strange to me that you would bring up John Denver. I can't think of ANYONE who would be more anti fossil fuel than John Denver. John Denver wrote about a West Virginia that the coal companies are working feverishly to to destroy. For profit. John Denver wrote about the Blue Ridge mountains, not about the Blue Ridge mountains with all the tops removed. John Denver wrote about the Shenandoah River----not the Shenandoah Acid Runoff Channel. John Denver wrote about country roads lined with cool pleasant forests, not dusty gravel mine truck tracks surrounded by a barren moonscape of bedrock and acid subsoils. John Denver wrote about sunshine on his shoulders,watching eagles fly, and dolphins guiding the way---he celebrated life, not blasting, bulldozing, poisoning and destroying it. I am sure that John Denver did not have mountain top removal mining in mind when he wrote "almost heaven".
------"That is a prescription for wrecking American prosperity for decades to come."---------
So this is what we come down to. Profits. All the anti-Gore rhetoric, anti-greenhouse gas rhetoric, put little band aids over every problem, clean up the smokestacks so we can hide the real problem and continue business as usual, no matter who it hurts, no matter what it destroys, as long as the profits flow in we are happy. That is what being "conservative" is all about isn't it? Keeping the profits high by trying to secretly pass off the costs to someone else.
I think we can have all the energy we need, and we can have it without damaging the environment, or people, or the economy. I think we can have all the energy we need so long as the sun shall shine, so long as the wind shall blow, so long as the rain shall fall and so long as the grass will grow.
If we continue to use fossil fuels, we will become the fossils.
Since John Denver is so anti-thetical to you views, and a great friend of Al Gore, perhaps you need a different song to express your feelings. I'd suggest John Prine's Muehlenberg County
Poppa, won't you take me back down to Muehlenberg County, Down by the Green River where Paradise lay. "Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking, Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away."
Or, considering all the jobs and wealth that coal has brought to Appalachia, maybe this one would be appropriate:
Nobody I know of has ever been killed living next to a chicken farm.
Jeremy Davidson, 3, however, was killed when a huge rock was dislodged by workers at a mine in Appalachia and crashed into his bedroom killing him at 2 AM in the morning.
--------" For immediate release January 5, 2006
Contacts: Vernon Haltom or Hillary Hosta 304-854-2182 Weak coal regulations, lax enforcement endanger communities as well as miners
Whitesville, W. Va.—The deaths of 12 coal miners in Upshur County, W. Va., tragically highlight the dangers that the coal industry and weak regulations impose on both miners and communities, say Appalachian residents. "As a miner's wife, my heart goes out to the families. The real miracle is that this hasn't happened more often," said Patty Sebok of Prenter, W. Va. Sebok's husband was injured in a coal mine in 2004. "Violations are just a slap on the wrist; fines are a drop in the bucket for these multimillion-dollar corporations," Sebok added. Mine safety citations are often appealed, reduced, or eliminated. When an explosion killed 13 miners in Jim Walter Resources No. 5 Mine in Brookwood, Ala., in 2001, the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) fined the company $435,000 for eight major violations. In 2005, Judge David F. Barbour of the Mine Safety and Health Review Commission threw out six of the violations and reduced the fines to $3,000, a 99 percent reduction. "Weak coal regulations and lax enforcement threaten miners and the people living nearby," said Vernon Haltom of the watchdog group Coal River Mountain Watch. "The death of three-year-old Jeremy Davidson is an example of the coal industry's low regard for people. The deaths of a dozen people in floods made worse by mountaintop removal mining is another." Jeremy Davidson was crushed in his bed on Aug. 20, 2004, when a bulldozer operator pushed a boulder from a mountaintop removal haul road above the boy's home near Appalachia, Va. State regulators fined A & G Coal only $15,000, the maximum allowable under then-existing state laws. The company appealed the fine. At least 12 people were killed in West Virginia floods in 1997, 2001, and 2002. An environmental impact statement (EIS) begun by the EPA in 1998 shows that deforestation, leveling of mountains, and filling of streams and valleys increase runoff and contribute to floods. In 2001, under the direction of former industry lobbyist and Bush appointee J. Steven Griles, the EPA changed the EIS focus to streamline and accelerate mountaintop removal permits. "I hope Governor Joe Manchin follows through on his promise to fully investigate the Sago mine disaster," said Bo Webb of Naoma, W. Va. "In July, he promised to fully investigate citizens' concerns for the safety of children at Marsh Fork Elementary School," Webb added. "But so far, there has been no air analysis at the school and no health survey of the children, and the Department of Environmental Protection tells him the seeping sludge dam is normal." Marsh Fork Elementary sits 220 feet from a Massey Energy coal silo and 400 yards downstream from a 2.8 billion-gallon toxic waste sludge dam. MSHA has cited the dam for safety violations 19 times since January 1995, with four of the violations considered "significant and substantial." MSHA fined Massey Energy $2,447 for the violations. MSHA inspection reports have also shown the dam to be seeping over widespread areas. In 1972, a failed waste dam killed 125 people in Buffalo Creek, W. Va. In 2000, a Massey sludge impoundment in Martin County, Ky., burst into underground mine shafts, coating lawns with several feet of sludge and polluting 75 miles of streams. The MSHA investigation was rushed with the new administration, and proposed MSHA fines were reduced to $5,600. "All Americans pay for their supposedly cheap electricity through tax incentives to the coal industry and FEMA assistance for flooded communities," said Hillary Hosta of Rock Creek, W. Va. "But, as we've seen time and time again, Appalachian people pay for it with their lives."-------------
Strange thing about researching this. The local papers have all kinds of archived stories about everything from softball games to school board meetings for 2004. There is a small by line article that the mine repaired the access road. But no articles about the accident that killed Jeremy Davidson. There is also no article about the mine being fined $15,000 for safety violations.
It smells like cover up by the mine to me. It smells worse than a chicken farm.
You are a very intelligent man. I wish there was a way that I could make it possible for you to see coal mining and use the way that I do for just a little while. If you did----perhaps you'd be motivated to find other ways to get our energy. I think that would be a very good day for peope everywhere if it were to happen. I'm sure that you could do great things if you put your mind to it.
BTW---living next to a chicken farm might not be too bad if they had an anaerobic digester to make produc methane, LOL.
If you can dream it, you can build it! Look at all the things we have today that were considered impossible dreams----and yet we use them everyday. Traveling at unheard of speeds in vehicles that don't even have horses hitched up to them.(remember that the fastest that most people ever traveled in their lifetime was about 30 miles per hour till the start of the 20th century). Talking live to people half way around the world anytime you want, and being able to see them too. As long as you want, for free. (internet video calling) Being able to fly higher and faster than any bird ever did, even into outer space or the moon. Being able to cure or prevent disease---even being able to change the basic genetics of life.
As for the funds to do it----maybe you've been hanging out around the wrong people. Try going to a few Star Trek and Star Wars conventions. I bet that there you'd meet a lot of people who'd pay BIG bucks to get their hands on an Anti-Grav Glider like in the Star Wars movies, or a teleportation device like on Star Trek. You need to get in the habit of being around people who see the possibilities of things that CAN be done, not people who constantly think in terms of what cann't be done. LOL. Yeah, the "what CAN be done" bunch can be pretty weird sometimes.
Good luck! I hope you are successful! And if you aren't, you just might come up with an idea that someone else builds on and is successful---that is often the way it works. At least I think you'd have fun trying.
PS: only your body gets older, your mind will stay as young as you want it to be. A blind man in a cave is not disabled because he can not see, it is everyone else that is disabled.
I do not consider Arther Laffer or the Heritage Foundation to be credible sources for anything but right-wing free-market blathering, er, "opinion".
Surely you realize that the "anti" side of any argument attempts to bolster their position with gross overestimations (or references to them) of the possible costs.
$200 per ton for CO2 mitigation will most CERTAINLY foster entire new methods, processes and industries for energy generation, simply to AVOID paying $200 per ton. The effective cost of using coal would go up by a factor of 5x to 10x, depending on where you buy your coal, because burning a ton of coal generates (more or less) about a ton and a half of CO2. So your $30 per ton of coal now costs $330 per ton to use. I think people will abandon coal long before it gets to that point, don't you?
Regarding the picture above, you still don't get the energy balance picture. Please review until you do see it. It is accurate...that's all I can offer you, unliess you would like each element balanced out for you with pictures.
PS - Circularly polarized light has been known about for a long time - those travelling helices preceeded your "discovery" of them by a few decades...I think I recall learing about this in high school in the early 70's, where it was already in the mainstream physics textbooks:
Get working on that anti-gravity thing! I need it to keep my own perpetual motion machine in operation!
All photons travel in helices. The paricle travels at the square root of two times its helical wave travel (c). The diameter of the helix is its wavelength divided by pi. The reason this works is that the circumference of the helix is identical to its wavelength. The photon also always hits the surface of an object at a 45 degree angle incedent to its travel. If it hit at any other angle it would be like living in a funhouse mirror, everything would be distorted. Pretty amazing job by God. I know antigravity exists, Jesus walked on water and St. Francis of Assisi could levitate as well as a lot of Holy Men from India back in time, Gravity is the same as light except the particles are much smaller.
Mr Ashwoth: "Piers Corbyn ... Remember the UN Security Council Feb 2003 hearing 'evidence' of Weapons of Mass Destruction to justify the Iraq war? UN weapons inspector Hans Blix was unable to find any weapons of mass destruction"
You clearly and knowingly are using a reference who is flat lying about how the 2003 (war on/illegal invasion of) Iraq got started. For a long period prior, Mr. Blix had convinced the Security Council that there were no WMD in Iraq. However, the US Government did a brainwash media blitz on their own people, including the President lying (probably knowingly) in a state of the union address to congress, and topped it off with a publicly broadcast presentation by Colin Powell to the UN in which Mr. Powell explicitly lied to the council members (likely due to false information provided to him by the intelligence bodies not under his conrol). It ruined his reputation and his excellent chances of going further in public service, though it has been clearly documented that he and his staff were blocked in their many attempts at accessing backup data beforehand, no doubt because it didn't exist. The moves ruined worldwide trust in accuracy of US staff abroad permanently, and rightly so. Your use of such material to promote your claims leaves me believing that if you spoke the time of day I would need to consult my watch first before believing it.
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