Pullen for the Party

Global Warming: Facts and Fiction Part 3

So where does this leave us today? The faulty science described above and false statements inserted by Ben Santer in the IPCC report have become the mantra of the environmental activists, Green Peace socialists, and political opportunists in the UN. It has become the conventional wisdom believed by a large segment of the U.S. population and the rallying cry for U.S. politicians choosing to demagogue on global warming. There primary goal is to reign in the U.S. economy and to reduce the standard of living for all developed nations in the world with the U.S. population bearing the brunt of this downscaling of the world economy.

The simple fact is the earth’s climate has always been erratic with cooling and warming trends throughout its history. Often, climate changes have been abrupt and do not follow the stable trend lines presented in computer models. Within the last 2,000 years of recorded history, there have been two world warming periods that exceed by several degrees that which has been experienced since 1850. These warming periods had nothing to do with greenhouse gases released by human activity. Clearly, something else was and continues to be at work in our climate. There are other scientific theories, which try to explain these cooling and warming occurrences on earth including the solar activity model. The simple fact is we do not know enough about what causes changes in our climate to create computer models that can model all of the climate data that is available.

Why are we fixated on global warming? Because it is occurring and we humans have a need to try and understand everything in the physical world around us. This is one of our human traits that has made us so successful. Whether it is black holes, time/space continuum, the big bang theory or natural selection, we humans have a need to know and to hypothesize what we don’t know. These are all theories, some better than others. Some will be replaced by new theories as our knowledge expands and continues to grow.

As with all theories the best tack to take is patience. Time is on our side. It will become clearer that the greenhouse gas theory of global warming is seriously flawed. Already, it has become clear that in order to comply with the Phase I of the Kyoto Protocol, the economic impact on the developed world would have been severe with the supporters of the treaty acknowledging that the potential improvement would be less than 0.1° C by 2050. One volcanic eruption can do 10 times this in one year.

The second phase of the treaty would have required the U.S. to reduce its fossil fuel usage by over 60% from 1990 levels. This would require us to essentially end the use of all fossil fuels including oil, coal and gas. The only replacements that environmental activists and like minded politicians would allow would be wind and solar power. Neither of which can be scaled to the levels we would need in the next 50 years.

Imagine explaining to a room full of high school student who just saw Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth that they can begin their part in saving our world by not being driven to school by their parents, nor driving a car or riding a bus, just walk to school. Turn off the air conditioning, the lights and their cell phones and learn to live without them. That way, less fossil fuels are expended and fewer greenhouse gases released. This is just the beginning of complying with the world according to Al Gore. I give them one day, maybe two at the most before their idealism and self guilt are replaced by their rationalizing global warming as a natural occurrence. So much for global warming, bring it on, we love it!

Global Warming: Facts and Fiction Part 2

Global Warming Blog Post #2

In Part I, I discussed the history and background of climate change and how the theory of global warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases became the dominant theory and was codified in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change First Assessment Report: 1990.

By the time of the IPCC Second Assessment Report: Climate Change 1995, there was wide spread interest in global warning. The second report built upon the foundation of the first report and did not correct for the faulty SO₂ data. The second report went even further, by stating, “The balance of evidence suggests a human effect on climate.”

This conclusion was predicated on the findings presented in chapter 8 of the report, which in part stated, “The body of statistical evidence in chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernable human influence on global climate.”

The story of how this conclusion came into existence is nothing short of amazing. As reported in several publications in 1996, including a Wall Street Journal article published on June 11, 1996 entitled, Cover up in the Greenhouse, and a subsequent one published on June 12th , entitled A Major Deception on Global Warming written by Frederick Seitz (Read the article HERE), stating that the conclusion was added after the end of the conference and had not been approved by the 130 climate scientists who had been in attendance and reviewed chapter 8 on behalf of the IPCC. It was also noted that key sections had been deleted or watered down in chapter 8 to essentially change the conclusions. One example of a section deleted is the following: “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidenced that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.”

The changes made after the completion of the report by the review panel were made by Ben Santer, a junior scientist for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. One individual had reversed the findings of the experts in the IPCC Climate Change 1995 report. Why did he decide to change the findings of chapter 8 and who agreed to it? We don’t know why he single handedly changed the report.

What we do know is Sir John Houghton, Chairman of the IPCC study team received a letter from the U.S. State Department in November 1995, shortly before the report was to be published. The letter stated that the chapters should not be finalized prior to the plenary session in Madrid, and chapter authors should be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner.

This politically charged letter was written and signed by senior career Foreign Service officer, Day Olin Mount, who was Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. As described in their book, Unstoppable Global Warming, Fred Singer and Dennis Avery point out Mr. Mount then received a posting as Ambassador to Iceland by President Clinton. A plum position usually reserved for political allies or major fundraisers.

What happened next at the Madrid conference in late 1995 is the findings of chapter 8 were rewritten to be consistent with the Global Warming Greenhouse campaign championed by the UN. As we say, the fix was in.

Here is where the Al Gore and White House factor came into play. For it is the 1995 IPCC report which became the cornerstone for the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty on greenhouse gas emissions, which was ostensibly and personally negotiated by then Vice President Al Gore on behalf of the United States in 1997.

The treaty was never brought to a vote in the U.S. Senate, because the Senate had already voted 95-0 against any treaty that did not include developing nations as part of the solution to global warming. The Kyoto Protocol treaty was DOA. It did not include major developing nations such as India and China. The economic cost of complying with this treaty would fall on the already developed nations of the world and the U.S. would shoulder the largest part. It has been estimated that in order to comply with the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. would have had to reduce its energy consumption from its 1990 level by 25% in order to comply by 2012 with the treaty!

The resulting impact on the U.S. economy would have been devastating, creating a depression at least as severe as the depression in the 1930s. Obviously, the political consequences of passing such a treaty were not lost on the 95 senators who opposed such a treaty. What is also clear is Vice President Gore did not understand the consequences or was not concerned.

What is even more amazing about this whole chain of events is it was all based on faulty science. Selective data was used to support questionable computer climate models, as well as one individual changing the findings of a critical chapter of the IPCC report in order to fit the political outcome desired by the UN and the Clinton-Gore administration.

In the final installment on Global Warming, I will discuss where we are today and why we as intelligent human beings need to reject the greenhouse gas theory.

Global Warming: Facts and Fiction Part 1

On a recent Sunday Square Off debate (seen Sunday mornings at 8:00am on NBC, Channel 12 in Phoenix), Arizona Democrat spokesperson Emily Bittner stated, “I am so sick of the debate as to whether or not global warming is real.” Well, I had not heard the debate was over and a consensus reached. Although as time passes, the “true facts” on global warming are refuting more and more the theory that man is the cause. What follows is a three part series on facts and fiction.

Not so long ago, Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. As it turned out, he had not, but he liked to think he was the change agent that made it happen. Wishful thinking on his part, fortunately for all of us it did no real harm. In the case of global warming, it may indeed turn out that he is the father of the modern global warming crisis. The irony of his winning a Nobel Prize for championing what appears to be one of the greatest scientific hoaxes of all time is laughable if it were not for the current and future harm his errant beliefs on global warming could cause all Americans.

The story begins long before the making of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s political statement on global warming. It begins with the issuing of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first assessment report in 1990. The report claimed that computerized global climate models showed a warming trend over the past century directly linked to CO₂ emissions resulting from recent human activity since 1940. Unfortunately for environmentalists and their scientific brethren leading the charge (they were not yet known as global warming extremists), their computer models did not fit the observed data, so they changed the data. Or more specifically, created data that made their model work.

It turns out that the fly in the ointment or in this case the anomaly in the data, were two fold, first, most of the measured change in temperature of .6° C (1°F) over the past century had occurred before 1940 and there had been a global cooling period between 1940 and 1975. This cooler period had given rise back in the 1970s to the theory that another ice age was on its way. As it turned out, the scientists writing for the National Science Academy were quickly proven wrong and the hundreds of millions of dollars they were requesting in grants to study further the problem of global cooling were never realized.

But not to worry, scientists are resilient and resourceful when it comes to devising new theories, especially when it impacts their grant funding. It is in their DNA or at least their learned university behavior. When temperatures began to increase in the late 1970s, some began to theorize that increased CO₂ emissions were the cause. At the same time, the advent of super computers made it possible to build computer models of the earth’s climate. Climate models were developed and refined over the next decade until they came up with a model that predicted increases in temperatures based on recent increases in CO₂ emissions. One problem, the cooling period from 1940 to 1975 did not fit their models.

The scientists began searching for an explanation for this data anomaly and found one. When the computer models were adjusted for the possible effects of emissions of sulfur dioxide (another greenhouse gas – SO₂) from electric power plants, the models seemed to fit the data. They claimed that these emissions had overwhelmed the heating affect of CO₂ and caused a cooling trend. At the time, there was not enough known about the impact of sulfur dioxide on the atmosphere to refute the theory.

Later in the decade, it would be shown that sulfur dioxide emissions could not be the cause of global cooling experienced from 1940 to 1975. Europe, North America and other industrialized countries are in the northern hemisphere, the highest sources of this greenhouse gas produced by man during this period. But the global cooling was worldwide and not concentrated in the northern half as one would expect. Human produced sulfur dioxide does not travel as far or as widely as the other major source of SO₂, volcanoes. An erupting volcano can spew out more SO₂ in one day than man does in a year. This source of SO₂ can affect worldwide temperatures causing noticeable cooling for a year or two.

So by 1990, they had their new theory of climate change. With the issue of the IPCC report in 1990, its finding that increases in CO₂ releases were causing global warming quickly became the accepted belief of environmental activists but not yet of the political class or the average person on the street. The fact it was based on faulty computer models escaped notice. This data error would not be addressed until 2001 in third report issued by the IPCC.

In my next blog on global warming, we will examine how this small beginning by the IPCC in 1990 became a cottage industry and led to the Kyoto Protocol treaty.

Randy

Good Grief...

Just when you thought they couldn't get any loonier, Congressional Democrats now want to divert intelligence funds to study Global Warming. From the Washington Times:

"Our job is to steal secrets," said Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.     "There are all kinds of people analyzing global warming, the Democrats even have a special committee on this. There's no value added by the intelligence community here; they have no special expertise, and this takes money and resources away from other threats."

"It's hard to imagine how anyone could believe that climate change represents a more clear and present danger to the United States than radical Islamic terrorists armed with bombs, but that's essentially what Democrats have concluded in this bill,' said Brian Kennedy, a spokesman for Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican.

So funds that were meant to hunt down terrorists, keep America safe from attack, and support our servicemen and women overseas are being used to study...Global Warming?   Al Gore would be proud. Not to mention that the federal government also spends $6.5 billion annually on studies, issues, and initiatives related to global warming.

Check out the full story: http://www.washtimes.com/national/20070504-123740-8370r.htm

Posted by Brett

 

Carbon Crusaders

Today's quote: "We are the President." Hillary Clinton, 1993.

547 days until election day and counting...

THE CARBON CRUSADE

Liberals are always looking for a big new crusade to join. They have been without one for most of the past 27 years, ever since President Reagan came to office.  Reagan's positive, pragmatic approach to solving problems totally disarmed them and began a period of policy reformation in the United States led by the Republican Party. As we moved away from bigger government solutions to problems toward solving problems locally and reducing taxes, Democrats chafed as they watch many of their prize social programs reformed.

Well, they now have found their new cause: Global Warming.  Led by former Vice President AL Gore, who is as famous for his Inconvenient Lie, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." as he is for his Oscar winning drama, "An Inconvenient Truth."  Democrats think they have found the Holy Grail; or the equivalent of the Holy Grail in the secular world, an unproven scientific hypothesis. Twenty years ago, climate research took a sudden sharp turn when it was redefined as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases produced by man. At the time, this was just another hypothesis among hundreds of hypotheses on climate,  most of which have been proven to be wrong.

No matter, like Hollywood, all the Democrats need is a good storyline.  Fiction is melded with convenient, unrelated facts and a script is written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The storyline? They declared that most of the rise in temperature since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.  This unproven hypothesis has become the conventional wisdom. Of course, if one looks into the short history of the Intergovernmental Panel, one discovers that it is a very self-serving group.  Many of the scientists who espouse the greenhouse gases hypothesis are the recipients of millions of dollars in grants to do more studies to confirm the preferred outcome. Anyone challenging their hypothesis need not apply for a grant.

There can be little doubt where this is heading. Soon, coming to a theater near you will be the wide screen production, Greenhouse Rock, where leading Democrat stars will trade conspicuous carbon consumption for carbon credits, while we are instructed in how to reduce our carbon footprint and where less is more and the sucking sound you hear is nothing less than your wages being siphoned from your pockets like Chinese noodles from a Kyoto Bowl.

This Oscar winning film will be followed by the sequel, Greenhouse Gulag with the appropriate subtitle: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, a Karl Marx production.

RANDY