Feb 18, 2008
CO2 Refusenik to Win Pulitzer
Polar bears are not quite the enormous white climate canary of frozen climes that we have been led to believe. In fact, they’re more likely to turn out to be the elephant in the room, when in fifty years time their numbers have grown despite Gory warnings.
Anyway, in the spirit of being contrary almost for the sake of it, but more seriously for the sake of science, I’d like your thoughts on the following article. It was published on ScienceandPublicPolicy.org, which is controversial enough, with the organisation’s Chief Science Advisor being Willie Soon, who along with Sally Baliunus, suggests that climate change is down to non-anthropogenic phenomena.
Anyway, the SPPI article highlights how some scientists have apparently now broken ranks to proclaim that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is not quite the forceful climate change driver those who advocate a global carbon tax would have us believe. After all, if George W Bush is suddenly on-message when it comes to the environment, then something is surely wrong with the world. Of course, I’d want the full insider details and to know if there are any conflicts of interest before taking any refusenik too seriously.
The post’s author Jerry Carlson suggests that a brave journalist who stands up against the carbon conspiracy might be in line for a Pulitzer by 2010. There are a few out there who are making waves including at least one NYT writer, he tells us. Carlson suggests that in order to take the Prize, that enterprising investigative journo will have to find answers to an intriguing pair of questions. I’m sure the folks at RealClimate.org will be readying their riposte right now, if they haven’t already, but here are Carlson’s queries for the record:
First, he asks, why don’t those who suggest we reduce atmospheric CO2 emissions and sequester carbon ever mention the enormous opportunities for feeding the world that might come from longer growing seasons and higher carbon availability for crops? Historically, civilisation has seemingly thrived when the climate has been warmer and wetter and agriculture more prolific. One might also tack on to the CO2 question the issue of water vapour being a much broader and potent greenhouse gas than CO2 as well as a dozen other apparently unaddressed issues within the climate change models.
The second Pulitzer-winning question Carlson offers is: Why is the IPCC’s projected future global warming almost linear or accelerating, when it is well-known that the greenhouse-gas impact of CO2 fades sharply with each incremental increase of CO2 in the atmosphere?
My own additional question to IPCC would ask about that 10% uncertainty in their initial report that suggested we are 90% certain that humans are responsible for rising temperature trends. 9 to 1 against is long odds, but not lottery impossible and mean that there is a chance (albeit just one in ten) that our carbon emissions are not to blame. If they’re not to blame, then rather than asking what is perhaps it’s
time
we checked
the climate change dataperhaps it’s time we checked the climate change data and took a more rigorous look at the historical and prehistorical trends, before it’s too late.
We live in an ice age, by definition; there is ice at the poles and that defines it as such. But, despite measurable volume changes in the Arctic ice sheet, NASA satellite images show without doubt that the ice cap is growing. Couldn’t that cause cooling because of increased reflectance? It has been said before, but what if we actually manage to reduce CO2 levels only to discover that the earth’s natural cycle is about to take us into a deeper ice age? We’ll regret meddling with atmospherics if it does. But, at least the growing polar bear population will be happy.
David Bradley
Site FAQ
Contact me
News by email
Free newsfeed
Social Media
Odiogo Podcast
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
Network with me on LinkedIn
Add me on StumbleUpon
Poke me on Facebook
Plurk with me
View my Flickr photos
Pownce Page
Be my Feed Friend
Johnx said,
February 18, 2008 at 3:59 pm
David:
It will be difficult to respond to that article here. The article and the equally controversial or “hotly disputed” detractors are lengthy, and each appear to be supported by “irrefutable data”.
In answer to your caveat: To be forthright, I am a “refusnik”. I have no ownership in “energy companies”, energy traders” or “carbon traders”. I have clients, none of which are any of the above. That said, all are free to or not to take my thoughts seriously. Notwithstanding, I steadfastly maintain a small “carbon footprint” — not because of carbon dispersal of carbon itself, but because, except for coal, our carbon resources are dwindling. Lastly, while I am trained or educated in science and mathematics, I no longer work in any of these fields.
First, Gore is no scientist. Second, Gore is co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a London based carbon trading company, from which he receives hefty compensation. Mr. Gore defends his style of life (consuming huge amounts of energy) by stating that he “trades carbon”. In essence, he refuses to address the dwindling energy supply question that plagues the planet. Enough of the Gore tirade.
Second, what nation or country would even consider being taxed by the U.N. to the tune of possibly trillions of Dollars. It’s a given that the U.N. is and has been incompetent in all of its endeavors. Who dares to trust it to use the trillions of dollars of “carbon tax” in any way other than to support its ever growing beuracracy. Forget the U.S., even a poor third-world country who is disfavored by the U.N. should refuse such controls imposed by a dysfunctional “governmental system”. Well, again, enough of the U.N. issue.
As to the science, it does appear that CO2 has a logrithmic decrease in its effect on the environment. And, it seems that human contribution is sub-nominal or nominal. Water vapor and methane seem to be more effective in altering the environment. (Let us give the U.N. control over these matters also?).
As to IPCC’s contention of its 10% uncertainty. How IPCC arrived at this number remains a mystery to scientists. IPCC could have said 2% or 40% and still nobody could utilize a real scientific method to discern how the number arose. (Although it’s a good enough of a number to attempt exerting control by taxation rather than nations’ donations. IPCC and the U.N. are not without scary agenda).
Lastly, I suggest that everyone read everything that can be found on the subject. I suggest a primer to start (not without bias itself), it is:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html
Bill said,
February 18, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I had thought I was the only person left in the world to be somewhat skeptical of the global warming question. The world has gone through several natural cycles of warming and cooling. Parts of the Western USA at one time were under the ocean. At other times, much of the Northern USA was under a sheet of ice.
I still think it is a good thing to reduce the various gases we put into the atmosphere, and getting away from an oil based economy can only help us, considering the instability of the Middle East, but to blindly accept the present explanations for global warming borders on the absurd.
No matter what the causes of current climate change are, it is still smart to get away from oil, so I do support attempts to reduce emissions, just not for the reasons most people cite.
David Bradley said,
February 18, 2008 at 5:23 pm
@Bill, JohnX - hear, hear! The whole climate change debate, IPCC posturings, Gory nonsense and carbon soundbites have all become rather too cozy over the last couple of years. Even though many of the skeptics have been revealed as having energy company connections and that may invalidate many of their claims, there is the issue that the climate is bigger than we are and even if we think we have some way of controlling it by manipulating carbon dioxide levels short-term solutions are very unlikely to have a long-term impact.
Waste not, want not is a good motto to live by regardless of the current media scaremongering. The whole carbon offsetting is nothing more than sweeping the dust under someone else’s carpet, to mix yet another metaphor you really cannot rob Petra to pay Pauline.
I was going to link to this blog post on the global warming debate in the original item but changed my mind for fear of diluting the main points, but I’d be interested in Sciencebase readers’ take on this too.
db
Johnx said,
February 18, 2008 at 6:43 pm
David,
I am familiar with this blog. While I think the the “refusniks” there are on target, it usually has a paucity of scientific references. This causes people to espouse opinions based upon no facts for substantiation.
I think that we all must rely only on data that has been scrutinized at least by objective peer review (and not friendly peer review, which is no review at all). Otherwise we are back to the Gore movie and we should do two things: Invest in “carbon traders” (which is a joke); and turn our energy costs over to the U.N. I reject doing anything without the data and the review.
One of the reasons I read your material is that you always provide substantiation. I see no smoke and mirrors.
azmanam said,
February 18, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Here’s my disclaimer: I’m a grad student. I barely have enough money to pay rent and see a movie let alone invest monetarily in either side of the
Global WarmingClimate Change issue.I’m with johnx. Humans border on the presumptuous to suggest we have had a statistically significant impact on global climate and more so to suggest we can reverse our impact in a statistically significant manner. Here’s a picture of the carbon cycle: visionlearning.com. Counting all the “up” arrows (sources releasing CO2), we get a total carbon “input” of 217.1 gigatons of carbon per year. The humans on the right of that figure account for 5.5 gigatons of carbon per year, 2.5% of global carbon production.
Even if humans had the ability to cut our ‘carbon emissions’ in half, we’d then be contributing 1.3 % of the globe’s carbon emissions. 2.5% –> 1.3 %. And at what cost? How many industries will be severely crippled with this significant cutback? What will happen to those nation’s economies with an industrial contraction of that magnitude?
As to burying carbon at sea (on the sig fig page), the figure I link to shows the ocean as the largest carbon sink we have on the planet, with some 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere. So burying our 2.5% in the sea would not significantly change the amount of carbon in the oceans. But I do wonder what effect that would have on the local pH of that region of the ocean (CO2 + H2O –> H2CO3 (carbonic acid)). And what effect will that local rise in pH have on the local life forms and oceanic ecosytem?
Dan Pangburn said,
February 19, 2008 at 12:53 am
For 22 years, from 1976 to 1998, carbon dioxide level and average earth temperature both increased. This resulted in a scary Hollywood movie and world-wide global warming hysteria. Group-think developed in the climate science community where peer-review bias led to de facto censorship and a paucity of published studies that objectively investigate the extent to which human-produced carbon dioxide contributes to global warming. It has been over nine years now and atmospheric carbon dioxide level has continued to increase but temperature has gone down. Apparently no one did any real research or they would have discovered that 440 mya the planet plunged into the Andean-Saharan ice age when atmospheric carbon dioxide was over ten times the present level (http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/07_1.shtml ). With a little further real research they would have discovered that, in the current ice age, temperature trends have changed direction at many different temperature levels. This could not occur if there was positive feedback. They might have also noticed that carbon dioxide level change lagged temperature change by hundreds of years. The forced conclusion from all this is that non-condensing greenhouse gas, and therefore human activity, has no significant influence on global temperature. The ‘documentary’, “Six Degrees Could Change the World” is another example of media exploiting a hoodwinked public to sell advertising. They need to show it right away because, as atmospheric carbon dioxide level continues to increase and the planet temperature continues to drop, it will look more and more foolish.
Adrian Vance said,
February 20, 2008 at 4:47 pm
We are going to have a Congress and President that will endorse anthropogenic global warming, Kyoto treaty, carbon taxes and sequestration. If we handle carbon as garbage. SCAF technology changes all of that the turns carbon into gold, boosts agricultural harvests, saves 50% of all water used in farming and recovers natural or man-made alkali soil. You can read all about it at: http://SCAF.i8.com
Adrian Vance