I May Have Been Wrong on a Couple of Things

So, I've been blogging since 2004, and several early posts had me doubting global warming was caused by man.  I suggested we couldn't know that for sure since there are so many variables, but more evidence has mounted in the past 5 years, and I have to admit that I was probably wrong and climate change like we are experiencing is most likely mostly mankind's fault.  It has taken me some time to come around, and I don't believe all the "chicken little" stuff out there, but mounting evidence of humans' contribution to global warming has convinced me.  Here's the article that finally made me "come out".  A passage of interest:

"Updating this analysis using observational data through 2011 (not even including the 2012 record low sea ice extent), the 32-year trend (1979-2011) is -530 thousand square km per decade, and the 20-year trend is -700 thousand square km per decade.  Using the Vinnikov et al. results, these trends both correspond to probabilities of well under 0.1% of being due solely to natural variability."

The other thing I was wrong about.... Hillary Clinton.  While I am still happy that Obama won out, even naysayers like me have to admit that Hillary has done an excellent job as Secretary of State.  I no longer get the urge to vomit when I see her, and I might even vote for her in 2016.  Sorry about all those "Stop Hillary" posts.  

Global Warming Talk Overheated

How much CO2 do we humans add to the atmosphere? A lot less than Al Gore would have you believe.

From WND:

"Carbon dioxide is 0.000383 of our atmosphere by volume (0.038 percent)," said meteorologist Joseph D'Alea, the first director of meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chief of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecast.

"Only 2.75 percent of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic in origin. The amount we emit is said to be up from 1 percent a decade ago. Despite the increase in emissions, the rate of change of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa remains the same as the long term average (plus 0.45 percent per year)," he said. "We are responsible for just 0.001 percent of this atmosphere. If the atmosphere was a 100-story building, our anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor."

Former Harvard physicist Lubos Motl added that those promoting the fear of man-made climate changes are "playing the children's game to scare each other."

"By the end of the (CO2) doubling, i.e. 560 ppm (parts per million) expected slightly before (the year) 2100 – assuming a business-as-usual continued growth of CO2 that has been linear for some time – Schwartz and others would expect 0.4 C of extra warming only – a typical fluctuation that occurs within four months and certainly nothing that the politicians should pay attention to," Motl explained.

NPR and other news outlets have stories on global warming every day, when any effects have been minimal at best. The human impact on global warming seems to be almost infinitesimal when you look at the big picture. The Chicken Little cries of "the sky is falling" are laughable.

We do need new clean energy sources, though. Not so much to protect us from global warming, but because our fossil fuel resources are going to run out someday. We need energy, and finding new sources should be a top priority. Many of the ideas of the global warming fans are ideas I share....conservation, clean alternatives to oil/coal/gas....but we need these things more to protect our economy than our atmosphere, in my opinion. I could be wrong, and I wish the global warming fans would admit as much.

image courtesy npr's flickr site

Citizen Watts, Global Warming Troublemaker

Anthony Watts decided somebody needed to check on the US's 1,221 ground weatherstations to see if they're measuring temperatures accurately. So far he's checked 227, and many of them do not meet NOAA specs, giving misleading warming information.

From Bill Steigerwald at Human Events:

"Citizen Watts may look like a troublemaker to NASA's experts but he's convinced he's on to something important. He's found no evidence that anyone except him has ever made an effort to verify the quality-control standards at every weather station site.

Until he finishes his project, Watts says, not even Jim Hansen will ever know for sure if -- as a recent scientific paper at the University of Colorado puts it -- "the use of the data from poorly sited stations provides a false sense of confidence in the robustness of the surface temperature trend assessments."

In English, that means Watts may be on the way to proving that the country is not as dangerously hot as we've been led to believe."

Interesting article, I'm sure this Watts guy is on the ball! Here's an interview with Watts from chicobeat.com

Truth, also inconvenient

From this article , titled " Greenland's Ice Sheet Is Slip-Sliding Away":


"From cores of ancient Greenland ice extracted by the National Science Foundation, researchers have identified at least 20 sudden climate changes in the last 110,000 years, in which average temperatures fluctuated as much as 15 degrees in a single decade."


Sudden temperature changes have happened scores of times before, without humans to blame.


That's a truth that's inconvenient for Gore and the in-liars he represents. (He kept referring to any dissenters as "out-liers" on a TV interview "There will always be outliers that refuse to learn the truth, the issue has been decided in the scientific community"....that term really bugged me because of its "liar" connotation. A-hole.) The thing is, I agree the planet shows signs of warming over the past 100 years. But I think it's not all bad news....only 1 degree despite burning half the planet's fossil fuel? Great! Would it be better for humans for the planet to be cooling? No. We've been fortunate with the climate for the past 10,000 years, but there are no guarantees for what the future will hold, no matter what we do.

Where are the holes?

Sprinkled throughout this article that looks to originate with the AP.

"...the last few decades of the 20th century
were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years," the
panel wrote. It said the "recent warmth is unprecedented for at least
the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia," though
it was relatively warm around the year 1000 followed by a "Little Ice
Age" from about 1500 to 1850."

Yeah, things have been all normal, 'cept for those warm years and then the 350 year ice age.

"It had compared the sharp curve of the hockey
blade to the recent uptick in temperatures _ a 1 degree rise in global
average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere during the 20th
century _ and the stick's long shaft to centuries of previous climate
stability." (since that recent ice age, that is)

1 degree rise in 100+ years of burning fossil fuel....ah, the instability of it all...

"Between 1 A.D. and 1850, volcanic eruptions and
solar fluctuations had the biggest effects on climate. But those
temperature changes "were much less pronounced than the warming due to
greenhouse gas" levels by pollution since the mid-19th century, the
panel said."

Yeah, except for that "Little Ice Age" and those "warm years". Climate changes, weather changes, and that IS normal. What, did the sun and volcanoes disappear in 1850? Yes, we've added a lot of CO2 to the atmosphere in the last 150 years....but we've only seen a 1 degree average temperature change....that is good news! But just because the sky isn't falling (you heard it here first), doesn't mean we can rest...there are many dire things that can happen to humanity.

Here's a good idea Smart, relatively small things like this will go a long way should we face some major "humanity squashing" disasters.

Gore-bal Warming Exposed

"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists
By Tom Harris

"Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?

No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field."

Most everyone accepts the global warming idea, and the fact that humans cause it and can correct it. Disagree, and they presume you're ignorant. But the more scientists know about the subject, the less certain they are about global warming and "weather" or not it is caused by the CO2 increase. Click through to read the whole article.

Global Warming? Beats the alternative..

From Walter Williams, WND:

"Hardly a day goes by without some kind of warning that mankind's use of fossil fuels, especially in the U.S., is causing global warming. Stossel looks at the numbers. Half of this century's global warming happened between 1900 and 1945. Stossel asks, "If man is responsible, why wasn't there much more warming in the second half of the century? We burned much more fuel during that time."

By the way, if there is global warming, it might be a godsend. According to Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, added carbon dioxide helps plants grow. Warmer winters give farmers a longer growing season, and the warming might end the droughts in the Sahara desert.

There's another consideration. For the past 800,000 years, there have been periods of approximately 100,000 years called Ice Ages, followed by a period of 10,000 years, a period called Interglacial, followed by another Ice Age. We're about 10,500 years into the present Interglacial period – namely, we're 500 years overdue for another Ice Age. If indeed mankind's activity contributes to the planet's warming, we might postpone the coming Ice Age."

I think there is global warming, but to say that it's solely or even mostly man's fault is giving us too much credit, in my opinion. We've burned through almost half of Earth's fossil fuel in a little over 100 years, with only a small measurable effect. I'd bet we could finish off all the fossil fuel on the planet and it won't make much more of a difference. The problem will be....we're out of fossil fuel! How will we make plastics and all the beneficial things we make from oil? Just think of all the oil-based products we use and need....for medicine alone! Ah, but I digress. Look, I'm all about protecting the environment, but the whole global warming thing seems blown out of porportion to me....we can do more for the environment by targeting specific chemicals...look what success we've had with the ozone layer and DDT. Global Warming? Sure, it happens, but we probably don't have a lot to do with it, and it's better for humans to be it a warming trend than a cooling one, so let's celebrate! Of course, I 'm probably wrong, and our coastal cities will all be underwater in 30 years, AND we'll be out of oil. Won't this post look silly?

Weather Changes

AlterNet Mobile Edition:

"In recent years, however, something has been amiss in Martin's idyllic setting. The weather is changing in strange ways. And for a farmer that's bad news.

'I don't know if you can talk about predictable weather anymore,' Martin said on a recent walk through his three-acre plot. 'Each of the last ten years has been anomalous in one way or another. The weather here used to be like clockwork. Around March 15 it would stop raining. But all through the '90s we had rain into April, May and even June. If you talk with farmers and gardeners, oh yeah, they think there's something off.'

Martin is right. From New England to the Midwest to California, farmers and scientists are noticing that once-dependable weather patterns are shifting, and concern is growing that those changes will have a significant impact on our agriculture system. Farmers in the United States and around the world are likely to face serious challenges in the coming decades as new kinds of weather test their ability to bring us the food we all depend on.

The culprit is climate change, caused by society's burning of fossil fuels. When it comes to global warming, farmers--who are more attuned to weather patterns than most people--may be the proverbial canaries in the coalmine."

Ahem, uh....weather changes...wow, you guys should be scientists! "Society's burning of fossil fuels" is a part of "global warming", but we don't have much reason to believe that is a main cause, or even a significant contributor to global warming. We also don't know if the warming may be helping....wouldn't we be worse off it if were cooling 1.8 degrees over the last 100 years? The weather has been changing on our planet....since it was formed. Climate change is normal, and weather patterns change. It is part of nature. Earth has been much cooloer and much warmer in the past, we've also had "volcantic winters" as recently as the 1800's (Summer never came one year). We're gonna be out of fossil fuel in the next 100 years or so anyway, a blink in time for our planet. Why do humans always think that we have such control over nature?

America's Peak Experience

America's Peak Experience:

"'Please sir, just one thin mint.'"

In the fifties, geologist M. King Hubbert coined the term, "peak oil," to describe the tipping point at which petroleum supply reaches its maximum annual output. Total US oil production reached its peak in the seventies. Now, the question is when the world supply will reach its zenith.

Recently a number of academic papers have been published that forecast the peak year for world oil production. Most place this event in a time period between 2005 (Princeton Geologist Ken Deffeyes) and 2014 (Germany's Deutsche Bank). Not surprisingly, the most optimistic projection - 2037 - comes from the Bush Administration's forecasters at the Department of Energy.

When peak oil will occur is more than an academic issue. It represents an important milestone for policy makers because it sets a "drop dead date" for our preparation for a time of oil scarcity. Experts believe that it will take at least 10 years for the economy to make the transition from oil to the various alternatives; the longer we wait to start this, the more extreme the economic turmoil will be. "

All the more reason to leave the Arctic alone...we will need to save that stuff for the future.