The United States is Evil... NOT!

After all the grief given those in the government who have opposed signing the Kyoto Treaty, who'd have thunk that our carbon emissions are increasing at a slower rate than those who have signed the treaty.

The American Thinker has a piece about this, with a downloadable Excel file with the data, for the obsessives out there.

The Kyoto treaty was agreed upon in late 1997 and countries started signing and ratifying it in 1998. A list of countries and their carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels is available from the U.S. government. If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following.

Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.

Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.

Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.

Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.

So, is it better to sign, or not to sign?

Even the Pope!

The Daily Mail reports that the Pope has attacked "prophets of doom" who are creating fear of global warming based on ideology more than science.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering. The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement.

God bless the Pope for telling it like it is.

Latest IPCC report still admits large uncertainty

Yes, yes. The text of the report claims scientists are 90% certain of the report's conclusions about global warming. But look at the actual data, supplied graphically in the 2007 report. (click image to enlarge)





Their estimate of man-made contribution to global temperature rise is expressed as somewhere between 0.6 watts/m² and 2.4 watts/m². That is a variance of a factor of four. It could be a little, it could be four times that amount!

Also, note that the level of scientific understanding of many important factors influencing global temperature is still admittedly low. On the column farthest to the right, the "LOSU" (level of scientific understanding) of aerosols, surface albedo (reflectivity), contrails, ozone, is all medium to low.

The IPCC claims to be 90% sure. Are they 90% sure that their understanding of these important factors is low? It would appear so. Here it is, in black and white (and red and blue) in the graph published in their report.

The BBC begins to tell the other side

No consensus on IPCC's level of ignorance

The BBC has been bearing down hard on the global warming alarmism for several years. Never was heard a skeptical word. Now, their tone seems to be softening somewhat. At least they are letting other voices be heard, voices of those who doubt the central thesis and wisdom of dire predications about climate. This article discusses the intertwining of political and scientific interests in the publication of the IPCC reports.

At an IPCC Lead Authors' meeting in New Zealand, I well remember a conversation over lunch with three Europeans, unknown to me but who served as authors on other chapters. I sat at their table because it was convenient. After introducing myself, I sat in silence as their discussion continued, which boiled down to this: "We must write this report so strongly that it will convince the US to sign the Kyoto Protocol." Politics, at least for a few of the Lead Authors, was very much part and parcel of the process. And, while the 2001 report was being written, Dr
Robert Watson, IPCC Chair at the time, testified to the US Senate in 2000 adamantly advocating on behalf of the Kyoto Protocol, which even the journal Nature now reports is a failure.

The author is a scientist who builds computer climate models -- of the type upon which the IPCC report's predictions depend so heavily. Models are designed to conform to past climate records. What we don't know is whether these models will perform well in the future. That will be the true scientific test.

Mother Nature is incredibly complex, and to think we mortals are so clever and so perceptive that we can create computer code that accurately reproduces the millions of processes that determine climate is hubris (think of predicting the complexities of clouds).

Of all scientists, climate scientists should be the most humble. Our cousins in the one-to-five-day weather prediction business learned this long ago, partly because they were held accountable for their predictions every day.

Answering the question about how much warming has occurred because of increases in greenhouse gases and what we may expect in the future still holds enormous uncertainty, in my view.

To counter overconfidence in computer modelling, the author offers an anecdote from his formative ears:

The best advice regarding scientific knowledge, which certainly applies to climate, came to me from Mr Mallory, my high school physics teacher.

He proposed that we should always begin our scientific pronouncements with this statement: "At our present level of ignorance, we think we know..."

Intelligence²: Global Warming is not a crisis (radio debate)

In March, public radio aired a debate produced by the Rosenkranz Foundation on the proposition "Global Warming is Not a Crisis." Experts for and against the statement gave their views, and the audience voted. Comparing a poll of the audience before and after the debate, the number believing that we do NOT have a crisis increased from 30 percent to 46 percent.

When people learn more of the facts, they become more skeptical of the global warming crisis "consensus."

Read about the debate at npr.org, or download the MP3 audio file of the debate directly at this link.

Policy planning in an "atmosphere" of uncertainty

Let's return one last time to the Summary For Policymakers written in 2001 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the source many global warming alarmists cite as the "consensus" view that proves we must act to prevent further global warming.

The complete chart from that report showing influences on warming in the industrial era (since 1750), is reproduced here, and this time we want to pay particular attention to the very bottom of the chart. You can click on the chart at any time for a larger view.




The bottom of the chart represents the IPCC's estimate of our level of scientific understanding of each of the factors contributing to the warming of planet earth since 1750. They claim a "high" or "medium" scientific understanding of carbon dioxide (C02), nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4), halocarbons, and tropospheric ozone (O3) as warming factors. They also claim a medium level of scientific understanding of the cooling factor stratospheric ozone.

Now let's note what they admitted (in 2001) that science does NOT understand very well. Warming of the planet caused by solar radiation? They classify scientific understanding of solar-induced warming (over which man obviously has no control) as "very low." Similarly, they confess a "very low" level of understanding of the cooling effects caused by changes in land use, and the indirect effects of aerosols -- how tiny particles we release into the atmosphere affect cloud formation and precipitation, which cool the earth.

What else do we understand poorly? According to the IPCC, our understanding of global cooling from sulphates, organic carbon from burning of fossil fuels released as aerosols, and biomass burning. Also, the effects of aviation contrails, mineral dust, and carbon black from fossel fuel burning are poorly understood.

To summarize, of the major factors influencing the warming of the planet (according to the IPCC, the scientific "consensus"), we have a high level of understanding of greenhouse gases, a medium level of understanding of the effects of ozone, and a low or very low level of understanding of eight other factors: sulphate, carbon black, organic carbon, biomass burning, mineral dust, indirect effects of aerosols, aviation contrails, and the effects of the sun. I think this last item cannot be repeated enough: the IPCC admits to a "very low" level of scientific understanding of the role changes in the sun play in global warming in the industrial age.

Two global warming factors we understand well, eight factors we do not. How can accurate climate models even exist, when eight out of a dozen or so factors are poorly understood? This is a no-brainer. It is impossible to even create a reliable computer model to predict future climate and temperature when most of the major factors in such a model are poorly understood. Such was the admission of the 2001 report by the IPCC, clear to anyone who would examine their summary closely.

The "consensus" of climate scientists reports that we are heading for disastrous global warming. It does so on the basis of computer climate models. The models must take into account many factors for which our level of scientific understanding is admittedly "very low." Why should the public pay any heed to predictions that are based on such huge uncertainties?

Next time, we will update this information by examining the most recent IPCC report from 2007. The basic conclusions do not change. Their estimates are, by their own admission, subject to a very wide range of possible outcomes. The uncertainty of any such estimates is built-in, via computer models, which must necessarily take into account many things we understand poorly.

Human land use cools the planet

Examining a section of the same graph seen in the two previous entries, a graph from the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, note that humans change the surface of the earth, by planting or harvesting forests, by cultivating land for farming, by building cities, and other activities that change the reflectivity (albedo) of the earth's surface. If man takes a forest and plows it up to create a field of bare dirt, the blackness of the soil will absorb more of the sun's heat, and this creates a warming effect.

According to the scientists represented by the IPCC, however, the net effect of human activity on albedo is actually a cooling effect.

On the other hand, increased solar activity, the item on the right edge of the graph, is a warming influence. This graph was designed to compare the pre-industrial climate and conditions (circa 1750 A.D.) to the current day. Clearly the IPCC believes that increased solar activity is partly responsible for our slightly warmer global temperatures today compared with the climate 250 years ago.