merry Xmas to all the alarmists living in denial...

Nature will decide Earth's fate ... climate change sceptics are wary. Source: The Daily Telegraph

AS the core samples from deep underground pass through the logging sensor before me, the rhythmic pattern of ancient climate change is clearly displayed. Friendly, brown sands for the warm interglacial periods and hostile, sterile grey clays for the cold glaciations. And for more than 90 per cent of recent geological time the Earth has been colder than today.

We modern humans are lucky to live towards the end of the most recent of the intermittent but welcome warm interludes. It is a 10,000 year-long period called the Holocene, during which our civilisations have evolved and flourished.

The cores tell the story that this period is only a short interlude during a long-term decline in global temperature - they also warn of the imminence of the next glacial episode in a series stretching back more than 2 million years.

Together with 50 other scientists and technicians, I am aboard the drilling ship Joides Resolution. JR, as it is affectionately known, is the workhorse of the Ocean Drilling Program, an international program that is to environmental science what NASA is to space science.

JR's drilling crew can retrieve cores up to 1km or more below the seabed and we are drilling today about 80km east of South Island in New Zealand. The ancient muds and sands that make up the sediment layers we pass through are the most important record of ancient climate that scientists possess. And they tell the tale that climate always changes.

Some core alterations are ruled by changes in the Earth's orbit at periods of 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years, others by fluctuations in solar output and others display oceanographic and climate shifts caused by . . . we know not what.

Climate, it seems, changes ceaselessly: sometimes cooling, sometimes warming, oft-times for reasons we do not fully understand.

Similar cores through polar ice reveal, contrary to received wisdom, that past temperature changes were followed - not preceded but followed - by changes in the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide.

Yet the public has been misinformed to believe that increasing human carbon dioxide emissions will cause runaway warming; it is surely a strange cause of climate change that postdates its supposed effect?

The now numerous special interest groups who continue to lobby for unnecessary and economically harmful carbon dioxide taxation need to appreciate that nature, not the world's governments, will determine future climate. Second, that there is no scientific evidence that warmings greater than the much-talked about 2C will cause environmental catastrophe; rather, this number is one plucked out of the air for reasons of political targetry and control. And, third, that to limit atmospheric carbon dioxide to 450ppm, also a widely touted figure, makes no sense, because past carbon dioxide levels attained more than 10 times this without known adverse environmental effects, while greening the planet.

Politically popular though it may be, the belief that atmospheric carbon dioxide is the primary driver of average planetary temperature is junk science. For instance, Earth experienced an ice age about 450 million years ago at a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are estimated to have been 15 times the pre-industrial level.

It is simply science fiction to believe that 450ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide and 2C of warming are magic numbers that somehow mark a "tipping point"in Earth's climate system. Rather, they are politically contrived targets, erected for the purpose of stampeding scientifically innocent citizens into a gaping corral of carbon dioxide taxation.

The simplest explanation for the mild warming that occurred in the late 20th century is that it was part of Earth's ever-changing pattern of natural climate change and the job of scientists is to seek evidence to test that interpretation. They have and literally thousands of scientific papers to date have described climate evidence that is consistent with natural change.

Despite all the efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the expenditure of about $100 billion of research money since 1990, no scientific paper exists that demonstrates that the late 20th century warming, or the past 10 years of cooling for that matter, fall outside the rates and magnitudes of past (geological) climate change.

Melting glaciers (but, in some places, advancing), rising sea levels (but, in some places, falling), increasing numbers of storms (actually, currently at a 30-year low), increasing numbers of polar bears and changes in migratory patterns of birds may very well all have happened or be happening. But these facts say nothing about a human causality for such changes.

It is not for the independent climate scientists (the so-called "climate sceptics") to disprove that dangerous human-caused warming is happening. Rather, it is for the alarmist scientists of the IPCC and CSIRO to show that the simple idea of natural climate change can be invalidated. This they have failed to do.

What a crock....  

care to disagree with anything Bob has said?

oh and if you manage to stop all of man's CO2 emissions...  ahhhh...  what are you going to do about the other 97% "naturally" occuring?  hmmm?   

eh mr fatuous and flatulent...  give us a break from the incessant ad hom eh.

prove them wrong for a change.

that might be nice

what did Carter say for example that was wrong.

Oh right...  he disagrees with you and the rest of the Emperors New Clothes Brigade.

Sorry...  I keep forgetting.

Another witless response...

Care to address the article?  Refute any facts?

No?

How unusual.

that's ok Skippy... Bob actually knows what he's talking about.

Grendel wrote on Dec 9^th, 2009 at 11:42am:


OK, give me one point that Carter makes that you think is valid, and I'll explain to you why it isn't valid. Some of what he says is actually true but irrelevent - a bit like Plimer's dissertation on the energy generated by man being miniscule compared to Solar Energy. Big deal - but nobody is disputing that. It's irrelevent.

I don't particularly want to read through his usual nonsense.

Grendel wrote on Dec 9^th, 2009 at 3:39pm:

lmao, that is because you are too bloody minded, and pig headed to ever actually read any real science.

If it were up to denialists, doctors would get their degrees from Yahoo, or Google, because anonymous bloggers must certainly know more than the world's top scientists.
I mean, why do they waste their time going to harvard or yale, or oxford, when they can learn all they know from billybobsueboyjoe's good ol' boys blog.
You can also learn how jesus rode dinosaurs, and how he created heaven and earth in six days, because billybobsueboyjoe is full of useful facts that ordinary folk just never get to hear cos them fancy pants scienticians is all colludin' to keep yuz in the dark.

You seriously need to stop listening to denialist bloggers Mantra, they are deceitful, bald faced liars.

They lie that the earth is cooling, yet 11 of the last 14 years, were the hottest ever recorded, since instrumental temperature recording began, 150 years ago.\

Now because 1998 was the hottest year ever, that fact that each year since then has not increased in temperature, has these liars going around saying that the earth is cooling, and it just is not so.

These lying jerks love to spout off about natural variation, but when the scientists explain that the 1998 peak was due the the strong El Nino adding to that years warming, and subsequent years have not had as strong an El Nino so the record stands, but the background warm has not gone away, just the fluctuating variables have seen the failure to surpass 1998 temps.

Unfortunately, we should not need to wait long to beat the 1998 record, probably next year, or 2011, when the sun comes out of it's diminishing radiation cycle, and another El Nino event occurs, which are both likely within the next two years, then we will very likely see a new highest ever record year.
We may even get a run of two or three new record hottest years, but then the solar forcing and El Nino events should start to subside, and we will see a slight lowering from those new record highs once more, like we have seen since the record of '98.
No doubt denialist liars will again claim we are cooling, but the facts will be that the global warming trend will be continuing, but with usual seasonal variability seeing some lower temps until the next record highs hit a few years after that.

The time has come for people to stop allowing these lying tools of the heavy polluters to drive their deceitful campaign of misinformation, and for people to stop allowing themselves to be so easily conned by these carbon vandals, and begin to reject idiotic blogger denialists, and visit real science sites, providing real scientific analysis and opinion.

Once enough people actually make the effort to examine the denialists lies for themselves, then they will have nobody left that is ignorant of their methods of deceit.