Climate claims fail science test

THE UN Climate Change Summit started this week in Copenhagen with far more dissent than its organisers hoped for from two extremes of the climate change debate

. We had the "grandfather of climate change", James Hansen, describing the proceedings as counter-productive and "a farce", while the chief Saudi Arabian negotiator to the summit, Mohammed al-Sabban, doubts the current science and suggests there is no longer any point in seeking agreement to reduce emissions.

It is therefore certain that the global political debate on managing carbon emissions and climate change will continue well beyond the Copenhagen summit. It is to be hoped that the scientific debate is also permitted to continue.

Results released this year suggest that the degree of scientific certainty falls short of that desirable before we set binding targets and dollar values on carbon emissions. Indeed, Tim Flannery, chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council admitted that: "We can't pretend we have perfect knowledge: we don't."


This is a refreshingly honest comment when contrasted with some of the statements in the hacked emails of the Climatic Research Unit, UK, made by leading British and US climate scientists, who were caught with their fingers on the "delete button" when faced with climate data that failed to agree with their computer models.

Meanwhile two recent results published by top scientists cast doubt on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's theory about the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming. These are of of significance because whereas the climate models used by the IPCC rely on software to represent a large number of highly complex Earth processes, these results are equivalent to experimental observations on the Earth itself.

Paul Pearson of Cardiff University and his international team achieved a breakthrough recently, published four weeks ago in arguably the world's top scientific journal, Nature.

They unravelled records of atmosphere, temperature and ice-cap formation 33.6 million years ago, when the Earth cooled from a greenhouse without ice caps, into something quite similar to our present day.

These results from "Laboratory Earth" have a particular advantage: we can see what happened after the event for two million years.

With today's records we see changes in atmospheric CO2 and temperature over 50 years and seek to project what will happen in the future.

Pearson's work contains a couple of remarkable results.

First the greenhouse atmosphere pre-cooling contained a CO2 concentration of 900 parts per million by volume, or more than three times that of the Earth in pre-industrial days.

We can't be sure what triggered the Earth to cool despite, or because of, its changing green-house atmospheric blanket, but once it did, cycles of ice cap formation and glaciation commenced, apparently governed by the same variations in the Earth's orbit that govern the ice ages of the past million years.

Second, while the cooling of the Earth took place over a time-span of around 200,000 years, the atmospheric CO2 first dropped in association with the cooling, then rose to around 1100ppmv and remained high for 200,000 years while the Earth cooled further and remained in its new ice ages cycle.

We can compare these huge swings (both up and down) in atmospheric CO2 with current computer-modelled estimates of climate sensitivity by the IPCC which suggest that a doubling of CO2 relative to pre-industrial

times will produce a temperature increase of 2.5C to 4C.

If the Earth started a cycle of ice ages 33.6 million years ago while having its very carbon-rich atmosphere, and if the Earth showed cycles of ice-age activity when atmospheric CO2 was four times the level that it was in humankind's pre-industrial times, what new information must we incorporate into our present climate models?

Another key parameter in climate modelling is the warming amplification associated with increasing CO2 in our atmosphere.

This amplification factor is generally believed to be greater than one, giving rise to an understanding that increases in atmospheric CO2 amplify warming (a positive feedback in the physical process), and the IPCC has quantified this to deliver the finding that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in man-made greenhouse gas concentrations.

pt1

A lot of comments taken out of context there. Welcome back Grendel. We missed you so much. 

Oh the CRU Climategate article?  Want to hear the facts, or are you just interested in the hype? Here you go - you don't even have to be able to read. Just sit back and watch.

http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/a/u/0/P70SlEqX7oY

Grendel wrote on Dec 9^th, 2009 at 9:56am:


I can't fault it as a prime example of deliberately engineered nonsense. In that respect, it's a masterpiece.

THOUGHT SO...  sigh 

LET ME KNOW WHEN THE FINGERS COME OUT OF YOUR EARS AND YOU STOP STOMPING ROUND IN CIRCLES SINGING LALALA AT THE TOP OF YOUR VOICE.  

ROTFLMAO...

you've got more red herrings than the baltic Muso... 

Gee who'd have thought politics was involved in this debate. 
in fact that's basically all you have on your side of the debate.

Tom, It isn't about the miniscule amount of CO2 that human beings exhale. It's about the massive amount produced by burning fossil fuels each year. All 8000 odd megatonnes of it.

You're being conned if you fall for the easy comfortable message.

The decline they were talking about in the climategate emails was nothing to do with actual temperatures. It was about tree ring proxy temperatures.

The decline since 1961 is due to the fact that the tree growth rings are no longer in accordance with temperature, probably due to increased pollution or reduced moisture.

If you really want to get a better picture, watch that video I linked to.

If you don't know and don't want to know, continue to do what every second layperson on the blogosphere seems to do. Continue to repeat the mantra.

I know that there is hard physical evidence for global warming and that there is a clear causal link with increasing CO2 levels.

If you have any scientific background at all,  try reading some textbooks instead of echoing the words of the true believers (denialists). They 'know' everything already. Who needs science?  

- and if you think Copenhagen is about saving polar bears and furry animals? Think again. The big ticket item will be a people tragedy if we fail to come up with solutions for this crisis.

Quote:

Yea, every leader in the world is a member of a secret movement  that plans to take over the world.