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Karen,
Although the ground is warming, the troposphere -
the lower atmosphere - is not.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide increased through the last
century, yet there was a cooling beginning in the forties and lasting 35 years
until the upper seventies. During this period CO2 increased.
Abruptly, in the late seventies, ground temperatures
began to soar.
Why?
I'm not sure anyone knows, but the soaring was gathered
under the umbrella of Global Warming. (If I were a climatologist,
I would be more interested in why this sudden change.) But, even
the cooling event has to be dragged out of the IPCC.
The IPCC is a political animal and is - as is often the
case these days - more interested in funding than science. It is an enormous
propaganda machine with some dubious activities in its history. (Dissenting
ideas "forgotten", authoritative peer reviews made "in-house" - all in an
atmosphere of overweening arrogance.)
I suspect that much of the support outside the "old
boys" comes from scientists not particularly interested in the subject, but who
are willing to sign agreement with what is clearly a done deal.
A few more points - perhaps the first being that a
gigatonne is a thousand million tonnes and a tonne is a thousand kilograms - an
English ton. Further that a tonne of carbon leads to about 3.7 tonnes of carbon
dioxide.
The atmosphere contains about 750 gT of carbon and
it is rising by about 3.3 gT a year. This is after the larger part of CO2
emissions from fossil fuels and land clearing is absorbed by vegetation and the
oceans.
To put that atmospheric 750gT in perspective,
carbon in vegetation is 500gT, in soil about 2,000gT, and in the oceans about
39,000gT.
More perspective - fossil fuel emissions are about 6.3
gT a year. The Kyoto Protocol tackles this with a policy - if
fully implemented - that would reduce emissions by 0.3 gT. (Which is why Kyoto
is criticized from both sides.)
But, bully for Kyoto!
Not that it matters, for if Russia refuses to join,
Kyoto is dead - according to its own rules. That puts Putin in the catbird seat.
He must be enjoying the pleas of the European frantics.
Harry
********************************************
Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net ******************************************** From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Karen Watters Cole Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 5:58 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Futurework] Hear No Evil See no Evil... In the name of protecting the public health
and in the greater public common interest -
Precautionary
Principles: identifying environmental risks and implementing policies that will
head off environmental damage before it occurs.* Oregonian Editorial: 12/05/03:
See No Warming, Feel No
Warming Northwest researchers challenge the claim
that scientists are evenly divided about the causes of climate change
With
so many policymakers covering their ears, climate scientists must speak louder
to be heard. Now, with Congress rejecting global warming legislation and the
Kyoto treaty possibly on the verge of collapse, is a good time for 17 Northwest
researchers to raise their voices. Oregon's
and Washington's leading climate change experts are publicly challenging a claim
by U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., that scientists are evenly divided about
whether current warming has human causes or is entirely natural. Smith made the
claim in a Nov. 5 op-ed article in The
Oregonian explaining his vote against the Climate Stewardship Act,
which would have reduced greenhouse gas emissions. In
fact, as the scientists make clear in a letter to Smith, which appears on the
opposite page, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that much of the warming
over the past 50 years is due to human activities, particularly the emission of
greenhouse gases. Smith
is free to believe what he wants about global warming, even if it is
contradicted by the experts in his own state, by the U.S. National Academy of
Sciences and by hundreds of scientists who contributed to a landmark report for
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. However, the senator's claim that
"just as many scientists" believe that a natural cycle is responsible for the
warming trend is flat wrong. Smith,
of course, is in good company in looking the other way from the growing pile of
scientific evidence
about global warming, its human causes and its potential to cause tremendous
social and economic problems. President Bush has adopted the same stance, sowing
doubt about the science and pushing a wholly inadequate voluntary plan to reduce
greenhouse gases. Meanwhile,
the only serious global effort to combat warming, the Kyoto Protocol, depends
now on whether Russia agrees to ratify the treaty. On Tuesday, a senior adviser
to President Vladimir Putin said Russia would not agree to Kyoto because it
would be too much of an economic burden. The next day, the Russian government
said it had not made up its mind about Kyoto -- suggesting that the Kremlin is
still trying to wring more concessions out of Europe and Japan.
Whatever
the Russians decide, the world will not successfully attack global warming
without the support and participation of the United States, the No. 1 emitter of
greenhouse gases. Real progress on global warming will come only when President
Bush and other political leaders realize that it's not enough to hope against
hope that the overwhelming consensus of scientists is wrong.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Oregon senator cited imbalanced
scientific view on global warming Commentary
in The Oregonian,
12/05/03 The
following is from a letter that 17 Northwest scientists -- including five on the
faculties of Oregon universities -- sent to Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore.,
responding to his Nov. 5 guest column, "Climate bill posed risks to
economy."
Dear
Sen. Smith, We
read your opinion piece in The
Oregonian and believe that the reasons you gave for voting against
the Climate Stewardship Act included some misrepresentations of the science of
climate. We certainly agree with you that "nature is in a constant state of
change." However, it is quite untrue to present the consensus view of climate
scientists as evenly divided about whether current warming is entirely natural,
as you did in your piece: "And our understanding of climate change is very
limited. Some think automobiles and industrialization are to blame for Earth's
current warming period. Yet, just as many scientists point to natural indicators
-- from ancient tree rings to glacial ice cores -- as evidence that the planet
regularly experiences both warming and cooling trends . . ."
A
bit later in the piece, you state: "The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics reported that the 20th century has neither the warmest nor the most
extreme weather of the past 1,000 years." Three
important points must be made in response to these claims:
On
the issue of climate change, more than on any other policy-relevant science
issue we know of, scientists have repeatedly been asked to produce comprehensive
assessments of the state of science. To ignore those assessments is to ignore
the very basis of a sophisticated modern society . . . the role of experts. When
someone ignores or discredits experts in favor of a single paper (produced by
two researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, not by the
entire institution, and faulty in its analysis) that supports an extreme point
of view, then it really is "more to do with politics than science."
The
most important such assessment culminated in early 2001 -- the years-long effort
by 600 scientists laboring under the auspices of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
to produce an 894-page report on
"The Scientific Basis"
of climate change. This document was peer-reviewed piece-by-piece by several
hundred scientists; the language in each chapter was carefully crafted to
reflect the state of scientific understanding, including areas of great
controversy and substantial agreement. The report's summary stated that "There
is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50
years is attributable to human activities. . . ." At
the request of President Bush, The U.S. National Academy of Sciences convened a
panel in spring 2001 to answer "some key questions" that reaffirmed the IPCC's
conclusions that most of the recent warming was likely due to human activity:
"The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is
likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations
accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this
issue. . . ." The
evidence for a growing human influence on climate is very strong.
This
evidence includes
(a) rapidly increasing greenhouse gases; (b) a pattern of warming that resembles
the pattern expected from this increase in greenhouse gases; (c) direct
measurements ruling out solar radiation as the cause of warming in the last 24
years . . . The
existence of past natural variations -- like the glacial-interglacial cycles --
in no way diminishes the likelihood that in the past 30 to 50 years, human
influence has also played a role in observed warming. There can be and indeed
are multiple causes for climate variations; the differences between
human-induced and natural causes are (a)
the pace of global (as opposed to regional) change,
which most research suggests is unusual; (b)
the moral and legal responsibility for the change.
As the American Geophysical Union puts it in its official statement on climate
change, "The
present level of scientific uncertainty does not justify inaction in the
mitigation of human-induced climate change."
We applaud those who, rather than hoping that the overwhelming consensus of the
climate research community is completely wrong, are seeking innovative and
cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gases. This
letter takes no position on whether the Climate Stewardship Act was a good,
cost-effective policy; rather, we are grieved to see members of the most august
legislative body in the world citing a tiny minority of climate researchers in
constructing an imbalanced view of the state of science, rather than relying on
expert knowledge as represented in the comprehensive assessment efforts of the
IPCC and the National Academy of Sciences. Richard Gammon, professor of oceanography and
chemistry, University of Washington (and 16 cosigners from Northwest
universities) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> * Precautionary
Principles: identifying environmental risks and implementing policies that will
head off environmental damage before it occurs. “In the 1980s, the precautionary principle
began appearing in policy statements and mechanisms in Europe and Canada, and it
has been written into international treaties such as the North Atlantic Treaty,
the Maastricht Treaty on the European Union, and the 1992 Rio Declaration from
the UN Conference on Environment and Development (Agenda 21), to which the
United States is a signatory. In 1998, at the Wingspread
Conference on the
precautionary principle, an international gathering of scientists, government
officials, lawyers, labor representatives, and environmental activists
formulated some of the principle’s key components:
Simply put, the precautionary principle
embodies a philosophy of “better safe than sorry” in matters of commerce,
industry, environmental law, and public
health. … after all, those critics who are concerned about entangling
red tape are engaged, even if they don’t realize it, in the very dynamic that
the precautionary principle advocates: one of vigorous, multi-sided debate about
the potential future consequences of a particular course of action. That’s
the whole idea, and the stakes are too high, for ourselves and for future
generations, not to take it seriously.” - KWC
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- Re: [Futurework] Hear No Evil See no Evil... Ray Evans Harrell
- Harry Pollard
