1.Once and for all is global warming fact or fiction. Please explain reasons.

We must discriminate here between natural warming which may occur through natural variability, and warming which has been (or may become in the future) generated by human activity. Most of the warming in the 20th century occurred before 1940, a large number of scientific papers attributing that warming to the sun. The sun is now hotter and more active than at any time in the last 400 years, and it would be absurd not to expect some warming from that source alone. The sun will eventually decline in activity – it always does.

As for man-made warming over and above that caused by natural variability and the sun, the present climate cannot yet be considered as having a significant human component for the simple reason that nothing we have today is unprecedented in recorded human history. The Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, confirmed by proxy evidence from all over the world. Even the 1930s was warmer in the 20th century in the USA than present climate. This is particularly significant as the USA has the best quality monitoring network of any country, making it’s climate history all the more credible as a guide to what has been happening globally. Other countries have less reliable data, and consequently may be exhibiting, not human-induced warming, but instrument-induced warming.

We now have satellites to measure global temperature for us more accurately than the surface network (most in poorer countries). It is significant that since 1979 when the satellites began, the surface warming amounts to +0.3″C while the same warming measured by the satellites is only +0.08″C, all of it in the northern hemisphere (the southern hemispheric has cooled very slightly). Only one reasonable explanation exists for this discrepancy – the surface record as compiled by the greenhouse industry is wrong. If it is wrong post-1979, then the same statistical processing must have made the pre-1976 wrong also. The fact that the high-quality U.S. surface record shows a quite different trend to the claimed global record further suggests that the claims of global warming during the 20th century cannot be believed.

2.Is man-made carbon dioxide causing a greenhouse effect on earth?

CO2 has always caused a greenhouse effect on earth. It’s contribution to the overall effect is quite small, most of the effect being a result of water vapour in the atmosphere. An increase of CO2 to double the pre-industrial level, expected in about 150 years, is theorised to add about +0.6″C warming to the atmosphere on its own. However, that is only the beginning – there are `feedbacks’, both positive (making things even warmer) and negative (dampening that warming). The earth could not have survived billions of years with positive feedback. This is because positive feedback is inherently unstable as it magnifies any small trend either way. The earth would have boiled over, or frozen into an ice ball, billions of years ago if there had been net positive feedback in the system. So we must have net negative feedback. This is supported by the fact that the earth has not warmed nearly as much as the models say it should have (most of that warming being solar anyway). With net negative feedback, the CO2×2 warming would be down to around +0.25″C, barely measurable.

The IPCC and the models deny this and predict net positive feedback, building on the initial +0.6″C warming to give a final warming up to 6″C. In effect, they have built a global warming mountain out of a CO2 molehill.

Is the sea level actually rising?

The IPCC claims it is, but this claim is based on yet another model, the ICE-3G model, which shows that sea level should have risen 10-25 cm during the 20th century. For the IPCC that seems to be enough. However, tide gauge evidence from outside the North Atlantic basin (which is badly affected by post-glacial rebound, causing some land to rise, some to subside) shows this claim to be incorrect. In Australia, fronting onto three oceans, a survey of long-term tide gauges shows a sea level rise of only +0.16 mm/yr compared with the IPCC claim of 1 to 2.5 mm/yr.

A small islet in southern Tasmania called the `Isle of the Dead’ (so named because it is a convict graveyard from the convict days of the mid-19th century), has a sea level mark on its north-facing cliff, put there in 1841 by Captain Sir James Clark Ross (the renowned Antarctic explorer). He said in his later book that the mark was struck at the `mean level of the sea’ (he said this several times). The mark is still there, but it is now 30 cm above mean sea level as it exists today. This apparent fall in sea level since 1841 cannot be explained by land uplift as that is estimated to be only a few cms during that time. The lead author of the IPCC 2001 Report chapter on sea levels is Dr John Church of the University of Tasmania. He is familiar with the Isle of the Dead, but there is no reference to this important sea level benchmark in that report, even though it bemoans the lack of data in the southern hemisphere, and the lack of data before the 20th century. Only my website reveals exactly what is significant about the Isle of the Dead. After years of research by the CSIRO and several universities, not a word has been published in the scientific literature about the benchmark.

A recent Swedish study in the Maldives shows no sea level rise there either.

If it is, are the consequences dire, as predictions have shown?

If sea level did rise, we are looking at an IPCC prediction of around 50 cm to 1 metre sea level rise in the next 100 years. This would require a sea level rise rate of +10 mm/yr. This compares with the Australian tide gauge survey of +0.16 mm/yr. The IPCC prediction is thus not credible. If it were to happen though, it would cause significant problems for low-lying countries like the Netherlands and Bangladesh. Coral atolls would also be in difficulty.

3.How do we deal with the economic consequences of reducing fossil fuel usage, if Kyoto protocol is implemented?

We would have to deal with a serious brake on economic development, rising unemployment, massively increased energy costs (energy being an economically price inelastic commodity). A better option would be to make technology work for us, not to arrest it. For example, removal of CO2 at the point of production in power stations would be a better option economically than simply reducing fossil fuel use. The billions of dollars now spent wastefully on climate research and modeling could by now have produced the very technology needed – if indeed we think we need it.

4.Are the Global Warming “dissenters” being funded by the oil and gas companies

The question of funding is a one-sided proposition. Does not the 4 billion dollar funding worldwide for climate research and modeling amount to a powerful bureaucratic self-interest? Twenty years ago, climatology was just a small-scale science, a minor offshoot of meteorology. Today, thanks to the intervention of politics, it attracts more money than any other science.

And yet, the dissenters to this bureaucratic juggernaut are held to account for their own meagre funding sources, while the `greenhouse industry’ escapes any accountability for the massive funding it receives.

That said, I can only speak for myself, not other dissenters. I finance my own website out of my own pocket. I have a regular full-time job unrelated to climate. Over the years, I have made some money through the sale of articles and reports, some of them to organisations which are themselves connected to fossil fuel companies such as the Greening Earth Society and `Norwegian Oil Review’. In these cases, I simply receive the normal fees that anyone authoring articles involving extensive research would earn. That amounts to simple `fee-for-service’, not funding. No-one funds my website except me. But the occasional fees I receive for articles and reports help me to continue my work. In no case have I ever tailored such articles and reports to suit the biases and prejudices of those who buy them.

The alternative of course would be for me to work long hours for free, something I don’t think the rest of the industry does, or would be expected to do. If Green Peace were to commission me to write a report for them, I would readily oblige – and expect payment – and without any tampering by them with what I have written, other than minor editing. That’s the basis on which I have written articles for others.

5.Is the Kyoto protocol effective in combating the global warming?

Completely ineffective. Tom Wigley of NCAR has even estimated that the climate would be a few hundredths of a degree cooler with the Kyoto Protocol compared with the `business as usual’ position. Mass poverty is a high price to pay for a mere few hundredths of a degree.

6.how true is the notion that increased global temperatures would if anything have a beneficial effect on agriculture and food production.

CO2 has a fertilizer effect. Since it provides the carbon mass for plants via photosynthesis, plants will grow better and faster with enhanced CO2. Numerous experiments confirm that. However, that is not due to warming per se, but the gas itself. However, Neville Nicholls of the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia published results in `Nature’ to show that warming in Australia during the 20th century resulted in enhanced wheat yield over an above that due to other factors such as better fertilizers and farming methods. If warming were significant, it would enable agriculture to spread into areas presently unusable, particularly in the far north.

7.There is a school of thought that solar variability is a major cause of Global warming as opposed to greenhouse gases. What is your opinion on that? Has it got any credibility?

There is now a large body of published scientific evidence to show that the sun is highly variable, not just with the 11-year sunspot cycle, but also with the length of that cycle and the effect of the solar wind indirectly modulating cloudiness. A further effect arises from the sun’s own motions (it is not stationary relative to the rest of the solar system, but moves around to balance the other planets as they orbit), and also the effects of solar flares. One scientist has even linked solar changes to the El Nino/La Nino oscillation, and has predicted that the next El Nino will peak late in 2002, a prediction based entirely on solar motions and activity.

It must also be remembered that the cycle of ice ages and interglacials (100,000 year ice ages, with 10,000 year interglacials) is itself caused by subtle changes in solar insolation as the earth’s orbit undergoes slow changes in its geometry. This has been known for over 60 years, ever since Milutin Milankovich first published his calculations. The Milankovich is the now established explanation for the glacial-interglacial cycle, an explanation which has been validated numerous times from observations of ice and sediment cores.

8. Please clarify my doubts. If the whole global warming theory is a hoax or an exaggeration, what is it in aim of? Who gains from concocting a story like that?

Social science tells us that bureaucracy has but one imperative – growth. Growth underpins careers, funding, promotion. Climatology has undergone explosive growth in the last 20 years, a growth which must inevitably corrupt the scientific ideals that should have been the cornerstone of their work. This shows itself most clearly in the difficulty that any scientist now has in gaining publication for any paper which contradicts or moderates IPCC predictions. Peer review, a process which should assure scientific quality, has now become an instrument of censorship in the climate sciences, and I have numerous reports of this. For example, the INQUA report on sea levels in the Maldives to show there has been no sea level rise there has so far not been published in peer reviewed journals. And yet, I can cite numerous cases of sub-standard papers which have been published without any difficulty at all – their only common denominator being their support or confirmation of IPCC policy.

Look also at the history of climatology. It has built its vast bureaucratic empire on the basis of frightening the general public. In the 1970s it was the predictions of an impending ice age which had the public in a state of anxiety, allowing politicians to increase funding for climatology. A sharp warming in the late 1970s ended that theory. By the 1980s the industry moved onto new pastures scaring people about a possible `nuclear winter’ – with yet more funding. The abrupt end of the Cold War in the late 1980s also ended that scare. But with hardly a missed step, the industry moved onto `global warming’ and has ridden that wave ever since – much to the benefit of the industry itself. It is hard to trust anything such an industry says given its past form. They blame the media of course, but I don’t. Whenever a new `study’ is published which reinforces the warming scenario, the scientists concerned are quickly appearing before media conferences to convey the news to an increasingly alarmed public. Such scare mongering thus comes from the scientific institutions themselves, the media being merely carriers of the bad news (have you even seen a good news story related to climate?).

9.I am made to believe by official purveyors of the global warming theory that ‘global warming dissenters’ are a minority. How far is this true?

No-one knows. I know of many scientists who are `dissenters’ – in private. They do not come out in public because of the adverse impact that would have on their careers. Much of the information I get on my website comes from just such people. How else would someone like me, isolated on an island at the bottom of the world, still be able to report on the unfolding drama of `climate change’ – or more accurately lack of change. Many of the scientists on the IPCC who are part of the `consensus’ are not climate scientists at all, but `impacts’ scientists. These are people such as biologists, social scientists, oceanographers etc. who *begin* with the assumption of the modellers that there will be global warming. From that assumption, they can then dream up a limitless variety of `impacts’ of that warming – all of them undesirable of course. But the dissenters are not interested in those impacts people. Rather the dissenters question the underlying assumption about the warming itself. Without that warming, the `impacts’ and the vast bureaucratic effort spawned by it, amount to nothing. The number of scientists on the IPCC who originate the warming theory and are qualified in climate sciences amounts not to thousands, but mere dozens.

It is significant that state climatologists in the USA have opposed the IPCC predictions, as have 18,000 signatories to the Oregon petition, most of whom are qualified scientists in climate or related fields. That petition was subject to `hacking’ attacks by environmentalists getting bogus names onto the list in a bid to discredit it. The organizers of that petition were in no position to fund an in-depth vetting of every single name (which would be an invasion of privacy among other things), so it took a `dirty tricks’ campaign to throw doubt on that petition. That such a campaign should be engaged in illustrates the degree to which the petition was seen as posing a danger to the claim that the debate was a done deal.

How much of academic/political backing and credibility does the ‘greenhouse dissenters’ have? Are your efforts considerably dampened by the major media institutions that endorse the idea of global warming?

Some of the dissenters are leading scientists in the field like Richard Lindzen. Others, like myself, take the more journalistic approach. The degree of expertise varies a lot, as does the particular specialties. The attitude of the media is not helpful as headlines like “The Climate is OK” does not exactly appeal to editors. The biggest problem is that the media regards all science with deference, uncritically accepting anything scientists say. We do not do this with any other profession -lawyers are the butt of jokes and frequent contempt, doctors are often regarded as self-serving, dentists and accountants are little better in the public perception. But when it comes to science, there is a disturbing lack of questioning or accountability.

With most sciences, this is no serious problem as the scientists themselves are more interested in their own work than in what the media thinks of them. But with greenhouse science, we have a quite different beast – a science which has built itself and prospered on public scare mongering, using both the media and the political clout of the environmental movement. But the media seems reluctant to stand back and ask themselves if greenhouse science deserves to be given the same degree of deference that they accord to other sciences. Only the dissenters are active in calling the greenhouse industry to account for their actions. Part of the problem is that it is very easy for unscrupulous institutions to use jargon and mathematics to throw up a smokescreen to avoid public accountability of their activities. This is why the dissenters are so necessary to cut through this smokescreen and hold the industry to some degree of account.

10. What is the IPCC controversy? Is it true that the original IPCC climate report was tampered with?

The IPCC is the `Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’, an offshoot of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). In other words, the IPCC is an intergovernmental organization under UN auspices, not a scientific organization. It uses the work of scientific institutions in its reports, but then proceeds to write `summaries’ which often run counter to, or exaggerate the scientific reports which underpin them. The latest summary is highly selective and biased in that it selects only those parts of the scientific report which suits their policy position. The scientific report itself is open to question as the participants are themselves beneficiaries of the odious history of climate science.

This was at its most extreme in the 1995 report when the scientific report was drafted by panels of scientists representing the various chapters. The final draft of the summary was agreed by the scientists concerned, only to find that the published version was significantly different to what the scientists agreed to. There has never been a satisfactory explanation as to why these changes were made without reference to the full scientific panels. The IPCC claims they were merely `editing’ changes to clarify the original version. However, I have published the changes made on my website, and these changes go far beyond mere editing.

To sum up, the composition of the scientific panels assures bias. But even here, the summaries are then further biased by the intervention of government officials inspired by environmental activism. And then, in the case of 1995, the bias was refined further between the completion of the summary and the published version.

The IPCC is therefore a political organization, plain and simple, and carries no authority with those of us who dissent against the whole basis of this industry.

Two scientists have completed a study showing how acidic clouds contribute to the killing of red spruce trees, one of the Northeast’s dominant forest species, according to the Institute.

While previous research pointed to the relationship between acid rain, acidic clouds and damage to the trees, the new study demonstrates exactly how that damage happens in the case of one species, said Jay Jacobson, BTI plant physiologist who conducted the project with James Lassoie of Cornell.

Clouds containing sulfuric acid and nitric acid–the two major pollutants in acid rain–often envelop high mountain forests like those of the Adirondacks.

Jacobson and Lassoie found that sulfuric acid-containing clouds hurt the red spruce’s foliage, killing the needles outright at high concentrations of the pollutant. Foliage damage weakens trees by interfering with photosynthesis, the process by which trees thrive.

Nitric acid in the clouds upsets the trees nutrient balance and causes chronic deficiencies, the team found. Jacobson predicts the work will be controversial. Many other natural factors – including drought, low soil nutrients, extreme weather, and inner atmospheric ozone – could also be contributing to the decline of forest trees.

The rapid death of forests is a critical Gaian life sign which is underreported by the press and underestimated by scientists.

In the mind of a detective investigating a death, most glaring is the omission from the report of the sources of acid air. We have a body and a bullet, but where is the gun? Who “fired” the weapon? The word “combustion” is never mentioned, nor “fossil fuels, fertilizer, industry, autos…” What good is the truth if it isn’t the whole truth? How long will media remain myopic?

The most crucial revelation is that photosynthesis of carbohydrates is disrupted by acid air attack. The trees are starving. Greenhouse effect/global warming watchers will realize this blocks CO2 removal at its fundamental bottleneck. Ozone/CFC watchers will wonder about the role of ozone in this photosynthetic paralysis.

It is logic to guess nitric acid is upsetting nitrate balances in the synthesis of amino acids. We now know half the sulphur in acid air rises from rotting algae blooms dying in waters over-enriched with sewage and nitrogen fertlizer runoff. An unknown amount of nitrogen in acid air is from farm fertilizers–after all, where does all that ammonia and ammonium go? Not all of it runs off into streams. A “smoking gun” lies invisible in fumes rising from chemical drenched soil in farm fields while media neglect to even mention industrial shotguns belching across the land.

What is desperately needed coverage of the whole story of the imminent death of our forests–not only its mechanisms and cause, but its cure. Such treatment requires a degree of wide angle focus, attention span and honest self reflection the news media ever supply. After all, all of industrial society is suspect in this who-done-it murder mystery.

“Evidence is increasing on the scientific table that change is occurring,” said Robert Corell, Assistant Director of Geological Science at the National Science Foundation (NSF), one of the agencies which participates in the program.

Other agencies besides NSF which will be working on the program include the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, State and Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Council on Environmental Quality.

Although climatologists are generally saying that the Earth’s atmosphere is warming as heat-trapping gases are released through the combustion of fossil fuels and other human activities, there is some uncertainty about the rate of change and about the impact of a host of secondary “feedback” effects such as a possible increase in cloud cover.

One purpose of the program will be to develop more information on following topics.

Climate and hydrologic systems: Studies of clouds, ocean circulation, and the interaction of the land, water and air.

Biogeochemical dynamics: The interaction of the biosphere, living things, water and atmosphere (e.g., the rate at which vegetation absorbs and releases carbon dioxide).

Ecological systems and dynamics: Possible reactions of people, plants and animals to warming temperatures and any feedback effects those reactions might create.

Earth system history: Studies of past climate changes.

Human interactions: The impact of population growth and development and how human activities such as energy and industrial production affect the Earth.

Solid Earth research: Studies of coastal erosion, volcanoes, ocean sedimentation, and their effects on climate.

Solar influences: Studies of the sun’s radiation and how it affects climate.

Global Warming Rising Sea

The real danger of global warming is not that there will be atypical freezes during some years. It’s that the polar and arctic areas are getting warming, which released more water, which affects global sea levels, which affects the amound of land which can sequester CO2 to ameliorate global warming. Once the cycle starts, the solution will be much more difficult.

The majority of the 1-2mm/year increase in sea level is attributable to thermal expansion, rather than inflow of melt water from glaciers.  This is somewhat uncertain since getting a good measure of global sea level is difficult and it takes several decades of data to spot a trend. Floating ice has only a very minor effect on sea level due to the solution of fresh water into salt on melting. Only landbound ice can affect sealevel in a significant way.

My greatest fear is that the rise in temperatures http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/news/ over the next 20-30 years will trigger a melting of the Greenland icesheet.

Studies have shown that the WAIS is much more stable than previously thought, but this points to the rise in sea level in the last interglacial being due to melting of Greenland instead. The continent is much closer to the equator than the WAIS and thus more affected by GW, as well as being in the area of greatest warming.

http://www.nature.com/nsu/000406/000406-9.html

It should be appreciated that much of the stability of the Greenland Ice Sheet is due to the height of the mass, which causes winds being force over it into adiabatic cooling and thus snow precipitation. If the height of the ice sheet is reduced by a few hundred meters by melting, the process will start a positive feedback as snowfall accumulation is reduced, which can lead to *relatively* rapid collapse. A decade? A hundred years? A millenia?

Regardless of the rate, the amount of the rise is staggering. Six to seven meters of rise over say 300 years would be .mean two meters rise in 2100, and a one meter rise by 2150, with estimates of 17 million displace from Bangladesh alone. It would eventually flood large areas of Florida and Louisiana. Maybe that will get the U.S. attention? Maybe the Pearl Harbor of GW to break their indifference.

We only know that it has previously collapsed due to natural temperature change and that GW is almost certain to eventually be enough to start the process. The only possible ’save’ would be a cooling of the NA due to a termination of the ThermoHaline Circulation, but that would lead to massive migration out of Europe. I don’t think there is a ‘win’ here!

Global Warming

It’s been something of a talking point in recent years amongst the polluters’ cartel spruikers that this was some sinister plot by proponents of the AGW-hypothesis to cover up flaws in the model. This was and is nonsense of course, because describing what is happeneing to the world’s climate as “climate change” is a good deal more accurate.

Nobody has suggested that AGW means everywhere will warm at the same rate or even all warm at the same time. It is allowed that there may well be periods of regional cooling, and of course, as is well known, what is warming is the lower troposphere even as the very same processes driving this warming are *cooling* the stratosphere. But enough about the science, because oddly, there was some cynical spinning going on in the choice to adopt the term climate change in preference to global warming. Contrary to the contrarians though, it wasn’t our isde that was doing it, but the naysayers.

Frank Luntz, Republican pollster and Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America” spinmeister laid it all out. Luntz worried about seriously in a memo during Bush’s first term that the Repugs were exposed because of their stand on the environment: Luntz claimed that “Voters believed that there was  no consensus about global warming within the scientific community … [and that] .. should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, he argued “you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate”

Carrying on in this vein he added: “It’s time for us to start talking about ‘climate change’ instead of global warming and ‘conservation’ instead of preservation.

1. ‘Climate change’ is less frightening than ‘global warming;’ As one focus group participant noted, climate change ’sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.’ While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge;”

and then added

“A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.”

Now doesn’t that sound like our naysaying trolls here?

He is also reputed to have said that the key to survey polling is “to ask a question in the way that you get the right answer”

http://www.ewg.org/files/LuntzResearch_environment.pdf

So there you have it. The next time someone from the polluters cartel points darkly to this, refer them to Frank Luntz and ask them why they think it’s like a drive to Fort Lauderdale.