Carbon Dioxide a "Pollutant"?

Governments often find it useful to have an enemy on whom it can blame a need to raise taxes and/or take away individual rights from its citizens. Real people such as WWII-era Japanese Prime Minister Tojo and personifications like Johnny Reb have proven useful targets as have ethnic and racial groups. The Jews have been a favorite target since biblical times. But never before has a gas — carbon dioxide — been public enemy number one.

For the last two decades, we have been bombarded with the claim that carbon dioxide, a minor greenhouse gas, is going to cause the planet to heat up, the polar ice to melt, the sea level to rise, tropical diseases to become rampant, and hurricanes to intensify and become more numerous. Virtually any problem, including record snowfalls, has been left on the doorstep of this supposedly evil gas.

More and more often the term "pollutant" is used in political circle to describe carbon dioxide as if it weren't produced by all living things — including plants. Supposedly, we must "limit" the production of this greenhouse gas in order to "save the planet"? But let's look at some data that seems to have been overlooked.

Water vapor is by far the greatest contributor to the greenhouse effect, accounting for about 95 percent of the total amount of greenhouse gases. (Does that make water vapor a far more dangerous "pollutant" than carbon dioxide that will need to be dealt with later?) Ignoring minor greenhouse gases that comprise less than 1 percent of the total, carbon dioxide makes up the remaining 5 percent. But how much of this carbon dioxide is anthropogenic — that is, caused by man's activities? About 3.2 percenet.

We are told again and again that burning coal, driving cars, breathing, and other carbon-dioxide- producing activities are going to bring us to some "tipping point" where the the total greenhouse-gas "pollution" becomes too great for the planet to survive. Yet, as already stated, only 3.2 percent of the 5 perceent contribution of carbon dioxide to the total amount of greenhouse gases is caused by man. That is less than 0.2 percent of the total amount of greenhouse gases. What this means is that even a doubling of the amount of manmade carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would result in an overall increase of only 0.4 percent in the total amount of greenhouse gases. Yet we are supposed to believe that a such a tiny increase is going to cause global warming leading to the death of civilization as we know it. (For an thorough analysis of greenhouse-gas contributions, click here.)

One would hope that all scientists would be interested in seeking the truth about this matter, but sadly that has not proven to be the case. In fact, a global-warming industry has developed that includes thousands of "researchers" and media followers who continually come up with more scary scenarios of species extinctions, sea-level inundations, etc. The political pressure and money fueling this industry is so great that it has become a joke in writing government grant requests that the term "global warming," or the more chic "climate change," must be included if the request is to have any possibility of success. Want to do a study on the mating habits of the Purple-footed Titmouse? Then entitle your proposed study "The mating habits of the Purple-footed Titmouse under conditions caused by global warming." And it better show that we are about to lose the critters if we keep driving SUVs!

What is the evidence given to show this relationship between a rise in carbon dioxide and the rise in global temperatures that began in the mid-1800s and continues sporadically until today? First, carbon dioxide has increased; and second, there has been a warming trend. Therefore, carbon dioxide has caused global warming. However, by this same logic you can prove that ice cream is a major cause of drowning deaths as there is a direct correlation between the two. (Hint: More people both swim and eat ice cream during summer months when the temperature goes up.)

A closer look at the evidence shows this to be bunk. The primary period of temperature rise in the 20th century was between 1900 and 1940 while the rapid rise in carbon dioxide didn't begin until the '40s. As carbon dioxide continued to rise in the '70s, the temperature decreased, causing many scientists to worry about the beginning of a new ice age. Similarly, over the last 10 years there has been no warming trend, and in the last two years a cooling trend is evidenced by satellite temperature data.

Historically there is a relationship between carbon dioxide and global temperatures, but not the one Al Gore and company would want you to see: temperature rises precede increases in carbon dioxide due to a phenomenon seen by everyone who has opened a bottle of warm club soda. Warm water cannot absorb as much carbon dioxide as cold water. As the climate warms, so does the sea, although there is a lag time of hundreds of years owing to the sea's enormous thermal mass. The warming sea releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from 800 to 2,800 years after the climate warming.

The suggested cure for AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is to cut our use of fossil fuels back to levels of 1990. That this will totally disrupt not just our industrial capacity but our personal activities is a given. And what do the global-warming alarmist say we will get in return? Perhaps a decrease in the temperature rise they are forecasting by as much as one-tenth of one degree Celsius by the year 2100. Whoop-de-do. What's going on here?

Carbon dioxide is neither a pollutant nor is it causing global warming. In fact, the increase in carbon dioxide is known to have driven the rise in agricultural efficiency worldwide and accelerate the growth of forests. The carbon dioxide "enemy" is a convenient lie to give control of energy to governments at all levels, including a world government. With control of energy comes control of the entire economy and control of our personal activities. What more could a dictatorship want.

source

Inquisition-Dr. Roy Spencer

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Dr Roy Spencer PhD. Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center


Some heretical writing by this Skeptic
The Sloppy Science of Global Warming

Satellite and Model Evidence Against Substantial Manmade Climate Change

Global Warming as a Natural Response to Cloud Changes Associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

Cloud and Radiation Budget Changes Associated with Tropical Intraseasonal Oscillations
**************Point to Ponder**************

It is interesting to note that, even though carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth to exist, there is precious little of it in Earth’s atmosphere. As of 2008, only 39 out of every 100,000 molecules of air were CO2, and it will take mankind’s CO2 emissions 5 more years to increase that number by 1, to 40.

Dr. Roy Spencer

Inquisition-Dr. Richard Lindzen

*****************Point to Ponder***************************
"How can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into claims about future catastrophes? The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism."
-Richard S. Lindzen



Richard S. Lindzen ' Ph.D.- MIT Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

Some heretical writing by this Skeptic

Discussion on Global Warming by Prof Richard S. Lindzen

Is There a Basis for Global Warming Alarm?

Climate of Fear
Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.

THE FLUID ENVELOPE: A CASE AGAINST CLIMATE ALARMISM

Near the Peak

Imagine you are in an airplane flying over a mountain range. You look out your window and see a lone figure slightly below the mountain's peak looking towards the top. "Ah" you think "the man is headed towards the summit." However as you continue to observe, you notice that there are tracks in the snow leading down from the peak.

Your entire frame of reference is changed and your first assumption was wrong. The mountain climber is not ascending he is descending and is looking back at where he has been rather than where he is going. Just because someone or something is near the peak does not necessarily mean that the only way to go is up, it could also mean it is on its way down.

On October 19, 2007 the Dow Jones Average was at 13522 slightly below its historic height of 14093 set on October 12th. In the next couple of weeks it went a bit higher than on the nineteenth, but the general trend was down and of course we know that despite ups and downs, a year later the Dow would drop nearly 5000 points from its historic high of October 12 2007. For the most part back in October 2007 investors and experts were giddy at the dazzling heights of the stock markets and despite the warnings of some skeptics, most felt there was nowhere to go but up. They were convinced that the peak had not yet been reached.

Much is being written and opined about the year 2008 and the probable final global temperature when it is calculated. Depending on whom you believe it will be between the ninth and fifteenth warmest year on record. This sounds impressive and it is an obvious attempt to make it sound frightening, but which way are they looking at the peak? The fact is that they are looking back up the mountain to where we have been from where we are now.The fact is we are looking a full decade into the past to find the peak.

Much can be made of Global Warming and they do, but reality is that no matter who you believe if you believe anyone at all and there are justifiable reasons not to, the warmest year on record was 1998 it has been down hill ever since. Despite some ups and downs, based on the truth of observations we have reached our peak and begun a descent, the tracks lead down the mountain and no amount of spin can change that reality.



This Graph was done by Dr. John Christy. Dr. John R. Christy is the Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville where he began studying global climate issues in 1987. Since November 2000 he has been Alabama's State Climatologist. In 1989 Dr. Roy W. Spencer (then a NASA/Marshall scientist and now a Principle Research Scientist at UAH) and Christy developed a global temperature data set from microwave data observed from satellites beginning in 1979. For this achievement, the Spencer-Christy team was awarded NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1991. In 1996, they were selected to receive a Special Award by the American Meteorological Society "for developing a global, precise record of earth's temperature from operational polar-orbiting satellites, fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate." In January 2002 Christy was inducted as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.

Both Dr. Christy and Dr. Spencer are notorious skeptics.

The Chart (above) is simply this chart (below) which comes directly from The IPCC AR 4 report with the actual UAH (satellite) and HadCrut (land-ocean) temps over laid. The fuzzy areas in the original below are error margins for each scenario. The bottom most line (yellow above) is what was projected to happen if we maintained CO2 concentrations at their level of 2000, obviously they have risen since then.




















Figure 1. Projected increases in 21st century global average temperature assuming different CO2 emissions futures (described below). These projections are from the 4AR Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), and appear in Figure SPM-5 of the Working Group I “Summary for Policymakers”.11 The zero level was set to the average temperature between 1980–1999, which is why most of the 20th century shows negative values.


Obviously temperatures have not followed the program.