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Glacial melting is not caused by global warming

By: Kelvin Kemm

One of the major achievements of mankind, over many centuries, has been the development of logical thinking processes. Science now has a well-established process of thinking patterns by which scientists work.

Some pieces of evidence that appear in scientific investigation may seem to be confusing. This is why the rules of logic have to be followed to ensure that there are no false conclusions.

It really amazes me – and also does not surprise me – when, in climate change discussions, completely illogical conclusions take hold in the public mind. It is amazing that basic logic escapes the public or is twisted without anyone seeming to care. On the other hand, it does not surprise me because there are elements in society which want false conclusions to be fed to the public so that they will toe the line of the propagators.

Let me now ponder the issue of claims of melting glaciers and melting ice, in general, that is blamed on global warming.

First, let us establish a fact that even the extreme green lobby does not dispute: total global warming over the last century has been less than 1 ºC; remember that figure – less than 1 ºC.

The properties of water and ice are well known. Ice melts at 1 ºC. Let us get that clear – to melt ice, the temperature has to go up past 0 ºC to at least ‘plus something’.

So, if the temperature of the air around a glacier is, say, –10 ºC or –20 ºC, then a rise in temperature to 1 ºC will bring the temperature up to –9 ºC or –19 ºC. That is far too low for melting to occur.

The number of people I come across who simply think that if air warms a little it will lead to glaciers melting is totally amazing.
So, let us imagine, on a given day, that the air temperature over a glacier does pass 0 ºC and goes up to, say, 2 ºC. Then we are above the melting point and melt- ing can start. But what happens when night arrives? Usually, the difference between day and night temperature is significant, and so at night it will drop below freezing and the water will freeze to ice again. A temperature of 2 ºC is not going to result in some glacier coming apart.

Let me now bring in a very major factor. To increase the temperature of a cubic centimetre of water by 1 ºC requires one calorie of heat. So, putting 80 calories of heat into a cubic centimetre of water at a room temperature of 20 ºC will cause it to boil – it will reach 100 ºC.

Now for a major piece of important science. For one cubic centimetre of ice at 0 ºC to melt into a cubic centimetre of water, still at 0 ºC, an amount of heat of 80 calories is required. That 80 calories is required to get the molecules in the solid to ‘let go of one another’ so that they can flow and become liquid.

So, if air temperature above a glacier is, say, 2 ºC, then a huge amount of heat must be extracted from the air to melt ice, even if the ice temperature is right near 0 ºC. There will just not be enough heat, and any melted water will refreeze at night.

But some glaciers are undoubtedly receding. Indian researcher RK Chaujer produced a paper in 2009 titled ‘Climate change and its impact on the Himalayan glaciers – a case study on the Chorabari glacier, Garhwal Himalaya, India: Based on the dating of lichens developed on loops of moraines formed due to various stages of advance and retreat of the glacier’. The paper was published in Current Science.

Chaujer found that “research on various glaciers of the northern and southern hemis- pheres has shown that most of them started their retreat in the mideighteenth century, thereby indicating the end of the Little Ice Age Maximum, which suggests the possibility of a common trend in mountain areas of both hemispheres and the Himalayas”, indicative of a global phenomenon.

The Indian researcher concluded: “These results suggest that climatic changes in the world started during the early to the mideighteenth century.” This is long before the historical increase in the air’s carbon dioxide (CO2) content could have been involved in the process of their retreat. Hence, it must be concluded that there is no compelling reason to believe that late-twentieth- century global warming has anything to do with glacial retreat.

So what is happening? We know that, when summer comes around, in glacial areas, glaciers retreat – they have always retreated. The primary mechanism seems to be the sun. The intense sunlight falling on the surface of the ice melts a fine surface layer. This water then runs down fissures, and eventually goes to the bottom of the glacier. There, the water lubricates the interface between the ice and the rock floor. The ice then slides more easily. Sunlight has a major impact and air temperature essentially nothing. When one watches videos of glaciers calving, one sees huge blocks as big as a house fracture off and fall into the ocean. This is not the ice melting – it is ice breaking off under the influence of gravity because it has been pushed out with diminishing structural support so that large blocks break off.

Over the weekend I prepared two blocks of ice in my fridge, with identical flat sur- faces of about 20 cm2 each. I took a plank of wood and put it on the lawn by my swimming pool. I inclined the wood at about 30º. The wood was 40 cm wide. I put the two ice blocks at the top of the incline. I then placed a table in a position so that it cast a shadow over only one ice block. I sat with a stopwatch and waited. After a quarter of an hour, the ice block in the sun suddenly slid down the plank to the bottom. The one in the shade had not moved at all half an hour later.

In fact, the one in the shade had not moved at all another half hour later. I repeated the experiment a few times, with the same results. The air temperature here in South Africa on the day was 24 ºC – way above that of a glacial region. Remember that both blocks were in the same air temperature all the time.

So, Chaujer is correct: CO2 is not leading to melting glaciers – it has to be something else. I imagine it is sunlight. The more sunlight that falls on a glacier, the more it will move, owing to water lubrication. So, glacier movement is much more likely to be linked to the amount of cloud cover over a period than to any global warming.

Svensmark, of Denmark, proposes that cloud cover is linked to the sun’s magnetic influence over cosmic rays, which, in turn, influence total cloud cover. We need to think of melting ice in that context.

Edited by: Martin Zhuwakinyu

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Adventures in the Climate Trade

By Norman Rogers

Global warming, now called climate change, is a big industry with academic and commercial branches.  One way or another the government provides the money to keep it in business.  The academic side supports thousands of scientific workers churning out some good science larded with lots of junk science.  The commercial side is busy turning out tank cars filled with corn ethanol and covering the landscape with windmills.  Nobody would be doing any of this without government subsidies and mandates.   A recent example of how the geniuses in Washington direct policy is the loaning of hundreds of millions to electric car companies like Tesla.  Tesla is the stock that everyone is going to be trying to short when they aren't trying to short First Solar.

Some of this government support is direct, such as the 1.8 cents per kilowatt hour subsidy for windmill electricity.  But much is mandated by regulations that result in increased consumer prices -- a hidden tax.  For example utilities may be required to generate a certain percentage of their electricity from green sources such as windmills.  Since the electricity from these sources is expensive, prices to the consumer must be raised. 

Why the government even bothers trying to reduce CO2 emissions is a mystery.  Rising CO2 emissions from China and the rest of Asia make any efforts to reduce CO2 emissions in the U.S.  irrelevant.  The numbers and trends are very obvious on this point.  China currently generates 1/4 as much electricity per capita as the U.S.  and China has 4 times the population.  This suggests that China could eventually increase its electricity generation by a factor of 16 to match the per capita electricity usage enjoyed in the U.S.  In the single year 2010 electricity production grew 15% in China, a pace that would double production in 5 years. Electricity in China comes mainly from coal, the indigenous fuel available in large quantities and the most CO2 emitting fuel.  China is also consuming ever increasing quantities of oil to support its growing automobile population.  Even at its current early stage of economic development China passed the U.S.  in the generation of CO2 5 years ago.  Some apologists for Chinese CO2 policy claim that China is leading in windmills and solar panels while neglecting to point out that these are export industries, selling hardware or emissions credits to Europeans who are even bigger believers in the  climate change religion than we are.  Those Chinese industries are currently suffering because the Europeans are running out of mad money.

How big is the climate change industry and how large could it become?  Probably the research side is in the single digit billions.  The mitigation, or CO2 reduction, side is where the big bucks are.  To get an idea consider that the cost of electricity amounts to about $3 a day for each person in the U.S. or around  $300 billion per year.  Double the cost of electricity, something that is seen as good start by the preachers of climate change, and you have another $300 billion per year.  That's half of the cost of Medicare in 2008.   Some people in California are already paying 5 times^[i] as much as people in areas less affected by the green virus.  The beauty of green electricity mandates is that it results in a gradual creep upwards in the cost of electricity and it's not easy to know who to blame.  Of course the climate change industry reaps the benefits as surely as if the government wrote them a check.   Perhaps writing a check should be considered, because it would be a big savings if the government just bribed these people to stop building windmills.

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Historic amnesia

by Gerrit J. van der Lingen

For their propaganda, global warming alarmists rely heavily on historic amnesia. This can be well illustrated by examples from Australia.

A large part of Australia has harsh climatic conditions. About 80% of Australia, mostly in the centre of the continent, has an arid to semi-arid climate. Other parts repeatedly suffer from severe droughts or floods.Tropical cyclones regularly strike the northern and northeastern coasts. Most of these weather phenomena are caused by naturally-occurring ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) climatic events.

Indigenous plants and animals have adapted to these severe conditions. The ability of Australian plants to handle fires is quite unique. Eucalypts, the largest tree family in Australia with more than 900 species, have adapted to all climate conditions, from hot arid regions to cold snowfields. They contain inflammable oils that make them susceptible to fires, and many species rely on fire for their seeds to germinate. Another adaptive example is the Paperbark (Melaleuca rhaphiophylla), which has little dormant buds under thick bark. These buds can only sprout when subjected to heat by fire. The bark protects the buds against fire and also provides starch to feed the sprouting buds until they have developed enough green leaves to start photosynthesising. Such trees are therefore called “sprouters”. Paperbarks are also deep-rooted (up to 15 metres) to reach groundwater below scorched surface soil.

Marsupials were the first mammals to develop in Gondwana, of which Australia formed a part. Australia started to drift away from the supercontinent about 55 million years ago, before the placental mammals started to evolve. Marsupials have a slower lifestyle and require less food and water than other mammals. But they have also developed other survival strategies. For instance, during extreme dry conditions, kangaroos can keep embryos in suspended animation until rain arrives. The Thorny Devil lizard (Moloch horridus) collects dew during the night on large spines, which then flows between its scales to its mouth.

These adaptations to harsh climatic conditions, especially heat and drought, must have taken millions of years to evolve. This inescapably means that severe climatic events have been a common natural occurrence in Australia in the past, as they are today. However, this doesn’t seem to deter climate alarmists from blaming every severe drought or flood on human CO2 emissions. Good examples include the 2010 bushfires in Victoria, the recent catastrophic floods in Queensland and the destructive cyclone Yasi.

read entire article here

The Cancun Climate Capers

FROM-American Thinker


By S. Fred Singer


Today, Nov. 29, marks the beginning of the Cancun COP (Conference of the Parties [to the Kyoto Protocol]). This is the 16th meeting of the nearly 200 national delegations, which have been convening annually since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 at COP-3.


This conference promises to be another two-week extravaganza for some 20,000 delegates and hangers-on, who will be enjoying the sand, surf, and tequila-sours -- mostly paid for by taxpayers from the US and Western Europe. For most delegates, this annual vacation has become a lifetime career: it pays for mortgages and their children's education. I suppose a few of them actually believe that they are saving the earth -- even though the Kyoto Protocol [to limit emission of greenhouse (GH) gases, like CO2, but never submitted for ratification to the US Senate] will be defunct in 2012 and there is -- thankfully -- no sign of any successor treaty.

But never fear: the organizers may ‘pull a rabbit out of a hat' and spring a surprise on the world. They will likely announce that they have conquered the greenhouse gas hydrofluorocarbon (HFC). Now, HFCs are what replaced HCFCs, which in turn replaced CFCs, thanks to the Montreal Protocol of 1987. This succession of chemical refrigerants has reduced ozone-destroying potential; but unfortunately they are all GH gases. So now HFCs must be eradicated, because a single molecule of HFC produces many thousand times the greenhouse effect of a molecule of CO2. What they don't tell you, of course, is that the total forcing from the HFCs is less than one percent of that of CO2, according to the IPCC [see page 141]. So ‘slaying the dragon' amounts to slaying a mouse -- or something even smaller. But you can bet that it will be trumpeted as a tremendous achievement and will likely invigorate the search for other mice that can be slain.

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UN IPCC: Rotting from the Head down

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is stinking like a dead fish, rotting from the head down. In what has been dubbed ‘Glaciergate’, the IPCC has been exposed as conspiring to present a tissue of lies about the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, claiming that they would disappear by 2035 or sooner. There was never any scientific basis whatsoever for such claims, and the ’source’ quoted was WWF, an avowed advocacy group. Both the IPCC and WWF have recently admitted that the claims were false, long after these claims have become embedded in countless papers, books and presentations and caused alarmism about the fate of hundreds of millions of people who rely on the rivers that run from the Himalayas. But the damage this has done goes very deep: not only were the claims in the IPCC Fourth Assessment report (AR4) based on lies, but the lies have for years been peddled by the head of the IPCC himself, who sought to belittle those who drew attention to the problem.

This post deals briefly with the extraordinarily arrogant, unprofessional and dishonest nature of Rajendra K Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, but goes on to show in detail that the UN and the scientific community were well aware as far back as 2004, and from an article in the peer-reviewed literature in 2005, that the claim of the imminent disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers was a lie propagated by advocacy groups and vested interests, and yet they deliberately incorporated the lie into the AR4 report in 2007. We show how the falsehood was embroidered stage by stage by advocacy groups, politicians and bent ‘scientists’ to appear as one of the most outrageous scientific claims in modern times.


The passage in question reads as follows in AR4:

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).

We will show that such claims as these were known to be arrant nonsense as far back in 2004. But first we fast forward to the end of 2009 when the Indian Government Ministry for Environment and Forests (MoEF) put out a discussion paper written by V.K. Raina, former Deputy Director General of the Geological Survey of India, looking at 150 years’ worth of data gathered from the Geological Survey from 25 glaciers. Entitled Himalayan Glaciers: A State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change, the report described the claims made by the IPCC as “imaginative”, and gave a comprehensive picture of what was actually occurring with the Himalayan glaciers.

R.K. Pachauri blasted the report, saying it was “extremely arrogant”, “schoolboy science”, “totally unsubstantiated” and “Voodoo science”. Such outbursts betray the desperate notes of someone who has something to hide – an agenda that is starting to unravel. As it now turns out, all these epithets look much more appropriate for the IPCC AR4 report, except for the “schoolboy science” remark, since even a schoolboy wouldn’t make as many foolish errors as the IPCC report has.

Of course, this was all very inconvenient for the IPCC, coming as it was shortly before the Copenhagen summit, and, as we shall see, when Pachauri was trying to secure huge amounts of cash for TERI, his research institute, based on these false claims. Other academics started to weigh in, saying that the IPCC report was grossly erroneous on the Himalayan glaciers, and brought this to the attention of Pachauri. For example, even the BBC correspondent, Pallava Bagla in Delhi, reported on December 5, 2009 before the summit:

The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says…When asked how this “error” could have happened, RK Pachauri, the Indian scientist who heads the IPCC, said: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

In other words, no comment. Eventually, the IPCC had to back down and admit that the claims were lies, but not before Pachauri had added his own dissembling (exposed as a lie in the quote above) about when he first heard of the problem. The London Times reported on January 23:

Dr Pachauri also said he did not learn about the mistakes until they were reported in the media about 10 days ago, at which time he contacted other IPCC members. He denied keeping quiet about the errors to avoid disrupting the UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen, or discouraging funding for TERI’s own glacier programme.

We will see later that he must have known about it long before Copenhagen, and the previous day he had adopted the grossly unscientific and very silly position reported in the Hindu, New Delhi, January 22, 2010

Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on Friday said the chances of the U.N. panel having made more errors in its benchmark 2007 report were “minimal if not non-existent”, while again admitting the “regrettable error” that has raised questions about its credibility.

Several other egregious ‘errors’ were then pointed out, and the following day it was reported in the London Times

The Indian head of the UN climate change panel defended his position yesterday even as further errors were identified in the panel’s assessment of Himalayan glaciers. Dr Rajendra Pachauri dismissed calls for him to resign over the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change’s retraction of a prediction that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. But he admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report, and said that he was considering whether to take action against those responsible.

The deception about the glacial melt was very useful in securing US$500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation and the lion’s share of around US$4million of EU funds into Dr Pachauri’s Energy Research Institute (TERI), to which he had appointed Syed Hasnain a Distinguished Fellow, whom we will see below was the one cited as the source of the nonsense about the imminent disappearance of the glaciers, and who (by his own subsequent admission) knew that what was in the AR4 report was fraudulent. From TERI’s own press release of January 15, where they acknowledge getting their hands on the cash, even though by then the scientific community knew the claims were untrue, and Pachauri and Hasnain had known long before, we read (emphasis added)

…changes in weather patterns and the climate are bound to cause profound changes in the Himalaya. Of particular consequence will be changes of the glaciers. According to predictions of scientific merit they may indeed melt away in several decades. This, in turn, will have implications for the entire water system of the sub-continent, with immediate effect on soil, water management, and the possibilities of food production…Present on the occasion was… Dr R K Pachauri, Director-General TERI…and the TERI Glaciology team, headed by Prof Syed Iqbal Hasnain…Elaborating on the collaboration, Dr R K Pachauri, said, “…Scientific data assimilated by IPCC is very robust and it is universally acknowledged that glaciers are melting because of climate change.”

Predictions of scientific merit…very robust…universally acknowledged, my foot. Pachauri knew enough then to know that those statements were untrue. Let us see how the web of lies in IPCC AR4 was spun. I will emphasize certain text in italics.

The UNESCO report of the International Hydrological Programme of 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the past and at present on a Global and Regional Scale, was the source of some of the numbers, perhaps correctly stated, but as we shall see, misquoted and manipulated for nefarious ends. In this report, the paper by V. M. Kotlyakov, The Future of Glaciers under the Expected Climate Warming, stated

With the further progress of warming or stabilization of the present climate…The degradation of the extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be apparent in rising ocean level already by the year 2050, and there will be a drastic rise of the ocean thereafter caused by the deglaciation-derived runoff (see Table 11 ). This period will last from 200 to 300 years. The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates—its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2350. Glaciers will survive only in the mountains of inner Alaska, on some Arctic archipelagos, within Patagonian ice sheets, in the Karakoram Mountains, in the Himalayas, in some regions of Tibet and on the highest mountain peaks in the temperature [temperate?] latitudes.

Note that 500, 000 km² is the total area of ALL extrapolar glaciers throughout the world. With unabated global warming, shrinkage to 100,000 km² takes place by 2350 (not 2035), and even then glaciers will survive in the Himalayas.

By 2005, this had been grossly manipulated by WWF to read something completely different in its report An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China:

In 1999, a report by the Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology (WGHG) of the International Commission for Snow and Ice (ICSI) stated: “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the livelihood [sic] of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high”.

Further embellishment and alarmism beyond even the ridiculous WWF remarks leads to the absurd statements in the UN IPCC report:

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its [sic] total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).

It is here that Syed Hasnain, the Indian scientist comes into the picture. He is said to have suggested that the Himalayan glaciers could be gone within 40 years – quoted by Fred Pearce of New Scientist in 1999. Even WWF picked up on that:

The prediction that “glaciers in the region will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming” and that the flow of Himalayan rivers will “eventually diminish, resulting in widespread water shortages” (New Scientist 1999; 1999, 2003) is equally disturbing.

It appears that Syed Hasnain had also said something in 2003 to the effect of the Himalayan glaciers vanishing within 40 years, and affirming that they would be gone by 2035, though this claim is never found in any published work by Hasnain. As reported in the peer-reviewed Himalayan Journal of Sciences in 2005:

The Times of London (21 July 2003), reporting on an international meeting held at the University of Birmingham, noted that ‘Himalayan glaciers could vanish within 40 years because of global warming . . . 500 million people in countries like India could also be at increased risk of drought and starvation.’ Syed Hasnain is quoted as affirming that ‘the glaciers of the region [Central Indian Himalaya] could be gone by 2035’.

However, most interestingly, the above quote comes from a withering attack and exposure by Professor Jack D. Ives of the false claims being made by Hasnain about the Himalayan glaciers. Jack Ives is a foremost expert on mountains, especially the Himalayas. As Professor Emeritus, Environmental Science, University of California and Davis Honorary Research Professor, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ives is no obscure scientist, but a towering figure in the field. No-one researching Himalayan mountains could fail to know of Jack Ives, his extensive research, and exceptional achievements. Here are a few details to fill in the picture.

Ives has over 180 publications, scientific papers, and books to his credit, and was Founder and Editor (1968-1980) of Arctic and Alpine Research journal, and Founder and Editor (1980-2000) of Mountain Research and Development journal. Very many photos of the Himalayas in the literature trace their origin to Jack Ives.

Jack Ives’ earliest interests involved glaciology and the physical aspects of mountains and the Arctic. In 1973, UNESCO invited him under the Man and the Biosphere programme to work with an international team of academics. In 1978, he was appointed coordinator of United Nations University’s mountain research project.

In 2002, Ives was awarded the King Albert I Memorial Foundation Award, an award “to honor persons or institutions that have distinguished themselves through exceptional and lasting achievements in the Mountain World.” In 2006, he was awarded the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his mountain and arctic research, extensive publishing, teaching, and especially “for his role internationally in establishing the global importance of mountain regions.”

Ives worked with several international organizations, including the United Nations University (UNU), UNESCO, and the International Geographical Union. His 30-year work with UNU was regarded as of particular importance as it played a critical role in the designation of 2002 as The International Year of Mountains by the United Nations Organization. As Mountain Research and Development noted:

Jack Ives’ numerous scholarly papers and books, in particular his founding editorship of the journal Mountain Research and Development (1981–2000) reveal his impressive expertise and tireless efforts to enhance the knowledge and vision of students, scientists, and political leaders. The book Mountains of the World: A Global Priority, edited by Bruno Messerli and Jack Ives and intended for the eyes of the UN General Assembly, met with world-wide approval. Jack Ives notes that his award is virtually identical to that received by Bruno Messerli—a reflection of their 25-year collaboration as codirectors of the United Nations University’s Mountain Programme, and of their contribution to the initiation of Mountain Agenda and Chapter 13 of Agenda 21 at the Rio Earth Summit.

On the occasion of the International Year of Mountains (2002), Ives was the UN’s chief spokesperson. Then in 2004, Ives authored a seminal work entitled Himalayan perceptions: environmental change and the well-being of mountain peoples, which inter alia exposed the myths being propounded about the Himalayan glaciers. In the preface to the second edition (2006) Ives himself wrote:

…During the last five years the news media have begun to propagate this catastrophic scenario, aided by the United Nations Environment Programme and several other vested interests…even this narrative is already being superseded with the posited threat that, after all the glaciers have melted and the floods have done their worst, the Ganges will be reduced to a trickle and hundreds of millions will die of thirst

The section in both editions entitled Some current myths on a Himalayan scale is largely reproduced in the paper published in the peer-reviewed Himalayan Journal of Sciences 2005, and because of its relevance will be quoted at length below.

The title of the paper is Himalayan misconceptions and distortions: What are the facts? Himalayan Delusions: Who’s kidding who and why — Science at the service of media, politics and the development agencies.

This whole paper is well worth a read. It is a devastating exposure.

Some current myths on a Himalayan scale

…the following examples are offered because the degree of misinformation appears to be both extensive, widespread, and continuing…Reporting on global warming, the world economy, international terrorism, or almost any disaster has become comparable to the campaign speeches politicians tend to make at election time. It has also been understood for several decades now that ‘green’ movements have felt compelled to exaggerate in order to compete for attention with the possible bias of well-financed campaigns of big business and industry. Regardless, the examples of ‘latter-day myths’ are set forth because their pervasiveness tends to clutter the sustainable development landscape and perpetuate the Himalayan scale of uncertainty…

…The Times of London (21 July 2003), reporting on an international meeting held at the University of Birmingham, noted that ‘Himalayan glaciers could vanish within 40 years because of global warming . . . 500 million people in countries like India could also be at increased risk of drought and starvation.’ Syed Hasnain is quoted as affirming that ‘the glaciers of the region [Central Indian Himalaya] could be gone by 2035’.

According to Barry (1992: 45) the average temperature decrease with height (environmental lapse rate) is about 6ºC/km in the free atmosphere. The dry adiabatic lapse rate (DALR) is 9.8ºC/km. If it is assumed that the equilibrium line altitude (comparable with the ‘snow line’) in the Central Himalaya is about 5,000 masl and it will need to rise above 7,000 m if all the glaciers are to be eliminated, then the mean temperature increase needed to effect this change would be about 12–18ºC. Given that degree of global warming, summers in Calcutta would be a little uncomfortable.

As indicated earlier, myths tend to be self-perpetuating. In practice their longevity is often encouraged by vested interests of one form or another.

This, by one of the most well-known experts in the field, is a direct attack on the lies being propagated, and the prostitution and corruption of science in “the service of media, politics and the development agencies”. It is simply not possible after 2004 to suggest that the UN and those studying the Himalayas were unaware of the exposure of the myth and scam by such a prominent person as Jack Ives. Moreover, WWF were fully cognizant of Ives and his works – after all, in 2005 they quoted from four of his works in their paper: Ives, J. and Barry, R.(eds.), Arctic and Alpine Environments; Ives, J. D. (1986). Glacial lake outburst floods and risk engineering in the Himalaya; Ives, J. D., and Messerli, B. (1989). “The Himalayan Dilemma” and Messerli, B. and Ives, J.D. (Eds.), (1997). Mountains of the World – A Global Priority. A contribution to Chapter 13 of Agenda 21.

Additionally, the foreword to his book was written by none other than Prof. Dr. Hans J.A. van Ginkel, Rector of the United Nations University, a UN agency and think tank for the UN:

In writing this book, Jack Ives has…succeeded in laying to rest, once and for all, the regrettable misrepresentations that have been made about the Himalayan environmental situation…This volume is of immense value in bringing light to a long-standing area of misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Its findings will contribute to a rethinking of the policies and approaches of decision-makers and government agencies concerned with the Himalayan region…

Well, that was 2004. It was to be expected, of course, that exposure of the lies and myths would scotch them, except perhaps among advocacy groups. In spite of Ives’ superb work, he and the United Nations University could not have expected that any respectable scientific body would deliberately perpetuate and embellish the myths he had slain and foist them onto an unsuspecting, and generally trusting public. In embodying these lies, the IPCC has behaved in a disgracefully cynical and evil manner with a public who could reasonably expect better.

But of course, Ives pointed out how the longevity of myths “is often encouraged by vested interests”, and that brings us right back to Rajendra Pachauri. It was none other than R.K. Pachauri who continued to spread the lies after their exposure by Ives, as reported in Hindustan Times (New Delhi), 22 July 2006

R.K. Pachauri, who heads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: “In the next 25 years half of Himalayan glaciers will be lost to warming, affecting adversely crops and people of the region.”

So there you have it. This dead fish rotting from the head ensured that the lie was propagated and cemented into AR4 in 2007, years after it had been exposed in the relevant peer-reviewed literature as a lie.

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This Episode brought to you by WORLD CLIMATE REPORT

Lessons of the Ice

We have all heard over and over that the icecaps are melting, glaciers are retreating, and sea level is rising as ice around the world turns to liquid water. We have covered this topic many times in our essay series, but we revisit the ice issue given two recent and important publications in the science literature.


The first article of interest is in the prestigious Journal of Climate written by two atmospheric and earth scientists from Canada. The title of the article is “A five-year record of summer melt on Eurasian Arctic ice caps”, and we never thought we would have much interest in the piece given its five-year time frame. We were wrong.

Sharp and Wang were concerned with summer melt for the Arctic sub-regions shown in the map below, and they used satellite-based “scatterometer” data to assess the rates of melt in the study area. It is a complicated story, but basically, when liquid water is present in near-surface layers of snow and firn (compact snow), there is a sharp reduction in microwave backscatter received by the satellite. More basic, but similar, measurement techniques have been used since 1973 to estimate melt activity from satellites, and the methods appear to work with reasonable accuracy. For most of the Sharp and Wang article, maps and tables are presented for their five-year 2000-2004 study period, and the results are impressive.

Figure 1. Map of the Arctic showing the locations of Svalbard (A), Novaya Zemlya (B), Severnaya Zemlya (C), the Queen Elizabeth Islands (D), and Greenland (E) relative to the major Arctic Ocean current systems (from Sharp and Wang, 2009).

A section in the article entitled “Longer-term context” is where the action is for us! Sharp and Wang determined the relationship between 850 mb temperatures (atmospheric temperatures about 5,000 feet above sea level) and annual and June-August melt season duration. The results were excellent for the June – August period with correlation coefficients between temperature and snow melt duration ranging from 0.91 to 0.95 for various sub-regions shown on the map. Next, they used the known 850 mb temperatures from 1948-2005 to estimate melt duration in over the past six decades. To our surprise, they conclude “If we consider all discrete 5-yr periods (pentads) between 1950 and 2004, the 2000–04 pentad has the second longest mean predicted melt duration on Novaya Zemlya (after 1950–54), and the third longest on Svalbard (after 1950–54 and 1970–74) and Severnaya Zemlya (after 1950–54 and 1955–59).”

We cannot help but notice that the time of greatest melting was the pentad from 1950 to 1954. Is that curious or what? The Earth warmed from 1910 to the mid-1940s, cooled from mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, warmed from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, and has not warmed or cooled over the most recent decade. The 1950 to 1954 pentad with the longest melt seasons happens to have occurred during a time of global cooling. The same can be said for the 1955-1959 and 1970-1974 pentads with long melt seasons. The 2000-2004 pentad has seen relatively large melt duration periods, but to suggest that it was caused by global warming is not consistent with the largest melt duration values occurring during a time of global cooling.

Next up, Indian geologist Ravinder Kumar Chaujar of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology published a recent paper in Current Science of interest to us at World Climate Report. Chaujar investigated the retreats and advances of the Chorabari glacier located near the long-standing Kedarnath Temple in the Himalayan region. The author notes that “Two wall engravings of writings/poems dated AD 650 and 850, on the back boundary wall of the temple, discuss the beauty of the Kedarnath temple. There is no mention about snow/ice/glaciers in them. These findings suggest that there was no glacier during that period around the temple.” These dates precede the Medieval Warm Period and remind us that modern day glaciers in the region have certainly come and gone many times in the past, long before anyone could blame humans for glacial retreats.

But the warmth ended, and as stated by Chaujar, “We consider that glaciations in the region started during the mid-14th century, i.e. the beginning of the Little Ice Age”. The Chorabari glacier advanced at this time, and it appears to have gone through periods of advances and retreats. As the glacier would advance, it would bulldoze rocks at its terminus, and there would be no chance of lichens establishing themselves in the active rock zone. However, once the glacier would retreat, the rocks would be left behind, and lichens could then be established. A variety of lichenometric techniques are available to date when the lichens began to grow, and those dates would indicate when the glacier began to retreat. Chaujar determined that the retreat began 258 years ago; around 1748 AD warming at regional and possibly global scales caused the melting. However, we read “After the peak of the Little Ice Age, recession of the glacier was followed by its three major stages of advance and retreat as indicated by the four loops of terminal and lateral moraines of the glacier.”

Two major lessons come from this study. One, any argument that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were confined to Europe is clearly not supported by the evidence from the Himalayan region. Two, glaciers have advanced and retreated many times in the past with absolutely no connection to humans and/or the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. To suddenly pronounce that glaciers are responding to human activities seems to disregard their behavior during periods when human activities certainly had no impact whatsoever.

Glaciers around the world are generally experiencing a melt period at present and there is evidence of melting occurring in the Arctic. However, as seen in the Chaujar and Sharp and Wang articles, there is a lot more to the story when it comes to linking global warming to melting ice.

References:

Chaujar, R.K. 2009. Climate change and its impact on the Himalayan glaciers – a case study on the Chorabari glacier, Garhwal Himalaya, India. Current Science, 96, 703-708.

Sharp, M., and L. Wang. 2009. A five-year record of summer melt on Eurasian Arctic ice caps. Journal of Climate, 22, 133-145.




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"The Other Side Of The Story"

This Episode broght to you by View Zone


The earth's magnetic field impacts climate: Danish study

COPENHAGEN (AFP) -- The earth's climate has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming.

"Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth's magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics," one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal.

He and his colleague Peter Riisager, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), compared a reconstruction of the prehistoric magnetic field 5,000 years ago based on data drawn from stalagmites and stalactites found in China and Oman.

The results of the study, which has also been published in US scientific journal Geology, lend support to a controversial theory published a decade ago by Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark, who claimed the climate was highly influenced by galactic cosmic ray (GCR) particles penetrating the earth's atmosphere.

Svensmark's theory, which pitted him against today's mainstream theorists who claim carbon dioxide (CO2) is responsible for global warming, involved a link between the earth's magnetic field and climate, since that field helps regulate the number of GCR particles that reach the earth's atmosphere.

"The only way we can explain the (geomagnetic-climate) connection is through the exact same physical mechanisms that were present in Henrik Svensmark's theory," Knudsen said.

"If changes in the magnetic field, which occur independently of the earth's climate, can be linked to changes in precipitation, then it can only be explained through the magnetic field's blocking of the cosmetic rays," he said.


Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) come from outside the solar system but generally from within our Milky Way galaxy. GCRs are atomic nuclei from which all of the surrounding electrons have been stripped away during their high-speed passage through the galaxy. They have probably been accelerated within the last few million years, and have traveled many times across the galaxy, trapped by the galactic magnetic field. GCRs have been accelerated to nearly the speed of light, probably by supernova remnants. As they travel through the very thin gas of interstellar space, some of the GCRs interact and emit gamma rays, which is how we know that they pass through the Milky Way and other galaxies.

The elemental makeup of GCRs has been studied in detail , and is very similar to the composition of the Earth and solar system. but studies of the composition of the isotopes in GCRs may indicate the that the seed population for GCRs is neither the interstellar gas nor the shards of giant stars that went supernova. This is an area of current study.

Included in the cosmic rays are a number of radioactive nuclei whose numbers decrease over time. As in the carbon-14 dating technique, measurements of these nuclei can be used to determine how long it has been since cosmic ray material was synthesized in the galactic magnetic field before leaking out into the vast void between the galaxies. These nuclei are called "cosmic ray clocks".

The two scientists acknowledged that CO2 plays an important role in the changing climate, "but the climate is an incredibly complex system, and it is unlikely we have a full overview over which factors play a part and how important each is in a given circumstance," Riisager told Videnskab.

Svensmark's Theory Explained


Man-made climate change may be happening at a far slower rate than has been claimed, according to controversial new research.

Scientists say that cosmic rays from outer space play a far greater role in changing the Earth's climate than global warming experts previously thought.

In a book, to be published this week, they claim that fluctuations in the number of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere directly alter the amount of cloud covering the planet.

High levels of cloud cover blankets the Earth and reflects radiated heat from the Sun back out into space, causing the planet to cool.

Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre who led the team behind the research, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.

This, he says, is responsible for much of the global warming we are experiencing.

He claims carbon dioxide emissions due to human activity are having a smaller impact on climate change than scientists think. If he is correct, it could mean that mankind has more time to reduce our effect on the climate.

The controversial theory comes one week after 2,500 scientists who make up the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change published their fourth report stating that human carbon dioxide emissions would cause temperature rises of up to 4.5 C by the end of the century.

Mr Svensmark claims that the calculations used to make this prediction largely overlooked the effect of cosmic rays on cloud cover and the temperature rise due to human activity may be much smaller.

He said: "It was long thought that clouds were caused by climate change, but now we see that climate change is driven by clouds.

"This has not been taken into account in the models used to work out the effect carbon dioxide has had.

"We may see CO2 is responsible for much less warming than we thought and if this is the case the predictions of warming due to human activity will need to be adjusted."

Mr Svensmark last week published the first experimental evidence from five years' research on the influence that cosmic rays have on cloud production in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Journal A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. This week he will also publish a fuller account of his work in a book entitled The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change.

A team of more than 60 scientists from around the world are preparing to conduct a large-scale experiment using a particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, to replicate the effect of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.

They hope this will prove whether this deep space radiation is responsible for changing cloud cover. If so, it could force climate scientists to re-evaluate their ideas about how global warming occurs.

Mr Svensmark's results show that the rays produce electrically charged particles when they hit the atmosphere. He said: "These particles attract water molecules from the air and cause them to clump together until they condense into clouds."

Mr Svensmark claims that the number of cosmic rays hitting the Earth changes with the magnetic activity around the Sun. During high periods of activity, fewer cosmic rays hit the Earth and so there are less clouds formed, resulting in warming.

Low activity causes more clouds and cools the Earth

According to Svensmark:

"Evidence from ice cores show this happening long into the past. We have the highest solar activity we have had in at least 1,000 years.
"Humans are having an effect on climate change, but by not including the cosmic ray effect in models it means the results are inaccurate.The size of man's impact may be much smaller and so the man-made change is happening slower than predicted."

Some climate change experts have dismissed the claims as "tenuous".

Giles Harrison, a cloud specialist at Reading University said that he had carried out research on cosmic rays and their effect on clouds, but believed the impact on climate is much smaller than Mr Svensmark claims.

Mr Harrison said: "I have been looking at cloud data going back 50 years over the UK and found there was a small relationship with cosmic rays. It looks like it creates some additional variability in a natural climate system but this is small."

But there is a growing number of scientists who believe that the effect may be genuine.

Among them is Prof Bob Bingham, a clouds expert from the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils in Rutherford.

He said: "It is a relatively new idea, but there is some evidence there for this effect on clouds."

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"The Other Side Of The Story"

This Episide broght to you by-The Heritage Foundation

National Security Not a Good Argument for Global Warming Legislation

by James Jay Carafano, Ph.D.

The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill has engendered tremendous controversy. Concerns abound about the legislation's adverse economic consequences as well as skepticism of its affects on world climate trends. Faced with mounting opposition, the bill's supporters are increasingly making the case that creating a new law is a national security imperative. They are wrong.

Indeed, passing the bill would create far more severe, dangerous, and imminent global crises. A better approach is to simply allow nations to adapt to the national security challenges implied by long-term global climate changes.
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Fighting Air

The premise behind Waxman-Markey is that the United States must create a government-run program to reduce the emission of "greenhouse gases,"including carbon dioxide (CO2). The bill would establish a complex energy tax scheme to penalize businesses and industries that emit these gases.

Despite passage in the House, the bill has become increasingly controversial as the economic consequences of the legislation have become more apparent. For example, a study by The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis finds that the law would make the United States about $9.4 trillion poorer by 2035. Much of this decline would be from reduced economic productivity and job loss. In particular, under Waxman-Markey there would be 1.15 million fewer jobs on average than without a cap-and-trade bill.[1]

Carbon Wars

Faced with mounting opposition, proponents have turned to arguing that passing the bill is an imperative for national security. Without the law, proponents argue, adverse climate changes will cause nations to fail, natural disasters that will yield unprecedented humanitarian crises, and states chronically going to combat over the remaining resources.

The problem is that the catastrophic predictions--such as massive sea-level increases and declining food production that would lead to global unrest--are poorly supported by the evidence. To make the national security arguments, global warming legislation advocates must embrace the most alarmist scenarios.

Nonetheless, connecting the dots between human-caused global warming and global conflict has become a popular theme as proponents prepare to take up the bill in the Senate. Last week, Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) called a hearing on the subject. This tactic is nothing new. Last year, Congress directed the Pentagon to address the national security impacts of climate change in its Quadrennial Defense Review, due this December.

The more opposition grows against the bill, however, the shriller these warnings have been become. "Global warming alarmists,"notes Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), "see a future plagued by catastrophic flooding, war, terrorism, economic dislocations, droughts, crop failures, mosquito-borne diseases, and harsh weather--all caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions."Proponents of Waxman-Markey conclude that without such laws, the world will become unmanageable.

Doubtful Impact

Arguing that the law will make the world safer is deeply flawed. First, there are significant doubts that the cap-and-trade system described in the 1,500-plus-page bill will even have a significant and positive impact on global climate trends. According to climatologist Chip Knappenberger, Waxman-Markey would moderate temperatures by only hundredths of a degree after being in effect for the next 40 years and no more than two-tenths of a degree at the end of the century.[2]

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson concurred, recently saying, "U.S. action alone will not impact world CO2 levels."[3]

Additionally, the impact of "managing" greenhouse gases on the environment also remains a subject of great controversy. For example, as Senator Inhofe noted in a floor speech, S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Virginia, who served as the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service and more recently as a member and vice chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, said that "no one knows what constitutes a 'dangerous' concentration. There exists, as yet, no scientific basis for defining such a concentration, or even of knowing whether it is more or less than current levels of carbon dioxide."[4]

Additionally, viewing climate change as a national security crisis makes little sense. The global climate has always been changing. Adapting to these changes and human efforts to manage their surrounding environment is a permanent feature of human competition. The environment does not cause wars--it is how humans respond to their environment that causes conflicts.

Thus, climate change does not necessarily ensure that there will be more or less conflict. For example, as the Arctic ice melts and the environment becomes more benign, Arctic waters will become more available for fishing, mineral and energy exploitation, and maritime transport. Nations will compete over these resources, but it is how they choose to compete--not the change in the weather--that will determine whether war breaks out.

Furthermore, any changes in the climate, for better or for worse, will occur gradually over decades. Thus, there will be ample time to adjust national security and humanitarian assistance instruments to accommodate future demands.

Finally, if the Senate really wants to get serious about how global warming affects national security, it should closely examine the rules and regulations under Waxman-Markey and similar government-driven efforts. These rules would stifle economic growth, create energy scarcity, and make fragile states even more fragile.

For example, a collapse in U.S. economic growth would result in even more draconian cuts to the defense budget, leaving America with a military much less prepared to deal with future threats. Indeed, if America's military power declines, there would probably be more wars, not fewer. Likewise, a steep drop in American economic growth would lengthen and deepen the global recession. That in turn will make other states poorer, undermining their ability to protect themselves and recover from natural disasters.

World Without Peace

Congressional proponents continue to press for the passage of Waxman-Markey. If they are successful, they will almost certainly create the world they want to avoid. The law would ensure a steep decline in U.S. economic competitiveness and military preparedness. The consequences of a weak America would inevitably lead to a string of national security crises and an undermining of the nation's capacity to deal with natural disasters here and abroad.

Congress should reject climate change legislation that creates national security problems rather than strengthening the capabilities of the U.S. to deal with the challenges of the future.

James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is Assistant Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies and Senior Research Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1]William W. Beach, David Kreutzer, Karen Campbell, and Ben Lieberman, "Son of Waxman-Markey: More Politics Makes for a More Costly Bill, "Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 2450, May 18, 2009, at http://www.
heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/wm2450.cfm.

[2]Chip Knappenberger, "Climate Impacts of Waxman-Markey (the IPCC-Based Arithmetic of No Gain),"MasterResource, May 6, 2009, at http://master
resource.org/?p=2355 (August 3, 2009).

[3]Press Release, "Jackson Confirms EPA Chart Showing No Effect on Climate Without China, India, "U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, July 7, 2009, at http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?Fuse
Action=Minority.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=564ed42f-802a-23ad-4570-3399477b1393 (August 3, 2009).

[4]Senator James M. Inhofe (R-OK), "The Science of Climate Change, "Senate floor statement, July 28, 2003, at http://inhofe.senate.gov/
pressreleases/climate.htm (August 3, 2009).

The Other Side Of The Story

This Episode brought to you by Epoch Times


Reviewing the Evidence for Climate Realism

By Arthur Wiegenfeld

When I was in college, I was drawn to both the natural and social sciences. I studied physics for a few years but then changed my major to economics. I am sure that my fascination with the issue of global warming arose because it encompasses concepts from a number of scientific and socioeconomic disciplines. It is obvious that the science is important. But economics is equally important. It is at the heart of the alternative fuel question and necessitates costs that dwarf even the current expenditures related to the banking crisis.

One important event was critical in inspiring me to write this article. In March, I attended a conference in New York City entitled “Global Warming: Was It Ever Really a Crisis?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based nonpartisan public policy think tank, it was attended by over 600 scientists, economists, and policy makers who, using Heartland terminology, characterize themselves as “climate realists” as opposed to “climate alarmists.” In general, climate realists believe that the danger of climate change has been exaggerated both as to the magnitude and the degree of human causation, and that most of the proposed solutions, far from solving any assumed problems, will only make the world poorer.

Speakers included Dr. Richard Lindzen, a renowned atmospheric physicist at MIT; Dr. William Gray, a pioneer in the study of hurricane forecasting with over 40 years of experience; Dr. Nir Shaviv, an expert on the relationship between astrophysical phenomena and weather; Dr. Roy Spencer, a co-developer of methods for satellites to record temperatures accurately; and Dr. Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic, who holds a Ph.D. in economics and has published a book on the subject. The speakers and the staff were very instrumental in illuminating the climate issues.

The subject matter, however, can be overwhelming for the average person. I could not find any individual article that summarizes the wide range of issues reasonably well. That is why I wrote this article. I have combined material from their writings and suggested readings (see endnotes) with other information I have learned over the last several years. The result is a statement of the realist position, which is a diagnosis of what is wrong with alarmism.


The Nature of the Problem
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Carbon dioxide (CO2) is added to the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels, which include coal, gasoline, natural gas, and oil. CO2 can trap infrared radiation reflected back from the surface of the earth and, other factors being equal, will cause some additional heat to be retained. Gases with this property are called greenhouse gases. They are mostly natural and include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor. Water vapor overwhelmingly dominates CO2, and most of the CO2 is natural, with a small percentage coming from humans.

The issues at hand are whether the effect is substantial, and whether anything can or should be done about it: (1) Are humans altering the climate in a substantive and detrimental way? My answer is “No.” That is the science issue. (2) Would the widely proposed solutions help, or would they simply make matters worse? That is the economics issue, and my answer is “much worse.” Let us look at each in turn.


Scientific Weaknesses of the Alarmist Position

Natural Cycles. Climate change is the normal course of events. Alarmists claim that there have been unusual changes in climate, but that is not the case. The earth has been undergoing large temperature fluctuations for millions of years. For the earth, a century is proportionately equivalent to about a minute for a person. Therefore, since the period of expanded fossil fuel usage started in the 1940s, we are talking about the equivalent of less than a minute in a person’s life.

For the other 99.9+ percent of the time, the earth went through the same cycles without any help from humans. Corresponding to these cycles, the media has reported a number of major climate scares over the last century, most notably the “cooling” crisis of 1976, where the alarm was, in a number of cases, sounded in reverse by the same organizations that are doing so now.

During the first part of the 20th century, before the widespread use of fossil fuels, the earth nevertheless warmed. It cooled from 1940 to 1975, when fossil fuel use expanded significantly.[1] Toward the end of the century, the earth again warmed, although, as a result of errors detected in the NASA/Goddard’s GISS record, we now know that the 1930s edged out the 1990s as the warmest decade of the century.[2]

Since 1998, the temperature of the earth has remained constant. We know this because satellites provide the most accurate and unbiased means of measuring temperature.[3] In contrast, other methods for measuring temperature, such as placing thermometers at land stations, have become problematic due to their increasing proximity to heat-producing machines (such as air conditioners which dissipate heat in order to cool buildings), and surfaces (such as black pavement).[4]

Of the four periods I listed above, there was only one during which the temperature increase coincided with increased CO2, which strongly suggests there is no causal relationship.

However, the overall temperature increase is consistent with the earth’s recovery from the Little Ice Age, from about 1450 to 1850, interspersed with smaller fluctuations. The rate was less than a degree C per century, with a rise in sea level of less than a foot per century.[5]

On a somewhat longer time horizon, the “hockey stick” analysis purported to prove that the earth is now warmer than it has been in a thousand years, a blink in geological time. Because the analysis suggested that over most of the past millennium there was a minimal temperature increase, followed by a large increase in the last century, the resulting graph resembles a hockey stick. However, this analysis was shown to have mathematical flaws, and it contradicted well-known historically reported climate events, such as the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age.[6]

With respect to other alleged problems, the events are either not out of the ordinary, or unrelated to CO2. The temperatures of the Arctic and Greenland were higher in the 1930s. Temperatures have been declining in Antarctica, except for the small peninsula that extends northward from the main body of ice.[7]

A number of claims in Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” have been shown to be false. For example, changes in the snow cover of Mount Kilimanjaro were underway long before the increase in greenhouse gases. Indeed, a British citizen sued Gore in court, contending that his movie, which was mandated in British schools, was propaganda. A British court agreed. After finding eleven major factual errors in the film, the court ruled that the film must be accompanied by notes acknowledging the major problems it enumerated.[8]

Models. Scientific proof is based on the use of controlled experiments. However, we cannot have a “control” group, as with drug tests—there is no spare copy of the earth. Therefore, alarmists must rest their case largely on computer models. Computer models are essentially glorified spreadsheets that purport to reduce the earth to a series of equations. Though the outputs of models are sometimes reported as “experiments,” they are no more so than stock market forecasts and analyses are.

You are probably familiar with the acronym GIGO—“Garbage in, garbage out.” Models are nothing more than statements, in mathematical form, of what someone believes might be true. Translating a set of assumptions into mathematical formulas no more makes them true than does translating an argument from English to a foreign language.

Nor does the availability of powerful computers matter. One cannot program that which one does not understand, and critical aspects of the climate are not understood. Computers simply make it easier to create formulas that support a particular viewpoint. And there are different models, and different versions of a given model, creating an endless list of possibilities.

Models are heavily implicated in the current financial collapse. With a comparatively simple analytical problem, financial instruments with a small set of known characteristics, the modelers failed. Now compare that to the awesome complexity of the earth: The earth is 4.6 billion years old, its climate is affected by hundreds of poorly understood factors, and it is an enormous three-dimensional object.

Climate models also require an elaborate forecast of the world economy, to determine energy usage. Thus, it is not surprising that there would be problems. The physical predictions fail: They predict that the atmosphere’s middle troposphere (about six miles up) should warm.[9] This effect is not observed. Nor can they reliably predict the long-term climate. And they lack sufficient compensating features of the earth’s climate (“negative feedback”), which, like your body, has the ability to adjust to moderate changes in the environment.

CO2 Science. CO2 science contradicts alarmist claims. The human contribution of CO2 is a small fraction of the earth’s CO2, about 3 percent, which, in turn, is a small fraction of all greenhouse gases, about 4 percent. (Water vapor is about 95 percent.)[10] There is therefore no reason to assume that slight increases in CO2 would matter—after all, 3 percent of 4 percent is 0.12 percent, or about one-eighth of 1 percent.

Greenhouse warming may have made Venus extremely hot (a point often noted by alarmists), but Venus, whose atmosphere consists mostly of CO2, has thousands of times the density of CO2 as does Earth. Therefore, to justify alarmism, it is necessary to make certain assumptions, such as that carbon dioxide will interact with water vapor, a more prevalent greenhouse gas, to amplify the effect. But that assumes what needs to be proven—it is circular reasoning.

It is important to reiterate that climate fluctuations have occurred for the 99.9+ percent of the time where humans did not add CO2 to the atmosphere. Thus, the burden of proof is on the alarmists, not on the realists. Indeed, there have been periods in the earth’s history where CO2 levels were dramatically higher—without catastrophic consequences.[11] Climate realists are investigating the major factors that really do influence the long-term climate, but that is a long-term effort, given the abundance of possible explanations.

I would like to note some additional points. In his movie, Al Gore attached great importance to his contention that climate warming follows CO2 increases in the atmosphere, with the causal implication that CO2 alters the earth’s temperature. Wrong. The evidence shows that warming precedes changes in CO2 levels, with the clear implication that warming itself increases CO2 levels. This is probably due to warm ocean water releasing CO2.[12]

There is also a natural limit to the effects of additional carbon dioxide. The additional effects are diminished as more is added.

Furthermore, increased levels of CO2, which plants take in, are known to be favorable to plant growth, the foundation of the food supply. And cold, not heat, poses by far the greater danger to human life.


Economic Issues

Alarmists themselves widely acknowledge that treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol would make a miniscule difference in the temperature—a fraction of a degree C. To reduce emissions of CO2, alarmists advocate alternative fuels and massive taxes on fossil fuels. The cost to the world economy would be trillions of dollars each year, the most expensive project in human history. And massive resources would be diverted from efforts to reduce world poverty, such as providing inexpensive power.


Alternative Energy

With the exception of nuclear power, alarmist proposals for alternative energy cannot work. Ethanol requires almost as much energy to create as it produces. Its yield is very low: The grain required to fill an SUV tank with ethanol once equals what a person eats in a year. The removal of large tracts of land from food production dramatically raised world food prices by reducing supplies. As a result, there were food riots as millions of people were exposed to hunger. A food consultant for the U.N. called it a “crime against humanity.” Furthermore, ethanol from corn requires fertilizers that increase nitrous oxide emissions that are themselves extremely potent greenhouse gases.

Hydrogen is not freely available, but must be extracted from molecules such as water. To do so requires more energy than it produces. Hydrogen is also flammable and hard to contain.

Wind and solar energy are not substantive solutions. It takes thousands of windmills to equal one large power plant, and the power must be transported from wind farms to cities.[13] Because the wind is highly variable, turbines must be backed up by traditional power sources anyway. The same is true of solar plants, which work best in warm climates with direct sunlight.

Interestingly, environmentalists themselves have opposed these installations due to environmental damage and land requirements. Household installations of solar power may have some limited long-term potential, but are still expensive and cannot meet peak needs. River dams offer a modest contribution to national energy needs (about 3 percent), but the most productive sites are already used up, and dams radically alter the environment.

As a result of their deficiencies, alternative power sources require massive government subsidies in the form of tax breaks and requirements that utilities buy inefficient power; otherwise, the barely noticeable fraction of power they now offer, around 1 percent, would drop further. To reduce fossil fuel use, massive “cap and trade” programs will effectively ration our primary energy source. These twin policies will result in the direct and indirect cost to the world economy of trillions of dollars.

I see no alternative to fossil fuels other than nuclear energy. It reduces our dependence on hostile countries, so it can be justified regardless of where one stands on global warming. It alone utilizes the energy in the nucleus, providing the enormous energy described by Einstein’s famous equation. (Most energy sources rely on the limited chemical energy of electron bonds.)

Nuclear plants are safer than coal plants and produce less radiation. Furthermore, they can directly produce electricity, and power our cars by providing electricity for batteries, making a hydrogen infrastructure unnecessary. Unfortunately, there are irrational biases against nuclear power. Environmentalists widely oppose it, though some are re-examining the issue. Although they are much less concerned about CO2 than alarmists, realists widely support nuclear power because its expanded use would reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Thus, there is an irony here—that climate realists offer the best solution to the concerns of climate alarmists!


Funding

Despite alarmist claims about improper realist funding, alarmist funding by interested parties is the problem. Over $7 billion is spent annually on government funding of alarmist climate change and related research.[14] (Government departments are more likely to be funded if they claim that there is a problem, as opposed to the absence of one.) Moreover, environmental groups and nonprofits massively fund alarmist efforts, including lawsuits.

It is often claimed that skeptics are heavily funded by the oil companies. In fact, funding by oil companies, measured in tens of millions of dollars, has diminished as oil companies have been exposed to bad publicity. Instead, energy corporations are actively pursuing the vast profit opportunities awaiting them from government policies such as cap and trade and alternative power mandates. For example, General Electric has entered the wind turbine market. Conservatively stated, overall funding of alarmism exceeds that of realists by a factor of a hundredfold.

The Heartland Institute, which sponsored the conference I attended, did not solicit or use corporate donations for the event. Donations from all energy sector companies totaled less than 5 percent of its 2008 operating budget. And think tanks that question the orthodoxy are massively dwarfed in size by those embracing alarmism.


Solving ‘Related’ Problems

A final issue is related to the assumed effects of climate change on existing problems, such as malaria, coastal flooding, and heat deaths. Even if we accept the alarmist claims of causation, solutions are available that are orders of magnitude less expensive than attempting to alter the earth’s climate.

With respect to the alarmist issue that malaria is increasing due to global warming, I would note that the highly effective anti-malarial chemical DDT has now been recognized as safe by the World Health Organization of the United Nations. Trying to alter the climate, even if possible, would be ineffective. The reason: Climate is a minor factor in the incidence of malaria.[15]

Damage by hurricanes, caused mostly by increased development in high-risk locations, can best be handled by reduced development in risky areas. Hurricane Katrina had become a modest Category 3 hurricane by the time it hit New Orleans—the damage was caused by defective levees. Heat deaths, which are far less of a danger to humans than deaths due to cold, can be best handled by providing increased funds for air conditioners and fans.

Trying to solve the problems of malaria, hurricanes, and heat deaths by changing the climate would be like a tailor cutting off a customer’s arms because the sleeves are too short. In these cases, and the earlier ones I discussed, the realists offer better analysis and more rational energy proposals than do the alarmists.

Arthur Wiegenfeld is an independent investor in New York City. He has training in physics, computer simulation, finance, and economics.

References:
[1] Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, Willie Soon, “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (2007) 12, 82.
[2] S. Fred Singer, ed., Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate: Summary for Policy Makers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, (Chicago, The Heartland Institute, 2008), 9.
[3] Singer, Nature, Not Human Activity, 9-10.
[4] Anthony Watts, Is The U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? (Chicago, Heartland Institute, 2009), back cover.
[5] Arthur Robinson, Environmental Effects, 4.
[6] Singer, Nature, Not Human Activity, 3.
[7] S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming, (Summit, PA, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2008), 105.
[8] Neutral Citation Number: [2007] EWHC 2288 (Admin) Case No: CO/3615/2007 IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION ADMINISTRATIVE COURT Royal Courts of Justice Strand, London, WC2A 2LL Date: 10.10.2007 http://www.nzcpr.com/dimmock.pdf.
[9] Patrick Michaels, Climate of Extremes, (Washington D.C., Cato Institute, 2009), 31.
[10] Dr. Wallace Broecker, “Global Warming: A Closer Look at the Numbers,” American Geophysical Union’s spring meeting, (Baltimore, MD.), May, 1996. http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
[11] Zbigniew, Jaworowski, “CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of our Time,” EIR Science, (March 16, 2007), 41.
[12] Dr. Martin Herzberg, “The Lynching of Carbon Dioxide, The Innocent Source of Life,” (May, 2008), 5-11. http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/hertzberg.pdf.
[13] Gwyneth Cravens, Power To Save the World, (New York, Random House, 2007),16.
[14] Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget, Federal Climate Change Expenditures Report to Congress, May, 2007.
[15] Paul Reiter, “Global Warming and Malaria: Knowing the Horse Before Hitching the Cart,” Malaria Journal, 2008, 7 (Suppl 1):S3, 2.

"The Other Side Of The Story"

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Missing Fingerprints

According to the climate models used by the IPCC and other climate alarmists, the mid-troposphere should be rapidly warming if increasing CO2 is a forcing for warming. If this warming does not occur roughly as predicted then the climate models are proved to be worse than useless. The ‘fingerprint’ evidence of anthropogenic warming due to increasing CO2 is predicted to be a pronounced ‘hotspot’ in the troposphere between latitudes 30N and 30S (which comprises exactly half the surface of the earth) at a height of around 10km (cruising altitude for jet planes), see below for expected change during the 20th century from the latest IPCC report. Obviously, if anthropogenic global warming is going to ‘take off’ this century, then this hotspot will be considerably more pronounced in the 21st century. The models used by the IPCC predict warming of the troposphere some 12 km high at the rate of 4-5 degrees per century for this century. This hotspot is absolutely essential if the climate models have any validity at all.

Other climate models predict the same thing: here are four others (showing effect of doubling of CO2). Note that all predict a pronounced tropospheric ‘hotspot’ 10km up and between the tropics.
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However, this hotspot has never been found – if it had been, we would certainly have heard about it, shouted from the rooftops by the climate alarmists. This missing fingerprint that they are peculiarly silent about (for obvious reasons) invalidates their models. It shows their models and their whole hypotheses to be trash. Below are the actual measured anomalies, and it is evident that not the slightest hotspot can be found.


Time series measured data for mid-troposphere temperature anomalies in the tropics since 1978 is shown below. Notice that there is no trend over 30 years (though a pronounced recent cooling trend!) even though the temperatures in the mid-troposphere are supposed to be shooting up! Current temperatures in the mid-troposphere are around 0.2 degrees below the 20-year 1979-98 average.



Below is a regression plot showing the historical warming/cooling rate of the mid-troposphere from this data over time periods in months (horizontal axis). [Note: it is not significant trying to look at trends over periods of less than a few years, so no values are shown for a period less than 4 years (48 months)].



What this shows us is that the trend calculated over the period from today back to 96 months (8 years) ago is strongly negative, a cooling rate of more than 3 degrees per century. Apart from one blip, one has to extend the dataset to 180 months (15 years) to find a trend that is zero (neither warming nor cooling). The trend in mid-troposphere temperature taking data as far back as 14 years is thus a cooling one – exactly the opposite of what is required by the models.

Extending the data back more than 15 years reveals a very slight warming trend over such periods, but as the dataset is enlarged further back in time, the size of this warming decreases. Taken over 360 months (30 years), the warming trend is less than 0.5 degree per century. Remember, the climate models require values an order of magnitude higher than this going forward to resist invalidation (the yellow line on the graph).

Moreover, as the dataset is extended, we see that the trend line appears asymptotic to zero. A few more months of tropospheric cooling (as we have been having in recent years) will bring the trend line even closer to the axis. In other words, the long-term trend in tropospheric heating/cooling is zero, the hotspot is not appearing, and the ‘fingerprint’ evidence of anthropogenic global warming is nowhere to be seen.

There is no doubt about it: anthropogenic global warming is a con.