Jan 11 2009
January 2009: Global Warming Memorial Month
The Global Warming alarmists from the Church of Al Gore/UN IPCC are facing a fierce battle this year. Their enemy: Nature.
The man-made GW alarmists will be huddled throughout Europe and the US trying to claim the end of the Earth is near, to be caused by out of control warming. The backdrop to this fiery scenario will be some of the coldest temperatures in living memory. For example, now in parts of Europe the mind numbing cold is beyond imagination:
Slovenia registered the lowest temperatures ever. At the Bohin resort, a half frozen weatherman standing outside, reported minus 49°C.
And the US Weather Service is forecasting a bitter cold week ahead:
That’s right, you’re reading it correctly. The model is predicting that the temperature in New York City will be about -13 F on the morning of January 17th.
I can tell you without even looking at historical data that a -13 degree reading would be “historic” in the Big Apple. If you do look at their history, you find that -15 was the lowest they have been there since 1869.
I said last fall, if predictions of massive and steep global cooling (based on solar sunspot activity and the solar cycle) were true the world population would soon be welcoming any concept of warming. When temperatures go well below anything in living memory the reality is much more powerful than abstract concepts. The anger coming out of the chittering teeth at the buffoons who feared warmth will be quite powerful.
Mounting cold weather news here, here and here (H/T Drudge Report).
Fortunately for the science challenged the sun has decided to charge and make a stand. If it weren’t for the sun going quiet in Oct 2005 and drastically cooling off planet Earth, we would have never stood a chance convincing the kooks that their hoax was, well ‘ya Know’ a like, hoax. But here we are. CO2 is still a rising and the temperatures are plunging.
If the current solar trends continue, it will soon be so cold, the snow piled so high, the glaciers growing so fast, the sea ice so thick, that Al gore will be the only one left on the planet who doesn’t, well ya Know, like, Al Gore is a kook.
Some things are just ordained by a higher power.
Poor algore…….lost an election, now his only claim to fame is freezing over. What a guy!
One other thought on algore. If the media had honestly stated the facts of the election in 2000, what algore had tried to do to win it, or steal it, maybe algore wouldn’t have gone so insane. When the media refuses to report and instead plays politics in the face of facts, really bad things happen and the media is responsible. What a sad state of affairs.
I’ve linked to your post from here for a collection of articles on discerning science.
There are several things to consider when one looks at the problem of “global warming”. First, is CO2 even a problem? We don’t yet have any clear evidence that CO2 has caused any warming at all. Yes, we can see that CO2 is rising and we did have a period of rising temperatures but for most of the time CO2 has risen, temperatures have fallen. The greatest increase in rate of temperature rise since the Little Ice Age was in the 1700’s before any significant use of fossil fuels. Errors in surface measuring station siting, “adjustments” to the raw record data, and elimination of a large number of rural sites from the global network can account for nearly all of the “global warming” in the 1990’s and since.
The rest can be accounted for by normal natural cyclical processes such as PDO/ENSO cycles. A warm phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation results in warmer Northern Hemisphere temperatures. We are now in the cool phase of this natural oscillation and are seeing temperatures decline.
Until the surface measurement mess is straightened out, there is absolutely no evidence that any of the warming we have seen do date is due to CO2.
The next question is the impact of CO2. The “models” don’t show that CO2 increases temperatures that much themselves. They show that a slight increase in CO2 causes a little warming which increases evaporation and the additional water vapor causes a huge increase in temperature. So the CO2 acts to force another greenhouse gas into higher concentration. The problem is the models assume, to varying degrees, that water vapor is always a positive feedback. It always increases temperatures. It makes no account of clouds and the cooling impact of them. As more attention is focused on clouds, it is becoming apparent that water vapor is probably a net negative feedback. So any increase caused by CO2 is offset by a decrease caused by additional clouds and the system comes back into balance.
Today’s CO2 levels are under 300 parts per million (ppm). When most modern plants and animals evolved, CO2 was 5 to 7 times current levels in the atmosphere. The rise if the Himalaya mountains has resulted in the accelerated scrubbing of CO2 from the atmosphere in recent geological history. Overall, Earth’s atmospheric CO2 was recently at record levels. At the end of the last glaciation, CO2 levels were probably at the lowest they had ever been since there has been life on this planet. If this drop in CO2 continues, we could expect to see mass extinctions of plants (over a long time, mind you) due to a lack of CO2 resulting in lower plant productivity.
When CO2 levels were at 7,000 ppm, global temperatures were about 5 degrees higher than today. Earth experienced an ice age when CO2 levels were at 5,000 ppm. Today we are somewhere around 385 ppm. The plants that inhabit the planet today seem to thrive best in concentrations of about 1,000 ppm or a little over double the current atmospheric concentration.
There are also a couple of other things to remember: First, the more CO2 in the air, the faster it is scrubbed out. If rainfall contains more carbonic acid, it reacts more strongly with exposed rock producing more carbonates. Basically we are converting fossil fuel into carbonates over a long period of time. Second, the response to CO2 isn’t linear, it is logarithmic. If I add, say 10 ppm of CO2 to the atmosphere, I get some amount of warming. To get that same amount more warming, I need to add much more than 10 more parts of CO2. So a doubling of CO2 might warm us a degree. If we were to get around 800ppm of CO2, it might warm a degree. CO2 content of the air is currently increasing at a rate of roughly 2 ppm per year. At the current rate of increase, it would take about two centuries for atmospheric CO2 to double provided plants and erosion don’t take CO2 out at a faster rate when it increases. To increase the temperature another degree would take many more centuries.
People have no idea of the sense of scale involved. To increase global temperatures only 2 degrees by simply increasing CO2 to put us back where we were in temperature during the Holocene Optimum would take so long that we will likely be into another ice age by then. That assumes that increasing CO2 would increase temperatures. Again, nobody has shown yet that increasing CO2 levels are responsible for any climate change.
We have more CO2 in their air now than we had in 1987 but December 2008 temperatures were lower than December 1987 and the trend in temperature change has been down over the past 8 years.
…and how about CO2 absorption in sea water, inverse WRT temperature I am told. The warmer the oceans the less absorbed CO2. Cart, Horse…
Yes, evidence is that CO2 responds to temperature not the other way around. And the CO2 response greatly lags. So we are likely still seeing the response from warming out of the Little Ice Age.
Consider that water in the LIA that sank in polar regions takes decades (centuries) to resurface where it can be warmed and dump its stored CO2.
The ocean as a whole doesn’t respond to surface anomalies, only the surface does. Water temperatures are pretty stable at the bottom of the ocean … right about the freezing point. There is a lot of water and its response to temperature change on the surface is slow. There is a lot of thermal “inertia” there. So as we warm out of the little ice age, the ocean at depth warms only gradually and it can take a very long time to make a very small change in temperature even while the sea surface can change in temperature fairly rapidly.
But what REALLY bothers me is when Obama’s “Global Warming Czar” must have her affiliation with socialist groups scrubbed from their web pages before her confirmation hearings.
And again, that is what I hate about our web based society. People can go back and change reality, change the past, eliminate people’s affiliations, etc. In the past you wouldn’t be able to recall every single copy of an organization’s journal, clip out unwanted materiel and send it back. Print publishing forces some modicum of responsibility. Web publishing isn’t worth the paper it is printed on. What you read tomorrow can be changed or different today.
CO2, mmmm plants love the stuff. Grow big and strong plants with lots of CO2. What do you think they do in a greenhouse? No CO2, dead world.
Crosspatch has all the scientific reasons for not falling for the Global Warming nonsense. I have a few non-scientific reasons to dispute the CO2 myth. Natives in Zimbawee are eating cow dung now–Bay area progressives say , great!! They are not eating meat. And they want because the would be elimating their food supply. They nuts want us all to become vegetarians–they hate cows. I’ll help them out–bring me the cows, I’ll eat them (I love eating them) guess I do my part for the enviroment.
what we really have to look forward to is an abrupt climate change , a massive cooling trend backed by the de-salinization of the ocean . fir reference watch the movie “the day after tomorrow” very closly . Dont believe me im just a man, check it out 4 yourself, the evidence is overwhelming. Im not a smart man, but id like to believe the facts given from the professionals,
thank u for your time , love peace and chicken grease homie ,
later.