Weekend Pundit

Global Warming Starting To Lose Its Luster

Are any of you out there surprised I've been on an anti-anthropogenic global warming campaign lately? As more evidence comes to light that the AGW folks may have been premature going into “We're all gonna DIE!” mode, the faithful cling to the notion that we must take drastic measures to save Earth's climate. But what does that mean? What drastic measures? And how much effect will those drastic measures actually have?

Listening to the AGW adherents over the past few years, I've come to the conclusion that they really don't know what needs to be done, or by whom. (Actually they know exactly who should handle it: the Government.) Oh, they'll talk a great game, but when it comes to actually doing something about it, it's somebody else that should bear the burdens they want to place upon the rest of humanity. Not them. After all they need to be able to keep an eye on the rest of us to make sure we've properly impoverished ourselves and are not exceeding the limits they intend to place upon every other human being on the planet.

But still the question begs, what exactly would the ever not-so-mysterious “They” have us do? And what if the actions we take to 'repair' Earth's climate ends up doing little if anything to affect climate change but prevents us from taking steps to mitigate the effects of it, to adapt ourselves and our societies to the changes expected by the AGW proponents? If the AGW folks are right, and even if by their best estimates the massive reductions in human generated greenhouse gases they want will have little effect over the next 100 years or so, wouldn't the billions or trillions of dollars they want us to spend be better spent preparing for those changes? The AGW faithful will, of course, say that any price is worth it to fix the problem. The problem with that answer is that they are wrong, wrong in so many ways I'm not even going to attempt to list them.

Now ask yourself this question: What if the global warming folks are wrong and the warming we've seen in the past hundred years or so is a normal variation? Or what if they're wrong about the negative effects of global warming and the effect of such warming is positive? (Think the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, when the global temperatures were warmer than they are now.) Or what if these changes are now reversing themselves and we are instead entering another Little Ice Age? Or worse, entering an extended Ice Age? Would the billions or trillions we spent combating global warming have been wasted on something that was never a threat or was, in fact, something beneficial to us?

Of course the AGW faithful will never let such thoughts enter their minds. It goes against the doctrine of the sainted Al Gore, the inventor of the Internet and the Supreme Climatologist Extraordinaire whose wisdom and knowledge about such things should never be questioned.

Yeah. Right.

The Anthropogenic Global Warming Scam

The hysteria over global warming, and particularly the cries of “Heretic!” coming from the followers of AlGore (may the blessings of Gaia be upon his name) when confronting those with the audacity to question the catechism of anthropogenic global warming, has reminded me so much of the trials and tribulations of Galileo when he thought to question the orthodoxy of his day.

It's one thing to call those not conversant with climate science who question AGW 'deniers', but how can those who are far more knowledgeable about it than many of the proponents be called such? The faithful will try to diminish their expertise by claiming they are bought and paid for by the oil and coal companies even though those same faithful are fully in thrall to those who see that AGW as a path to power and wealth. It is the faithful who hate the deniers, who try to state the debate about global warming is over and that “everyone knows” humans are the sole cause. Whatever you do, don't try to confuse them with facts that go against their orthodoxy. To them everything else is unimportant.

America is in the throes of a major housing and financial downturn, soaring food and energy costs, rising unemployment and near recession. But many legislators and bureaucrats are falling all over themselves to restrict fossil fuel use, advance climate change legislation – and thereby increase oil imports, energy prices, and impacts on families and businesses.

Earth did warm slightly over the last quarter century, as it emerged further from the Little Ice Age, and humans likely played a role. However, literally hundreds of climate scientists say catastrophic climate change and dominant human influence are over-hyped myths.

These are real climate scientists saying this, not political hacks or those with little or no knowledge about climatology, like sociologists, economists, and political scientists. Prophesying the disastrous effects of global warming (which no one has proved will be the outcome of such warming, and history appears to say otherwise) is a way of selling fear, and fear allows the AGW faithful to gain political and financial power. After all, they say that all we have to do to be safe is to allow them to impoverish the poor even more and destroy the world economy. All it takes is for us to give them the power to do what needs to be done. It's a ploy that's been used before (Hitler, anyone?). My dear brother came up with a more direct approach to dealing with the 'problem': kill two-thirds of the world's human population.

Of course the AGW folks solution to the problem will accomplish the same thing, but will make it a long, drawn out, excruciatingly painful process, which in their eyes is, in some twisted fashion, more humane. (Don't ask me to explain this belief...I don't think I can.)

Despite all of this it appears that global warming is not high on Americans' lists, at least in regards to the upcoming November elections, where the issue appeared dead last in a recent poll. But that won't stop the faithful from preaching their ever less relevant gospel.

Another Example of Shortsightedness

History abounds with examples of the Law Of Unintended Consequences. One particular example that repeats again and again is when laws are enacted that are supposed to be “good for the environment” but end up causing more harm than they prevent. And so it is with RoHS (Restrictions on Hazardous Substances). First enacted in the EU, the idea was to remove six harmful substances from consumer and commercial electronic and electrical equipment. On the face of it the idea sounds good, but there are side effects to this decision that are just now starting to make themselves felt. One such side effect I wrote about before is the coming 'Electronic Armageddon'.

Not too many believe it will come to that, where electronic and electrical appliances will start failing in ever larger numbers because of the shortsightedness of European Union lawmakers. Or at least they didn't believe me back then, but more are starting to come to the realization that it wasn't a false prediction. While the problem caused by the use of lead-free solders in electronics isn't widespread yet, it could rapidly become a major problem in short order. Who else believes this is a disaster in the making? Would you believe the IEEE and NASA?

Tin whiskers grow in the absence of lead in solder and pose a serious reliability risk to
electronic assemblies. Tin whiskers have caused system failures in both earth and spacebased
applications as well as missile systems. At least three tin whisker-induced short
circuits resulted in complete failure of in-orbit commercial satellites.

Most people think, "If it hasn’t happened to me, then I don't care about it" not realizing
that it is happening to them. Most people address problems that they know they have had
before. They do not recognize a steady drizzle of problems caused by metal whiskers. It’s
hard to "see" whiskers even when whiskers are present.

That's because they're smaller than a human hair.

The big issue with one side effect of RoHS is how the reliability of electronic and electrical systems have been or will be affected, with many people concerned that reliability will go down. So far there has been little effect on system reliability, but RoHS has not been in effect long enough to claim there will be no changes. We need to give it another year or two before any claims like that can be made.

One very big downside is RoHS is causing the use of more energy to manufacture the same products because higher processing temperatures are required in order to get lead-free solders to flow. Also, the lead-free solders use copper and silver in pace of the lead. Silver is a precious metal. It also causes far more ecological harm mining silver than it does lead. (Lead is one of the more recycled metals in use today, behind only steel, aluminum, and copper, and much of the lead used in solder comes from recycled lead.) While leaded solders are anywhere from 30 to 85% lead, with most electronic solders being around 37% lead, as little as 0.5% lead content will prevent tin whisker growth. But the EU says that lead is bad, taking much of this knowledge from the toxicity of lead paints and the tetraethyl lead once used in gasoline to boost the octane rating. But lead as used in solder for electronics isn't the same. And despite claims that lead from electronics will leach into the ground if put in a landfill, the tin/lead alloy is one form that is quite stable and won't leach into the ground. Who says so? The US Environmental Protection Agency, that's who.

So here we have feel good legislation passed in Europe that is not based on any kind of scientific evidence or studies, which in turn may cause even greater harm than it prevents. Other countries have followed suit, again with no studies of the long term impact. The EU is planning to add even more substances to their banned list even though no study has been done on the impact of the present ban, which might make the present situation even worse.

An Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming

Don Surber has more thoughts about the Global Warming faithful and how their “inconvenient truths” are starting to look inconveniently false.

Global Warming Theories Suffering Setbacks

Apparently I'm not the only one questioning the claims of those saying global warming is inevitable, it's All-Our-Fault, and that we're all doomed unless we take drastic actions to turn things around. But weather trends over the past 10 years as well as colder than normal temperatures this past winter may be yet another nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming.

Incredibly, the BBC has reported that temperatures this summer are also likely to be below normal due to an extended La Niña pattern in the Pacific.

Between recold cold, record snows, snowfalls in places that haven't seen snow in up to a century, and rapid ice formation in both the Arctic and Antarctic, the AGW theory of global warming is showing more and more holes that cannot just be explained away or ignored.

More Skepticism About Global Warming

I found it ironic that at the moment the US is negotiating at a UN climate conference in Bangkok, some are truly starting to question the premise that the global warming debate is over. Other's, like the US delegation to the conference, are saying many of the proposed 'solutions' to the alleged problems with greenhouse gases are worse than the problems they're meant to correct.

The EU has proposed that industrialized countries slash emissions 25-40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 as part of a global climate pact. The U.S., which is one of the world's top polluters, has repeatedly rejected mandatory national reduction targets of the kind agreed to under the Kyoto Protocol a decade ago.

Harlan Watson, the head of the U.S. delegation in Bangkok, said such hard targets failed to take into account the potential economic impact.

''If you push the globe into recession, it certainly isn't going to help the developing world either,'' Watson told The Associated Press. ''Exports go down, and many of the developing countries of course are heavily dependent on exports. So there's a lot of issues which need to be fleshed out ... so people understand the real world.''

The US could certainly reduce its greenhouse gases by that amount. But it might take the dismantling of the entire economy to do so. That's no solution.

What makes this conference seem as useless as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is more evidence that we may be entering a period of global cooling rather than global warming. If the slow start of upcoming Sunspot Cycle 24 is any indication, we may be entering a prolonged period of lower solar activity, which in turn will cause a cooling of Earth's climate. Assuming the It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans branch of the global warming faithful are partially correct in that our activities have increased greenhouse gases to the point where they have some effect on the climate, then we may not want to take any actions that will prevent the effects of those gases. They may actually help moderate the cooling period and prevent major climate shifts to much colder weather. Much colder temperatures would have a far more devastating effect on climate patterns than a warming trend. Too many people ignore the positive effects of the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods, when global temperatures were about 1.5ºC warmer than they are today. Somehow people have gotten it into their heads that the temperatures and weather patterns their grandparents and great-grandparents experienced were 'normal'.

I'll let you in on a little secret: They weren't. 'Normal' is relative. What is normal to you and me might be considered above or below normal by someone who lived 250 or 1000 years ago. How do we quantify normal? I certainly have no idea.

Antarctic Ice Shelf Proving Global Warming?

An ice shelf in Antarctica is breaking up! We're all DOOMED!!

Er...well, maybe not.

Yet More Blows Against The Anthropogenic Global Warming Argument

Yet another set of blows has been struck against the Global Warming Is-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans believers.

First, according to the holy writ from the sainted Al Gore, temperatures continue to climb, with no end in sight unless we “Do Something!” But there's a problem with the claim.

It's wrong.

If one uses the year 1998 as a reference point, global temperatures since then have fallen. If 2002 is used as the reference, then temperatures have plateaued, staying steady for the past 5 years. If atmospheric carbon dioxide is steadily rising and carbon dioxide causes global warming, shouldn't the temperatures have continued climbing?

More than one anthropogenic global warming theorist has proclaimed that carbon dioxide levels would soon reach a tipping point that would throw the Earth's climate into a runaway thermal meltdown. The problem with this theory is that it is based upon the false assumption the climate is controlled by a positive feedback mechanism, where a small change triggers a big reaction. But if that were so, none of us would be here because our climate would be more like that of Venus. The fact we are here shoots holes in that theory. The carbon dioxide level in Earth's atmosphere has been many times higher than it is now, but it didn't trigger the kind of catastrophe predicted by the AGW theory. Instead, it appears the climate is moderated by a negative feedback mechanism, where any change is minimalized by that feedback.

In a debate between two commenters to the post linked just above, we get a tutorial from one of them on how feedback works, particularly in regards to Earth's climate. The first, a dyed-in-the-wool AGW believer using the moniker The Scientist, tries to come across as an authority on the aforementioned feedback, sounding smug and condescending at the same time.

...just like the author of this blog, you don't understand what positive feedback actually means. If anyone's a complete idiot in their understanding of this, it's you.

...your simple estimate would be wrong because that's not how you calculate climate sensitivity. And you don't believe that water has a high heat capacity? Oh dear. Tell me, generally speaking, which places have more extreme climates? Those near oceans, or those far from oceans?

A number of others replied to The Scientist's comments, getting to the point that one could see he/she was fighting a battle of wits while unarmed. One reply in particular shredded The Scientist's pronouncements, showing it was he/she with little understanding, if any, about climatic feedback mechanisms. It is quoted in its entirety below in the extended view.

If you choose not to explain, people will assume that you don't really know. And in any case, will not be persuaded. The concepts are not at all hard to understand. Why not simply help people out and explain them?

When people talk about positive feedbacks, what they're actually talking about are positive perturbations on an overall negative feedback. The hotter things get, the faster heat is convected or radiated away, which is a massive negative feedback. Water vapour may make that slightly less negative, and as such is a positive feedback contribution, but the overall feedback is still negative. When you're talking about the effect of changes in temperature and changes in water vapour, the bulk of the feedback drops out, and the feedback on the changes could indeed then be considered positive, but its a rather specialised usage of the term. It's because of the dreadful way they're explained by climatologists that people get confused.

It is true that positive feedback with a feedback coefficient below unity doesn't give a runaway effect. It magnifies changes by a factor of 1/(1-f). But given the wide range of changes of forcings over the past few billion years, the climate would have been a lot more unstable than it has been if f were above 0.6 as proposed. And if there were any "tipping points" as some supposedly reputable scientists have claimed, we would have hit them. That's a valid argument against a slightly different argument to the one you made.

Your examples regarding the thermal capacity of the oceans are a bit misleading. Oceans warm and cool more slowly than the land because they are transparent, not because water has a greater thermal capacity. Nevertheless, ocean surface waters can change temperature by many degrees in a matter of weeks. Adjusting a fraction of a degree, such as that proposed as being caused by AGW, would be far faster.

Where it gets complicated is when you get to the role of the deep ocean, and overturn. In fact the ocean has many different thermal capacities, when considered on many different timescales. The surface waters mix only slowly with the deeper water, on a timescale of hundreds to thousands of years. It is extremely nonlinear that way. Temperatures that when averaged over long periods are above or below normal can give net transfers of heat to or from deeper layers, and in return cool or warm the surface slightly, that could in principle give such an effect. The longer the delay involved, the slower the process and the less heat will be transferred in any given time, so it can only explain so much.

However, such effects ought to show up as long-term average temperature changes in the sub-surface ocean. Measurements are highly uncertain and subject to large errors - we don't really know much about conditions below the surface except for a few samples at isolated spots - but observations by Levitus et al. have gone looking for these changes and failed to find them. I don't regard the science here as conclusive yet.

There is also, as alluded to above, the impulse response function measured from volcanic eruptions that suggest the time constant is very short. And the calculation by Schwartz of the time constant from the autocorrelation function of temperatures suggests the global climate has about a five year delay on the decadal timescale at which AGW should show up.

There are many ways to estimate climate sensitivity, and dreamin gave a simplified version of one of them. I assume it was based on Idso's paper on natural climate experiments - if so, I suggest you comment on Idso's arguments in detail rather than dismissing it with a vague "that's not how you calculate it."

So you can see from that that the explanations aren't quite as simple as you made out, and that patronising comments about people being "beyond help" are somewhat uncalled for.

If you know this, then the best thing you can do is to take the time to explain it, without being snide about it. It helps, even if only to the extent that we don't use that particular argument again. If you didn't know it, and yet are still pretending that one would have to be a fool not to, then consider yourself 'caught out'. I assure you, seeing that sort of thing helps the skeptic case enormously. :-)

What's puzzling is that robot probes used to measure ocean temperatures at various depths (down to the ocean floor in some cases) have been showing no change in ocean temperatures anywhere. If the AGW climate models are correct, there should be some changes below the surface, but they're nowhere to be found.

Of course I'm leaning heavily towards the heliogenic model of climate change. If it holds up we might be in for a lengthy period of colder weather, perhaps another Little Ice Age. Should that happen I'll be one of those working towards anthropogenic global warming.

NOTE: As an aside, my one big question for the AGW folks: “What makes you think a warmer climate will automatically be a bad thing?” So far they've shown no evidence that this will be the case. If past history is any indication (think the Medieval Warm Period or Roman Warm Period), the climate will be better.

Just something to think about.

Heliogenic Or Anthropogenic - The Global Warming Question

After listening to yet another bunch of sanctimonious self-important pseudo-environmentalists in Washington State going on and on about global warming, the failure of the United States to sign on to Kyoto, and how they were going to do their part by greatly reducing Washington's carbon footprint, I felt the need to respond to their recitation of the religious dogma from the House of Gore.

Listening to the properly indoctrinated faithful spout the gospel of anthropogenic global warming, it became clear there was no room in their belief system for contrary views or theories. As more than one of them said, the debate is over, global warming is a fact, and it's all our fault.

If only it were so easy.

Time and time again I have pointed out to the anointed that much of the information they take on faith is based upon unproven theory and discredited studies, all the while ignoring that the computer climate models their high priests have used to 'prove' their beliefs have so far not matched what is actually happening. All the while skeptics have been pointing out factors the true believers have purposely ignored or tried to marginalize.

There's more evidence that recent trends in climate have been driven by solar activity, part of a regular cycle that's been going on for eons. While the cycles have been ongoing, they aren't always regular. There is the short term 11-year sunspot cycle, of which we're at the beginning of Cycle 24. That means that sunspot count on the Sun's surface is minimal, if not non-existent. It also means that the Sun's activity in general is at a minimum. Solar output is down, the Sun's magnetic field is calm, and cosmic radiation reaching the Earth is at its maximum. Because there is a lag between the Sun's activity and its effect on Earth's climate, changes in solar radiance aren't immediately reflected in the weather experienced. But what happens if the Sun enters a prolonged period of minimal sunspot activity? At least one scientist, Dr. Theodor Landscheidt of the Schroeter Institute in Germany, is predicting that Cycle 24 will be a particularly weak one, implying global temps may start falling. More than one weak cycle in a row may well put us into yet another Little Ice Age, meaning that it isn't global warming we need to worry about, but global cooling.

Regardless of the predictions above, it is foolish to ignore the solar activity theories of global climate change, particularly in light of climate trends over the past 100 years. Should the global warming of the last few decades turn out to be heliogenic rather than anthropogenic, the billions or trillions of dollars the true believers want us to spend to combat global warming will have been wasted taking measures that will not reverse the trends one way or the other. Rather the money should be spent mitigating the effects of climate change, whether it gets warmer or cooler.

What proof can I offer that it isn't human activity alone driving the warmer temperatures we've seen since the 1970's? Only this: Temperatures on other planets in the solar system have been rising, too.

Somehow I doubt the true believers will be able to point the finger at human activity to explain that. However, I did once have to explain to one of the even less well informed true believers that humans weren't polluting the Martian atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which he claimed was causing the temperature rise, because the Martian atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and had been since long before humans walked the earth.

Other scientists have been able to track climate changes with changes in the sunspot activity over a period of more than 3,000 years using carbon dating of sedimentary layers of soils and peat bogs for sunspot activity and historical records and paleoclimatology findings. (The post linked above only covers back a little over 1,000 years, but other articles linked to in that post go back even farther.)

In the past I've had commenters counter with the argument that the amount of change in solar radiation isn't enough to affect the climate as much as we've allegedly been seeing recently. But that argument misses one of the points about the side effects of decreased solar activity: more lower level cloud formation. More lower level clouds means more solar radiation reflected back into space. The more solar radiation reflected into space, the cooler the temperatures. When solar activity picks up there's less lower level cloud formation but more upper level clouds. These upper level clouds trap the infrared radiation, which in turns cause temperatures to go up. In each case the solar radiance hasn't changed much, but cloud formation has, which has either a subtractive or additive effect depending upon the types of clouds.

So would you consider the debate about anthropogenic global warming is over, or are there still too many unanswered questions?

Biofuels Not So Environmentally Friendly After All

Is it any surprise legislation passed in response to concerns about global warming turns out to cause more problems than it solves? Not to me, it isn't. But I think a number of Congresscritters and members of the It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans™ cabal just got a rude awakening when two different studies, one by Princeton and Woods Hole Research Center, and the other by the University of Minnesota and the Nature Conservancy, show that biofuels do more harm to the environment than fossil fuels.

A number of factors were overlooked when debate on the aforementioned legislation was taking place. The environmental consequences of biofuel were never studied, something that has now come back to bite Congress in the ass.

So what else is new?

The Law Of Unintended Consequences - California Style

Who says there is no God?

The following story illustrates the clash of California environmentalists, in this case neighbors fighting over solar panels and redwood trees. (Registration required)

Talk about a clash of cherished green values.

In a case with statewide significance, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office is pursuing a Sunnyvale couple under a little-known California law because redwood trees in their backyard cast a shadow over their neighbor's solar panels.

Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett own a Prius and consider themselves environmentalists. But they refuse to cut down any of the trees behind their house on Benton Street, saying they've done nothing wrong.

"We're just living here in peace. We want to be left alone," said Bissett, who with her husband has spent $25,000 defending themselves against criminal charges. "We support solar power, but we thought common sense would prevail."

The only problem is common sense isn't all that common, particularly in the land of fruits and nuts. In fact, it isn't all that common anymore anywhere in this country. To prove that, take a gander at this:

Their neighbor Mark Vargas considers himself an environmentalist, too. His 10-kilowatt solar system, which he installed in 2001, is so big he pays only about $60 a year in electrical bills. He drives an electric car.

Vargas said he first asked Treanor and Bissett to chop down the eight redwoods, which the couple had planted from 1997 to 1999 along the fence separating their yards. Later, he asked them to trim the trees to about 15 feet.

"I offered to pay for the removal of the trees. I said let's try to work something out," Vargas said. "They said no to everything."

He installed the panels.

So this self-professed green installed his photovoltaic panels knowing ahead of time that his neighbor's trees might block the sunlight on some of his panels. I guess he figured he could bully them after the fact using a little known California law that gives precedence to solar over trees.

The [California Solar Shade Control Act] was written by former Assemblyman Chuck Imbrecht, a Ventura Republican, as a way to guarantee, amid the energy crises of the 1970s, that people who installed solar panels wouldn't see a drop in their investment from nearby trees.

Better they should call it the Law Of Unintended Consequences, which has caused The Clash Of The Environmentalists. Cutting down trees in order to “save” the environment? Priceless!

(H/T Instapundit)

A Lesson Learned About Global Warming

Want to tell me about global warming...again?

Wait! Before you start let's see about treating the frostbite on your toes....

A Brit's View On Global Warming

Steven Fry, British documentary maker, author, and sometimes actor, has certainly stirred up a number of people with some observations about global warming, apparently siding with those who believe that all global warming is caused by human activity. He hasn't even entertained the thought that there may be other contributing factors.

As he lays it out in his lengthy 'blessay', there are three groups of people when it comes to global warming.

Type A believes the preponderance of established scientific evidence. Whether Type A believes it because they are equipped to do so, or whether they believe it because they are gullible, or whether they believe it because they are stupid, or whether they choose to/pretend to believe it because they are anti-progress, anti-capitalist, anti-global economy, communist, hippy or anarchist is neither here nor there. They believe or profess to believe that there is a pressing threat to the continuation of human life on this planet such as we have known it since the earliest civilizations began to build harbours and ports on the edges of the land. It’s a big deal.

Then there is Type B. Type Bs do not believe this. They think the evidence is wrong, misinterpreted, flawed, misrepresented, unconvincing, not to be acted upon. Type A will call Type Bs “deniers” which irritates them with that suggestion of holocaust denial, not to mention its accompaniment of that special whiff of sanctimonious self-righteous and political correctness that many Bs observe will always hang about your classic Type A. Type B believes the evidence is either manufactured, ignored or slanted. They believe that the whole eco industry and the thousands of academic departments which have sprung up have a vested interest in those alarm bells. They think it’s political correctness, a new orthodoxy, liberal, bossy and dishonest.

Finally there is Type C, the category into which Jim falls. Type C says: “I cannot possibly know. I hear this from one side and that from another. Both seem convinced, both seem to be marshalling impressive technical figures to their side. I cannot make a judgment.”

Obviously there are views that shade between the three categories but in essence you either believe, deny or sit on the fence.

The problem is he's forgotten that there's a fourth group that doesn't fit into any of the others. Let's call this Type D. Type D's are those who believe that global warming is probably happening, but do not believe that humans are the sole (or major) cause. Instead they have looked at all of the evidence, read the reports, and come to the conclusion that much of the climate change we're seeing is a natural phenomenon. They do not rule out the possibility that human activity has contributed to climate change. They agree that something must be done, but it must be the right something. Throwing billions, if not trillions of dollars on solutions to problems that do not exist, while ignoring the problems that do is foolish. The solution may be to adapt to the coming changes rather than trying to prevent them. The first is far more likely to succeed than the second.

Count me in as a Type D.

Conservatives Aren't Ignoring Global Warming

The accusations and paranoid bleatings of the It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans leftists/greens/clueless envirofascists about how conservatives care nothing for the environment, deny any possibility of global warming, and eat the children of 'progressives' for supper are getting louder and taking on the screeching tone of the truly insane.

Okay, maybe I've exaggerated a little. Actually we eat the children of progressives for breakfast.

All kidding aside, the claims that conservatives care nothing for the environment are specious, made to inflame the faithful. The second claim that conservatives are global warming deniers is also a canard. I know many conservatives have concerns about global warming (me included). But our concerns deal with the actual causes of global warming, not what the so-called consensus tells us it is.

Conservatives want to make sure that we take the right actions, spend money in the proper places and on the right goals. It makes no sense to spend billions, if not trillions of dollars on efforts that will do little to solve the problems global warming might cause.

Even if the climate is changing, is there anything we can do about it? No one is sure. Lowering emissions may indeed slow down or even eliminate excess global warming. Then again, it may not have any effect at all.

And here is where politics insinuates itself into the debate to the detriment of science as well as the debate itself. Scientists argue whether the Greenland glaciers are growing or shrinking, whether the Antarctic ice cap is melting, whether the cyclical nature of sunspots are to blame for the increase in temperature, even whether polar bears are at risk of becoming extinct or not. But it is politicians and advocates who argue about climate change “solutions” and charge their opponents with being mindless fanatics or anti-science zealots depending on whose ox is being gored.

Where does that leave rational, thoughtful science enthusiasts like you and me who may not have the technical acumen to judge the efficacy of scientific arguments but who try and follow the debate anyway?

On the outside looking in, I’m afraid.

And that's one of the biggest problems with the debates. Though there is some scientific debate still ongoing, it is overshadowed by politics. It is the politics that may end up determining the course of action, if any, that we will take. And because the decision will likely be political and not based on science, it will most likely be wrong. Far too often when politics gets involved in serious scientific discourse, the science becomes lost in the noise of politicians hearing themselves speak about things they know little about.

And here is where you will find the most bizarre collection of anti-globalists, anti-capitalists, “sustainable growth” nuts, and population control fanatics allying themselves with Third World kleptocrats in order to soak the west with “carbon offsets” and other gimmicks without reducing emissions by one single molecule. This was the now defunct Kyoto agreement, the first attempt by this motley coalition to radically alter western industrialized civilization.

At least on the other side of the political coin with the most organized efforts to debunk global warming there is the rationality of promoting an anti-warming agenda based largely on economic interests. Lost profits may not be a very noble reason to oppose efforts to reduce emissions but at least it has logic so sorely lacking on the other side.

This then is the political atmosphere in which charge and counter charge is hurled back and forth, with the global warming cadres spewing nonsense about comparing skeptics with “Nazis” while the skeptics accuse climate change advocates of being Luddites.

Again, at that point polite discourse is impossible and political ideologies take over. The science is lost in the meaningless noise of two or more camps arguing like a bunch of kids on a playground. The purpose of the debate is shoved to the background and the contest becomes one of “who can scream the loudest?”

I thought the idea was to determine the truth about global warming – is it caused by human activity, or is it part of a natural cycle? Or is it a little bit of both? Conservatives are generally skeptical about anthropogenic global warming, want more proof rather than some flawed studies, incomplete data, or outright fabrications. We aren't ignoring global warming. But we aren't willing to swallow the malarkey being peddled by those claiming It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans. There are too many unanswered questions to say definitively one way or the other.

Too Many Unanswered Questions

Though this speech was given almost 3 years ago, it is still germane to the debate about global warming, or more specifically, human-caused global warming.

As Michael Crichton says, there are still too many unanswered questions to be spending billions, if not trillions of dollars to prevent a problem that may not even exist.

This is a very contentious issue, especially in environmental circles where the precautionary principle is popular.

There are some instances in which prevention is obviously the best strategy: oil slicks, radiation leaks, exposure to lead and pathogens. Thus the conversion to double-hull tankers and vaccination. It all makes sense. But inevitably things still go wrong. And when they do, we adapt. Indeed, we're so adaptable that we often demand a crisis in order to address the root cause of a problem.

So, over time, I have actually developed an affinity for adaptation, as opposed to prevention, both as a coping mechanism and as a policy predicate. I believe it's the better strategy. As Mark Twain said, "I've seen a heap of trouble in my life, and most of it never came to pass."

In addition, I remind you of the work of the late Aaron Wildavsky, who argued, in a very complicated analysis that you can find in "Searching for Safety," that the strategy of prevention favors the elite; adaptation favors the average person. Certainly if you look at who is advocating which strategy, it seems clear that Wildavsky was right.

The debate isn't anywhere near over.

Consensus Does Not Imply Truth

Despite Al Gore's claim that the consensus is that global warming is All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans©, the inconvenient truth is that there is no consensus. Too many respected climatologists, meteorologists, and other climate scientists disagree, saying that there is not enough data or that the models used to process the data are seriously flawed. Some dissenters are saying that humans have had little, if any effect on the climate and that what changes have been seen are part of a natural process.

Moonbattery has a number of links that names names of those standing up against the so-called consensus that all global warming is caused by humans. Many do not deny there is some kind of global climate change, but they do not look at humans as the cause. After all, climate change has been an ongoing phenomenon since Earth has had an atmosphere. Too many people seem to think that normal climate is what they've been experiencing during their lifetimes or the lifetimes of their parents or grandparents. But within the past 2000 years the climate worldwide has been both warmer and cooler than it has been over the past 100 years.

So what is considered 'normal' in regards to climate? I guess it depends upon each period of time one is talking about. Perhaps we should be speaking about average climate versus normal. But what would the
response of the It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans cabal if they found out the average climate for any given area on Earth is warmer than it is presently? Would they then be guilty of promoting global cooling to keep global temperatures below the' average' temperatures? It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it?

All of that notwithstanding, Al Gore's claim that there is scientific consensus should be a warning, not the end of the argument for or against anthropogenic global warming. As author and physician Michael Crichton said:

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus…

So consensus as Al Gore defines it means nothing when it comes to science, because science can not be legislated nor defined by ideology, such as Al Gore's. Science must stand on its own, and so it is with the science of global climate change.

The Debate Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

Again and again we here that the debate about global warming is over, that it's been proven that It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans®. But nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, the debate has been stifled because it pays more to agree that it is true in order to gain research funding and lobbying money. Anyone saying different is branded a sellout in an effort to marginalize them.

But that doesn't mean they aren't telling the truth.

Prepare For The Upcoming Electronic Apocalypse

Once or twice before I've written brief posts about something called RoHS, or Restriction of Hazardous Substances, a directive from the European Union to severely restrict six toxic substances used in consumer electronics (lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chrome, PBB, and PBDE – the last two being fire retardants used in plastics). This directive was enacted to reduce the amount of these toxic substances entering the waste stream. The concern of the EU was that with the increasing number of electronic devices being used by the average person, the number of these devices entering the waste stream would be increasing at a like rate as such devices reached the end of their useful service life. A mandatory recycling system was also set up to help keep the amount of electronic and electrical waste going to the landfills to a minimum.

The original target of the directive were items like cell phones, PDA's, computers, MP3 players, and related types of electronics, devices with an expected service life of 2 to 3 years. Then more and more electronic and electrical equipment was added to the list until contained just about every one you can think of. It certainly seemed like a good idea...at the time. But there was a major problem with RoHS directive: the ban on lead.

Lead has been used in electronic solders for as long as there's been electronics. Solder is an alloy made up of tin and lead, the most common type with a ratio of 63% tin and 37% lead. This particular mixture has exceptional electrical and physical properties that make it perfect for use in electronics. Yet due to the EU RoHS directive, it is now banned. The problem?

There isn't an acceptable substitute that has the same properties as tin/lead (SnPb) solder.

But that didn't stop the EU from banning it anyways. And now we'll all pay the price.

Replacing tin-lead with pure tin is turning out to have been a huge mistake. There are two significant differences between lead-free assembly and lead-based assembly.

(1) Lead-free assembly is not better for the environment, it is worse. The additional tin mining required to produce high-purity tin alloys, plus the mining of other precious metals required to alloy with tin in substitution for lead is a poor trade for the use of existing lead, much of which comes from recycled products. This information comes from a study conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The study undercuts the primary basis for ROHS.

(2) Lead-free assembly is less reliable than lead-based assembly. The E.U. environmental commission admits this point. That's why they grant exceptions for military and high-reliability applications that still use SnPb solder.

One of the big problems with the lead-free solders being used is that they can promote the growth of tiny tin whiskers, thinner than a human hair. In and of itself, this might not be a problem. But what happens if one of those whiskers growing on a component lead causes a short to another component?

The device in which the components are located fails.

If the time it took for something like this was measured in decades, then there really wouldn't be a problem. But what if it only took 2 to 3 years?

Now you're getting it.

If the electronic device is a cell phone, it probably won't matter. But what if it's your relatively new 52” LCD HDTV? Three years after you took it home it suddenly stops working. It's now out of warranty and you'll have to pay for the cost of diagnostics and repair. And then another two or three years down the road it fails again for the same reason. How would you feel? I know I'd be pissed off.

But now let's look at something even more daunting.

What happens if a RoHS-compliant lead-free circuit board ends up in a nuclear power plant and tin whisker growth causes a short circuit, which in turn causes a false alarm that causes the plant to shut down its reactor?

Think it won't happen? Think again.

How about a worse scenario?

That same circuit card has a short caused by a tin whisker that prevents a detected fault that should shut down the reactor is never sent. The reactor that should have been shut down because of a system failure instead stays on line and causes a much bigger problem.

Mind you, consumer electronics and those used to monitor and control nuclear power plants are different, but they could suffer from the same problem.

The lead-free solder problem could also affect transportation. What of the computers that control the power train in your car or truck? Would you like to pay to have them replaced every few years because tin whiskers caused a malfunction? I know I wouldn't. (Thank goodness aviation electronics are exempt, allowing the use of leaded solder.)

Think about all of the appliances in your home requiring replacement of electronics every few years because short sighted bureaucrats and know-nothing politicians decided that they had to save us from ourselves. RoHS has spread to other countries as well, making it mandatory that manufactures build products that meet those requirements if they want to stay in business.

The irony of the whole thing? Lead, as it is used in electronics, has never been a problem in regards to causing toxic pollution in land fills. Because it is alloyed with tin, it doesn't leach into the ground like lead in paints or old car batteries have been known to do. How do I know this?

Because the EPA says so.

Feeling nervous yet?

UPDATE 10/10/07: I should have posted the video that went with the EDN article. It's well worth the 20 minutes to see what kind of problems going lead-free has created.

Here Comes The Sun

It seems that I'm going to be stuck on a global warming thread for the next couple of days.

After reading the article from which yesterday's post was created, I checked the links that accompanied the article (called “The Deniers”) a series that looks closely at those that have chosen to say “Hey, wait a minute! Something doesn't add up here. Not one little bit!”

Yet another space scientist, Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research says that theories of human caused global warming are all wet.

In 2004, he led a team of scientists that, for the first time, quantitatively reconstructed the sun's activity since the last Ice Age, some 11,400 years ago. Earth hasn't been this hot in 8,000 years and, he predicts, the hot spell will carry on for a few more decades before the sun turns down the heat.

The 19th and 20th centuries are especially noteworthy. "The sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently -- in the last 100 to 150 years," he says. "The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures."

Dr. Solanki gives cold comfort to those who claim that global warming took off with the Industrial Revolution, and that the warming we've seen over the last century is mostly man-made. To demonstrate how unlikely this is, Dr. Solanki shows an almost perfect correlation between solar cycles and air temperatures over the land masses in the Northern hemisphere, going back to the mid 19th century.

For example, when the length of solar cycle increased dramatically, as it did in from 1910 to 1940, so did the temperature on Earth; when it decreased, as it did from the 1940s to the 1960s, so too did Earth temperatures. Dr. Solanki's startling correlation marked a pivotal point in the climate change debate: Its publication, more than any other single event, caused researchers around the world to examine the role that the sun plays in heating and cooling our planet.

This man is not a global warming denier. Instead he is offering a theory that goes against the so-called “consensus” that all global warming is all our fault. Unlike many of the theories offered about anthropogenic global warming, Dr. Solanki offers some hard to refute data that backs his theory that it is solar activity that has been the cause of climate change. But he hasn't ruled out the possibility that human activity has had an effect on the global climate.

Not that Dr. Solanki discredits the role of man-made greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. These have probably played a large role in Earth's climate, he believes, but only since 1980 or so, when the sun's almost perfect correlation with Earth temperatures ended. He also believes that evidence that greenhouse gases have played a larger role in climate change may some day turn up, because his near-perfect correlation does not constitute proof. To date, however, he hasn't seen anything compelling that undermines his own findings.

I am far more inclined to believe Solanki's figures than those from the anthropogenic global warming camp. Their theories have large holes, they lack the data to prove their theories, or ignore data that disproves them. It seems they and their supporters act more from emotion and the misinformation that stokes those emotions rather than looking at all of the evidence, all of the data, and then coming up with a conclusion. There are too many unanswered questions to say definitively that humans are the sole, or major cause of global warming.

I want facts, dammit! Not half-baked or poorly thought out theories that are difficult, if not impossible to test in any way, shape, or form. Our future actions will be dictated by whichever theory wins out, and heaven help us if it's the wrong one because it means we will waste precious time and money on a solution to the wrong problem and we won't be prepared when reality slaps us in the face.

Global Cooling Is The Danger

For some time I have been a skeptic of anthropogenic global warming. There were too many unanswered questions as well as alternate theories that had a lot of evidence to bolster them. Too many 'scientists' have been too willing to point the finger at humans as the cause of global climate change, even though some of those 'scientists' had no background in climatology or meteorology or any related sciences. Many advocates of the It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans theory of global climate change have been all too willing use seriously flawed climate models, cooked data, or outright fabrications to prove their point.

But there have been scientists that have bravely stepped up to the plate and defied the It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans global warming groups, pointing to another cause, a verifiable cause for global climate change: the Sun.

Timothy Patterson is one of those scientists.

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past century's 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

My research team began to collect and analyze core samples from the bottom of deep Western Canadian fjords. The regions in which we chose to conduct our research, Effingham Inlet on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, and in 2001, sounds in the Belize-Seymour Inlet complex on the mainland coast of British Columbia, were perfect for this sort of work. The topography of these fjords is such that they contain deep basins that are subject to little water transfer from the open ocean and so water near the bottom is relatively stagnant and very low in oxygen content. As a consequence, the floors of these basins are mostly lifeless and sediment layers build up year after year, undisturbed over millennia.

Using various coring technologies, we have been able to collect more than 5,000 years' worth of mud in these basins, with the oldest layers coming from a depth of about 11 metres below the fjord floor. Clearly visible in our mud cores are annual changes that record the different seasons: corresponding to the cool, rainy winter seasons, we see dark layers composed mostly of dirt washed into the fjord from the land; in the warm summer months we see abundant fossilized fish scales and diatoms (the most common form of phytoplankton, or single-celled ocean plants) that have fallen to the fjord floor from nutrient-rich surface waters. In years when warm summers dominated climate in the region, we clearly see far thicker layers of diatoms and fish scales than we do in cooler years. Ours is one of the highest-quality climate records available anywhere today and in it we see obvious confirmation that natural climate change can be dramatic. For example, in the middle of a 62-year slice of the record at about 4,400 years ago, there was a shift in climate in only a couple of seasons from warm, dry and sunny conditions to one that was mostly cold and rainy for several decades.

With these cores they were able to track what the climate was like over the previous 5,000 years, finding both gradual and rapid shifts in the climate. They were able to correlate these shifts to changes in the sun's luminosity. Their conclusions parallel that of Dr. Henrik Svensmark, who also found strong evidence that the sun is the driving force in climate change and not human activity.

One of the other conclusions that others have reached is that if the current trends in solar activity continue, the climate will get warmer until about 2020, and then take a sudden downward dive as solar activity falls off. If this is indeed the case, no amount of our tinkering with CO₂ emissions will have any effect on that change at all. And, if it is indeed the case, we will have wasted billions, if not trillions of dollars on trying to prevent global warming rather than preparing for a climate shift that will have far more impact on humankind than global warming would. It will be no less a shock than when the Little Ice Age began sometime after 1300.

I have come to believe we are heading in the wrong direction and should be working to mitigate the effects of climate change rather than trying to prevent it. It is likely that it is nothing we can prevent, regardless of how many treaties are signed or how much money is thrown at the “problem”.

Questions About Weather Instrument Accuracy

One of my questions when it's come to claims that temperatures are rising due to global warming has been “Where are the thermometers taking these readings located?”

NOAA has over 1200 surface weather observation stations throughout the US. Many have been at the same location for decades. Others may have been moved from time to time. The problem is that too many of them are at locations that do not give accurate surface temperature readings either due to placement near heat generating equipment, concrete buildings or asphalt pavement that wasn't there when the instruments were installed, or defective instruments. This can cause higher readings than are actually present at the location, which of course skews the results as well as the historical record.

It appears that I'm not the only one asking the question.

Anthony Watts, a former TV meteorologist had questions about the accuracy of the readings from many of the weather stations and decided to do some investigating.

To assure accuracy, stations (essentially older thermometers in little four-legged wooden sheds or digital thermometers mounted on poles) should be 100 feet from buildings, not placed on hot concrete, etc. But as photos on Watts' site show, the station in Forest Grove, Ore., stands 10 feet from an air-conditioning exhaust vent. In Roseburg, Ore., it's on a rooftop near an AC unit. In Tahoe, Calif., it's next to a drum where trash is burned.

Watts, who says he's a man of facts and science, isn't jumping to any rash conclusions based on the 40-some weather stations his volunteers have checked so far. But he said Tuesday that what he's finding raises doubts about NOAA's past and current temperature reports.

"I believe we will be able to demonstrate that some of the global warming increase is not from CO2 but from localized changes in the temperature-measurement environment."

If what he's found is also the case in other parts of the world, then the question becomes “How much have the world's temperatures really increased?”

Unless the accuracy and placement of the weather stations can be verified, then any data gathered by them is suspect, which calls into question the dire predictions of many of the “We're-All-Doomed” branch of global warming activists. If the data is suspect or corrupted, then any climate model using that data is likewise suspect or corrupted. The models will be worthless.

Maybe it's time to check the data, or at least the instruments used to collect it.

Hurricane Predictions For 2007

Forecasters have again predicted a busy hurricane season, figuring on 13 to 17 tropical storms and 7 to 10 of them becoming hurricanes. Of those, 3-5 are expected to major storms.

Yeah. Right.

All I can remember is how far off the mark the forecasters were last year.

Warm Enough For You?

Unless you've been buried in your basement, you know how unseasonably warm it's been along the East Coast in the US. Here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire it reached 65 degrees today. 65 degrees. In January.

I'm not complaining. Well, not much.

While I like the fact that with temperatures like this there's no need to run either the woodstove or the furnace, there are definite downsides.

One of the biggest ones, at least in this state, is the lack of winter tourist dollars. There's no skiing, no snowmobiling, no sales of winter goods. That's not a good thing, economically.

Frankly, the timing could have been better.

You see, last night our 6-year old refrigerator decided that it wasn't going to refrigerate any more. It's a big inconvenience, but not a disaster by any means. But the thing that gets me, that sets my teeth on edge, is that had this been a normal winter here in New England it would have been a simple matter to put the various refrigerated and frozen foods in coolers and put them outside on one of the decks, thereby keeping them cold. No muss, no fuss. But no, we had to have some of the warmest January weather in over 60 years, meaning that we had to go out to one of the local general stores and buy ice to fill our coolers.

Buying ice. In January. In New England.

What is this world coming to?

Another Report On Global Warming

A new report was released this week that outlines the economic costs of global warming. The report, also known as the Stern Report, tries to lay out the costs of both putting an effort into reducing carbon emissions and of doing nothing. The problem is that the numbers in the report don't add up, in many cases understating both the costs of combating climate change and the time it will take to do so.

Also, global warming skeptic Bjorn Lomborg digs deeper into the numbers and shows that certain assumptions made in the 700 page Stern Report are either suspect or appear to made up out of thin air.

In any case the report will give both pro- and anti-global warming supporters plenty to talk about.

Energy/Environmental Madness

This post will be a two-fer.

First, a full page ad has been running in the statewide newspaper over the past few days. It brings up a simple point:

Much of America's oil and natural gas lies offshore, miles from our coasts. But outdated federal laws prevent exploration and production in many areas, even though advanced technologies allow us to develop these energy sources safely.

While it's true that this message comes from the American Petroleum Institute, their message is valid, at least when it comes to discussing the issue. Banning exploration of the continental shelf seems ludicrous in light of ever increasing oil prices.

While many of the less open minded environmentalists will fight tooth and nail to keep the oil industry from drilling off shore, what these same folks don't realize is that our laws won't prevent oil companies and exploration firms from foreign nations from doing just that. On more than one occasion the topic of Chinese gas and oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere along the US coast has come up. It seems stupid to me to prevent our own industries from exploring while being unable to prevent others from doing the same thing, but without the environmental or safety oversight under which the U.S. Petroleum industry works.

Second, like many of you out there I caught part of ABC's 20/20 last night. And, like many of you, I was outraged at the last segment of the show. The show gave a countdown of the many ways the world could end. The one considered to be the most dangerous was not the supervolcano or gamma ray burst or asteroid strike. Rather, it was human-caused global warming.

While I could rant and rave about the junk science that is being taken as gospel, I think that I'll leave it up to Jim Lundgren at the Volokh Conspiracy as he did a much better job blasting the segment and its premise.

Among the claims that were repeated multiple times (by Al Gore and others) were that there was no scientific debate over whether the cause of global warming was humans. Not only did ABC liken those scientists who did not accept this orthodoxy to Holocaust deniers and to scientists who claimed that cigarettes were not associated with cancer, but ABC actually showed witness after witness for tobacco companies claiming that tobacco did not cause cancer, as if it were not enough merely to mention the analogy in passing. (Query whether that airtime could have been devoted to at least one reputable expert who disagreed with ABC's smugly certain experts?)

ABC showed experts claiming that the reason that scientific dissenters were unwilling to accept the orthodox opinion is that they were being paid by major polluters to take those positions.

ABC trotted out various group studies about the impending environmental disaster, as if ABC was unaware of just how inaccurate group environmental predictions had been in the 1970s and 1980s.

Lundgren also links to a piece in the Boston Globe titled “MIT's Inconvenient Scientist” that tells us about Richard Linzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT.

Here's the kind of information the "scientific consensus" types don't want you to read. MIT's Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen recently complained about the "shrill alarmism" of Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth." Lindzen acknowledges that global warming is real, and he acknowledges that increased carbon emissions might be causing the warming--but they also might not.

"We do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change" is one of Lindzen's many heresies, along with such zingers as "the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940," "the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average," and "Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why." . . .

He's smart. He's an effective debater. No wonder the Steve Schneiders and Al Gores of the world don't want you to hear from him. It's easier to call someone a shill and accuse him of corruption than to debate him on the merits. . . .

Like Linzen, I am not saying that global warming isn't happening. Like Linzen, I also believe that the the finger has been pointed prematurely at homo sapiens as the sole cause. There are a number of other factors that can be driving climate change, including such things as the Sun and natural climatic cycles. To claim otherwise is madness, ignoring factors that we may have no control over. If climate change cannot be averted because it is part of a natural cycle, then pouring resources into programs and projects that will have no effect is a waste of time and money. Instead, those resources should go towards adapting to the upcoming changes and mitigating the effects of those changes where possible.

The problem is that we just don't know enough yet. Going off half cocked will solve nothing and may, in the end, make things worse.

But don't tell Al Gore that.

More Information About The Causes Of Global Climate Change

There's more evidence that Dr. Henrik Svensmark may be correct in his theory that it is solar activity, not to be confused with solar luminence, that is the determining factor in global climate change.

In the words of the four solar scientists, their findings indicate that "periods of higher solar activity and lower cosmic ray flux tend to be associated with warmer climate, and vice versa," and that "the major part of this correlation is due to similar long-term trends in the data sets." In fact, both the sunspot number and cosmic ray parameters exhibit low-frequency variations that closely match the declining temperatures of the Roman Warm Period-to-Dark Ages Cold Period transition that was in progress at the start of the 1800-year records, the subsequent warming that produced the Medieval Warm Period, the following cooling that led to the Little Ice Age, and the most recent warming that produced the Current Warm Period. Hence, it would appear that the millennial-scale oscillation of Earth's climate that has given us these distinctive multi-century warm and cold periods was likely driven by a similar-scale oscillation of the solar-modulated cosmic ray flux.

This does not rule out human activity as a contributing factor to global climate change, but it does rule it out as the sole factor.

Links to other related articles and extracts can be found here.

(H/T GraniteGrok)

A Convenient Lie

And here is Part II of John Stossel Day, where one of my favorite debunkers goes after the hype about how the Kyoto Treaty can save us all, particularly if we destroy the US economy in the process.

I have long maintained that the Kyoto Treaty was a sham, particularly since it only targets successful developed nations while giving a pass to other nations that already pollute far more than the US or Western Europe.

When he was in college, atmospheric-science professor John Christy was told, "it was a certainty that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy."

That prediction has gone the way of so many others. But environmentalists continue to warn us that we face environmental disaster if we don't accept the economic disaster called the Kyoto treaty.

[...]

Christy says, "Doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines but have proven to be completely false. Similar pronouncements today about catastrophes due to human-induced climate change sound all too familiar."

But the media can't get enough of doomsday.

That's part of the problem. Doomsday sells because it generates fear, and the media wants to maintain a “state of fear”, much as Michael Crichton described in his novel of the same name.

It doesn't matter if the doomsday scenarios can't be backed up with science - theories that we have no way of testing any time soon. The media and those with the most to gain by such hysteria are pushing them for all they're worth. Who among them cares if it's true or not? It sells papers, magazines, TV advertising, and generates funding for those within the scientific and pseudo-scientific community pushing these doomsday warnings.

Such an atmosphere makes it almost impossible to have a truly intelligent debate about global climate change, its effects, and its causes. Hysteria reigns and the more moderate or dissenting opinions are drowned out, many times with the doomsayers denouncing those that have the temerity to disagree with them as crackpots, sellouts, or stooges for their corporate masters.

Crichton mentions another doomsday scenario that created quite a stir during the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries: Eugenics. Even though it was later debunked, the theory caused immeasurable harm, eventually leading to the so-called “Final Solution” by Hitler and his cronies – extermination of millions of those the Nazis considered undesirable and genetically inferior.

Am I saying that the global warming hysteria will lead to mass slaughter by those abiding by the numerous doomsday theories out there? No. But I have heard of more than one of the more extreme environmentalists suggesting that 90% of humanity should be eliminated in order to “Save-The-Earth.” Just remember that the Final Solution started out as a “what if” speculation. It's not too far a trip from idle speculation to implementation.

Global Warming - Al Gore Style

Al Gore is on the stump again. But rather than running for President he's touting his latest cause, global warming.

I have no problem with anyone talking about global warming, but I do mind when those talking about it take an alarmist stance and use half-truths, unproven 'facts', and outright falsehoods to bolster their claims.

What's worse, Al and the other Global-Warming-Is-All-Our-Fault cultists scream that we have to “Do Something!” But what? What do we do to control something that has been happening since before humans walked the Earth? How do we control global climate change?

Of course they don't have a viable or technologically feasible solution. But that doesn't stop them from saying that something must be done. It doesn't help that they are wrong about so many things. An example:

In 15 years, Gore said, there will be no more glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro.

That is quite true, but the reason the glaciers are melting on Kilimanjaro is not global warming, but is most likely caused by a change in the local climate conditions due to deforestation along the base and lower slopes of the mountain. The forests provided a lot of moisture to the air that rose along the slopes of the mountain. As the warm moist air rose, it eventually cooled, condensed, and fell as rain and snow on and around the summit. No precipitation, no ice, no glacier. The deforestation wasn't caused by global warming but by people cutting firewood or clearing land for farming.

According to [Douglas R.] Hardy, [a climatologist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst], forest reduction in the areas surrounding Kilimanjaro, and not global warming, might be the strongest human influence on glacial recession. "Clearing for agriculture and forest fires—often caused by honey collectors trying to smoke bees out of their hives—have greatly reduced the surrounding forests," he says. The loss of foliage causes less moisture to be pumped into the atmosphere, leading to reduced cloud cover and precipitation and increased solar radiation and glacial evaporation.

That's but one example of the so-called truths that Al Gore and others point to as proof of anthropogenic global warming.

Claims have been made by many that we're polluting the air and water as we never have before, that we're making our country unlivable and killing off wildlife in the process. Pete Du Pont says otherwise.

Since 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, America's population has increased by 42%, the country's inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has grown 195%, the number of cars and trucks in the United States has more than doubled, and the total number of miles driven has increased by 178%.

But during these 35 years of growing population, employment, and industrial production, the Environmental Protection Agency reports, the environment has substantially improved. Emissions of the six principal air pollutants have decreased by 53%. Carbon monoxide emissions have dropped from 197 million tons per year to 89 million; nitrogen oxides from 27 million tons to 19 million, and sulfur dioxide from 31 million to 15 million. Particulates are down 80%, and lead emissions have declined by more than 98%.

When it comes to visible environmental improvements, America is also making substantial progress:

• The number of days the city of Los Angeles exceeded the one-hour ozone standard has declined from just under 200 a year in the late 1970s to 27 in 2004.

• The Pacific Research Institute's Index of Leading Environmental Indicators shows that "U.S. forests expanded by 9.5 million acres between 1990 and 2000."

• While wetlands were declining at the rate of 500,000 acres a year at midcentury, they "have shown a net gain of about 26,000 acres per year in the past five years," according to the institute.

• Also according to the institute, "bald eagles, down to fewer than 500 nesting pairs in 1965, are now estimated to number more than 7,500 nesting pairs."

Environmentally speaking, America has had a very good third of a century; the economy has grown and pollutants and their impacts upon society are substantially down.

So who do you believe? I'll let you do the research so you can make up your own minds. But I know who it is I'm inclined to believe, and it isn't Al Gore.

The Move To Lead Free Electronics

Though not known much outside the electronics industry, a deadline looms for electronics and electrical equipment manufacturers. On July 1st of this year, much of the electronics and electrical appliances being sold in Europe must meet the EU's Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive, which bans six chemicals or compounds that contain these chemicals. The six substances are lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, cadmium, and two flame retardants – PBB and PBDE.

The banning of these substances has forced the affected industries to scramble to find acceptable substitutes. Some haven't been difficult to replace or phase out altogether, such as cadmium, mercury, chromium, and the two flame retardants. But replacing lead, in the form of tin/lead electronic solder, has been a real challenge. My employer has been going through the pain of making the conversion to the lead-free process. I can say from personal experience that it is indeed painful.

Many of the alternatives to leaded solders don't perform nearly as well, generally require higher temperatures to use, and don't flow very well once they do melt. Most of these replacements still use a very high percentage of tin mixed with copper, silver, or gold. Some also contain bismuth or indium. But they still don't do the job nearly as well as a tin-lead alloy.

One of the major problems with the lead-free solders and component leads is something called tin whiskering. The high tin content of the solder and plating on components can promote the growth of fine filaments of elemental tin, thinner of a human hair. It's not a problem unless these whiskers make contact with another component lead, creating a short circuit. At that point the electronic gizmo will fail. This is a failure mechanism that doesn't exist with tin-lead solders and that the electronics industry is very worried about.

While folks with cell phones, PDA's, laptops, and MP3 players/iPods will likely have little to worry about, those with TV's, computers, microwave ovens, Surround Sound receivers, and others may have to be concerned with the premature death of their beloved electronic devices. The reason for this is that “short term” electronic devices like cell phones and so on have a service life of two or three years before their owners upgrade them. The tin whisker problem can take longer than that to appear. But “long term” electronics like the aforementioned TV's, computers, microwave ovens, Surround Sound receivers, and other gizmos may be around for 5, 10, or 15 years, plenty of time for the whiskering problem to raise its ugly head.

Manufacturers of non-consumer items are also worried about long term reliability. Even the EU realized there might be issues with use of lead-free solder, so they granted exemptions from RoHS requirements - particularly lead - to military, aviation, and medical electronics. They realized that electronic devices in use in these areas were critical to the preservation of life and safety of the public.

But do you want to know what the real kicker is about the banning of lead in electronics?

It's all based upon false assumptions.

Because lead can cause such harm to people, an effort to reduce the potential exposure to lead has gotten it removed from gasoline and paint. Because it was such a problem with gas and paint, it was assumed that it would also be a problem in electronic and electrical devices as well, that the lead solder in those devices would leach into soil and water when they were disposed of in landfills. But that conjecture isn't based upon fact. It was merely assumed.

A number of studies disprove the assumption. I haven't found one study that supports the assumption. If the assumption is false, then why has the electronics industry had to beat itself into a frenzy to conform to a directive that end up doing more harm than good? Simply, politics.

What makes the whole thing even worse is that a study by the US EPA shows that the more common lead-free solders may be more harmful to the environment than tin-lead solder.

It kind of defeats the purpose of going lead-free, doesn't it?

Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

I find it interesting that even as we have reached a number environmental milestones, many are still decrying the toxic wastelands that we have created, the poisonous air that we are all forced to breathe, and the watery sludge we are forced to drink. Except that we aren't.

Many of the more rabid environmentalists would have us believe that things are getting worse all the time. To hear them tell it, our rivers, lakes, and streams are nothing more than toxic cesspools. The very air we breathe is so polluted that it drastically shortens human life, causes asthma, beriberi, and the plague. (OK, so I'm going a bit over the edge on the air thing....but so are the crackpots.)

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Since 1970, carbon monoxide emissions in the U.S. are down 55%, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Particulate emissions are down nearly 80%, and sulfur dioxide emissions have been reduced by half. Lead emissions have declined more than 98%. All of this has been accomplished despite a doubling of the number of cars on the road and a near-tripling of the number of miles driven, according to Steven Hayward of the Pacific Research Institute.

Mr. Hayward compiles the "Index of Leading Environmental Indicators" published around Earth Day each year by PRI and the American Enterprise Institute. It serves as an instructive antidote for the doom and gloom that normally pervades environmental coverage, especially of late.

This year, for example, Vanity Fair has inaugurated an "Earth Issue," comprising 246 glossy, non-recycled pages of fashion ads, celebrity worship and environmental apocalypse. Highlights include computer-generated images of New York City underwater and the Washington mall as one big reflecting pool. The magazine also includes a breathless essay by U.S. environmental conscience-in-chief Al Gore. The message is that we are headed for an environmental catastrophe of the first order, and only drastic changes to the way we live can possibly prevent it.

If arguments were won through the use of italics, Mr. Gore would prevail in a knockout. But as Mr. Hayward notes in his "Index," the environmental movement as a whole has developed a credibility problem since the first Earth Day 36 years ago. In the 1970s, prominent greens were issuing dire predictions about mass starvation, overpopulation and--of all things--global cooling. Since then, population-growth estimates have come way down, biotechnology advances have found ways to feed more people than the doomsayers believed possible, and the global-cooling crisis has become the global-warming crisis without missing a beat.

The fact that the environmental doom-sayers have been so wrong hasn't stopped them from issuing dire predictions based upon nothing more than conjecture, junk science, and faith that they are the saviors of the world. Unfortunately their outlook upon the state of the environment is sadly out of date, harking back to the 60's rather than the 00's. Rivers and streams are no longer open sewers or filled with toxic waste that has killed every living thing within them. I remember all too well the polluted water and air of that era.

I'm not claiming that everything is perfect as there's still lots of work to do to finish the job, but we aren't on the brink of environmental disaster as these over-the-top 'environmentalists' claim.

Climate Of Fear

Once again the debate about global warming has come forward, with alarmist stories on ABC's World News Tonight, diatribes in numerous daily, weekly, and monthly publications, and, of course, the Internet. Fear has pervaded many of the reports, painting doomsday scenarios and pointing the finger at the Bush Administration for all of the problems the human race will have to deal with because the US has failed to embrace Kyoto blindly, refused to go back to living in caves or living hand-to-mouth in order to 'Save The Planet'.

It's ironic that many Americans have taken a ho-hum attitude about the whole thing, basically ignoring the apocalyptic reports, stories, and studies despite the media's best attempt to stir up a state of fear. That in itself is not a problem. What is a problem is those same media outlets and climate doomsayers will stop at nothing to silence dissenting voices, particularly if those voices are of scientists and scholars as well versed in climate science as the doomsayers. Anyone who disagrees with them and can back up their theories with scientific evidence rather than innuendo and junk science are automatically seen as heretics, traitors to “The Cause”.

There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?

The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.

But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

It sounds almost like Lysenkoism in the old Soviet Union – Ideology triumphs over science, trying to define what is true through the political microscope rather than what can be proved through scientific inquiry and study.

“Anthropogenic climate change” is the mantra, all shifts in global climate are automatically the fault of human activity. Anyone postulating other causes or questioning whether mankind is the cause of climate change is demonized and dismissed out of hand as crackpots or sellouts. After all, “everybody knows” global warming is all out fault. Except that it may not be happening at all, and if it is, it probably isn't our fault, at least most of it isn't.

There are many factors that can contribute to climate change, only one of which is human activity. More often than not, human activity can change climate in a very small area, usually due to defoliation and construction of roads, homes, and buildings. I still maintain that if something is driving climate change (and since when has it been that climate has ever been static) that it is most likely that it is something off of Earth. One of the biggest reasons I've come to this conclusion is that the climate of Mars has seen change, particularly its ice caps.

They're melting.

How do the It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans fearmongers explain that?

They don't. They merely decide to ignore it as it flies in the face of their beliefs. It's one of the reasons I stopped taking them serious years ago.

Die, Hippies, Die!

I saw this and knew I had to share it with the regular WP readers, all 15 of you.

(H/T It Comes In Pints?)

Global Warming - Part LVI

I haven't broached this subject for a while: global climate change.

It started innocently enough with a discussion at work. Once I got home from work I checked out Instapundit and there was a link to an article on the Wall Street Journal Online about getting some oversight on climate studies. There was also a blurb in one of the local papers about warming and how its caused cancellation of the annual Laconia Sled Dog Races.

I figured that all of these happenstances were a sign, so here goes.

It's about time that we take a serious look at some of the claims being made about climate change. For far too long the public and the media have been taking as gospel the 'fact' of global warming and how It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans™. Global climate change has gone on for millennia without any input from us. To think that from now on that it can only happen because of us is just plain ignorant. To ignore the possibility that human activity is a contributing factor is also a non-starter. Now we're about to start getting a serious look at how the various climatologists are acquiring and analyzing their data and programming their climate models based upon that data.

Seeking to resolve a scientific dispute that has taken on a rancorous political edge, the National Academy of Sciences said it had agreed to a request from Congress to assess how well researchers understand the history of temperatures on earth.

The study by the academy, an independent advisory body based in Washington, will focus on the "hockey stick," a chart of past temperatures that critics say is inaccurate. The graph gets its name because of the sudden, blade-like rise of recent temperatures compared with past epochs.