Global Warming Panic Merchants

Despite dire warnings about global warming, and atmospheric CO2 increasing by about 18% during the last decade, the average temperature has not gone up since 1998. In fact, last year the northern hemisphere had the most snow cover in 66 years, and 2008 has been the coldest year for a decade. This doesn’t make sense if “Global warming” is caused by CO2. In fact, there is no scientific proof what-so-ever that CO2 is responsible for more than a tiny portion of the global warming that has occurred since the end of the, so called, Little Ice Age, which ended 150 years ago.

There is also no scientific proof that CO2 is not causing global warming, although the evidence is weighted in favor of current global warming being a natural event. The Arctic and Antarctic ice cores clearly show that prehistoric global warming occurred prior to increased atmospheric CO2. More recently we had a period of global cooling from about 1960 to 1980, although post-industrial atmospheric CO2 rose rapidly during that period. At the time, many of the same people who are now touting “man made global warming,” were warning the public that catastrophic global cooling was imminent.

One of the most disturbing phenomena’s of the global warming event, are the fanciful warnings from professional panic merchants. All Gore warned that global warming will lead to more hurricanes, blithely ignoring data that there were more, and larger hurricanes during the first half of the 20th century than in the second half, and that 2007 and 2008 hurricane seasons had the least hurricane activity in the Northern Hemisphere in 30 years. In point of fact, it I reasonable to assume that storminess and weather variability will actually decrease in a warmer world. According to observations, climate changes are greater in the high latitudes than in the tropics. Thus, in a warmer world, we would expect that the temperature difference between high and low latitudes would diminish, leading to less storminess, and less violent weather variations.

That is the thing about the panic merchants; they don’t seem to care about actual observations on the ground. Essential to alarm is the fact that most current climate models predict a response to doubling of CO2 of about 4C, which is at least four times greater than one would expect the simple doubling of CO2 to produce. That is because the climate models all assume that water vapor and clouds will act in such a way as to amplify the effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. That is pure speculation, and actual observations make such conclusions implausible.

The alarm surrounding the issue of global warming seems peculiarly inconclusive and irrelevant to the predicted catastrophes. The panic merchants fail to note there have been many sources of climate change, and that climate change occurred many times both before and after man appeared on earth. Given the ubiquity of climate change, it is improbable that all change will be for the worse. Moreover, the coincidence of increasing CO2 and the small amount of warming over the past century hardly establishes causality.

The impact of CO2 on temperature is nonlinear in the sense that each added unit contributes less than its predecessor. So, if doubling CO2 from its pre-industrial value of 290 parts per million by volume or ppmv to 580 ppmy causes a 2% increase in temperature, then to obtain another 2% increase in temperature we must increase CO2 by an additional 580 ppmv rather than by another 290 ppmv. At present, the concentration of CO2 is about 380 ppmv. The easiest way to understand this is to consider adding layers of paint to a pane of glass. The first layer of paint cuts out much of the light, and subsequent layers cuts out more, until the painted pane is essentially opaque.

Unfortunately, the scientific community appears committed to the maintenance of the notion that alarm and fear of global warming is essential to the maintenance of funding. A good indicator of this is the widespread scientific agreement that the Kyoto Agreement would have no discernible impact on climate. This fact clearly is of no importance to the thousands of negotiators, diplomats, regulators, and advocates whose livelihood is tied to climate alarmism.

Gråulf.