Posted on February 2nd, 2010 by admin
Most of the long-term climate models show feedback from an increase of carbon dioxide that ultimately creates more carbon dioxide. The theory is that as CO2 increases, the temperature increases. As the temperature increases, it forces more CO2 to be released from CO2 sinks or it causes less CO2 to be absorbed. This extra CO2 causes a dramatic increase in temperature – which releases more CO2. Many of the models that predicted the end of world had this increase in CO2 and temperature. It really wasn’t the CO2 from man that was the problem, it was the tipping point that was reached by man’s CO2. Read more... (805 words, estimated 3:13 mins reading time)
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Filed under: Getting warmer, Greenhouse gas, Human fault, Weather science
Posted on December 22nd, 2009 by admin
Nigel Lawson has done a remarkable job of explaining the basic problem with limiting the use of carbon based fuels in our world today. His argument doesn’t really take a side on the merits of the science but rather on the realities of economics. His opinion recently showed up in the Wall Street Journal and I have taken the liberty to include selected parts here. I suggest that you click through to read the entire article.
Lord Lawson was U.K. chancellor of the exchequer in the Thatcher government from 1983 to 1989. He is the author of “An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming” (Overlook Duckworth, paperback 2009), and is chairman of the recently formed Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org). Read more... (902 words, estimated 3:36 mins reading time)
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Filed under: Getting warmer, Politics, Technology
Posted on December 2nd, 2009 by admin
David Harsanyi has an excellent editorial on the ClimateGate fiasco that has been dominating this blog and many others across the blogosphere. His editorial originally appeared on RealClearPolitics. He is allowing me to reproduce parts of it here and I encourage you to jump over to the full article to read more.
Who knows? In the long run, global warming skeptics may be wrong, but the importance of healthy skepticism in the face of conventional thinking is, once again, validated.
We found out that respected men discussed the manipulation of science, the blocking of Freedom of Information requests, the exclusion of dissenting scientists from debate, the removal of dissent from the peer-reviewed publications, and the discarding of historical temperature data and e-mail evidence.
Read more... (428 words, estimated 1:43 mins reading time)
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Filed under: Politics
Posted on November 24th, 2009 by admin
Most people that read this site have likely heard of the emails that were stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). I would like to offer a few of my thoughts on the subject.
First, catch the people responsible for breaking into the property of the University of East Anglia. Prosecute the offenders to the fullest extent of the law. I am not versed in the laws of the UK but I would assume that each document and email that was illegally stolen from those servers would be an individual count of theft, so the parties involved would be liable for several thousand counts of theft. No one should ever break the law to further their political interest (and remember there was nothing purely scientific in these emails – they are simply emails with opinions and, as such, are not facts). Breaking the law is simply not a way to discuss the scientific relevance of information. So just as I condemn Mr. Al Gore, former Vice President of the US, for suggesting civil disobedience, I condemn the stealing of information from the University. Read more... (2189 words, estimated 8:45 mins reading time)
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Filed under: Politics, Technology, Weather science
Posted on November 4th, 2009 by admin
This is absolutely unbelievable. It now appears that Mr. Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States and Nobel prize winner for his theories on global warming, may be stepping back from some of his strong beliefs.
“Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that’s still justified,” Gore told Newsweek . “But a comprehensive plan to solve the climate crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all” of the greenhouse culprits identified in the Nasa study.” Read more... (527 words, estimated 2:06 mins reading time)
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Filed under: Uncategorized
Posted on August 27th, 2009 by admin
As nations around the world begin to plan for Copenhagen to discuss the next generation Kyoto treaty, it is increasingly obvious that they will be ineffective.
Chief among the reasons for this ineffectiveness is that with the price of oil at its current state, it is simply not cost effective to use alternative fuels that will dump less CO2 into the atmosphere. The oil producing nations are probably not maintaining crude at this level to doom the planet to disaster, they are simply smart business people that are providing their “drugs” to the “addicts” at a price and in a way that will insure that no one can ever move off. Read more... (860 words, estimated 3:26 mins reading time)
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Filed under: Greenhouse gas, Politics
Posted on August 12th, 2009 by admin
I am often asked if the reduction of the size of glaciers is the fault of global warming. My standard answer is that I don’t know as the evidence is far from conclusive.
A case in point is a graph from the USGS fact sheet:
Two conclusions are fairly obvious from the above graph. First, the size of glacier recession has been occurring almost since the time when we started measuring the size back in the late 50s. The second is that the reduction seemed to increase rather rapidly in the late 80s and early 90s. If we draw a straight line to average the reduction from 1960 to 1975, we will see a totally different rate as compared to the line that averages 1980 to 2005.
Read more... (380 words, 2 images, estimated 1:31 mins reading time)
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Filed under: Getting warmer, Weather science
Posted on July 30th, 2009 by admin
If you read this site often, you will know that I am an engineer by training (even though I don’t currently practice). I tend to respect this profession a great deal as being fairly straight-forward and hard working. As a group, they also tend to be a pretty smart bunch.
One of the major trade rags in engineering is C&EN (Chemical and Engineering News). It is edited by Mr. Rudy Baum. If you aren’t in that trade, you would probably never pick up an issue so you may not be familiar with it. I haven’t read the publication in a long time but was recently made aware of a bit of controversy by Climate Depot. While the readers of C&EN are likely not climatologists, the science of CO2 and its affect on the atmosphere is very steeped in chemistry which their target market knows a bit about. Read more... (1165 words, estimated 4:40 mins reading time)
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Filed under: Greenhouse gas, Technology, Weather science
Posted on July 29th, 2009 by admin
I found this study by reading the blog at AccuWeather.com. If you are interested in climate, then you should spend time reading what the meteorologists over there have to say.
A study by 3 researchers and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research has concluded that the weather variations (both increases and decreases) are the result of natural climate processes. They find that the Southern Oscillation is a key indicator of changing global atmospheric temperatures seven months later.
The paper is titled “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature” and following is the abstract: Read more... (667 words, estimated 2:40 mins reading time)
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Filed under: Getting warmer, Greenhouse gas, Natural, Weather science
Posted on July 16th, 2009 by admin
There is an article in the USAToday (that is based on an article in Nature Geoscience) that is getting a lot of web traffic lately.
While few people would call me a global warming alarmists, I do think it is important to have relatively balanced perspective on all of this. In fact, that is the essence of this blog.
Most reputable scientists without an agenda (which likely excludes anyone associated with Al Gore) had concluded long ago that it wasn’t the CO2 concentrations that would deliver the doom and gloom of the alarmists. Rather, the concern was a feedback loop that would be accelerated by a fairly rapid expansion of carbon dioxide. One theory is that this CO2 increase would cause temperatures to increase slightly which causes an increase in H2O in the atmosphere which further increases the temperature in an escalating fashion. Read more... (460 words, estimated 1:50 mins reading time)
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Filed under: Getting warmer, Greenhouse gas, Natural, Weather science