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Bad news for our AGW zealot friends!!
Hannah Hoffman
7 Nov 2008
A number of researchers say that despite public opinion, global warming may
be a result of natural causes
If the Greenland icecap melts, the Sahara expands and the Siberian
permafrost disappears, don't blame carbon-emitting SUVs or billowing
smokestacks, says a group of scientists who claim their research on global
warming has been repressed.
The explanation, they argue, might be simpler: Mother Nature is just going
through her natural cycles.
Researchers from around the world have begun to question the growing
acceptance among the public, the media and the scientific community that
labels human behavior as the primary cause of global warming.
The researchers who go against the scientific grain on the climate change
issue know their ideas are unpopular. In fact, many claim their research is
so disliked the rest of the scientific community is working to suppress it
in spite of convincing scientific evidence.
They also claim that the suggested effects of global warming are nothing
short of "sheer fear-mongering," as Marlo Lewis of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute put it. The more probable effects of climate change are
likely to be much less severe than activists would indicate, researchers
say.
These unpopular and inflammatory ideas don't seem to have infiltrated the
University of Oregon community. Many professors at the University adamantly
insist global warming is man-made and any debate to the contrary is
pointless.
Humans aren't at fault
While many University of Oregon professors are in the public majority on the
global warming issue and in line with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, an international group that compiles research and issues reports on
climate change, the voice of dissent is surfacing in a growing number of
intellectual communities.
In December 2007, a group of more than 400 scientists from more than 24
nations testified that they do not think global warming is man-made. The
group, appearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public
Works, contested many of the main points that support human-induced global
warming and said their skeptical views have been repressed by scientific
journals and the mainstream media.
Scientists in the group represented had worked for institutions such as
Harvard University, NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University
of London, Princeton University and the International Arctic Research
Centre.
Don Easterbrook, a geology professor at Western Washington University in
Bellingham, has spent his career studying climate patterns and glaciers in
the Cascade Mountains and Greenland. He has concluded carbon dioxide
emissions are not causing global warming - natural climate fluctuation
patterns are.
Easterbrook and his colleague Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at
the University of Alabama at Huntsville, say nature can regulate itself with
climate and solar cycles. Compared with other greenhouse gasses such as
water vapor, carbon dioxide does not trap heat in a significant way, they
say.
They say that assuming humans alone have created global warming borders on
arrogance.
The two are studying the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a naturally occurring
temperature fluctuation in the Pacific Ocean that has been observed by NASA
satellite observations. The PDO changes between warm and cold cycles
approximately every 20 to 30 years, which changes the cloudiness of Earth,
the behavior of the jet stream and subsequently the temperature, according
to NASA.
In the abstract for his article "Tropical Pacific decadal variability and
global warming," Benjamin Giese, a professor of oceanography at Texas A&M
University, writes: "The results suggest that much of the decade to decade
variations in global air temperature may be attributed to tropical Pacific
decadal variability."
Spencer believes the PDO cycles explain about 75 percent of the climate
change during the 20th century. During that time, Earth went through a cold
period from 1900-20, was warm from 1920-45, cooled down from 1945-77 and
warmed from 1977-98. Spencer and Easterbrook say all of those fluctuations
correlate with changes in the PDO.
Global warming may be affected by more than just earthly causes, Easterbrook
said. Solar cycles may be having an effect as well. The number of sunspots,
or black areas of the sun, range from zero to 170 and the fewer there are,
the cooler the Earth is.
Current sun spot activity is very similar to that around 1600 and 1800,
which were very cold times in history, Easterbrook said. During the last 500
years, solar cycles have changed between 25 and 30 times, corresponding with
climate changes.
According to Easterbrook, 80 to 90 percent of global warming can be
attributed to the greenhouse effect of water vapor.
University of Notre Dame professor William Evans echoed this observation.
"Yes, CO2 is one of several greenhouse gasses, but (it's) not the biggest
contributor. Water vapor is," Evans said in an e-mail.
Tim Patterson, professor of Earth sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa,
told the Canadian Free Press in 2005 that carbon dioxide levels today are 10
times lower than 450 million years ago - when the Earth was the coldest it
has been in the past half-billion years.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, carbon
dioxide levels in the atmosphere are currently at 385 parts per million, a
rise of about 100 parts per million since the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution. Nevertheless, Easterbrook said current levels are still too
negligible to have the effects the scientific community has been attributing
to them.
Spencer agreed. He added it is very difficult to prove carbon dioxide is
causing global warming because the current warming cycle is the only one in
which the gas had a significant presence at all. Just because Earth has
warmed while carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere does not mean there is
actually a correlation, Spencer and Easterbrook said.
"The possibility that global warming is completely natural has never really
been investigated," Spencer said.
'Fear Promotion'
Although a body of research focuses on the cause of climate change, a group
of researchers say the cause is superfluous. To them, the possibility of
catastrophe is more important - and it is a possibility that has been
drastically exaggerated, they say.
In the group that testified before the Senate, some participants were
environmentalists who wanted to protest the "fear promotion" they thought
global warming activists were using.
The problems that global warming can cause - increased sea levels, melted
ice caps, endangered arctic species - have been overblown, according to some
researchers.
Lewis has analyzed former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al
Gore's documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth" and found it an example of
the "fear promotion" vetted in the Senate hearings.
Lewis took to task Gore's three main claims, which he says are overstated
and created unfounded fear among the public.
The first said the Greenland ice sheet is melting and the moulins, or rivers
of melted glacial ice, are destroying the structural integrity of
Greenland's glaciers.
The second predicts a 20-foot sea level rise and the third predicts a trend
of very severe hurricanes.
At a glance
Fluctuations in PDO and global climate (20th century)
1900-20: Cold
1920-45: Warm
1945-77: Cold
1977-98: Warm
1998-Present: Cold
Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis,
said none of the predicted problems is new and most have been described
inaccurately. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he said, scientists predicted
severe hurricanes would be a continuing trend brought on by global warming.
The mediocre hurricane seasons of 2006 and 2007 directly refute that claim.
Both years had only five hurricanes and two major hurricanes, according to
the Pew Center on Global Warming, in contrast to 2005, which had 15
hurricanes and seven major hurricanes.
Burnett also said that while sea levels may rise a few inches during the
next century, they have already risen 400 feet since the end of the last ice
age 12,000 years ago, an increase of three feet per century. That indicates
that sea level increases today are nothing out of the ordinary.
George Kukla, a research scientist at Columbia University, said creating
fear about global warming is more harmful than the phenomenon itself. He
also raised the concern that money and funding were a major motivation
behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's and its allies' focus
on disaster scenarios and negative effects of climate change.
"The only thing to worry about is the damage that can be done by worrying.
Why are some scientists worried? Perhaps because they feel that to stop
worrying may mean to stop being paid," Kukla said before the Senate.
At a glance
GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE TIMELINE
1974: Time Magazine publishes an article entitled "Another Ice Age?"
1976: Stephen Schneider, Stanford University climatologist, predicts global
warming
1988: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change founded by United Nations in
the wake of evidence of a warming climate
1998: The hottest year in recorded history
2001: The Kyoto Treaty is drafted; the United States declines to sign
2006: The documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" is shown at the Sundance Film
Festival
2007: Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize for the documentary and book "An
Inconvenient Truth"
Repression in the scientific community
Like Kukla, Spencer claimed that money motivates the IPCC's findings and
suggested its existence is purely political. Easterbrook had the same
concerns, as did Burnett and several scientists testifying before the
Senate.
Spencer went so far as to say the IPCC had been created solely to compile
sufficient scientific evidence to call for the reduction of fossil fuels -
and that essentially, the political motivation preceded the scientific
evidence. He said colleagues had admitted as much in private conversations.
Many present at the Senate hearing in December 2007 said they had colleagues
who agreed but would not come forward for fear of the scientific community's
reaction. Since the testimony, a number of scientists have come out of
hiding, boosting the group's membership to more than 500.
In the Senate hearing, Madhav Khandekar, a Canadian scientist with the
Natural Resources Stewardship Project and expert reviewer for the 2007 IPCC
report, claimed the IPCC did not follow proper scientific procedure and
disregarded questions or concerns about its report on global warming.
Khandekar said the IPCC ignored his comments and suggestions to the first
draft of the report. They made almost no changes to the document and didn't
bother to communicate with him at all about concerns he had raised, and
other expert reviews whom Khandekar knows experienced the same frustrations,
he said.
"This is not an acceptable scientific review process."
The dissenting majority
A number of University of Oregon professors appear personally affronted when
presented with the suggestion that climate change is a naturally occurring
phenomenon. History professor Matthew Dennis, a member of the environmental
studies department, said, "I think most people wouldn't take that view on
campus."
Dennis said questioning scientific information is helpful and useful because
skepticism is part of the academic process. "If we hear these truths
espoused," he said, "what academics are trained to do is question that."
However, Dennis said the questioning can go too far, and implied that it had
done so in the case of global warming skepticism. "Some sides have been
heard enough," he said. "After a while it's just perverse."
Geography professor Patrick Bartlein said, "That's just preposterous," and
added, "How do I explain the Earth's not flat?" He said he has no doubt
whatsoever that the climate is changing and that humans are the culprits.
University law professor Mary Wood said, "There's just no real debate
anymore." She called questioning the cause of global warming a "dangerous
distraction."
Wood said it is no longer useful to continue re-hashing this issue, which
she thinks has been decided. "The scientific and governmental community has
moved on and now the question is, can we cut our carbon in time to avoid
dangerous climate thresholds?"
Chris Stratton, a University master's candidate in architecture and
environmental studies, agrees that the debate is over. "It's like giving
equal time to two theories about evolution, one of which speculates that an
enormous spaghetti monster created us all, and one that speculates that
evolution occurs through natural selection," he wrote in an e-mail.
In a lecture on journalism bias, University media ethics professor Tom
Bivins told a lecture hall full of more than 100 students that a
continuation of the global warming debate is an example of "fairness bias"
in the media and an ethical issue. Fairness bias is when a journalist
presents two sides to an issue when the overwhelming majority of society has
already agreed on a solution to the debate. As far as Bivins' lecture is
concerned, presenting two sides to the global warming debate is a prime
example of this kind of unethical bias.
Never a closed door
The majority of scientists, government officials and private citizens think
the debate on global warming is - and should be - closed. However, in the
scientific world even the most accepted theories are up for discussion.
String theory, for example, is an effort to unite in one mathematical model
all the natural forces - gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong.
This means that more than 300 years after Isaac Newton mathematically
described gravity and nearly 100 years since Albert Einstein published his
Theory of Relativity, scientists are still debating how gravity really works
and if Newton and Einstein were right at all.
Most recently, scientists have discovered that much of what they thought
were proteins produced by DNA were actually a chemical called RNA. This has
led to a re-evaluation of the human genome and the way it works - 55 years
after Francis Crick and James Watson discovered DNA.
The door is never closed on scientific debates and according to scientists
who dissent on the global warming issue, it shouldn't be.
"Science is not a democracy," Burnett said. "Galileo was a minority of one."
http://media.www.dailyemerald.com/media/storage/pape
r859/news/2008/11/17/News/A.Global.Farce-3547140.sht
ml
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
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HONOUR TO YOU MR KANGA, YOU ARE ONE OF THE BEST
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