Vast Majority?
You at least have to give credit to Agence France-Presse for admitting that the 'consensus' on global warming has some very credible dissenters. They try to denigrate those dissenters by marginalizing them, but they at least mention them. They at least pick up the story that a study has found that the widely used, agreed upon climate models are seriously flawed. The study, by David Douglass, John Christy, Benjamin Pearson and Fred Singer, found that the models break down - to the point of reversing symbols from positive to negative, as altitude increases. If global warming gasses were indeed the cause of the warming trend, that should not be true. Yet, there it is. AFP says this about the study - which used actual, agreed-upon data and the actual, agreed-upon models:
These experts believe that global warming is a natural phenomenon, and they point to reams of data they say support their assertions.
These conclusions are in sharp contradiction to those of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reached its conclusions using largely similar data.
The UN body of about 3,000 experts, including several renowned US scientists, adopted a landmark report in mid-November stating that the evidence of a human role in the warming of the planet was now "unequivocal."
Retreating glaciers and loss of snow in Alpine regions, thinning Arctic summer sea ice and thawing permafrost shows that climate change is already on the march, the report said.
Carbon pollution, emitted especially by the burning of oil, gas and coal, traps heat from the Sun, thus warming the Earth's surface and inflicting changes to weather systems.
A group of US scientists however disagree, and have written an article on their views that is published in The International Journal of Climatology, a publication of Britain's Royal Meteorological Society.
"The observed pattern of warming, comparing surface and atmospheric temperature trends, doesn't show the characteristic fingerprint associated with greenhouse warming," wrote lead author David Douglas, a climate expert from the University of Rochester, in New York state.
"The inescapable conclusion is that human contribution is not significant and that observed increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases make only a negligible contribution to climate warming," Douglas wrote.
Dr. Douglass' name is misspelled in the AFP article. It is actually David Douglass. I have exchanged emails with Dr. Douglass and he was kind enough to send me a copy of his paper. I reproduced a graph from that paper that shows how off the models are. They are off, rather badly, yet policy decisions are being forced based upon them. There are flies in that pot of ointment, however. Some of the much genuflected to 3,000 scientists have publicly disavowed the IPCC conclusions. There are also problems with the media-propagated stories. Take arctic ice, for example.
Even the greenies are admitting that arctic sea ice is refreezing at a rate never before seen - they have to, NASA says so.
The record melting of Arctic sea ice observed this summer and fall led to record-low levels of ice in both September and October, but a record-setting pace of re-freezing in November, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. Some 58,000 square miles of ice formed per day for 10 days in late October and early November, a new record.
But, of course, the simple fact is that the records only go back a very few years because we have only been keeping them for a few years. We have only had the technology to do so in a human lifespan or so. Before that, we had an occasional observation. Not long before that we had no data at all. Yet we are now supposed to change the world based on this minuscule amount of data.
The United Nations has proved, over and over again how utterly corrupt and utterly incompetent they are at virtually everything they touch. Why in heaven's name are we listening to them?
Environment | Gaius Saturday, 15 December , 2007
By ajacksonian, Sunday, 16 December , 2007 @ 10:53 am
One of the problem with AGW is that it does not explain the record beyond the mere present. That is *not* the history of life on this planet nor of carbon dioxide levels, nor of many other things that each play into overall climate. As a geologist, I call ‘bunk’ on that and did some time ago and continue to do so. When you look at the larger and longer record, you learn that what we are seeing is an inter-glacial phenomena of sudden warmings and coolings due to the relatively low global temperature we have now. The overall record on these things does not show a correlation between carbon dioxide and overall average global temperatures, although the concept of regression to the mean does show up with temperatures, but now with the current tectonic conditions on the Earth.
Those conditions as they have been for the past 70 million years or so, demonstrate that continental speed, elevation due to speed, lack of shallow oceans and breaking up of a super-continent all matter far, far more to overall climate than carbon dioxide which appears to be a fully independent variable. Until those tectonic conditions change, we are stuck in a cycle of climate variation that looks to be unrelated to carbon dioxide. In fact the planet is damn chilly compared to its normal temperature over hundreds of millions of years. But even then and going back far into history to the appearance of life on the continents, carbon dioxide was over 20 times as high in concentration then as it is today… along with methane, water vapor and a slew of other ‘greenhouse gases’. Didn’t happen or we wouldn’t be talking about it here, today.
If you want to know *weather* talk to a meteorologist.
If you want to know *climate* talk to a geologist… the folks with the data.