Global warming

Copyright by John T. Reed

It would take an encyclopedia to cover the global-warming debate. I will not write that much, but I want to go on record about it to an extent.

Definition

The phrase “global warming” suggests nothing more than a series of scientific temperature readings. But thanks to Al Gore and others, it has taken on a much larger, political meaning, namely,

The earth is rapidly getting catastrophically warmer because of increased burning of fossil fuels by humans and emergency laws must be passed to reduce that burning of fossil fuels to Nineteenth Century levels.

Warming?

Is the earth warming? According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the temperature of the earth rose a total of .6 degrees Celsius between 1900 and 1999. .6 degrees Celsius is 1.08 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the total, cumulative 100-year change, not the annual change.

Like many, I wonder how they measure that, and where. If they use a rectal thermometer, my guess is they stick it in Mogadishu.

And excuse me, but how is a 1.08 increase in temperature over 100 years an emergency or even noteworthy?

‘Climate change’

After being embarrassed by numerous incidents of cold weather, the leftists changed the name of global warming to “climate change.” Now they get to bitch about and say “we told you so” in response to any weather other than average. My Harvard Business School classmate, Orit Gadiesh, is head of Bain and famous for the comment, “The average person has one tit and one ball.” There’s also the old chestnut that you can drown in a pond with an average depth of six inches. As any bell curve graph of data can confirm, if you get to use all data other than average to gain political power, you will be powerful indeed.

It’s always warming or cooling

In his book Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity, ABC 20/20 reporter John Stossel reproduces a graph of the earth’s average temperatures for the last 4,000 years. The so-called global warming about which Al Gore is so excited is a barely visible, tiny uptick just before the end of the graph. It is the smallest movement up or down on the 4,000-year graph. Earlier periods show much bigger upward and downward movements. They also show that the earth’s temperature has never been stable. The global-warming movement would have you believe it has always been stable until SUVs.

We did have a bunch of ice ages you know. The fact that they all ended indicates there must have been some big-time global warming back then, not just 1.08 degrees in 100 years. And most of that big-time global warming occurred before the human race existed, let alone before suburbanites began driving SUVs.

You can probably find the graph on the Internet. It is from the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program and World Data Center for Paleoclimatology in Boulder, CO.

Man-made

What about the notion that humans caused the 20th Century increase in temperature by driving cars more and having air-conditioning?

According to page 202 of Stossel’s book, since half of the 1.08-degree increase in earth temperature came between 1900 and 1945, and the use of fossil fuels was low then and did not dramatically increase until the 1950s and thereafter, it would appear that the cause is not humans burning fossil fuels.

Politics

Liberals would have us believe global warming is scientific fact. If it is scientific fact, why is it a liberal/conservative debate? Liberals and conservatives are not scientists, they are political advocates.

When politics gets involved, facts and truth go out the window.

It has been well said that the green movement is really the red movement in a disguise. The red movement—Communism and socialism, class hatred, profit hatred, and all that—has been discredited by having been tried in numerous countries. One of the great stories of the last several decades is the collapse of Communist and socialist economies because it simply does not work, and the replacement of those economic systems with capitalist ones. Unprecedented capitalism-created prosperity now characterizes formerly socialist countries like Russia, Eastern Europe, China, India, and Vietnam.

The emergence of the green movement now is an indication that the reds never were in favor of prosperity to begin with. They just hate those who win when competition, not politics, is the criterion as it is in free economies.

So now they are claiming to be green to save the earth, just as they claimed to be red to save the “workers of the world” before. In fact, they were red, and are now green, to jerk around those who succeed when competition decides the winners.

Global warming and the wider green movement is just a disguised effort to establish government control of much of the economy—the same sort of government control that socialism sought, obtained in many countries, then lost because of its massive failures.

Columnist Thomas Sowell calls it “Global hot air.”

6/26/09 Wall Street Journal article

The 6/26/09 Wall Street Journal had an excellent article by Kimberly Strassel. It was titled “The Climate Change Climate Change.” It listed people who dispute the so-called “consensus” of scientists who agree with the leftists on man-made climate change. Here are the noteworthy persons and groups in the article who dispute the existence of man-made, deleterious, reversible climate change:

Steve Fielding, Australian Senator
Polish Academy of Sciences
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic
89% of Czech people in polls
Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France
Claude Allegre, French Minister of Industry and Innovation and former global warming supporter who retracted that position
The new parliament of New Zealand which promptly stopped the country’s cap and trade program
700 scientists as counted by Senator Jim Inhofe (OK)
Joanne Simpson, first female PhD meteorologist who revealed her opposition only after retiring out of fear for her job
Dr. Kiminori Itoh, Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to U.N. climate report supporting global warming
Ivar Giaver, Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Norway
54 physicists led by Princeton’s Will Happer who demanded that the American Physical Society reverse its position that global warming science is settled
Dr. Ian Plimer, Australian geologist

This is not a comprehensive list.

Melting icebergs

Global warming advocates say the higher temperatures will flood low-lying areas of the world including the coasts of the U.S.

Let me be Mr. Wizard for a moment. Get a glass of water and add ice cubes until it is almost at the top of the glass. Let it melt, then see how much flooding (overflow out of the glass) occurred. As you will see, it will be zero.

Why? Laws of physics.

Ice is frozen water. When it freezes, water in the form of ice takes up more space than the water it is made up of. That’s why frozen pipes or soda bottles burst when they freeze. Icebergs occupy more space than the water they are made up of occupied before they froze or will occupy after they melt. That’s why ice floats. It is less dense than the water it is in.

Furthermore, the tip of the iceberg that sticks above the water is precisely the amount of the increased volume. In other words, when the ice in your full glass of ice water melts, even though the ice stuck above the top of the glass, it will still precisely fill the glass, no less and no more.

Like a boat, ice floats by displacing its weight in water. Since it is less dense than water, it goes to the surface. But when it melts, it becomes water again so it occupies precisely the same volume of water as it displaced when it was ice. Melting water changes (reduces) its volume, but not its weight. When it goes back to being water, it occupies the exact same volume as the water it displaced when it was ice, therefore there is no flooding.

This applies to all floating ice including the entire Arctic (north) polar ice cap. The north pole has no land under it. Global warming advocates say the north polar ice pack will entirely melt in future summers. Whether it does or not will have no effect whatsoever on sea level. All of that water, whether in the form of ice or not, is already in the sea.

Glaciers

Glaciers and other ice and snow that are on land are another matter. When they melt and run into the sea, the sea levels can rise. That’s because they were not in the sea at all until they melted. Antarctica (South Pole) has some land under it.

Carbon?

The global warming people keep talking about carbon. How many tons of it we awful humans are putting into our air? Carbon offsets. etc.

Carbon?

Carbon is a black powder. Charcoal briquettes are carbon. It’s actually used to clean air in gas masks, kitty litter, and to clean water in filters.

Global warming is caused mainly by water vapor (clouds) (Here is an article about that aspect of it: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.htm) and to a slight extent by carbon dioxide. To talk about carbon dioxide as if it were the same as carbon is like talking about lightning bugs as if they were the same as lightning.

Carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless, non-poisonous gas. Plants need it to thrive. It comes out of your mouth and nostrils every time you exhale. Dry ice, which is white not black, is frozen carbon dioxide.

By speaking of carbon dioxide as carbon, they make it sound like dirt. That’s dishonest.

Components of air

How much carbon dioxide is now in the air after 100 years of it increasing “catastrophically?”

Would you believe 383 parts per million? European leftists were forming the number 350 with mobs of people in late 2009. Why? That’s what the want the number of parts per million of carbon dioxide reduced to. Why? It’s an excuse to take billions from corporations and spend it on their pet, and not cost-effictive, “alternative” energies.

Air is about 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, .94% argon, 1 to 4% water vapor, and .04% carbon dioxide. See the Wikipedia article on it for more details.

If you drew a pie chart of the components, carbon dioxide’s slice would be invisible unless the pie chart were enormous.

Lawn watering

The same liberals who are now out to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere are the ones who live in the city and got my suburban neighbors and I to pay punitive rates for the water we put on our lawns. Those lawns convert carbon dioxide to oxygen. Those lawns remove carbon dioxide from the air. They remove “carbon” from the air if you want to play the “carbon dioxide = carbon” semantic game. Why are my suburban neighbors and I not getting medals for our fight against global warming instead of being punished for our cultivation of beneficial plants like grass?

Drowning polar bears

The claims that polar bears are drowning because they cannot swim to the increasingly-far-apart ice floes are ridiculous.

The before and after aerial photos showing glaciers moving north only show hundreds of yards or a couple of miles movement. The polar bears wouldn’t even notice such things over 100 years. Plus they are not going to sit on a piece of ice until it gets out of sight of all other ice or the main ice pack. That has always been a danger to them throughout their existence, global warming or not. If the ice is really melting, all it will mean for polar pears is that they move north at an imperceptible rate over decades.

The ‘right’ temperature

Underlying all the global-warming doomsdayism is the notion that the temperature of the earth in 1900 was the “right” temperature.

Says who? Based on what? Seems to me the right temperature, if humans are going to get into the business of setting the planet’s temperature, would be the one that produces the highest world-wide crop yield on land masses and the minimum need for heating and air-conditioning where humans live.

Go continent by continent. The widest mass of land in South America is between the equator and 15º below the equator. Here is the complete list:

As this table shows, the greatest earth land mass is between 25º and 70º north. OK. If we humans are going to decide the planet’s temperature, optimize those latitudes for growing crops and minimizing heating and air-conditioning cost.

Would that, by great coincidence, be the temperature of the earth in 1900? I doubt it. Probably it would be a warmer temperature.

In other words, the earth would likely better off if it were warmer. Maybe not the Maldives Islands, who recently held a government meeting in SCUBA gear underwater. But then dopes who builds cities almost at sea level, or below sea level like New Orleans, deserve the floods they get.

Permafrost turning to mud

On 6/2/07, news accounts said that some Alaskan village built on permafrost was having trouble because the permafrost melted. The permafrost turned to mud. They had to build wooden sidewalks and the houses were tilting because the permafrost had been their “foundation.” So move. That was a stupid place to live to begin with, not unlike locating New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico and below sea level.

What’s more important, letting some strange people live in a village on top of a previously frozen swamp or growing more crops in Canada and Siberia?

Never give a date

Economists joke about their predictions that they frequently give a number or a date but never both.

The idiot global-warming advocates should have followed that con-man advice. But they have given a number and a date. They say that widespread flooding and disaster will occur in 2020. That’s just 10 years away. I expect we will be done with them then as a result of their prediction not coming true.

Global warming reminds me of the fall-out shelter craze of the 1950s and 1960s, the OPEC oil “crises” of the 1970s, and the millennium bug hysteria of the late 1990s. Its dupes are going to be embarrassed. Don’t be one of them. I have a couple of Web articles about the recurring prophets of doom in finance and other areas like food shortages, oil, population, and so forth at http://www.johntreed.com/doomsday.html.

Religious discussion

I generally do not get into religious discussions because there is no convincing the true believers to change their minds. Global warming is a religious discussion. That is, its advocates will listen to no logic or facts that do not support their position. But when religious nuts, whether they go to church or not, start to change public policy in ways that affect me, I have to speak up.

8/13/07 Newsweek cover story about us ‘deniers’

Newsweek used to be generally a great magazine with a well-deserved reputation. But global warming seems to cause yet another derangement syndrome and Newsweek is not immune. Let me just make some comments about the various call-outs in the article. A call-out is a brief summary quote as opposed to the main body of the article.

Newsweek also has an economics columnist: Robert Samuelson. Here, from his 2008 book The Great Inflation and its Aftermath, is his nice way of saying that global warming is dangerous bunk.

...an uncritical reaction to the possibility of global warming that may cause us to undertake costly policies that, in the end, do little to affect global warming but do weaken our economy’s performance.

He addresses global warming in detail on pages 237 to 242. He says about the same thing I do, although he tries to be more politically correct in his wording, I assume so he can keep his jobs at Newsweek and the Washington Post.

One of Saumelson’s summary paragraphs on global warming says this,

For now, anything that would sharply reduce the greenhouse gases requires shutting down large parts of the global economy…Measures short of that may be economically costly as well as ineffective. Only major technological advances can break the dilemma. Will we admit this? It seems doubtful. Our politics seem predisposed toward denial. We won’t admit the inconsistence, conflicts and simplicities of many appealing goals. We strive for the impossible and ignore the obvious.

And here is a general comment about do-gooders:

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm– but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

T.S. Eliot in The Cocktail Party, p.111)

John T. Reed

What Al Gore left out of his movie: the 800 year lag

by Dan Reed

Does CO2 have a strong effect on global temperatures? Al Gore shows a graph in his film An Inconvenient Truth where CO2 levels and global temperatures have a strong correlation to one another (based on the Vostok ice core samples). Both graphs are displayed on the big screen behind them, and he asks "Did they ever fit together?" Yes, Al, they definitely do fit together. He says the relationship is "complicated," but that the correlation shows that CO2 increases cause global temperature increases. That is certainly one possibility when you have a correlation, but it is not the correct conclusion in this case. If you zoom in on the graph, you find the exact opposite of Gore's claim; the temperature change comes first, then the CO2 follows. CO2 changes in the graph lag 800 years behind the temperature changes.

"The scientists working on the Vostok ice core report that temperature changes PRECEDE changes in CO2 concentration by about 800- to 1,300 years." (TucsonCitizen.com)

In other words, the earth gets warmer first, and that warmth appears to cause CO2 levels go up, not vice versa as Gore asserts. It would be like trying to tell you ocean tides are responsible for the moon's gravity. Gore has swapped cause and effect. This is the same data from the Vostok ice core research that Gore uses. Search for "Vostok ice core 800 year lag yourself" on the internet to see yourself. The scientists that collected the data acknowledge the 800 year lag. So the very ice core samples that Al Gore cites as his evidence for why human carbon dioxide emissions are causing warming, in fact, show the exact opposite.

ICE CORE SAMPLES SHOW NO EVIDENCE THAT CARBON DIOXIDE CAUSES WARMING

This phenomenon of temperature changes causing atmospheric CO2 changes is explained in many places online including a British documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. The short explanation is global temperature affects the solubility of carbon dioxide in water. In other words, when global temperatures decrease, the oceans dissolve more CO2, lowering atmospheric CO2. When global temperatures increase, the oceans dissolve less CO2, raising atmospheric CO2. The documentary also shows a much better correlation to global temperatures than CO2, which I will discuss below. (Go to timestamp 35:00 in the video to see)

What this means is the entire premise of An Inconvenient Truth is false. With a straight face, Al Gore shows you evidence that suggests heat increases CO2, but tells you the opposite. He just flat out lies about the details of the correlation that he cites as his powerful piece of evidence. The reason he gets away with this is because the x-axis of the graph cover over 600,000 years, so the 800 year lag is to miniscule to see with the naked eye. If you zoom in on the graph, the lag is clear.

You don't have to be a climatologist to grasp the fundamental fallacy of carbon dioxide's relationship to the greenhouse effect and global temperatures. As my father pointed out above, and the Swindle documentary as well, water vapor is by far the biggest greenhouse gas, yet most discussions of global warming never mention it. The Swindle documentary goes on to explain how so many scientists and journalists could miss such a glaring fact.

Most importantly, the documentary finds a variable that correlates even closer to global temperatures than CO2, and in the correct direction. Any guesses on what the variable is? SOLAR ACTIVITY. Imagine that. That big ball of exploding fire in the sky is the biggest factor.

-Dan Reed