Another Good GW Article

[Burke]

The Wall Street Journal is really pouring them out. This one is by a highly respected expert, Richard Lindzen, MIT professor of meteorology:

"Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

"The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...917025400.html

[VAg8r1]

Global warming?

Two German Cargo Ships Pass Through 'Arctic Passage'
September 13, 2009

By MATT MOORE and SETH BORENSTEIN,
Associated Press Writers

FRANKFURT–Two German merchant ships have traversed the fabled Northeast Passage after global warming and melting ice opened a route from South Korea along Russia's Arctic coast to Siberia.

Now the German-owned ships are poised to complete their journey through the cold waters where icebergs abound, heading for Rotterdam in the Netherlands with 3,500 tons of construction parts.

The merchant ships MV Beluga Fraternity and MV Beluga Foresight arrived this week in Yamburg, Siberia, their owner Beluga Shipping GmbH said Friday. They traveled from Ulsan, South Korea, in late July to Siberia by way of the Northeast Passage, a sea lane that, in years past, was avoided because of its heavy ice floes.

Scientists report that the Arctic Ocean ice cap has been shrinking to unprecedented levels in recent summers, because of global warming, opening up many passages that were ice-choked in earlier times.

Link

Lindzen does have impressive credentials, however he is a meteorologist not climatologist. The two disciplines are not identical. Meteorology focuses on short-term changes in weather (the focus is from a few hours to perhaps a few years). Climatology focuses in long-term changes in climate.

From an article that l linked a couple of times over the last year:

Scientists Agree Human-Induced Global Warming Is Real, Survey Says
ScienceDaily (Jan. 21, 2009) — While the harsh winter pounding many areas of North America and Europe seemingly contradicts the fact that global warming continues unabated, a new survey finds consensus among scientists about the reality of climate change and its likely cause.


A group of 3,146 earth scientists surveyed around the world overwhelmingly agree that in the past 200-plus years, mean global temperatures have been rising, and that human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.

Peter Doran, University of Illinois at Chicago associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, along with former graduate student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, conducted the survey late last year.

The findings appear January 19 in the publication Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union.

In trying to overcome criticism of earlier attempts to gauge the view of earth scientists on global warming and the human impact factor, Doran and Kendall Zimmerman sought the opinion of the most complete list of earth scientists they could find, contacting more than 10,200 experts around the world listed in the 2007 edition of the American Geological Institute's Directory of Geoscience Departments.

Experts in academia and government research centers were e-mailed invitations to participate in the on-line poll conducted by the website questionpro.com. Only those invited could participate and computer IP addresses of participants were recorded and used to prevent repeat voting. Questions used were reviewed by a polling expert who checked for bias in phrasing, such as suggesting an answer by the way a question was worded. The nine-question survey was short, taking just a few minutes to complete.

Two questions were key: have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures.

About 90 percent of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82 percent the second.
In analyzing responses by sub-groups, Doran found that climatologists who are active in research showed the strongest consensus on the causes of global warming, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role. Petroleum geologists and meteorologists were among the biggest doubters, with only 47 and 64 percent respectively believing in human involvement. Doran compared their responses to a recent poll showing only 58 percent of the public thinks human activity contributes to global warming.

Science Daily

[Burke]

VA,

No one doubts that we have seen some warming. As Lindzen says, about 1.5 degrees F since 1850.

We have been coming out of the Little Ice Age since then.

During the Medieval warming period prior to the Little Ice Age, Greenland was green.

As for people who believed that it was caused by man, many are now realizing that they have been lied to by those with the (now "lost") data and in many other ways.

They are coming to realize that the "threat of CO2 caused GW" is complete BS.

[ChartsandGrafs]

Originally Posted by VAg8r1

From an article that l linked a couple of times over the last year:

You should also make note of the fact that you run away after posting that article to avoid answering questions about it.

For instance, how do scientists quantify, in numbers, the impact mankind is having on global warming? What percentage of the increase in temperatures is mankind's fault? Is mankind 100% responsible, or merely 5% responsible?

More specifically, how do they know this?

[Burke]

The IPSC has claimed in the past that man must have been responsible for the warming because they could not account for it otherwise in their models. But then they haven't been able to account for the last 10 years of no warming in their models, either.

Lindzen writes,

"The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.

"Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false."


They don't have a clue what the climate is doing. That's why it is "climate change" now instead of "global warming."

[CitRain12]

The question I have about the 19th century data is how was it collected? Did they use the same method as they did back then for this up to date data, and if so, did anyone bother to check the validity of the data recorded in the 19th century?

[Burke]

Rain,

I wrote an answer to your question, but decided to use it for a new thread on this subject. It's entitled The Global Warming Dispute In A Nutshell.

[CitRain12]

Originally Posted by Burke

Rain,

I wrote an answer to your question, but decided to use it for a new thread on this subject. It's entitled The Global Warming Dispute In A Nutshell.

Ok, will be interesting to see how this plays out.