Hot Water

In a recent interview with New Scientist (24 Jan, 2009, No2692) James Lovelock (originator of the Gaia theory) said that:

"Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change"

James Lovelock is one of the founding fathers of global warming alarmism and is still a strong believer and promotor that man is causing disastor, if he claims carbon trading etc... is just a big money making scam that will do nothing to stop global warming, maybe the alarmists that support such schemes should sit up and listen?

What do you think of his comment about carbon trading etc...is a scam? I am interested especially to hear what alarmists think of this.

He at least cant be accused of being a "denier", devout christian or a right wing conservative funded by Exxon!

I often see the statement "co2 causes warming, its simple physics".

Firstly, I find it hard to believe the physics of the atmosphere are simple, physics is never simple - particularly at a planetary scale!

My understanding of the greenhouse effect is that it in fact ignores several laws of physics.

Firstly "greenhouse" is a misnomer as radiative forcing does not warm a greenhouse (even though glass absorbs infrared like co2), in fact the glass actually slightly cools a greenhouse over say panes of polished salt crystals (that don’t absorb infrared). The question is actually why is it cooler outside of the greenhouse? (greenhouse warm due to a lack of convection)

I understand the concept that Co2 in the troposphere (often incorrectly shown a blanket over the earth) absorbs a few narrow bands of infrared, and as it increases in the atmosphere it becomes more opaque to infrared until all the leaving infrared energy is eventually absorbed causing slightly increased emission (about the point we are at), but within the laws of physics this could not heat ground air, as it would have to flow against the actual heat flow. To enable co2 to warm surface air you have to essentially set thermal conductivity in the atmosphere to zero (an un-physical assumption) and assume local thermal equilibrium, ignoring the lower temperatures of the atmosphere above.

Or am I (or the IPCC) misunderstanding the effect? Common sense would actually say that as Co2 is present and greatest at the surface of the earth, the absorption would occur at or very close to the surface (rather than the troposphere) and would then be drawn upward to space via convection (as is observed in the temperature data available i.e. the surface is warming faster than the troposphere in contradiction to the IPCC models).

Co2 induced warming calculations basically assume the atmosphere is in a constant state of energy balance, but it is in fact in a constant state of flux and highly choatic.

Either way, to ignore physical effects such as radiative convection seems to me to an entirely un-physical representation of the “greenhouse” layer.

So is the “greenhouse” effect really simple physics, or is it physics simple?

The conclusion of Chillingar et. al., 2008 suggests that increasing methane does nothing interms of climate change and co2 leads to cooling. Now another paper has been published that suggests that high levels of co2 could have caused an ice age (see Telegraph article) and that increased co2 levels due to mans output will lead to cooling. Do you think they are right, or is this just because we are entering a cooling phase the scientists are now rethinking their hypothesis?

At least we can now be blamed whether it warms or cools due to Co2 emissions!

http://www.springerlink.com/content/c47m4x8222886n...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/clima...

Al Gore recently bought a $4,000,000 condo in Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco just feet from the sea. He obviously can't be to concerned about his own prediction of a 6m rise in sea level can he!

Can anyone take this guy seriosuly when he doesnt take his own predictions seriously?

In the IPCC AR4 it states that solar activity during the Maunder Minimum (little iceage) was only 0.15 below the present mean (IPCC, 2007). This caused temperatures globally to fall by varying degrees but the earths mean temperature was cooler by at least 1.5 degrees.

In the same chapter they show in a reconstruction of solar activity that solar acitivity was slightly lower than today during the Medievil Optimum which was around 3 degrees warmer than today (Petit et al, 1999, IPCC, 1990) and that solar activity is currently 0.25 - 0.5 above the mean. (IPCC, 2007)

They also point out that the El-Nino southern oscilation (another warming effect we have experianced over the last 50 years) may have responded to solar and volcanic activity (Adams et. al., 2003; Mann et. al.)

They then later on dismiss the increase in solar activity of 0.25 - 0.5 as being insignificant (remember a drop of 0.15 caused the little iceage), even though they acknowledge changes in solar actvity was a key driver of the natural climate system and that the sun has been the most active in the last 70 years than the last 11,400 years (Usoskin et al., 2003; Hathaway et al., 2004; IAU, 2004; Solanki et al., 2005).

They also acknowledge they do not understand the role of the sun very well and the feedbacks it triggers.

If a drop of only 0.15 caused the little iceage, and an increase of 0.2 - 0.45 caused the Medievil Optimum, and solar activity is currently even higher now, how can they rule the sun out as a key driver of climate now, particuarly when they acknowledge they dont understand its influence very well?

The Mid-Pliocene (about 3.3 to 3.0 Ma) is the most recent

time in Earth’s history when mean global temperatures were

substantially warmer for a sustained period, estimated to be around 3 degrees warmer (global average) than today. (IPCC AR4, 2007, Chandler et al., 1994; Sloan et al., 1996; Haywood et al., 2000; Jiang et al., 2005)

During this time co2 is estimated to have been in the range of 360-400ppm (IPCC AR4, 2007, Raymo and Rau, 1992; Raymo et al., 1996) a similar level to today.

Geologic evidence and isotopes also show that sea level during this time was at least 15 to 25 m above modern levels (Dowsett and Cronin, 1990; Shackleton et al., 1995), with correspondingly reduced ice sheets and lower continental aridity (Guo et al., 2004). Note the world was LESS arid!

Both terrestrial and marine palaeoclimate proxies (Thompson, 1991; Dowsett et al., 1996; Thompson and Fleming, 1996) show that high latitudes were signifi cantly warmer, but that tropical SSTs and surface air temperatures were little different from the present. The result was a substantial decrease in the lower-tropospheric latitudinal temperature

gradient. (IPCC AR4, 2007)

So if co2 is a primarly climate driver as many believe, why is it so much cooler today with the same level of co2?

The continents have hardly moved since then (IPCC AR4, 2007) so it not due to that.

Also the sun has been more active in the past 70 years than in the previous 11,400 (Usoskin et al., 2003; Hathaway et al., 2004; IAU, 2004; Solanki et al., 2005). We have been experiancing warm PDO & MDO cycles and volcanic activity has been low this centuary (generally believed to cause cooling).

If all this is going against us, why is it so cool today?

Was it warmer then due to increased solar activity or changes in orbital tilt? If so then how could co2 be a primary driver of climate?

Are the co2 reconstructions from ice cores wrong and co2 was actually much higher back then? If thats so then the entire global warming hypothesis is wrong.

I am interested to hear your thoughts, as the IPCC do not discuss the reasons for why it was warmer then.

James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and was one of the first scientists to raise the alarm about global warming in the 1980s. He recently paid his own expenses to fly to the UK to defend 6 eco-terrorists that had broken the law. He argued they were right to break the law as they were trying to save the world from climate change.

In a recent conference he made the following comment “If we don’t get this thing under control we are going to destroy the creation,” which to be sounds like it has religious conotations. He seems to be an environmental fanatic so can he be trusted in such an influential position and can he be really be impartial?

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2008/sep/23/nasa_clim...

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/10/note-to-nasa...

http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2007/09/james_...

Dr. Kiminori Itoh, (IPCC lead reviewer) an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist who specializes in optical waveguide spectroscopy from the Yokohama National University calls man-made global warming fears “the worst scientific scandal in the history"

Dr. Akasofu (Professor Emeritus, University of Alaska) “When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists,” speaking on AGW

James Spann , Meteologist speaking on AGW “It’s pretty rapidly running out of gas and it just seems like every day more and more people [phd scientists] are coming out with the fact that that’s pretty much a hoax.”

‘IPCC theory of anthropogenic warming is a hoax’ says Patrick Carroll, retired Environment Canada meteorologist

Professor Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters says "Man-made global warming is not real"

Prize-wining Geologist Dr. Ian Plimer, a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia says all the expense will be for nothing, as climate change cannot be stopped—and it isn’t even caused by human-created carbon dioxide. “There is no relationship between carbon dioxide produced by industry and climate change,” he said.