Archives for October 19, 2007

A Russian scientist claims global warming can be just a temporary inconvenience, since climatic changes show their natural fluctuating patterns and depend on our Sun’s activity level. A Research fellow of the Arctic and Antarctic research and science centre suggests the phenomenon, widely known as global warming, is not more than a natural variation.

The rest of the translated article is here.

The original Russian article is here.

Anyone who speaks Russian should be able to find out his name.

Thanks to Marc Morano for the links.

Listening to the Speech from the Throne Tuesday, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Conservatives were copying Stephane Dion’s leadership campaign tactics of 13 months ago. In Dion’s case, he took his climate change phraseology essentially verbatim from a David Suzuki report. In the case of the Harper government, they appear to have lifted most of their assertions from a wider selection of environmental groups, but the messages are equally unfounded nonethe-less.

First, the government tells us that “Threats to our environment are a clear and present danger that now confronts governments around the world.”

“Clear and present danger” is a popular phrase used by environmental activists when speaking about climate change, Al Gore-trained Desiree McGraw of Montreal and Ralph Torrie, whose company produces greenhouse gas emissions software, being typical examples.

Read the rest of Tom Harris’s article in the Canada Free Press entitled ‘Now is the time to listen to climate scientists, not activists.’

Washington Post Blog:

Last Friday, shortly after Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming, we posted an item on a recently concluded court case in Britain that questioned some of the facts in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth. We are now giving Gore’s spokeswoman, Kalee Kreider, the opportunity to respond to the criticisms of the British judge. Kreider also serves as Gore’s environmental adviser.

The Gore response

With a column titled “Fact Checker,” it is difficult not to lose the forest for the trees. First and foremost, An Inconvenient Truth presented thousands and thousands of facts. We stand by our initial statement. We were gratified that a UK High Court judge, a layperson with a full docket, found the film worthy enough to be shown in British schools. A generation of schoolchildren will become more educated about global warming and what can be done to solve the climate crisis.

A number of other broader points need to be addressed from the Fact Checker’s last two postings:

Read all about it here.

World Climate Report’s take is entitled ‘Sensational.’

Thanks to Marc Morano for the links.

Science is the pursuit of the truth, not consensus

John Kay, Financial Times, 9 October 2007

The notion of a monolithic “science”, meaning what scientists say, is pernicious and the notion of “scientific consensus” actively so. The route to knowledge is transparency in disagreement and openness in debate. The route to truth is the pluralist expression of conflicting views in which, often not as quickly as we might like, good ideas drive out bad. There is no room in this process for any notion of “scientific consensus”.

Read the rest of the article here (free registration required).

How can you predict global warming if you can’t predict rain?

Some say climate change is part of a complex natural cycle – so complex, in fact, that it can’t be forecast. Are current climate models reliable?

By Peter N. Spotts Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

To those of us who are not climate scientists, it may come down to this: How can we be so certain what the climate will be like a century from now if you can’t get a decent weather forecast more than two weeks ahead? In the end, isn’t climate change just too complex?

True, weather forecasters are fallible, and there is no planet out there similar to Earth so we can truly gauge the effect human activity is having on our climate. But climate researchers are increasingly confident of their models and simulations. Besides, some argue, predicting the weather is tougher than predicting the climate, and scientists have been working on perfecting climate models for more than a century.

In a chilled, windowless room here at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geo physical Fluid Dy namics Laboratory (GFDL), a supercomputer is furiously crunching numbers in an attempt to mimic Earth’s climate system.

It’s a tool Svante Arrhenius could only dream about. In 1896, the mustachioed Swede gave the first detailed description of carbon dioxide’s warming effect on climate. He had to solve some 10,000 equations to do it. Armed with his crude climate model, he reckoned that if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doubled, global average temperatures might rise by up to 9 degrees F. Today’s modelers say his estimate is high – but not by much.

Today’s climate models try to simulate more than one feature – more than Arrhenius’s CO2 – of the climate system and in greater detail. They’re still far from perfect and miss important processes.

Read the full article here.

Hat tip to Marc Morano.