Climate & Climate Change

CLIMATE is complex but in an attempt to understand the effects of increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide on global temperatures simplified General Circulation Models (GCMs) have been developed and are used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).      Al Gore, in his famous movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, explained that as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, more energy is trapped, warming the planet.   This assumption is central to the GCMs and the current consensus on climate change. 

Some sceptics complain that the GCMs do not realistically simulate climate because there are many processes that can’t be adequately modelled including cloud formation.  Michael Hammer, an engineer who specializes in spectroscopy, is also sceptical of the GCM but his criticism is more fundamental.  In the following paper, using the basic laws of spectroscopy, he shows that a significant portion of energy loss from the Earth’s surface is by direction radiation to space at wavelengths not absorbed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.    This is in direct contrast to the IPCC explanation that there is low radiation from the Earth’s surface to space and potentially high radiation from the atmosphere to space.

Science is a process of getting it wrong and hopefully learning – on this single issue Michael Hammer and the IPCC can’t both be right.  

[Read more…] about Radical New Hypothesis on the Effect of Greenhouse Gases

“BUT the climate is warming and CO2 is increasing. Doesn’t this prove that CO2 is causing global warming through the greenhouse effect? 

“No, the current warming period began about 1800 at the end of the little ice age, long before there was an appreciable increase of CO2. There have been similar and even larger warmings several times in the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age. These earlier warmings clearly had nothing to do with the combustion of fossil fuels. The current warming also seems to be due mostly to natural causes, not to increasing levels of carbon dioxide. Over the past ten years there has been no global warming, and in fact a slight cooling. This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models.”

So explained William Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton University, to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on February 25, 2009.

[Read more…] about Global Warming in Perspective: A Note from William Happer

AT his popular New York Times blog, environmental journalist Andrew Revkin asks the question “Can a scientists be a Citizen, Too?”  But what Mr Revkin is really asking is: should scientists become involved in advocacy?

Mr Revkin provides the case of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Chief, James Hansen, as a specific example and suggests that because the issue of global warming has such “big consequences for society” Dr Hansen is almost obliged to become involved in politics.

I disagree.  

In the following note, Mr Coleman goes on to explain that reporting on global warming at Mr Revkin’s newspaper, The New York Times, is unfortunately more advocacy than journalism.  

“DID advocacy Journalism first get out of hand during the civil rights movement or the Vietnam war?  It seems to me it began to sweep the newspapers and TV in the 1960’s and hasn’t been arrested since.  I have little expectation that in the difficult times reform will take hold, but I will here and now hope for it.

[Read more…] about No Balance in Environmental Reporting at The New York Times: John Coleman