I was about to post that. The show is made to appeal to all ages.
Anyone Watch Cosmos?
- Thread starter RetroGrow
- Start date
I was about to post that. The show is made to appeal to all ages.
Funny about the astrology. Have had the same experience with females. As soon as they ask me what my sign is, I know they are empty headed. I often travel to Brazil for girls. Funny thing about these girls. ALL of them believe in god, and ALL of them believe in astrology. I have found a direct correlation between lack of education and belief in astrology. However, I don't necessarily "dip" when I encounter one of these girls. Empty headed can be fun!!!!
Oh buddy, bangin is cool.......but seriously getting involved with one, FFFFUuuuuk no lol.
Crazy chicks are usually KILLER in the sac for sure......But yeah, nothing serious.
Astrology is the warning sign of bat-shit craziness...............one day it's she likes astrology, next day she thinks/believes Miley Cyrus works for the CIA and her twerking with blurred lines boy was a CIA Black OP to take public attention away from Syria.......I shit you not, I had that exact conversation.
Banging's cool........smiling and nodding yer way through crazy-ass conversations everyday is not so cool....IMO.
Danny
Crazy chicks are usually KILLER in the sac for sure......But yeah, nothing serious.
Astrology is the warning sign of bat-shit craziness...............one day it's she likes astrology, next day she thinks/believes Miley Cyrus works for the CIA and her twerking with blurred lines boy was a CIA Black OP to take public attention away from Syria.......I shit you not, I had that exact conversation.
Banging's cool........smiling and nodding yer way through crazy-ass conversations everyday is not so cool....IMO.
Danny
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ALL people's opinions should be respected. The only real thing that makes me sad are the creeps that say what other people think makes them sad. People who say that must be sad a lot every moment of everyday then in this big world. Instead of being some kind of personal attack they think it is, saying that actually indicates more a personal problem than anything else. And that is because of all the differing opinions about just about anything and everything in this huge world that everyone is exposed to each and every day. Now THAT makes ME sad.
...I guess the cosmos is too small for more than one opinion...
So I guess WOMEN'S MENSTRUAL CYCLES have nothing to do with the moon? Hear that women? Retro says they are NONSENSE and not provable to be related to the moon! haha... good one... And those cycles DON'T affect your emotions do they? Cause that is what Astrology teaches. It's all nonsense. You women have been making this up all this time!!! Good to know!
I'm not even going to get into it. You probably deny global warming too.
BTW, most global warming deniers claim it's being caused by SUN CYCLES not human caused - so there again is the SUN affecting life on earth, but of course NOTHING IN SPACE CAN EVER AFFECT US cause Astrology is just a lie.
From what you stated already, you've shown yourself to be as ignorant as Carl Sagan about Astrology, so I suggest you abandon trying to defend your position until you've read a book or two on the subject and not just the daily horoscopes. If there was no Astrology there would be no Astronomy and no Space Race and no Carl Sagan or Cosmos.
OOOOH, here's something "scientific" two STARS apparently having NO INFLUENCE on each other cause Astrology is a lie, and nothing in space can influence anything else in it's proximity according to the Carl Sagan Groupies.
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i would venture that astronomy grew out of astrology too.
them pagan heathens chanting and dancing in fairy rings under the solstice moon...
are now watching nebulae unfold the mysteries of the universe...
them pagan heathens chanting and dancing in fairy rings under the solstice moon...
are now watching nebulae unfold the mysteries of the universe...
I suppose most ppl know that Cosmic Rays (gamma mostly) emanating from deep in the COSMOS, can cause mutations such that entire species evolve into things like (gasp!) humans! Of course those rays are the LEAST predictable and hardest to measure thing, hence astrology does not bother with them. Evolution takes many lifetimes.
But some things are VERY predictable, and Astrologers were the first to accurately predict the movements of the planets and stars. Way before Galileo and "science", which began to separate humans from their natural surroundings (including the Cosmos.) This is when humanity lost its intimate connection with the universe and started objectifying everything, removing ourselves from nature, turning nature into something to be exploited and trashed for profits.
Read the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra for further enlightenment on the subject.
So what Astrologers did once they figured out the solar system's movements was assemble astronomical DATA that correlated to specific human experiences.
You can be sure that the first thing they correlated was women's periods with the phases of the moon.
Then over the course of CENTURIES, Astrologers correlated huge data sets of human experience with the motions of the planets.
Then they were able to postulate that given a certain set of astrological conditions, the likelihood of a certain event occurring for an individual was statistically increased (or decreased!) as that is what seemed to occur often to people under the same set of conditions.
Eventually they were able to amass THEOREMS of how planets influence human behavior and situations.
So whole civilizations (some like China and India still exist today) were guided at times by the predictions of Astrologers. As were presidents of the United States of America and some very wealthy individuals)
I also recall a few biblical references as well... something about Jesus' birth, it sure excited some Astrologers and WISE MEN, supposedly, if you believe in such fairy tales...
Funny how some will believe in a virgin birth and god as man, but Astrology? Oh, wait, that's not scientific is it? I mean compiling data points over centuries, correlating that to observable human behavior, postulating relationships among real physical objects according to exact mathematical angles, developing theorems based on all of this knowledge.
Gee, that's not scientific is it???
But some things are VERY predictable, and Astrologers were the first to accurately predict the movements of the planets and stars. Way before Galileo and "science", which began to separate humans from their natural surroundings (including the Cosmos.) This is when humanity lost its intimate connection with the universe and started objectifying everything, removing ourselves from nature, turning nature into something to be exploited and trashed for profits.
Read the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra for further enlightenment on the subject.
So what Astrologers did once they figured out the solar system's movements was assemble astronomical DATA that correlated to specific human experiences.
You can be sure that the first thing they correlated was women's periods with the phases of the moon.
Then over the course of CENTURIES, Astrologers correlated huge data sets of human experience with the motions of the planets.
Then they were able to postulate that given a certain set of astrological conditions, the likelihood of a certain event occurring for an individual was statistically increased (or decreased!) as that is what seemed to occur often to people under the same set of conditions.
Eventually they were able to amass THEOREMS of how planets influence human behavior and situations.
So whole civilizations (some like China and India still exist today) were guided at times by the predictions of Astrologers. As were presidents of the United States of America and some very wealthy individuals)
I also recall a few biblical references as well... something about Jesus' birth, it sure excited some Astrologers and WISE MEN, supposedly, if you believe in such fairy tales...
Funny how some will believe in a virgin birth and god as man, but Astrology? Oh, wait, that's not scientific is it? I mean compiling data points over centuries, correlating that to observable human behavior, postulating relationships among real physical objects according to exact mathematical angles, developing theorems based on all of this knowledge.
Gee, that's not scientific is it???
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So I guess WOMEN'S MENSTRUAL CYCLES have nothing to do with the moon? Hear that women? Retro says they are NONSENSE and not provable to be related to the moon! haha... good one... And those cycles DON'T affect your emotions do they? Cause that is what Astrology teaches. It's all nonsense. You women have been making this up all this time!!! Good to know!
I'm not even going to get into it. You probably deny global warming too.
BTW, most global warming deniers claim it's being caused by SUN CYCLES not human caused - so there again is the SUN affecting life on earth, but of course NOTHING IN SPACE CAN EVER AFFECT US cause Astrology is just a lie.
From what you stated already, you've shown yourself to be as ignorant as Carl Sagan about Astrology, so I suggest you abandon trying to defend your position until you've read a book or two on the subject and not just the daily horoscopes. If there was no Astrology there would be no Astronomy and no Space Race and no Carl Sagan or Cosmos.
OOOOH, here's something "scientific" two STARS apparently having NO INFLUENCE on each other cause Astrology is a lie, and nothing in space can influence anything else in it's proximity according to the Carl Sagan Groupies.
View Image
Please, I do not want to get into a pissing contest with you.
Astrology is NOT science. It is the anti-science. ALL scientists know this, and you will not find a single scientist that says astrology, which is mythology, is science. That you believe in something so non-sensical is shocking to me, but you are entitled to believe whatever you want. As I stated, people believe in witchcraft. Doesn't make it true. Anyway, astrology has been thoroughly debunked by scientists way smarter than me.
Many links debunking the mythology of astrology. It seems that you are the one who needs to do some reading.
http://www.sillybeliefs.com/astrology-1.html
"For many Washingtonians, Astrology influences daily decisions, pursuits, hopes and
fears. Despite general agreement by the scientific community that astrology is a false-
science, over 1/3 of Americans continue to believe
in the validity of its predictions. Washingtonians
have even gone so far as to establish the Washington
State Astrological Association, an organization
dedicated to training astrologers and disseminating
astrological beliefs. This study, in the pursuit of
transparency and truth, examined Washingtonians birth signs through the lens of the
Washington State Population Survey, and found no correlation between birth signs and
their associated life outcomes. Despite be
ing predicted to be so by astrologers,
•
Aquarians are not more socially minded,
•
Aries are not more involved in the Armed Forces,
•
Tauri are no less likely to be separated or divorced,
•
Librans are not more engaged in artistic work,
•
Virgos do not earn higher salaries,
•
Sagittarians are not more educated, and
•
Gemini work just as hard as everyone else.
Implications from these findings include new public awareness around the underlying
falsities of astrological claims, helping Washingtonians make more educated investments
when seeking out advice for life’s challenges."
http://courses.washington.edu/pbaf527m/PolicyReport.HA.MF3.11.08.doc.pdf
I could bludgeon you with more, but what's the point? Astrology is pseudoscience, NOT science.
Here is Neil deGrasse Tyson's alarming prediction about losing the polar ice caps for the climate deniers:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/...-about-losing-the-polar-ice-caps?detail=email
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/...-about-losing-the-polar-ice-caps?detail=email
S
Spider Crab
I don't think science is 'flawless'.
As in, not everything can be explained.
And i also don't think astrology is completely worthless.
Horoscopes, perhaps, but i think astrology is more than just giving horoscopes.
There is some Yin and some Yang in everything.
As in, not everything can be explained.
And i also don't think astrology is completely worthless.
Horoscopes, perhaps, but i think astrology is more than just giving horoscopes.
There is some Yin and some Yang in everything.
I loved the original, and I really like this one too. I loved the Science channel, until it turned into stupid bullshit like both the Discovery and History channel did. NOVA still produces some good stuff. I watch BBC America sometimes because they carry some pretty good science programming.
What pisses me off is how this country no longer values education and Science. For Christs sake, there is actually a group that is trying to get the definition of Pi changed from 3.14 to 3 because it's too frigging hard for some of the precious snowflakes to comprehend.
And do not get me started on Intelligent Design. Give me the chance and I would kick Ken Hamm, Kent Hovind and Kirk Cameron in the balls so hard they would have to use a long stick to poke them back down where they were.
What pisses me off is how this country no longer values education and Science. For Christs sake, there is actually a group that is trying to get the definition of Pi changed from 3.14 to 3 because it's too frigging hard for some of the precious snowflakes to comprehend.
And do not get me started on Intelligent Design. Give me the chance and I would kick Ken Hamm, Kent Hovind and Kirk Cameron in the balls so hard they would have to use a long stick to poke them back down where they were.
holy fuck! did you just link to that absurd notion of icecaps melting enough to cover earth 100 feet or so above present levels?
ffs.
makes me shiver. math.
so 10% of earths land mass ice cover melting will cover 70% of surface to depths of 150 or so feet? BS. just ludicrous.
ffs.
makes me shiver. math.
so 10% of earths land mass ice cover melting will cover 70% of surface to depths of 150 or so feet? BS. just ludicrous.
Let's see....hmmmmm....who should I have confidence in concerning the science of climate change? Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson (an astrophysicist), or trichrider (a conspiracy theorist)?
Give me a minute or two or three, this is going to take some consideration.
Give me a minute or two or three, this is going to take some consideration.
I don't think science is 'flawless'.
As in, not everything can be explained.
And i also don't think astrology is completely worthless.
Horoscopes, perhaps, but i think astrology is more than just giving horoscopes.
There is some Yin and some Yang in everything.
Of course, not everything can be explained. The universe is chaos. Our knowledge is but a speck. What we know is dwarfed by what we don't know. That's why we have science-to explore, examine, theorize, and, with a healthy dose of skepticism, prove a theory with experimentation, which can be duplicated by any other scientist.
Astrology is not worthless in the sense that many books on astrology have been sold, some "astrologists" have gotten rich off their "readings", and other cons. But by no stretch of the imagination is it in any way scientific. It comes from Greek mythology, who got it from the Babylonians. To hate on Carl Sagan just because he debunked astrology is silly, because any real scientist in the world would tell you the same thing: astrology may be "fun" or interesting to some people, but it is not even close to being a science. "Belief" in something doesn't make it true. Suicide bombers believe they are going to get 17 virgins after they commit murder/suicide. We know that's ridiculous, but they believe it enough to kill themselves. In Africa, albinos are hunted and killed because of the belief that they are somehow "evil spirits". Men with AIDS in Africa are raping babies in the belief that this will cure them. Witchcraft is alive and well in Africa and in Haiti, and other countries. Trichrider thinks global warming is a conspiracy of sorts. We know it's bunk, but the believers think it's real.
Belief does not=science. Science requires skepticism, and proof, not faith. People will believe whatever they want, even in the absence of any evidence, as in the case of the 10,000 gods that man has created, or astrology. This doesn't confront me. Calling it science, does.
Same goes for "astrologers"......
31,487 American scientists have signed this petition,
including 9,029 with PhDs
For information about this project, click on the appropriate box below.
Monday, 02 June 2014 17:33
Intolerance: Global-warming Fanatics Intimidate Swedish Scientist
Written by William F. Jasper
Thuggish threats, censorship, and intimidation are not supposed to occur in the collegial, hallowed halls of science; differences of opinion on scientific issues are expected to be resolved cordially via argumentation based on research, experimentation, analysis, and presentation of evidence. But things don’t always work out that way, especially when the issue concerned involves billions of dollars in research funding, as well as political policies that would cost trillions of dollars and radically re-engineer global society.
The recent case of meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson (shown), one of Sweden’s leading climate scientists, shows that Climategate-style censorship of skeptics continues. Since mid-May, Professor Bengtsson has been at the center of a simmering scandal that has been the talk of the climate science blogosphere. It has also broken out into a number of mainstream media stories.
In April, Bengtsson accepted an invitation to become a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a British-based think tank that includes many eminent climate scientists. Why would that cause scandal and controversy? After all, many other scientists have also joined various think tanks involved in the controversial anthropogenic (human-caused) global-warming (AGW) debate. Well, the GWPF does not simply regurgitate the latest overheated bloviations of Al Gore, the UN’s IPCC, or the EPA; it has published 15 detailed reports and numerous shorter articles challenging the apocalyptic predictions and hysterical claims of the AGW alarmists. GWPF spokesmen are often quoted in media stories contradicting the prophets of climate doom and gloom.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/...warming-fanatics-intimidate-swedish-scientist
31000 scientists sign Oregon GW Skeptic Petition
In 1998, Dr. Arthur Robinson, Director of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, posted his first Global Warming skeptic petition, on the Institute’s website (oism.org). It quickly attracted the signatures of more than 17,000 Americans who held college degrees in science. Widely known as the Oregon Petition, it became a counter-weight for the “all scientists agree” mantra of the man-man Global Warming crowd.
Recently, with America being dragged toward Kyoto-style energy limits by cadres of alarmists, Robinson mailed a new copy of the petition to his original signers, asking them to recruit additional qualified scientists. Now his list includes nearly 32,000 American man-made warming skeptics with science qualifications. More than 9,000 hold scientific PhDs. Almost 32,000 thousand skeptics happens to be twelve times as many scientists as the 2,500 scientific reviewers claimed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to form a scientific consensus.
Last week Robinson held a press meeting at the National Press Club in DC, followed by a luncheon on Capital Hill, to which members of Congress and their aides were invited. Not surprisingly, attendance was low.
Robinson’s petition states a truth: “There is no convincing evidence that human release of CO2, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will cause, in the foreseeable future, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
What do these approx 32,000 scientists believe has caused the earth’s warming since 1850 if it isn’t CO2? He points to the sun. Robinson notes that over the past 150 years the sunspot index has predicted the Earth’s temperature changes—with 79 percent accuracy—about ten years before they happen. The sunspots actually predicted the 2007 global temperature decline; the index turned down in 2000. The computer models didn’t foresee it.
The correlation between Earth’s temperatures and CO2 is only at the “accidental” level—22 percent and declining sharply over the past decade as the temperatures have refused to increase with the CO2 levels. Robinson says the lack of correlation between CO2 levels and past Earth temperatures proves that CO2 is not dominating our climate.
The Oregon chemist warns that “no other major scientific problem has ever been tackled the way the UN has approached global warming.” The UN hosted a big meeting of scientists, he says, and then a small group of “authors” summarized the discussions into a global action plan. But the UN has never produced any evidence that humans are warming our climate. The UN panel says CO2 became the culprit “by the process of elimination” but such a process is neither scientific nor admissible in a court of law.
The forecasts of desperate temperature increases all come from computer climate models, notes Robinson. But the computer models keep forecasting more warming than we get. In fact, 70 percent of the earth’s recent warming occurred before 1940, while virtually all of humanity’s greenhouse gas emission has occurred since that date. The Earth’s net warming since 1940 is a tiny 0.2 degree C.
“If CO2 isn’t causing our tiny warming, then banning all our energy will simply make people poor and helpless, says Robinson, “The cold spells and heat waves nature will always throw at us, will then indeed, threaten human lives on the planet.”
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3214
List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.
A majority of earth and climate scientists are convinced by the evidence that humans are significantly contributing to global warming.[1][2]
This is a list of notable scientists who have made statements that conflict with the mainstream scientific understanding of global warming as summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and endorsed by other scientific bodies.
Establishing the mainstream scientific assessment, climate scientists agree that the global average surface temperature has risen over the last century. The scientific consensus and scientific opinion on climate change were summarized in the 2001 Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The main conclusions on global warming were as follows:
1.The global average surface temperature has risen 0.6 ± 0.2 °C since the late 19th century, and 0.17 °C per decade in the last 30 years.[3]
2."There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities", in particular emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.[4]
3.If greenhouse gas emissions continue the warming will also continue, with temperatures projected to increase by 1.4 °C to 5.8 °C between 1990 and 2100.[A] Accompanying this temperature increase will be increases in some types of extreme weather and a projected sea level rise.[5] The balance of impacts of global warming become significantly negative at larger values of warming.[6]
These findings are recognized by the national science academies of all the major industrialized nations.[7]
Interest in such scientists has been increased by attempts to compile lists of dissenting scientists,[citation needed] including a minority report to the US Senate by Marc Morano,[8] another by Arthur B. Robinson, which is often known as the Oregon Petition,[9] and another by the Heartland Institute,[10] all three of which have been criticized on a number of grounds.[11][12][13]
Listing criteria: The notable scientists listed in this article have made statements since the publication of the Third Assessment Report which disagree with one or more of these 3 main conclusions. Each scientist included in this list has published at least one peer-reviewed article in the broad field of natural sciences, although not necessarily in a field relevant to climatology. To be included on this list a scientist must have made a clear statement in their own words; it is not enough for a name to be found on a petition or similar.
Contents
1 Peer review
2 Scientists questioning the accuracy of IPCC climate projections
3 Scientists arguing that global warming is primarily caused by natural processes
4 Scientists arguing that the cause of global warming is unknown
5 Scientists arguing that global warming will have few negative consequences
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links
Peer review
As of August 2012, fewer than 10 of the statements in the references for this list are part of the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The rest are statements from other sources such as interviews, opinion pieces, online essays and presentations. Academic papers almost never reject the view that human impacts have contributed to climate change. In 2004, a review of published abstracts from 928 peer-reviewed papers addressing "global climate change" found that none of them disputed the IPCC's conclusion that "Earth's climate is being affected by human activities" and that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations"[14] A 2013 survey of 3984 abstracts from peer-reviewed papers published between 1991 and 2011 that expressed an opinion on anthropogenic global warming found that 97.1% agreed that climate change is caused by human activity.[15] (see also Scientific opinion on climate change and Surveys of scientists' views on climate change).
Scientists questioning the accuracy of IPCC climate projections
Scientists in this section have made comments that it is not possible to project global climate accurately enough to justify the ranges projected for temperature and sea-level rise over the next century. They may not conclude specifically that the current IPCC projections are either too high or too low, but that the projections are likely to be inaccurate due to inadequacies of current global climate modeling.
Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of the School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study; Fellow of the Royal Society [16]
Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences[17][18][19]
Nils-Axel Mörner, retired head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University, former chairman of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (1999–2003).[20]
Garth Paltridge, retired chief research scientist, CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research and retired director of the Institute of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre, visiting fellow ANU[21]
Peter Stilbs, professor of physical chemistry at Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.[22]
Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London[23]
Hendrik Tennekes, retired director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute [24]
Fritz Vahrenholt, German politician and energy executive with a doctorate in chemistry[25]
Scientists arguing that global warming is primarily caused by natural processes
Graph showing the ability with which a global climate model is able to reconstruct the historical temperature record, and the degree to which those temperature changes can be decomposed into various forcing factors. It shows the effects of five forcing factors: greenhouse gases, man-made sulfate emissions, solar variability, ozone changes, and volcanic emissions.[26]
Scientists in this section have made comments that the observed warming is more likely attributable to natural causes than to human activities. Their views on climate change are usually described in more detail in their biographical articles.
Khabibullo Abdusamatov, mathematician and astronomer at Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences[27]
Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics[28][29]
Tim Ball, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Winnipeg[30]
Robert M. Carter, former head of the school of earth sciences at James Cook University[31]
Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa[32]
Chris de Freitas, associate professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland[33]
David Douglass, solid-state physicist, professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester[34]
Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology, Western Washington University[35]
William M. Gray, professor emeritus and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University[36]
William Happer, physicist specializing in optics and spectroscopy, Princeton University[37]
Ole Humlum, professor of geology at the University of Oslo[38]
Wibjörn Karlén, professor emeritus of geography and geology at the University of Stockholm.[39]
William Kininmonth, meteorologist, former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology[40]
David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware[41]
Anthony Lupo, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri[42]
Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa[43]
Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and professor of geology at Carleton University in Canada.[44][45]
Ian Plimer, professor emeritus of Mining Geology, the University of Adelaide.[46]
Arthur B. Robinson, biochemist and former faculty member at the University of California, San Diego[47]
Murry Salby, former chair of climate at Macquarie University[48]
Nicola Scafetta, research scientist in the physics department at Duke University[49][50]
Tom Segalstad, head of the Geology Museum at the University of Oslo[51]
Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia[52][53][54]
Willie Soon, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics[55]
Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville[56]
Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center[57]
George H. Taylor, former director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University[58]
Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, professor emeritus from University of Ottawa[59]
Scientists arguing that the cause of global warming is unknown
Scientists in this section have made comments that no principal cause can be ascribed to the observed rising temperatures, whether man-made or natural. Their views on climate change are usually described in more detail in their biographical articles.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.[60]
Claude Allègre, politician; geochemist, emeritus professor at Institute of Geophysics (Paris).[61]
Robert Balling, a professor of geography at Arizona State University.[62]
John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, contributor to several IPCC reports.[63][64]
Petr Chylek, space and remote sensing sciences researcher, Los Alamos National Laboratory.[65]
David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma.[66]
Ivar Giaever, professor emeritus of physics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.[67]
Vincent R. Gray, New Zealander physical chemist with expertise in coal ashes[68]
Keith Idso, botanist, former adjunct professor of biology at Maricopa County Community College District and the vice president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change[69]
Antonino Zichichi, emeritus professor of nuclear physics at the University of Bologna and president of the World Federation of Scientists.[70]
Scientists arguing that global warming will have few negative consequences
Scientists in this section have made comments that projected rising temperatures will be of little impact or a net positive for human society and/or the Earth's environment. Their views on climate change are usually described in more detail in their biographical articles.
Craig D. Idso, faculty researcher, Office of Climatology, Arizona State University and founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change [71]
Sherwood Idso, former research physicist, USDA Water Conservation Laboratory, and adjunct professor, Arizona State University[72]
Patrick Michaels, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and retired research professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia[73
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...tream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
Intolerance: Global-warming Fanatics Intimidate Swedish Scientist
Written by William F. Jasper
Thuggish threats, censorship, and intimidation are not supposed to occur in the collegial, hallowed halls of science; differences of opinion on scientific issues are expected to be resolved cordially via argumentation based on research, experimentation, analysis, and presentation of evidence. But things don’t always work out that way, especially when the issue concerned involves billions of dollars in research funding, as well as political policies that would cost trillions of dollars and radically re-engineer global society.
The recent case of meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson (shown), one of Sweden’s leading climate scientists, shows that Climategate-style censorship of skeptics continues. Since mid-May, Professor Bengtsson has been at the center of a simmering scandal that has been the talk of the climate science blogosphere. It has also broken out into a number of mainstream media stories.
In April, Bengtsson accepted an invitation to become a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a British-based think tank that includes many eminent climate scientists. Why would that cause scandal and controversy? After all, many other scientists have also joined various think tanks involved in the controversial anthropogenic (human-caused) global-warming (AGW) debate. Well, the GWPF does not simply regurgitate the latest overheated bloviations of Al Gore, the UN’s IPCC, or the EPA; it has published 15 detailed reports and numerous shorter articles challenging the apocalyptic predictions and hysterical claims of the AGW alarmists. GWPF spokesmen are often quoted in media stories contradicting the prophets of climate doom and gloom.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/...warming-fanatics-intimidate-swedish-scientist
31000 scientists sign Oregon GW Skeptic Petition
In 1998, Dr. Arthur Robinson, Director of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, posted his first Global Warming skeptic petition, on the Institute’s website (oism.org). It quickly attracted the signatures of more than 17,000 Americans who held college degrees in science. Widely known as the Oregon Petition, it became a counter-weight for the “all scientists agree” mantra of the man-man Global Warming crowd.
Recently, with America being dragged toward Kyoto-style energy limits by cadres of alarmists, Robinson mailed a new copy of the petition to his original signers, asking them to recruit additional qualified scientists. Now his list includes nearly 32,000 American man-made warming skeptics with science qualifications. More than 9,000 hold scientific PhDs. Almost 32,000 thousand skeptics happens to be twelve times as many scientists as the 2,500 scientific reviewers claimed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to form a scientific consensus.
Last week Robinson held a press meeting at the National Press Club in DC, followed by a luncheon on Capital Hill, to which members of Congress and their aides were invited. Not surprisingly, attendance was low.
Robinson’s petition states a truth: “There is no convincing evidence that human release of CO2, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will cause, in the foreseeable future, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
What do these approx 32,000 scientists believe has caused the earth’s warming since 1850 if it isn’t CO2? He points to the sun. Robinson notes that over the past 150 years the sunspot index has predicted the Earth’s temperature changes—with 79 percent accuracy—about ten years before they happen. The sunspots actually predicted the 2007 global temperature decline; the index turned down in 2000. The computer models didn’t foresee it.
The correlation between Earth’s temperatures and CO2 is only at the “accidental” level—22 percent and declining sharply over the past decade as the temperatures have refused to increase with the CO2 levels. Robinson says the lack of correlation between CO2 levels and past Earth temperatures proves that CO2 is not dominating our climate.
The Oregon chemist warns that “no other major scientific problem has ever been tackled the way the UN has approached global warming.” The UN hosted a big meeting of scientists, he says, and then a small group of “authors” summarized the discussions into a global action plan. But the UN has never produced any evidence that humans are warming our climate. The UN panel says CO2 became the culprit “by the process of elimination” but such a process is neither scientific nor admissible in a court of law.
The forecasts of desperate temperature increases all come from computer climate models, notes Robinson. But the computer models keep forecasting more warming than we get. In fact, 70 percent of the earth’s recent warming occurred before 1940, while virtually all of humanity’s greenhouse gas emission has occurred since that date. The Earth’s net warming since 1940 is a tiny 0.2 degree C.
“If CO2 isn’t causing our tiny warming, then banning all our energy will simply make people poor and helpless, says Robinson, “The cold spells and heat waves nature will always throw at us, will then indeed, threaten human lives on the planet.”
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3214
List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming
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This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.
A majority of earth and climate scientists are convinced by the evidence that humans are significantly contributing to global warming.[1][2]
This is a list of notable scientists who have made statements that conflict with the mainstream scientific understanding of global warming as summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and endorsed by other scientific bodies.
Establishing the mainstream scientific assessment, climate scientists agree that the global average surface temperature has risen over the last century. The scientific consensus and scientific opinion on climate change were summarized in the 2001 Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The main conclusions on global warming were as follows:
1.The global average surface temperature has risen 0.6 ± 0.2 °C since the late 19th century, and 0.17 °C per decade in the last 30 years.[3]
2."There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities", in particular emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.[4]
3.If greenhouse gas emissions continue the warming will also continue, with temperatures projected to increase by 1.4 °C to 5.8 °C between 1990 and 2100.[A] Accompanying this temperature increase will be increases in some types of extreme weather and a projected sea level rise.[5] The balance of impacts of global warming become significantly negative at larger values of warming.[6]
These findings are recognized by the national science academies of all the major industrialized nations.[7]
Interest in such scientists has been increased by attempts to compile lists of dissenting scientists,[citation needed] including a minority report to the US Senate by Marc Morano,[8] another by Arthur B. Robinson, which is often known as the Oregon Petition,[9] and another by the Heartland Institute,[10] all three of which have been criticized on a number of grounds.[11][12][13]
Listing criteria: The notable scientists listed in this article have made statements since the publication of the Third Assessment Report which disagree with one or more of these 3 main conclusions. Each scientist included in this list has published at least one peer-reviewed article in the broad field of natural sciences, although not necessarily in a field relevant to climatology. To be included on this list a scientist must have made a clear statement in their own words; it is not enough for a name to be found on a petition or similar.
Contents
1 Peer review
2 Scientists questioning the accuracy of IPCC climate projections
3 Scientists arguing that global warming is primarily caused by natural processes
4 Scientists arguing that the cause of global warming is unknown
5 Scientists arguing that global warming will have few negative consequences
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
9 Further reading
10 External links
Peer review
As of August 2012, fewer than 10 of the statements in the references for this list are part of the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The rest are statements from other sources such as interviews, opinion pieces, online essays and presentations. Academic papers almost never reject the view that human impacts have contributed to climate change. In 2004, a review of published abstracts from 928 peer-reviewed papers addressing "global climate change" found that none of them disputed the IPCC's conclusion that "Earth's climate is being affected by human activities" and that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations"[14] A 2013 survey of 3984 abstracts from peer-reviewed papers published between 1991 and 2011 that expressed an opinion on anthropogenic global warming found that 97.1% agreed that climate change is caused by human activity.[15] (see also Scientific opinion on climate change and Surveys of scientists' views on climate change).
Scientists questioning the accuracy of IPCC climate projections
Scientists in this section have made comments that it is not possible to project global climate accurately enough to justify the ranges projected for temperature and sea-level rise over the next century. They may not conclude specifically that the current IPCC projections are either too high or too low, but that the projections are likely to be inaccurate due to inadequacies of current global climate modeling.
Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of the School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study; Fellow of the Royal Society [16]
Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences[17][18][19]
Nils-Axel Mörner, retired head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University, former chairman of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (1999–2003).[20]
Garth Paltridge, retired chief research scientist, CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research and retired director of the Institute of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre, visiting fellow ANU[21]
Peter Stilbs, professor of physical chemistry at Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.[22]
Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London[23]
Hendrik Tennekes, retired director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute [24]
Fritz Vahrenholt, German politician and energy executive with a doctorate in chemistry[25]
Scientists arguing that global warming is primarily caused by natural processes
Graph showing the ability with which a global climate model is able to reconstruct the historical temperature record, and the degree to which those temperature changes can be decomposed into various forcing factors. It shows the effects of five forcing factors: greenhouse gases, man-made sulfate emissions, solar variability, ozone changes, and volcanic emissions.[26]
Scientists in this section have made comments that the observed warming is more likely attributable to natural causes than to human activities. Their views on climate change are usually described in more detail in their biographical articles.
Khabibullo Abdusamatov, mathematician and astronomer at Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences[27]
Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics[28][29]
Tim Ball, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Winnipeg[30]
Robert M. Carter, former head of the school of earth sciences at James Cook University[31]
Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa[32]
Chris de Freitas, associate professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland[33]
David Douglass, solid-state physicist, professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester[34]
Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology, Western Washington University[35]
William M. Gray, professor emeritus and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University[36]
William Happer, physicist specializing in optics and spectroscopy, Princeton University[37]
Ole Humlum, professor of geology at the University of Oslo[38]
Wibjörn Karlén, professor emeritus of geography and geology at the University of Stockholm.[39]
William Kininmonth, meteorologist, former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology[40]
David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware[41]
Anthony Lupo, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Missouri[42]
Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa[43]
Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and professor of geology at Carleton University in Canada.[44][45]
Ian Plimer, professor emeritus of Mining Geology, the University of Adelaide.[46]
Arthur B. Robinson, biochemist and former faculty member at the University of California, San Diego[47]
Murry Salby, former chair of climate at Macquarie University[48]
Nicola Scafetta, research scientist in the physics department at Duke University[49][50]
Tom Segalstad, head of the Geology Museum at the University of Oslo[51]
Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia[52][53][54]
Willie Soon, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics[55]
Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville[56]
Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center[57]
George H. Taylor, former director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University[58]
Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, professor emeritus from University of Ottawa[59]
Scientists arguing that the cause of global warming is unknown
Scientists in this section have made comments that no principal cause can be ascribed to the observed rising temperatures, whether man-made or natural. Their views on climate change are usually described in more detail in their biographical articles.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.[60]
Claude Allègre, politician; geochemist, emeritus professor at Institute of Geophysics (Paris).[61]
Robert Balling, a professor of geography at Arizona State University.[62]
John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, contributor to several IPCC reports.[63][64]
Petr Chylek, space and remote sensing sciences researcher, Los Alamos National Laboratory.[65]
David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma.[66]
Ivar Giaever, professor emeritus of physics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.[67]
Vincent R. Gray, New Zealander physical chemist with expertise in coal ashes[68]
Keith Idso, botanist, former adjunct professor of biology at Maricopa County Community College District and the vice president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change[69]
Antonino Zichichi, emeritus professor of nuclear physics at the University of Bologna and president of the World Federation of Scientists.[70]
Scientists arguing that global warming will have few negative consequences
Scientists in this section have made comments that projected rising temperatures will be of little impact or a net positive for human society and/or the Earth's environment. Their views on climate change are usually described in more detail in their biographical articles.
Craig D. Idso, faculty researcher, Office of Climatology, Arizona State University and founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change [71]
Sherwood Idso, former research physicist, USDA Water Conservation Laboratory, and adjunct professor, Arizona State University[72]
Patrick Michaels, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and retired research professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia[73
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...tream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)
Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.
Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.
We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.
Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.
According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.
However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.
Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible – because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide. Although the sun’s output is likely to decrease until 2100, ‘This would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08C.’ Peter Stott, one of the authors, said: ‘Our findings suggest a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.’
These findings are fiercely disputed by other solar experts.
‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’
He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming.
CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.
So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid.
‘The ten-year projection remains groundbreaking science. The period for the original projection is not over yet,’ he said.
Dr Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University in North Carolina, is the author of several papers that argue the Met Office climate models show there should have been ‘steady warming from 2000until now’.
‘If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories,’ he said.
He believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand.
‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’.
She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
‘They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,’ said Prof Curry. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific cycle ‘flipped’ back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years .
Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997.
The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.
‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’
Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific.
‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ight-Thames-freezing-again.html#ixzz33mmVwGFz
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Confessions of Members Of The Climate Science Community
While it does not explicitly say so, an article in the May 2011 of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has redefined the dominate climate issue. The authors might not admit that they have altered from the IPCC focus on global average surface temperature trends as the icon of climate change, but the reality of this change is obvious from their text. In the report
National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. Committee on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp.
it is written
“…..the traditional global mean TOA radiative forcing concept has some important limitations, which have come increasingly to light over the past decade. The concept is inadequate for some forcing agents, such as absorbing aerosols and land-use changes, that may have regional climate impacts much greater than would be predicted from TOA radiative forcing. Also, it diagnoses only one measure of climate change—global mean surface temperature response—while offering little information on regional climate change or precipitation. These limitations can be addressed by expanding the radiative forcing concept and through the introduction of additional forcing metrics. In particular, the concept needs to be extended to account for (1) the vertical structure of radiative forcing, (2) regional variability in radiative forcing, and (3) nonradiative forcing.”
Joe D’Aleo, Joe Bastardi, Judy Curry, Roy Spencer, Peter Webster and others who have been out front on this issue also need to be recognized for documenting a much more significant role of natural climate variability on seasonal, yearly, decadal and longer time scales.
The new article, which exemplifies where the broader climate community is finally starting to accept this more robust perspective on climate, is
Mehta, Vikram, and Coauthors, 2011: Decadal Climate Predictability and Prediction: Where Are We?. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 92, 637–640.doi: 10.1175/2010BAMS3025.1
Extracts from the paper read [highlight added]
“The importance of decadal climate variability (DCV) research is being increasingly recognized, including by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). An improved understanding of DCV is very important because stakeholders and policymakers want to know the likely climate trajectory for the coming decades for applications to water resources, agriculture, energy, and infrastructure development. Responding to this demand, many climate modeling groups in the United States, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere are gearing up to assess the potential for decadal climate predictions. The magnitudes of regional DCV often exceed those associated with the trends resulting from anthropogenic changes.”
“PREDICTABILITY AND PREDICTION. Initial decadal prediction efforts in the last few years show predictive skill of global average temperature up to a decade in advance using both initial conditions and the climate change signal created by already emitted greenhouse gases.”
This claim of decade surface temperature prediction skill, of course, is not supported by their lack of skill since 1998. The next section of their paper highlights the wide range of uncertainties for decadal prediction and the movement away from the global average surface temperature as the icon of climate change. For multi-decadal climate predictions, these uncertainties are necessarily even higher.
“THEORY AND MODELING. Although global coupled models designed in the last 15 years are able to generate DCV patterns that resemble observed DCV patterns, the models tend to displace them spatially and temporally with respect to observed patterns. Also, it has not been obvious that the same mechanisms operate in both models and nature to produce similar DCV patterns. A much better understanding of the physical mechanisms of DCV in nature is required. Without this, the sources and skills used to make decadal predictions will remain unreliable.”
“Among the known, major problems in global coupled models are large systematic biases; the absence of eddies and nonlinear interactions in ocean components; incorrect/inaccurate representation of planetary wave dynamics, interactions with eddies, 3D basin modes, and forced responses of basin modes; air–sea interaction; representation of vertical mixing in the upper ocean; and subpolar ocean dynamics, including the relative importance of temperature,salinity, wind-driven and thermohaline circulations, weak vertical stratification, and interactions with sea ice. The atmospheric components of the global coupled models are also not complete; the most important required additions are a well-resolved stratosphere that includes its chemical makeup, the representation of ice in the water cycle, and a better parameterization of convection, cloud physics, and tropospheric chemistry. Because resolution appears to be one of the model attributes influencing DCV time scales, model resolution is another aspect that needs major improvement. Major biases, however, are not removed simply by increasing resolution; persistent problems such as poor representations of the Indian summer monsoon rainfall still remain even in high resolution models.”
The confessions that are listed in this article are an implicit admission of the bankruptcy of the approach on climate assessments such as the 2007 IPCC WG1 report with its assumption that the multi-decadal climate model predictions are skillful.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.c...-of-members-of-the-climate-science-community/
...
Relative Roles of CO2 and Water Vapor in Radiative Forcing
In the second edition of our book
“Cotton, W.R. and R.A. Pielke, 2007: Human impacts on weather and climate, Cambridge University Press, 330 pp”,
we present a new analysis completed for our book by Norm Woods and Graeme Stephens at Colorado State University.
This new material discusses the relative role of CO2 and water vapor with respect to their radiative forcings, and provides a quantitative documentation of the dominance of water vapor as a greenhouse gas.
An excerpt from the text reads,
“To examine the impact of changing carbon dioxide and water vapor concentrations on radiative fluxes and heating rates, single column radiative transfer calculations were performed on standard atmospheric profiles for which carbon dioxide and water vapor concentrations were varied. Three profiles, representative of tropical subarctic summer and subarctic winter clear-sky conditions (McClatchey et al., 1972), were used for the calculations. The atmosphere was discretized into nineteen layers and the BUGSrad model (Stephens et al., 2001) was used.
Carbon dioxide was treated as uniformly mixed. Concentrations of 0, 280 (preindustrial), 360 (current), and 560 (doubling of preindustrial) ppmv were used for the calculations. For water vapor, the mixing ratios associated with the standard profiles were scaled by factors of
0, 1.0, 1.05, and 1.1. Figures with the heating rates for the particular scenario in K\/day, and the changes in heating rates attributable to the perturbations in carbon dioxide or water vapor mixing ratio, and a Table presenting the effects on downwelling longwave fluxes at the surface will be presented in the book.
The results suggest that the radiative changes induced by perturbations to carbon dioxide and water vapor are substantially different. For water vapor, modest increases beyond the base profile mixing ratios have minimal impact on longwave heating rates, but cause significant increases in downwelling longwave fluxes to the surface. For carbon dioxide, increasing the concentration beyond the base profile of 280 ppmv contributes to enhanced heating in the lower troposphere and to significantly enhanced cooling in the stratosphere, but causes minimal increases in downwelling longwave flux, particularly for the tropical and subarctic summer profiles. For the subarctic winter profile, this doubling of carbon dioxide produces an increase in downwelling longwave flux similar in magnitude to that for a ten percent increase in water vapor mixing ratio.
A number of factors potentially contribute to these differences in the effects of water vapor and carbon dioxide on heating rates and fluxes. First, water vapor is significantly more prevalent in the lower troposphere than in the upper troposphere and stratosphere. Consequently, the scaling approach used here to perturb the trace gas amounts tend to produce stronger perturbations of water vapor mass mixing ratio in the lower troposphere than at higher altitudes. This effect is less significant for carbon dioxide since this gas is more uniformly mixed.
In terms of radiative factors, the heating rate in a layer of the atmosphere is a function of the spectrally-varying absorption/emission characteristics of the layer, the spectral fluxes incident on the layer, and the layer temperature. The absorption by a layer is a function of the abundances of absorbing gases in the layer. In the longwave spectral region in which carbon dioxide is a significant absorber (for wavelengths of about 12.5 micrometers and longer) water vapor is also radiatively active. For a wavelength at which water vapor is already significantly absorbing, the addition of an amount of carbon dioxide to the layer will cause relatively little increase in the flux absorbed by the layer and thus cause relatively little increase in the radiative heating of the layer.
The spectral fluxes incident on the layer are also a function of the temperatures and emission characteristics of the layer’s surroundings. For a layer with given absorption characteristics, a stronger incident flux will cause more flux to be absorbed by the layer and contribute to heating. In particular in the lower troposphere, the proximity of the warm surface of the Earth contributes to this effect. A warmer surface temperature (as in, for example, the tropical or subarctic summer profiles used here) will contribute to enhanced heating in the lower troposphere as opposed to a cooler surface (as in the subarctic winter profile).
Finally, the temperature of the layer itself influences the amount of flux emitted by the layer. A warmer layer will emit flux more strongly, and thus have a greater tendency for cooling, than will a cooler layer. Profiles with warmer temperatures in the lower troposphere, such as the tropical profile, have stronger cooling in the lower troposphere than will a profile, such as the subarctic winter, which has cooler temperatures in the lower troposphere.
The downwelling flux at the surface is a function of the emission characteristics of the atmosphere, in particular the profile of the derivative of transmission with respect to height, known as the weighting function, and the temperature profile of the atmosphere. The height at which the weighting function peaks generally indicates the level of the atmosphere from which emission from the atmosphere most effectively reaches the surface, and this peak can be either broad (indicating the flux reaching the surface is strongly blended from different levels of the atmosphere) or narrow (indicating the flux reaching the surface is strongly selected from that particular level of the atmosphere). As trace gas concentrations in the lower troposphere increase, the general tendency is for the weighting function to shift lower in the atmosphere. For temperature profiles which decrease with height, this shift leads to increased emission to the surface.
The downwelling fluxes at the surface for the subarctic profile appear less sensitive to changes in carbon dioxide and water vapor concentrations than do the fluxes for the tropical and subarctic summer profiles. The subarctic winter profile has a relatively weak lapse rate in the lowest part of the troposphere, so changes in the position of the weighting function may have had little effect on the downwelling fluxes. In addition, the water vapor amounts in the subarctic winter profile are considerably smaller than those in the two other profiles. Since a scaling factor was used to perturb water vapor amounts for this study, the change in water vapor mixing ratio in the lower troposphere would be considerably smaller for the subarctic winter profile than for the two other profiles. This approach probably contributed to cause a less significant change in the weighting function for the subarctic winter case than that for the other two cases.
There are two tables that Norm Woods prepared that are insightful in terms of the effect of different atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and water vapor. For the tropical sounding, the downwelling longwave flux at the surface when the CO2 concentration changes from 360 ppm to 560 ppm is 0.09 Watts per meter squared, as contrasted with a change of 0.41 Watts per meter squared when the concentration changes to 360 ppm from 0 ppm. The reason for this relative insensitivity to added CO2 in the tropics is due to the high concentrations of water vapor which results in additional long wave flux changes due to CO2 being very muted.
For the subarctic summer sounding, the corresponding values are 2.94 Watts per meter squared when changing the CO2 concentrations to 360 ppm from 0, and 0.47 Watts per meter squared when changing the CO2 concentrations to 560 ppm from 360 ppm. For the subarctic winter sounding, the change is 14.43 Watts per meter squared when the CO2 concentrations are changed to 360 ppm from 0, and 1.09 Watts per meter squared when the CO2 concentrations are changed to 560 ppm from 360 ppm.
For water vapor, with the tropical sounding, the change of the concentration from zero to its current value, results in a 303.84 Watts per meter squared change in the downwelling longwave flux at the surface. Adding 5% more water vapor, results in a 3.88 Watts per meter squared increase in the downwelling longwave flux. In contrast, due to the much lower atmospheric concentrations of water vapor in the subarctic winter sounding, the change from a zero concentration to its current value results in an increase of 116.46 Watts per meter squared, while adding 5% to the current value results in a 0.70 Watts per meter squared increase.
This analysis shows that
1. The effect of even small increases in water vapor content of the atmosphere in the tropics has a much larger effect on the downwelling fluxes, than does a significant increase of the CO2 concentrations. Thus, the monitoring of multi-decadal water vapor trends in the tropics should be a high priority. While the increase in CO2 concentrations, and resulting increase in downwelling longwave flux can result in surface ocean warming, and thus increase evaporation into the atmosphere, it is the atmospheric water vapor signal that should be monitored for long term trends, as it is the dominant greenhouse gas that has the greater climate response.
2. The fractional contribution of the effect of added CO2, relative to a 5% increase of water vapor in the subarctic winter is significantly larger than in the tropical sounding. This is because the subarctic sounding is quite dry. An increase in absolute terms of water vapor similar to a 5% increase in the tropical sounding would, however, dominate the increase of downwelling longwave fluxes. This again indicates that the assessment of long term water vapor atmospheric concentrations needs to be a climate science priority.
Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.
Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.
We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.
Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.
According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.
However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.
Yet, in its paper, the Met Office claimed that the consequences now would be negligible – because the impact of the sun on climate is far less than man-made carbon dioxide. Although the sun’s output is likely to decrease until 2100, ‘This would only cause a reduction in global temperatures of 0.08C.’ Peter Stott, one of the authors, said: ‘Our findings suggest a reduction of solar activity to levels not seen in hundreds of years would be insufficient to offset the dominant influence of greenhouse gases.’
These findings are fiercely disputed by other solar experts.
‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’
He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming.
CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.
So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid.
‘The ten-year projection remains groundbreaking science. The period for the original projection is not over yet,’ he said.
Dr Nicola Scafetta, of Duke University in North Carolina, is the author of several papers that argue the Met Office climate models show there should have been ‘steady warming from 2000until now’.
‘If temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories,’ he said.
He believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand.
‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’.
She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
‘They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,’ said Prof Curry. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific cycle ‘flipped’ back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years .
Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997.
The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.
‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’
Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific.
‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ight-Thames-freezing-again.html#ixzz33mmVwGFz
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Confessions of Members Of The Climate Science Community
While it does not explicitly say so, an article in the May 2011 of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has redefined the dominate climate issue. The authors might not admit that they have altered from the IPCC focus on global average surface temperature trends as the icon of climate change, but the reality of this change is obvious from their text. In the report
National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. Committee on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp.
it is written
“…..the traditional global mean TOA radiative forcing concept has some important limitations, which have come increasingly to light over the past decade. The concept is inadequate for some forcing agents, such as absorbing aerosols and land-use changes, that may have regional climate impacts much greater than would be predicted from TOA radiative forcing. Also, it diagnoses only one measure of climate change—global mean surface temperature response—while offering little information on regional climate change or precipitation. These limitations can be addressed by expanding the radiative forcing concept and through the introduction of additional forcing metrics. In particular, the concept needs to be extended to account for (1) the vertical structure of radiative forcing, (2) regional variability in radiative forcing, and (3) nonradiative forcing.”
Joe D’Aleo, Joe Bastardi, Judy Curry, Roy Spencer, Peter Webster and others who have been out front on this issue also need to be recognized for documenting a much more significant role of natural climate variability on seasonal, yearly, decadal and longer time scales.
The new article, which exemplifies where the broader climate community is finally starting to accept this more robust perspective on climate, is
Mehta, Vikram, and Coauthors, 2011: Decadal Climate Predictability and Prediction: Where Are We?. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 92, 637–640.doi: 10.1175/2010BAMS3025.1
Extracts from the paper read [highlight added]
“The importance of decadal climate variability (DCV) research is being increasingly recognized, including by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). An improved understanding of DCV is very important because stakeholders and policymakers want to know the likely climate trajectory for the coming decades for applications to water resources, agriculture, energy, and infrastructure development. Responding to this demand, many climate modeling groups in the United States, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere are gearing up to assess the potential for decadal climate predictions. The magnitudes of regional DCV often exceed those associated with the trends resulting from anthropogenic changes.”
“PREDICTABILITY AND PREDICTION. Initial decadal prediction efforts in the last few years show predictive skill of global average temperature up to a decade in advance using both initial conditions and the climate change signal created by already emitted greenhouse gases.”
This claim of decade surface temperature prediction skill, of course, is not supported by their lack of skill since 1998. The next section of their paper highlights the wide range of uncertainties for decadal prediction and the movement away from the global average surface temperature as the icon of climate change. For multi-decadal climate predictions, these uncertainties are necessarily even higher.
“THEORY AND MODELING. Although global coupled models designed in the last 15 years are able to generate DCV patterns that resemble observed DCV patterns, the models tend to displace them spatially and temporally with respect to observed patterns. Also, it has not been obvious that the same mechanisms operate in both models and nature to produce similar DCV patterns. A much better understanding of the physical mechanisms of DCV in nature is required. Without this, the sources and skills used to make decadal predictions will remain unreliable.”
“Among the known, major problems in global coupled models are large systematic biases; the absence of eddies and nonlinear interactions in ocean components; incorrect/inaccurate representation of planetary wave dynamics, interactions with eddies, 3D basin modes, and forced responses of basin modes; air–sea interaction; representation of vertical mixing in the upper ocean; and subpolar ocean dynamics, including the relative importance of temperature,salinity, wind-driven and thermohaline circulations, weak vertical stratification, and interactions with sea ice. The atmospheric components of the global coupled models are also not complete; the most important required additions are a well-resolved stratosphere that includes its chemical makeup, the representation of ice in the water cycle, and a better parameterization of convection, cloud physics, and tropospheric chemistry. Because resolution appears to be one of the model attributes influencing DCV time scales, model resolution is another aspect that needs major improvement. Major biases, however, are not removed simply by increasing resolution; persistent problems such as poor representations of the Indian summer monsoon rainfall still remain even in high resolution models.”
The confessions that are listed in this article are an implicit admission of the bankruptcy of the approach on climate assessments such as the 2007 IPCC WG1 report with its assumption that the multi-decadal climate model predictions are skillful.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.c...-of-members-of-the-climate-science-community/
...
Relative Roles of CO2 and Water Vapor in Radiative Forcing
In the second edition of our book
“Cotton, W.R. and R.A. Pielke, 2007: Human impacts on weather and climate, Cambridge University Press, 330 pp”,
we present a new analysis completed for our book by Norm Woods and Graeme Stephens at Colorado State University.
This new material discusses the relative role of CO2 and water vapor with respect to their radiative forcings, and provides a quantitative documentation of the dominance of water vapor as a greenhouse gas.
An excerpt from the text reads,
“To examine the impact of changing carbon dioxide and water vapor concentrations on radiative fluxes and heating rates, single column radiative transfer calculations were performed on standard atmospheric profiles for which carbon dioxide and water vapor concentrations were varied. Three profiles, representative of tropical subarctic summer and subarctic winter clear-sky conditions (McClatchey et al., 1972), were used for the calculations. The atmosphere was discretized into nineteen layers and the BUGSrad model (Stephens et al., 2001) was used.
Carbon dioxide was treated as uniformly mixed. Concentrations of 0, 280 (preindustrial), 360 (current), and 560 (doubling of preindustrial) ppmv were used for the calculations. For water vapor, the mixing ratios associated with the standard profiles were scaled by factors of
0, 1.0, 1.05, and 1.1. Figures with the heating rates for the particular scenario in K\/day, and the changes in heating rates attributable to the perturbations in carbon dioxide or water vapor mixing ratio, and a Table presenting the effects on downwelling longwave fluxes at the surface will be presented in the book.
The results suggest that the radiative changes induced by perturbations to carbon dioxide and water vapor are substantially different. For water vapor, modest increases beyond the base profile mixing ratios have minimal impact on longwave heating rates, but cause significant increases in downwelling longwave fluxes to the surface. For carbon dioxide, increasing the concentration beyond the base profile of 280 ppmv contributes to enhanced heating in the lower troposphere and to significantly enhanced cooling in the stratosphere, but causes minimal increases in downwelling longwave flux, particularly for the tropical and subarctic summer profiles. For the subarctic winter profile, this doubling of carbon dioxide produces an increase in downwelling longwave flux similar in magnitude to that for a ten percent increase in water vapor mixing ratio.
A number of factors potentially contribute to these differences in the effects of water vapor and carbon dioxide on heating rates and fluxes. First, water vapor is significantly more prevalent in the lower troposphere than in the upper troposphere and stratosphere. Consequently, the scaling approach used here to perturb the trace gas amounts tend to produce stronger perturbations of water vapor mass mixing ratio in the lower troposphere than at higher altitudes. This effect is less significant for carbon dioxide since this gas is more uniformly mixed.
In terms of radiative factors, the heating rate in a layer of the atmosphere is a function of the spectrally-varying absorption/emission characteristics of the layer, the spectral fluxes incident on the layer, and the layer temperature. The absorption by a layer is a function of the abundances of absorbing gases in the layer. In the longwave spectral region in which carbon dioxide is a significant absorber (for wavelengths of about 12.5 micrometers and longer) water vapor is also radiatively active. For a wavelength at which water vapor is already significantly absorbing, the addition of an amount of carbon dioxide to the layer will cause relatively little increase in the flux absorbed by the layer and thus cause relatively little increase in the radiative heating of the layer.
The spectral fluxes incident on the layer are also a function of the temperatures and emission characteristics of the layer’s surroundings. For a layer with given absorption characteristics, a stronger incident flux will cause more flux to be absorbed by the layer and contribute to heating. In particular in the lower troposphere, the proximity of the warm surface of the Earth contributes to this effect. A warmer surface temperature (as in, for example, the tropical or subarctic summer profiles used here) will contribute to enhanced heating in the lower troposphere as opposed to a cooler surface (as in the subarctic winter profile).
Finally, the temperature of the layer itself influences the amount of flux emitted by the layer. A warmer layer will emit flux more strongly, and thus have a greater tendency for cooling, than will a cooler layer. Profiles with warmer temperatures in the lower troposphere, such as the tropical profile, have stronger cooling in the lower troposphere than will a profile, such as the subarctic winter, which has cooler temperatures in the lower troposphere.
The downwelling flux at the surface is a function of the emission characteristics of the atmosphere, in particular the profile of the derivative of transmission with respect to height, known as the weighting function, and the temperature profile of the atmosphere. The height at which the weighting function peaks generally indicates the level of the atmosphere from which emission from the atmosphere most effectively reaches the surface, and this peak can be either broad (indicating the flux reaching the surface is strongly blended from different levels of the atmosphere) or narrow (indicating the flux reaching the surface is strongly selected from that particular level of the atmosphere). As trace gas concentrations in the lower troposphere increase, the general tendency is for the weighting function to shift lower in the atmosphere. For temperature profiles which decrease with height, this shift leads to increased emission to the surface.
The downwelling fluxes at the surface for the subarctic profile appear less sensitive to changes in carbon dioxide and water vapor concentrations than do the fluxes for the tropical and subarctic summer profiles. The subarctic winter profile has a relatively weak lapse rate in the lowest part of the troposphere, so changes in the position of the weighting function may have had little effect on the downwelling fluxes. In addition, the water vapor amounts in the subarctic winter profile are considerably smaller than those in the two other profiles. Since a scaling factor was used to perturb water vapor amounts for this study, the change in water vapor mixing ratio in the lower troposphere would be considerably smaller for the subarctic winter profile than for the two other profiles. This approach probably contributed to cause a less significant change in the weighting function for the subarctic winter case than that for the other two cases.
There are two tables that Norm Woods prepared that are insightful in terms of the effect of different atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and water vapor. For the tropical sounding, the downwelling longwave flux at the surface when the CO2 concentration changes from 360 ppm to 560 ppm is 0.09 Watts per meter squared, as contrasted with a change of 0.41 Watts per meter squared when the concentration changes to 360 ppm from 0 ppm. The reason for this relative insensitivity to added CO2 in the tropics is due to the high concentrations of water vapor which results in additional long wave flux changes due to CO2 being very muted.
For the subarctic summer sounding, the corresponding values are 2.94 Watts per meter squared when changing the CO2 concentrations to 360 ppm from 0, and 0.47 Watts per meter squared when changing the CO2 concentrations to 560 ppm from 360 ppm. For the subarctic winter sounding, the change is 14.43 Watts per meter squared when the CO2 concentrations are changed to 360 ppm from 0, and 1.09 Watts per meter squared when the CO2 concentrations are changed to 560 ppm from 360 ppm.
For water vapor, with the tropical sounding, the change of the concentration from zero to its current value, results in a 303.84 Watts per meter squared change in the downwelling longwave flux at the surface. Adding 5% more water vapor, results in a 3.88 Watts per meter squared increase in the downwelling longwave flux. In contrast, due to the much lower atmospheric concentrations of water vapor in the subarctic winter sounding, the change from a zero concentration to its current value results in an increase of 116.46 Watts per meter squared, while adding 5% to the current value results in a 0.70 Watts per meter squared increase.
This analysis shows that
1. The effect of even small increases in water vapor content of the atmosphere in the tropics has a much larger effect on the downwelling fluxes, than does a significant increase of the CO2 concentrations. Thus, the monitoring of multi-decadal water vapor trends in the tropics should be a high priority. While the increase in CO2 concentrations, and resulting increase in downwelling longwave flux can result in surface ocean warming, and thus increase evaporation into the atmosphere, it is the atmospheric water vapor signal that should be monitored for long term trends, as it is the dominant greenhouse gas that has the greater climate response.
2. The fractional contribution of the effect of added CO2, relative to a 5% increase of water vapor in the subarctic winter is significantly larger than in the tropical sounding. This is because the subarctic sounding is quite dry. An increase in absolute terms of water vapor similar to a 5% increase in the tropical sounding would, however, dominate the increase of downwelling longwave fluxes. This again indicates that the assessment of long term water vapor atmospheric concentrations needs to be a climate science priority.
From the Wikipedia page on the petition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition
"According to Robinson, the petition has over 31,000 signatories. Over 9,000 report to have a Ph.D.,[1][2][3] mostly in engineering.[5] The NIPCC (2009) Report lists 31,478 degreed signatories, including 9,029 with Ph.D.s.[6] The list has been criticized for its lack of verification, with pranksters successfully submitting Charles Darwin, members of the Spice Girls and characters from Star Wars, and getting them briefly included on the list.[7]"
Engineers ARE NOT EXPERTS in climate science. Individually, they could very well know absolutely nothing about the intricacies of how the planets climate works.
Here is another critique of your petition, which to a normal thinking person will make a whole lotta sense....
From an article on Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-grandia/the-30000-global-warming_b_243092.html
The 30,000 Global Warming Petition Is Easily-Debunked Propaganda
To say that the oft-touted "30,000 Global Warming Petition" project stinks would be the understatement of the year.
I thought it would be timely to once again break down this flawed piece of global warming denier propaganda after it was mentioned last night in Daily Show host Jon Stewart's interview with US Energy Secretary of Energy, Dr. Stephen Chu.
.1% of Signers Have a Background in Climatology
The Petition Project website offers a breakdown of the areas of expertise of those who have signed the petition.
In the realm of climate science it breaks it breaks down as such:
Atmospheric Science (113)
Climatology (39)
Meteorology (341)
Astronomy (59)
Astrophysics (26)
So only .1% of the individuals on the list of 30,000 signatures have a scientific background in Climatology. To be fair, we can add in those who claim to have a background in Atmospheric Science, which brings the total percentage of signatories with a background in climate change science to a whopping .5%.
The page does not break out the names of those who do claim to be experts in Climatology and Atmospheric Science, which makes even that .5% questionable [see my section on "unverifiable mess" below].
This makes an already questionable list seem completely insignificant given the nature of scientific endeavor.
When I think I'm having chest pains I don't go to the dermatologist, I go to a cardiologist because it would be absurd to go to skin doctor for a heart problem. It would be equally absurd to look to a scientist with a background in medicine (of which there are 3,046 on the petition) for an expert opinion on the science of climate change. With science broken down into very narrow specialties a scientific expert in one specialty does not make that person an automatic authority in all things science.
In this way the logic of the 30,000 petition is completely flawed, which isn't surprising given its questionable beginnings.
The Petition's Sordid Beginnings
The petition first emerged in April 1998 and was organized by Art Robinson of the self-proclaimed "Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine" (OISM) [their headquarters are the Photo Inset].
Along with the Exxon-backed George C. Marshall Institute, Robinson's group co-published the infamous "Oregon Petition" claiming to have collected 17,000 signatories to a document arguing against the realities of global warming.
The petition and the documents included were all made to look like official papers from the prestigious National Academy of Science. They weren't, and this attempt to mislead has been well-documented.
Along with the petition there was a cover letter from Dr. Fred Seitz (who has since died), a notorious climate change denier (and big tobacco scientist) who over 30 years ago was the president of the National Academy of Science.
Also attached to the petition was an apparent "research paper" titled Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. The paper was made to mimic what a research paper would look like in the National Academy's prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy journal. The authors of the paper were Robinson, Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon (both oil-backed scientists) and Robinson's son Zachary. With the signature of a former NAS president and a research paper that appeared to be published in one of the most prestigious science journals in the world, many scientists were duped into signing a petition based on a false impression.
The petition was so misleading that the National Academy issued a news release stating: "The petition project was a deliberate attempt to mislead scientists and to rally them in an attempt to undermine support for the Kyoto Protocol. The petition was not based on a review of the science of global climate change, nor were its signers experts in the field of climate science."
An Unverifiable Mess
Time and time again, I have had emails from researchers who have taken random samples of names from the list and Google searched them for more information. I urge others to do the same. What you'll quickly find is either no information, very little information or information substantiating the fact that the vast majority of signers are completely unqualified in the area of climate change science.
For example:
"Munawwar M. Akhtar" - no info other than the fact that he is a signatory on the petition.
"Fred A. Allehoff" - no info other than the fact that he is a signatory on the petition.
"Ernest J. Andberg" - no info other than the fact that he is a signatory on the petition.
"Joseph J. Arx" - no info other than the fact that he is a signatory on the petition.
"Adolph L. Amundson" - a paper by Amundson on the "London Tunnel Water Treatment System Acid Mine Drainage." [PDF]
"Henry W. Apfelbach" - an Orthopedic Surgeon
"Joe R. Arechavaleta" - runs an Architect and Engineering
company.
And this is only names I picked in the "A's." I could go on, but you get my point. The list is very difficult to verify as a third-party, but this hasn't stopped the Petition from bouncing around the internet and showing up in mainstream media.
Given all this it seems to me that anyone touting this as proof that "global warming is a hoax" completely misunderstands the process of scientific endeavor or has completely exhausted any real argument that rightfully brings into to doubt the reality of climate change.
Or, then again, they could just be in it for the money.
.
