Global Warming?

My wife was part way through Michael Chrichton's State of Fear when she asked me if what Chrichton said was true? She knew that there were problems with Global Warming but she had no idea of the extent.

Spoiler - The premise of the book is that an environmental organization is having trouble raising the $40 million it needs per year. Global Warming isn't scaring people enough so they try some other tactics. The change the term to "Rapid Climate Change" and attribute all unusual weather to Global Warming, even cold. They also pressure scientists whose work does not support warming to reword their papers (lie). Eventually they employ environmental extremists to create "natural" disasters to coincide with a conference.

How much of this is true? The part about the eco-terrorists is fiction and the organization, NERF, doesn't exist. Much of the rest is straight from science journals.

For example, here is an article with a geological timeline. Anthro-centric beings that we are, we tend to look at recorded history as being most of time. It isn't. Ice ages and warming periods have always happened. Current notions on Global Warming start with the idea that climate somehow stabilized 1,000 years ago or so and no longer changes naturally. The core of that belief if the "Hockey Stick" graph showing global mean temperatures for several centuries. Prior to the Hockey Stick it was assumed by historians that the world had a warm spell around 1000-13000 followed by a cold spell leading into a modern warm spell. The Hockey Stick shows a fairly constant temperature until the late 19th century. There is a sudden sharp climb forming the blade of the stick.

The Hockey Stick has been disproved numerous different ways but it is still quoted as a proof of the human-induced warming trend.

Just as in Chrichton's book, natural events are being turned into evidence of Global Warming. The Antarctic lost some huge ice shelves in the last few years. Is this due to warming? Not according to this article.

The high-profile collapse of some Antarctica's ice shelves is likely the result of natural current fluctuations, not global warming, says a leading British expert on polar climates.

This surprising finding is supported by analysis of data from the European Space Agency's ERS-1 satellite, according to Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London. The data, measuring changes in ice thickness across the Antarctic ice sheet using the polar orbiting satellite, show areas of growth from snowfall are as common as areas of decline.

This is a contrasting picture to one based solely on the northern Antarctic Peninsula - a shark's fin of land jutting out from the body of the continent, and reaching to just 750 miles from Chile - where there has been a drastic increase in temperature, thinning of ice sheets and collapse of ice shelves.

[...] "Taken as a whole, Antarctica is so cold that our present efforts to raise its temperature might be regarded as fairly puny. Change is undoubtedly occurring: in the collapse of the northerly Peninsula ice shelves, and elsewhere in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where the circumpolar current appears to reached the ice edge and is eating away drastically at the ice shelves. One cannot be certain, because packets of heat in the atmosphere do not come conveniently labeled 'the contribution of anthropogenic warming'.

"But the warming of the Peninsula has been going on for a considerable time, and the pattern of regional change is variable, and neither of these is favorable to the notion we are seeing the results of global warming".

Note the phrasing in this excerpt:

The professor continued: "I am not denying global warming. For instance, Greenland, in the northern hemisphere, does seem to be going. But Greenland's ice cap - Greenland is quite far south - is a last survivor from the ice age and only its height protects it. The more that cap melts, the more it will continue to melt as it gets lower and warmer. But Antarctica is different. Even in the Arctic I am skeptical of some claims that 40 per cent of the sea ice has already vanished, and that what remains is drastically thinning

Notice that he gives Greenland as an example of Global Warming then dismisses it in the same sentence? Greenland's ice cap is not natural, it is the result of an ice age .

Last Fall four hurricanes hit the southern US. This happened because a stagnant air mass in the mid-Atlantic prevented the storms from following the usual trajectory. That didn't stop a leading climate researcher from saying that Global Warming was to blame. Here is an angry column about this and other such lies.

It appears we have now entered a phase of the global climate change debate wherein scientists feel free to trumpet their personal bias even if it runs contrary to evidence compiled by the scientific entity they represent or, even more astounding, if it runs counter to research results they themselves produce!

Or possibly scientists cannot get funding unless they make these claims.

Putting aside all of this, what if Global Warming is real and it is caused by humans. What can be done? The Kyoto Protocol, even if the signatories live up to their commitments, will do nothing. Individual countries have pledged to limit emissions. They will do this by either moving the source of their emissions elsewhere or by buying credits from poor countries. Luxemburg shut down its generators. Did it stop using electricity? No, it now buys it from elsewhere.

If we were serious we could burn more high-sulfur coal. Sulfur dioxide holds less heat than carbon dioxide and it is much more efficient at it. Many computer models show that global warming has not happened yet because of sulfur dioxide emissions.

Or we could cut methane emissions. Methane holds 20-30 times as much heat as carbon dioxide and it has commercial uses. Keeping a pound of methane from escaping an oil well is equivalent to saving 25 pound of carbon dioxide.

So why aren't greens celebrating all this? As Daniel Sarewitz and Roger Pielke Jr. wrote in The Atlantic back in July of 2000: "A central tenet of environmentalism is that less human interference in nature is better than more." And the great symbol of non-interference has become reduction in CO2 emissions. Carbon dioxide, which makes life on this planet possible, became the poster child for the Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the like of all human interference with Nature.

The Greens love Global Warming. They always hated cars, yards, public parks (unless closed to the public), and anything else that allows people choice in their lives. CO2 reduction gives them everything they ever wanted. All they have to do is convince the world of it.

This goes back to the socialist causes that the Greens are descended from. Greens are often referred to as "watermelons" - green on the outside and red on the inside. Socialists always believed that choices were bad. The state would tell you where to live. They would design the building you live in, etc. The Kyoto Protocols and their possible follow-ups will give governments far more intrusive control into everyday life than Communist Russia ever had.

In a junk-science related matter, breast implants are back in the news and are being fought.

A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel is again preparing to review the science concerning the safety of silicone breast implants

Though the scientific data will, once again, point to the safety of silicone implants, it’s not clear that the science alone will drive the panel’s decision.

All the new data reaffirm a 1999 report from the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine concluding that available medical and scientific evidence does not associate SBIs with cancer and other systemic diseases. But as is often the case where activists and personal injury lawyers are involved, having the science on your side isn’t always enough

[...] But the FDA never rejected silicone breast implants. The agency simply requested more long-term safety data. The October 2004 study’s average 12-year follow-up among more than 7,000 women would seem to fill the bill -- as do several other epidemiologic studies with maximum follow-up times ranging from 23 years to 30 years. The claim that there aren’t long-term data supporting the safety of SBIs is flat-out wrong.

I’m not surprised by the distortions in the letter pushed by NOW and the other groups -- NOW is known to have had ties to personal injury lawyers involved in the multi-billion dollar breast implant litigation.