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The Disputed Science of Global Warming (PDF)
Any current warming of the earth is small and is probably due to quite normal climate variability. There is no noticeable increase in the frequency of extreme weather events. Any talk of rising sea levels is alarmist and not supported by data. Despite claims to the contrary, research shows that temperatures and carbon dioxide levels have been higher in the past than they are today. The current level of carbon dioxide is no cause for alarm. An increase in the level of carbon dioxide is not the cause of global warming. The man-made carbon dioxide available for any possible contribution to total warming (if any) is, at most, about 0.1%, or in other words, one one-thousandth. Water vapor is the most common and most significant greenhouse gas. It makes up about 3% of the atmosphere compared to carbon dioxide's 0.03%. Water vapor at least 200 times more significant than carbon dioxide. More than 95% of water vapor occurs naturally and it is often ignored in reports of global warming.

The Kyoto Agreement will achieve very little. And neither would a greater reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Kyoto's best case might be to achieve a 10% reduction in man-made carbon dioxide. If that is even possible, we will have addressed just one ten-thousandth of the total contribution to global warming. At a cost of about $150 billion per year. (Money that could be put to good use, such as starvation, sanitation, AIDS, improved living conditions for the poor, healthcare, or other ways to improve life for the less fortunate or for any of us on planet Earth...but improving life conditions for humanity on Earth is not really the goal of the environmentalists anyway.)

Computer models of climate are inaccurate -- the IPCC admits this -- and have no credibility; neither do reports based on those models. The mechanisms which dictate the climate are still under investigation and to assign warming to specific causes is premature. Researchers have shown that sunspots and water vapor play a significant role but there is still much to learn.

Sidenote: Organized religion is adding environmentalism to its list of concerns. The National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 51 church denominations and 30 million conservative Christians, named curbing global warming among its goals last fall.

The Emperor’s New Climate: Global Warming?
Sunspots increase, so do global temperatures. Sunspots decrease, so do global temperatures.
Willie Soon, a mild-mannered Malaysian native teaching at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, had done something unthinkable. He and his colleague at the center, Sallie Baliunas, with other researchers, had published a paper in Energy and Environment arguing that the 20th century had not been the warmest in the last 1,000 years. It did not seem to mollify global warming’s true believers that the basics of Soon’s claim had been well established in the peer-reviewed literature for decades.

Soon and Baliunas confirmed that from 800 to 1300 A.D., average temperatures in many regions worldwide were 2 to 4 degrees or more higher than the allegedly sweltering 20th century. It’s referred to as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and the extra warmth made life better, not worse. It is not only the arcane techniques of paleoclimatology, such as testing core samples of glacial ice for radioisotopes, that testify to the MWP, but history—such as people’s contemporary accounts of what they grew in their fields.

Decent wine grapes grew in Merrie England. (No more, alas.) Olives grew in 13th-century Germany, where St. Albert the Great also noted abundant fig and pomegranate groves in Cologne and the Rhine valley—places too cold for those crops today. Renaissance culture awakened and flourished throughout Europe.

The MWP also explains why Greenland, now essentially a glacier, could credibly be called Greenland. It was a Danish colony, and things actually grew there.

Following the MWP, the Greenland colony died out as average temperatures plummeted 3 to 5 degrees—about 2 degrees colder than our climate today. This Little Ice Age (LIA) finally moderated but lasted in most places until about 1900. For whatever reason, many regions have warmed up about 1 degree since 1900.

Because of Soon and Baliunas’s paper, Mann’s "hockey stick" was not so much broken as shattered. Interestingly enough, the two studies don’t entirely contradict each other. The Mann "hockey stick" study used such a small number of temperature record samples to create its dramatic trend line that the margin of error is substantial. Indeed, it’s so wide that you could draw a variety of lines through the chart—including a trend of global cooling.

Soon says: "They’re showing incomplete sets of data. If you do that, it's easy to show the curve you want people to see. For explaining this, they called me a 'right-wing extremist.' I don’t care what wings are. I want to know what the facts are."

The Soon and Baliunas study included more up-to-date research published in the four years since Mann’s study had been released.

Soon speaks enthusiastically of logic and measurement. "One of the most important pillars of the claim that CO2 is producing global warming," he says, "is the thermometer readings taken over the last 150 years. They show warming from 1900 to the 1940s. But the amount of CO2 produced then was negligible compared to the next period—from the 1940s to the 1970s -- when there was cooling. So how can the CO2 be producing the warming? That is the contradiction. They have yet to show why this would be."

But there’s another reason global-warming scientists have it in for Soon and Baliunas: The point of their work is not merely to demolish the "hockey-stick" model of history. They aim to replace it.

Since they’re astrophysicists, Soon and Baliunas know about sunspots -- powerful pulses of electromagnetic energy whose effects are felt hundreds of millions of miles distant. It turns out that while increased CO2 emissions don’t correlate very well with global warming, something else does -- something as far out of our control and as firmly in the hands of God as it can be: the fluctuating heat of our ultimate heat source, the sun.

More research is needed, but it appears that, stretching back 1,000 years, when sunspot activity went up, the earth got warmer; when the activity went down, the earth got colder. Soon is co-author of a new book on the sun’s variability, The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection (World Scientific Publishing, 2004).

As Soon painstakingly told me, "I am still trying to disprove my theory, to see if it is correct. But from the data, I still cannot rule out the possibility that I am right. I’m shocked by the lengths some scientist-believers go for the global warming cause...."

posted by Hal 8:24 PM