Posted by
malibu1L on Saturday, February 24, 2007 4:56:34 PM
This is a great piece off NR further debunking the the hype of global warming pushed on the American people by Algore and the complicit media. it's
here.
Inconvenient TruthsNovel science fiction on global warming.By Patrick J. MichaelsThis Sunday,
Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-warming documentary
An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science fiction.
The
main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious,
very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland’s 630,000
cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels
over twenty feet by the year 2100.
Where’s the scientific
support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker’s
Summary from the United Nations’ much anticipated compendium on climate
change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s
medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea
level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore’s film
exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.
Even 17 inches is
likely to be high, because it assumes that the concentration of
methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly. Atmospheric
methane concentration hasn’t changed appreciably for seven years, and
Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCC’s methane
emissions scenarios as “quite unlikely.”
Nonetheless, the top
end of the U.N.’s new projection is about 30-percent lower than it was
in its last report in 2001. “The projections include a contribution due
to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica for the rates
observed since 1993,” according to the IPCC, “but these flow rates
could increase or decrease in the future.”
According to satellite data published in
Science in
November 2005, Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per
year. Dividing that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice
loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding
ice at 0.4 percent
per century.
“Was” is the operative word. In early February,
Science published
another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland’s ice
loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed.
Nowhere in
the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find any support
for Gore’s hypothesis. Instead, there’s an unrefereed editorial by NASA
climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal
Climate Change —
edited by Steven Schneider, of Stanford University, who said in 1989
that scientists had to choose “the right balance between being
effective and honest” about global warming — and a paper in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was only reviewed
by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. Hansen.
These
are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to “do”
something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami. And
given that Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago, the
real clock must be down to eight years!
It would be nice if my
colleagues would actually level with politicians about various
“solutions” for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by
every signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius
per half-century. That’s too small to measure, because the earth’s
temperature varies by more than that from year to year.
The
Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto — i.e., less
than nothing — for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which
themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around
2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to
dictate our energy policy for today).
Mendacity on global
warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes that we replace 20
percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the next
decade. But it’s well-known that even if we turned every kernel of
American corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our
annual gasoline consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto,
would be too small to measure, though the U.S. would become the first
nation in history to burn up its food supply to please a political mob.
And
even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol
efficiently, only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from
transportation. Even the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of
gasoline would only reduce our total emissions by 7-percent below
present levels — resulting in emissions about 20-percent higher than
Kyoto allows.
And there’s other legislation out there,
mandating, variously, emissions reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by
2050. How do we get there if we can’t even do Kyoto?
When it
comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient. And it’s
not just Gore’s movie that’s fiction. It’s the rhetoric of the Congress
and the chief executive, too.
— Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.