Friday, December 4, 2009

Climategate

It's no secret that I am, what is derisively termed, a skeptic on the global warming issue. The dump of a large volume of hacked emails from East Anglia's Climate Research Unit(CRU), which it seems is ground zero for global warming enthusiasts, has raised many questions.

To me the biggest take from all of this is that the CRU scientist have admitted they destroyed the data from which they built their climate models. There is no science if the data cannot be reviewed and verified. What this means is that whether the CRU scientists are right are wrong, their findings are totally worthless. If they cannot be independently verified by other scientists the process of verification is finished. Since most if not all of global warming science seems to exist in a small closed circle of researchers we can no longer accept that their is any scientific proof of global warming.

This does not mean that we are not experiencing a warming climate. It just means that we have no scientific evidence to support the theory that the Earth is warming and that man is responsible.

3 comments:

Cousin Mark said...

I don't think I'm going to die from global warming, but I'm not as sure as you appear to be that it's not a problem.

J.R. said...

You know Mark, you could agree with me when I'm right.

I don't know that it's a problem or not. But warming should be beneficial to humans on the whole. Of course, there are winners and losers, as always. But warmer temps should create higher crop yields. That's a good thing.

It is just ridiculous to me to think that we live in the moment of climate perfection. The climate is dynamic and changes rapidly, with or without human influence. The odds are that cooling would be awful, and warming is not a bad thing.

But the true believers are a lot more interested in a social agenda than whether we are better off or worse off. These are the same people who were scaring us about the coming ice age in the mid-70's. I remember reading articles about that for a high school research paper.

Cousin Mark said...

I am not aware of the benefits of higher sea level on coastal cities, for example. Following is interesting from Wiki (I love reading about geology):

Aside from purely human-produced synthetic halocarbons, most greenhouse gases have both natural and human-caused sources. During the pre-industrial holocene, concentrations of existing gases were roughly constant. In the industrial era, human activities have added greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests.[12][13]

The 2007 assessment report compiled by the IPCC noted that "changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols, land cover and solar radiation alter the energy balance of the climate system", and concluded that "increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations is very likely to have caused most of the increases in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century".[14]

Grennhouse gas levels:
1750 Today Change
CO2 280ppm 387ppm 107 ppm
CH4 700ppb 1,745ppb 1,045 ppb
NOx 270ppb 314 ppb 44 ppb
CFC 0 533 ppt 533 ppt

Ice cores provide evidence for variation in greenhouse gas concentrations over the past 800,000 years. Both CO2 and CH4 vary between glacial and interglacial phases, and concentrations of these gases correlate strongly with temperature. Before the ice core record, direct data does not exist. However, various proxies and modelling suggests large variations; 500 million years ago CO2 levels were likely 10 times higher than now.[15] Indeed higher CO2 concentrations are thought to have prevailed throughout most of the Phanerozoic eon, with concentrations four to six times current concentrations during the Mesozoic era, and ten to fifteen times current concentrations during the early Palaeozoic era until the middle of the Devonian period, about 400 Ma.[16][17][18] The spread of land plants is thought to have reduced CO2 concentrations during the late Devonian, and plant activities as both sources and sinks of CO2 have since been important in providing stabilising feedbacks.[19] Earlier still, a 200-million year period of intermittent, widespread glaciation extending close to the equator (Snowball Earth) appears to have been ended suddenly, about 550 Ma, by a colossal volcanic outgassing which raised the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere abruptly to 12%, about 350 times modern levels, causing extreme greenhouse conditions and carbonate deposition as limestone at the rate of about 1 mm per day.[20] This episode marked the close of the Precambrian eon, and was succeeded by the generally warmer conditions of the Phanerozoic, during which multicellular animal and plant life evolved. No volcanic carbon dioxide emission of comparable scale has occurred since. In the modern era, emissions to the atmosphere from volcanoes are only about 1% of emissions from human sources.[20][21]