By John McFadden
GCC/Staff
Dec. 19, 2009

Columnist Eugene Robinson, in his Forum piece of Dec. 4, “E-mails look bad, but polar ice still melting,” says, “Most Americans are convinced that climate change is real.”

While temperatures have been slowly rising over the past millennium, there is little evidence that humans are the cause or that a majority of us are concerned.

The temperature rise from 1000 to 2009 is just 1 degree.

He wrote, “In one message sent to a long list of colleagues, (Phil) Jones (head of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, in England) speaks of having completed a ‘trick’ with recent temperature data to ‘hide the decline.’ “

The message was to Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, originator of the hockey-stick graph used by Al Gore in his movie.

The message actually says “your trick,” meaning what Mann had done to his own figures. The graph, showing a very rapid rise in the 20th century, has been widely criticized.

To get temperature data, Mann used “proxies,” in this case mostly tree rings. The problem with tree rings is they show only summer growth. If the winter is very warm or very cold, you will never know it.

The hockey stick also shows no evidence of either the Medieval Warm Period (800-1300) or the Little Ice Age (1300-1850), phenomena widely documented by others.

Temperature data gained in recent times has relied on ground stations here in the U.S. Most of the stations are in urban heat sinks and tend to record higher-than-normal temperatures.

Satellite data, available since 1959, refutes much of the excessive-warming data from the Climatic Research Unit and others.

“Hide the decline” refers to the inability of any climate model to explain the cooling of the past 10 years, and the efforts of the Climatic Research Unit, Mann and others to manipulate the data at any cost.

Jones temporarily has stepped down from the research unit. Mann is under investigation by the university.

Robinson is correct in saying that the e-mails showing the scientists squelching dissent are “most damning.”

Climate scientists agree that, if the carbon-dioxide content of our atmosphere doubled, the temperature would rise just 1.2 degrees. The current concentration is 388 parts per million.

The current rate of increase is 2 ppm per year. Doubling would take 194 years. No algorithms are needed; just extrapolate from graphs used by the research unit, Mann and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control. Humans are responsible for just 3 percent of CO{-2} emitted.

Water vapor, by far the greatest contributor to global warming, is out of the control of man.

Why is there such a rush to spend trillions of dollars on a project over which we have very little control?

Under the proposed cap-and-trade act, we will be put into the ludicrous position of borrowing trillions of dollars from the Chinese to give to China and India to build wind farms.

Source: Stand Up America

 

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think. dan@goldcoastchronicle.com