Many of you have read the front page Plain Dealer article titled, “Cleveland-area TV meteorologists disagree with prevailing attitude about climate change.” This article correctly claims that I, as well as many of my on-air colleagues are skeptical of the Man-Made Global Warming Hypothesis that is so prominent in today’s headlines.
In general, I believe that the earth has cycles of warm and cold, wet and dry. Indeed, global climate extremes are a part of the natural cycle and have been occuring for millions of years. A few of the cycles have now been given names based on their atmospheric signatures: El Nino, La Nino, and the North Atlantic Oscillation (to name just a few). No one disputes the fact our last major global cooling episode (the last ice age) occured about 10, 000 years ago. Within that ice field, the Great Lakes were created. Ten such ice ages are believed to have occured in just that last million years. The Vikings settled the warm and friendly climate of Greenland more than one-thousand years ago. How would you like to live there now?!?
Climate change is a part of life. Yes, its true that, from 1978 to 1998, the planet experienced warming. The question remains: is MAN the cause of recent warming trends? Is Carbon Dioxide produced by humans the reason for recent warming trends of the 1980s & 1990s? Will temperatures continue to rise out of control? WIll this set in motion the melting of glaciers, a 20-foot rise in sea levels, increased famine and drought? Will polar bears and human kind survive?? For answers to these questions, you must rely on SCIENCE.
Lets understand the driving force behind Man-Made Global Warming. In the late 1980’s, the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their mission was NOT to seek the truth about the recent warming trend. They were chartered ”with the express charge of finding a scientific basis for a global climate treaty.” Do you see the difference? They pick and choose which studies best suit their agenda. They also censor dissenting opinions. Are they skewing the data to fit their conclusion? That is for you to decide.
The Plain Dealer Article also points out that many TV Meteorologists disagree with their very own certifying body, The American Meteorological Society (AMS). The AMS as an organization, does support the Man-Made Global Warming Hypothesis. The main author of the AMS’s position paper on Global Warming worked with Al Gore during the Clinton Administration. Does politics play a role here? That is for you to decide.
One might infer from reading the Plain Dealer article that we TV Meteorologists are removed from Climatology. That is patently absurd. We see the research and converse will colleagues in other similar disciplines. It was also inaccurate for the Plain Dealer and the American Meteorological Society to imply that it is just the TV Weather folks who disagree with the United Nation’s IPCC. Many Climatologists also dispute this theory. In fact, 22,000 scientists from around the globe have signed an “Anti” Man-Made Global Warming Petition, including Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT, & Dr. David Gee, chairman of the science committee of the International Geological Congress. That far out-numbers the 1,200 to 6,000 or so lobbyists, political leaders and grant-chasing professors who signed on to the Theory at the UN Global Warming Conference last year.
Remember this: CONSENSUS DOES NOT EQUAL FACT. Facts stand on their own after rigorous testing by qualified individuals. According to renowned Scientist Dr. Arthur Robinson, Professor of Chemistry and cofounder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine: “We can show that the hypothesis of human-caused global warming is false, because we have enough empirical data to falsify this hypothesis. Human-caused global warming is a hypothesis that has failed so many experimental tests that it is clearly without merit.”
So, why is it still going strong? The problem is: The Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming Theory has moved away from science and become an extremely political issue. I encourage you to do your own research and form your own opinions. If you are open to discussion, here are just a few of the reasons I, as well as many others in the scientific community, question the “Man-Made Global Warming Hypothesis” as it stands today:
1) NASA ADMITS ITS WORLD-WIDE CLIMATE DATA IS NOT RELIABLE. Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute are responsible with tracking daily, monthly and yearly global temperature patterns. Their findings are used by the UN IPCC to further the Man-Made Global Warming assertion. In early November of this year, scientists from the GODDARD INSTITUTE declared October 2008 the WARMEST OCTOBER ON RECORD globally. Problem is, they were wrong. Other climatologists examined the data and noticed that the temperatures from parts of Europe and Russia were numbers from SEPTEMBER! Oops! After the correction was made, October 2008 was actually the 77th warmest out of 125 years. Here’s the story:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/16/do1610.xml
What was most incredible about this story: Goddard Scientists admit they “did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data (the lab) was supplied with.” WOW! This is the agency that most Global Warming Supporters use to further their assertions. Yet, NASA scientists admit they don’t know if the data is correct or not! Unreliable data means unreliable results which lead to unreliable theories & conclusions.
2) NORTH AMERICAN GLACIERS ARE INCREASING IN SIZE. Yep, its true. Many glaciers in Alaska, Canada, and Finland have increased in size. But, this does not fit into any of the Global Warming forecasts. Haven’t heard about it?
Read about it here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/27/glaciers-in-norway-alaska-growing-again/
3) ARCTIC SEA ICE IS INCREASING, NOT DECREASING. October and November of 2008 saw some of the largest ice growth in history. Read about it here: http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/october-2008-possibly-set-for-record-sea-ice-extent-increase-rate/
4) THE POLAR BEAR POPULATION IN SOME ARCTIC AREAS IS INCREASING, NOT DECREASING. Read about it here: http://newsbusters.org/node/12694 . Even the Pro-Global Warming Scientists admit they don’t know if the Polar Bear population is increasing or decreasing. Phil McKenna of NewScientist.com concedes “the truth is that no one can say for sure how overall numbers (of Polar Bears) are changing.” This, despite a media blitz to convince you that the animals are vanishing from the planet due to shrinking sea ice.
But, you say, the Polar Bear was added to the Threatened Species list this year by the US Gov’t. Science or politics? Hmmmmmmm. The State of Alaska is suing the Federal Govt over this issue.
5) WORLD-WIDE COOLING CONTINUES. Several peer-reviewed studies show that Global Warming stopped after 1998. Research shows that Global Cooling has occured over the last 7 years. Here’s a link to one of the studies: http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Widescale+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm
The article’s assertion that 12-months of data can erase 100 years of data is exaggerated. Still, the Man-made Global Warming Scientists are shocked by the cooling trend that continues even today. NONE OF THE 22 Global Warming Forecasts Models predicted this cooling. They all missed it. Yet, we’re supposed to believe that these same computer models can predict global patterns 25 to 50 years down the road!
6) NASA ADMITS THE 1990s NOT THE WARMEST DECADE THIS CENTURY. Another NASA Goddard Institute blunder! Here’s their initial press release claiming that 1998 was the Warmest year on Record: http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrl9906.html
Problem is, its not true. Once corrections were made, 1934 proved to be the WARMEST year on record. In fact four out of the top ten warmest years in the US came from the 1930s. Yes, the 1930s was actually the warmest decade in US history…not the 1990s as NASA previously stated. Here’s the TRUE story: http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html
7) BRITISH COURT RULES GORE’S MOVIE “INCONVENIENT TRUTH” CONTAINS “UNTRUTHS.” Some British leaders wanted Al Gore’s Oscar-winning movie to be shown in all secondary schools across the country. A British Magistrate ruled that the movie was not a documentary, but a one-sided political film. The judge found that 13 of Gore’s assertions in the movie were either false or greatly exaggerated. Here’s the link to this story:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/corporate_law/article2633838.ece
I welcome your responses. – Mark Johnson
There are nearly nine billion humans and we have altered the global carbon cycle on a massive, exponentially increasing scale over less than 200 years…it seems fairly logical without much further study that humans could affect the atmospheric composition and physical properties.
I’m on the record as supporting the finding of the majority of climate scientists and modelers that anthropogenic effects on the global climate system are likely real and that there are likely many negative repercussions.
Your references leave much to desire. I suggest you read and get your information from more reliable scientific organizations.
If you require more indepth scientific studies or would like further information on anthropogenic effects, please let me know. I would be happy to educate you.
Vast majority of climatologists and modelers agree? Not even close. Pro Global Warming folks just have better PR than the hundreds of thousands of dissenting scientists.
-Mark Johnson
Global warming? We are still coming historically from the last ice age. Proof: State of Michigan ground is still isostatically rebounding from the release of the weight of the glacial ice. It is measurable! Also, as you mentioned, weather [climate] is cyclical. The cycle can be taken in the approx. 11-year intervals, or on a more historical broad cycle. This brings up several points. 1. What scientific basis are these “global warming alarmsts” using as their foundation? Is it one study, a questionable one, or none at all? 2. Exactly what background does Al Gore [ house of +11,000 sq. ft and electric/energy guzzler] have as a geoscience/atmospheric expert? I don’t think being a politician with that huge house makes him an expert. 3. data can be skewed or parts eliiminated/avoided to support any so-called cause. 4. It is too much a coincidence that Dr. Hansen is a strong ally of al Gore. This goes back to #s 2 & 3.
You need possibly centuries of data, which we don’t fully have, to determine this. We forget that historically the earth went through several sysles of warming [dinosaurs, etc] and then cooling [ice ages].
I don’t teach global warming in my classes saying it is too political and not all the data is in/available.
I am agreement with you. It literally burns me [pun intended]. Thanks Mark for pointing this out. Maybe we can finally get the word out. We just need some politicians that can go up against the Al Gores with the truth.
Mark,
One of your examples of a contrary event states:”It’s because October 2008 is set to break all records in the daily rate of increase in sea ice extent in the Arctic, that’s why.”
I have 2 objections to this being used as evidence against Global Warming: 1> This talks about a RATE of formation, NOT total sea ice; and 2> This is a Monthly rate, hardly indicative of a long term trend (decades to centuries.)
Yes, there are Natural long term Climate Cycles. The Milankovich cycle invloving repetitive changes in the shape, size and motion (precession) of the Earth’s orbit, is one of the better known astronomical changes that probably influences our climate over 1,000’s of years. It may have had a profound effect on Ice Ages.
The sun’s output actually varies, in periods from 11 to 1,000’s and even billions of years. Most of it’s shorter cycles do not invlove significant changes. One exception is the “Maunder Minimum” sunspot cycle which produced “The year with no summer” back in the Middle Ages.
Over longer periods, Plate Tectonics affects oceanic circulation which certainly can change climate over 1000’s to 1,000,000’s of years.
Over shorter periods, you mentioned several that are well documented. But no one is dismissing these natural phenomena. Any man-made change occurs over and above such natural fluctuations.
The one piece of evidence that is best documented over decades to centuries is the increasing amount of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere. Analysis of air trapped in ice cores taken around the world verify this trend. We are undeniably contributing substantially to that increase.
As you know, Carbon Dioxide acts to prevent some heat, which originally came from the sun, from escaping back into space, thus warming the atmosphere. An extreme example is Venus, whose atmosphere is almost all Carbon Dioxide. It’s surface temperature is over 800 deg F due largely to this “Greenhouse Effect.”
Yes, there are natural* sources of Carbon Dioxide such as Volcanic eruptions. But, the point is, WE are major contributors and WE can do something about it. It could be too late, in some respects, but we need to try. If we don’t, as the Earth warms, it will cause the release of an even more potent “Greenhouse Gas”, Methane. There are many billions of tons of Methane trapped in permafrost, bogs and as Hydrates in sea-floor sediment around the world. If even a portion of these deposits were released we could have a runaway, self-accelerating planetary catastrophe.
Sorry to prattle on and on Mark and I certainly do not in any way mean to demean your intelligence. But I think it is very important that we take “Global Warming” very seriously. Most of the devastating climatic changes that it potentially brings will ocurr in the distant future, but we are at a point in time where WE can mitigate, if not stop, the progression of the warming.
The bottom line is WE are contributing to it, to whatever extent. And WE have the ability to slow or stop it.
Thanks for taking the time to explain your opinion and reading mine.
Joe Swinglish
* It seems strange to use the word “Natural” to exclude man-made things. Are we un-natural or Supernatural?
Wait a second! Every time we have a warmer than normal day, week, or month, the Pro Global Warming folks are the first to issue a press release. The pendulum swings both ways. Besides, this is just one example of many that contradicts what the Man-Made Global Warming Theory predicted would happen.
- Mark Johnson
M: “If you require more indepth scientific studies or would like further information on anthropogenic effects, please let me know. I would be happy to educate you.”
In the meantime, please educate me why these peer reviewed papers all putting the lie to AGW should be ignored..
During each of the last four interglacial periods over the past half-million years, temperature was 5 to 8 °F warmer than the present (Petit et al., 1999).
McIntyre & McKitrick (2003, 2005) establishing that the UN’s graph had been doctored so as falsely to deny the reality of the mediaeval warm period, to whose existence hundreds of peer-reviewed papers from all parts of the globe attest.
At both Poles, it was warmer only half a century ago than it is today. For temperatures in the Arctic, see Soon et al. (2004). For the Antarctic, see Doran et al. (2002).
During the Maunder Minimum, a period of more than half a century ending in 1700 when there were no sunspots on the surface of our Sun, a Little Ice Age occurred all over the world (Hathaway, 2004).
During the Grand Maximum, the Sun was more active, and for longer, than during almost any previous similar period in the past 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2005; and see Usoskin et al., 2003; and Hathaway, 2004).
It is now thought possible that no new global annual temperature record will be set until at least 2015 (Keenlyside et al., 2008). Yet the projection of the UN’s climate panel had been that temperature would rise by about 1 °F during the 17 years to 2015.
Two-thirds of the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is naturally present, and carbon dioxide occupies just one-ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere today than it did 250 years ago (Keeling & Whorf, 2004, updated): for the atmosphere is large and we are small.
Allowing for the fact that the UN’s climate panel has exaggerated the effects of temperature feedbacks, the temperature increase in consequence of a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration could be as little as 1 °F. Values as low as this have been suggested in the peer-reviewed literature (e.g. Chylek et al., 2007).
A recent survey (Schulte, 2008) of 539 peer-reviewed scientific papers published since January 2004 and selected at random using the search term “global climate change” reveals that not a single paper provides any evidence whatsoever that “time is short” or that “the dangers are great”.
The late Edward Lorenz (1963), in the landmark paper that founded the branch of mathematics known as chaos theory, proved that long-run climate prediction is impossible unless we can know the initial state of the millions of variables that define the climate object, and know that state to a degree of precision that is and will always be in practice unattainable.
Douglass & Knox (2006) and Douglass et al. (2008) have established that the absence of the “hot spot” predicted by the UN’s models is real, and is not (as was suggested by Thorne et al., 2007) a measurement error or artifact within the estimated uncertainty interval of the observed record. Lindzen (2008) estimates that in the absence of the “hot-spot” the UN’s estimate of climate sensitivity must be divided by at least three. Thus, making this adjustment alone, a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration would raise global temperature not by 6°F but by a harmless and beneficial 2 °F.
The world’s foremost expert on sea level is Professor Niklas Moerner, who has been studying nothing but sea level throughout his 30-year career. In a recent paper (Moerner, 2004), he condemns the IPCC for its baseless exaggeration of future sea-level rise, and says there is no reason to suppose that sea level will rise any faster in the 21st century than it did in the 20th – i.e., by about 8 inches.
The vast majority of the 160,000glaciers in the world – including the biggest on the planet, which is 250 miles long and 40 miles wide – are in Antarctica, most of which has been cooling for half a century (Doran et al., 2002).
Furthermore, since satellite monitoring began in 1970, the surface temperature at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro has averaged 12.5 °F below freezing, and has never exceeded 3 °F below freezing (Molg et al., 2003). The glacier is not, therefore, melting.
It is also significant that the Larsen B ice shelf, which disintegrated suddenly a few years ago, had not been present during the mediaeval warm period (Pudsey et al., 2006). As with the glaciers, so with the ice shelves, all we are seeing is a natural cycle in the coming and going of the Earth’s ice.
The East Antarctic ice sheet is on a high plateau at high latitude. Since most of Antarctica has cooled over the past 50 years (Doran et al., 2002), so much so that environmental damage caused by cold has occurred in some of the Antarctic glens, there is no danger of this ice sheet disappearing, and there are no satellite images revealing that it has done so, is doing so, or is about to do so.
But the most telling evidence of all is that of Johannesen et al. (2005), who used satellite interferometry to determine that the mean thickness of the Greenland ice sheet increased by 2 inches per year – a total of 1 ft 8 in – during the decade 1993-2003. Once again, there is no cause for alarm.
The Sahara – has actually shrunk in area by 300,000 square kilometers over the past 30 years, allowing nomadic tribes to return to regions that they had not occupied within living memory (Nicholson, 1998, 2001).
The chief danger to polar bears has nothing whatever to do with “global warming” – indeed, a recent survey (Norris, 2001) for the World Wide Fund for Nature shows that in those parts of the Arctic that have warmed the population of polar bears has increased; in those parts that have neither warmed nor cooled the population is stable; and in those parts that have cooled the population has fallen. Polar bears, like us, are warm-blooded animals, and, like us, they prefer warmer weather. The recent bitterly cold winter in the Arctic drove many starving bears to approach human habitations in the hope of finding food.
Joe Says: “The one piece of evidence that is best documented over decades to centuries is the increasing amount of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere. Analysis of air trapped in ice cores taken around the world verify this trend. We are undeniably contributing substantially to that increase.”
Hey Joe: Several ice core studies show CO2 increases lag BEHIND temperature increases by several hundred years.
Mark
Of all the many weather forcasts I’ve listened to & somtimes groaned of the repitition I must say you have finally gained respect in my eyes. Global Warming??????? is an Al Gore hallucination after too much weed so the Big Brother Goverment can pour more of our tax dollars into another worthless project with no meaning. I really do not see much Global Warming in our area this year.