Relevant

2 January 2011:  The Canadian Senate Standing Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources held hearings on climate change on December 15, 2011. The testimonies are an excellent summary of scientific evidence showing that man-made emissions are not the primary cause of global warming.

Four scientists presented realistic science to the committee:

• Ross McKitrick, Professor, Department of Economics, University of Guelph
• Ian D. Clark, Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa
• Jan Veizer, Professor Emeritus, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa
• Timothy Patterson, Professor of Geology, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University

Professor McKitrick stated:

The global warming issue is often described with emphatic claims that the "science is settled," the situation is urgent, and the necessary actions are obvious. The reality is that there are deep disagreements about underlying scientific issues, there is reason to believe the problem has been exaggerated, and most policy proposals simply do not pass objective cost-benefit tests."

Professor McKitrick's excellent written testimony can be found here and a video of the hearings can be found here. Both the testimonies and question sessions are well worth the viewing time. 

11 November 2011:  Matt Ridley, renowned British author, recently delivered the Angus Millar Lecture of the Royal Society of the Arts in Edinburgh.  The subject of his speech was scientific heresy and the "pseudoscience" of climate change, as he calls it.  Matt is a self-described "lukewarmer," accepting that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, that the climate has been warming, and that man is at least partly responsible.

Matt succinctly summarizes the bankruptcy of the theory of man-made global warming:

"...there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past, when it changed naturally.  It was warmer in the Middle Ages and medieval climate change in Greenland was much faster.

Stalagmites, tree lines and ice cores all confirm that it was significantly warmer 7000 years ago.  Evidence from Greenland suggests that the Arctic ocean was probably ice free for part of the late summer at that time.  Sea level is rising at the unthreatening rate about a foot per century and decelerating.  Greenland is losing ice at the rate of about 150 gigatonnes a year, which is 0.6% per century.  There has been no significant warming in Antarctica, with the exception of the peninsula.  Methane has largely stopped increasing.  Tropical storm intensity and frequency have gone down, not up, in the last 20 years.  Your probability of dying as a result of a drought, a flood or a storm is 98% lower globally than it was in the 1920s.  Malaria has retreated not expanded as the world has warmed.

And so on.  I've looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data - as opposed to a model - that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm."

Ridley attacks the heart of the issue with a discussion about climate sensitivity.  Climate sensitivity is usually defined as the amount the Earth will warm from a doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.  Climate sensitivity includes not only the affects of CO2 increase, but also the additional warming or cooling from other forces as Earth reacts to the doubling of CO2. Ridley points out that climate scientists generally agree that the warming from a doubling of CO2 alone would warm global temperatures about 1.2 degree C.  This rise by itself is not enough to cause the catastrophic impacts projected by many global warming doomsayers.  The big disagreement is in the size of the feedback, that is, how Earth reacts to the doubling.  The Global Circulation Models on which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely all conclude that a positive feedback will be added to CO2 rise, boosting global temperatures from 1.2 degrees C to an average of 3 degrees C. But, our modern rise in global temperatures does not support model predictions.  As the graph to the right shows, surface temperatures have risen about 0.6-0.7 degrees C in the last 150 years as atmospheric CO2 levels have risen from a pre-industrial level of about 285 ppm to today's level of 390 ppm.

Click on image above to see a larger view of this graph.

11 October 2011:  An article recently published in the journal Nature casts doubt on the IPCC's Carbon Cycle Model. Researchers at the Scripps Institute of Oceanograpy find that previous estimates of the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed annually by global vegetation may be low by as much as 45%.

A cornerstone of the theory of man-made global warming is the concept that emissions of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere.  In its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC states:

"The additional burden of CO₂ added to the atmosphere by human activities ... leads to the current 'perturbed' global carbon cycle ... these perturbations to the natural carbon cycle are the dominant driver of climate change because of their persistent effect on the atmosphere."

 The IPCC further claims that carbon dioxide remains for a long time in the atmosphere:

"About 50% of a CO₂ increase willl be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years."

Should these new estimates be true, we can conclude that 1) annual emissions by mankind are a yet smaller part of Earth's carbon cycle, only about 2% of the flows, and 2) about 34% of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is exchanged with the biosphere and oceans each year. These findings further challenge the IPCC's assertions that mankind's relatively small emissions have "perturbed the carbon cycle" and that CO₂ "remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years."

29 July 2011:  Dr. Roy Spencer, Chairman of the CSCA Technical Advisory Board, along with William Braswell, published an article this week in the Journal of Remote Sensing containing new information on climate feedbacks and the climate models relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  In a press release from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, Dr. Spencer stated:  "The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show.  There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."  See the press release here.

Spencer and Braswell compared temperature data from the Hadley Centre Climate Research Unit in Great Britain with radiated energy measurements collected by the Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments aboard NASA's Terra satellite.  Time-lagged regression analysis showed that climate feedbacks proposed by the climate models were not able to explain changes in measured radiation after temperature changes, particularly over the oceans.  The analysis indicates the presence of natural forcing factors due to changes in clouds, solar radiation, heat rising from the oceans or other factors that are not described by the models. 

According to Spencer:  "The main finding from this research is that there is no solution to the problem of measuring atmospheric feedback, due mostly to our inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in our observations."  Since climate models do not account for these natural forcings, they likely overstate the temperature changes caused by CO2 emissions.  See the full technical article here.

23 May 2011:  Dr. William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University, provides an excellent analysis of current misguided climate science. He was formerly Director of Research for the U.S. Department of Energy, but fired by Vice President Al Gore in 1993 over his skepticism regarding assumptions regarding the Ozone Hole. Dr. Happer has testified before Congress on several occasions on the topic of climate science.

Dr. Happer points out:

"A normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 (the simplest chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth's atmosphere) per day. . .Now the Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate atmospheric CO2 as a 'pollutant'. . .As far as green plants are concerned, CO2 is not a pollutant, but part of their daily bread--like water, sunlight, nitrogen, and other essential elements. Most green plants evolved at CO2 levels of several thousand ppm, many times higher than now. Plants grow better and have better flowers and fruit at higher levels. Commercial greenhouse operators recognize this when they artificially increase the concentrations inside their greenhouses to over 1000 ppm."

"Other things being equal, doubling the CO2 concentration from our current 390 ppm to 780 ppm will directly cause about 1 degree Celsius in warming. At the current rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere--about 2 ppm per year--it would take about 195 years to achieve this doubling."

"The existence of the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period were an embarrassment to the global-warming establishment, because they showed that the current warming is almost indistinguishable from previous warmings and coolings that had nothing to do with burning fossil fuel."

Dr. Happer provides an excellent summary discussion of CO2, temperature and climate, the IPCC, emails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University (Climategate), the American Physical Society, and other topics. This article is well worth the read.  Find the complete text at First Things here.