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THE EVER-CHANGING IPCC CARBON CYCLE |
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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."
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The IPCC bases its conclusions on the Carbon Cycle Model shown at right, which was published in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. The model estimates that annual emissions of carbon from the land and biomass is 122 gigatons of carbon, with an annual absorption by the land and biomass of 123 gigatons. Annual man-made emissions are estimated at 6 gigatons. The model also shows that about 215 of the 750 gigatons of carbon in the atmosphere is exchanged with the biosphere and oceans, or about 29% of the carbon in the atmosphere each year. Many skeptical scientists have questioned the IPCC Carbon Cycle Model, pointing out that the uncertainties in the carbon flows are very large--much, much larger than yearly human emissions.
The scientists at the Scripps Institute recently found that yearly uptake of global vegetation is probably in the range of 150 to 175 gigatons of carbon, or up to 45% more than in the current IPCC models. This 45% error in one of the carbon cycle flows is 8 times more than total annual human industrial emissions. Read more about it here.
The article calls into question the accuracy of the whole Carbon Cycle Model. It's clear that climate science really doesn't have a good handle on the estimates of global carbon flows.
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The Carbon Cycle According to the IPCC. Numbers in billions of tons of carbon. The numbers shown are estimated carbon totals residing in each climate subsystem. The numbers next to the arrows are estimates of annual transfers of carbon in the form of CO2. Diagram from Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century's Hottest Topic. |
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." |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 18 November 2011 05:12 )
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CERN CLOUD EXPERIMENT CONFIRMS SOLAR INFLUENCE ON CLIMATE |
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31 August 2011: CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has reported results that will shake the foundation of the theory of man-made global warming that has been accepted by most of the world. Results from the CLOUD experiment show that cosmic rays boost formation of aerosols in the atmosphere. Since aerosols are critical to cloud formation and clouds are key to the amount of solar radiation that reaches Earth's surface, cosmic rays, a natural effect, are therefore a key component of climate change. This finding counters the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are the primary driver of global warming.
Researchers at CERN bombarded a chamber of gas with a stream of high-energy ions, simulating Earth's atmosphere under bombardment from cosmic rays. They then studied the new particles formed during the experiment.
In a press release on August 25, CERN announced that "We found that cosmic rays significantly enhance the formation of aerosol particles in the mid-troposphere and above. These aerosols can eventually grow into the seeds for clouds." See the press release here. The CERN announcement is a confirmation of a theory by Dr. Henrik Svensmark and other researchers at the Danish Space Research Institute that was proposed in the 1990s.
It had been known for many years that the level of cosmic rays reaching Earth's surface was inversely related to the level of sunspot activity on the sun. Svensmark noted also that recent satellite data showed that low-level cloudiness varied with the level of cosmic rays measured at Earth's surface. Svensmark hypothesized that cosmic rays collided with aerosols in our atmosphere, forming ions that then served as cloud condensation nuclei, stimulating the formation of clouds. He then concluded that solar sunspot activity was affecting the level of cloudiness on Earth. Therefore, a higher level of sunspots could be the cause of global warming.
When first announced, Svensmark's theory was heavily criticized by the IPCC and the climate science community. Bert Bolin, former chairman of the IPCC, pronounced Svensmark's theory "extremely naive and irresponsible." But now, CERN has confirmed that sunspot activity may indeed be a significant factor in climate change.
See further excellent commentary by Lawrence Solomon here.
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More Sunspots Cause Global Warming. The diagram shows the mechanism for global warming from increased sunspot activity. More sunspots increase the solar wind, reduce cosmic rays, and reduce low-level cloudiness, which reflects less sunlight, causing Earth to warm. Climatism! Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century's Hottest Topic
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 03 September 2011 17:55 )
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HAPPER ON THE DUBIOUS SCIENCE OF THE CLIMATE CRUSADERS |
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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. |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 23 May 2011 14:46 )
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SPENCER ON CLIMATE MODELS |
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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.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 29 July 2011 18:06 )
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25 April 2011: Dr. David Evans, Australian climate scientist, provided an excellent comment in Canada's Financial Post earlier this month. He points out that the projections of catastrophic global warming by climate models were proved wrong by empirical evidence gathered at the end of last century. According to Evans:
"Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, '80s and '90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide."
Indeed, the IPCC described this hot spot as a "signature," which would show that the greenhouse effect was driving the recent global warming. But multiple data sets gathered by both weather balloons and satellite measurements do not show the predicted hot spot. To quote Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman:
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."
Read the rest of the excellent article by Dr. Evans here. |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 25 April 2011 13:27 )
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