My cover story for The Sunday Times (the biggest UK broadsheet with 1m copies).
Getting smarter with global warming:
"As I fly into a snow-bound Britain, I realise that you might be asking where global warming has gone as you shiver in the coldest March for 50 years and wonder what you will do if gas has to be rationed. I have been involved in the climate debate for more than a decade, but I am still amazed at how wrong we get it. Let us try to restart our thinking on global warming.
Yes, global warming is real and mostly man-made, but our policies have failed predictably and spectacularly.
Dr. Hans Labohm writes at the Dutch Standaard that one of the world’s leading geologists, Peter Ziegler of Switzerland, recently made a presentation on the factors driving climate. It’s not CO2, he said.
Labohm writes at the Dutch Standaard blog here that Arthur Rörsch and Peter Ziegler have been busy lately with the editors of a special issue of Energy & Environment, where a number of prominent climate skeptics are sharing their views on the factors that determine climate. This publication will be communicated to the members of the UN climate panel (IPCC) in due course.
Labohm then writes that Peter Ziegler has also recently completed a presentation based on peer-reviewed literature and current measurements, where he shows that the sun is mainly driving climate change, and not CO2.
The main points of the presentation, Labohm writes:
● Climate changed in response to natural processes that are active also at present, including variations in solar activity and the galactic cosmic ray [GCR] flux and ocean current oscillations.
The world's tropical forests are less likely to lose biomass, or plant material, this century due to the effects of global warming than previously thought, scientists said in a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday.
This adds to growing evidence that rain forests might be more resilient to the effects of climate change than feared....
...In 2009, a group of British scientists said that 20 to 40 percent of the Amazon could die off within 100 years if global temperatures rose by 2 degrees Celsius, and 85 percent would be lost if temperatures rose by 4 degrees, which is seen as increasingly likely.
But a study last month said the Amazon rain forest was less vulnerable to dying off because carbon dioxide also acts as an airborne fertilizer.
Warmist scientists would have us believe it is. One recent European study claims that CO2 and temperature rose simultaneously at the end of the last ice age, implying CO2 is a real driver. However, one prominent German meteorologist dismissed it and bluntly called the Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l’Environnement study by Parrenin et al ”the latest gag“.
Now yet another new study published at Quaternary Science Reviews shows in no uncertain terms that the sun, the source of almost all of the Earth’s thermal energy, drives the climate and that the climate naturally swings in cycles.
The paper looks at the relationship between climatic variations, vegetation dynamics and early human activity between c. 4150–2860 BC reconstructed from a high-resolution pollen and geochemical record obtained from a small lake located in County Sligo, Ireland.
The study shows that human activity responded to changing climate conditions over the period. No surprise there. For example the abstract writes: “A nearly century-long climatic amelioration between c. 3460–3370 BC facilitated a revival of human activity on a small scale around the lake. Abandonment of the area and full woodland recovery occurred after a period of particularly wet and cool conditions ranging from c. 3360–3290 BC.”
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) publishes almost daily newsletters containing information on climate science and energy policy, The Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) publishes weekly newsletters on climate science and energy policy, and the Nongovernmental International Policy on Climate Change (NIPCC) by The Heartland Institute publishes weekly newsletters on latest peer-reviewed publications on climate science.
These are only three of hundreds, and maybe thousands worldwide, of Internet and published newsletters dealing with climate science and energy policies that show fallacies of the hypothesis carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels causes catastrophic global warming and energy policies trying to reduce fossil fuel use. Free subscriptions are available from all sources by simply checking a box “subscribe” on their home pages. [Get the weekly NIPCC report here.]
The February 21, 2013 GWPF featured an article titled, “The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures,” Global and Planetary Change, Vol 100, January 2013, pp 51-69. The Norwegian authors are Ole Humlum, Kjell Stordahl, and Jan-Erik Solheim.
This is an important piece of research that should have been reported years ago. However, due to research funding in the United States and other parts of the world only being distributed to support the hypothesis carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels causes global warming, this type of research would be deemed irrelevant.
New data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are continuing to rise but global temperatures are not following suit. The new data undercut assertions that atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing a global warming crisis.
NOAA data show atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rose 2.67 parts per million in 2012, to 395 ppm. The jump was the second highest since 1959, when scientists began measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
Global temperatures are essentially the same today as they were in 1995, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were merely 360 ppm. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rose 10 percent between 1995 and 2012, yet global temperatures did not rise at all. Global warming activists are having a difficult time explaining the ongoing disconnect between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures.
This isn’t the first time in recent years that global temperatures have disobeyed the models presented by global warming activists. From the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s, global temperatures endured a 30-year decline even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rose nearly 10 percent. From 1900 through 1945, by contrast, global temperatures rose rapidly despite a lack of coal power plants, SUV’s, and substantial carbon dioxide emissions.
Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO2 variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes in atmospheric CO2, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO2. In our analysis we use eight well-known datasets: 1) globally averaged well-mixed marine boundary layer CO2 data, 2) HadCRUT3 surface air temperature data, 3) GISS surface air temperature data, 4) NCDC surface air temperature data, 5) HadSST2 sea surface data, 6) UAH lower troposphere temperature data series, 7) CDIAC data on release of anthropogene CO2, and 8) GWP data on volcanic eruptions. Annual cycles are present in all datasets except 7) and 8), and to remove the influence of these we analyze 12-month averaged data. We find a high degree of co-variation between all data series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature. The maximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature is found for CO2 lagging 11–12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature, 9.5–10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to global lower troposphere temperature. The correlation between changes in ocean temperatures and atmospheric CO2 is high, but do not explain all observed changes.
Highlights
► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5–10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature. ► Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980. ► Changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.
(Reuters) - The Amazon rainforest is less vulnerable to die off because of global warming than widely believed because the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide also acts as an airborne fertilizer, a study showed on Wednesday.
The boost to growth from CO2, the main gas from burning fossil fuels blamed for causing climate change, was likely to exceed damaging effects of rising temperatures this century such as drought, it said.
"I am no longer so worried about a catastrophic die-back due to CO2-induced climate change," Professor Peter Cox of the University of Exeter in England told Reuters of the study he led in the journal Nature. "In that sense it's good news."
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