Articles Tagged "Jonathan DuHamel"

Dr. Norman Page says that “The earth is entering a cooling phase which is likely to last about 30 years and possibly longer.” See his detailed analysis here.

Page’s prediction is based on observation of the geologic record. He notes that there has been no net warming since 1997 even thought carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has risen 8.5%. Page says that atmospheric temperature is driven by sea surface temperature (SST) which is, itself, solar driven. The oceanic oscillations control the general climate. There is good correlation between solar cycles and SST, but note that because of the enthalpy and thermal inertia of the oceans, there is a 10 – 12 year lag between solar cycle troughs and global SSTs. This lag time definitely establishes cause and effect similar to the lag in carbon dioxide changes following temperature changes in the major glacial cycles as shown in ice cores The graph below shows the variations in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the major oceanic oscillation (the red line is actual measurement, the blue line is predictive modeling.) (Graph source here.)

Within just a few days in September, Arctic sea ice extent reached the lowest minimum ever recorded by satellites since 1979, while at the same time, Antarctic sea ice reached the greatest extent ever recorded.

In my post “The Arctic-Antarctic seesaw” I explained how natural forces work to produce these phenomena. In my post “Challenge to the Arizona Daily Star – get the facts” I accused the Arizona Daily Star of content bias because they prominently reported the Arctic minimum, but until now, did not report the Antarctic maximum.

Now, 21 days after the Antarctic maximum, the Arizona Daily Star has reprinted an AP article which attempts to spin observations to fit AGW global warming theory: “Experts: Global warming means more Antarctic ice.” The article author is Seth Borenstein, long known for bad reporting on climate change. With global warming media bias, it’s “heads I win; tails you lose.”

The AP/Star story says, “It sounds counterintuitive, but the Antarctic is part of the warming as well.” Really? Was this a surprise to some climate scientists and their models? Let’s see what the climate models said according to a study in the Journal of Climate:

...If CO2 is such a powerful greenhouse gas and the major driver of global temperature as alleged, why does it stop rising? According to AGW hypothesis, CO2 should cause temperature to rise which would produce more water vapor (a strong greenhouse gas), and lead to an enhanced or runaway greenhouse effect which would cause even more carbon dioxide to exsolve from the ocean. But something seems to curtail each rise in carbon dioxide. The cited paper suggests that both temperature and atmospheric CO2 content is controlled by sun-driven decadal ocean cycle oscillations. If there is some influence from human carbon dioxide emissions, it is too small to be detected in the study.

For some additional perspective, I show a table above, constructed by a geologist several years ago, which shows the relative contributions to the greenhouse effect. That estimate concludes that total human contribution is just 0.28%. If that estimate is anywhere near reality, it helps explain why the researchers in the first paper cited above found “changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.”

Click source to read FULL report from Jonathan DuHamel

It has been gospel among proponents of dangerous anthropogenic global warming that atmospheric content of carbon dioxide has never, in the last 400,000 years, risen above about 280ppmv (parts per million by volume) prior to the industrial revolution and its consequent burning of fossil fuels. Current concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is approximately 390ppmv.

That contention is based on analysis of bubbles entrained in glacial ice and the unproven assumption that the composition of the bubbles accurately reflect the composition of earth’s atmosphere at the time the bubbles were formed. There is much uncertainty about that assumption. There are also the troubling facts that values of pre-industrial carbon dioxide derived from Antarctic ice core estimates are inconsistent with those derived from most other proxy methods and that carbon dioxide values derived from Antarctic cores often don’t agree with the much higher values derived from Greenland ice cores. I will address some of those uncertainties in this post.

As snow falls and accumulates, the weight of the snow causes it to eventually recrystallize into ice granules called “firn.” At this point the spaces between firn granules are open, allowing migration of gases. With sufficient burial, the firn becomes glacial ice with closed off bubbles. This process can take tens to thousands of years with the result that what eventually becomes trapped in bubbles may be different from the atmosphere.

Chinese and Swedish researchers examined a 2,485-year record of tree ring data from the eastern Tibetan Plateau. The researchers say:

The results showed that extreme climatic events on the Plateau, such as the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and 20th Century Warming appeared synchronously with those in other places worldwide. The largest amplitude and rate of temperature change occurred during the Eastern Jin Event (343–425 AD), and not in the late 20th century. There were significant cycles of 1324 years, 800 years, 199 years, 110 years, and 2–3 years in the 2485-year temperature series. The 1324-year, 800-year, 199-year, and 110-year cycles are associated with solar activity, which greatly affects the Earth surface temperature. The long-term trends (>1000 years) of temperature were controlled by the millennium-scale cycle, and amplitudes were dominated by multi-century cycles. Moreover, cold intervals corresponded to sunspot minimums.

The graph above shows their temperature reconstruction and their prediction for the next 120 years.

The mainstream media is all exercised that some Republican candidates, notably Rick Perry, do not agree that humans are the principal cause of global warming. Typical of the stories is one from the Los Angeles Times, reprinted in the Arizona Daily Star, that quotes Jon Huntsman as saying, “Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I’m saying is that, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science.” The Star headlined the article: “GOP’s Huntsman a voice of reason on global warming.”

Let’s take a closer look at “science” and see where the 98% number came from. It probably came from a paper from the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science titled “Expert credibility in climate change.”

In that paper, researchers scanned the literature and constructed a “database of 1,372 climate researchers based on authorship of scientific assessment reports and membership on multisignatory statements about ACC [anthropogenic climate change]” as outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The researchers then arbitrarily assigned “expert” status to those who had published at least 20 papers. That cut the number of “experts” to 908. In the supporting material at the end of the paper we find that of the original 1,372 researchers, 619 were contributors to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment report, and 212 were signatories to the UN’s Bali declaration. After culling duplicate names, the paper’s authors wound up with 472 “experts” out of tens of thousands of practicing researchers.