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Could the best climate models -- the ones used to predict global warming -- all be wrong?
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Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.
"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."
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As the levels of carbon increased, global surface temperatures also rose dramatically during the PETM. Average temperatures worldwide rose by around 13 degrees in the relatively short geological span of about 10,000 years.
Wait! The Earth survived that?
Oh dear. Something most of us have known for years.
Carbon dioxide forcing alone insufficient to explain Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum warming
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We conclude that in addition to direct CO2 forcing, other processes and/or feedbacks that are hitherto unknown must have caused a substantial portion of the warming during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. Once these processes have been identified, their potential effect on future climate change needs to be taken into account.
I bought and saved a copy of "An Inconvenient Truth" about 4 years ago, I'm going to give it to my uncle (blind follower/activist) in 10 years when we've moved on to the next state of fear and laugh at this one.
The climate political science has only gone to show us how history repeats itself, how mankind is no different than it was at the dawn of man where people can be manipulated through fear, greed, and bias. So much time changes and so much stays the same. If people learn from their errors, good for them, those that don't, may nature take them.
Einstein once said:
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
I bought and saved a copy of "An Inconvenient Truth" about 4 years ago, I'm going to give it to my uncle (blind follower/activist) in 10 years when we've moved on to the next state of fear and laugh at this one.
Yea, thats great, all those glaciers are not really disappearing, but I do agree, Bush and Cheney were a far more immediate threat than climate change. Now that the world survived their reign we do need to start addressing climate change again.
Hopefully we wont wait too long before passing the tipping point and the world will still retain glaciers 50 years from now
I bought and saved a copy of "An Inconvenient Truth" about 4 years ago, I'm going to give it to my uncle (blind follower/activist) in 10 years when we've moved on to the next state of fear and laugh at this one.
Your uncle is going to feel pretty foolish in 10 years.
But the science is settled. It is obvious.
The New York Times's headline read, "America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise." Well, what's so new about that? The Times has been having an historic fit about global warming for years, hasn't it?
Yes, but that particular headline ran in the good gray Times on March 27, 1933 -- 73 years ago. What's more, the Times changed its mind dramatically on the subject 42 years later, in 1975, when it startled its readers on May 21 with "Scientists Ponder Why World's Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable."
Nor has the Times been the only major periodical to blow hot and cold (if you will forgive me) on the subject of the global climate. On Jan. 2, 1939 Time magazine announced that "Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right ... weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer." Yet Time scooped The New York Times by nearly a year when, reversing itself, it warned readers on June 24, 1974 that, "Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age." Today, of course, Time has changed its mind again and joined the global-warming hysteria. On April 3 this year, it announced that "By Any Measure, Earth is At ... The Tipping Point. The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame."
The last major attack of hysteria, in the mid-1970s, focused on the peril of global cooling, and was especially severe. Fortune magazine declared in February 1974 that "As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed. It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude." Fortune's analysis was so impressive that it actually won a "Science Writing Award" from the American Institute of Physics.
But the prize for sheer terrorizing surely belonged to Lowell Ponte, whose 1976 book "The Cooling" (a predecessor of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," though from the opposite point of view) asserted that "The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations." If countermeasures weren't taken, he warned, it would lead to "world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000."
All of the above quotations, and many more, can be found in a wonderful new booklet by R. Warren Anderson and Dan Gainor of the Business & Media Institute, a division of the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Va. (Full disclosure: I am the avuncular and largely indolent board chairman of the latter.) Entitled "Fire and Ice," it quotes alarmist predictions of both global warming and a new ice age dating back to 1895. The authors identify no less than four swings of scientific opinion, with considerable overlapping, from global cooling (1895-1932) to global warming (1929-1969) to global cooling (1954-1976) and now back to global warming (1981 to the present). The booklet can also be read for its sheer entertainment value. (I particularly liked the anecdote about the penguin found in France in 1922, which was widely viewed as an "ice-age harbinger," though wiser heads concluded it had probably escaped from the ship of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.)
The booklet notes sensibly that "Most scientists do agree that the earth has warmed a little more than a degree in the last 100 years. That doesn't mean scientists concur that mankind is to blame. Even if that were the case, the impact of warming is unclear." And in its wisest paragraph it concludes, "This isn't a question of science. It's a question of whether Americans can trust what the media tell them about science."
But if you're looking for a new career, here's a hint: "Global warming is a good business to be in for government funding. More than 99.5 percent of American climate change funding comes from the government, which spends $4 billion per year on climate change research."
Yea, thats great, all those glaciers are not really disappearing, but I do agree, Bush and Cheney were a far more immediate threat than climate change. Now that the world survived their reign we do need to start addressing climate change again.
Hopefully we wont wait too long before passing the tipping point and the world will still retain glaciers 50 years from now
What does some melting prove? You mislead the issue. The fact is not that we may have had warming, but that it is unprecedented, that it is abnormal to the functionary of the planet and that it is caused by man. None of those have been proven. Not one.
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