Global warming

Global warming is an increase in average air temperature in the Earth's atmosphere. In the modern period of global warming, a slight increase of 0.8 °C [1.4 °F] has been measured at weather stations throughout the world, since around 1850, when organized records began to be kept. As far back as temperature records can be reconstructed, periods of global warming and global cooling have alternated; see ice ages and interglacial warming.

Controversy

For a more detailed treatment, see Global Warming Controversy.

Since 1989, advocates have clashed on the issue of whether human beings are more responsible than nature for modern periods of global warming; see "greenhouse warming" and global warming theory.

Most non-scientific support for the global warming theory rests on popular accounts such as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth or on reports issued by the UN's IPCC. However, Keston Green of Monash University and Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School wrote that:

• Because the forecasting processes examined in Chapter 8 overlook scientific evidence on forecasting, the IPCC forecasts of climate change are not scientific.

Politician Al Gore calls it a moral issue, while scientist Richard Lindzen says, "It is probably the most immoral thing you could do to restrain energy so that the billions in the earth who don’t have access to electricity won't conveniently get it." However, it is to be noted that many proponents of the theory propose energy conservation only until 'green' energy generation becomes predominant.^{[Citation Needed]}

In the general, the term global warming can be used for any upward trend in the global mean temperature, but it is mostly used to refer to the 1° F warming since 1850.

The two sides are divided on whether this warming is a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age or a man-made environmental phenomenon. There are also debates regarding the potential positive or negative effects of a warming.

Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. are evenly split on the issue. Boston Globe writer Ellen Goodman wrote:

• 23 percent of college-educated Republicans believe the warming is due to humans, while 75 percent of college-educated Democrats believe it.

"Clinging to alarmist scenarios for which there is no evidence, is simply exploitation of public gullibility."

The Modern Warm Period

File:Artic 1979.jpg

A computer projection comparing the Polar Ice Mass in 1979 (left) and 2000 (right).

Average Earth surface air temperature has risen about 1° F since 1970. How much of this is due to contamination of the temperature record from the urban heat island effect is hard to assess. Efforts are currently underway to detect and remove this bias. Spurious warming trends that might be considered as global warming can occur almost anywhere. Nonetheless, controversy has persisted over the influence of urban warming on reported large-scale surface-air temperature trends.

According to temperature reconstruction made within an Old Earth paradigm, there have been many cycles of naturally-caused global warming and cooling over many millions of years (see climate cycles). Some scientists, including Richard Lindzen of MIT, Sallie Baliunas of Harvard and Fred Singer (independent), say that the recent warming could be part of another natural cycle or random fluctuations in the atmosphere. However, many scientists also think that human activities were most likely the cause of the the planet's recent warming.

A United Nations panel (IPCC) asserts that most of the warming since around 1850 is human-caused. Global warming proponents call this panel "authoritative". Others question its objectivity, and a handful of scientists have resigned from the panel in protest over unauthorized changes in scientific reports.

In February, 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose members were appointed by their governments, released their fourth assessment report on climate change. That report concluded that most of recent global warming was "very likely" caused by human activity. It says that increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases cause warming. Several members of this panel later complained their contributions were misrepresented in the final report.

In 2008, a study revealed that the worlds glaciers had shrunk an average of 4.9 feet in 2006, compared to an average of one foot a year from 1980 to 1999. On 25 March, 2008, the antarctic Wilkens ice shelf began to break up, losing 220 square miles, with an area the size of Connecticut at risk..

IPCC controversy

A reporter for the Chicago Tribune called the IPCC "the top body of climate change scientists in the world".

Fred Singer and other scientists dispute this view.

False Claims of "Consensus"

Richard Lindzen wrote in 1992,

Indeed, a recent Gallup poll of climate scientists in the American Meteorological Society and in the American Geophysical Union shows that a vast majority doubts that there has been any identifiable man-caused warming to date (49 percent asserted no, 33 percent did not know, 18 percent thought some has occurred; however, among those actively involved in research and publishing frequently in peer-reviewed research journals, none believes that any man-caused global warming has been identified so far).

Oddly enough, even though 82% of US climate scientists refused to support the global warming theory then, liberal activists were already claiming a scientific consensus for anthropogenic global warming. (It's hard to understand how 18 percent credence in any global warming translates into "consensus" support for human-caused global warming.)

The campaign to convince the public (and their elected representatives) that the "science is settled" began in 1988 or 1989, shortly after the communist nations lost the Cold War.

The Hockey Stick Temperature Reconstruction

File:Hockey stick chart ipcc.jpg

The flawed Hockey Stick graph in a 2001 IPCC report shows blue proxy values along the "shaft" with red instrumental values superimposed as the "blade".

One of the main pieces of evidence for anthropogenic global warming presented during the 3rd IPCC report was a temperature reconstruction done by climatologist Michael Mann. The resulting graph of the Northern Hemisphere temperature is shaped like a hockey stick, and it is used as evidence for the unusualness of the earth's temperature in the past few decades.

While dramatic, the graph encountered serious questions from the beginning. It failed to reproduce two Northern Hemisphere climate episodes that were well documented in the literature, the Medieval Warm Period and The Little Ice Age (it should be noted that these were not global phenomenons, but were limited to Europe and Greenland; the Mann diagram concerned global average temperatures). Concerned about these discrepancies, Stephen McIntyre and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick attempted to reproduce the result and discovered a serious flaw in the statistical methods used to construct the hockey stick graph. Because of this, the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC included several different temperature reconstruction methods instead of favoring just one hypothesis.

Natural Variability of the Climate System

Evolutionary scientists who believe in global warming think that the Earth has experienced numerous ice ages over two million years, during which global temperatures dropped approximately 6 °C [11 °F] and then returned to normal. The frigid temperatures allowed ice sheets to expand southward, covering much of Asia, Europe, and North America. The cooling associated with ice ages is gradual, while the terminations are relatively rapid. However, even the rapid terminations of ice ages take centuries to millennia.

Natural Climate Change on Other Planets

Since the Viking spacecraft reached Mars in the 1970s until recent readings were taken, the average temperature on Mars has risen 0.6 °C [1.1 °F] just as the average temperature on the earth has risen. Since human industrialization is clearly not to blame for the change on Mars, other causes are being considered. One possibility is that dust storms are changing the albedo of the planet, allowing it to warm, while another possibility is that solar variations from the sun are causing the warming.

Recently, it has also been found that similar to the Earth and Mars, Neptune is also undergoing global warming. Measurements taken at the Lowell observatory in Arizona have shown an increase in Neptune's brightness and temperature since 1980 following the same pattern seen on Earth and Mars. The researchers who discovered this warming suggest there may be a correlation between the warming and solar variations.

Pluto has also been found to be undergoing global warming. The overall temperature increase on Pluto has been greater than that on the earth.

On the other hand Uranus has had no net change in temperature since 1977. A rapid increase in temperature reversed itself. The reasons for this are not understood.

Politics of Global Warming

'Global Warming Now World's Most Boring Topic’

The need to fight "global warming" has become part of the dogma of the liberal conscience.

Clearly, "global warming" is a tempting issue for many very important groups to exploit. ... dealing with the threat of warming fits in with a great variety of preexisting agendas [like] dissatisfaction with industrial society (neopastoralism), ... governmental desires for enhanced revenues (carbon taxes), and bureaucratic desires for enhanced power.

The global average surface temperature warmed about 0.9 °F over the second half of the 20th Century.

Assessments of climate science by the United Nations (see IPCC - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have claimed that scientists are 90% sure that over 50% of the observed global warming in recent decades is human-caused, and that continued global warming should be expected over at least the next century. Science published a literature search by Naomi Oreskes concluding that "scientific consensus" supports the IPCC reports.

Several prominent scientists have pointed out the politicized science of the UN's assessment methods. The scientific reports are submitted to a panel of representatives appointed by each country in the IPCC. Several scientists whose research demonstrates that climate change is taking place have complained about their work being misrepresented by the U.N.

• In addition, a number of the participants have testified to the pressures placed on them to emphasize results supportive of the current scenario and to suppress other results. That pressure has frequently been effective, and a survey of participants reveals substantial disagreement with the final report.

Richard Lindzen wrote:

Perhaps more important are the pressures being brought to bear on scientists to get the "right" results. Such pressures are inevitable, given how far out on a limb much of the scientific community has gone. The situation is compounded by the fact that some of the strongest proponents of "global warming" in Congress are also among the major supporters of science (Sen. Gore is notable among those).

Al Gore's Claims

• Gore claims that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking and global warming is to blame. Yet the September 2006 issue of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate reported, "Glaciers are growing in the Himalayan Mountains, confounding global warming alarmists who recently claimed the glaciers were shrinking and that global warming was to blame."

• Gore claims the snowcap atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro is shrinking and that global warming is to blame. Yet according to the November 23, 2003, issue of Nature magazine, "Although it's tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain's foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests' humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine."

• Gore claims global warming is causing more tornadoes. Yet the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in February that there has been no scientific link established between global warming and tornadoes.

Scientists

Roger Revelle

Roger Revelle Achim Steiner Fred Singer Richard Lindzen Sallie Baliunas Lonnie Thompson

James E. Hansen Michael Mann Charles Keeling Edwin A. Hernández-Delgado

See Also

• Anthropogenic global warming theory
• Global Warming Controversy
• Politics of global warming
• Global Warming Derangement Syndrome
• Socialist Environmental Disasters
• An Inconvenient Truth
• Articles about Global Warming from previous "Breaking News"
• Articles about Global Warming from "More News"

External Links

• Attempting to Stop Global Warming is Futile and a Mistake, says letter to the UN
• Signatories of an open letter on the UN climate-conference
• Does a global temperature exist?, Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics, June 2007.
• The appliance of science by Mike Hulme.
• An Inconvenient Truth, Film by Al Gore
• The Great Global Warming Swindle - Documentary Film
• Climate Sensitivity and Observed Negative Feedbacks, lecture by Richard Lindzen and Roberto Rondanelli.
• Nature of Arguments for Anthropogenic Global Warming, by Richard Lindzen
• Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warmings's Unfinished Debate, by S. Fred Singer
• Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus - Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• "Should We Have Acted Thirty Years Ago to Prevent Climate Change?", by Randall G. Holcombe.
• "After Kyoto: A Global Scramble for Advantage," by Bruce Yandle.
• The physical evidence of earth's unstoppable 1,500-year climate cycle
• "Is There a Basis for Global Warming Alarm?", by Richard Lindzen
• "New Perspectives in Climate Change: What the EPA Isn’t Telling Us"
• Survey Shows Climatologists Are Split on Global Warming
• Fighting the Hoax
• Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre's blog
• Real Climate, blog by a group of climatologists including Michael Mann

Critique of the Hockey Stick Reconstruction

• Corrections To The Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base And Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, Energy & Enviornment volume 14, 2003.
• The Decay of the Hockey Stick by Von Storch published on the journal Nature's blog, May 3, 2007.
• A Global Warming Bombshell by Richard A. Muller, Technology Review , Oct. 2004; calls into question famous graph by Michael Mann.
• Reconstructing Past Climate from Noisy Data by Hans von Storch, Eduardo Zorita, Julie M. Jones, Yegor Dimitriev, Fidel González-Rouco, Simon F. B. Tett, Science magazine, 22 October 2004.