U.S Army Chief Scientist Says Sun, Not Man, Is Causing Climate Change – June 3, 2008 (Dr. Bruce West, Chief Scientist, Mathematical & Information Science Directorate, Army Research Office)
[Note: Dr. West co-authored a March 2008 scientific analysis Nicola Scafetta showing the Sun “could account for as much as 69% of the increase in Earth's average temperature” (LINK) & (LINK) ]
Excerpt: The Army is weighing in on the global warming debate, claiming that climate change is not man-made. Instead, Dr. Bruce West, with the Army Research Office, argues that "changes in the earth’s average surface temperature are directly linked to ... the short-term statistical fluctuations in the Sun’s irradiance and the longer-term solar cycles." In an advisory to bloggers entitled "Global Warming: Fact of Fiction [sic]," an Army public affairs official promoted a conference call with West about "the causes of global warming, and how it may not be caused by the common indicates [sic] some scientists and the media are indicating." In the March, 2008 issue of Physics Today, West, the chief scientist of the Army Research Office's mathematical and information science directorate, wrote that "the Sun’s turbulent dynamics" are linked with the Earth's complex ecosystem. These connections are what is heating up the planet. "The Sun could account for as much as 69 percent of the increase in Earth’s average temperature," West noted. […] He argues that these groups have done a poor job modeling the Sun's impact, however, and that's why they have "significantly over-estimated" the "anthropogenic contribution to global warming." […] Global Warming: Fact of Fiction - 11 AM Thursday, June 5 - Is global warming really caused by humans, or is it simply the result of different aspects of the sun’s dynamics? Dr. Bruce West, Chief Scientist, Mathematical & Information Science Directorate, Army Research Office, will discuss the causes of global warming, and how it may not be caused by the common indicates some scientists and the media are indicating. Research conducted by Dr. West contends that the changes in the earth’s average surface temperature are directly linked to two distinctly different aspects of the sun’s dynamics: the short-term statistical fluctuations in the Sun’s irradiance and the longer-term solar cycles. Please reply to this message if you are interested in participating. Lindy Kyzer - Public Affairs Specialist - Media Relations Division - Office of the Chief of Public Affairs - Department of the Army
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/06/army-vs-global.html
Skeptical Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer, Formerly of NASA, Reveals Being Muzzled – June 3, 2008
Excerpt: A NOTE ON NASA'S JAMES HANSEN BEING MUZZLED BY NASA - I see that we are once again having to hear how NASA's James Hansen was dissuaded from talking to the press on a few of the 1,400 media interviews he was involved in over the years. Well, I had the same pressure as a NASA employee during the Clinton-Gore years, because NASA management and the Clinton/Gore administration knew that I was skeptical that mankind's CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming. I was even told not to give my views during congressional testimony, and so I purposely dodged a question, under oath, when it arose. But I didn't complain about it like Hansen has. NASA is an executive branch agency and the President was, ultimately, my boss (and is, ultimately, Hansen's boss). So, because of the restrictions on what I could and couldn't do or say, I finally just resigned from NASA and went to work for the university here in Huntsville. There were no hard feelings, and I'm still active in a NASA satellite mission and fully supportive of its Earth observation programs. In stark contrast, Jim Hansen said whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted to the press and congress during that time. He even campaigned for John Kerry, and received a $250,000 award from Theresa Heinz-Kerry's charitable foundation -- two events he maintains are unrelated. If I had done anything like this when I worked at NASA, I would have been crucified under the Hatch Act. Does anyone besides me see a double standard here? -Roy W. Spencer
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm
Climate Bill: Democrats Call Largest Tax Increase -- A ‘Big Tax Cut!’
Excerpt: The Lieberman-Warner global warming cap-and-trade bill has been called many things, but this appears to be the first time it has been called a “huge tax cut.” The reference to the bill as a “big tax cut” was made by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), despite the bill’s being considered the largest tax increase in American history. “The biggest pieces of this bill, is funds for the American people, a big tax cut. If my [colleague] opposes a tax cut, he ought to say it. It is a huge tax cut for the American people,” Boxer said on the Senate floor on June 3. […] Assuming Congress does devote those funds to the tax relief as intended, families and workers will still have to pay $6.735 trillion into the new bureaucratic system over the next 50 years in the form of higher energy costs to get back $802 billion in tax relief. That’s a return of only $1.00 for every $8.38 paid. Boxer is essentially claiming that taking $6.7 trillion from the American people and giving back only $838 billion is somehow a “big tax cut.” In reality, the bill represents the largest tax increase in American history. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the bill would effectively raise taxes on American families by a trillion dollars just over the next 10 years. CBO says “most of that cost would ultimately be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for energy and energy-intensive goods and services.”
Oz TV advises CO2-emitting children to die early
Excerpt: Carbon Cult sickos are under fire for an interactive website that tells children they should die because they emit CO2. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "Planet Slayer" site invites young children to take a "greenhouse gas quiz", asking them "how big a pig are you?". At the end of the quiz, the pig explodes, and ABC tells children at "what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of Earth’s resources!" It's one of a number of interactive features that "Get the dirt on greenhouse without the guilt trips. No lectures. No multinational-bashing (well, maybe a little...). Just fun and games and the answers to all your enviro-dilemas," ABC claims. […] The site is aimed at 9-year olds. However even a "virtuous" rating (e.g. not owning a car and recycling) is outweighed by eating meat, or spending an average Aussie income - with the result that many 9-year olds are being told they've already outstayed their environmentally-compliant stay on the planet. "Do you think it's appropriate that the ABC ... depict people who are average Australians as massive overweight ugly pigs, oozing slime from their mouths, and then to have these pigs blow up in a mass of blood and guts?" asked Senator Mitch Fifield in the Herald-Sun.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/03/abc_planet_slayer
National Post: Global Cooling! 'Spotless Sun' prompts scientists to fear 'dramatic turn for the worse' – May 31, 2008
Excerpt: ith the debate focused on a warming Earth, the icy consequences of a cooler future have not been considered You probably haven’t heard much of Solar Cycle 24, the current cycle that our sun has entered, and I hope you don’t. If Solar Cycle 24 becomes a household term, your lifestyle could be taking a dramatic turn for the worse. That of your children and their children could fare worse still, say some scientists, because Solar Cycle 24 could mark a time of profound long-term change in the climate. As put by geophysicist Philip Chapman, a former NASA astronaut-scientist and former president of the National Space Society, “It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age.” The sun, of late, is remarkably free of eruptions: It has lost its spots. By this point in the solar cycle, sunspots would ordinarily have been present in goodly numbers. Today’s spotlessness — what alarms Dr. Chapman and others — may be an anomaly of some kind, and the sun may soon revert to form. But if it doesn’t – and with each passing day, the speculation in the scientific community grows that it will not – we could be entering a new epoch that few would welcome. […] Several renowned scientists have been predicting for some time that the world could enter a period of cooling right around now, with consequences that could be dire. “The next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do,” believes Dr. Chapman. “There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the U.S. and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.”
Greenhouse Gas Theory called ‘scientifically unsound’ – June 2, 2008 – Analytical Chemist Hans Schreuder and Radiochemist Alan Siddons
Excerpt: Based on UN IPCC dogma and according to this Australian website for children, the greenhouse effect is "caused by gases in our atmosphere (especially water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane). They trap energy from the sun's light and reflect it back to Earth, so we just keep on getting warmer." As Alan Siddons points out: "You might as well believe that your image in a mirror can burn your face”. It is palpably absurd, and yet it is an accurate depiction of the theory that the IPCC has foisted on the public - a theory that IPCC critics won't even attack because, presumably, they believe it too. Moreover, the actual trapping of heat cannot raise an object's temperature in the first place. It only slows down heat loss. For instance, a polar bear is a living thermos bottle. Its internal body temperature is much the same as ours. But its surrounding fat and fur are such that - and this is remarkable - a polar bear is virtually invisible to a thermal camera. Just like coffee in a thermos, you can't tell how hot the inside of a polar bear is by looking at it from the outside. But neither does coffee in a thermos get hotter because its heat is trapped. It just retains its temperature for a longer time. Otherwise, both the polar bear and the thermos would self-ignite. In short, the earth absorbs enough energy from the sun to reach a certain temperature. Since it radiates the same amount, its temperature obviously isn't raised by carbon dioxide absorbing some infrared - for CO2 simply releases that energy at the same pace, as satellites attest. But even if CO2 did trap thermal energy, as insulation does (creating an emission discrepancy that would be quite observable to satellites), the earth's temperature could go no higher than what it began with. To repeat, coffee doesn't get hotter in a thermos."
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Greenhouse_Effect_And_Radiative_Forcing.pdf
[Note: A December 2007 U.S. Senate report reveals over 400 scientists and growing at over 500 currently, dissented from man-made climate fears, and more and more scientists continue to declare themselves skeptical of a man-made climate “crisis” in 2008.]
Scientists continue to sign petition opposing man-made warming fears
Excerpt: As the Senate prepares for floor debate on global warming legislation, the list of scientist signatories to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's petition against global warming alarmism is growing by about 35 signatures every day, announced OISM's Art Robinson. On May 19, 2008, OISM announced that over 31,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, signed a petition that states, "... There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the future, catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate..." Signatories include such luminaries as theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, MIT's atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen and first National Academy of Sciences president Frederick Seitz. More than 40 signatories are members of the prestigious national Academy of Sciences. The purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of "settled science" and an overwhelming "consensus" in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong. No such consensus or settled science exists. As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject this hypothesis. The petition's web site is www.petitionproject.org, http://www.oism.org.
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/flood-of-scientists-continue-to,416369.shtml
Revisionist History! Warmists Now Claim No Global Cooling from 1940-1970s! (By Meteorologist Joe D'Aleo weighs on the revisionist history below)
Excerpt: The global warmers are becoming increasingly desperate to prop up their failing prophesy in every way possible. Behaving just as Leon Festinger predicted in When Prophecies Fail. As the earth shows no net warming in a decade and cooling into its 7th year, as new models suggest cooling may continue because of natural ocean cycles, as the sun stays quiet now 12 years since the last solar minimum, usually a signal of cooling, as more and more peer review calls into question the importance of CO2 and of the the accuracy of the models and the entire greenhouse theory because of the failure of fingerprinting, the alarmists begin a frantic effort to save their failing theory. You see so many have won the lottery and want to ensure the annuity checks keep coming. As we indicated in an earlier blog, they are now busy reinventing old data. NASA and NOAA continually revises old data and makes gross assumptions that always result in more warming.
Yet another! Dissenter Watch: Data doesn't support global warming theory (By R. John Muench, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Heartland Community College in Illinois. )
Excerpt: As a scientist who has studied the global warming issue extensively, I can say with high certainty that man's influence on global climate is at best minimal. The temperature data of the recent past does not support the theory of anthropogenic global warming. While carbon dioxide levels have continued to increase at a steady rate, global temperatures as measured by both satellites and land/sea stations have remained flat since 1998. That is over nine years with no measurable increase in the temperature. More recent trends of are showing a significant cooling is beginning. As reported by NOAA, April was the 29th coldest in the lower 48 states out of the last 115 years. One problem with carbon dioxide is that it is a poor absorber of radiation and accounts for between 4 percent and 8 percent of the ``greenhouse'' effect. Water vapor, on the other hand, accounts for over 90 percent of the ``greenhouse'' effect. Another issue with carbon dioxide is that its ability to absorb radiation is highly logarithmic. The first 100 ppm of this gas produces a net warming of 2.25 degrees Celsius. The next 100 ppm adds only another 0.3 degrees of additional warming. The amount of warming added from manmade emissions of since 1940 can produce no more than 0.1 degrees of warming. Thus, as more carbon dioxide is added, it has an ever smaller and smaller effect. Those in the pro-AGW crowd believe that carbon dioxide has a positive feedback - that increasing this gas creates a cascading effect. This is the so-called ``tipping point'' that you will hear them describe. Recently, climate scientist Roy Spencer using data from NASA's Aqua satellite has disproved this positive feedback exists. Unlike Al Gore, I would welcome an open debate on this subject.
http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2008/05/31/opinion/letters/131731.txt
Dissenter Watch: Another Scientist speaks up: Fractured Consensus (By Nuclear Physicist & Engineer James A. Marusek - personal website: http://personals.galaxyinternet.net/tunga/ )
Excerpt: So why is the support for this theory evaporating among scientists? Perhaps it might be due to the fact that global temperature trends have remained flat for the past decade while the levels of carbon dioxide have risen 5.5%. The foundation of the AGW theory is based on rising carbon dioxide levels producing higher temperatures. Perhaps this evaporating consensus might be due to the analysis of paleoclimate data that reach back hundreds of thousands of years through glacial/interglacial transitions. This analysis showed that changes in Earth’s temperature always preceded changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide. How can that be? Well the oceans are a vast reservoir of carbon dioxide. As the oceans warm, it release this gas back into the atmosphere. The atmospheric carbon dioxide levels measured today are primarily of a natural origin rather than man-made. Or perhaps the global warming theory is in trouble because it is based primarily on a complex computer climate model that is more hype than substance. This sophisticated model fails to include the effects of cloud-cover. […] Dr. Noah
Keenlyside of Germany's Leipzig Institute of Marine Science, published a paper this month in Nature indicating global warming will stop until 2015 based on an analysis of ocean temperatures and the giant ocean "conveyor belt" known as the meridional overturning circulation. So as I sit near my computer with the heater running during the end of May when it should be warm, I ponder “Where is a little global warming when you really need it!”
http://personals.galaxyinternet.net/tunga/Consensus.pdf
Boxer Climate Tax - ‘Cap-and-Destroy’ - ‘Unprecedented Control’ By Gov’t
Excerpt: Yesterday the U.S. Senate began what it insists on calling "debate" (more like serial dopey speeches designed for home consumption) on the worst piece of legislation introduced into that body in the new century. Perhaps worse than anything in the last century as well. There's nothing good to be said about the disingenuously named Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008. A better name would be the Let's Destroy the Economy by Turning it Over to Left-Geek Bureaucrats in 2008 Act. The heart of Lieberman-Warner is a cap and trade system that would turn decisions on how much and what kind of energy to use in the private sector over to government. This is the approach, you'll recall, that worked so well in the Soviet Union that that dismal country's first five-year plan lasted 74 years before the whole sorry business caved-in on its own command and control butt. If adopted, this would be the most fundamental change in the nature of this country in the country's history. […] The rent seeking opportunities under this system would be immense. Naturally, as Washington assumed these new wealth-allocating powers all economic participants would have a powerful incentive to hire lobbyists to influence policy. An inevitable result would be the suppression of competition as larger more influential companies seek to manipulate the system to their own advantage.
Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer: Sacrifices to the Climate Gods - Beware Lieberman-Warner.
Excerpt: Now, the Senate is preparing to debate the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which aims to limit carbon-dioxide emissions in the belief that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is disrupting the Earth’s climate and ecosystems. Since we now have the scientific method, we rely on computer models to predict these future catastrophes rather than on our fears and prejudices. While this gives the illusion of modern objective precision, the truth is that all we have done is enlisted one of our modern idols — the computer — to justify what we want to believe anyway. And that fundamental belief is that anything mankind does to nature is inherently evil. To be sure, the scientific method can help us understand the physical world… something the ancients could not do. But global-warming theory, unfortunately, is out of the realm of being a legitimate, testable scientific hypothesis. For instance, to be a valid scientific hypothesis, there should be some kind of climate behavior observable in nature that would be inconsistent with the theory that mankind is responsible for global warming. But instead, everything we observe has now become consistent with the theory. Floods and droughts. Too much snow and too little snow. More hurricanes and fewer hurricanes. It is sometimes pointed out that a theory that explains everything really explains nothing. Similarly, there is no experiment we can carry out in the laboratory to test the theory. Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and yes we are adding more of it to the atmosphere. But since weather processes create and control over 90 percent of the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect through their continuous adjustments to water vapor and cloud amounts, it is not at all obvious that more CO2 will cause substantial warming. Indeed, it could well be that one of the functions of weather is to maintain a relatively constant greenhouse effect, no matter how much carbon dioxide is present. Alarmists like Al Gore will use pseudo-scientific justifications and comparisons in their attempt to make a connection between carbon dioxide and global warming. Even though CO2 is necessary for life on Earth, the alarmists insist on calling it a pollutant, referring to our atmosphere as an “open sewer.”
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MDExMTEwZWVjZmI5MGFmNzgzYmM1MWVmNTc0MDMyYTU=
Marc Morano
Communications Director
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) Inhofe Staff
202-224-5762
202-224-5167 (fax)
www.epw.senate.gov