Global Warming Skeptics, Many people are still skeptics
when it comes to Global Warming
Despite all the evidence on Global warming there are still a lot of
skeptics that attribute the warming on our planet to other factors. Here is a good article
that shows the point of view of many skeptics.
Is the debate now over for skeptics of global
warming hysteria?
Readers of USA Today may certainly have that
impression.
“Satellite and weather-balloon research released today removes a last bastion of
scientific doubt about global warming, researchers say,” reported USA Today on
Aug.12.
Certainly the USA Today report was partially correct – the researchers did, in fact,
“say” that “the last bastion of scientific doubt” had been removed.
But claims and reality often don’t match up.
Three papers published in the journal Science last week purport to debunk an important
argument advanced by skeptics of the notion of catastrophic, manmade global warming. The
skeptics’ argument is that while temperatures measured on the Earth’s surface
seem to indicate that global temperatures have increased at a rate of about 0.20 degrees
Centigrade per decade (deg. C/decade) since the 1970s, temperatures measured in the
atmosphere by satellite and weather balloons have shown only a relatively insignificant
amount of warming for the same time period (about 0.09 deg. C/decade).
The implication of the skeptics’ argument is that whatever warming seems to be
happening on the Earth’s surface, similar warming isn’t happening in the
atmosphere. This might mean that any observed surface warming is more likely due to the
urban heat island effect -- where the heat-retaining properties of concrete and asphalt in
urban areas artificially increase local temperatures -- rather than increasing atmospheric
levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
One of the new Science studies reported that the satellites had drifted in orbit, causing
errors in temperature measurement. Corrections to the satellite data, according to the
researchers, would increase the atmospheric warming estimate to 0.19 deg. C/decade -- more
in line with the 0.20 deg. C/decade warming of the Earth’s surface. Another study
reported that heating from tropical sunlight had skewed the balloon temperature
measurements.
Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the studies’
authors, told USA Today that, “Once corrected, the satellite and balloon temperatures
align with other surface and upper atmosphere measures, as well as climate change
models.”
So is it really game-set-match in favor of the global warming alarmists? Not so fast, say
the skeptics.
When University of Alabama-Huntsville researcher Roy Spencer, a prominent climatologist,
factored the newly reported corrections into his calculations, his estimate of atmospheric
warming was only 0.12 deg. C/decade -- higher than the prior estimate of 0.09 deg.
C/decade, but well below the Science study estimate of 0.19 deg C/decade and the surface
temperature estimate of 0.20 deg. C/decade.
As to the claimed errors in the weather balloon measurements, Spencer says that no other
effort to adjust the balloon data has produced warming estimates as high as those reported
in the new study and that it will take time for the research community to form opinions
about whether the new adjustments advocated are justified.
Climate expert Dr. Fred Singer of the Science and Environmental Policy Project says the
temperature adjustments are “not a big deal.”
“Greenhouse theory says (and the models calculate) that the atmospheric trend should
be 30 percent greater than the surface trend -- and it isn’t,” says Singer.
“Furthermore, the models predict that polar [temperature] trends should greatly
exceed the tropical values -- and they clearly don’t ... In fact, the Antarctic has
been cooling,” adds Singer.
Singer also had some related thoughts concerning the gloom-and-doom forecasts concerning
future temperatures.
Last January, a study in the journal Nature estimated that a doubling of atmospheric
levels of carbon dioxide would increase global temperatures anywhere from 1.9 degrees
Centigrade to 11.5 degrees Centigrade by mid-century. But Singer says the researchers
“varied only six out of many more parameters necessary to model clouds… Their
result confirms… that clouds are still too difficult to model and that climate models
underlying the Kyoto Protocol have never been validated.”
So it’s far from “case-closed” on global warming skepticism. Moreover,
aside from the controversy over the satellite and weather balloon data, many key climate
questions remain unanswered including: whether humans are causing significant warming;
whether warming is undesirable; and whether anything be done to avert any undesirable
warming.
Because of its prohibitive costs, alarm over global warming has been rejected numerous
times by President Bush and the U.S. Senate. European nations are already discovering that
their economies can’t live with the Kyoto Protocol that was just implemented in
February.
Despite alarmist media reports, global warming-mania is melting. It’s no wonder the
alarmists are in such a hurry to close the book on the science.
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