CO2 Facts

Meteorologist Brian Sussman points out the insanity of the "Climate Change" crowd, convinced that the "debate" is over and that we're all going to die unless we make drastic, large scale and expensive modifications to modern civilization. Yes, between the years 1970 and 1998 there was a small upward temperature trend of .34 degrees F. Since that time? Not so much - in fact all of the observed warming has since been reversed over the last decade.

Here's some of the facts about carbon dioxide:

"All of these insane moves by the government are being imposed upon us because of carbon dioxide -- which is not a problem. CO2 accounts for less than 4/10000ths* of our planet's atmosphere (.00036%). And what percentage of the miniscule amount of CO2 is produced by human activity, including the utilization of fossil fuels? According to a thorough analysis by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center -- a research wing of the U.S. Department of Energy -- only 3.207% -- all of this global whining over an atmospheric component so tiny, it is difficult to comprehend.

Allow me to repeat this critical fact:

Carbon dioxide comprises less than 4/10000ths of the earth atmosphere and of that amount, a mere 3% is generated by mankind. And how much has CO2 increased in the atmosphere over the past 150 years? Approximately 35%. A 35% increase and still the gas comprises less than 4/10000ths of earth's atmosphere."

Sussman also raises another disturbing and incredibly salient fact. The largest component of all greenhouse gasses is not carbon dioxide, but water vapor. Water vapor is responsible for 95% of the greenshouse effect. Yes, it's true - water vapor composes all but 5% of greenhouse gasses. We also know water vapor as humidity, which we experience in spades during the summers here in Nebraska. Humid air tends to hold in heat, and its a real benefit that it does so or the Earth would likely be a frozen mudball devoid of life. Here's Sussman's kicker:

"Curiously, research I culled from the Department of Energy fails to list water vapor as a greenhouse gas. This is incredibly disingenuous, given that, in reality, water vapor is the 600 pound gorilla in the greenhouse. After water vapor, the remaining five percent of the greenhouse gases are, in order of concentration: CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and a variety of other minor gases, including ozone, carbon monoxide, and chlorofluorocarbons. However -- stay with me here -- it must be noted that methane is 21 times more potent than CO2 when it comes to retaining the sun's heat, and nitrous oxide is 310 times more effective than CO2. Carbon dioxide is actually a puny player in the greenhouse game."

He goes on to calculate the effect human activity has on just the non-water sources of the greenhouse effect as 2.33%, accounting for the individual concentrations and potencies of the other greenhouse gases. He then does the math including water vapor, reducing the effect to .117% - just over one tenth of one percent. And for all this we are being asked to give up fossil fuels, fork over mountains of cash for "sustainable/renewable energy sources" and radically change our lifestyles.

I'm not sure there has been a larger hoax in the history of mankind with the possible exception of organized religion.

Yet Another Cimate Model Issue

In another item of interest, ScienceDaily reports that soil studies of black carbon, the organic residue from burned and decomposed matter found in the earth, indicates that global climate models are consistently overestimating the release of carbon dioxide gas from black carbon. In fact, climate models are generally supposing a postive reinforcement of these releases, one in which warming leads to the release of more Co2 which in causes more warming. However in the largest study of black carbon ever conducted, it has been found that the Co2 remains sequester far longer than initally thought, perhaps as much as 2,000 years.

"Climate models try to incorporate these increases of carbon dioxide from soils as the planet warms, but results vary greatly when realistic estimates of black carbon in soils are included in the predictions, the study found. Soils include many forms of carbon, including organic carbon from leaf litter and vegetation and black carbon from the burning of organic matter. It takes a few years for organic carbon to decompose, as microbes eat it and convert it to carbon dioxide. But black carbon can take 1,000-2,000 years, on average, to convert to carbon dioxide.

By entering realistic estimates of stocks of black carbon in soil from two Australian savannas into a computer model that calculates carbon dioxide release from soil, the researchers found that carbon dioxide emissions from soils were reduced by about 20 percent over 100 years, as compared with simulations that did not take black carbon's long shelf life into account. The findings are significant because soils are by far the world's largest source of carbon dioxide, producing 10 times more carbon dioxide each year than all the carbon dioxide emissions from human activities combined. Small changes in how carbon emissions from soils are estimated, therefore, can have a large impact."

In addition, the modelers genreally assume a relatively uniform distibution of black carbon, but the new study shows that the substance can vary from as much as 80 percent in a soil sample to nearly zero. So what we have here, again, is a major Co2 source (actually THE major source. 10 times that produced by all of humanity), one completely out of the control of humanity, being over estimated in global climate models.

And Al Gore says "the science is settled." What a load.

Warming Debate in Senate

Marc Sheppard at The American Thinker takes a look at the "Great Debate" over climate change and actually goes so far as to examine the evidence, which is a lot more than our Congresscritters have apparently done. While the vote went against the socialist greens, the arguments against the climate bill were couched not in scientific terms, but economic. Sheppard I think argues it should have been both.

"Don't get me wrong -- the fiscal arguments against the bill's draconian business regulations were inexorable -- its massive consequent spike in energy costs would be nothing short of ruinous to the nation. An April EPA analysis of the bill estimated a 53 cents per gallon increase in the price of gasoline and a 44% jump in electricity costs by 2030 should it become law. Even those figures precariously assumed a 150% increase in nuclear and "significant use of biomass" for electricity generation; otherwise costs will be "significantly higher." Add a projected net loss of almost a trillion dollars in GDP by that very same year and this blatantly socialistic power-grab attempt deserved the pauper's funeral it received on financial grounds alone. That's without even considering that there's no proof whatsoever that the actions of mankind can influence global temperatures even one degree Celsius in either direction."

Sheppard also points out that even Kyoto treaty signatories such as the UK, Japan, Russia, Italy and France haven't even come close to making their targeted reductions. The US increased its carbon emissions only 6.57%, while France, which generates a majority of its energy from carbon friendly nuclear power, just barely beat that figure with an increase of 6.21%. The global average increase was just over 18%, with Russia and Itlay over 15%, and Japan over 10%.

Despite the failure of Kyoto and the increase in global carbon emissions, the predicted planetary catastrophe just isn't happening, in fact, the world average temperature is cooling, not warming, and has been since 2002. In fact the temperature reductions from the last 5 years alone have countered all of the recorded warming from the last 100 years. Further, the JPL is predicting that a shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation will bring a colling trend for the next 20-30 years.

You'd like to think the new data would ahve an impact, but the hysteria continues.

Global Warming Redux

James Lewis over at the American Thinker pokes yet another hole in the "science" of Global Warming. If you haven't heard, 2007 was the coldest year in a century, with a .6 degree decline in temperatures, which wipes out the entire century's temperature increase commonly attributed to human induced global warming. Naturally, all the climate modelers are beginning to react by "tweaking" their models.

"How can this super-cold winter happen? It's got all the faithful a little worried. Climate modeling teams all over the world are sweating 24/7 to deal with it. They are producing epicycles for their models, to hang on the warming story.

"Epicycles" are cycles on top of cycles. When traditional astronomy began to collapse in the years before Copernicus, True Believers reacted by adding lots of little cycles on top of the great cycles of the planetary orbits, to protect their faith. Trouble is, they had to add so many cycles on top of cycles that eventually, the whole system became a laughingstock. Ultimately you could explain anything you wanted -- after the fact."

Lewis also recounts the story if Hungarian mathemetician Ferenc M. Miskolczi, who used to work for NASA, which wouldn't publish his paper (now published in a Hungarian journal) pointing out that all the climate models treat the Earth's atmosphere as infinitely think - because it greatly simplifies the math involved while simaltaneously helpings them "prove" their assumptions. If you correct these models to the actual thickness of the atmosphere (around 65 miles) all the warming effects of greenhouse gasses disappear entirely. Ooops.

The ironic thing about all of this is that NASA administrator James Hansen has been the one complaining about the Bush administration's politicization of science, all the while the agency has been engaging in a fair piece of censorship itself, all in the name of a political agenda of its own. It would be pretty ironic if it wasn't so tragic.

Oxygen on Early Earth

Astrobiology has a good article on the substantial impact that the rise of oxygen producing organisms have had on our planet. There have been two major increases in the atmospheric oxygen levels in our distant past - both occurring between 635 and 551 million years ago.

"Today, we take oxygen for granted. But the atmosphere had almost no oxygen until 2.5 billion years ago, and it was not until about 600 million years ago when the atmospheric oxygen level rose to a fraction of modern levels. For a long time, geologists and evolutionary biologists have speculated that the rise of the breathing gas and subsequent oxygenation of the deep oceans are intimately tied to the evolution of modern biological systems."

The first change sparked a slight change in microscopic life forms, with the second having a larger impact on the evolution and diversification of early life forms, including a significant spike in complex algaes. Following these developments, the number of species nearly doubled, and shortly thereafter (in evolutionary terms, anyway) the first animals to develop external skeletal structures (shells) evolved.

Earth's Orbit & Climatic Effects

SD also looks into the effects that our shiny blue marble's orbit has on the climate on the ground. In short, a lot of things effect the weather and climate.

"Parameters such as planetary gravitational attractions, the Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun and the degree of tilt of our planet's axis with respect to its path around the sun, have implications for climate change and the advent of ice ages."

While the Earth's orbit is elliptical, it is also irregular - meaning that the orbit tends to stretch further from the Sun on occaision, and when that happens, look out -it tends to get a bit chilly. These periods of more elliptical orbits happen about every 100,000 years - the same period of time that separate the more recent Ice Ages.

In addition, the summer and winter months are greatly effected by the Earth's tilt, with the summer months occuring mid year in the Northern hemisphere and at the yearly transistion in the Southern hemisphere. What most people don't realize is that the Earth is actually further away during the middle of the year. However, the Southern summer is greatly mitigated since it is mostly water, which heats five times more slowly than the land which comprises most of the Northern hemisphere. Thus the climatic effects of the seasonal swings is muted, or at least until the situation reverses itself - in 12,000 years. At that point, the seasonal variations will reinforce themselves creating more extreme temperature swings - mcuh warmer in Northern summers and much colder in Southern winters.

Will the Ice Caps Really Melt?

Much has been made of the possibilities of the polar ice caps melting due to "global warming", and the consequences (dramatic rise in sea levels, coastal flooding, millions of people displaced) have been described in dramatic detail as a rationale for taking "action". However, an engineer recently looked into the possibilities of the caps actually melting at The American Thinker (as claimed by a certain former vice president) and found the math involved....rather fuzzy.

As the engineer, Jason Schmidt puts it:

"Al Gore's claim that ocean levels will rise 20 feet thanks to global warming seems to ignore the laws of thermodynamics. I am no climatologist, but I do know about physics. Anyone who has ever spent time in a temperate climate following a snowy winter realizes that when the air temperature rises above 32°F the snow and ice do not melt immediately. We may experience many balmy early spring days with temperatures well above freezing while snow drifts slowly melt over days or weeks. Similarly, lakes and ponds take some time to freeze even days or weeks after the air temperature has plunged below zero. This is due to the latent heat of freezing/melting of water, a physical concept long quantified in thermodynamics.

That aspect of basic physics seems to have been overlooked by climatologists in their alarming claims of dramatic and rapid sea-level rise due to melting of the Antarctic ice caps and Greenland glaciers. But of course, we have learned that models predicting global warming also failed to take account of precipitation, so overlooking important factors ("inconvenient truths") should not cause much surprise anymore. The scientific data necessary to calculate the amount of heat necessary to melt enough ice to raise ocean levels 20 feet is readily available on the internet, and the calculations needed to see if polar cap melting passes the laugh test are surprisingly simple. Nothing beyond multiplication and division, and because we will use metric measures for simplicity's sake, much of the multiplying is by ten or a factor of ten."

He then goes about to step us throught the math involved in both raising the atmoshperic temperature of the Earth 5 degrees centigrade and the math involved in heating the ice caps to melt, and finds a rather large discrepancy.

"Heat needed to raise the temp of the atmosphere 5° C:
~2.5 x 10 to the 19th power kJ (kilojoules)

Heat necessary to melt ice to achieve 20-foot sea-level rise
~7.4 x 10 to the 21st power kJ

There is a difference of 300* between these two figures. Even if I am wrong by an order of magnitude, there is still an enormous difference. This does NOT mean that ice caps have not melted in the distant past nor that ice-age glaciers have not grown to cover much of the northern hemisphere; it simply means that the time scales involved to move sufficient quantities of heat to effect such melting or freezing occur over what we scientists commonly call "geological" time scales, i.e. hundreds of thousands and millions of years.

Even if sufficient heat is trapped in the atmosphere to raise it the maximum value predicted by anthropogenic "global warming" alarmists (5°C) over the next 100 years, hundreds of times more heat energy must be imparted into the ice-caps to melt sufficient ice to raise sea-levels the catastrophic levels prophesied by Al Gore.

I humbly submit that this might constitute a flaw in his equations."

Ooops.

Methane, Nitrous Oxide, Cows & Warming

The LA Times points out the elephant in the global warming debate isn't what people do, it's what they eat. Methane and Nitrous oxide emissions emitted from livestock are greenhouse gasses with a far greater impact than that of the entire tranportation industry. Methane emissions cause 21 times the warming effect that Co2 does, and nitrous oxide's effect is 296 times that of C02. While ruminant livestock belch methane, both chemical compounds are released from the management of livestock manure pens. If you're really concerned with global warming, focusing on what we drive is a spurious strategy. You should also be concerned with volcanic eruptions, but that's another (and later) post.

So how bad are the releases from livestock operations?

"All told, livestock are responsible for 18% of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide, according to the U.N. -- more than all the planes, trains and automobiles on the planet. And it's going to get a lot worse. As living standards rise in the developing world, so does its fondness for meat and dairy. Annual per-capita meat consumption in developing countries doubled from 31 pounds in 1980 to 62 pounds in 2002, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, which expects global meat production to more than double by 2050. That means the environmental damage of ranching would have to be cut in half just to keep emissions at their current, dangerous level."

So why isn't this getting more media play? Easy - the political influence of America's cattle and dairy lobbies, and the fact that legislating food choices is about as popular with people as former athletic directors in Lincoln. The Times seems to believe the only thing to do is eat less meat, but that's about as likely as pigs flying. Small steps could be made in waste management, but only about 20% of these emissions would be effected. It would give us more time to think of something else, which is my preferred strategy for the whole issue in the first place, if indeed the impacts of the "crisis" can be shown as such. Still, a very illuminating piece.

Gore Ducks Debating on Warming

Great article at TCS by Dr. Bonner Cohen -
An inconvenient truth for Al Gore is that he has been ducking numerous attempts by global warming heretics to engage them in a debate on how much humans contribute to actual increases in the planet's temperature. Gore refuses to respond to Czech President Vaclav Klaus's offer to debate, nor the earlier offers from Hudson Institute fellow Dennis Avery or Britain's Lord Mornton.

Klaus is pretty unequivocable on the subject, as he stated in a piece published in the Financial Times in June of this year.

""As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."

Gore's also been offered a bet in June of this year by University of Pennsylvania's Professor Scott Armstrong for $10,000. Both men would predict the change in the global average temperature 10 years in the future, and the one closest to the actual increase at the time would donate the $20k plus the accumulated interest to the charity of his choice. Gore hasn't responded to Armstrong's offer either, despite his substantial earnings from his movies, books and lecture fees on this subject.

Interestingly enough, there has been a debate on the subject, as Cohen relates:

"Gore's reluctance to go toe-to-toe with global warming skeptics may have something to do with the - from the standpoint of climate change alarmists - unfortunate outcome of a global warming debate in New York last March. In the debate, a team of global warming skeptics composed of MIT scientist Richard Lindzen, University of London emeritus professor of biogeology Philip Stott, and physician-turned novelist/filmmaker Michael Crichton handily defeated a team of climate alarmists headed by NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt. Before the start of the nearly two-hour debate, the audience of several thousand polled 57.3 percent to 29.9 percent in favor of the proposition that global warming is a "crisis." At the end of the debate, the numbers had changed dramatically, with 46.2 percent favoring the skeptical point of view and 42.2 percent siding with the alarmists."

One has to wonder if the results of this effort have led Gore to be a bit reluctant to respond to his critics.

Hansen's Global Crusade

James Lewis at the American Thinker takes NASA climate science modeler and Global Warming Crusader James Hansen to task. Hansen has been crying about the Executive branch of government trying to politicize science - exactly what Hansen has been doing by claiming that the seas will inundate the coasts under as much as 80 feet of water by the end of the century and that we positively must destroy our economy in order to deal with this issue.

"Dr. Hansen is a math modeler in the climate change game. How does he get Planetary Doom from a math model? It's very simple. You build in "positive feedback loops." That is, you look in the vast toolbox of climate variables to find just two factors that might reinforce each other in a catastrophic loop. For instance, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might create a greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, which causes more water evaporation, which causes more greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, etc., etc. Keep looping that, and you raise world temps by just one degree Centigrade, so the polar ice caps melt and the oceans rise, up to 25 meters. See? It's easy.

The big problem with this scenario is that the climate system almost certainly has negative feedback loops, i.e., causal connections that work to bring temperatures back to a rough baseline. The climate is likely to have self-regulation mechanisms in much the way that our bodies have self-regulating loops to stabilize our temperature, blood sugar, and a hundred other variables. Why does that seem likely? Because the world hasn't burned up or drowned in quite a long time, even though temperature variations and greenhouse gases have existed for many millions of years. Such factors as clouds and air particulates are believed to lower temperatures. With a little imagination we could easily build math models for self-regulating loops that would tend to stabilize temperatures. (But it might be hard to swing the federal grant support for those models.)"

Hansen's temperature data has been "massaged" in a number of ways that he hasn't allowed anyone to review, but Canadian Steve MacIntyre has delved deeply into the published numbers to "correct" a couple of points over the years. MacIntyre first demolished the now infamous "hocky stick" graph showing temperature rising steadily in the 20th century with a recent accelerated rise over the last 20 years. The actual data show the real numbers to oscillate (warming in the early 20th century, cooling in the middle of the century, then warming again after 1970) although the general trend has been toward a slight (less than 1 degree Celsius) increase. Just recently Hansen was forced to reshuffle his list of the top 10 warmest years in the US by MacIntyre raising 1934 to the warmest year of all time and dropping the rankings of several recent years, including one year off the chart completely.

Hansen has now come up with a manifesto of sorts, asking Presidential candidates to sign a pledge to "save the planet", and he has all sorts of wacky ideas about how to do so, like completely halting the construction of any new energy generation plants that don't meet his specific criteria, taxing carbon emissions and changing the laws of supply and demand. And anyone who disagrees with Hansen is more or less a paid political flunky of special interests and anyone who doubts his "facts" can safely be ignored, because Hansen KNOWS the TRUTH.

This guy Hansen calls himself a scientist?

Aussie Documentary Against Warming

Meanwhile, an Australian documentary poking holes in the religion of Global Warming has generated a counter-productively ferocious repsonse from the True Believers. The documentarian, Martin Durkin, asks why so defensive?

"First, the ferocity of the attack, I think, revealed the intolerance and defensiveness of the global warming camp. Why were Jones and co expending such energy and resources attacking one documentary? We are told the global warming theory is robust. They say you'd have to be off your chump to disagree. We have been assured for years, in countless news broadcasts and column inches, that it's definitely true. So why bother to stamp so aggressively on the one foolish documentary-maker - who clearly must be as mad as a snake - who steps out of line?

I think viewers may also have wondered (reasonably) why the theory of global warming has not been subjected to this barrage of critical scrutiny by the media. After all, it's the theory of global warming, not my foolish little film, that is turning public and corporate policy on its head.

The apparent unwillingness of Jones and others at the ABC to give airtime to a counterargument, the tactics used to minimise the ostensible damage done by the film, the evident animosity towards those who questioned global warming: all of this served to give viewers a glimpse of what it was like for scientists who dared to disagree with the hallowed doctrine.

Why are the global warmers so zealous? After a year of arguing with people about this, I am convinced that it's because global warming is first and foremost a political theory. It is an expression of a whole middle-class political world view. This view is summed up in the oft-repeated phrase "we consume too much". I have also come to the conclusion that this is code for "they consume too much". People who believe it tend also to think that exotic foreign places are being ruined because vulgar oiks can afford to go there in significant numbers, they hate plastic toys from factories and prefer wooden ones from craftsmen, and so on.

All this backward-looking bigotry has found perfect expression in the idea of man-made climate disaster. It has cohered a bunch of disparate reactionary prejudices (anti-car, anti-supermarkets, anti-globalisation) into a single unquestionable truth and cause. So when you have a dig at global warming, you commit a grievous breach of social etiquette. Among the chattering classes you're a leper."

Ouch, I think he struck another nerve there, and with good reason. The theory is starting to crumble away at every turn.

First there is the disturbing lack of warming since 1998 - global temps have been either static or slightly declining since that time. Then there is that pesky ice core data showing that increased carbon dioxide levels FOLLOW warmer temperatures, rather than precede them. Then the IPCC was forced to drop the infamously hoaxed "hocky stick" graph - the one that "adjusted" away the Medieval Warming period, and then there is that that unambiguous satellite data showing that the Earth's troposphere isn't warming, as it should if the theory is correct, but is actually cooling! Then there is that bizarre cooling period from the 1940s-1970s that can't be explained either (unless you take into account the activity of that big ball of fire we orbit - but I digress).

The whole enchillada is crumbling, just as everyone and their Grandma's dog is jumping onto the bandwagon. No wonder they see red.

Antarctic Ice Core Reveals 800,000 Years of Climate Change

Almost to post number 500! (doesn't seem possible, but it's true) - and it just so happens to be one of those "bees in my bonnet" topics - global warming/climate change.

via National Geographic again, an ice core recovered from the South Pole by a French research team shows the climate history for over 3/4 of a million years. Earth has been up to 10 degrees colder and almost 5 degrees Celsius warmer over the historical record. The interesting thing is both the warmest and coldest periods that were uncovered were relatively recent, dating back to the latest Ice Age.

"The new climate record covers an additional cycle of glacial change, amounting to 11 cycles in total, lead author Jouzel said. Plugging the data from the entire core into an atmospheric model, the scientists were able to reconstruct a reliable temperature record for the past 800,000 years. In today's online journal Science, the team showed that the coldest period occurred around 20,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum, when the ice sheets were at their peak.
It was about 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than today. (Related: "Antarctica's Atmosphere Warming Dramatically, Study Finds" [March 30, 2006].)
Meanwhile, the warmest period was during the last interglacial period, which is an interval of warmer global average temperature that separates ice ages. At that time, around 130,000 years ago, it was a balmy 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today."

This is another of those things the global warming crowd don't seem to understand, or willfully choose to ignore in order to try to make their political point, which seems to be that we should all go back to horses and buggies or something.

We are still recovering from the last Ice Age, and there have also been quite a number of climate oscillations (like both the Medieval Warming period and the Little Ice Age within the last millennium, for example) within that time frame. So a 1 degree warming trend over the course of the last century (which is the biggest piece of evidence used to justify the warming theory) just isn't that big of a deal, and furthermore, no one can prove just how much human industrialization has influenced the warming we've seen.

Humans have adapted to far greater climate changes over just the last 20,000 years without the benefits of our current technology, so it is difficult to imagine (for this writer at least) a scenario with changes so severe, so dire that we can't adjust to it, however painful any change might be. Call me an optimist, but I believe humanity will survive, whatever actually occurs. So completely altering our economic and industrial base to address a potential, but still unproven (and unlikely) disaster just doesn't seem like a wise policy course for us to undertake.

Perhaps better evidence will be forthcoming and we will all die in a global cataclysm of flooding, the roaches will eventually take over and discuss amongst themselves human civilization the way we do the dinosaurs - but I doubt it.

Global Warming Climate Modeling Flawed

via NG again.

Global climate models have apparently failed in their predictions in at least one respect - as the Earth has warmed, precipitation has also increased in a similiar fashion. Satellite imagery available since 1987 has been recently analyzed showing this to be the case.

"The results fly in the face of many of the world's most sophisticated climate models, which predict that worldwide rainfall will increase at a much slower rate than temperatures.
The findings also cast doubt on the ability of climate models to accurately predict precipitation on regional scales."

Most climate models tend to predict that dry areas will get drier, and wet ones wetter with additional warming, but the evidence does not appear to be stacking up in this fashion, which is good news for regions such as the Americna Southwest.

Ooops.

Warming Facts

via Sally Pipes at NRO.

Unfortunately for the smelly hippy eco-doomster crowd, things appear a bit cheerier than you might believe after seeing Professor Gore's movie, or reading convoluted legal reasoning from the nation's highest court. The rate of growth in carbon emissions is slowing in the US, the rate dropping to less than half what it was in the 1990s. Methane emissions, (23 times the greenhouse effect of carbon) are actually declining. Worldwide, methane emissions have declined almost 13% from 1990, and the 4 million ton reduction is about the same as a 90 million ton carbon reduction.

In addition, as the developing world grows their economies, their rate of deforestation drops and reverses itself. No nation with a per capita income over $4600 has negative rate of forest stock growth. In particular, China has added over 20 million hectares of forest between 2000 and 2005. Of course, trees take in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. Worldwide, the net rate of forst loss is declining as well.

Lakebed sediment reveals climate history

ScienceDaily.

The bottom sediments of Lake Van in eastern Turkey (that nation's largest lake) is being researched by an international team of scientists interested in climatic history. Each summer, the lake sediments accumulated pollen grains that can be studied to determine what types of plants were growing in the region, and thus the region's climate and weather patterns. The mud leaves a historical footprint (like that of tree rings) that extends back over 3/4 of a million years, with the sedimentary mud extending to a depth of several hundred meters in many places along the lake bottom. Volcanic activity and earthquakes in the region can also be indentified through their effect on the sediments as well. Preliminary investigations of the strata show that the climate patterns have changed radically in the past in as little as 10 to 20 years.

This area in Turkey is of intense interest to me due to the fact that many of the domesticated plants and animals of the Neolithic period have been genetically traced to wild species found in the region in prehistoric times. The study of this lake bed sediment could have profound implications for not only climatic shift research, but the history of early civilization as well. Such stratigraphic studies of bog sediment pollen in Britain have already given us fascinating clues into the cultures and climate of Ice Age Europe.