Piers Corbyn, an astrophysicist, is the originator of the revolutionary solar weather technique of long-range forecasting and a founder of Weather Action Long Range Forecasters. His first scientific publications were on aspects of meteorology and astronomy. He also carried out astrophysics research at Queen Mary College London and published work on galaxy formation and the mean matter density of the universe.
From his research into the causes of weather change, he totally rejects the carbon dioxide-based theory of global warming and climate change. Corbyn is one of the scientists featured in the wagTV film-produced "The Great Global Warming Swindle," shown on Channel 4 in Britain in March.
Corbyn was interviewed by Gregory Murphy on May 2.
EIR: Could you please tell us a little of your background?
Corbyn: I've got a first-class degree in physics from Imperial College, and a high degree in astrophysics at Queen Mary College, which are both part of the University of London. Prior to that, I was always very interested in weather, and I built myself an observing weather station and did experiments in science and the weather.
While studying astrophysics, I knew of various supposed connections between solar activity (that is, sunspots) and the weather, although at the time, I was more interested in sunspots. Subsequently, I thought that the idea of trying to predict sunspots, which is all I wanted to do, was a bit silly, because, who cares? It might be more interesting if one could predict the weather using solar activity, and I set about doing that.
Now, it was too difficult, and I gave up—until the miners' strike came along in 1984. And friends involved in these things in Britain, asked me, "Piers, you were trying to do long-range weather forecasting. Is it going to be a cold Winter?"
And I said, "I haven't a clue. I've given up."
And they said, "Well, have another go, see if you can tell us."
So, I did go back into trying to do this, and I said that the Winter of 1984-85 in the United Kingdom would be very cold. And it was. It wasn't quite cold enough for the miners—you know, they wanted to win—but it was very cold.
After that, I went back into doing [weather prediction]. And to cut a long story short, I found a certain connection, a certain predictability. I tested this by doing gambling with William Hill, the bookmaker here, in the Summer of 1988. Then, for 12 years, I carried on doing gambling every month [on weather prediction], and made a lot of money, until they stopped me from doing it.
This was things like, will April in London be warmer than normal, or will there be thunderstorms in a certain time period....
EIR: I noticed that on your website, that you got banned. Now the going thing is risk management services, one Bob Ward (who wants to stop the DVD of "The Great Global Warming Swindle" from being released) is running a weather derivatives operation. So, while you were doing it on a small scale, now they want to make a whole financial services industry out of it.
Corbyn: That's right. They want our financial services industry run on fear. They want to carry on trading carbon and energy and so on, running on fear. The last thing they want, actually, is working long-range weather forecasts.
Now, in 1995, I set up a limited company called Weatheraction Ltd, and we've been through various phases since then, on and off the stock exchange (we're now off).... And we're now making long-range forecasts up to 12 months ahead, more accurate than anything we did before. We sell to farmers and the energy industry. The rail network buys them, for example, to get warning of heavy rainstorm and potential landslides.
EIR: It seems like you're producing your forecasts from actual physical observations, not like NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in the United States, which uses more computer modelling, and which tends to have high inaccuracy.
Corbyn: As I said in a presentation I gave in January, at the Science Museum in Imperial College: Computer modelling for weather forecasting, and indeed for climate forecasting, has reached its limits.
No amount of improved computer power will get past the really basic climate inputs. The activity from the Sun, which affects the upper atmosphere—these things are also modulated by lunar effects for example. We do take those into account in our forecasts. We have eight weather periods every month and six or seven out of the eight will be correct, in any one month.
EIR: It seems that the computer models hold the Sun's output as constant. They can't model water vapor. And what other researchers have told me, is that once you start putting up the energy input in the computer model, and the carbon cycle, the model is invalid.
Corbyn: That's right. The model is invalid, and it's "rubbish in equals rubbish out."
On the very fundamental, basic level, I think we can see it's invalid just by looking at the Ice Ages.
It's not the case that carbon dioxide drives temperatures. When you leave Ice Ages, it's the other way around: The temperatures go up first, and then carbon dioxide levels go up. And if you look at the fluctuations during the Ice Ages, you can see that, actually, temperature goes up and down, about twice as fast, and twice as often, as carbon dioxide levels go up and down.
So that means that at least about half the time, they're going to be moving in opposite directions, and half the time, they'll be moving in the same direction. I mean, essentially, that they are unconnected. They probably are connected in some complex way, but there's no evidence anywhere that carbon dioxide systematically drives temperature. Where there is evidence of some sort of driving, it's the other way around.
So, that being the case, that whole theory is fundamentally a failure. Actually, since 1998, world temperatures have been falling.
EIR: Lately, the BBC and the U.S. press have picked up on how this is the warmest April in Great Britain, but yet, they don't talk about the 4- to 5-year running cold snap in the Southern Hemisphere, because it pokes a hole in their line that "the whole Earth is warming up, and Antarctica is going to melt and flood whole islands in the Pacific."
Corbyn: There are fundamental things wrong with that "warm April" view. First of all, of course, America's just had a cold Winter. But the Central England data set occupies 1/5,000th of the global area. So, to say this warm April is evidence of global warming, is insane.
This is a description. It can't be a cause of global warming, in the world or anywhere. It's just complete nonsense.
EIR: The latest now, in the New York Times, is that a new study shows that the ice cap will melt 30 years ahead of time. So they must have found a satellite that looks 30 years into the future.
Corbyn: Well, of course, there's nothing new happening in the world now, that hasn't happened before: In terms of the post-glacial period, the last 700 or so years have been the coldest part of the last 10,000 years, and 4,000 years ago, it was much warmer than now. That was the Bronze Age. It was called the "climate optimum" by historians, and since then, temperatures have actually generally declined, while carbon dioxide levels have gone up.
And until about 1900, or 1910—about 100 years ago, carbon dioxide levels had gone up, for various reasons, at the same time as temperatures. But the general trend in the last 4,000 years is that carbon dioxide and temperature have been moving against each other.
Now, in the world, the fundamental periodicity of temperature changes is the 22-year magnetic cycle of the Sun. And we understand quite a lot about why that is. The peak of the current 22-year cycle was in 2002-2003, and we're now in a declining phase of that. And if you take [as the global warmers did] the world average temperatures, averaged over a two-year moving average, the recent peak was in 1998, because there were cold years before and after that.
But in 2002-2003, the world temperature moving average peaked at the same time as the phase of the natural 22-year cycle. So, what we think is happening is that world temperatures may be not rising on average, but in the last 10 years, up until 2002, we have seen the rising course of a natural cycle [related to the 22-year magnetic cycle of the Sun].
This happened to coincide with CO2 levels going up, but so what? It may be, that really we're in a period overall, where temperature and carbon dioxide are actually moving in opposite directions, in terms of deviations from a norm. But for some reason, there is also a general increase in solar activity. That was definitely the case since 1900 or so, and that is also causing a general slow warming, which may also be coming to an end now.
What carbon dioxide does, appears to be irrelevant.
EIR: What about the recent book of Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder, The Chilling Stars, about the cosmic ray connection to some formation of clouds and cooling? How does the 22-year magnetic cycle of the Sun affect that?
Corbyn: I think their experimental work to show that charged particles cause cloud nucleation and could therefore affect the development of weather fronts is of tremendously important significance, and groundbreaking. And that is their contribution, although I think their work has got a fundamental problem....
EIR: There's another meeting of the IPCC in Bangkok this week to produce another summary for policymakers. To be more honest, it's a summary written by policymakers.... And you wrote a letter requesting that certain graphs that question the IPCC science conclusions be included with their policy summary.
Corbyn: Correct.
EIR: Did you have an answer yet?
Corbyn: No, there are two things: One is, that I've written the letter to the leaders of the British activity on the IPCC, Sir David King, Chief Scientific Advisor and David Miliband, the minister responsible for environment—who, I would like to add, is the most callous liar in British politics, I've ever come across.
And I also sent a copy to Prof. Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, who, in previous times, I worked with on the question of neutrino energies in cosmology. So, I do know him. He is a very, very good scientist, but I think he's sold his soul for something or other, in the Royal Society. We'll see.
Anyway, there's been no reply to the letter I wrote saying, "Please, by Bangkok, get the graph that you left out put into that summary for policymakers."
What they've done in their summary for policymakers, is put in a graph showing that carbon dioxide levels have been rising, since about 5,000 years ago. So, I wrote them saying: If you're putting this in, please also put the graph, measured from my source, which show what temperatures have been doing. We must have these comparisons; policymakers should have these comparisons.
What also happened is that one Member of Parliament—Martin Jones—has now asked questions to Parliament on the lines I suggested, because he got hold of my letter. Jones is a scientist himself, and he's very distressed about what's going on.
EIR: Is he a member of the Conservative Party?
Corbyn: No, he's Labour....
EIR: There's a very interesting paper that's been published in Energy and Environment by Ernst Beck on the 180 years of measurements of atmospheric CO2 that were carried out by Nobel Prize laureates and other scientists from the 1800s into the 1950s. Contrary to what is shown in ice cores, there have been periods where you had 400 parts per million [ppm], almost up to 500 ppm, for example, and a period in the 1850s, where there is a peak. But, as I remember, there were not many power plants, and other assorted man-made industries at that time to account for this CO2.
Corbyn: Absolutely: There's a lot of modulation of carbon dioxide and temperatures, which has nothing to do with mankind—plant growth being one of them, and volcanoes being another.
Now, it is also very important to notice that ice cores do not measure annual amounts of carbon dioxide, but the values are spread out over centuries, because carbon dioxide is a gas, and it diffuses into the ice. So, although the annual layers of ice will give you measures of temperatures then, or temperatures within a year or so of any place, any date, carbon dioxide levels can not be measured like this.
This comes to another lie of the global warmers: They say, "Well, carbon dioxide levels are rising now faster than they've ever risen before."
Now, there's no evidence of CO2 levels having risen, or not risen, faster than before, because you couldn't see such things in the ice cores. It's like saying a blind man can't see, therefore there's nothing to see. What they put out about that is a total lie.
The papers you refer to, are very interesting and important, but carbon dioxide is not a driver of temperature. And there have been many periods when carbon dioxide levels must have been—or when you can measure them, it's clear they would have been, or were rather—reaching quite interesting peaks or troughs, but which have no bearing on temperatures.
EIR: Yes, I asked this question in an e-mail to Phil Jones [a leading British global warming scientist] at the Climate Research Unit, in which he said, he had not read the paper, but on face value, he could tell me that the paper was "totally wrong," and ice cores were the only way to determine CO2. Period.
Then I asked about the paper on global mean temperature that a Danish professor put out, which, you know, has created a big problem for the global warmers. Phil Jones, again, told me that there was something wrong with the paper, that it would not have been published in a "reasonable" climate journal, and that I had to use "Google Scholar" to see how many citations the paper had. So, in essence, he said, "check on the internet to see what's true!"
Corbyn: Check the internet to see if something's true—well that's interesting, isn't it!
EIR: These guys are having trouble, now.
Corbyn: Eee-yi-yi-yi. Well, I like the lie about sea level rising. Now, there have been actual measurements of the Maldive Islands that show that if you stick to actual data, they show that sea levels have gone down in the Maldives (or the Islands have risen up) in the last 70 years. But the general problem is that the [global warmers'] sea level measurements in the Pacific are insane, because the Pacific is in constant motion. You know, there's a ring of volcanoes in the Pacific, and indeed, it shows that the whole area is moving. So, these islands are going to go up and down, and it has nothing to do with sea level.
The overall point is, that since the last Ice Age, sea level has been constantly rising, because heat energy has been slowly getting into the sea. The sea as a whole used to be much colder, and now it has expanded. And that expansion has nothing to do with carbon dioxide, or what's happening this year, or last year, or the last decade in temperatures. And that is why, when the Romans came to England, the sea level was lower, and there are ports which they built, which are now well under the sea.
EIR: Yes, it seems that the warmers forget about underwater volcano activity, and they also forget about, the underwater volcano activity in the Arctic Sea, too! This is what creates the melt ponds, which they cry about.
Corbyn: Absolutely. Of course, they also don't admit the early Medieval Warm Period, which was much warmer than now. Greenland was much warmer: It was called Greenland when discovered by the Vikings, because it was habitable, and a lot of people emigrated there.
And polar bears did very well in the warmer times. They didn't die out at all; they didn't die out in the last 10,000 years, nor during the previous interglacial, nor the one before that. So, they're just used as a deceitful heartthrob; you know, to pluck your heartstrings because the polar bears might die out.
EIR: Yes, we should find a picture of a polar bear chasing one of these people trying to take its picture, and publish that, instead of all of these cute little pictures of polar bears.
Corbyn: Anyway, my view is that climate changes have happened in the last 80 years, that is, the world has got a little bit warmer, although not as warm as it has been in Medieval times, or the Bronze Age.
That warming is a good thing. It leads to more prosperity. If it goes on, it could lead to the reopening of what's called the Northwest Passages, a sea route to the North Pacific going through parts of Canada and Greenland. And our own ideas—and we do have some planet forecasts based on the ideas about changing solar activity—is that actually, this world warming has probably reached its peak, and it will stay constant, or it will go down a bit, until 2013. Beyond that, we're not sure what will happen, but the warming will probably carry on declining.
EIR: The global warming crowd talks about increased CO2 as some kind of negative thing, but if you think about all the changes in plants, with photosynthesis being produced better, you will have more food output—
Corbyn: Yes, that's right, more food. And it's good for trees, good for grasses; it's great! More CO2 equals good, and global warming equals good—although they're not calling it good. The CO2 causes the plants to grow, but the CO2 is not causing the temperatures. The temperatures encourage the plants to grow, as well. A warmer world, more CO2: That's the best.
EIR: Yes. Just ask anybody who moves from South Dakota in the United States, to Florida. That's what Fred Singer always says, when you ask him about "Is the warmer climate better?" "Well, just ask someone who just moved from South Dakota, where it's frozen a lot of the time, to Miami, where it's nice and warm. Ask them."
The one thing the warmers don't have, is a sense of humor. And the faked data, which are probably more faked than the intelligence we were told about the Iraq War—
Corbyn: Oh, absolutely! The so-called hockey stick [graph] is a lie. They've known it's a lie, yet they carry on repeating it.
EIR: Yes, the IPCC has backed off the hockey stick in its last report, but it's still there. It's just not pointed to as if it's their Holy Grail.
Corbyn: The Al Gore film, as far as I could see, has got the hockey stick in it.... I counted 20 deliberate lies in his film—well, I say "deliberate" because Gore ought to know better. And I wrote them all down. I daresay, you would've gotten a few of them anyway, but I think—
EIR: Yes, there's been a lot of people who've gone through it and found all the misrepresentations. And the global warmers are crying about "The Great Global Warming Swindle" over a small error in one little chart, while Al Gore's film is like Soviet propaganda. That's what some people have told me, that the film was just put together like Soviet propaganda.
Corbyn: He could change his name to Al Gorebbels.
They call this a consensus?[/b]
Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post
Published: Saturday, June 02, 2007]/i]
"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled."
S o said Al Gore ... in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren't sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn't think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.
Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent.
More than six months ago, I began writing this series, The Deniers. When I began, I accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies.
National Post's Deniers series:
Scientists who challenge the climate change debate
The series (http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=22003a0d-37cc-4399-8bcc-39cd20bed2f6&k=0)
Statistics needed -- The Deniers Part I (http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=22003a0d-37cc-4399-8bcc-39cd20bed2f6&k=0)
Warming is real -- and has benefits -- The Deniers Part II (http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=1d78fc67-3784-4542-a07c-e7eeec46d1fc&k=0)
The hurricane expert who stood up to UN junk science -- The Deniers Part III (http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=ae9b984d-4a1c-45c0-af24-031a1380121a&k=0)
Polar scientists on thin ice -- The Deniers Part IV (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=b228f4b0-a869-4f85-ba08-902b95c45dcf&k=0")
The original denier: into the cold -- The Deniers Part V (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=63ab844f-8c55-4059-9ad8-89de085af353&k=0")
The sun moves climate change -- The Deniers Part VI (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=fee9a01f-3627-4b01-9222-bf60aa332f1f&k=0")
Will the sun cool us? -- The Deniers Part VII (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=17fad0e2-6f6b-41f3-bdd8-8e9eeb015777&k=0")
The limits of predictability -- The Deniers Part VIII (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=9bc9a7c6-2729-4d07-9629-807f1dee479f&k=0")
Look to Mars for the truth on global warming -- The Deniers Part IX (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=edae9952-3c3e-47ba-913f-7359a5c7f723&k=0")
Limited role for C02 -- the Deniers Part X (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=069cb5b2-7d81-4a8e-825d-56e0f112aeb5&k=0")
End the chill -- The Deniers Part XI (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/archives/story.html?id=216ca730-10f0-4614-9692-fc37d99cbac3")
Clouded research -- The Deniers Part XII
(http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/archives/story.html?id=975f250d-ca5d-4f40-b687-a1672ed1f684")
Allegre's second thoughts -- The Deniers XIII (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2f4cc62e-5b0d-4b59-8705-fc28f14da388")
The heat's in the sun -- The Deniers XIV (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=67ac2d90-ec56-4460-a831-75aacc20670d")<a target="_blank" hrefUnsettled Science -- The Deniers XV (http://"http://services.canada.com/newsloader51/story.html?id=7e23a550-9cc4-4697-b730-b2d094f1628a")
Bitten by the IPCC -- The Deniers XVI (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=0ea8dc23-ad1a-440f-a8dd-1e3ff42df34f")
(http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=94b7d021-c5da-4e82-b37f-53d338709fb1")Little ice age is still within us -- The Deniers XVII (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=94b7d021-c5da-4e82-b37f-53d338709fb1")
(http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=985641c9-8594-43c2-802d-947d65555e8e")
Fighting climate 'fluff' -- The Deniers XVIII (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=985641c9-8594-43c2-802d-947d65555e8e")
Science, not politics -- The Deniers XIX (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=5b824408-9df0-4189-86fc-cf6465bf0aa8")
Gore's guru disagreed -- The Deniers XX (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=58e0c50c-1631-46ca-8719-778c0973526e")
The ice-core man -- The Deniers XXI (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=25526754-e53a-4899-84af-5d9089a5dcb6")
(http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=121163d6-d6b9-45bb-830c-5d27f88f899a")
(http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=121163d6-d6b9-45bb-830c-5d27f88f899a")
Some restraint in Rome -- The Deniers XXII (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=121163d6-d6b9-45bb-830c-5d27f88f899a")
Discounting logic -- The Deniers XXIII (http://"http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=7bd269b6-b2e7-44d2-85e0-e7749714ba34")
More on the environment (http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/environment/index.html)
My series set out to profile the dissenters -- those who deny that the science is settled on climate change -- and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world's premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop -- the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.
What of the one claim that we hear over and over again, that 2,000 or 2,500 of the world's top scientists endorse the IPCC position? I asked the IPCC for their names, to gauge their views. "The 2,500 or so scientists you are referring to are reviewers from countries all over the world," the IPCC Secretariat responded. "The list with their names and contacts will be attached to future IPCC publications, which will hopefully be on-line in the second half of 2007."
An IPCC reviewer does not assess the IPCC's comprehensive findings. He might only review one small part of one study that later becomes one small input to the published IPCC report. Far from endorsing the IPCC reports, some reviewers, offended at what they considered a sham review process, have demanded that the IPCC remove their names from the list of reviewers. One even threatened legal action when the IPCC refused.
A great many scientists, without doubt, are four-square in their support of the IPCC. A great many others are not. A petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine between 1999 and 2001 claimed some 17,800 scientists in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol. A more recent indicator comes from the U.S.-based National Registry of Environmental Professionals, an accrediting organization whose 12,000 environmental practitioners have standing with U.S. government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. In a November, 2006, survey of its members, it found that only 59% think human activities are largely responsible for the warming that has occurred, and only 39% make their priority the curbing of carbon emissions. And 71% believe the increase in hurricanes is likely natural, not easily attributed to human activities.
Such diversity of views is also present in the wider scientific community, as seen in the World Federation of Scientists, an organization formed during the Cold War to encourage dialogue among scientists to prevent nuclear catastrophe. The federation, which encompasses many of the world's most eminent scientists and today represents more than 10,000 scientists, now focuses on 15 "planetary emergencies," among them water, soil, food, medicine and biotechnology, and climatic changes. Within climatic changes, there are eight priorities, one being "Possible human influences on climate and on atmospheric composition and chemistry (e.g. increased greenhouse gases and tropospheric ozone)."
Man-made global warming deserves study, the World Federation of Scientists believes, but so do other serious climatic concerns. So do 14 other planetary emergencies. That seems about right. - Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation. Email: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.
Don't people ever get tired on searching for those 'definite proofs' that all climate scientists are lying? Or else, don't know what the he** they are speaking of?
Seems that some will fight it to the last minute doesn't it? Standing upon a sinking ship, declaring that its totally safe. Telling you that real soon we will all have our own weather cannon, fixing things :)
A pity we didn't have it when just one little puny volcano on Island started to spew?
Where are you guys, come on now, just one tiny volcano..
He** that's nothing, sprouting, as you are, solutions for fixing a global climate change.
You can probably do this while reading your morning paper :)
Skeptical?
That's cool with me, but burying CO2 and 'weather cannons' are not.
Jules Verne belonged to the Victorian era.
==
And 'anonymous' posts sort of 'smells' :)
I can't other than agree with you that the variables steering the climate are difficult to know and predict. But we do know a lot of them, and we are learning more as we go, it's no different than other sciences. As for cleaning up your own front yard before complaining about the others, that's always a good principle :)
"Considering we have highly inaccurate, incomplete data along with a nearly complete lack of understanding of the dynamic mechanism we call climate" Now that is a very serious statement, the data we have and collect comes from respective countries, it all depends on how willing those countries are to share their data. Some countries try, others like Canada presents only one weather station for the arctic side of their Country. How one should look at that kind of 'cooperation' I don't know?
It's like collecting data for the climate to its roots are political :) I know a lot of Americans and Canadians seems to think so, but considering Canada's choice here I'm still mystified. Do they expect the climate to disappear if we don't collect data about it? Like some uncomfortable political party that you don't want to discuss in fear of them getting sympathizers?
We will all win on as having as good a data collection as possible, sceptics as well believers. But there are a lot of good data still.
"I don't see any evidence for catastrophic climate change which means I see no reason for catastrophic changes which may be more harmful to the environment than current methods."
My friend, I have still to see any Country taking steps to avert the Climate disaster waiting our descendants :) Both the Kyoto and the Copenhagen meetings were jokes. The handling with CO2 stupidity on a global level as there was no real diminishing of it, just money moved between Countries. The cars you see today is not coming because the car manufacturers or their states somehow got 'enlightened'. The are a result of companies realizing that they have to change track as oil is starting to become very expensive, as well as opening Countries to blackmail from the producers.
The so called natural gas (Methane) is just the same, opens for blackmail from the producers, have a thirty percent leakage along the pipe lines. In Russia's case (Canada too) built on permafrost, now quickly transforming into bog's. When we take that methane from under the sea, we leap a very great risk of creating methane 'landslides' which we won't see, other than perhaps bubbles coming up from the water. That methane is seventy to twenty five times more capable of storing heat that CO2, as a educated guess, depending on over what period of time you count. And after transforming again it will become, guess what :) Yep, CO2. The CO2 have an average life time in the atmosphere somewhere between fifty to ??? Well we can't really say, the number most people think of today is around a hundred years.
What it does is to keep the heat inside our atmosphere, raising the global temperature. When the temperature raises you will get more humidity and changed weather patterns. The humidity will short term become water and snow where there was little such before, in other places, like Australia Africa India, droughts that won't end. I'm as little impressed by the politicians as I am of the deniers. To be a skeptic is okay, to say that we don't notice the changes already is not. To use skepticism to hide ones unwillingness to accept change? I don't like that, it's our sons and daughters that will pay the real prize of that.
But to tell me that there are some sort of conspiracy, as some seem to think :)
Yeah, there is. It's all of those that don't want change to come, even when it's inevitably. And those you will find everywhere, they belong to no certain Country, they're just humans, thinking of their wallets. The problem is that when the writing is on the wall for all to see, it will be to late. We need to understand that we're on the best built spaceship ever.
Spaceship Earth, and we're throwing big wrenches in it's mechanism, changing the way it works. Life might go on even if we continue. That earth have proven before, but I doubt we will, not as we are now at least. Normally when changes come it takes sufficient time for plants trees etc to migrate and follow the changes. This time it doesn't. There are already reports on that from f.ex Lapland here in Sweden (high north) and from other places too. Species are dying today, not because of us building some useless damn but because of the climate changing to fast for them to migrate.
We're natural predators, not ht biggest ones or the strongest, but the smartest. And as all predators we have a 'comfortability zone'. When everything is okay in that zone we're happy. Food on the table, a filled wallet, good jobs, that's what we're concerned about first, and family of course. Everything outside that, possible to change our zone, will be a threat to us.
And normally we react when things happens close to us, don't we :) This time it's a global, to us short lived humans, 'slow' change. But it's not a slow change at all geologically. It's extremely fast, in fact the IPCC have to revise their prognosis's upwards after each time they leave a report, every time NC. And why they have to is because they want to be seen as 'conservative'. No matter what people believe them to be they try to act 'moderately', only using the facts they truly believe to be without doubt. And extrapolating becomes then 'wild science' :) But Earth itself doesn't care about our visions. She blends and takes and create new effects all the time, and that's why we never get ahead in climate research. It's a whole f*ng world interacting, but the trends are there to see for all that have internet.
So don't go around believing that anyone is acting for real :)
Not yet, we won't really act until the writing is there.
At least not as I can see.
===
---Quote—Lisa Moore, Ph.D., scientist in the Climate and Air program at Environmental Defense.--
Here's a table showing a selection of greenhouse gases, their global warming potential (GWP), and their lifetimes:
Greenhouse Gas . . . . . . . . .Lifetime years . . (100-Year GWP)
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) . . …. . . . hundreds .. .. . .1
Methane (CH4) . . . . . . …. . . .. . . 1 . . . . . . .25
Nitrous Oxide (N2O) . . . . . . . . . .114 . . . . . . .298
Hydrofluorocarbon-23 (CHF3) . . . .264 . . . .. . .14,800
Sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) . . . . ..3,200. . . . .22,800
PFC-14 (CF4) . . . . . . . .. . . . . .50,000 . . . . .7,390
Notice that the carbon dioxide lifetime is "hundreds of years", rather than a specific number. The IPCC ‘Third Assessment Report’ defines a gas's lifetime as the amount of the gas in the atmosphere divided by the rate at which it is removed from the atmosphere. That sounds simple enough, except that not all gases are removed by just one (or mainly one) process. Ironically, the gas that accounts for the greatest proportion of global warming, carbon dioxide (CO2), is the hardest to pin down. When CO2 is released into the atmosphere, about three-quarters of it dissolves into the ocean over a few decades (- Acidity -). The rest is neutralized by a variety of longer-term geological processes, which can take thousands of years.
From IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years.
From U.S Greenhouse Gas Inventory Reports: (CO2) Atmospheric lifetime: 50-200 years. No single lifetime can be defined for CO2 because of the different rates of uptake by different removal processes.
From RealClimate: “My model indicates that about 7% of carbon released today will still be in the atmosphere in 100,000 years. I calculate a mean lifetime, from the sum of all the processes, of about 30,000 years. That's a deceptive number, because it is so strongly influenced by the immense longevity of that long tail. If one is forced to simplify reality into a single number for popular discussion, several hundred years is a sensible number to choose, because it tells three-quarters of the story, and the part of the story which applies to our own lifetimes.” ("How long will global warming last?")
For other gases, a meaningful lifetime is easier to calculate because one process dominates their removal from the atmosphere:
* Methane is mostly scrubbed from the atmosphere by hydroxyl radicals (a chemical reaction).
* Nitrous oxide is destroyed by photolytic reactions (chemical reactions involving photons or light) in the stratosphere.
As you can see from the chart, some gases have extraordinarily long lifetimes. Because emission rates are vastly higher than removal rates, greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere and will affect climate for generations to come.
----End of Quote----
"Our results are incompatibly lower (P < 0.05) than recent pre-industrial empirical estimates of ~40 p.p.m.v. CO2 per °C (refs 6, 7), and correspondingly suggest ~80% less potential amplification of ongoing global warming."
Catastrophic? Possibly so but not in our lifetimes NC :)
And not catastrophic for life in itself, for us, possibly.
As for 'proofs'? Greenland and the Arctic is one 'proof'.
Australia another, then you have Africa, India etc. You have the tundra warming up releasing a unknown amount of methane in the atmosphere, accelerating by every year as I understands it. You have observations from the shallow seas in the arctic where they've measured methane 'bubbling up', of an amount that it saturates the water surrounding those bubbles, not even getting mixed in but coming up just as 'bubbles'.
Why do you think Russia, even though denying that there is any problems with the so called 'Global Warming' still is pouring in money in researching its effects on the permafrost? Simple, when money comes into the picture you have to look to real circumstances, not to 'wishes' and the fact is that all pipelines resting on permafrost-soil now leaps a risk to break down as the ground becomes too soft. And that same ground releases more and more methane doing so. Russia, methane and Power. (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=25747.msg303193#msg303193)
And try this one for size. It's somewhat old, but, so very good to read. it takes up a lot of evidence from all over the globe. TOWARDS CURBING GLOBAL VILLAGE WARMING. Nepal. (http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/AEJ/article/download/739/759)
If you need more evidence just tell me :)
===
One more thing NC, when trying to prof a point, it's better to avoid 'pay per view' sites.
I will presume that you have read it, so, perhaps you can link it from somewhere free?
Instrumental records also often contain data errors resultant from the data recording
and archiving processes. These errors, which take many forms (e.g., outliers, truncations), reduce confidence
in the analyses. In addition, instrumental records are subject to inhomogeneities caused by
many factors, such as local station moves and the introduction of new thermometers. Such inhomogeneities
introduce nonclimatic variation into historical records and thus further cloud temporal trends. In
short, each of these forces contributes to a bias embedded in the historical record that complicates the
detection of climatic change on any scale.
"Water Vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, which is why it is addressed here first. However, changes in its concentration is also considered to be a result of climate feedbacks related to the warming of the atmosphere rather than a direct result of industrialization. The feedback loop in which water is involved is critically important to projecting future climate change, but as yet is still fairly poorly measured and understood."
My goal?
Well, I find the data sets as good as they 'can be'.
Doesn't mean they can't get better, but you're absolutely right thinking that I do believe in Anthropogenic (manmade) Global Warming. As for relating it to education? We all get 'educated' when we sit down and 'connect' as I think. Kind'a love the Internet I do :)
But you do need to look at what I cited there, if you look you will see that it's not Gavin, it's a guest commentary by Jim Bouldin and? Discussing it in terms of 'winning a argument' make little sense to me when it comes to this. Jim Bouldin didn't and would you write there I would expect you to comment on facts, not trying to win any argument.
As for arguing that we can't see this warming, that I would call impossible, arguing that it's not us? Just look at the statistics for the last two hundred and fifty years, impossible to deny too I would say.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to draw those conclusions. But if you mean that you're so sure that those climate scientists believing in what they say are wrong? Well, that's seems more what it mean being a denier. Not a skeptic, a skeptic I would expect to check the source before telling me that it's 'useless' :)
Realclimate was the site discussing your 'pay per view' paper NC, so that was the site I used, and if you read what they wrote you will find that they're not calling it 'worthless'. They put it into perspective instead which is always a good thing to do.
===
This might interest you. Cold winters. (http://www.physorg.com/news190525439.html) There are all kinds of data out there, and guys like those you mentioned in your link are sorely needed, but to quantify what's happening now we also need to look at the 'anomaly' presented by mans use of 'energy sources' and the way that change the climate.
Okay, you're not denying anything.
You're just invalidating it. And thereby you can always say that there isn't enough 'data'. Well, I'm not satisfied either. Looking at Country's as Canada who uses only one weather station NOAA Weather Station Scandal. (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=28455.msg298957#msg298957)
And others.
---Quote-
Researchers are barred from publicly releasing meteorological data from many countries owing to contractual restrictions. Moreover, in countries such as Germany, France and the United Kingdom, the national meteorological services will provide data sets only when researchers specifically request them, and only after a significant delay. The lack of standard formats can also make it hard to compare and integrate data from different sources. Every aspect of this situation needs to change: if the current episode does not spur meteorological services to improve researchers' ease of access, governments should force them to do so.
---End of quote--
So i agree, but from the other end :) I think we're doing as good as possible. But I would like more weather stations too, and ocean stations, measuring. But looking at how IPCC is funded and research money is alloted it's seems mostly political decisions from diverse country's.
==Quote.
Much of the reason why “data are vexatious” is because this research has been starved for instrument resources.
A prime example: ICESat, now offline for gathering more cryo data due to the failure of its last working laser of the three units onboard, an anticipated failure that came as no surprise. We knew that a replacement spacecraft was imminently necessary with the last laser failure in 2008, we know that polar observations are very important to narrowing uncertainties w/regard to climate change. Despite this, we had no spacecraft ready for launch; a replacement will not be launched until 2014.
One could argue that failure to plan and construct a replacement (and what would be wrong with simply an identical satellite, if budget was an issue) was down to poor oversight of the mission but one would be wrong. One could say that other, more important Earth observation missions took priority over an ICESat replacement but one would again be wrong. No, this feckless gap in our data will most likely be revealed as political in nature once historians produce a definitive account; the particular inclinations of the administration in charge during the period of interest are a hint but we’ll see about that.
Fortunately ESA has launched a replacement for CryoSatNow since they had a slightly more urgent attitude about climate change and quickly produced a replacement for the spacecraft lost on their first launch attempt. Meanwhile NASA is doing gap-filling via other means to make up for the loss of ICESat. But thanks to crappy management we’re now faced with a data splicing nightmare, a pointless challenge for investigators which also naturally will provide fodder for Dark Ages personalities determined to throw sand in the wheels of public policy.
There are other examples. Ocean heat content is tough to fathom (hah!) in part because the ocean is not as richly instrumented as necessary. This is a great intellectual challenge for researchers but at the end of the day, the fact we can’t account for missing energy (Trenberth?) is a serious problem when it comes to public policy; the heat we can’t measure is made into a subject of debate which again retards policy response.
The amount of money we’re talking about in all cases here is paltry compared to what we spend on other things. Compared w/a $60 trillion global economy the gap between proper resources and poor resources is invisible.
This parsimonious approach to instrumentation is one of the reason I laugh when I hear rejectionists muttering about all those rich scientists and their giant AGW gravy train. Innumeracy strikes again.
== by Doug Bostrom.
I quite agree with him. We really need better observations there. The largest carbon sink is our oceans. About 70 percent is oceans, and the average depth is around three thousand three hundred feet (1000 meters). Only two percent of the water is freshwater, the rest is our oceans. And December 2009 was the second warmest ocean temperature on record, according to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, based on records going back to 1880. The temperature anomaly was 0.97 degree F above the 20th century average of 60.4 degrees F.
That means that the waters waves are moving faster now than it did a hundred years ago as there are more kinetic energy stored in it, due to its heat uptake. Also that it breaths out more humidity, creating worse storms, from category three to category five. We will see more of category five every decade now. "it is likely that greenhouse warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense on average and have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes." from Global Warming and Hurricanes (http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes)
---Quote----
Most scientific opinion agrees that between 1961 and 2003 ocean temperature has increased by 0.1 degree Celsius from the surface to a depth of 700 metres. This temperature increase is based upon many millions of historical measurements. It seems therefore that the oceans are gradually warming but that it's not conclusive, it is persuasive.
---End of Quote--
And it also means that the oceans are acidifying. A new model, capable of assessing the rate at which the oceans are acidifying, suggests that changes in the carbonate chemistry of the deep ocean may exceed anything seen in the past 65 million years. accidification (http://www.physorg.com/news185444922.html). What it means is that the water is fastly becoming unusable (unbreathable) for most of the fish we eat although some species seems to thrive in it, like jellyfish. Google on 'jellyfish invasion' and see what you find. And I'm not talking about over-fishing now.
--Quote--
Iron and the Carbon Pump by William G. Sunda
The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth's atmosphere has risen by ~38% since the start of the industrial era as a result of fossil fuel burning and land use changes; if current trends continue, it is projected to increase further by at least a factor of 2 by 2100. About a quarter of the CO2 emitted through human activities has been absorbed by the ocean. On page 676 of this issue, Shi et al. show that the resulting acidification of ocean surface waters may decrease the biological availability of iron, which could in turn reduce the ability of the ocean to take up CO2.
Beaufort Laboratory, National Ocean Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 101 Pivers Island Road, Beaufort, NC 28516, USA
--End of quote--- Science magazine 5 February 2010 (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/327/5966/654)
And our oceans are loosing some of their appetite for CO2 too, meaning that they don't take up as much CO2 as they used too earlier. " The oceans near Antarctica are thought to have one of the healthiest appetites for greenhouse gases. Their surface waters can guzzle around 15 percent of all the carbon dioxide produced by people, which comes mostly from industry and automobile emissions. The new study found the oceans are mopping up only about 10 percent of carbon- oxide, requiring projections for future levels of greenhouse gases to be bumped up accordingly. " Antarctic Oceans Absorbing Less CO2 from 2007. (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070517-carbon-oceans.html)
For an estimate over how much the oceans already have taken up from us you can look at National Geographic News 2004 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/07/0715_040715_oceancarbon.html) The sources ain't that new and I don't expect the facts to have become any better since those research was done.
"Sabine and researchers from the United States, Europe, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and other nations have now completed the most comprehensive survey of ocean carbon chemistry.... In the new study, however, researchers collected direct samples on dissolved carbon dioxide levels in oceans around the world throughout the 1990s. Data were collected at some 9,600 sites around the world on 95 separate research voyages. Their results suggest that the oceans have taken up 48 percent of all carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuel burning and cement manufacture (a major source of the gas) between 1800 and 1994. "
So our greatest heat sinks seems to be getting saturated, as for the heat distribution in the oceans there are a lot of dispute going on, but considering the few probes we use as compared to the volumes of water we're speaking about here (around 326 million trillion gallons or 1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters) being in a constant cycle, evaporating from the oceans raising as humidity and raining down, to then flow back into the ocean, we can't really say for sure how this trend will end.
And the methane in the tundra is already getting released, there are this 'crazy' :) Soviet researcher Sergei Zimov who built an observation post on the tundra to document it. stanford magazine 2008. (http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2008/sepoct/features/siberia.html) That discussion about if the last two hundred and fifty years mean something I had just recently with Frethack. If you want you can go here to view that, with graphs. (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=29078.msg302983#msg302983).
You have to understand that I do recognize the importance of what we can see before, but, you as well, need to see what differ those earlier eras with our current, counting two hundred and fifty years back, and continuing. Both are important, but the one we can see recently is actually the true description of what we have now. Those earlier periods didn't have us there polluting :) and to try to compare medieval farmsteads to our industrialized society seems rather awkward to me.
===
And as if that phreaking 'Methanebomb' wasn't enough :)
As the tundra thaws. (http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2008/sepoct/features/carbon.html)
Creationists :)
Al Gore?
Don't know what to say here, it's an All American view you have there, not many else on this planet take that view too seriously I think :) But it's okay, To me it doesn't really disturb. We're all entitled to our own view as you say.
And yours is that the data shown is, at best, foolish, right? and that those climate scientists and those other scientists, all over the Earth, involved are, at best, 'misguided' perhaps? Ah well, I gave you a lot of good data :) as I see it. Maybe you are right, they're all, ah, ?? Pushing for something that just ain't true. And the data I've taken up in my threads are all bad too of course.
But you're wrong :)
They can be better, but the data shown is correct.
Maybe you have that link in another format?
As for the amount of deniers :)
They're shrinking, daily, and changing their views constantly.
I seem to remember an poll made one year ago?
With around 10 000 scientists involved in climate issues?
Asking if they thought we were the reason to the Global Warming we see today.
And I think they said a resounding yes :) They can all be misinformed naturally, but somehow I doubt it.
I believe that I'm the one delivering data here?
The link you gave me was one I couldn't read due to its format, as well as the one to a 'pay per view' site. If you have alternative's ready? I really would like to read both :) Too see what base you have for your claims. And how can I disprove anything, as long as you decide that those scientists, ah, 'alarm' you for nothing? As well as you choose to invalidate the data they convey to us?
But I do expect them to do as good as they can and, to me, it seems you have choosen the other side of that variable, expecting them to have some hidden agenda, and therefore 'falsify' data to suit their needs?
Don't think so :)