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12 Facts about Global Climate Change That You Won’t Read in the Popular Press |
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Written by Joseph D’Aleo, Energy Tribune
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Monday, 18 August 2008 |
- Temperatures have been cooling since 2002, even as carbon dioxide has continued to rise.
- Carbon dioxide is a trace gas and by itself will produce little
warming. Also, as CO2 increases, the incremental warming is less, as
the effect is logarithmic so the more CO2, the less warming it produces.
- CO2 has been totally uncorrelated with temperature over the last decade, and significantly negative since 2002.
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CO2 is not a pollutant, but a naturally occurring gas. Together with
chlorophyll and sunlight, it is an essential ingredient in
photosynthesis and is, accordingly, plant food.
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Reconstruction
of paleoclimatological CO2 concentrations demonstrates that carbon
dioxide concentration today is near its lowest level since the Cambrian
Era some 550 million years ago, when there was almost 20 times as much
CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today without causing a “runaway
greenhouse effect.”
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Temperature changes lead, not lag, CO2
changes on all time scales. The oceans may play a key role, emitting
carbon dioxide when they warm as carbonated beverages lose fizz as they
warm and absorbing it as they cool.
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Most of the warming in the
climate models comes from the assumption that water vapor and
precipitation increase as temperatures warm, a strong positive
feedback. Water vapor is a far more important greenhouse gas than CO2.
However, that assumption has been shown in observations and
peerreviewed research to be wrong, and in fact water vapor and
precipitation act as a negative feedback that reduces any small
greenhouse warming from carbon dioxide.
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Indeed, greenhouse
models show the warming should be greatest at mid to high atmosphere
levels in the tropics. But balloon and satellite observations show
cooling there. The greenhouse signature or DNA does not match reality,
and the greenhouse models thus must greatly overstate the warming – and
in a court of law would have to be acquitted of any role in global
warming
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The sun has both direct and indirect effects on our
climate. Solar activity changes on cycles of 11 years and longer. When
the sun is more active it is brighter and a little hotter. More
important though are the indirect effects. Ultraviolet radiation
increases much more than the brightness and causes increased ozone
production, which generates heat in the high atmosphere that works its
way down, affecting the weather. Also, an active sun diffuses cosmic
rays, which play an important role in nucleation of low clouds,
resulting in fewer clouds. In all these ways the sun warms the planet
more when it is active. An active sun in the 1930s and again near the
end of the last century helped produce the observed warming periods.
The current solar cycle is the longest in over 100 years, an
unmistakable sign of a cooling sun that historical patterns suggest
will stay so for decades.
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The multidecadal cycles in the ocean
correlate extremely well with the solar cycles and global temperatures.
These are 60 to 70 year cycles that relate to natural variations in the
largescale circulations. Warm oceans correlate with warm global
temperatures. The Pacific started cooling in the late 1990s and it
accelerated in the last year, and the Atlantic has cooled from its peak
in 2004. This supports the observed global land temperature cooling,
which is strongly correlated with ocean heat content. Newly deployed
N.O.A.A. buoys confirm global ocean cooling.
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Warmer ocean
cycles are periods with diminished Arctic ice cover. When the oceans
were warm in the 1930s to the 1950s, Arctic ice diminished and
Greenland warmed. The recent ocean warming, especially in the 1980s to
the early 2000s, is similar to what took place 70 years ago and the
Arctic ice has reacted much the same way, with diminished summer ice
extent.
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Antarctic ice has been increasing and the extent last
year was the greatest in the satellitemonitoring era. We are running
ahead of last year’s record pace.
What will it take for the media to let go of their biases and begin doing their job, reporting the truth?
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