If any of you have seen the pseudo-scientific movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and/or have been made to worry about man’s contribution to “Global Warming,” you should definitely invest some time and effort and read the information from the following links - cooler minds definitely need to prevail at this time. I have to add that, as an engineer who has dedicated his life to the practical application of science to making the world a better place to live via rural electrification, I am shocked and appalled at the lack of rigorous science that has been applied to this issue vs. the incredible quantity of funds (yours and mine) that have been thrown at it. This whole "debate" reminds me of the time a couple of years ago when my 7th grader confidently told me that "scientists" were very interested to see what was going to happen on May 5, 2005 because the date was going to be 5/5/5!? The level of science that the majority of our politicians, celebrities, and media have applied to the subject of Global Warming is of about the same caliber as that 7th graders' friends'. I’m so disillusioned at the fact that our present and past governments have been equally lazy in evaluating and deriving solutions to this issue as they have been to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that I'm looking for a whole new political home and am voting "None of the above" until I find one. I guess it’s no wonder that our currency is at a new low on the world market and still falling. Shame on us all for being so lazy.
I. BBC Documentary on Climate Change -- if you only have time to review one thing, you should spend 1 hour and 13 minutes seeing this documentary aired recently in Great Britain by the BBC: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3028847519933351566
II. A Skeptic’s Guide to Debunking Global Warming Alarmism -- compiled by the staff of the U.S. Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, led by U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). Good summary of many scientific points. Full report: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=56dd129d-e40a-4bad-abd9-68c808e8809e
III. Unmasking “An Inconvenient Truth” - Much of Al Gore’s evidence for his claims lacks credibility when examined without the emotive baggage of impending disaster, blame and simplistic political solutions.: http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070330_kininmonth.pdf
IV. A Science-Based Rebuttal to the Testimony of Al Gore before the U.S. EPW Committee -- a longer read but a powerful summary of most of the relevant science that soundly debunks much of what Gore is selling these days. http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070522_isdo.pdf V. EPRI Study on Costs Of California's Climate Change Policies: http://www.westernroundtable.com/air/EPRI_Report_Summary.doc
VI. Memorandum by Professor Richard S Lindzen, MIT, to the British Parliament -- Dr. Lindzen is one of of the world's most preeminent climate experts. He is the Alfred P Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Physics at MIT. If you only read one piece on the science of climate change, this is the one I would read: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/5012506.htm
VII. Op-Ed by Professor Lindzen (Newsweek) -- a shorter version of Professor Lindzen's main scientific points: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17997788/site/newsweek/
VIII. MIT Study On Costs of Cap-and-Trade Proposals -- something you should definitely review. A good summary of the report is here: http://www.westernroundtable.com/air/MIT_ANALYSIS.pdf
The full report is here: http://www.westernroundtable.com/air/MIT_captrade_study.pdf
IX. George Will's Column on Climate Change -- if you like George, you must read this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/11/AR2007041102109.html
X. Quash silencing of global-warming skeptics By Walter Williams -- "Suppression of ideas is far more dangerous to our civilization than man-made global warming — real or imagined. Given the horrible history of brutal attempts to silence people who have different ideas or dissent from the conventional wisdom, those of us in the academic and scientific communities ought to openly repudiate and condemn the efforts to silence global warming skeptics." http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,695198704,00.html
XI. Op-Ed by Czech President Vaclav Klaus -- a very powerful and moving piece. Excerpt: "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.... The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment.... The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature." Full story: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9deb730a-19ca-11dc-99c5-000b5df10621.html
XII. Following is a brief, point by point discussion of the movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", written by an engineering colleague, a must-read for those of you who have actually seen the movie:
1. The film’s portrayal of the temperature for the past few thousand years attempted to make it seem like the medieval warming period was less warm than today. That is not true – it was as warm or warmer then than now according to glacial records. If you freeze frame the film at the point where he shows the temperature plot for the last 1000 years (this is near the beginning of the film) you can see he is pulling a graphical slight-of-hand by plotting two sets of data on top of each other for the very last part of that graph and only one set of data for the rest of the graph. For the movie theater viewer that only gets to quickly see this graph they won’t notice that trick. But look carefully - that last part in red that rises up is really a plot of land based temperature measurements (from actual thermometers). Look under that you see glacial core readings – he’s not telling the audience that – and the two types of readings are very difficult to calibrate together. Look at only the glacial part of the curve and suddenly you see that medieval period was actually warmer than now! How about that!!!!!! In the glacial records he (Al Gore) explains the relationship between CO2 and temperature backwards. CO2 is the dependent variable, not temperature, as he describes– so as the temperature rises the CO2 increases. This is because as the ocean gets warmer CO2 gas that’s dissolved in the ocean comes out of solution and goes into the air. When it cools, CO2 goes back into the water. His relationship between CO2 and temperature and a main pillar of his argument is totally flawed and BACKWARDS!
2. Not once did he mention that CO2 is only a tiny portion of the greenhouse effect on earth and water vapor is 95% of the greenhouse effect. Not once did he mention that humans annual output of CO2 is only about 4-5% of the total produced in the world (if even that) and that natural emissions are the other 95%. Depending on how you do the calculation, man-made CO2 is as little as 0.25% of the total greenhouse effect. Many scientists are now leaning toward the 0.25% figure but nearly all will agree it’s no more than 2%. The rest of the effect is all natural!!!!!!
3. He (Al Gore) did not mention that Mount Kilimanjaro glaciers are receding due to decreasing precipitation - not due to increasing temperatures as he implies. This is verified by NASA satellite data.
4. Not once did he mention that the sun has radiation output cycles that impact the climate and could play by far the dominant role in climate. Climate models often cited don’t even take such solar changes into account. He failed to mention how well temperature data lines up with solar activity proxies.
5. He showed photos of glaciers receding in spots all over the world. But he failed to show corresponding photos of places where glaciers are documented to be increasing in other parts of the world!!!! He also failed to mention that in many areas where he shows receding glaciers, the rate of de-glaciation is slowing down dramatically (not increasing) during the last half of the 20th century.
6. He claimed that the Artic sea ice cover is rapidly receding, but he failed to mention that this has happened before as part of climatic cycles in just the past few hundred years and is nothing unusual and did not lead to runaway temperature effects in the past.
7. He failed to mention that part of the land based temperature data are subject to urban heat island effects and also impacted by recent reductions in smog and aerosols caused by the clean air act and other factors – which means more sun is getting to urban areas heating them up. He failed to mention that in most rural areas the land based readings and satellite data show very little (if any) global warming.
8. When he said the US was the largest emitter of CO2 it was a hugely simplistic calculation based on fossil fuel consumption that did not take into account carbon sequestration effects due to landfills, wood use in houses and furniture, or discarded plastics, food, etc. Calculations also don’t factor the huge amounts of reforestation in the US during the last 50 years of the 20th century. Factoring these effects the US may be a much lower emitter of CO2 than portrayed by him.
9. He talked about ice sheets receding and breaking away in the Antarctic Peninsula but failed to mention that many climatologists have attributed this to localized ocean effects of a cyclical nature and that overall ice cover in and around Antarctica is actually increasing not decreasing! Ice breaking away in the Artic and Antarctic is a normal process. What do you think sank the Titanic 95 years ago?
10. He claimed that people have abandoned “island nations” due to rising sea levels caused by global warming but failed to mention that sea level has been rising steadily for thousands of years. Islands gradually sinking beneath the sea are nothing new. In many areas subsidence or shifts in land elevation due to tectonic activity, water tables, and other geologic factors exceed by a factor of 5 or more the rate of ocean level changes.
11. He made Republicans look stupid by showing an out of context clip of Ronald Reagan claiming that smog was caused by trees and natural processes. But he failed to mention that Reagan said this in the context that trees were responsible for part of our smog levels in the southeast (not all) and that cleaning up emissions of tailpipes beyond a certain point has no further benefit since trees are always creating a “background level” of natural smog pollution. Numerous peer reviewed scientific studies have now conclusively shown his statement to be factually correct (so those people that laughed at him in the 1980’s look like fools now).
12. He talked about how a NASA scientist and others have been censored by the Bush Administration about global warming. The recent published analysis showed that the NASA scientist in question was censored ONLY 1 out of 1400 times. The NASA scientist mentioned was shown to have been allowed 1400 press interviews to spout apocalyptic views without any sort of censorship and only 1 opportunity turned down by his supervisors!!!! This is, of course, the one instance he complains and whines about. It’s even worse than this; that NASA scientist was allowed the 1400 press interviews even though the comments he made were known to be extreme and at the fringe of alarmist scientific thought on the effects of global warming. In my opinion, he probably should have been fired for insubordination!!!!!!!
13. He talked about how essentially all developed foreign countries have better car emission regulations than us. This is simply not true. Perhaps some have better mileage requirements, but for the real pollutants that matter (NOx, SOx, particulates, etc. and not CO2) the US has better regulations for those real pollutants than other countries (including most of Europe which is heavily dependent on diesel cars that would not pass US regulations – did you know that?).
14. He talked about a 928 to 0 score for a study of peer reviewed articles and scientific papers on global warming that supported the contention that global warming was due to anthropogenic causes. That claim made in his film is false! It turns out that only a very small fraction of those 928 papers in that study directly and fully supported the claim of anthropogenic global warming. Just as many of them were against the claim. Many in the study simply were not even of an applicable topic to either support or not support the claim of human global warming. It was just a big distorted trick to make it appear that a huge base of peer reviewed research supported the claim.
I could probably come up with another 50 items. But that is enough!
I. BBC Documentary on Climate Change -- if you only have time to review one thing, you should spend 1 hour and 13 minutes seeing this documentary aired recently in Great Britain by the BBC: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3028847519933351566
II. A Skeptic’s Guide to Debunking Global Warming Alarmism -- compiled by the staff of the U.S. Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, led by U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). Good summary of many scientific points. Full report: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=56dd129d-e40a-4bad-abd9-68c808e8809e
III. Unmasking “An Inconvenient Truth” - Much of Al Gore’s evidence for his claims lacks credibility when examined without the emotive baggage of impending disaster, blame and simplistic political solutions.: http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070330_kininmonth.pdf
IV. A Science-Based Rebuttal to the Testimony of Al Gore before the U.S. EPW Committee -- a longer read but a powerful summary of most of the relevant science that soundly debunks much of what Gore is selling these days. http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070522_isdo.pdf V. EPRI Study on Costs Of California's Climate Change Policies: http://www.westernroundtable.com/air/EPRI_Report_Summary.doc
VI. Memorandum by Professor Richard S Lindzen, MIT, to the British Parliament -- Dr. Lindzen is one of of the world's most preeminent climate experts. He is the Alfred P Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Physics at MIT. If you only read one piece on the science of climate change, this is the one I would read: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/5012506.htm
VII. Op-Ed by Professor Lindzen (Newsweek) -- a shorter version of Professor Lindzen's main scientific points: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17997788/site/newsweek/
VIII. MIT Study On Costs of Cap-and-Trade Proposals -- something you should definitely review. A good summary of the report is here: http://www.westernroundtable.com/air/MIT_ANALYSIS.pdf
The full report is here: http://www.westernroundtable.com/air/MIT_captrade_study.pdf
IX. George Will's Column on Climate Change -- if you like George, you must read this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/11/AR2007041102109.html
X. Quash silencing of global-warming skeptics By Walter Williams -- "Suppression of ideas is far more dangerous to our civilization than man-made global warming — real or imagined. Given the horrible history of brutal attempts to silence people who have different ideas or dissent from the conventional wisdom, those of us in the academic and scientific communities ought to openly repudiate and condemn the efforts to silence global warming skeptics." http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,695198704,00.html
XI. Op-Ed by Czech President Vaclav Klaus -- a very powerful and moving piece. Excerpt: "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.... The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment.... The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature." Full story: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9deb730a-19ca-11dc-99c5-000b5df10621.html
XII. Following is a brief, point by point discussion of the movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", written by an engineering colleague, a must-read for those of you who have actually seen the movie:
1. The film’s portrayal of the temperature for the past few thousand years attempted to make it seem like the medieval warming period was less warm than today. That is not true – it was as warm or warmer then than now according to glacial records. If you freeze frame the film at the point where he shows the temperature plot for the last 1000 years (this is near the beginning of the film) you can see he is pulling a graphical slight-of-hand by plotting two sets of data on top of each other for the very last part of that graph and only one set of data for the rest of the graph. For the movie theater viewer that only gets to quickly see this graph they won’t notice that trick. But look carefully - that last part in red that rises up is really a plot of land based temperature measurements (from actual thermometers). Look under that you see glacial core readings – he’s not telling the audience that – and the two types of readings are very difficult to calibrate together. Look at only the glacial part of the curve and suddenly you see that medieval period was actually warmer than now! How about that!!!!!! In the glacial records he (Al Gore) explains the relationship between CO2 and temperature backwards. CO2 is the dependent variable, not temperature, as he describes– so as the temperature rises the CO2 increases. This is because as the ocean gets warmer CO2 gas that’s dissolved in the ocean comes out of solution and goes into the air. When it cools, CO2 goes back into the water. His relationship between CO2 and temperature and a main pillar of his argument is totally flawed and BACKWARDS!
2. Not once did he mention that CO2 is only a tiny portion of the greenhouse effect on earth and water vapor is 95% of the greenhouse effect. Not once did he mention that humans annual output of CO2 is only about 4-5% of the total produced in the world (if even that) and that natural emissions are the other 95%. Depending on how you do the calculation, man-made CO2 is as little as 0.25% of the total greenhouse effect. Many scientists are now leaning toward the 0.25% figure but nearly all will agree it’s no more than 2%. The rest of the effect is all natural!!!!!!
3. He (Al Gore) did not mention that Mount Kilimanjaro glaciers are receding due to decreasing precipitation - not due to increasing temperatures as he implies. This is verified by NASA satellite data.
4. Not once did he mention that the sun has radiation output cycles that impact the climate and could play by far the dominant role in climate. Climate models often cited don’t even take such solar changes into account. He failed to mention how well temperature data lines up with solar activity proxies.
5. He showed photos of glaciers receding in spots all over the world. But he failed to show corresponding photos of places where glaciers are documented to be increasing in other parts of the world!!!! He also failed to mention that in many areas where he shows receding glaciers, the rate of de-glaciation is slowing down dramatically (not increasing) during the last half of the 20th century.
6. He claimed that the Artic sea ice cover is rapidly receding, but he failed to mention that this has happened before as part of climatic cycles in just the past few hundred years and is nothing unusual and did not lead to runaway temperature effects in the past.
7. He failed to mention that part of the land based temperature data are subject to urban heat island effects and also impacted by recent reductions in smog and aerosols caused by the clean air act and other factors – which means more sun is getting to urban areas heating them up. He failed to mention that in most rural areas the land based readings and satellite data show very little (if any) global warming.
8. When he said the US was the largest emitter of CO2 it was a hugely simplistic calculation based on fossil fuel consumption that did not take into account carbon sequestration effects due to landfills, wood use in houses and furniture, or discarded plastics, food, etc. Calculations also don’t factor the huge amounts of reforestation in the US during the last 50 years of the 20th century. Factoring these effects the US may be a much lower emitter of CO2 than portrayed by him.
9. He talked about ice sheets receding and breaking away in the Antarctic Peninsula but failed to mention that many climatologists have attributed this to localized ocean effects of a cyclical nature and that overall ice cover in and around Antarctica is actually increasing not decreasing! Ice breaking away in the Artic and Antarctic is a normal process. What do you think sank the Titanic 95 years ago?
10. He claimed that people have abandoned “island nations” due to rising sea levels caused by global warming but failed to mention that sea level has been rising steadily for thousands of years. Islands gradually sinking beneath the sea are nothing new. In many areas subsidence or shifts in land elevation due to tectonic activity, water tables, and other geologic factors exceed by a factor of 5 or more the rate of ocean level changes.
11. He made Republicans look stupid by showing an out of context clip of Ronald Reagan claiming that smog was caused by trees and natural processes. But he failed to mention that Reagan said this in the context that trees were responsible for part of our smog levels in the southeast (not all) and that cleaning up emissions of tailpipes beyond a certain point has no further benefit since trees are always creating a “background level” of natural smog pollution. Numerous peer reviewed scientific studies have now conclusively shown his statement to be factually correct (so those people that laughed at him in the 1980’s look like fools now).
12. He talked about how a NASA scientist and others have been censored by the Bush Administration about global warming. The recent published analysis showed that the NASA scientist in question was censored ONLY 1 out of 1400 times. The NASA scientist mentioned was shown to have been allowed 1400 press interviews to spout apocalyptic views without any sort of censorship and only 1 opportunity turned down by his supervisors!!!! This is, of course, the one instance he complains and whines about. It’s even worse than this; that NASA scientist was allowed the 1400 press interviews even though the comments he made were known to be extreme and at the fringe of alarmist scientific thought on the effects of global warming. In my opinion, he probably should have been fired for insubordination!!!!!!!
13. He talked about how essentially all developed foreign countries have better car emission regulations than us. This is simply not true. Perhaps some have better mileage requirements, but for the real pollutants that matter (NOx, SOx, particulates, etc. and not CO2) the US has better regulations for those real pollutants than other countries (including most of Europe which is heavily dependent on diesel cars that would not pass US regulations – did you know that?).
14. He talked about a 928 to 0 score for a study of peer reviewed articles and scientific papers on global warming that supported the contention that global warming was due to anthropogenic causes. That claim made in his film is false! It turns out that only a very small fraction of those 928 papers in that study directly and fully supported the claim of anthropogenic global warming. Just as many of them were against the claim. Many in the study simply were not even of an applicable topic to either support or not support the claim of human global warming. It was just a big distorted trick to make it appear that a huge base of peer reviewed research supported the claim.
I could probably come up with another 50 items. But that is enough!
