Your article agrees sharply with what I am experiencing and living through.

To the public….please read this article carefully. In my experience, it will problably be the canvas on which you and your children and grandchildren paint their lives on.

Overall, I highly recommend your article.

The planet has evolved mechanisms over geological time (4.5 billion years of trial and error) to protect itself. Earth’s climate varies for a lot of extraterrestrial reasons. The shortest period has to do with the interplay of solar activity and cosmic radiation from the Milky Way. During quiet periods of solar activity, like now, cosmic radiation penetrates the atmosphere and creates clouds where conditions permit. Over long periods this cools the earth. Most of the time however, sun’s magnetic activity induces earth’s geomagnetic field. The geomagnetic shields are up during most of the 11 year sun spot cycle. Earth’s cooling (1940-1965) and earth’s heating (balance of the 20th century) is 95% correlated to sunspot peak frequency. Short cycles induce cooling and long cycles induce warming. This is a magnificently balanced system because the total solar irradiance varies very little. The subtlety is the correlation with sunspot peak frequency. During the Maunder Minimum there were no sunspots and the world suffered through the Little Ice Age.

CO2 has come out of the planet during 4.5 billion years of volcanic activity. Plants use CO2 to produce carbohydrates, oxygen and water vapour. Free oxygen is not produced by volcanoes. CO2 has the property of inverse solubility. Global warming from the sun forces CO2 out of the ocean in increasing quantities like warming beer. CO2 is the effect, not the cause of the warming. Moreover, the absorption wavelength for CO2 in the spectrum is filled. CO2 will not contribute any more heating. The analogy is adding a second Venetian blind to your window may not make the room any darker.

Sea level is said to be rising (ICPP) at 2 – 3 mm a year. Since the Pleistocene it has risen 125 metres (6 mm a year) and most of the coastal tribes of the earth have a Noah. The coral reefs of the oceans have kept pace because of a symbiotic relationship with algae that keep them thriving in the sunlit surface of the sea no matter how fast sea level rises. Barrier bars like the Atlantic longshore bar are dynamic features that are fed sand by Piedmont rivers and maintain themselves in the surf zone. A summer beach is wide and fine and a winter beach is coarse and steep. Common sense needs to be applied.

By the way modern coal-fired power plants produce electricity, water vapour and CO2; plant food not pollution. The US has enough coal and oil shale to support itself for 1,000 years. This AGW piece is political, not scientific, and is coming out on party lines.

“Tropospheric ozone is the species considered a greenhouse gas.”

All ozone is considered a greenhouse gas(GHG), though it is true that ozone in the troposphere is more effective as a GHG.

“From a scientific point of view, the IPCC is a nightmare. From a government and corporate (sadly, the same) point of view, the IPCC is a useful bureaucracy that dampens the “alarmist” potentialities of unfiltered scientific findings being broadcast to the public. From the public’s perspective, the net result may be an acceptably reliable source of sobering information that gently understates the possibilities.6″

Great statement! Love it!

“Any IPCC scientist will have both compelling and restraining motivations. Their original passion for science, the interest and excitement of the work, will drive them to uncover as much of the mechanisms of climate as they can, and to tell others about their findings and the implications to human society. When their results are accepted and adopted by other scientists in their field, their esteem rises, and they become invested in maintaining their technical reputations. These two motivations, one personal the other social, combine to push scientists into becoming advocates for their fields. However, successful government scientists are supremely political creatures who have mastered the art of extracting money from political structures to fund their activities. They understand the value (to their careers) of packaging the message for sponsor consumption; so the asperity of the raw and knotty truth emerging from science’s workbenches must be slipped into the most svelte form possible that preserves the facts. It is easy to see how these forces of personal psychology will find an equilibrium that matches the institutional character of the IPCC, a measured and deliberate style and a thorough technical conservatism (all scientists except the mad ones and the geniuses are terrified of ever being wrong). Politics slows and dampens the message from the IPCC, but it does not quash it.”

Very adroit and thoughtful “human systems” based analysis of the process. I’d say that the knife can cut both ways with there being a certain amount of bandwagonning wrt anthropogenic climate change.

Here, here. Overall a good article and a good read.

I think the first thing is to agree on the problem.

I think our main disagreement is with the notion: “energy is abundant”. First, I agree that renewable energy is abundant and if appropriately applied could certainly provide most of the world (particularly those in the South) with sufficient sustainable energy. I think there is agreement that such a thing as “peak oil” is real and that we’re heading rapidly in that direction. Since oil is the foundation of Western (and most of the developing world) its disappearance creates a crisis – Oil produces and distributes most of the world’s food today, for instance. It is the endless growth syndrome which ignites our endless wars, US policy in the Middle East and else where, it creates endless consumption of needless stuff displacing a meaningful life with “ consuming energy sources to the point of oblivion”. And oil is the basis for all of that and more.

I think of it in these terms: If I had a candy bar (oil) and I ate it while you looked on with desire for a bite, and I ate the last bite, who now has a candy bar? But unlike the candy bar we can’t make any more oil.

Obviously fossil fuel has another dimension, it pollutes the environment; and if science is correct it contributes to the destruction of the thin layer of atmosphere that sustains life on the planet. Now, we can distribute the oil and share in the globes destruction, or we can re-think the whole arrangement we (humans) have with the ecosystem.

I don’t think sharing oil is the answer nor are piecemeal conservation efforts, per se. I think renewable, intermediate technologies is the answer for non-Western areas. I think the West is in deep trouble and with it the world. Short of massive revolts, I think the needed transformation will come in many forms – within and outside of the systems if the root causes are to be addressed.

The dominating economic system (manifested in global capitalism) is a major obstacle but it is enmeshed in our cultural and political systems. As long as these are in place, they will always – even with the best of intentions – come at the problem from the WRONG place and thus exaserbate it. Your point about nuclear power is case in point, as well as our “Save Darfur” interventionist crap, or feed the hungry programs. The problem is all of a piece and the systems in place feed one another; and in so doing continue a pathological systemic loop.

I will go along with the notion of a systemic problem, but let’s be consistent. Yes, food production could feed all, indeed we could feed more if needed. Consider that energy is abundant also. False scarcity is power for those who create it. Exploitation requires indigence. Gauging requires scarcity. The concept of consuming “energy sources to the point of oblivion” furthers the power of those who would take advantage of phony shortage. Indeed even clean fresh water (which is more essential than energy) is for the most part available, if we would treat it.
I do not suggest prioritisation, and agree that the economic system is in need of change first and foremost, including with regard to environmental problems. Sadly, our current environmental movement is geared toward further maldistribution and deprivation that furthers the power of elites. Bear in mind, it is what 6 billion of us choose to do that should be paramount. It would appear that appeal to the morality of conservation for future generations is phony when used to promote nuclear plants and their un-disposed waste. This is what both carbon taxes and cap and trade actually accomplish, they make nuclear energy competitive. In the end, how do you convince 6 billion people to forego the use of electricity or mechanised mobility while the elites fly about in jets? I doubt that deprivation will prevail, and it would appear that the abundant sources of heavy oil, and natural gas are what will see us through the next few centuries.

The “real” problem is that there are many problems threatening our existence, most of them human induced. I don’t think we can or should separate these problems as if hunger throughout the world (including the “richest” nation) is separate from environmental destruction. That war is separate from the precipitice decline in water supply and drop in water tables throught the globe. That we have an enormous surplus of food that can easily feed the world except our economic “system” won’t let it. That the food we grow is inadequate while abundant.

These are all problems of sustainability. What stops us from curing the curable diseases of the world? It is the same machine that creates food surpluses while enabling world hunger, that deploys troops and occupies foreign lands and cultures for energy to keep the machine cranking, that consumes energy sources to the point of oblivion, in a mindless and yet pathologically single-minded fashion.

When we think we need to prioritize these problems – so that this one needs our attention first, then that, then that; that’s when we are lost because they are, for the most part, wrapped in the same systemic problem. And to think we can put one aside of another day, and tackle these one at a time, is to be in a perpetual cycle of self-induced calamity. Why, becasue the system that creates these threats, cannot solve them. Try as it might.

So, while I agree that “global warming” is a hot button (no pun intended) it is not a myth. It can be detrimental if it becomes the sole environmental issue which takes us off on exploitative “green” business, natural capitalism, and nuclare energy. But global warming is part and parcel with the other threats, and it is part of a common cure.

What we choose to do or not do is really the question.

ABC News June 4,2007

…does it matter if global warming is a “crisis” or not? Aren’t we threatened by a serious temperature rise? Shouldn’t we act anyway, because we are stewards of the environment?

Herein lies the moral danger behind global warming hysteria. Each day, 20,000 people in the world die of waterborne diseases. Half a billion people go hungry. A child is orphaned by AIDS every seven seconds. This does not have to happen. We allow it while fretting about “saving the planet.” What is wrong with us that we downplay this human misery before our eyes and focus on events that will probably not happen even a hundred years hence? We know that the greatest cause of environmental degradation is poverty; on this, we can and must act.

The global warming “crisis” is misguided. In hubristically seeking to “control” climate, we foolishly abandon age-old adaptations to inexorable change. There is no way we can predictably manage this most complex of coupled, nonlinear chaotic systems. The inconvenient truth is that “doing something” (emitting gases) at the margins and “not doing something” (not emitting gases) are equally unpredictable.

Climate change is a norm, not an exception. It is both an opportunity and a challenge. The real crises for 4 billion people in the world remain poverty, dirty water and the lack of a modern energy supply…