Here begins the long climb down from the high horse of man made
global warming that has bedeviled debate on the warmer climate we
find ourselves experiencing. In time they will reach the point I
made when I began this blog several years ago.
It remains warmer and that is good news. The bad news is that is as
good as it likely gets. If we are lucky, we may get two or three
decades of nice conditions. If unlucky, it will dump and we will be
into the deep freeze again . This warm spell is getting old.
Of course the climb down will switch into a route if we get a sudden
chill that freezes the Potomac. Let us hope not. That will be
expensive. I am expecting a long drawn out warm era myself that may
even last a couple of centuries but can be wrong in the short term
and this is only based on a weak thousand year long signal in the
data.
CO2 argument begins
cooling
FEBRUARY 8, 2013
BY: JEFFREY
PHELPS
Albeit very quietly,
a major mainstream news publication came forward admitting the once
over-hyped threat of CO2, as it relates to alleged “global
warming,” may no longer be as much of a problem as previously
advertised.
An extraordinarily
strange phenomenon has occurred within the world of science and
news.
A gigantic shift is
taking place in the way a potential threat to mankind has been
largely viewed by “science” and the public for decades. Yet,
somehow, the entirety of the vast media-industrial complex has
managed to overlook this massive situation.
Once billed as the end
of human civilization as we know it, CO2, labeled a
“greenhouse gas”by the EPA and potentially threatening
all life on the planet, if not brought under control, is now all of
the sudden being acknowledged asmuch less of a threat to the
public as was once thought.
Despite this
incredible revelation, somehow no one in the establishment's media
has either seen it or is willing to touch it, other than the original
journalist and a blog or two.
Any other time news of
this magnitude becomes public, it would typically be seen as a
gigantic story. But when a respected NYT earth-science
blog unearths a damning report, downplaying a formerly impending
situation, one would think it would become one of those news days
that would go down in the annals as one of the more memorable.
UN climate scientists
have been arguing for decades that carbon emissions from various
sources, like cars, factories, cows, etc., are all causing a dramatic
and unsustainable rise in global C02 emissions. According to the UN
and former UN lawyer Al Gore and his Academy award-winning
documentaries and best-selling books, this was causing a greenhouse
effect that was quickly approaching a point of no return for all life
on the planet.
The focal point of the
UN's climate alarmist arguments were in regard to “climate
sensitivity,” in relation to additional atmospheric concentrations
of greenhouse gases. It referred to how much warming can be expected
from a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere,
based on current (CO2) greenhouse gas emissions projections.
According to the
United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), a 2007 report concluded that:
Climate sensitivity is
likely to be in the range of 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of
about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. Values
substantially higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded, but agreement of
models with observations is not as good for those values.” In IPCC
parlance, likely means that there is a 66 percent probability that
climate sensitivity falls between 2 and 4.5°C (3.6 to 8.1°F), with
3°C (5.4°F) as the best estimate.
Conversely, some
researchers even suggested the UN's figures were conservative and
likely much worse than even that.
In layman's terms,
should industrial CO2 emissions not be addressed in any meaningful
way, according to many of the world's climate alarmists piggybacking
off of the UN's information, the earth was warming and the eventual
rise in overall global temperature averages would lead to polar ice
cap melting, rising oceans and ocean temperatures, natural disasters
of epic proportions and a domino effect leading to vast famine and
disease.
If global carbon taxes
weren't implemented on all of the pollution and CO2 emitting
corporations, in a vast transfer of wealth to those who would be
self-proclaimed as responsible for managing the situation for the
rest of humanity, all life on the planet would be eventually doomed
to man's inability to see the “warning signs,” before it was too
late. Humanity was in desperate peril.
Now, as if somebody
just switched on the lights, scientists have begun discovering that
CO2 may not actually be anywhere near the problem it was originally
being sold to the public as.
According to a
substantiated group of corroborating studies, recent figures suggest
that climate sensitivity is drastically less than the IPCC's old
estimate. In the NYT report, the publication suggests:
...one critically
important metric — how hot the planet will get from a doubling of
the pre-industrial concentration of greenhouse gases, a k a “climate
sensitivity” — some climate researchers with substantial
publication records are shifting toward the lower end of the
warming spectrum....
But while plenty of
other climate scientists hold firm to the idea that the full
range of possible outcomes, including a disruptively dangerous
warming of more than 4.5 degrees C. (8 degrees F.), remain in play,
it’s getting harder to see why the high-end projections are given
much weight.
This is also not a
“single-study syndrome” situation, where one outlier research
paper is used to cast doubt on a bigger body of work — as Skeptical
Science asserted over the weekend. That post focused on
the as-yet-unpublished paperfinding lower sensitivity that was
inadvisedly promoted recently by the Research Council of Norway.
In fact, there is an
accumulating body of reviewed, published research shaving
away the high end of the range of possible warming estimates from
doubled carbon dioxide levels. Chief among climate scientists
critical of the high-sensitivity holdouts is James Annan,
an experienced climate modeler based in Japan
who contributed to the 2007 science report from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It seems as though,
best estimates of climate sensitivity are now merging into a commonly
understood figure that is even lower than 2°C… A vast reduction
from alarmist's original estimates.
And although having
trouble with just how much of a reduction that is, while still
holding on to the belief that even the new, much lower estimates
could still potentially cause eventual warming detrimental to the
well-being of the planet's current ecosystem, the publication ends by
by acknowledging “libertarians” as having been right all along,
saying:
I can understand why
some climate campaigners, writers and scientists don’t want to
focus on any science hinting that there might be a bit more time to
make this profound energy transition. (There’s also reluctance, I’m
sure, because the recent work is trending toward the published
low sensitivity findings from a decade ago, from climate scientists
best known for their relationships with libertarian groups.)
Nonetheless, the
science is what the science is.
That's for sure.
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