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The Future of Science & Environmental Journalism

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
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RoyalWe Avatar
RoyalWe
Posts: 47
Posted: 04.18.09, 10:00 AM
What an absurd comparison. What the does it even mean to 'blame' climate change? Blame it for what? The current public conversation is something out of Alice in Wonderland.

Key facts that routinely get dodged in the public convo:
1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

2. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the "urban heat island" effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses. Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

3. The most recent ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

These are just a few of dozens of pts that throw the alarmist climate models (and we shld emphasize the highly circumstantial modeling that all of this relies on) into question.

And yet they are rarely discussed.
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