UAF professor emeritus continues to question sources of global warming
Published Friday, September 19, 2008
FAIRBANKS — A University of Alaska Fairbanks professor emeritus known for his belief that carbon dioxide is not the sole cause of climate change presented his latest research Thursday.
More than 40 researchers and students gathered into a room at the International Arctic Research Center, now named after Syun-Ichi Akasofu, for the hour-long presentation.
“Retirement is good because I can spend the time to correct information,” Akasofu said.
For several years now, Akasofu has put forward the idea that while the world was warming for most of the 20th century, it stopped warming sometime around 2000 or 2001. He clarified Thursday that according to his latest research, the oceans have stopped warming since that time, but it appears as if temperatures are still rising if one only looks at land temperatures.
Akasofu also was skeptical of reported changes in land temperature, however. For example, he noted that while many scientists claim global temperatures have risen slightly less than one degree on average across the past few decades, their studies don’t take urbanization into account.
Tokyo, he said, appears to have warmed four degrees, but that does not take into account the fact that the number of dark manmade structures that absorb heat, raising temperatures in their vicinity.
The retired geophysics professor also questioned the accuracy of readings from weather stations where no one is there to regularly monitor the equipment.
“A friend of mine found one station where the temperature gauge was just outside the air conditioner,” he said.
Still, Akasofu doesn’t completely deny the existence of climate change, so much as question what causes it. One culprit he suggested is the recent lack of sunspots.
“Something is happening on the sun,” he said. “There are no sunspots when there should be 50-100 right now, so people warn the sun has become warmer.”
A similar phenomenon was observed between 1650 and 1700, which coincides with what researchers call the Little Ice Age, a period of widespread cooling that came shortly after a warming trend may have peaked sometime around 1000 AD.
However, Akasofu didn’t necessarily connect that warming period to what the planet is experiencing now.
“Some people say it was a degree higher or about the same, but there were no thermometers, so how accurate were they?” he said.
How many times does this have to happen???? Scientists point out that the methods of data collection are so poor, the data becomes invalid….
How many REAL scientists, who actually follow the scientific method, does it take to call into question the politically motivated IPCC conclusions???
Is it even possible for ‘reason’ to be heard, nowadays, among the multitude of greatly interested voices???
I am losing hope…
Shouldn’t more sun spot mean a warmer sun?
The lack of sun spot could actually help explain the higher number of clouds and increase precipitation in the last year.
The good professor is not looking for grants. He has already made his mark. Many others are looking for their piece of the 5 billion or so a year in monies. So the temperature soars and by design the the equipment is not taken care of. Only Mr. Watts keeps after the equipment. I was surprised to hear on another post someone suggesting that Anthony pony up for the calibration stations. How come NASA hasn’t just used the pictures and GPS locations to go upgrade the equipment. If Hansen could just take a little time of his busy schedule and direct some action maybe the U.S. could have accurate ground based measuring sites.
Xanthippa:
Don’t lose hope, my friend, but be careful what you place it in. If you thought the AGWers were going to roll out of bed one day and admit they were wrong, then you have another thing coming. Also, the majority of people in Western civilization don’t even know (or, at times, even care) that reputed scientist after reputed scientist has questioned the supposed supreme roll of humanity and our CO2 emissions in ‘global warming’ or even whether global warming is even happening at present. Even if they don’t necessarily believe it themselves, they may feel they just don’t know enough about it. And AGW propaganda is pretty potent to the ignorant and the uninitiated. And there is a whole lot of money out there to be had in eco-friendly government-authored/sponsored programs. Don’t expect the delusion to fail any time soon.
Really, I see no way out of this myself. Sometimes, danger can be averted by warning others. But at other times we all must go through something together, watching our best and most brilliant efforts fail miserably time and again while those of us not suckered stand by patiently and illustrate that this was exactly why we did not sign up to the idea in the first place. This is not a battle we are going to win soon. It is even possible that we may never win it, as a consequence of course that also we may. But whatever happens, good or ill, it will take time. So don’t give up! It may be frustrating waiting for other folks to wake up to the fact they are involved in a hoax, but you can rest assured in the knowledge that you know enough of the truth about it not to be fooled yourself. And that whatever is based on a lie eventually comes crumbling down. Watch and wait.
It took communism around 70 years to finally fail. How long has this AGW thing been going? 1988?
When reading scientists’ statements I find it useful to remember that they are rather insular creatures. For the most part, once outside their own narrow area of expertise, they are as easily prone to accept the meme of AGW as any layman. The non-climatologist scientist may accept the idea of AGW under the assumption that the new science of climatology is as well developed as their own field and that the theory of AGW has been rigorously studied and has withstood the test of time. That the climate has warmed over the past couple of centuries is not in doubt, so it’s not surprising that scientists, immersed in their own fields, will accept the current warming as being anthropogenic in nature.
It is also not surprising to see, that when scientists retire from active research in their own fields, that they start to publicly develop doubts as to the validity of AGW. It probably has less to do with the cut-throat quest for grant monies than the fact that they now have the luxury of actually looking more seriously into the matter of AGW.
This whole global warming reminds me of the bomb shelters in the 50’s. A lot of people made money and a lot of people were left with old supplies in holes in their backyards… Wish I could live another 50 years to see a lot of solar panels/wind turbines deteriorating…
I don’t find the article cited easy to read.
The paragraph starting “Tokyo, he said” does not make sense.
Then it is reported that the good professor said absence of sunspots makes the sun warmer. Is that really what he said or meant? That might well be so but it is not the effect I have always understood sunspots to have.
And the following paragraph is simply bizarre. The prize of my finest cricket bat is offered to anyone who can explain what this means :
“A similar phenomenon was observed between 1650 and 1700, which coincides with what researchers call the Little Ice Age, a period of widespread cooling that came shortly after a warming trend may have peaked sometime around 1000 AD.”
Despite the appalling way the prof’s talk was reported the gist seems to be “they can’t explain what happened before and they can’t explain what is happening now”. That seems a pretty accurate observation to me. But what do I know? I haven’t been peer-reviewed, I just use a bit of my version of common sense.
http://thefatbigot.blogspot.com/2008/06/common-sense-anyone.html
That brings to mind a question I have meant to ask for a while. I read somewhere that there is no reason why a computer model of climate should be able to say what happened in the past. Is that so? It sounds like nonsense to me. But I haven’t been peer-reviewed, so what do I know.
Is that reporter’s name supposed to link to the staff of this blog? A pretty weak link it is, at that.
REPLY: WP has this bad habit of inserting it’s own precursor links in the URL’s during some copy paste ops, I’ve deleted the bad link and added direct link into the subtitle. – Anthony
The ‘green’ lobby have never had it so good. AGW is being used to hammer through much of the ‘green’ manifesto even if it is not true.
Whilst the climate and AGW is being so prominently promoted, it is possible to get funding for alternate power generation, the reduction of existing coal-fired generators recycling, alternate fuels, smaller vehicles (or more fuel-efficient ones), etc, etc, etc. Once started and with emissions trading schemes, carbon capture, etc, it will be hard to dismantle and will provide funds for years to keep the movement going.
Whilst many of these changes can be argued as being warranted and of benefit to mankind, changes are being forced on us under a false premise and will have major impacts on costs of living, etc.
Slightly off topic but there is an article in The Times which shows the advantage of global warming for Greenland http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4791047.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1
In the print version there is also a comparison of temperatures as shown by this picture. The odd part is that the warming is very localised and the inland/high altitude parts have cooled. http://www.holtlane.plus.com/images/greenland.jpg
Richard:
That’s Soviet communism, not just communism. Communism as a popular idea was around for quite some time before then. It just got its first expression in government through the Russian Revolution and subsequent events. AGW has far more popular appeal than communism, although you are correct in making the connection that both ideas desire the State to be supreme over the People. The various “green/mother earth/back to nature” movements have been around long before AGW was fashionable in political circles too. With some people this idea will never die just as communism still exists in some places as a form of government in some countries (Vietnam and Cuba, for example). AGW is the latest movement to try to unify the earth into one common cause, which will then be exploited endlessly for political and monetary gain while eroding natural freedoms and bringing economic ruin. The laugher is that there is anything scientific to AGW. There isn’t. It’s entirely political. It’s absolutely about control by the government, who will define pollution, the penalties for it, and how you may be spared if you comply. And the lifesblood of it without a doubt is money. Tax dollars subsidising markets for political gain paying no attention whatsoever to the realites on the ground experience by ordinary people, entirely caught up in their own ideas and rhetoric so fully that to them everyone else seems “a bit odd” if not downright insane.
When you boil AGW and Communism down from a political perspective, there is almost no difference. Both want to use the power of the State to shape the way people live not according to individual freedom of choice but according to the guidelines of a pre-planned philosophy that must be obeyed to the letter by everyone who is not on top. That is how Al Gore can fly on jetliners, drive in huge motorcades, own a house that uses 10 times more electricity than the average US household, and yet still have the unmitigated temerity to lecture people about their CO2 footprints. And his acolytes can suggest we cease eating meat because, since that guy is a Hindu, he probably doesnt anyway (not beef at least).
But communism had to be tried out on a grand stage to show how utterly vulnerable it is to the whims of madmen like Stalin, and to show its utter futility versus a political system that enshrined freedom of choice (in voting, I mean). AGW may have to go through the same process before people are disabused of the notion that this planet needs to or ought to be rescued from mankind by mankind.
There were no thermometers 1000 years ago. True. But here’s a proxy: At that time the Vikings had prosperous agricultural communities on Greenland lasting 3oo years, crops and livestock. The archeological evidence is still there – UNDER THE PERMAFROST! Forget the temperature reconstructions.
[…] on a recent link from Poptech there is this: (from Sounds familiar: ?A friend of mine found one station where the temperature gauge was just outside th…) "Still, Akasofu doesnt completely deny the existence of climate change, so much as question […]
Oldjim (01:48:43) : Those warm areas seem somewhat near to the ocean which might just have some influence on this warming trend. Where there is no influence of ocean, there appears to be cooling!
oldjim,
Thank you for the Greenland map link. The cooling in the interior of Greenland is a critical point, because that is where the ice is located. Sea level has declined since 2006, yet some key figures in this debate refuse to let go of their catastrophic sea level rise fantasies.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/on-straw-men-and-greenland-tad-pfeffer-responds/
Since global warming stopped in 1998 and cooling started around 2001, and with a growing belief that we may be entering another mini ice age (precipitated by the sun’s recent inactivity and the pacific ocean’s PDO recently started), how can one cash in on a cooling planet (much as St. Al is cashing in on his carbon credit scheme)?
Chris Osborne, “boss of the LECG consultancy,” tells the London Times today that “the investment gold rush in new green technologies comparable to the dot-com boom a decade ago.” Should we be calling it the green-con boom?
Bobby Lane.
I agree with you but…..
There are a lot of people that still believe in Communism/socialism.
According to documents now available from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Block countries, the Communists murdered some 120,000,000 of their own citizens. (The Hoover Institute for War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University has the documents. Their digest is worth getting.) An estimated 39,000,000 were starved to death during Mao’s Great Leap Forward: their food was confiscated and sold on the international market to provide funds for armament factories.
Look at the people that still support Hugo Chaves and FARC. Look at the people that still support Castro. Look at what happened when a silly airhead from Hollywood wore a shoulder bag with Mao on it down in Peru. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapse and look at the people that say we need more government intervention and control. (If you have been reading the Wall Street Journal, they have been predicting this crisis for years.) There are still a lot of people that willfully ignore the murder of tens of millions and the total economic failure of dozens of countries because they “know” that they should be in charge.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack
PS
Food for thought:
Communist Vietnam is rapidly converting to a fascist country, i.e. a capitalist economic system with a totalitarian government. This is happening because Communism JUST DOESN’T WORK. The next step is a liberalization of the government. Once that happens WE WILL HAVE WONE THE WAR!
That’s how Ronald Reagan ended the cold war.
I wonder how global warming looks if you just use the known good temperature stations.
Leon Brozyna (22:19:17) :
You refer to the “new science of climatology.” While I eventually switched to economics, 40 years ago I spent two years in college studying geography, geomorphology, geology, and geophysics. I clearly remember studying “climatology” in my geography classes. While originally a “social science,” the study of geography was already in those days morphing into an “earth science.”
The problem is not that climatology is new. The problem is that it has been shanghaied into the service of a political cause that has corrupted it. Little more than a decade ago, climate science still actively studied, and debated, the sources and causes of “natural climate variability.” At the same time, there were those publishing studies that raised concerns about AGW. It is hard to overestimate the damage done by the creation of the IPCC and its corrupting influence on the study of climate science. Created in 1988, it issued its first assessment report in 1990, and its second report in 1995. AGW came to dominate the research agenda of climate science. Billions of dollars poured in to fund research to shore up what had already been claimed in the first two assessment reports. You didn’t get grant money any more simply to study “natural climate variability.” You had to tie it to AGW. You didn’t get published simply reporting findings of “natural climate variability.” You had to either position your research into “natural climate variability” as being designed to show that it was masking evidence of AGW, or at least qualify your findings to say that they didn’t disprove AGW. The former was preferred, especially if you were looking for grant money to fund your research. Government agencies, such as NASA and NOAA here in the US, jumped on the gravy train as well, and became primary contributors to IPCC, as well as conduits to researchers and scientists to fund research into AGW.
Al Gore and the greenies just completed the corruption by turning it into a political agenda. That, by itself, would make a real scientist stop and take stock of what is going on. Whenever a political agenda is advanced in the name of “science,” it is almost always pseudoscience. Think here of the eugenics movement in the early 20th century. The parallels are scary.
The fact that Tokyo is warming is to be expected & is known as the urban heat island efect. This has heretofore been denounced by alarmists as not being a significant cause of warming. Now they seem to be saying global warming is still happening if you don’t count the 75% of it covered by sea & the bits ofland not urbanised.
FatBigot (23:58:40) :
You wonder why a computer model shouldn’t be able to say what happened in the past. Models are simplistic to an extreme. Drivers of earth’s climate are numerous, some as yet probably unrecognized, and their relationships complex to an extreme. History of known drivers is very poorly understood. Researchers still doing science (as opposed to artful story-telling, e.g. AGW) acknowledge that the most reliable predictor of past or future system behavior are analogous models. In other words, what happened before under similar conditions? E.g., imagine predicting (modeling) what conditions will greet you on a day three months from now when you visit your favorite park. Can you accurately predict the conditions of the landscape? The people who will be there and what they will be doing? The kind of day it will be? When you will arrive? When you will leave? How you will get there? This seems simple at first glance, but just recall the surprises and unexpected changes in plans you’ve had on each visit. And this is an environment you know intimately under conditions you can control! Now imagine you’re going to visit a place you know nothing about, at a time as yet undetermined, and a location defined only as a geographic region. How well could you predict anything? (And you are using the most complex calculating system known – a human brain.) This is analogous to our understanding of climate systems and forcings.
I did graduate course work in the 1990’s under ecology gods in the US, who cautioned us to beware of drawing unsubstantiated conclusions from model based studies. I’ve been disappointed in the steady decline of application of such caution, as evidenced in the peer-reviewed journals addressing ecological and environmental issues.
Climate models are not analogous models because of limitations on variables, reliable available data, limitations on types and number of cycle varations that can be included, etc. This is one reason why I have no confidence in AGM.
What one can obtain today from the articles on WUWT’s main page:
Akasofu believes ‘that carbon dioxide is not the sole cause of climate change.’
Christy claims ‘that the atmosphere no longer shows the characteristic of CO2 radiative forcing, and that the effect apparently peaked around 1998.’
Spencer ‘agrees that humans are creating more carbon dioxide, but he doesn’t agree it’s causing climate change.’
One scientist claims that CO2 doesn’t influence climate change, the other says it does but stopped doing so 10 years ago and the third says it does, but only partially so.
The possibility of such contradictory views posted so close to each other in my view greatly detracts from the credibility of this site. It’s too bad. I really long to be a ‘sceptic’, ie believe that Climate Change isn’t happening or that it isn’t caused by the actions of the world’s population, but the more I read here – especially the comments – the more I believe this is site about ‘being right’, no matter how, and not about the truth.
I hope ClimateAudit can convince me of the fact that MMCC isn’t happening. I thought WUWT looked promising when they corrected the Goddard-article on Arctic Sea Ice Decline but it turns out not to be so promising. A shame, really.
Neven,
One reason why people like myself are skeptics is because of the fact that the science is not settled as St. Al purports. The fact that three scientsts have differing opinions is not surprising, but taken in general indicate that mankind’s involvement in climate change is minimal at best. Actually statements 1 and 2 are not contradictory, as water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, contributing to as much as 95% by volume in the atmosphere. With respect to the third comment, it is demonstrated by various sources that yes, the level of CO2 has continued to increase over the last 10 years but the temperature has trended downwards during this time, essentially erasing the temperature increases of the last 30 years. This scenario seems to support his statement.