By STEVE GOREHAM
In President Obama’s remarks to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, he stated, “… My plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet — because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And in this election you can do something about it.”
The president’s remarks support the ideology of climatism — the belief that manmade greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate.
Today, the world is in the grip of the madness of climatism. Our president and 191 other world leaders of the United Nations continue to pursue futile policies to stop global warming. Universities preach “sustainable development.” Companies tout their “green” programs. Schools teach our children that if we change light bulbs, we can save polar bears. But an increasing body of science shows that the theory of catastrophic manmade warming is nonsense. Climate change is natural, and car emissions are insignificant.
The president did not mention the Keystone Pipeline in his speech. In January 2012, he halted the $7 billion Keystone project on recommendation by the State Department in order to assess potential environmental harm. During the last months of 2011, thousands of protesters gathered in front of the White House to protest the Keystone project. They claimed that the oil the pipeline would transport from Canadian tar sands would cause irreversible global warming. Dr. James Hansen of NASA was one of those arrested at the demonstrations. Media pundits speculated that the president halted the pipeline to strengthen his political support with environmental groups. But could it be that Mr. Obama believes that halting the pipeline was the right policy to save the planet?
Who can blame the president for sticking with the theory of man-made global warming? Most of his leading advisors, including Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, science guru John Holdren and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, warn that mankind is destroying the climate. The EPA campaign to halt CO2 emissions from power plants, new vehicle mileage standards, subsidies for wind turbines and electric cars, the Solyndra solar cell debacle, the banning of incandescent light bulbs, the looming California high-speed rail boondoggle and ethanol vehicle fuel mandates are all policies driven by climatism.
The president’s use of the term “carbon pollution” is disappointing. Environmentalists inaccurately use this phrase to conjure up images of billowing smoke stacks, and the president has picked this up. The theory of manmade global warming claims that carbon dioxide, not carbon, causes climate change. Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, while carbon is a black solid. Referring to carbon dioxide as “carbon” is as foolish as calling water “hydrogen” or salt “chlorine.” Compounds have totally different properties than their composing elements. Neither is carbon dioxide pollution. It’s an odorless, harmless gas that green plants need for photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide is a foundation for life on Earth along with oxygen and water.
Carbon dioxide is a trace gas. Only four of every 10,000 air molecules are CO2. It’s estimated that the amount of carbon dioxide that mankind added in all of human history is only a fraction of one of these four molecules. The idea that mankind’s tiny contribution to a trace atmospheric gas can cause hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods and wildfires is not a joke, it’s incredible.
Contrary to much of the recent press, a look at history shows that this summer’s drought was not unprecedented in these United States. The droughts of the 1930s and 1950s lasted longer and experienced higher temperatures. According to the State Climate Extremes Database of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), 37 of the 50 state high-temperature records dated prior to 1960, with 22 of these from the decade of the 1930s. Only one state high-temperature record was recorded during the last 16 years. Additional data on droughts and floods from the NCDC show no increasing trend over the last 100 years. Nature drives droughts and floods, not manmade emissions of carbon dioxide.
The president’s statement is remarkable in another way. He implies that we should vote for him because he can control droughts, floods and wildfires to safeguard “our children’s future.”
During a speech in June 2008, he implied that he could slow the rise of the seas. What’s next, regulation of snowfall? If Mr. Obama is re-elected and with bipartisan support in Congress and approval of the United Nations, look for the Snowfall Abatement Act of 2014.
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Steve Goreham is executive director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.”
Brian Johnson uk says:
September 28, 2012 at 10:30 pm
“Don’t mean to be rude but your President is really dumb. He must be surrounded by sycophants.”
Brian you have no idea how right you are.
If you review the people in cabinet positions as well as his czars they are all people with no real world experience and come from academia which in the US is largely socialist.
The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is actually anti-nuke !
The head of the Department of Energy has suggested we paint the roofs of our houses white to solve the energy crisis and stop global warming.
Even the President suggested checking the air pressure in your car tires as a way to stop global warming.
The list goes on and on.
“The recession was caused by a financial meltdown served up by an irresponsible banking industry….”. – RACookPE
That’s not even close. However it makes for a nice bumper sticker talking point.
If one goes on a quest to find the root cause of the recession [The Great Recession followed by the not-so-great-expansion], one will run head long into this proposition: politicos through the mechanism of government. That politicos set the stage for shenanigans through their own self-interest, and when one sets the stage for shenanigans…..shenanigans will occur.
You see RACookPE, your reason is quite notional. To be more succinct, your bumper sticker talking point is actually a political notional point.
Try this exercise in reading: Reckless Endangerment by Gretchen Morgensen, Getting Off Track by John B. Taylor, The Vision of the Anointed, A Conflict of Visions, and Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell. Follow those books up with The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. You’ll also need Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. Once you’ve managed the above, you might want to set the tone with New Deal or Raw Deal by Folsom, FDR’s Folly by Powell and The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes as one needs to understand the grand daddy of all rent-seeking and political constituency building through other people’s money, the main blue-printer for those politicos to come, one FDR.
If markets fail, then governments fail too. You might find market failure is really set up by government failure and more succinctly: failure via the self-interest of politicos through the mechanism of government. Unfortunately RACookPE, politicos are not altruistic keepers of the “public good”. Skip political science and go directly to public choice theory [politics without the romamance].
A final point for RACookPe. You have a zeal for believing the more complex the perceived problem, then logically follows the more complex the rule or regulation. Nay, nay. Welcome to counterintuitive world. Simple rules generally outperform complex rules even when the problem appears to grow more and more complex. One might find insight from Simple Rules for a Complex World by Epstein and the essay The Dog and the Frisbee by Andrew G Haldane.
Returning to your bumper sticker talking point of “The recession was caused by a financial meltdown served up by an irresponsible banking industry….” you might find some wisdom here:
“There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.”
– Fredrick Bastiat, French economist, 1848.
ericgrimsrud said: “until it was noted that the CFC’s were completely destroying ALL stratospheric ozone over the continent of Antarctica every Springtime.”
At first I thought your post was satire. What exactly is CO2 destroying? The perfect weather that we had in the Little Ice Age? The droughts, heat and freezes of the 30’s? Can you explain why the minor and benign warming from CO2 should produce a climate-destroying rise in temperature based on positive feedback that is not modeled (i.e. weather)?
The problem with your website e,g, “… is rising at an alarming rate of 2 ppm per year (the greatest rate of increase observed over the last 800,000 years)…” is that it is full of garbage designed to corrupt the thinking of children and others with very little knowledge. You have no proof whatsoever that the rate of 2ppm per year is the greatest rate of increase over the last 800,000 years. There is no justification for the adjective “alarming”. Soon the momentum from the high solar flux of the late 20th century will be over along with 80% of your arguments. It is sad that it has to be this way.
William Heasley please reread the single post by RACookPE and tell us where he said anything about the economy much less the quote you allege to be from him. Then you can apologize to him.
eric1skeptic,
Concerning the issues of stratospheric ozone loss by the CFC’s and warming by CO2, they are entirely difference problems. Thus your initial comments made no sense to anyone.
Concerning the proof for the rising rate of CO2 emissions, have you ever heard of the “Keeling Curve” and the “Ice Core Record”. Please look them up with a simple Google search and try to learn a bit before sharing non-sense. Both the concentrations of CO2 and the rates of concentration change are now known for the period from 800,000 years ago to the present.
wonder if Obama’s thought was “Al Gore lost an election to an overfunded idiot, I’ll use his campaign ideas!”
ericgrimsrud, your statement: “until it was noted that the CFC’s were completely destroying ALL stratospheric ozone over the continent of Antarctica every Springtime.” is false. Most people reading this blog can sort it out, perhaps you can look carefully at your each word you wrote and see where your claim does not hold up.
As for the ice code record, you are essentially claiming that natural rises in CO2 cannot exceed a certain rate using ice cores. Please show how a single reading every few hundred years or 1000 or more years can “prove” that CO2 never rose (and then fell) naturally at the rate observed today.
In general your absolutist and wild claims are not supported. You apparently never learned in your long career in science how to state facts in ways that are precise and supportable. Now that you are retired you appear pretty much stuck in the same mode.
To eric1skeptic,
OK, to be more precise, high altitude aircraft flying through the Antarctic Stratosphere during its springtime found that the ozone level in large portions of the stratosphere went down to “near zero” as the product of its destruction, chlorine oxide (ClO) jumped up to high levels. That is, almost all of the ozone, O3, in those regions was being converted to ClO by the reaction O3 + Cl -> ClO of O2.
Concerning the ice core record, you say that they provide only one measurement per century. The “time resolution” of the ice core record varies from high to low values than this. However, due to the extremely long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere, if its concentration ever rose to say some very high value, say such as 500 ppm, the high level would have been maintained for at least several centuries during which time it would have been noted in the ice core record even if the time resolution provided was as low as only one measurement per century.
In short, you do not know much about the subjects on which you are attempting to pontificate. None of us know it all, of course, and I always look forward to learning something new. But also try to keep in mind that new insights usually come from discussions of the science and rarely from personal insults and bursts from the gut.
Let me learn something here. Doesn’t Ozone deplete at -150F? The springtime temps in antarctican upper levels should be well below this point. I can find multitudes of studies that say it’s some kind of ‘chemical reaction’ but, temperatures alone can account for most of this loss, can’t it?
Martin457, A British research program in Antartica monitorred the total amount of ozone above that continent starting in the ’50’s. They noted a steady decrease which greatly accellerated in the 70′ and 80’s. That prompted the aircraft measurements in 1985 that clearly showed the loss and where it was occurring in the stratosphere. Note that the temperature of the Antarctic was alway very low so a temperature effect does not explain the enhances ozone loss in recent decades. The reactions I mentioned earlier did example the loss and they were related to Cl atoms coming originally from the CFC’s. Note also that since the use of CFC’s was banned in the 1990’s, the size of the “ozone hole” in the Antarctic stopped growing each year and now is getting smaller each year. Yes, the efforts of the atmospheric science research community save our butts on that one. Note also that it is this same community of scientists that are regularly dismissed as “alarmists” by the deniers of AGW today. Once again we are a scientifically foolish society today and will pay dearly for that deficiency.
ericgrimsrud, your statement about Antarctic ozone is better, although should also mention that the the end of winter marks the end of the lack of sun which creates varying amounts of ozone. It is in fact the ration of solar high frequency ultraviolet to solar low frequency ultraviolet that mainly determines how much ozone is in the stratosphere. Certainly CFCs do no help, but as they turn into free chlorine they will drift lower with gravity.
Now for your latest inexact statement: “However, due to the extremely long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere, if its concentration ever rose to say some very high value, say such as 500 ppm, the high level would have been maintained for at least several centuries during which time it would have been noted in the ice core record even if the time resolution provided was as low as only one measurement per century.”
If mankind stopped producing CO2 today, the concentration of CO2 would drop from whatever value it is at (e.g. 395) half way back to preindustrial in less than 40 years. Our current blip of CO2 would not register in a 100k year old ice core. As for higher res, it is true there are cores with higher resolution in Greenland but most are lower than a century, with one reading every couple of centuries at best.
To make a valid counterargument to a CO2 blip you would have to show that such a blip is not possible physically (other than what mankind is doing). You cannot use inaccurate statements about the lifetime of CO2. You say “I always look forward to learning something new.” Well, here’s something new for you, the current exponential decay time constant of CO2 shows about a 40 year half life (meaning 1/4 remains in 80 years etc). If you want, I will send you the spreadsheet where I demonstrate how the exponential decay works.
ericgrimsrud said: “Note that the temperature of the Antarctic was alway very low so a temperature effect does not explain the enhances ozone loss in recent decades.”
Inaccurate once again. The temperature of the stratosphere varies over the Antarctic and is not always very low (it is independent of the surface temperature). That temperature will drop in response to higher CO2, so that can lead to lower ozone. But the main modulators are weather and solar. I suggest if you want to learn something new, to look at the forecasts and charts of stratospheric temperatures such as this http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/10mb9065.gif
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ericgrimsrud says:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/28/the-president-decides-to-stick-with-climatism/#comment-1094768
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Thanks for the distasteful yet familiar catalog of stereotypical warmist dogma. One would’ve hoped after retiring, one would at least finally see the light.
My condolences….
to eric!skeptic:
Please!!
Gravity pulls molecules out of the air? Then why is SF6 (molecular weight – 146) well mixed throughout the total atmosphere.
It takes only 40 years for the excess biological carbon (such as that in atmospheric CO2, plants and the CO2 dissolved in the oceans) to be converted back to geological carbon (such as coal and limestone)? Conventional science tells us that the processes of weathering and coal production take thousands of years. The world needs to know about the mechanism you envision by which the excess carbon in the biocarbon cycle is removed. Please do send you idea to a journal where it can be peer reviewed.
The temperature of Antarctica is not alway sufficient to freeze water? Thereby allowing the amount of ice on that continent to increase even as GW occurs globally.
And ozone is destroyed spontaineously under temperture conditions the Antarctic stratosphere? Gosh, I sure did not know that!! I wonder if there is a literature reference behind that one – I have never seen one and do know the literature pretty well.
I am afraid that our understandings of climate science are so different that it is difficult to communicate. So please do carry on – while I politely bow out of this conversation.
Brian Johnson uk says:
September 28, 2012 at 10:30 pm
“Don’t mean to be rude but your President is really dumb. He must be surrounded by sycophants.
Mind you we have Cameron who has turned out to be apathetic wimp…..”
Not dumb. Part of the communist plan book. “Cause trouble, blame the opposition for the problems, offer more left wing solutions to those problems”. The lie is a central component to the left wing ideology. Loans to people who could not afford to pay them was a left wing idea then blamed upon the “lack of regulation” by the Republicans.
ericgrimsrud, you are showing an extreme unwillingness to learn new things. The upward flux of CFC’s is offset by the downward flux of HCl. see http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19850019103_1985019103.pdf#page=260 top of page 271/169. There is other motion and mixing as well, and not as simple as I described it since it is HCl not Cl moving downward.
The 40 year exponential decay for CO2 assumes that the ocean is doing most of the absorbing. It can be calculated given the amount of CO2 we create versus the rise in ppm over time. There is no need to consider permanent sequestration for a spike that would not show up in the ice core record. I could hypothesize a spike in CO2 from volcanoes quickly absorbed by the oceans tht would not show up in the record. You could easily point out that’s not what is happening today and that is correct, but still negates your claim above that it would show up in the ice core.
The temperature of Antarctica that I was talking about is the extreme cold in the stratosphere that destroys ozone. I am surprised you have not come across it since it has come up in recent winters when the Arctic showed a hole caused by extreme cold. Here’s an older case “On 1 February 1989, -83.5°C was recorded in 27.8 hPa over Hohenpeißenberg, the lowest temperature in the 22-year series. This was measured together with a very low total ozone amount of 266 DU. This may be compared with nearly twice this amount on 27 February 1989. The situation was very unusual: following an extremely cold winter in the Arctic stratosphere, ”
http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00114775?LI=true
ericgrimsrud, to spare you from looking up cause and effect http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01431161.2011.597792
“The main finding is that the 2010–2011 winter’s record-breaking [Arctic] ozone loss was instigated by the extremely low stratospheric temperatures that are linked to climate change”
To eric1skeptic,
You have missed the point of the article you referred to. The unusally large ozone hole was suggested to have resulted from an inverse temperature effect on the chlorine mechanism for ozone loss. It was not suggested to occur from the lower temperature alone – ozone does not decompose spontaineously at low temperatures.
Concerning the loss of atmospheric CO2 to the oceans, an equilibrium condition relatively quickly is establiished between the Atmosphere and THE SURFACE LAYER OF THE OCEANS, only. That surface layer roughly constitutes the top 200 meters of the ocean. Unfortunately, the surface layers do not mix with the cooler depths of the oceans below. That mixing process requires several to many centuries for completion. Thus it takes a very very long time for the CO2 content in the atmosphere to be transferred to the oceans. Sorry about that but that’s how Ma Nature does her thing.
ericgrimsrud,
Because the alarmist crowd makes the elementary mistake of reversing cause and effect, their conclusions are necessarily wrong.
CO2 may cause a negligible amount of warming, but it is too small to measure. However, it is easy to measure how Temperature changes cause changes in CO2. It is obvious that ΔT causes ΔCO2.
If something is too small to measure, then everything said about it is a conjecture. Not a theory. Not a hypothesis. A conjecture. An opinion. A belief.
The real world shows us which is the cause, and which is the effect. Sorry about your CO2=CAGW conjecture.
to D Böehm,
Please!! Increased atmospheric CO2 does not cause increased temperatures?
Have you ever heard of the Pleocene-Eocene Therma Maximum, an event that occurred about 55 Million years ago on this planet ?
Do you not know why the planet, Venus, has a surface temperature of about 750 degrees F ?
Do you not know that CO2 interferes with the Earth’s (and Venus’s) attempt to cool itself via the emission of IR radiation into outer space?
If the answer to these 3 questions is “no”, perhaps you should try to learn. For starters, I know of a short courses that might help – at ericgrimsrud.com.
ericgrimsrud, how does ozone spontaneously appear at warmer temperatures? In the part of the abstract I quoted above, the ozone doubled in 26 days. Obviously it is catalyzed in both directions and I never doubted chlorine is a powerful catalyst in the negative direction. What you cannot seem to notice is that all your statements about ozone above were incomplete at best. Mainly you left out the natural factors that cause sudden drops (in tandem with chlorine) and equally sudden restorations in ozone.
On the CO2 issue, your statement was that 2 ppm is “alarming” and unprecedented in 800k years. But the ice core does not support that claim, you can only support it by showing that there is no physical possibility of a natural spike like our post-industrial spike. You cannot, or you would have done so by now.
If we stopped producing CO2 tomorrow it would fall by a “reassuring” 1.5 ppm per year (average over 24 years) then 1.2ppm per year for 24 more years, then less, etc. This is not going to happen of course, but the numbers come from the current rates of absorption in the ocean and our current production which includes the deep ocean since that is part of the systematic response. It doesn’t matter how fast or slow your hand waving of the overturning rate is, the decay I quote above results from the real-world overturning rate. Depending on the source (e.g. volcanic), a sudden spike in atmospheric CO2 to today’s levels would be absorbed at the same rate and would show up as a minor blip in the coarse and smoothed ice core record.
Everyone here has something left to learn, some more than others. You are not exempt. You should stop pontificating and read a little more. Read a few papers to challenge yourself. Start by looking at how coarse and smoothed the ice core record actually is.
ericgrimsrud says:
Please!! Increased atmospheric CO2 does not cause increased temperatures?
That is a conjecture. It may be true, but if so it is still too small to measure. There is no testable, measurable scientific evidence proving that ΔCO2 causes ΔT. None. That’s why it is a conjecture. You cannot produce a chart like the one I posted above, showing that changes in CO2 cause temperature changes. Why? Because any such putative effects are too small to measure.
Have you ever heard of the Pleocene-Eocene Therma Maximum, an event that occurred about 55 Million years ago on this planet ?
Have you ever heard that coincidental correlation is no proof of causation? Anyway, let’s stick with the Holocene. The error bars on anything tens of millions of years old are just too large.
Do you not know why the planet, Venus, has a surface temperature of about 750 degrees F ?
Yes, of course. Venus is closer to the sun. At the same STP as Earth, the temperatures are almost identical.
Do you not know that CO2 interferes with the Earth’s (and Venus’s) attempt to cool itself via the emission of IR radiation into outer space?
Any warming due to CO2 is too small to measure. You’re getting all worked up over a non-problem. Quit scaring yourself, it’s juvenile.
CO2 is completely harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. More is better. Try worrying about real problems. The “carbon” scare is a false alarm.
D Böehm, the natural rise in CO2 due to the natural warming from the Little Ice Age would be about 5-10 ppm. That is because the oceans warmed about 1C and that’s roughly how much CO2 they offgas with that temperature rise. The rest of the rise that we see in the atmosphere (actually all of it) is due to manmade CO2. The reason I can safely say “all” (unlike the other Eric who likes to use ALL in caps) is that the oceans are now absorbing some of our CO2 based on the portion in the atmosphere that is above the equilibrium.
There is still some uncertainty even in established science like the above, but the oceanic CO2 measurements are pretty solid. There are piles of papers on it like this one: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v396/n6711/abs/396560a0.html
The simple answer is that if you are correct, the dissolved CO2 in the ocean would be dropping as it diffused into the atmosphere. But it is rising, supported by every paper I have seen.
D Böehm, I suggest you not bother reading about Venus, it is a red herring. A better way to think about it is what happens on cloudy nights. It is warmer, not because of ground level moisture or lapse rate or wind or any other such factor. It is warmer because the clouds absorb outgoing IR then reradiate part of it back to earth. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere does the same. You can argue the amount is small or whatever, but you can’t really argue with the principle.
eric1skeptic,
Agreed. But the basic question is this: will rising CO2 cause global damage or harm? So far, there is zero evidence of global harm traceable to rising CO2. Therefore, more CO2 is harmless, no?
And we know for a fact that more CO2 is beneficial to the biosphere. Therefore, CO2 is harmless, and beneficial. There is no scientific evidence to the contrary.
I have provided ample scientific evidence showing that CO2 is a function of temperature. There is no empirical evidence showing a reversed cause and effect. Any honest scientist would take the facts available and conclude that CO2 has not been a problem and is not likely to be a problem. But there are very few honest scientists in the climate alarmist camp. They have an agenda and a narrative, and they’re sticking with it.
Regarding the Venus issue, I was simply answering a question. Regarding radiative physics, I am in agreement. Note that radiative physics is not the same thing as AGW. There are people who know much more than I do about physics and the climate, such as Dr Ferenc Miskolczi, who flatly states that the sensitivity number for 2xCO2 is 0.0ºC. So the jury is still out.