As my ex-wife describes me, I'm the last person in the world who denies global warming. I am highly skeptical, to be sure, though this is not quite an accurate description.
One, I'm not convinced that the temperatures today are higher over a long enough period to be considered the highest ever rather than a blip in the long run.
Two, I'm not convinced that people are at fault for any rise even if there is a significant rise in temperatures this century.
And three, and this is the most important part, I think the idea that we must cripple economic growth in order to slow any increase in temperatures is sheer stupidity. Coping with change is cheaper and more effective than trying to stem the incoming tide.
So, via The Corner, I greatly enjoyed this article:
Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.
The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.
In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming.
And I do take guilty pleasure in yet another description of how the famous "hockey stick" chart purporting to show only recent increases in global temperatures is quite bogus.
But if evil people aren't a plague upon the Earth warming us to crispy critters, what could account for any recent warming?
Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably. But recent solar changes have been big.
Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.
The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure.
The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.
Oooh. Riight. The big hot thing up in the sky that is the source for about 99.99999999 percent of the heat on our planet (I assume our core provides some heat). Instead of being like a giant thermostat that constantly puts out heat at a uniform rate, it may actually--brace yourself--vary in intensity. So if the Sun gets hotter ... What? Come on. You can say it! That's right, our planet--and any other in the Solar System--gets hotter.
And the prophets of doom who fly off to UN-sponsored conferences?
Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and Herr Professor Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about energy-to-temperature as he was about atoms.
If socialist "efficiency" didn't convince you to plan our economy to death, I guess global warming is supposed to make you cry for the UN planners to save us.
Yeah, continue to count me as a skeptic of this whole panic-fest that conveniently demands we let experts control our economy.
Jerks. The science is bad. Trying to argue science based on "everyone is doing it" as the global warming mafia operates sounds so ... un-scientific.
The Sun, people. The Sun. You know, the big hot thing up in the sky?
UPDATE: Belated defense of my view that I can on occasion comment on global warming without seriously going outside my lane (The last thing I want to do is become an all-encompassing opinion on anything blog--I like to think I can offer informed opinion on what I comment on.) Anyway, the title says we have to defend ourselves on global warming against the global critics:
The chief American delegate was defending the U.S. position as an industrial country that rejects Kyoto's obligatory reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases that scientists blame for global warming.
Others here, meanwhile, sounded a more urgent note about growing perils from climate change.
"We are all gathered this morning on behalf of mankind because we acknowledge that climate change is rapidly emerging as one of the most serious threats humanity will ever face," Kenyan Vice President Moody Awori told delegates in an opening speech.
In the next two weeks, the delegates will get a closed-door preview of the latest scientific findings on a warming world, to be published next year in a comprehensive U.N. assessment by the world's leading climate scientists.
I've already linked above to a critique of the UN view. Yes, a theoretical problem centuries in the future is more "imminent" a threat than nuclear-armed jihadis and nutball regimes.
These people at the UN actually believe they are free to organize a huge clusterfuck "on behalf of mankind" that screws up our economy and fails to protect us against an actual threat we are facing right now.
I'm not convinced that the UN is completely worthless. But some days it is hard to maintain that view.
