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from Michigan Pete, comment at Gristmill
on 26-04-08: I think we need to stop worrying
about the polar bears... A survey of the animals'
numbers in Canada's eastern Arctic has revealed
that they are thriving, not declining... In
the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-sq kilometre
region, the polar bear population has grown
from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100 today. "There
aren't just a few more bears. There are a hell
of a lot more bears," said Mitch Taylor,
a polar bear biologist who has spent 20 years
studying the animals."
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I was a highly committed environmental activist,
believing in Global Warming
This was the case from the time I saw Al Gore's film and
learned about Peak Oil and Transition Towns. Transition Towns
felt exactly the way I wanted to respond - positively and
creatively to a challenge of unprecedented size and urgency
about which "all scientists agreed". I studied the
science of Global Warming and Peak Oil to be sure of my factual
foundations. I read up the "greenhouse effect" of
CO2, and the many "rebuttals of skeptics' arguments"
on the Internet eg at New
Scientist. As Al Gore said:-
- "Our CO2 emissions were the cause of
the rising CO2 levels, since nothing else could have caused
this.
- And the rising CO2 must have caused the global
temperature rise, since, again, there was nothing else."
A study by Naomi Oreskes showed that a complete consensus
of scientists were portraying a very serious picture - threatening
our whole future - unless we drastically lower our carbon
dioxide emissions, and unless we act quickly.
I was unprepared for what I found a few months
later
- Global temperatures have been falling for ten years, yet
CO2 is rising as steadily as ever.
- I went on to investigate extremely thoroughly, since this
evidence seemed seriously at odds with what Global Warming
said, and it's important we get our scientific foundations
right.
- I found bad science in high places, at the very heart
of Climate Science and the global warming thesis.
- I have now taught myself the science, because nothing
less would suffice; even scientists are not aware.
- People are about to make monumental blunders based on
bad science.
Who pays me: I'm not now, nor ever was
or will be, in the pay of any big business to promote their
position. I wish I had more money.
I wish I didn't have to put in this disclaimer - especially
since almost all the slush funding now goes towards AGW support.
I had to put aside my work with Transition Towns, because
they require adherence to the "climate change" orthodoxy.
But I know now that this scenario simply sells newspapers,
buys research grants, feathers the nests of various individuals
like Al Gore, and has not a grain of truth in it. Unfortunately,
anxious activist scientists wrote up a lot of inferior-science
studies, debunking a lot of good science and, unbelievably,
overriding well-established scientific laws; some got into
positions of power where they could - against the most basic
principles of openness and checkability in Science - suppress
the debate.
I hope that others will disengage from this corrupted climate
science, when they study the unbelievable evidence and use
commonsense, which shows CO2 to be not a villain but a resource
that is essential for plants to live - in fact, plants have
benefited from the recently increased CO2 levels, and could
easily take more. Market gardeners use up to FIVE TIMES the
current levels in their greenhouses to maximise growth - without
harm to anything.
To understand the full story, learn the real science, and
reclaim your power to check the facts for yourself, go to
my "Skeptics' Climate Science Primer".
To focus on key issues in debate, go to this excellent Skeptics'
Handbook. The only "Precautionary
Principle" of any use is to take the precaution of schooling
yourself in basic science.
| Recent Global Warming happened for a very
simple reason. The Sun. Now the orthodox
position knows about these pictures. But they then
show the apparent non-correspondence of these pictures
with earth temperature rise in the latter twentieth
century, and assert that only manmade CO2 rise fits
the anomaly. Not so. The
high solar levels you see in the lefthand graph
continued to warm the Earth even after they started
to drop, because they were still ABOVE the "norm"
of past levels, and because the oceans are slow
to warm and to cool, so they continue to warm the
land llike a hot water bottle, even after the Sun's
strength has dropped. Ever been
in a car and had to keep on turning down the heating,
notch after notch, after the car warmed up? When
it's hot, a decreasing heat input can still cause
more warming... Also there is serious evidence
that the recent unusually high Solar Magentic Flux,
which kept approximate pace with Solar Irradiance,
kept clouds at bad and thus amplified the sun's
warming effect. This has unfortunately now dropped!
Cool weather ahead... |
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<--- See the large,
sustained increase in Total Solar Irradiance.
See the recent ---> high sunspot
counts - almost certainly relates to less cloud
cover - see here. |
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| The rise of CO2 is almost entirely a natural
by-product of sea surface warming. If there
had been no solar warming, manmade CO2 would virtually
all have been absorbed by the sea, as per Henry's
Law. CO2 always follows temperature change. Claims
that CO2 amplifies, are unsubstantiated bluster.
If CO2 did amplify temperatures, oceans outgassing
would have gone into a chain reaction millions of
years ago. The CO2
greenhouse effect is negligible at current levels;
it is already saturated. For a while
it was difficult to find enough evidence to be sure
about the Sun - and for mediocre scientists who
disregarded the evidence of the past, had not checked
the greenhouse effect in practice, and had forgotten
Henry's Law and the size of the oceans, CO2 was
a natural suspect. |
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Often, the accusations of "oil-funded!" and "not
peer-reviewed!" arise in situations where the AGW attackers
cannot fault the science itself. This speaks about the scientific
understanding of the attackers, not the truth of the science,
in a situation where the
peer-review process itself has, unbelievably, become corrupt.
I thought that environmental watchdogs would watch for corrupt
environmental science, but I now realize that this has not
happened.
I've found many environmentalists with superb track records
who are also fighting for the truth in Climate Science. Peter
Taylor advised the UN, Greenpeace, and our government
on green issues - but because of his stance on climate science,
can no longer get funding. Lawrence
Solomon started off believing our CO2 emissions were causing
serious warming, but as he investigated the evidence, finding
top scientists who were "deniers" - a shameful term
- he shifted his position so completely that he's written
a book by this title. And there are many others.
Some of the evidence is close at hand - read my
science primer and learn a bit of science. Knowledge is
power. |
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