Chicken Manure and climate change

I have pasted an article that to me succinctly sums up the whole crazy
debate on global warming.It is quite long (as i don`t think you can use
links on this serve) but well worth a read.The article also goes into how
even though Richard Lindzen of MIT was brought into the UN`s IPCC for his
expertise,as he did not follow the ''plan'' he was vilified and hounded.This
is not how science is supposed to work..people like Lindzen publish papers
and people are free to criticize methodology,conclusions etc but as like
when Alan says that Lindzen ''has extreme right wing views'' that is
smearing the man instead of critiquing his work.
 

This is so typical of this debate with the most classic example being the
head of the IPCC describing as ''voodoo science'' the temerity of  some
scientists questioning how all of the Himalayan glaciers were going to be
melted by the 2035 which was in the IPCC`s 2007 report.As some of the
glaciers are hundreds of meters thick it was patently absurd for them to
melt in this time frame but the telling point was how when this was pointed
out to the IPCC,the messengers were attacked for their troubles.This  organ
of the UN(IPCC) is who people like Nick Smith look to when they parrot on
about the ''science is settled''

Enjoy..

debate

9 June 2010
Meet the green who doubts 'The Science'
The author of *Chill* explains why he's sceptical about manmade global
warming - and why greens are so intolerant.
*Peter Taylor *

*The science around climate change is not as settled as it's presented as
being. I used to think it was, until about 2003 - and then, feeling that the
remedies being proposed for climate change would be more damaging to the
environment than climate change itself, I took it upon myself to look at the
science.*

In my book on biodiversity, *Beyond
Conservation*<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Conservation-Wildland-Peter-Taylor/dp/1844071987/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2>,
I had mentioned in one of the chapters that perhaps the man-made global
warming theory was not all it was being cracked up to be. The changes we are
seeing now, I wrote, suggested that some other processes were at work. I
then took time out, visited the science libraries, and checked the original
science upon which today's models are based.

I was shocked by what I found. Firstly, there's no real consensus among the
scientists in the UN working groups, especially around oceanography and
atmospheric physics. The atmospheric physics of carbon dioxide for example
is *presented* as being pretty straightforward: it is a greenhouse gas,
therefore it warms up the planet. But even that isn't settled. There's a
huge amount of scientific disagreement on how much extra heating in the
atmosphere you will get from carbon dioxide. It is even broadly accepted
that carbon dioxide on its own is *not* a problem. So, you can double the
amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and get half to one degree
warming, which is within the natural variability range over a period of 50
years from now at the current rate of emissions.

The role of water vapour in planetary warming is also open to questioning.
While it is presented as being a heat amplifier, in fact because it can turn
into cloud it could actually regulate temperature instead. As it turned out,
at the very beginning of the UN discussions, Richard Lindzen, a professor of
meteorology at MIT, and a leading expert appointed to the committee because
of his meteorological expertise, was saying precisely that: the
amplification effect asserted cannot be relied upon to increase warming
because the vapour could turn into cloud. This needed to be proved before
basing assumptions on it. But Lindzen was overruled. Despite still being a
key part of the IPPC process, he is now vilified by the press and by the
environmental movement. So even on the most basic science of the
atmospherics, there is doubt.

Or take oceanography. Most of the heat of the planet is not contained in the
atmosphere; it is in the oceans. And what happens in the oceans is
absolutely vital to the dynamics of heat moving around the planet. So while
of course it is possible to warm up the planet to an additional extent as a
result of human activity, if the planet then lets more heat out than it
would normally do, then it will balance out. That is to say, you have only
to produce less cloud over the oceans and the oceans will release heat to
space. Like CO2 itself, the atmosphere doesn't actually hold heat - it
simply delays its transmission to space.

The real dynamic of the planet is to do with clouds, yet this area of
science - oceanography and cloud cover - is incredibly uncertain. When I
first looked at the basic science, the findings were surprising. Over the
global warming period - which I limit to the past 50 or so years - the globe
didn't warm at all between 1950 and 1980, even though carbon dioxide
emissions were going through the roof due to the postwar expansion of
industry; global temperatures stayed pretty much flat.

The real global warming took off in the 1980s and 90s, through to about
2005. (In the last 10 years it's actually plateaued.) That period of 25
years, from around 1980 to 2005, coincided with changes in the ocean and
cloud cover - that is, there was less cloud and more sunlight getting
through to the ocean. And this can be seen in the satellite data on the kind
of energy that's coming through (short-wave energy, which is the only energy
that heats water - infra-red energy coming from CO2 cannot heat water). So
when you look at the real-world data, the warming of that entire period
seems to be due to additional sunlight reaching the oceans.

In 2007, I put out a report on this, in the hope of getting feedback before
I published my book, *Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory*. Since
then, top scientists at NASA have agreed that this period of warming over
the past 25 years is entirely due to the short-wave radiation from sunlight,
with the ocean transferring that heat to the land.

So the crucial question is: has the cloud thinning been due to carbon
dioxide? Or is it part of a cycle? If you ask some of the top people at NASA
- that is, the people who interpret all the satellite data - they will say
it's 50-50. So you could say the greenhouse effect has warmed the oceans and
the warmer oceans have thinned the clouds. But that is still just a
hypothesis, it is not a proven scientific fact. That means you could assert
with equal validity that thinning clouds have warmed the oceans, which has
led to global warming - meaning the effect of carbon dioxide is minimal.

There is a fairly easy way of deciding between the two viewpoints: you look
at the history of climate to find out whether there has been warming and
cooling in the past, *before* carbon dioxide became such an issue. And of
course there have been cycles of warming and cooling, with the longest of
the cycles lasting about a thousand years and the shortest cycle - El Nino -
about four-to-eight years.

So, right now, we are at the peak of a thousand-year cycle. We also had a
peak for all the other cycles between 1995 and 2005. Given that these cycles
have peaked, temperature-wise, before, one can look at what happened back
then. A thousand years ago, for instance, the Vikings were growing crops on
Greenland, which assumes that the summer ice would have been more limited
than it is now. The Arctic melted down a thousand years ago, just as it did
2,000 years ago. What's astonishing is that you can see all of that in the
ice-core record in Greenland. And in each cycle of a thousand years, the
peak is getting lower. So overall the planet is actually cooling, from a
peak about 8,000 years ago.

Now the only way in which you can get cycles of warming and cooling on such
a scale is through the oceans. And the only way that can happen is in
relation to cloud cover. So the crucial question then is, how do the oceans
vary their cloud cover? What creates these cycles? There is a major
scientific controversy over how the sun's magnetic field influences the
different types of energy that reach the planet, and how they, in turn,
influence cloud cover. There are several different scientific teams working
on it, including one from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research
(CERN). What this shows is that it is still an unresolved question. Nobody
knows what the mechanisms are.

So why is the UN saying what it is saying? Well, if you actually look at the
wording of what this so-called consensus of scientists has produced, then
you will see that they believe that 'global warming is not due to known
natural causes acting alone'. This is clever wording. It means that the door
is open to an *unknown* mechanism driving the warming. So although it is
well known that the warming is naturally driven, the mechanism is not.

Why would the UN suppress all of this debate happening within its working
groups? The problem is that the secretariat within the UN tasked with
processing this debate is already committed - financially - to focusing upon
carbon dioxide as the climate-change driver. It is very hard for them to
backtrack.

It is only recently that the scientific world has bought into this
consensus. In 2001, America, Russia and China did not accept the UN's
analysis. But by 2004, America had signed up to it. And this was all down to
a certain team in the US which produced an analysis that ironed out the past
cycles of warming and cooling. Although it has since been discredited, this
report had a tremendous effect in bringing scientific institutions around to
the idea of man-made global warming.

So behind the appearance of consensus and settled science, there is now this
tremendous battle going on. The dissenting scientists are described by
certain journalists and environmentalists as 'denialists' and 'sceptics'
funded by the oil industry. This is simply not the case. There are top-level
atmospheric physicists, oceanographers and solar scientists who do not agree
that the case is proven for global warming. Nobody is seriously saying that
carbon dioxide has no effect whatsoever, but the defenders of the faith, as
it were, set up a straw man. 'These people', they say, 'think carbon dioxide
has no effect'. Only a lunatic fringe thinks that.

The critical scientists are simply saying that carbon dioxide's effect is
small, at most 20 per cent. This means that even a 50 per cent reduction by
2050 in manmade greenhouse gas emissions would only reduce the driving force
of climate change by 10 per cent. That's because the natural driving force
will determine the climate. As I argue in *Chill*, if you look at all the
past cycles, the temperature declines after a peak. And this decline will
bring with it wholly different problems - ones which, so far, we are
woefully underprepared for.

What's really disconcerting for me is that I am a longstanding
environmentalist. As part of environmental groups I've helped to prevent
nuclear waste from being dumped in the ocean, I've helped change emergency
planning for nuclear reactors, and I've also helped develop biodiversity
strategy. I'm as green as you can get. But what I am faced with now is
environmental groups and major NGOs - Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF,
even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds - which have allied
themselves with the state. They talk about so-called denialists allying
themselves with 'Big Oil', but they have fallen into the arms of big
government. They've allied with disreputable prime ministers; they've allied
with chief policy advisers who have never got anything right in their lives;
they've allied themselves with scientific institutions that have never led
on any of these environmental issues.

If you write something, as I have done with *Chill*, which is a rational,
critical appraisal of the whole situation, you would at least expect to have
some dialogue. But there has been nothing. I haven't had a single invitation
to speak to any of these groups. Even universities have been reticent. I
have been invited to speak at Leeds University, which has quite a strong
climate community, and the Energy Institute. But the environmental community
has been absolutely silent towards me. I would challenge them to bring all
of their experts to the table and hammer it out.

We're seeing the dangerous development here of a very intolerant political
ideology. It is a very strange political and scientific situation, in which
vast sums of money are underwriting a bureaucracy of climate accountants and
auditors, and in which academic funding is easier to obtain if you put
man-made climate change at the top of your research proposal. I have never
seen anything like it in the 40 years of my scientific and environmental
career.

*Peter Taylor was talking to Tim Black.*

*Peter Taylor* is author of *Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming
Theory*.

On 23 July 2010 09:42, Alan T wrote:

>
>
> Tom is right of course - climate change has become ridiculously
> politicised. Linzen, for example, holds strong right-wing views, and his
> work, funded for years by the US coal industry, is generally not taken
> seriously.
>
> The climate has always gone through cycles. Ice ages, for example, are
> caused by a slow wobble in the Earth's orbit. So in the face of all the
> shouting and accusations of conspiracy between the political right and the
> Greens, what are we to think? Well, you could do what Gareth Morgan did if
> you've got a couple of spare million lying around but I fall back to
> looking
> at the evidence - and it doesn't look hopeful.
>
> One way or the other, the fact is we are inadvertently conducting a
> planetary experiment on a massive scale. Maybe it's all down to chance,
> but
> having just come back from a not-quite-record heat wave in Germany, I'm
> not
> feeling particularly lucky.
>
>
> Cheers
>
> Alan