MORE CRACKS IN THE ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING DAM:

(I saw this today, so I thought I'd tack it up here:)

"The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming.  The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science.  The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.” …

"The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling.   A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

"Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton’s paper an “expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and “extensive errors”

"In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, “I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central ‘climate sensitivity’ question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method.”

COOL IT - CHAPTER TWO:

In chapter two of Bjorn Lomborg's book, he asks several interesting questions about properly measuring the effects of global warming:

1.   What happens when temperatures increase?
2.   What can we do about this?
3.   What does it cost?

Lomborg observes that the rate at which people are adding CO2 to our atmosphere is increasing, and this increase is contributing to the rise in temperatures.  Furthermore, as nations such as China and India continue to develop, even more CO2 will be added, increasing the man-made greenhouse effect. {Curiously, he makes no immediate mention here of the minuscule proportion that CO2 represents among all of the greenhouse gases, but presumably we will come back to that later}.

Drawing on the computer modeling used in the United Nations' IPCC report, Lomborg notes that the IPCC has predicted a global rise in temperatures of 4.7 degress F by the year 2100.  He also points out, however, that this "average" will not be equally distributed around the globe.  Land warms up faster than the ocean, cities create "heat islands," and "cold" temperatures are warmed up faster than "warm" temperatures (in other words, temperatures at night and in the winter are increased faster than temperatures in the day and in summer; similarly, temperature rises will be greater in temperate and polar regions, and lesser in the equatorial regions).

The thrust of this chapter is to bring to the reader's attention the fact that global warming may have a net favorable effect on the rate of human deaths because, even though there may be more deaths from the additional heat in the warmer months and locations, there will be far fewer deaths during cold weather.  Lomborg also begins to make the point here that there are cost-efficient ways to combat many of these warming trends that are nowhere near as expensive and wasteful as the much-touted Kyoto protocols (which require severe limitations on CO2 emissions).  For instance, cities can dramatically reduce the heat-island effect by planting more trees, or by simply painting black asphalt white.

There's much more to chapter two, but that will have to do for now.

COOL IT - CHAPTER ONE

So, I've begun to read Bjorn Lomborg's new book, "Cool It - The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming." (2007)  I hope to be able to carve out enough time to read it before I have to return it to the library.  I'll be posting various observations along the way.  Here's one excerpt from chapter one (after reciting the alarms that have been sounded in the press -- by Al Gore, Time Magazine, and others) about the supposed imminent demise of the entire polar bear population because of global warming:

    "But the real story of the polar bear is instructive.  In many ways, this tale encapsulates the broader problem with the climate-change concern: once you look closely at the supporting data, the narrative falls apart." * * *
    "Over the past few years, this story has cropped up many times, based first on a World Wildlife Fund report in 2002 and later on the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment from 2004.  Both relied extensively on research published in 2001 by the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the World Conservation Union."
    "But what this group really told us was that of the twenty distinct subpopulations of polar bears, one or possibly two were declining in Baffin Bay; more than half were known to be stable; and two subpopulations were actually increasing around the Beaufort Sea.  Moreover, it is reported that the global polar-bear population has increased dramatically over the past decades, from about five thousand members in the 1960s to twenty-five thousand today, through stricter hunting regulation.
    "Contrary to what you might expect -- and what was not pointed out in any of the recent stories -- the two populations in decline come from areas where it has actually been getting colder over the past fifty years, whereas the two increasing populations reside in areas where it is getting warmer."

Lomborg points out that the polar bear story teaches us three things: (1) we hear vastly exaggerated and emotional claims that are simply not supported by the data; (2) polar bears are not the only story -- many species do better when the arctic ecosystem warms; (3) our worry makes us focus on the wrong solutions (i.e., if you really want to help polar bears, you should focus on hunting regulations).