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.