Nov
29
Global Warming, Is it a Real Issue or a Political Business?
November 29, 2007 | 5 Comments
One of the great pushers for alternate fuel and energy sources is the drive known as global warming or climate change. Although I appreciate the added impetus to my favorite field, I certainly do not wish progress to come from a falsehood and the many strident calls for action that will simply distort our lives, cost us unimaginable investments and long term expenses and make us regular citizens poorer while the political and lobbyist manipulators design ploys to make fortunes for themselves. If anyone still believes that global warming or climate change is some incredible dangerous problem there is and will continue to come refutations that will be used for more hysteria and character assassination by the promoters of global warming and climate change.
While there is little doubt that the planet is warming, a hard look, with a careful eye will reveal that the climate history is at best poorly documented and subject to the interpretation of anyone’s choice. That leaves even me to check and consider what I might say, based on my choice of “facts.” The debate that is supposed to be over hasn’t even begun. I would offer just one visual aid. Its a set of graphs over 5, 65 and 540 million years. (Linked – as to get the point one will need to read the descriptions provided with each graph.) With the simplest question, “where are we now compared to where we’ve been, tells us what?”
It was damn cold not very long ago. And the oscillations have been pretty wide swings. The last million years or so have really long whipsaws of change. Mankind has only been around some 40,000 years or so and it’s alleged that in less than one hundred years we’ve upset a solar system sized energy system. Get real.
The sole, only, and unique driver for incoming energy is the sun. OK, there’s a bit of cosmic radiation, but its number on the scale of what comes in from the sun – is minuscule. That makes the sun’s activity the prime suspect in any analysis. The sun’s radiation can only impact the atmosphere and the planet’s surface – the things in the air, the surface of the oceans and land. The full spectrum of the sun’s light that matters is the infrared and the primary absorber, by far, is water vapor in the atmosphere and the surface of the oceans. The role that CO2 plays is minimal, after all it’s measured as a few hundred parts per million. What matters are the particulates we pitch into the air. But even that is small compared to cataclysmic events such a large volcano eruptions. That leaves us with the same question that bedevils every other topic we examine, what is the source of the variable energy? The sun.
No credible assertion about the global climate can be made without primary examination of the solar input to the planet. Well, try and get lots of good data on that. While there are a slew of studies looking at the atmosphere in place at given periods of time, there remains a relative paucity of solar radiation study over time. Which is understandable, as there don’t seem to be a lot of scientists looking and so far as I can tell, no good ideas on how to look into the deep past and get some solar radiation numbers to compare over long periods of time.
You would think that the science community would be deeply interested. But like all people, the blindside is always there. With the best of intentions, and the brightest minds better trained than any time in history, that is a minor disappointment. But something will crack, as it did in the search for planets in other solar systems, where the search parameters used were more narrow than the characteristics of the most easily observable planets. Open up the parameters and there are planets everywhere.
That makes the global warming and climate change issue a prime target for opening up the parameters, too. But as valid as science is, politically it’s a wasted cul-de-sac to be populated with government agencies, institutions, economic burdens and prodigious wastes of human capital to be paid for by all of mankind from the richest to the poorest with the poorest bearing the largest burden in coping with the consequences. This cul-de-sac is being made in the face of an obviously upward trend in global temperature thousands of years in progress and inevitably coming to an end.
But the political scam has a lot of stored energy to keep it going. Even as top minds will quietly admit the evidence is poor only some will stand up for common sense and good science. I mentioned John Coleman a few days ago and recently Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic spoke openly and forthrightly about the political problem it’s become at the UN.
Which is what the context needs to be. “Global Warming” or “Climate Change” has matured and some of us now realize that it isn’t a solar system energy event mangled by mankind; it’s a political cul-de-sac that is frankly a problem of politics and media behavior for citizens worldwide. This issue needs to be made clear, how much will we waste now and in the future until the solar activity turns and the cooling begins again?
My belief is that we need new energy and fuel for more than just an offset for oil or coal or uranium atomic power. Its going to get colder someday and we better get ready.
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The role of the sun in global warming has been studied. Here is a page with lots of info. Enjoy.
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html
Thanks Domenick! But I was looking for data based in the infrared not over less than 200 years but tens of thousands or millions. Science with some facts. I looked quite a bit and virtually all I’ve seen is selling CO2 from humans as the problem. The pages linked above are the cleanest that I found and John Coleman has some links. But the Stanford pages just leave me a little incredulous with a question, where is the science for the commentary?
I agree that we need some long range data reflecting solar variation and climate. Climateaudit.org is probably the best blog for discussions of proxy climate studies.
Two posts from climateaudit.org offer contradictory viewpoints: Scafetta, recently published in JGR, and Svalgaard, a NASA astrophysicist.
Both arguments have problems and neither will settle the issue. I am personally waiting for Svengard’s newer satellite data to become available within a year or so–to test his solar wind/cloud formation theory. If his data are strong enough, that may provide a good starting point for a stronger scientific focal point for climate change.
Pardon me, I meant to write “Svensmark” rather than “Svengard” as the Danish researcher studying the ongoing experiment relating cosmic radiation in the solar wind to cloud formation in earth’s atmosphere.
I discovered some interesting information on the sun-earth climate connection here.
There is some interesting background here and here.
[…] As I noted last week, the Global Warming campaign has become a political cu-de-sac for building out a home for the believers paid for by all the rest of us. Like it or not, the scientists we see working in the linked study papers above have to compete with issue artists living in the Global Warming cul-de-sac for funding so its very very important to be aware the climate is changing and the real research is still in its early stages. Because we’re the workers who support and will be beneficiaries of the science work, we must grasp that the climate needs to be understood much better before we fund a cul-de-sac of special interests that may prove to be an endless drain of our money and who expel a fog of disinformation and error to keep their zone filled with investment, salaries and pensions. I am very concerned that the press and public policy makers catch on and soon! […]