Global Warming Hysteria Has A Life of Its own

Global warming hysteria and “end is near” howlings have taken on a life of their own, though cut off from the nourishment of scientific support for their basic foundation.

The fever pitch of hysteria is exemlified by these two recent stories on ScienceDaily.com:

Toll Of Climate Change On World Food Supply Could Be Worse Than Thought

Climate Change Predicted To Drive Trees Northward

For more apocalyptic articles, see my previous post on the topic.

But all of this fear has barely a leg to stand on. A recent study to be published in The Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres suggests that the climatic warming estimated since 1980 may be overestimated by 100% due to a failure to account for the effects of land use changes. Similar problems were pointed out by McKendry in 2003 (Mckendry, Ian G., Progress in Physical Geography 27, 4 (2003) pp. 597–606).

Another recent study from the same journal suggests that as much as 50% of the warming observed since 1900 may be attributable to changes in solar irradiance.

And then there is “dirty snow“:

Dirty snow has had a significant impact on climate warming since the Industrial Revolution. In the past 200 years, the Earth has warmed about .8 degree Celsius. Zender, graduate student Mark Flanner, and their colleagues calculated that dirty snow caused the Earth’s temperature to rise .1 to .15 degree, or up to 19 percent of the total warming.

In the past two centuries, the Arctic has warmed about 1.6 degrees. Dirty snow caused .5 to 1.5 degrees of warming, or up to 94 percent of the observed change, the scientists determined.

Add this to the fact that the so called “hockey stick” graph of Mann et al. has been shown to have fatal flaws, and when the data are correctly handled, recent years turn out to be not much warmer than the Medieval Warm Period (see here and here).

Add Dr. Richard Lindzen’s points about the alarmist hype, for example, that we are already 3/4 of the way to a doubled carbon dioxide, but temperatures have only risen by less than half of model predictions.

Add the fact that a key “signature” or “fingerprint” of greenhouse-effect global warming that should be present in the temperature profile of the tropical atmosphere is missing (see Santer et al., Science 309, 1551 (2005)). Addded 12/11/07: This point is reemphasized in a new studiy published in the International Journal of Climatology (Douglass et al. 2007. DOI: 10.1002/joc). The study shows that greenhouse effect climate model predictions cannot be reconciled with the observed temperature trends in the tropical troposphere.

Add the reserach last year that showed correlations between cosmic rays and climate (see Svensmark, A&G, february 2007, Vol 48, p. 1.18).

After spending quite a bit of time researching this topic last year, I came to the conclusion that the only evidence for dangerous greenhouse-effect global warming is the climate models used by many researchers. Computer models, it seems to me, are the only leg they have to stand on, and these are questionable.

So why all of the continued hype and incessant alarms? It all smacks of propaganda, though perhaps it is just a social cascade.

About these ads