global warming

In a comment on a story on Wattsupwiththat,  Julian Flood makes the following interesting suggestion:

No doubt you are familiar with planktonic carbon-fixation paths, but let me remind you anyway. Most plants, phytoplankton included are C3, a process which is discriminatory against the heavier carbon isotopes, so a richly-fed ocean will tend to take up a slightly greater proportion of the light isotope 12C. C3 requires a good level of trace elements, including… zinc and chromium, IIRC, but don’t quote me on that… and without those trace elements the phytos which use C4 will begin to dominate. Indeed, certain flexible phytos will change in those circumstances to C4 from C3. C4 uses much more C13/14 than C3.

A starving, stratified ocean will thus move towards a metabolic pathway which pulls down more heavier isotopes of carbon and the atmosphere will be depleted of those isotopes. I have argued that this is the source of the light isotope atmospheric signal which we are pointing to as the anthropogenic signal.

Jeremy Grantham has put out a report claiming to be "everything you need to know about global warming in five minutes". Thank you Jeremy for summarising the global warming case so succinctly. It should make it much easier for readers to see where the truth lies. Here are my comments on your case, please feel free to post any response you wish.

1) The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, after at least several hundred thousand years of remaining within a constant range, started to rise with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It has increased by almost 40% and is rising each year. This is certain and straightforward.

True. It is also a fact, proved by literally hundreds of careful scientific experiments, and also by every operator of a commercial greenhouse, that almost every plant on Earth grows better—30% better for a 300ppm increase is a conservative average—with more CO2. There are six billion people on Earth, and the increase in CO2 you mention has fed about a billion of them with the same cropland under cultivation. I think you had something else in mind when you mentioned the CO2 increase, but it had better be really important if  you intend us to put it ahead of the lives of billions.

Charles the moderator over on Wattsupwiththat called the following from http://www.congress.org/soapbox/alert/15194771 the stupidest article he'd ever seen. It's hard to disagree. For those who imagine that we have an issue with two sane sides in the global warming debate (or even worse, who think that the alarmists are the only sane side!), this article should show you, unless you too are so far gone there's no hope, just how much sheer mindless stupidity and lunacy surrounds the global warming scam / false religion / mass delusion. And all this despite the increased CO2 feeding an extra billion people and saving who knows how many wildlife and species.

Be alarmed. Be very alarmed. But not with the increase in vital CO2 plant food, rather with the demonstrable fact that our species can collectively go completely and utterly insane. Those of us who want a good future for our children and for all the other creatures on Earth have a lot of hard work to do to reverse the mass insanity. (I am putting the entire article here because it is evidence, and I don't trust these people to leave it in place when it gets rightly panned all across the internet.)

As readers will know, I have been thinking about the hullabaloo about CO2 and global warming and I quickly concluded that CO2 is no threat, won't do any significant warming (which would be good anyway), and is in fact 100% good for the planet. But someone said to me, if CO2 is no danger, that doesn't mean that humans are not causing a danger in some other way. Of course I agreed with this, because there are lots of things humans are doing wrongly and thereby causing terrible damage to our world (and the CO2 storm in a teacup is distracting us all from fixing those real problems).

My friend then went on, however, to propose that the danger was still global warming and that the mechanism was, instead of CO2 greenhouse warming, the mere fact that human technology gives off heat. All the power used by all the machines and transport and so on eventually ends up as waste heat. Maybe that is in itself enough to cause us serious warming trouble? So I did some calculations.

According to the laws of thermodynamics, the process of doing useful work must necessarily lose some of the energy from the fuel in the form of waste heat; and that heat, well, heats. In other words, because of the huge extra amount of useful work we do, we create excess heat that would not have been here otherwise, and that heat has to either be dissipated somehow, or else raise the temperature.

The factors that have caused the ice ages, as we saw, are primarily small changes in insolation (heating) by the Sun. The changes can happen because the Sun’s energy output changes or because of cyclic changes in the Earth’s orbit and inclination, etc., changing the amount of heat that actually arrives on the surface. Changes in the Earth’s orbit are believed to be the triggers for the onset of ice ages, and the changes in heating caused by those changes are thought to be quite small compared to the total power output of the Sun. This might lead us to suspect that human-caused changes in the amount of heat at the surface might indeed have a significant effect on the climate.

I created this website to explore options for peace, so why do I find myself writing so much about global warming? Well, if there's disharmony in the home and you want the family to talk it through, if you find the house is on fire, you have to do something about the fire first. And the loss of truth in science to push a very bad political 'solution' to a non-problem is a worldwide fire threatening civilisation itself.

Case in point: the lost island in the Bay of Bengal. Here's the BBC, covering itself in inglory pushing political antiscience instead of truth:

A tiny island claimed for years by India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal has disappeared beneath the rising seas, scientists in India say.

The uninhabited territory south of the Hariabhanga river was known as New Moore Island to the Indians and South Talpatti Island to the Bangladeshis.

Recent satellites images show the whole island under water, says the School of Oceanographic Studies in Calcutta.

Its scientists say other nearby islands could also vanish as sea levels rise.

Beneath the waves

The BBC's Chris Morris in Delhi says there has never been a permanent settlement on the now-vanished island, which even in its heyday was never more than two metres (about six feet) above sea level.

In the past, however, the territorial dispute led to visits by Indian naval vessels and the temporary deployment of a contingent from the country's Border Security Force.

"What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Professor Sugata Hazra of the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University in Calcutta.

Anyone wishing to visit now, he observed, would have to think of travelling by submarine.

Very tragic, the loss of that island. Let's see, the sea rose, how much? They were two metres above sea level and now require a visit by submarine? Would that be at the very least, say, three metres, would you think? And in how long a time? India didn't have a navy until after independence in 1947, which is 62 years, or a rise of about five metres per century, which is drivel pure and simple. So much for sea level rise, and so much for the BBC's journalistic skills and/or integrity in reprinting the drivel. But we can actually do much better then this. Here's The Independent's almost as uncritical take on the same story:

It particularly irritates me when people make strident claims and then, when the claims are found to be untrue, someone says "Oh well, maybe a few people said that, but not any of us level-headed chaps." In other words, they get the mileage from the absurd claim, but when the claim is caught out, it is downplayed and disowned.

Which brings me to this 2006 article (index.php/ archives/ 2006/ 03/ bush-on-the-debate) from realclimate dot org, the website that proclaims itself "climate science from climate scientists." The site seems to be funded out of the taxes of those of you in America, so it must be reliable (wink wink):

"...warming yes, but is it caused by humans? This position is equally out of step with science, where the debate over this question has also now been settled."

In my last post I took apart the frivolous claim by scientists at the Hadley Centre, the University of Edinburgh, Melbourne University and Victoria University in Canada, that global warming was increasing the salinity of the oceans. They claimed, remember, that they had 'studied' 100 scientific papers:

The panel assessed more than 100 recent peer-reviewed scientific papers and found that the overwhelming majority had detected clear evidence of human influence on the climate.

Apparently they forgot to 'study' this one by NASA's Earth Observatory: 

Researchers Link Ice Age Climate Change Records to Ocean Salinity

October 4, 2006

Sudden decreases in temperature over Greenland and tropical rainfall patterns during the last Ice Age have been linked for the first time to rapid changes in the salinity of the North Atlantic Ocean, according to research published Oct. 5, 2006, in the journal Nature. The results provide further evidence that ocean circulation and chemistry respond to changes in climate.

The Australian gives us this precious piece, reprinted from The Times:

Man-made climate change evidence stronger: study

EVIDENCE that human activity is causing global warming is much stronger than previously stated and is found in all parts of the world, according to a study that attempts to refute claims from sceptics.

I'll get to the bit that shows this "study" for what it really is in just a mo', but in passing, I note that real scientific work doesn't have an agenda, it attempts to find the truth. Yes, scientists do set up "devil's advocate" experiments in which they attempt to disprove theories, but the purpose is to test the strength of the theory: if it passes, it gains credibility. Or, of course, if it fails, it is disconfirmed. But one shouldn't set up 'studies' whose goal and methodology is designed to confirm what you already claim; science is tested by passing hard tests, not by being confirmed in 'studies' designed to be helpful. Moving on...

The "fingerprints" of human influence on the climate can be detected not just in rising temperatures but in the saltiness of the oceans, rising humidity, changes in rainfall and the shrinking of Arctic Sea ice at the rate of 600,000sq km a decade.

Now let's just stop and think for a moment about this, and let's overlook the detail that Arctic sea ice has risen every year since 2007, because I just can't get my eyes off that "saltiness of the oceans" bit. For all intents and purposes the amount of water on Earth is constant. Yes, meteorites may deliver some, and some may be broken up by radiation in the atmosphere, some hydrogen atoms escape the Earth's gravity, and so on. But compared with the total quantity of water, these changes are, on the scale of hundreds or even thousands of years, minuscule. So much for two countries' erstwhile best newspapers.

I attended the Brisbane leg of Lord Monckton's Australian tour last week. The Irish Club was packed. I tried to estimate capacity and got up to around 400, but as the talk started crowds poured in and a standing crowd filled the space between the seats and the back wall. While the crowd swelled, Lord Monckton took the opportunity to introduce himself to attendees.

While the ideologues and ethics-free financiers gather in Copenhagen to set up an unelected socialist world government (suits the former) that runs a scam "market" in an invisible and unaccountable "product" - carbon offsets (certainly suits the latter, who will find lots of opportunities there for mtaking money -ours!), we repeatedly hear the allegation that the "deniers" (meaning the ones who say the climate always changes and always will) are well financed by "Big Coal" whilst the ones who believe in "climate change" (i.e. who assert the climate was magically constant for two thousand years) are strapped for cash and always fighting against overwhelming odds.

Yes, the odds are overwhelming in one sense, because the "deniers" - meaning the realists - have truth on their side, whilst the "good guys" - meaning the ones trying to starve the planet of CO2 plant food and thereby send a billion people into starvation - don't.

But as for money, no, sorry. "Big Coal" finances the alarmists, not the realists. Here is part of a press release from Australian "Big Coal" (The Australian Coal Association):