global warming

The red Australian dust storm: I stood at the window, looking out in amazement. I had never seen anything like this before in my life. The front gate, a mere hundred metres or so away, was close to invisible. The red, choking dust had forced us all indoors, windows shut fast, the dust slowly obscuring more and more of our view. The fine, red silt nevertheless managed to find its way in under the doors and through the smallest crack, coating the floor near the entrances in red.

What is the common factor in all these recent issues in Australia:

1. An ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) to reduce carbon emissions and which will ruin the economy and add huge expenses to every single person in the  country;

2. Digging up prime agricultural land to provide coal for China to emit huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, and in the process ruining the standard of living of the rural people, and polluting the water supply and polluting food with heavy metals;

This is a reasonably short work, very different from Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth. Although Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and erstwhile Chief Research Scientist with Australia's CSIRO, he has put together an accessible summary of some of the damning evidence against the global warming alarmism.

When I started looking into the claims of dangerous warming due to carbon dioxide, I was completely baffled, buried in details of climate models, puzzled by energy balance diagrams, and so forth. Was there a "greenhouse" blanketing the Earth, slowly frazzling us to death? The truth could have been anything. If you've followed this path too, you'll know what I mean. But one thing, one single piece of the jigsaw, cut through all the fog and answered the question. I want to show you the thing that absolutely clinched the global warming question for me. I have postgraduate training in physics, which helped, but the basic point is understandable by anyone, and in this article I want to explain what seems to me the key, conclusive fact in everyday terms.

Over on the newsgroups, folk are discussing a rather sad article from ScienceDaily, called "Apparent Problem With Global Warming Climate Models Resolved".

Apparently the folk at ScienceDaily, as well as a large fraction of the general public, need some basic lessons in how real science, the science that increases our understanding and helps us make sense of the world, works. Here's a textbook example of how not to do it:

I am writing a book for lay people on global warming. I want to look at it from the angle: what are the best, simplest, convincing arguments? The other main question is, what are the questions people trying to make up their minds are going to ask in order to be sure?

The one fact that convinced me was that there is no heating signature in the troposphere, whereas all GCMs say there must be. That's a killer, and I'll shortly write a blog about it. But what convinced you? And when you were investigating, what were the big questions on your mind?

I'll probably be posting quite a bit about global warming, and you might wonder why I think it's a big issue for a site devoted to peace. Well, peace is easier if we aren't all scrapping with each other to eke out an existence in a starving world. True peace (which includes peace with all our nonhuman friends) requires we don't do things that will harm wildlife or damage Earth's capacity to feed us all. True peace should make everyone happy; and if you've seen Gitie's and my wild bird website (wingedhearts.org, you'll know I don't reserve "everyone" just for people.

I haven't yet told you all the reasons I personally am convinced we are in deep trouble with the belief that humans are causing dangerous global warming, but luckily there is a book that does so. Ian Plimer is perhaps best known as the geologist who debunked creationism in "Telling Lies for God". Here he turns his attention to the global warming beliefs that are now resulting in huge (possibly disastrous) policy changes by governments in the hope of avoiding "climate change". In "Heaven+Earth", I think Plimer does pretty well.