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July 16, 2009
Looks like the science of global warming isn't 'settled' at all
Rick Moran
Note to Al Gore: Your house of cards is falling down. Time to go into hiding.
At a time when the US is contemplating ruining our economy to save the planet from overheating, scientific inquiry into climate change continues - even as politicians tell us the issue is "settled" and all scientists agree we are headed for disaster.
That's what's great about science. When compelling proof emerges to contradict a theory - even one as politically and economically driven as global warming - good scientists pause and recalculate. The news that a front line science publication, Nature Geoscience, has published a public debunking of climate models that posit human activity as the main cause of global warming, will not alter the debate right away. But it certainly gives a foot in the door to skeptics and may be a tipping point that would entail a vigorous re-examination of the evidence.
In USA Today's Science Fair:
The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery."In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."
During the warming period, known as the "Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum" (PETM), for unknown reasons, the amount of carbon in Earth's atmosphere rose rapidly. This makes the PETM one of the best ancient climate analogues for present-day Earth.
As the levels of carbon increased, global surface temperatures also rose dramatically during the PETM. Average temperatures worldwide rose by around 13 degrees in the relatively short geological span of about 10,000 years.
The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of this ancient warming. "Some feedback loop or other processes that aren't accounted for in these models -- the same ones used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for current best estimates of 21st century warming -- caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM."
Please note that this does not debunk global warming - only the human caused aspect of the phenomenon. What it shows is that reducing emissions won't do a damn thing to reduce warming - which makes cap and trade obsolete.
Of course, that won't stop Democrats from trying to pass it. That's because it has never been about saving the planet. It's always been about aggrandizing power into the hands of the government at the expense of the rest of us. To that end, this study will be ignored by politicians. The best we can hope for is that scientists re-examine their own conclusions.
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