Heidi Cullen on Katrina and Covering the Climate
By Montag | Related entries in Environment, Hurricane Katrina, Science, Smart Things Said By Smart PeopleAlterNet posts an interview with the Weather Channel’s climate expert Heidi Cullen. She says global warming isn’t the only culprit we sould examine with regard to the intensity of Hurricane Katrina.
What lesson should we draw from Katrina? In light of the fact that it was predicted years ago what a hurricane like Katrina would do to the Gulf Coast, Cullen says:
. . . As I see it, Katrina is a warning that scientific predictions need to be better integrated into the public discourse and play a bigger role in America’s long-term thinking and planning.
AlterNet: If You Don’t Like the Climate, Wait a Minute
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September 27th, 2005 at 4:02 am
Fascinating in many ways, and damaging to those who push the global warming agenda. The interviewer has an attitude that people are sheep who must be led around by those who know better. Dr. Cullen is evolving, right there in the interview, from a cautious scientist skeptical of simple explanations and simple-minded policies to a full-fledged “journalist” for whom emotion and public manipulation for the sake of an agenda is more important. Global climate change and what to do about it are important issues. Scientists like Dr. Cullen might help us get out of this mess. Journalists like her interviewer will only increase public skepticism.
October 10th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
I feel that you lost your way here with this comment.
…”full-fledged “journalistâ€Â? for whom emotion and public manipulation for the sake of an agenda is more important…”
This is a very aggressive reading of what Dr. Cullen was actually talking about near the end of the interview. Her changing approach to the presentation of her topic was not about the “agenda”, but simply about television and entertainment and how the feedback she receives from the producers has led her to try present the information in a more lively fashion.
I think if you read the answers you will not find that she saying anything different about Global Warming than she was saying when you considered her a cautious and appropriately skeptical scientist.
TV has different goals than science journals. The fact that TWC is attempting to even approach this topic is admirable, and problematic for a scientist/journalist given the current state of the debate on global warming, and its being bogged down in idealogoy and economics. Both scientist and journalist are supposed to be neutral observers of what is actually occurring. But … TV journalism in general has not been very neutral for quite a while now.
November 16th, 2006 at 8:07 am
RE: Dr. Cullen: #1. The weather channel is a great guide to know how to dress before leaving the house for work. #2. The climate models assumed and built in too many errors from the start; I guess that wouldn’t science, but politics. How can anyone compete with a Mt. St. Helen? #3. The environments we can effect would be in our homes and work places; that’s what I do. Cancer has been touring our family caused by chemicals in the work place and homes. We were not sure of these things 20 years ago, but of course now there is proof.
Well OK, go back to #1; add to that a good looking group. Al
January 17th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Dr. Cullen, I read on Drudge Report that you want to discredit and decertify scientists who don’t believe the way you do. That sounds very totalitarian, don’t you think. I don’t believe in global warming, either, and think that people who run around touting it are godless fools. I think every global warming report should be greeted with an equal and opposite anti-global warming report. You’ve thoroughly discredited yourself as a scientist with your rigidity and fear of being wrong. You must be a communist to try to silence free thinkers and free speech.
January 20th, 2007 at 6:09 am
Heidi Cullen, needs to be fired NOW! It is one thing to use your own Free Speech to talk about your subject on Global Warming, but to call for ALL others to be silenced, smacks of pique and shows only she needs to be silenced.
She crossed the line and she needs to be canned. She is afraid of her own crossed questions that give crooked answers so she wants silenced, obedience and censorship. This is a mark of a radical emotional child not the ink of a scholar.
She can forfeit her position and speech NOW!
January 20th, 2007 at 6:46 am
Cullen’s imaginary know-how on climatologic includes, among other things, earning a bachelor’s degree in Near Eastern religions and history from Juniata College. One must indeed have to believe in the magic to accept anything Ms. Cullen has to say about climatology.
A clever fact the Weather Channel does not publish on her rubbish bio.
The retreat from scientific forecasting of the weather to sensationalized fascists political advocacy is Wonya Lucas, executive vice president and general manager of The Weather Channel Networks, a CNN flunky. Remember it was CNN that proffered to interview a Dictator Murderer Sadamn Hussein rather than tell the truth about his actions too.
We can expect the Weather Channel to provide us with same ethics, censorship and falsehoods, so long as Heidi and Wonya are there managing lies for the truth.
Shame on them both and the Weather Channel is now history in my household.
January 20th, 2007 at 11:32 am
GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL. GODDAMMIT!!!
January 22nd, 2007 at 4:22 pm
I am an Engineer,
Can anyone get me the full data
report/data set on Global Climate Change
and its causes.
I would like to review all the data for validity.
Please send all data to my address
43568 Mulholand HWY Malibu, CA 93046
If it is to much work to send the data, Please just tell me that Global Warming is serious and it is all caused my man. I will then
believe you and send you all the money you need
for any solution you want.
Thanks Jim
January 23rd, 2007 at 8:35 am
To Heidi
Do you not know that there is FREEDOM of PRESS and the RIGHT to FREE SPEECH. Unless it stops at the door of the weather channel why on earth would you make such a stupid statement. I think you should be fired and then the Fed. Gov’t investagate you for tryinh to surpress others right to free speech. I for one will block this channel untill they can your ass
January 23rd, 2007 at 11:43 am
Heidi,
You called for anyone disagreeing with Global Warming not be certified, then you deny you said it?
Then you said all Hurricanes move Clockwise and anyone denying it is just proof they do not know what they are talking about and should not be taken seriously. Then you were corrected and found out Hurricanes in Southern Hemisphere move Counter Clockwise. Yet, you proved only you were wrong.
Finally, it is clear you lack the intelligence to be used as any scientific source and should just look for another vocation.
The Weather Channel stinks for hiring you, and until they admit that mistake, I will go elsewhere for realiable weather based on verified data, not made up speeches calling for censorship.
Lou
January 23rd, 2007 at 11:46 am
Hail Heidi!
Lets practice Hitler’s Policies and drown out, remove or extinguish anyone that fosters an alternative view than your own.
I am proud of you and your scietific approach to free speech and the weather.
Adolph Hitler
February 15th, 2007 at 5:05 am
Funny, the Meeting on Global Warming was cancelled due to Snow, Frezzing Rain and cold conditions…….maybe they should cancel the meeting forever!
February 15th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
Antarctic temperatures disagree with climate model predictions
COLUMBUS , Ohio – A new report on climate over the world’s southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models.
This comes soon after the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that strongly supports the conclusion that the Earth’s climate as a whole is warming, largely due to human activity.
It also follows a similar finding from last summer by the same research group that showed no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet.
David Bromwich, professor of professor of atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geography, and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, reported on this work at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at San Francisco.
“It’s hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now,” he said. “Part of the reason is that there is a lot of variability there. It’s very hard in these polar latitudes to demonstrate a global warming signal. This is in marked contrast to the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula that is one of the most rapidly warming parts of the Earth.”
Bromwich says that the problem rises from several complications. The continent is vast, as large as the United States and Mexico combined. Only a small amount of detailed data is available – there are perhaps only 100 weather stations on that continent compared to the thousands spread across the U.S. and Europe . And the records that we have only date back a half-century.
“The best we can say right now is that the climate models are somewhat inconsistent with the evidence that we have for the last 50 years from continental Antarctica .
“We’re looking for a small signal that represents the impact of human activity and it is hard to find it at the moment,” he said.
Last year, Bromwich’s research group reported in the journal Science that Antarctic snowfall hadn’t increased in the last 50 years. “What we see now is that the temperature regime is broadly similar to what we saw before with snowfall. In the last decade or so, both have gone down,” he said.
In addition to the new temperature records and earlier precipitation records, Bromwich’s team also looked at the behavior of the circumpolar westerlies, the broad system of winds that surround the Antarctic continent.
“The westerlies have intensified over the last four decades of so, increasing in strength by as much as perhaps 10 to 20 percent,” he said. “This is a huge amount of ocean north of Antarctica and we’re only now understanding just how important the winds are for things like mixing in the Southern Ocean.” The ocean mixing both dissipates heat and absorbs carbon dioxide, one of the key greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
Some researchers are suggesting that the strengthening of the westerlies may be playing a role in the collapse of ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula.
“The peninsula is the most northern point of Antarctica and it sticks out into the westerlies,” Bromwich says. “If there is an increase in the westerly winds, it will have a warming impact on that part of the continent, thus helping to break up the ice shelves, he said.
“Farther south, the impact would be modest, or even non-existent.”
Bromwich said that the increase in the ozone hole above the central Antarctic continent may also be affecting temperatures on the mainland. “If you have less ozone, there’s less absorption of the ultraviolet light and the stratosphere doesn’t warm as much.”
That would mean that winter-like conditions would remain later in the spring than normal, lowering temperatures.
“In some sense, we might have competing effects going on in Antarctica where there is low-level CO2 warming but that may be swamped by the effects of ozone depletion,” he said. “The year 2006 was the all-time maximum for ozone depletion over the Antarctic.”
Bromwich said the disagreement between climate model predictions and the snowfall and temperature records doesn’t necessarily mean that the models are wrong.
“It isn’t surprising that these models are not doing as well in these remote parts of the world. These are global models and shouldn’t be expected to be equally exact for all locations,” he said.
###
Contact: David Bromwich (614) 292-6692; Bromwich.1@osu.edu
February 16th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Cleveland’s weather wizards downplay global warming:
Sure, a panel of 2,500 scientists this month declared that it is “unequivocal” that global warming is occurring and at least 90 percent certain that humans are responsible but what 90% of not proving it?
And, yes, the international report predicted that world temperatures will rise from 3.2 to 7.8 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 and that sea levels could rise from 7 to 23 inches, leading to worldwide catastrophe.
OK, fine — but don’t get too worked up over it. That was the consensus among five Northeast Ohio meteorologists at a panel discussion Tuesday at Landerhaven in Mayfield Heights.
It’s not that Mark Johnson, Dick Goddard, Mark Nolan, Jon Laufman or former Cleveland weatherman Don Webster disbelieve the data entirely.
But they’re skeptical, and they don’t believe that it’s necessarily our fault or that we should panic over it.
“We have maybe 100 years of data on a rock that’s 6 billion years old,” said Johnson, a WEWS Channel 5 weatherman. “Mother Nature tends to even herself out, and the fact is, the Earth is cyclical.”
Goddard, WJW Channel 8 meteorologist, said scientists have flip-flopped on the matter: “I have a file an inch thick from 30 years ago that says the planet was cooling,” he told the crowd of several hundred.
They cautioned listeners not to put too much stock in what they said was an insufficient history of warming.
“The term global warming’ strikes fear in the heart of people every time you say it, but it’s simply a rise in temperature over time, and it’s happened before,” said Nolan, meteorologist at WKYC Channel 3. “I’m not sure which is more arrogant for humans: to say we caused it or to say we’re going to fix it.”
Laufman, who has free-lanced for WOIO Channel 19 and taught meteorology courses at several local colleges, including Case Western Reserve University, also referenced history.
“There was also a significant spike in world temperatures during the 1400s — and that was well before the Industrial Revolution,” he said “We haven’t studied it long enough to know what causes global warming.”
Even Webster, who now lives in Hilton Head, S.C., but flew in this week to moderate the discussion, was flippant.
“Where’s Al Gore now?” he joked with the audience, referring to the former vice president and his documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which argues the case for global warming. “You can bet he’s not in New York, where they’ve got nearly 12 feet of snow right now.”
Oh by the way, most meetings were cancelled on Global Warming after the snow, ice and cold wind storms happen the last 10 days.
Of course we now are 90% sure that no human did it all by himself, but some media babes calling herself a scientiss will say it, like Heidi Cullen if she is going to be put on TV.
Another reason to be concern when minds claiming to use science turn mush into facts they cannot prove. Heidi only you deserve not to have certification, not based on what you say, but based on not being bale to prove anything about the weather except your TV ratings.
February 19th, 2007 at 8:38 am
18 February 2007
Global warming doomsdayers were out and about in a big way recently, but the rain came in Central Queensland and then here in Sydney. January also was unusually cool.
We have been subjected to a lot of nonsense about climate disasters as some zealots have been painting extreme scenarios to frighten us.
They claim ocean levels are about to rise spectacularly, that there could be the occasional tsunami as high as an eight story building, the Amazon basin could be destroyed as the ice cap in the Arctic and in Greenland melts.
An overseas magazine called for Nuremberg-style trials for global warming skeptics while a U.S.A. television correspondent compared skeptics to “holocaust deniers�.
A local newspaper editorial’s complaint about the doomsdayers’ religious enthusiasm is unfair to mainstream Christianity. Christians don’t go against reason although we sometimes go beyond it in faith to embrace probabilities.
What we were seeing from the doomsdayers was an induced dose of mild hysteria, semi-religious if you like, but dangerously close to superstition.
I am deeply skeptical about man-made catastrophic global warming, but still open to further evidence. I would be surprised if industrial pollution, and carbon emissions, had no ill effect at all. But enough is enough.
A few fixed points might provide some light.
We know that enormous climate changes have occurred in world history, e.g. the Ice Ages and Noah’s flood, where human causation could only be negligible.
Neither should it be too surprising to learn that the media during the last 100 years has alternated between promoting fears of a coming Ice Age and fear of global warming!
Terrible droughts are not infrequent in Australian history, sometimes lasting seven or eight years, as with the Federation Drought and in the 1930s. One drought lasted fourteen years.
We all know that a cool January does not mean much in the long run, but neither does evidence from a few years only. Scaremongers have used temperature fluctuations in limited periods and places to misrepresent longer patterns.
The evidence on warming is mixed, often exaggerated, but often reassuring. Global warming has been increasing constantly since 1975 at the rate of less than one fifth of a degree centigrade per decade.
The concentration of carbon dioxide increased surface temperatures more in winter than in summer and especially in mid and high latitudes over land, while there was a global cooling of the stratosphere.
The East Anglia university climate research unit found that global temperatures did not increase between 1998 – 2005 and a recent NASA satellite found that the Southern Hemisphere has not warmed in the past 25 years.
Is mild global warming a Northern phenomenon?
While we might have been alarmed by the sighting of an iceberg off Dunedin as large as an aircraft carrier we should be consoled by the news that the Antarctic is getting colder and the ice is growing there.
The science is more complicated than the propaganda!
Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
February 20th, 2007 at 6:21 am
Humans’ Beef With Livestock Plus Farts Means A Warmer Planet!
Global warmers want to take away our cars, heat, and now meat!
Now that Congress begins to seek causes and cures of global warming, the action will just focus on gas-guzzling vehicles and coal-fired power plants, not on lowly cows or our food supply.
But Global Warming Myth Makers avoid talking about how livestock are a major emitter of greenhouse gases that cause climate change at a higher rate than the targets they are addressing now.
It is well known that flatulence from manure of grass-chewing cattle is a prime contributor to global warming, according to a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
And it is not just the cow’s farts that cause it. Land-use changes, especially deforestation to expand pastures and to create arable land for feed crops, is a big part. So is the use of energy to produce fertilizers, to run the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants, and to pump water.
“Livestock are one of the most significant farters to today’s most serious environmental problems,” Henning Steinfeld, senior author of the report, said when the FAO findings were released in November.
Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, reports the FAO. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide.
Altogether, that’s more than the emissions caused by transportation. A truck carrying Cows to slaughter actually is a Bio-Hazard.
Methane has 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2 and nitrous oxide has 296 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.
Methane could become a greater problem if the permafrost in northern latitudes thaws with increasing temperatures, releasing the gas now trapped below decaying vegetation. Damn, what can we do that about that if that happens? Lets send candles to Eskimo’s and make them stand there and burh off the Methane as it rises.
What is more certain is, that emissions of these gases can spike as humans consume more livestock products. As prosperity increased around the world in recent decades, the number of people eating meat has risen steadily. But Hail Heidi wants to stop that progress too, maybe if we starve people there will be less gas?
As population increased, total meat consumption in the developing world grew nearly five-fold over that period. Damn, those poor people are farting us to oblivion!
Does this mean the “Heifer Charity Program� that donates critical cows to undeveloped families to survive are actually responsible for Global Warming and we should take their cows from them?
Maybe we can create a device that lights up and burns off the farty methane gases when cows and humans pass gas. Or we can create methane collectors on our toilets to catch the gases and then use it for our stoves.
Or we and all livestock could wear bubble far collectors that save our gas all day long. I have a problem with that, my cat will not wear a collar, I doubt he will accept a Global Fart Collector device for any length of time.
Maybe we just need another Holocaust to remove Human Life and Farts from our Planet and then need fewer cows to feed us?
Well, I am sure Nazi Weather Girl Heidi Cullen will come up with a solution when she silences all of us as she Goose Steps Global Warming Marches over any scientists that disagrees with her.
One of Heidi’s Plans for Global Control through silencing her critics is is to have Global Fart Police. If you are caught farting you will be sent to Prison Re-education camps and forced on a Non-Fart Diet! Or they will kill your cat or dogs for failure to control his farts!
Hail Heidi!
February 23rd, 2007 at 8:33 pm
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February 26th, 2007 at 8:33 am
Inconvenient Truths
Novel science fiction on global warming.
By Patrick J. Michaels
This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science fiction.
The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.Where’s the scientific support for this claim?
Certainly not in the recent Policymaker’s Summary from the United Nations’ much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100.
Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent. Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly.
Atmospheric methane concentration hasn’t changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCC’s methane emissions scenarios as “quite unlikely. �Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.’s new projection is about 30-percent lower than it was in its last report in 2001.
“The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica for the rates observed since 1993,� according to the IPCC, “but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future.
�According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005, Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century.
“Was� is the operative word. In early February, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland’s ice loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed. Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find any support for Gore’s hypothesis.
Instead, there’s an unrefereed editorial by NASA climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal Climate Change � edited by Steven Schneider, of Stanford University, who said in 1989 that scientists had to choose “the right balance between being effective and honest� about global warming � and a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was only reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. Hansen.
These are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to “do� something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami. And given that Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago, the real clock must be down to eight years!
It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with politicians about various “solutions� for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century.
That’s too small to measure, because the earth’s temperature varies by more than that from year to year.The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto � i.e., less than nothing � for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around 2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to dictate our energy policy for today).Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan.
President Bush proposes that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the next decade. But it’s well-known that even if we turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption.
The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food supply to please a political mob.And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol efficiently, only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation.
Even the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of gasoline would only reduce our total emissions by 7-percent below present levels � resulting in emissions about 20-percent higher than Kyoto allows.And there’s other legislation out there, mandating, variously, emissions reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050.
How do we get there if we can’t even do Kyoto?
When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient. And it’s not just Gore’s movie that’s fiction. It’s the rhetoric of the Congress and the chief executive, too.
� Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.
February 26th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
POWER: GORE MANSION USES 20X AVERAGE HOUSEHOLD; CONSUMPTION INCREASE AFTER ‘TRUTH’
Mon Feb 26 2007 17:16:14 ET
The Tennessee Center for Policy Research, an independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization committed to achieving a freer, more prosperous Tennessee through free market policy solutions, issued a press release late Monday:
Last night, Al Gore’s global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, collected an Oscar for best documentary feature, but the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy.
Gore’s mansion, [20-room, eight-bathroom] located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES).
In his documentary, the former Vice President calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home.
The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh�more than 20 times the national average.
Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh�guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.
Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.
Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.
“As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk to walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use,� said Tennessee Center for Policy Research President Drew Johnson.
In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006.
March 3rd, 2007 at 12:43 am
Great Article On How Mars & Earth Global Warming!
Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says
Kate Ravilious
for National Geographic News
February 28, 2007
Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet’s recent climate changes have a naturalâ€â€?and not a human- inducedâ€â€?cause, according to one scientist’s controversial theory.
Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Get an overview: “Global Warming Fast Facts”.)
Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.
In 2005 data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide “ice caps” near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.
Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.
“The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars,” he said.
Solar Cycles
Abdussamatov believes that changes in the sun’s heat output can account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets.
Mars and Earth, for instance, have experienced periodic ice ages throughout their histories.
“Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance,” Abdussamatov said.
By studying fluctuations in the warmth of the sun, Abdussamatov believes he can see a pattern that fits with the ups and downs in climate we see on Earth and Mars.
Abdussamatov’s work, however, has not been well received by other climate scientists.
His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion,” said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England’s Oxford University.
“And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report.” (Related: “Global Warming ‘Very Likely’ Caused by Humans, World Climate Experts Say” [February 2, 2007].)
Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that “the idea just isn’t supported by the theory or by the observations.”
Planets’ Wobbles
The conventional theory is that climate changes on Mars can be explained primarily by small alterations in the planet’s orbit and tilt, not by changes in the sun.
“Wobbles in the orbit of Mars are the main cause of its climate change in the current era,” Oxford’s Wilson explained. (Related: “Don’t Blame Sun for Global Warming, Study Says” [September 13, 2006].)
All planets experience a few wobbles as they make their journey around the sun. Earth’s wobbles are known as Milankovitch cycles and occur on time scales of between 20,000 and 100,000 years.
These fluctuations change the tilt of Earth’s axis and its distance from the sun and are thought to be responsible for the waxing and waning of ice ages on Earth.
Mars and Earth wobble in different ways, and most scientists think it is pure coincidence that both planets are between ice ages right now.
“Mars has no [large] moon, which makes its wobbles much larger, and hence the swings in climate are greater too,” Wilson said.
No Greenhouse
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov’s theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet’s surface.
He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth’s climate and virtually no influence on Mars.
But “without the greenhouse effect there would be very little, if any, life on Earth, since our planet would pretty much be a big ball of ice,” said Evan, of the University of Wisconsin.
Most scientists now fear that the massive amount of carbon dioxide humans are pumping into the air will lead to a catastrophic rise in Earth’s temperatures, dramatically raising sea levels as glaciers melt and leading to extreme weather worldwide.
Abdussamatov remains contrarian, however, suggesting that the sun holds something quite different in store.
“The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040,” Abdussamatov said. “It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years.”
March 5th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Here is a good article on Global Warming and all aspects on what to do.
Allegre’s Second Thoughts-The Deniers —
The National Post’s Series On Scientists Who Buck The Conventional Wisdom On Climate Science
LAWRENCE SOLOMON, Financial Post
Published: Friday, March 02, 2007
Claude Allegre, one of France’s leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming.
“By burning fossil fuels, man increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, for example, has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century,” Dr. Allegre, a renowned geochemist, wrote 20 years ago in Cles pour la geologie..”
Fifteen years ago, Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming’s “potential risks are very great” and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe’s fragility in order to stave off “spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse.”
In the 1980s and early 1990s, when concern about global warming was in its infancy, little was known about the mechanics of how it could occur, or the consequences that could befall us.
Since then, governments throughout the western world and bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have commissioned billions of dollars worth of research by thousands of scientists.
With a wealth of data now in, Dr. Allegre has recanted his views. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena. Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.
His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in l’ Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro’s retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes.
“The cause of this climate change is unknown,” he states matter of factly.
There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the “science is settled.”
Dr. Allegre’s skepticism is noteworthy in several respects. For one, he is an exalted member of France’s political establishment, a friend of former Socialist president Lionel Jospin, and, from 1997 to 2000, his minister of education, research and technology, charged with improving the quality of government research through closer co-operation with France’s educational institutions.
For another, Dr. Allegre has the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution. His break with scientific dogma over global warming came at a personal cost: Colleagues in both the governmental and environmental spheres were aghast that he could publicly question the science behind climate change.
But Dr. Allegre had allegiances to more than his socialist and environmental colleagues.
He is, above all, a scientist of the first order, the architect of isotope geodynamics, which showed that the atmosphere was primarily formed early in the history of the Earth, and the geochemical modeller of the early solar system.
Because of his path-breaking cosmochemical research, NASA asked Dr. Allegre to participate in the Apollo lunar program, where he helped determine the age of the Moon.
Matching his scientific accomplishments in the cosmos are his accomplishments at home:
Dr. Allegre is perhaps best known for his research on the structural and geochemical evolution of the Earth’s crust and the creation of its mountains, explaining both the title of his article in l’ Express and his revulsion at the nihilistic nature of the climate research debate.
Calling the arguments of those who see catastrophe in climate change “simplistic and obscuring the true dangers,” Dr. Allegre especially despairs at “the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man’s role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters.”
The world would be better off, Dr. Allegre believes, if these “denouncers” became less political and more practical, by proposing practical solutions to head off the dangers they see, such as developing technologies to sequester C02.
His dream, he says, is to see “ecology become the engine of economic development and not an artificial obstacle that creates fear.”
Lawrence Solomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.
CV OF A DENIER:
Claude Allegre received a Ph D in physics in 1962 from the University of Paris. He became the director of the geochemistry and cosmochemistry program at the French National Scientific Research Centre in 1967 and in 1971, he was appointed director of the University of Paris’s Department of Earth Sciences. In 1976, he became director of the Paris Institut de Physique du Globe. He is an author of more than 100 scientific articles, many of them seminal studies on the evolution of the Earth using isotopic evidence, and 11 books. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Science.
March 5th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Greenhouse effect is a myth, say scientists
By JULIE WHELDON
Research said to prove that greenhouse gases cause climate change has been condemned as a sham by scientists.
A United Nations report earlier this year said humans are very likely to be to blame for global warming and there is “virtually no doubt” it is linked to man’s use of fossil fuels.
But other climate experts say there is little scientific evidence to support the theory.
In fact global warming could be caused by increased solar activity such as a massive eruption.
Their argument will be outlined on Channel 4 this Thursday in a programme called The Great Global Warming Swindle raising major questions about some of the evidence used for global warming.
Ice core samples from Antarctica have been used as proof of how warming over the centuries has been accompanied by raised CO2 levels.
But Professor Ian Clark, an expert in palaeoclimatology from the University of Ottawa, claims that warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in carbon dioxide levels.
The programme also highlights how, after the Second World War, there was a huge surge in carbon dioxide emissions, yet global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.
The UN report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published in February. At the time it was promoted as being backed by more than 2,000 of the world’s leading scientists.
But Professor Paul Reiter, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said it was a “sham” given that this list included the names of scientists who disagreed with its findings.
Professor Reiter, an expert in malaria, said his name was removed from an assessment only when he threatened legal action against the panel.
“That is how they make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed,” he said. “It’s not true.”
Gary Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, claims clouds and solar activity are the real reason behind climate change.
“The government’s chief scientific adviser Sir David King is supposed to be the representative of all that is good in British science, so it is disturbing he and the government are ignoring a raft of evidence against the greenhouse effect being the main driver against climate change,” he said.
Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, said climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds.
He said: “The system is too complex to say exactly what the effect of cutting back on CO2 production would be or indeed of continuing to produce CO2.
“It is ridiculous to see politicians arguing over whether they will allow the global temperature to rise by 2c or 3c.”
The documentary is likely to spark fierce criticism from the scientific establishment.
A spokesman for the Royal Society said yesterday: “We are not saying carbon dioxide emissions are the only factor in climate change and it is very important that debate keeps going.
“But, based on the situation at the moment, we have to do something about CO2 emissions.”
March 9th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
I have no problem with Global Warming and I am for a cleaner energy base environment, but to attack others for not following along is not just unfair but hurts the debate on what we should be doing.
Now I personally believe Michael Crichton’s new novel “State of Fear” talks about the very issue that Heidi Cullen is doing, exaggerating the science of the global warming to further the ends of eco-terrorists trying to shock all of us in their reality.
I even disagree with the inevitable conclusion of his book that global warming is a non-problem. But he has a right to speak out too and we need debate on the subject before we make policies we cannot control in the future.
So, bring on more clean ways of providing energy, who cares if it is CO2 or Methane or man made or sun created, why not seek cleaner energy goals on own regardless of the political debate on Global Warning.
At the same time, Heidi is doing the exact opposite of Crichton and when we stifle debate no one wins, but even Crichton is for cleaner energy, just not being blinded by being told shut up if you do not believe me.
The Congress was about to have hearings but all of a sudden, they were cancelled due to snow in March. I do not care if it is global warming or cooling, all I know is we can produce clean coal, and we can produce cleaner cars, electricity, and airplanes.
No meeting will change it, no attacks will silence us, and no change will occur until we produce the technology to use cleaner fuels, electricity and energy, why debate it, we all want to clean it?
Heidi hurt the debate by wanting to decertify Weather Persons, Al Gore hurt it when he claimed mostly all Scientists agree with what is causing Global Warming, I say, lets just go and produce cleaner energy and that is what many companies are trying to do right now.
March 21st, 2007 at 11:37 am
Czech leader Klaus fights global warming ‘religion’
By Jan Lopatka
PRAGUE – Czech President Vaclav Klaus said on Wednesday that fighting global warming has turned into a a ‘religion’ that replaced the ideology of communism and threatens to clip basic freedoms.
The right-wing president, a free-market champion, wrote to the U.S. Congress that adopting tough environmental policies to fight climate change would have destructive impact on national economies.
‘Communism has been replaced by the threat of an ambitious environmentalism,’ Klaus wrote in response to questions from the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy and Commerce.
The U.S. House Subcommittee for Energy and Air Quality was due to hold a hearing on climate on Wednesday with former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, who sees global warming as a key challenge, and Danish sceptic Bjorn Lomborg, who says governments should focus on fight disease and hunger instead.
Gore, who won an Oscar for ‘best documentary’ for his ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ movie on climate change, has led a global warming awareness drive in the United States, the world’s largest source of gases believed to cause it.
Klaus, who does not hold many executive powers but is by far the most popular politician in the ex-communist Czech Republic, has taken a decisively opposite stance on the issue.
Klaus said poor nations would also be hurt by efforts to impose limits and standards on emissions of gases believed to cause global warming.
‘They will not be able to absorb new technological standards required by the anti-greenhouse religion, their products will have difficulty accessing the developed markets, and as a result the gap between them and the developed world will widen,’ he wrote.
‘This ideology preaches earth and nature and under the slogans of their protection – similarly to the old Marxists – wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world,’ he added.
U.S. President George W. Bush opposes mandatory caps on heat-trapping gases. He pulled the United States out in 2001 of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Klaus wrote that it was futile to fight against phenomena like higher solar activity or the change of ocean currents, and called for avoiding wasting taxpayers money on what he called doubtful projects.
‘No government action can stop the world and nature from changing. Therefore, I disagree with plans such as the Kyoto Protocol or similar initiatives, which set arbitrary targets requiring enormous costs without realistic prospects for the success of these measures,’ he said.
April 19th, 2007 at 9:28 am
Scientist: Warming not caused by humans
Thursday, April 19, 2007
By WENDY REEVES
Times Staff Writer wendy.reeves@htimes.com
Roy Spencer says we don’t know yet how changes are happening
MADISON – Roy Spencer is speaking up about his belief that Earth is not headed toward a global warming disaster.
Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and former NASA scientist, said he knows he’s in the minority with his opinions, but he doesn’t believe manmade influences are causing catastrophic climate changes.
“We see something change in our climate and we blame ourselves,” Spencer told the Republican Women of Madison during a lunch meeting Wednesday.
Spencer contends there is not yet enough known about the Earth’s atmosphere to understand exactly what occurs naturally to stabilize the earth’s climate.
“I don’t think we understand what happens. We can watch it happen on the (climate) models, we know it happens, but we don’t know for sure how it happens,” Spencer said.
Developing new energy technology is the only way to know for sure, he said, because he believes the existing climate models are too sensitive.
He said everything about the climate is tied to precipitation systems. But the climate models don’t consider precipitation efficiency. However, he said the little evidence that exists shows precipitation systems act as a natural thermostat to reduce warming.
“The air you’re breathing right now was, in the last few days, part of a precipitation system,” he said.
Spencer said the fears about global warming have people wondering whether something should be done now to stop it.
“That’s the precautionary principle, and it makes no sense because we don’t live our lives that way,” Spencer said. “Everything in life has risks and benefits; we could die from eating food.”
Energy is needed by humanity, Spencer said while poking fun at Al Gore and other environmentalists who talk about conservation.
“Most of us are already doing what we can to conserve, but it won’t have any impact on global warming,” Spencer said.
Two weeks ago, he testified in a congressional hearing on global warming. Next month, he’ll make presentations at the White House and to top evangelical leaders on his research.
“It’s a busy field and keeps me awake,” Spencer said.
April 19th, 2007 at 9:30 am
Climate change skeptics say it’s hard to get heard
Wed Apr 18, 2007 2:15PM EDT
By Jeff Mason
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – skeptics of the seriousness of global warming complained on Wednesday of not being heard by the public or policy makers while warning governments to take a second look at the scientific consensus on climate change.
Scientists who doubt the scope and cause of climate change have trouble getting funding and academic posts unless they conform to an “alarmist scenario,” said Roger Helmer, a British member of the European Parliament, at a panel discussion on appropriate responses to rising global temperatures.
“If global warming is happening, we can then ask: is it accelerating and is it likely to be catastrophic?” he said. “Many people think not.”
European Union leaders agreed in March to try to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least a fifth compared with 1990 levels by 2020 and as much as 30 percent if other industrialized and emerging countries joined in.
The EU pledge came shortly before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which groups 2,500 scientists and is considered the world authority on the issue, said all regions of the planet would suffer from a sharp warming.
David Henderson, an economist at the Westminster Business School in London and former head of the Economics and Statistics Department at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, said governments had given the IPCC a monopoly on climate advice.
“The very idea of creating a single would-be authoritative fount of wisdom is itself dubious,” he said, urging countries to seek a more balanced approach than the IPCC and to stop pursuing programs to urgently reduce carbon emissions.
“In this area of policy it’s high time for governments to think again,” he said.
Mahi Sideridou, climate policy director at environmental group Greenpeace, rejected criticism of the IPCC.
“Saying that the IPCC is not balanced is probably the most ridiculous claim that anybody can make,” she said, stressing the group’s reports were based on scientific consensus.
The IPCC findings are approved unanimously by more than 100 governments and will guide policy on issues such as extending the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol, the main U.N. plan for capping greenhouse gas emissions, beyond 2012.
Benny Peiser, a professor at Liverpool John Moores University, questioned the methods used by climate scientists. He said many were recognizing that using computer modeling to predict an “inherently unpredictable future” was illogical.
“Today’s scientific consensus very often turns out to be tomorrow’s redundant theory,” he said. He said that scientific journals refused to take papers from scientists who doubted climate change.
Most scientists say climate change will cause seas to rise, glaciers to melt and storms to intensify, potentially leading to more natural disasters around the world.
November 9th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Loan Payday…
We are expecting that because director-generals who attend business in West Valley City at intervals accredit payday loan advances…