Case for Greenhouse Gas Forcing Suffers Further Blow
In an article in the March Scientific American, James Hansen, father of global warming alarmism (along with then-Senator Al Gore, Jr.), implicitly acknowledges that climate models have failed to reflect accurately what is causing the small warming trend recently observed.
Hansen summarizes, Human-made forces, especially greenhouse gases, soot and other small particles, now exceed natural forces, and the world has begun to warm at a rate predicted by climate models.
This would surely qualify as validation of the climate models if the models included all the forcings Hansen claims. In fact, as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made clear, most climate models rely primarily on greenhouse gas forcings and include little or no estimate for the other forcings Hansen now considers so important. In other words, if the Earth is warming at a rate predicted by the models, this is more coincidence than anything else, because the models clearly overestimated the effect of greenhouse gas forcings.
Underlining the greater importance of other factors, Richard Somerville (a professor of meteorology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and the organizer of a symposium on aerosols at the AAAS meeting in Seattle, titled “Our Hazy Atmosphere: Aerosols and Climate) announced in a press release, It has become clear that local effects on the heat budget from aerosols can be substantially larger than those from greenhouse gases. I believe we are at a very early stage of understanding the effect of aerosols. Aerosols come from all kinds of sources: dust blown off the Sahara by wind, particles emitted from smokestacks, gas from volcanoes. There are many, many complicated interactions with aerosols that we are just beginning to learn about.
More Problems with Hockey Stick
To add to the problems surrounding the failure to reproduce the long-term historical data in the hockey stick graph on which much of global warming alarmism depends (see last few issues), new questions have been raised about the end of the curve (the blade of the hockey stick).
Writing in Geographical Research Letters (Feb. 14), Willie Soon, David Legates, and Sallie Baliunas found that they were unable to reproduce exactly the extremely sharp upturn depicted in the IPCC graph using any of three standard methods for analyzing trend data. While they still found an upturn, their analysis found a difference of around 0.25 C., which appeared to be at least in part due to unjustified data-padding.
The inventor of the hockey stick, Michael Mann, responded by launching an ad hominem attack on Willie Soon (UPI, Jan. 26): The researcher has produced very poor work in the past, and isn’t taken seriously in the climate community, Mann told UPI. This sounds like another in their installation of just bad work. He added: I’m amazed this paper got into print. They don’t even try to determine what method we used. Our method was described in more detail in other papers.
Hoffa Says Kerry Will Drill for Oil All Over the United States
The Teamsters Union has endorsed Senator John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) for president. On February 18, Chris Matthews interviewed Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. on Hardball and asked him about Kerrys votes against oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the Teamsters top legislative goals. Here is an excerpt from the interview:
MATTHEWS: How about ANWR? You guys want to see ANWR because you want to see guys working in your business. I guess theres a lot of Teamsters jobs up there lined up and organized, if you could put a pipeline up to the Alaska wilderness. He [Kerry] is against that.
HOFFA: Well, we talked about that. He says, look, I am against ANWR, but I am going to put that pipeline in and were going to drill like never before.
MATTHEWS: But he is against drilling up there. What are they going to run through the pipeline?
HOFFA: Well, they are going to drill all over, according to him. And he says, were going to be drilling all over the United States. And he says that is going to create more jobs.
MATTHEWS: It just seems amazing that he has turned around on NAFTA, turned around on WTO, turned around on ANWR, anything to get the Teamsters.
HOFFA: Oh.
This excerpt has been tidied up to remove crosstalk. The full interview transcript is available on the MSNBC site at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4302564/. The League of Conservation Voters has also endorsed Senator Kerry for president.