A friend of mine was recently hired by Sonoma County Schools (in California) to teach eighth grade science. Prior to becoming unionized, he was a global warming skeptic. One year after gaining NFT union protection, his curriculum and his emails read exactly like Democratic Party talking points. I mean verbatim.

If our secondary education system produced more critical thinkers, and the public school teacher’s unions were busted, the media and professoriat would not get away with this so easily.

Thanks for your post, Michael.
Steve

The real summary isn’t that the scare mongers should be ignored, but that we need to double up our efforts to figure out what is happening and possible solutions (even if they are not man made).

1. there is no real indication that anthropogenic CO2 levels are that high.
2. it’s likely that a small net rise in CO2 would actually be beneficial to the biosphere.
3. there’s no substantial warming over the last 150 years, and, in fact, temperatures seem to have declined since about 1940.
4. the climate of the earth is so beyond complex that none of the claims of so-called climatologists ten to twenty years ago have even come close to coming true. If we can not accurately predict the weather for a given area for the next ten days, how can we possibly make a prediction about the next ten years, 100 years, 1000 years?
5. despite the theory’s predictions, glaciers are advancing, not retreating. Antarctic ice is thickening.

As they used to say in those time/life book ads, Read the Book!

Same can be said of the hoax over CFC’s doing in the ozone, the concentrations of CFC vs. the vastness of the atmosphere make the theory bullshit.

A millenium after a remarkable rise in atmospheric CO2, sedimentary studies should reveal an increased layer of carbonate plankton skeletons on the sea-floor.

As far as I know, no proponents of Global Warming have factored biological CO2 absorption into their models.

-Steve

That is correct. A short Q&A on the subject can be found here.

However, the situation is complicated. The oceans are *the primary heat exchanger* for the entire planet. For that process to work properly, though, it’s necessary that the ocean be essentially homogenous in it’s salinity. Melting of arctic ices can cover key points in the ocean conveyer system with fresh water, shutting the heat exchanger down for landmasses warmed by the Gulfstream, mainly Europe.

A surface layer of fresh water also interferes with the abiility of the ocean to exchange heat with the atmosphere. (Diagram here)

However, I agree we don’t want a return of the Ice Ages. I support more research with the goal of moderating the climate to the best of our ability. Let’s see if we can break the cooling cycle without going overboard into a runaway greenhouse effect.

Climatologist have to get funding. They have lives too, and need an income. The way to get funding as a climatologist is to appear as if you support the “human caused global warming disaster” thesis.

These graphs look better than they actually are. You can look at them and think they are telling you something when they are not, or worse yet, they are misleading you.

The problem is that we have good measurements for the last hundred years or so, fair measurements for the past few thousand years, mediocre measurements for the past tens of thousands of years, and absolutely atrocious measurements for greater than 50 or 100 thousand years ago.

No wonder the graphs going back many hundreds of thousands of years appear so regular–they are based on so few data points as to be almost worthless.

Take a look at this graph. This is from the accompanying article:

“Establishing the exact role that atmospheric CO2 played in past natural climatic oscillations, however, is not a simple matter. Changes in atmospheric CO2 may have been more a response to climate change than a forcing mechanism. On the other hand, while we know that the pace of Quaternary glaciations was primarily driven by variations in Earth’s distance from the sun and in the angle of Earth’s axis of rotation, the resulting changes in incoming solar radiation to the planet’s surface are too small to account for the large climate variability observed. This implies that the effect of these orbital parameters must have been amplified by some internal feedback mechanisms within the earth’s environment, and we suspect that atmospheric CO2 may be a major factor. In view of its obvious connection to present societal concerns, this particular problem has elicited a lot of attention in the paleoceanographic community.”

It’s interesting that atmospheric CO2 seems to have peaked around 130,000 years ago. We haven’t yet matched that level.

Not an ideal situation, indeed. The thing that struck me about the second graph was not just the regularity of the previous warming periods but the lack of regularity of the present one. That is, the previous three warming peaks reveal that we spent a very short period of time above the baseline relative to the current warming. We have spent more than half of the last 50,000 years at or above or only slightly below the baseline.

It seems indeed true that global warming is a cyclical and naturally occurring phenominon. I have no doubt that we will, at some point take a nose-dive south, temperature-wise. Will our contributions to the natural effect cause the warming period to continue for an unnaturally long period of time? Will it have an effect on the steepness and depth of the cooling period? What will that mean for the future livability on earth?

I don’t think anybody knows, either…that’s what troubles me.

I don’t get it. The Keeling Curve measures CO2 concentrations at one location on Earth, which just happens to be Mauna Loa, the largest, and one of the most active, volcanoes on the planet according to the USGS.

The article you linked doesn’t explain how Keeling controlled for CO2 emissions from the volcano, or what rising CO2 measurements near a single active volcano over a 45 year period have to do with global CO2 concentrations or global warming.

But there are two pictures of the plaque commemorating the “Keeling Building”.

My political leanings incline me to be skeptical of most environmental scaremongering. But the global warming thesis was not hatched by a small band of granola-gobbling Sixties flotsam. Many scientists working independently in different disciplines over the past several decades followed clues that led to this hypothesis. That’s how major earth science discoveries are frequently made, like plate tectonics. Speaking as someone who grew up reading science columns by Isaac Asimov, and knows little more about science than what I read in the popular monthlies and on PBS, I think there is more to global warming than can be dismissed with some smashing jeers by conservative commentaters. It bears watching, and study, though of course we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be buffaloed into precipitate action until we’re all convinced of the need for it.