A dangerous climate
Thanks to blogger Michael Kruse for this find. Whether you are alarmed or skeptical about global warming, you can benefit from reading this article by a respected (as far as I know) environmentalist.
A dangerous climate | Uk News | News | Telegraph
A dangerous climate
By Bob Carter, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 1:12am BST 11/04/2007
Page 1 of 3The latest IPCC report, published on Friday, is the most alarming yet: not for its claims of human-caused global warming, writes the leading environmental scientist Bob Carter, but for its lack of scientific rigour
At 4C, it is cold in the storage refrigerator. One needs to rug up well to work here. I am at the US headquarters of the Ocean Drilling Programme at Texas A&M University, studying seabed cores from the southwest Pacific Ocean.
…For more than 90 per cent of recent geological time, the cores show that the earth has been colder than today. We modern humans are lucky to live towards the end of the most recent of the intermittent, and welcome, warm interludes. It is a 10,000 year-long period called the Holo-cene, during which our civilisations have evolved and flourished.
Backwards for hundreds of thousands of years, the core alternations march. Some, metronomic in their occurrence, are ruled by changes in the earth’s orbit at periods of about 20,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years; others are paced by fluctuations in solar output on a scale of centuries or millennia; and others display irregular yet rapid oceanographic and climate shifts that are caused by\u2026 we know not what. Climate, it seems, changes ceaselessly in either direction: sometimes cooling, sometimes warming, often for reasons that we do not yet fully understand.
Similar cores through polar ice reveal, contrary to received wisdom, that past temperature changes were followed – not preceded, but followed – by changes in the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide. Yet the public now believes strongly that increasing human carbon dioxide emissions will cause runaway warming; it is surely a strange cause of climate change that naturally postdates its supposed effect?
…n the present state of knowledge, no scientist can justify the statement: “Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperature since the mid-20th century is very likely due [90 per cent probable] to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations,” as stated in the 2007 SPM.
The environmental catchphrase of the moment is “sustainability”. It is therefore a good question to ask how much longer politicians, responding to pressure from the IPCC and other lobby groups, can sustain the fiction that dangerous human-caused climate change is upon us.
That climate change is part of our planet’s normal, dynamic behaviour is not in doubt. Nor should there be any doubt about the need for governments to prepare sensible response plans for future climate change, both warmings and coolings. But reflection on recent climatic episodes like the “little Ice Ages” makes it plain that future climatic coolings will cause much greater damage to our societies than will mild warmings similar to that of the 20th century.
advertisementThat 20th-century warming, the most recent of many previous warm phases of similar or greater magnitude, was dangerous or human-caused, or even that the warming has continued after 1998, both yet remain to be demonstrated.
I commend this long-ish article to your reading, if for no other reason than to point out that not all environmental scientists have jumped onto the global warming train.
Dave, who ‘rugs up well’ in the wintertime.
This writer may or may not be a “respected” climatologist. The article doesn’t give his credentials. He’s not publishing the article in a peer-reviewed journal, but in a newspaper.
Scientists involved in the actual research don’t tend to take time out to write articles for newspapers; this issue has become so politicized that mass-media statements usually are more political than reflecting any sort of scientific consensus.
No climate scientist of any repute claims that we aren’t in an interglacial period. This is true, but in the minute slice of geological time which concerns us, the time in which our children and grandchildren will live out their lives, the consensus is that the world will become a few degrees warmer.
The next ice age will inexorably come, there is no doubt about that. But in the short-term mean time, the next century or so, the temperature trend is upwards.
I’m in over my head, so I will defer to your comments. Thanks for chiming in.
Me too, perpetually in over my head. But this is interesting…
See Iain Murray’s essay at http://www.cei.org/gencon/004,05430.cfm
He is Oxford educated and was Director of Research at the Statistical Assessment Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that looked at how scientific and statistical information were used or misused by the media and policy-makers. Those with open minds may be interested. Those who have been listening to and believing Al Gore’s nonsense may not be. IMHO the hoopla over the dangers of global warming is so politicized that valid scientific data has been squelched if it does not support the prevailing speculation.