Dr. Martin Hertzberg, is a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry. In a letter to the USA Today he savages the Gore-IPCC theory that human activity is causing global warming.
“The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence shows that the Gore-IPCC theory that human activity is causing global warming is false….
The global warming alarmists don’t even bother with data! All they have are half-baked computer models that are totally out of touch with reality and have already been proven to be false….
From the El Nino year of 1998 until Jan., 2007, the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere near its surface decreased some 0.25 C. From Jan., 2007 until the Spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping 0.75 C.”
Have Your say!
January 5, 2009 at 3:07 am
BTW
If Kochie is listening to Don the Weatherman versus the MANY Australian scientists working on the problems of understanding global and local Climate Change of the calibre of Prof David Karoly of Melbourne University, he should talk to the chopper not the block. I thought he was brighter than that, but maybe he is just another “blonde TV face” after all.
Another hidden issue that is not coming through to the general public, is that while there are a handful of high profile Climate skeptics and hundreds of Climate Deniers, there are Tens of Thousands of Scientists from every discipline area imaginable putting effort into understanding, measuring and working out solutions and adaptive strategies to Climate Change. They are not doing it to “make money” if Climate Change did not exist they would still be working in their fields of physics, glaciology, ecology, horticulture or agriculture but with a different focus.
here are some interesting and useful sites for more is
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarmingQandA/
a long story on remote sensing of ocean temperatures
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/
Google “Drunken Forests”, about how the forests rooted in the Arctic Permafrost are falling over
National Snow and Ice Data Centre explains it here
http://www.nsidc.org/frozenground/how_fg_affects_land.html
This page at the University of Michigan shows more of the effects
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ahrensk/landscapes.html
and this page at “Discover” talks about the heatwaves in Alaska last northern summer
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/06/11/thawing-arctic/
January 5, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Hi David,
Just love posters that post tomes at 3:00 a.m.. I can’t cope with that (tough).
What I did pick up from that was the use of NSIDC. There has been notes that some of their data is corrupted.(Using data from Jim Hansen’s GISS purchance?)
I use AMSRE from Bremen University. There you can see the Arctic sea ice cover increase. I do a printout every couple of days, to do a comparison.
Even today 5/1/09 it is obviously still increasing, especially between Greenland and Svalbard. Also in the entrance to Lake Superior.
You can do the same with the Antarctic sea ice cover, it is diminishing because it is SUMMER, how frightening, the sea level will rise and we’re all going to drown.
January 5, 2009 at 2:46 am
This “cooling” of the globe is a good example of cherry picking figures, being selective about which figures are used to justify a climate change denial position.
Some of the professional Climate Denier sites dishonestly use figures from the UK Met Office that do not include Arctic temperature rises, while NASA and NOAA both include the Arctic where the rate of temperature rise is alarming and consequences already having a negative impact on ecologies and economies.
Global temperature averages are also about the heating of the Oceans. We are the “Blue Planet” with the majority of the Earth’s surface being covered in water, we just don’t live there, so it is largely out of our perception.
The figures being used to claim a “cooling” that all of a sudden cancels out climate change are from the weather, the daily, monthly and yearly figures. Climate is about long term trends and averages and the basic physics and how that plays out.
A dip in the last year, does not cancel out the basic physics of the energy in the system, or the long term graphs that indicate humans started altering the climate at the beginning of civilisation with cows, paddy fields and deforestation.
The difference between weather and climate is between taking a bet, buying lottery ticket or a roll of the dice in a Casino, versus the facts that the “House always wins.” So too the big picture of Climate is far more predictable within a range of figures than the small picture of weather predictions and individual temperature readings. see http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/
The basic physics of Climate Change are fairly simple to understand. What we do not understand adequately, as it has never been measured before, is at what point in pushing a delicately balanced system, do we push it over the edge. The worry about Climate Change in the scientific community is not about nice steady (linear) graphs but about sudden and unpredictable events that are like a one way jump over a cliff.
Where is the tipping point in a one way process… burning a cake, boiling the porridge dry, or the loss of the Ice mass of Greenland ???
eg. Glaciologists are now confident to say that land-based glaciers take thousands of years to build up, but potentially can collapse explosively in a very small period of years and decades; or in the case of Greenland and the West Antarctic Icesheets, God alone knows until it happens and if/when they do melt explosively, God help us and the hundreds of millions of people displaced.
We know that sea ice and glaciers reflect ~90% of incoming energy, but once you lose that icy white reflective surface, the mud, rock or seawater will absorb ~80-94% of incoming energy. So once you lose glacial ice, sea ice or ice shelves, there is a very good chance you will continue to lose ice at a faster and faster rate.
Its also the physics of domino effects,
1 lose sea ice,
2 heat ice shelves sticking out from the glaciers,
3 lose ice shelves
4 remove “champagne cork” from the glacial bottles and the glaciers (rivers of ice) speed up
5 glacial edge retreat leads to heating up of rock and more glacial melting
6 leading edge of some glaciers now backed up to the ice sheet of Greenland, ~2000kms long, 1200 wide, average of 2.4kms thick
Back to the basic physics
Put more blankets on and you get hotter, and certain gases in the atmosphere are doing exactly that, Carbon Dioxide, Water Vapour, Methane, Nitrogen Dioxide, and a stack of others including CFCs, Sodium Hexafluoride.
The molecules of these gases act like mini mirrors to infrared radiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared
So if we increase the concentration of the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, we stop energy leaving the planet.
All observations by NASA of incoming solar radiation see no significant change. But they do see a decrease in energy leaving the planet.
While there is no significant change in incoming energy, there is a significant increase and speeding up of the accumulation of all human caused (anthropogenic) greenhouse gases and there is a huge global scientific effort looking at the cycles of water vapour and the role of clouds. While water vapour and clouds are out of our control, the production of the other greenhouse gases is not.
So the simple energy equation of the Earth is that the Sun’s energy in many different forms (wavelengths or frequencies) including visible light, Infrared (heat), Ultraviolet A, B & C, mainly comes in at the equator and mostly leaves the Earth at the Poles as Infrared.
The energy moves from the equator to the poles via ocean currents and winds. So if the energy coming in remains relatively constant, and it is being slowed from leaving, where does it go?
The Planet is not just the bits we live in, not just the tropics, or the temperate zones where most of the development of western civilisation resides. It is also the Polar regions, and the oceans to the their very depths….. kilometres down.
The Polar regions ARE rising in temperature at a far faster rate than the rest of the planets. So are the other regions categorised as the Cyrosphere (all the cold bits) including the tropical high altitude glaciers.
The Oceans ARE rising in temperature, but not in any simple way, as the world’s oceans are complex in their patterns of heat distribution.
It takes 1000 times more energy to heat a quantity of water as the same volume of air.
Ocean circulation patterns are massive, with the Gulf Stream water descending to the ocean floor near Iceland not coming to the surface in the Indian or Pacific Oceans for 2,000 to 5,000 years.
The oceans also have circulation patterns from the top to the middle and the bottom. Currently the oceans are warming significantly 1 and 2 kilometres down, but a relatively cool on the surface. So it is the surface mass that is influencing our weather and producing cooler land temperatures, not the cessation of the basic physics governing our global climate.
There is evidence that this pattern of midwater warming and surface cooling is holding back global warming, and that when the Decadal (10yr) and Multi-Decadal circulation patterns bring the warmed water back to the surface, we will return to the catastrophic conditions of heat waves, severe droughts, food security issues and faster spreading of emerging tropical diseases.
Prof Ross Garnaut was right when he described Climate Change as the biggest challenge facing our world, and a “Diabolical Problem”.
It is complex, it is a real and present danger, and it is not easy to communicate to people when our education systems have not prepared us with an ecological literacy.
We all know about dollars, getting the correct change and using an ATM to pay for our groceries, but we are not taught about keystone species, ecological resilience and all the interdependent species and ecosystems we need for our clean water, healthy food and a stable climate.
Do any of us really want to risk a rapid rise in sea level of 5-15 metres….. say at 1m per year.????
That’s not the sort of risk taking future I want for all our children to have to face. But that is the sort of risk, real-time experiment we are playing.
We all know that young blokes “playing chicken on the roads” with a semi-trailer or a level crossing with trains eventually means someone gets killed, so why are we playing chicken with the biggest potential disaster you could imagine?
Sorry this is a bit long, but hopefully it helps. It is trying to distill what I have been studying for 20+ years and teach to my uni and TAFE classes into bite size chunks.
Cheers
David
Sustainability Educator
University of Canberra
January 2, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Hi Agmates,
Maybe we could arrange a study exchange between our Environment Minister or Climate Change Minister(or both) for this Minister in the UK.
At least for this term of office.
http://tinyurl.com/7kkyrl
January 2, 2009 at 10:25 am
It definitely is a turning point if Koschie is saying that – he is a present day ‘guru’ for many people apparently.
December 28, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Hi,
Hate to be boring, but this has been done before (Global Warming Scare):
http://tinyurl.com/7syuvv
But this time the big money has gotten behind it, oh, and of course the New Religious zealots now have a new Satan to fight.
December 28, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Yes I just love the global warming/cooling/drying/flooding/snowing/hailing/blowing/sleeting etc that is going on here and around the world – it is so important to have a Minister for Climate Change to keep an eye on the weather.
We just had a beautiful 15mm downpour to keep the grass growing – I say good on climate change – keep it happening Ms Wong !!
December 28, 2008 at 11:08 am
Just a quick note. South Australia’s yearly average temperature for 2008 was the lowest recorded for the past seven years.
December 27, 2008 at 9:02 am
I didn’t dare open my mouth to my corporate family in the city about the global warming hoax – they all believe it or are happy to go along with it.
With tons of food to eat and full and plenty of everything they are in denial about a lot of things and they don’t want to hear a person from the bush say it is all nonsense so I talk other stuff. I make very few anti – government statements in the city because they are all happy to go along with ( or don’t want to think about it ) the global waming hoax , the terror hoax , very likely the internet filter censorship anti-porn hoax and I don’t dare mention the recession/depression because they think it will be all better in a year or two .
While they have jobs and plenty to eat they will remain passive and let the government get more control over us and take more rights away from us gradually.
I was very cynical about the report concerning the Haneef case being delivered on Christmas Eve. There was a conspiracy of the Howard government including Ruddock and Andrews and the AFP to nail Haneef as a terrorist – BUT the politicians are above the law and it won’t be investigated by the Rudd government because he wants to do the same thing and it will be written off as incompetence – that is how our governments do terrorism – its easy when you are above the law.
January 2, 2009 at 9:55 am
Slowly. slowly, the tide seems to be turning, with even the great global warming bigot Koschie on Sunrise listening to what a weatherman had to say this morning on falling global temps. Basically his message was that man may be contributing to climate change but there could be other, bigger factors we have no influence over and which would need to be studied and debated if the cooling trend continues.
Why can’t Rudd and Wong see what is obvious to anyone with an open mind?
January 2, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Hi John Mikkelsen,
Climate Change doesn’t appear to be a problem for those that preach on the evils of fossil fuels use.
Besides our own Kevin737 we have Greenpeace:
Five-Star Green Hypocrisy
http://tinyurl.com/43s3eh