Climate Deniers Gather In Times Square

This week, more than 600 people have gathered in New York for the International Conference on Climate Change. But it may not be what you think -- it's a conference organized by the conservative Heartland Institute, which doesn't believe in climate change.

It comes on the heels of a gathering of some 12,000 young climate activists -- who favor action to stop climate change -- in Washington, DC.

This year's conference has its high points and its low points for organizers. Among the high points is one of its special guests -- the president of the Czech Republic.

Conference organisers were celebrating something of a coup in securing as a keynote speaker the Czech president, Václav Klaus, at a time when his country holds the rotating presidency of the EU. Klaus, a Eurosceptic, believes that efforts to protect the world from the impact of climate change are an assault on freedom.

In his remarks last night, Klaus accused European governments of being "alarmist" on the subject of climate change and in thrall to radical environmentalists.

"They probably do not want to reveal their true plans and ambitions to stop economic development and return mankind several centuries back," he said.

But Klaus and the others at the conference are being abandoned and questioned by others who only last year would have stood beside them. The New York Times' Andrew Revkin points out a wide variety of reasons that the conference is a bit weaker than usual, including the fact that not even Exxon wants to sponsor it now:

But two years after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded with near certainty that most of the recent warming was a result of human influences, global warming's skeptics are showing signs of internal rifts and weakening support.

The meeting participants hold a wide range of views of climate science. Some concede that humans probably contribute to global warming but they argue that the shift in temperatures poses no urgent risk. Others attribute the warming, along with cooler temperatures in recent years, to solar changes or ocean cycles.

But large corporations like Exxon Mobil, which in the past financed the Heartland Institute and other groups that challenged the climate consensus, have reduced support. Many such companies no longer dispute that the greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels pose risks.

Comments

[mrsolik]

SFTor:

You love the debate. And you have brought up fine points in your debate. Unfortunately, the only thing a debate determines is who's a better debater.

Debate powerpoints aside.

Using your reason, do you think pumping gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere is something good for the place that we live. Do you think, not "do you know", do you think this action will have a positive effect?

[SFTor]

I think my mind is clouded and complicated on this issue.

I don't think the emissions are good due to their overall content of pollutants.

CO2 is not a pollutant, not at this level or at any level we are likely to release into the atmosphere in the foreseeable future. We are not poisoning plants, animals, or acidifying the ocean for that matter with the CO2.

We are also coming out of a period with historically low CO2 levels (I know, I know, they were 180 ppm during the last Ice Age, but then again let's keep in mind that plants start to die at that level.) As we live in a carbon-eating biosphere I think the increased levels of CO2 are unlikely to cause much of a problem. As a matter of fact, the SeaWIFS data from JPL shows increased plant growth all over the planet.

If you can stop for a moment and take a detached look at the idea that the planet is in some kind of ideal state right now, that should say something.

[U2Dave]

Deniers are the same as heretics of conventional religion. Science was meant to be an antidote to this dilemma. Science, however, has merely taken it's place. Global Warming has become the green god. Many of you religion haters have become religious zealots with out thought. You've been baptized in the waters of public education indoctrination. May mother earth and god have mercy on your confused thoughts or souls. Pick which ever feels like it applies more aptly.

[Kaviraj]

Scientific opinion is but another opinion. Scientific work does not consist of having opinions but stating facts, which can be verified. The statement above about sea-levels rising as untrue, is still touted by the so-called scientific community as the ultimate truth. Nobody has accounted for axis wobble and nearly everyone focuses on CAR BON DI OXIDE and me thane, blaming vegetarians for producing greenhouse gases and wanting to abolish the cow for the same reason. Not only unrealistic, but highly confrontational, tendentious and aggressive to boot to spout such vagaries as the cause for the changing weather in different climate zones.

[Exusian]

Talk about scatter-brain.

So much nonsense, so little thought.

[Kaviraj]

Scientific opinion is but another opinion. Scientific work does not consist of having opinions but stating facts, which can be verified. The statement above about sea-levels rising as untrue, is still touted by the so-called scientific community as the ultimate truth. Nobody has accounted for axis wobble and nearly everyone focuses on C O 2 and me thane, blaming vegetarians for producing greenhouse gases and wanting to abolish the cow for the same reason. Not only unrealistic, but highly confrontational, tendentious and aggressive to boot to spout such vagaries as the cause for the changing weather in different climate zones.

[Kaviraj]

Another point, which the doomsday sayers have overlooked, is in the melting of the North Pole ice cap. Not that it is neglected – on the contrary; it is presented as the next doomsday scenario of disappear-ing Pacific islands and low-lying coastal plains. However, we see that the melting tundras leave huge holes in the ground. Houses built on the permafrost have sunk down as deep as ten metres or more. We have all been confronted with the images on TV, yet no scientist comes forward and points out that this creates a gigantic reservoir. Since the North Pole is a sea, the ice at the pole is floating on water and will also not cause a rise in the sea level. Even the Greenland ice cap can be easily accommodated by the gigantic surface of permafrost that will sink down. The area of permafrost is easily 10 times the size of Greenland, if not much bigger and can contain a huge amount of water. The danger of rising sea levels is in this light rather negligible or at least greatly exaggerated.

[Kaviraj]

That whole includes its history, both recent and remote: at least in terms of the earth and even in our own history. Not only the form, but also the history of how the form came about must be known if we are to understand completely. Partial understanding is no understanding, because too many parts are still missing to understand the whole.
CO2, THE SCAPE GOAT
The scientists have concentrated on but two of the parameters and blame CO2 and me thane for the rise in temperature. They have gone from the holistic to the partical and compartmentalised. This is the scatter-brain approach and is but a very limited book keeper"s view, which does moreover not take into account the historically mentioned and documented upon events of the past, of which Cracatoa in 1883, is a prime example. Then, a 2.5 kilometre high volcano, with a base of between 20 and 60 kilometres, exploded in a single blast, causing so much CO2 and debris in the air that for 15 years Indonesia and Austra-lia lived in a "nuclear winter". Yet the forests grew bigger and plants thrived generally. Old trees (2500 years-plus) felled in Australia have all larger growing rings for those years. CO2 has, from these reports, rather a beneficial influence on plant life, since plants and trees need this gas to grow.

[Kaviraj]

That whole includes its history, both recent and remote – at least in terms of the earth and even in our own history. Not only the form, but also the history of how the form came about must be known if we are to understand completely. Partial understanding is no understanding, because too many parts are still missing to understand the whole.
CO2, THE SCAPEGOAT
The scientists have concentrated on but two of the parameters and blame CO2 and methane for the rise in temperature. They have gone from the holistic to the partical and compartmentalised. This is the scatter-brain approach and is but a very limited bookkeeper’s view, which does moreover not take into account the historically mentioned and documented upon events of the past, of which Cracatoa in 1883, is a prime example. Then, a 2.5 kilometre high volcano, with a base of between 20 and 60 kilometres, exploded in a single blast, causing so much CO2 and debris in the air that for 15 years Indonesia and Austra-lia lived in a ‘nuclear winter’. Yet the forests grew bigger and plants thrived generally. Old trees (2500 years-plus) felled in Australia have all larger growing rings for those years. CO2 has, from these reports, rather a beneficial influence on plant life, since plants and trees need this gas to grow.

[Kaviraj]

The wobble causes things on earth to move south and other lands to take the place of the Poles, which of course will take time to become as cold as the pole once was.
A city like Amsterdam now is situated about where Nice and Mar-seilles once were, hence the hot summers and mild winters of the last years, since it is now situated in the Mediterranean weather band. Who is to say that this is not part of a pattern that happens every 50.000 years or so? What the bleep do we know really, considering we have measured things like temperature and weather for only 200 years, without ever considering the climate could change? What can we possibly discover at all, if we neglect to look at the whole?
At some point in the future, say in another 50 to 100 or even 1000 years, it will wobble back. Our progeny will panic like we do now and scream there will be an ice-age coming, blaming radioactive waste as the culprit of the day. The way things are going that is what we are heading for anyway, energy-wise, if the pundits are to be believed. If it lays further in the recesses of time they may have forgotten how we panicked today and simply blame something else. It is to be regretted that there are no Chairs for Earth-Ecology that look at the entire earth as a living system.

[Kaviraj]

None of the esteemed scientists have even considered observing the planet as a whole. Seen from the whole, the earth is a gyroscope, which wobbles on its axis as it turns. The weather bands encircle the earth along loosely defined ‘borders’. We have polar weather on the one end of the scale and tropical at the other. In between, we have subtropical and temperate weather bands.
At present the wobble is so strong, the axis no longer encircles the North Pole, but has sunk between 7 to 12 degrees to the south of the Pole. In 1910 it wobbled round the magnetic pole, albeit in an ellipse. In 1960, measurements indicated it had moved to just next of the magnetic pole. By 1990, the distance had increased and reached a wobble from 7 to 12 degrees next to the magnetic pole, which caused some doomsayers of those days to state that earth was going to turn upside down. A gyroscope never turns over, although the inner works may increase the wobble when they do turn over. Hence the wobble may increase due to imbalance at the inner works – like we have caused with oil-extraction – but the gyroscope earth will always stay upright, no matter the wobbl

[Kaviraj]

the closure of the isthmus of Panama 2.8-3 mya is thought to have led to the start of the current northern hemisphere ice age cycle. Even the sun was dimmer the further back you go.

Statements like these are what drives the deniers and rightfully so. Were you are anyone there to notice this? No. So how can you be so sure about the date of closure of the isthmus of Panama and the brightness of the sun? You have no idea, and you simply guess. CO2 is but a single gas that is THOUGHT TO contribute to the "greenhouse effect" which itself is up for debate. So is methane. two fragments of the atmosphere are taken as proof, when they contribute but a fraction of that atmosphere. Nobody looks at the planet as a whole. THOUGHT TO is simply speculation. Speculation is what drives the climate change prophets and proponents, rather than an assessment of ALL PARAMETERS.

[padrushka]

or to paraphrase Otto, some people don't know s--t from Shinola

[dandypuddin]

so glad they made it. i was afraid they might fall off the edge of the earth.

[OttotheScourge]

Until the "Anti-Glob­al-Warming­" discussion is not driven by religious zealots, it's hard to listen to the arguments.

[OttotheScourge]

Some people don't know the difference between climate and weather.

[Exusian]

SFTor, I replied to your question to me about CO2 driving climate down-thread.

[SFTor]

Exusian,

thank you for your thorough analysis. A quick quote:

"...no, CO2 was not the main driver under those circumstances, but it did add part of the warming.

But what happens under different circumstances?
Let's say Earth's orbital and axial geometry are not configured to provide any more insolation and thus be a warm forcing. What if a massive pulse of CO2 is added to the atmosphere then?"

OK, here is what I understand:

In a white world at the end of the last Ice Age a shift in insolation caused a cascading effect of albedo decreases and releases of greenhouse gases. We are now at a different point in Earth history, and the conditions are different.

Some questions back to you:

1. If there is no increase in insolation, and global temperatures go up, what accounts for it? To be more precise, GISP2 indicated 1875 to be the coldest year on record in Greenland since the last Ice Age. What drove temperatures up from that point? PDO? AMO? Sunspots? (We do agree that it couldn't be CO2, right?)

2. I have now created an image for myself of a carbon-eating biosphere that will use this essential nutrient to increase its volume for as long as the nutrient is economically available. What is wrong with that picture?

[SFTor]

continued:

Exusian:

3. In distant geological history major swings in CO2 levels seem to show no linkage to global temperatures. In recent history minor swings in CO2 levels show no linkage to global temperatures (sharply up until 1940, down until 1970, sharply up until 1998, down or flat until now.) What makes you believe that CO2 drives global temperatures under these circumstances?

4. Swanson and Tsonis talk about negative forcing by clouds in the Discovery article. Is this reflected in the GCMs? My understanding is that it isn't.

[SFTor]

correction: under point 3 it should say until 1980, not until 1970.

[Exusian]

SFTor, Your white world summation has the gist of it.

Your 1) Yes we agree it couldn't have been CO2. It was natural variability. It has always been part of Earth's climate, and it always will be. There is no reason it should suddenly disappear just because CO2 is rising. That's why you look at a long enough time period (30 years) that the trend emerges from the natural variability of weather and random events and coincidences.

What if a major volcanic eruption coincides with a particularly strong La Nina? It's going to totally overwhelm the long term trend over the short term. What if it's a particularly strong El Nino and the peak of the sun spot cycle? Same thing. What if it's a long-term lull in sunspots? No one says (or should say) that CO2 is the only factor or that another factor or combination of factors can not drown it out in the short term.

Your 2) I don't understand what you wrote. Are you talking about the carbon cycle?

[SFTor]

Exusian:

My point 2 discusses the biosphere--the total living biomass, as a carbon-eating system that will use readily (economically) available carbon (atmospheric CO2) to increase. The notion I am trying to express is this: how could it be that a carbon-eating system of organisms would show a tendency to be damaged by the very nutrient it depends on, especially when the presence of that nutrient cannot be said to be at any kind of extreme level?

The notion relates to the NPP of the SeaWIFS project: the planet seems to be producing more plant growth.

As to your response to 1: the idea is that the planet started heating from the end of the Little Ice Age, and then AGW was layered over it?

[SFTor]

Sorry about this barrage of questions, but isn't 30 years about the length of a PDO cycle? As PDO cycles don't seem to be particularly regular, aren't they likely to throw us some curve balls?

[Exusian]

Re your 1, please remember that the Little Ice Age was not a real ice age. There was no where near as much warming in the recovery from it as there was in that of the last glaciation. Also remember that it was not uniformly cold. There were warm years, even hot years and droughts, because there was natural variability then just as there is now.

I still don't understand what you are driving at in 2. I think it is the carbon cycle, but only the active cycle, and only the biosphere side of it at that.
Maybe it will help to think of it this way:

Going back to our end-of-glaciation example, all of the carbon in the CO2 and methane released by thawing methane and a warming ocean was already part of the active carbon cycle. It was just being moved from one reservoir within the cycle to another as temperature changed. During the next glaciation it will be moved back into those reservoirs.

continued.­..

[Exusian]

....contin­ued

But there is also an extended long-term carbon cycle that operates over tens and hundreds of millions of years. It's carbon reservoirs are in the form of buried fossil fuels and carbonate rocks such as limestone, and it moves between reservoirs at the geologic pace of carbonate and magnesium silicate weathering, plate tectonics and volcanic activity.

But since 1750 humans have been burning those fossil fuels and making cement out of that limestone, injecting around 340 Gt (billion tonnes) of fossil carbon into not just the atmosphere, but into the active carbon cycle itself. That carbon had been locked out of the active carbon cycle for tens to hundreds of millions of years, so in practical terms it is essentially 'new' carbon as far as the active carbon cycle is concerned, and your "carbon-eating system of organisms" (biosphere) and the ocean simply can not keep up with it, at least not on a timescale of 250 years, which is why CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere.

[Exusian]

Your 3) In distant geological history EVERYTHING was different: the composition of the atmosphere, the configuration of land masses and therefore ocean currents--for example, the closure of the isthmus of Panama 2.8-3 mya is thought to have led to the start of the current northern hemisphere ice age cycle. Even the sun was dimmer the further back you go. It was an utterly different planet.

In the the 20C, the cooling from 1945 to 1951 and the lack of any clear trend until the late 1970s is thought to be due to industrial aerosols and particulates offsetting (masking) greenhouse warming (global dimming). With clean air legislation of the late 1970s in the US and Western Europe, aerosols and particulates rapidly declined, unmasking the existing greenhouse warming. The same thing was seen on a smaller scale after the collapse of the East Bloc, and after Pinatubo in 1991.

The subsequent steep climb continued past 1998, which was a particularly strong El Nino outlier (see 1) and peaked in 2005-2007. The 2007-08 La Nina coincided with the growing Asian Brown Cloud of aerosols, the bottom of the sun spot cycle, AND a particularly long lull in sun spots. Only the future will tell if the current lull is a feature of the tend itself, or natural variability in other factors. Assuming the sun spot lull does not endure, I think we'll see another short-term surge in warming as aerosols fall due to the economic slump.

[SFTor]

About 3: although the atmosphere might have had a different composition in more distant history, is there reason to believe that this affected the greenhouse properties of CO2?

Or do we have to consider CO2 a minor driver of climate during this period?

In the 20C we haven't discussed the warming from the late 19th century to 1940. Is there an explanation for it? CO2 had not started to rise appreciably yet, so what other explanation is considered for it?

Do we really believe that industry in the 1945 to 1951 span was intensive enough to cool the planet with aerosol releases? I have a hard time with that one.

As far as 1998 is concerned, the graphs I have seen show a sharp decline in temperatures in 1999 and 2000. Doesn't that demonstrate a presence of negative forcings?

I appreciate your patience with these questions.

[Exusian]

Re 3 - There is no reason what so ever to believe that the greenhouse properties of CO2 were any different in the distant past. The ability to absorb and emit infrared energy is a fundamental physical property. But as I said: the sun has very slowly been growing brighter ever since it formed, which means the further back you go the dimmer it was. Less incoming solar energy meant a lower Earth energy budget to start with.

Yet there are at least three instances where a build up of CO2 is thought to have been a main forcing or diver of climate, even with a weaker sun:

A- The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) of 55-56 mya, when a massive injection of CO2 or methane (methane oxidizes to CO2) created a spike in global temperatures that lead to a minor extinction event in deep sea marine life and a surge in mammalian species. The CO2 and/or methane are thought to have come from either a violent volcanic event and/or the disturbance of sea bed methane hydrate ices, possibly caused by an impact event.

[Exusian]

B- The End-Permian or Permian-Jurassic Extinction Event of 251 mya, which resulted the extinction of over 90% of life. The event s also associated with an impact event and with the massive volcanic activity that laid down the Siberian Trapps deposits of flood basalt, which covered 2-7 millions square kilometers to a depth of several hundred meters. Such an event would have released a tremendous amount of CO2.

C- The hypothesized ending of Snow Ball Earth 635 mya. Long term near-global glaciation and frozen sea surface would have shut down the geologic processes that remove and permanently sequester CO2, allowing volcanic emissions of CO2 to accumulate in the atmosphere and build up to a high enough level to initiate melting.

[Exusian]

Re early C20 warming, to say that CO2 had not started to rise appreciably yet is simply not accurate. Industrialization had been progressing for 150 years and rapidly accelerated just before the turn of the century, especially steel production, which was entirely dependent on coal. Coal was also the main home heating fuel in industrialized urban centers, and had already been the main sea and rail transport fuel for half a century. All this accelerated up to and during the first world war, and the period after the war saw a huge increase in cement production for the construction of hard-surface highways, airport runways, concrete buildings and bridges, and especially large hydroelectric dams.

So on the contrary, the early C20 saw the initial large pulse of fossil carbon derived CO2, although it was clearly not yet large enough to eclipse other factors, even in the short term. The first half of C20 also saw a real increase in solar irradiance, and a reduction in explosive volcanic events compared to the C19, and the mid 1930s were particularly warm.

As for the the drop in the trend from 1945 to 1951 and subsequent flat trend, I think you grossly underestimate the enormity of the industrial war effort in Europe, Japan and the US, and of the post-war industrial boom, all before the advent of any restrictions on aerosol and particulate emissions. Look at the solar flux record, it clearly wasn't falling, so it couldn't be the sun.

[Exusian]

As for the temperature record over the recent past, look at the NASA GISS Temp and Hadley CRUT trend graphs and data sets:
GISS TEMP Global Land-Ocean graph:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
data:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt

Hadley Centre HadCRUT3 graphs:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/images/science/monitoring/indicators/Hadplot_globe%5B1%5D.GIF
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/hadcrut3.html
data:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/annual
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/time-series.html

The slope of the trend was clearly positive until 2005-2007, period. Whether or not more recent individual cooler annual mean temperatures represent a change in the long term trend or are just natural variability is impossible to say by the very definition of what a trend is.