Wind RushWind Rush
Wind Rush Files
No 4: Climate
Country Guardian does not dispute the connection between levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the global climate, and looks forward to the day when this relationship will be quantified. Until the science is established, so that we know the relative impact of CO2 and other greenhouse gas, plus the influence of the Sun and water vapour, we cannot accept the catastrophic visions being spread about. In particular we reject the attempts to use this argument to promote windfarms.
The Case Against Windfarms covers climate issues in Appendix 1 . These are the opening paragraphs
“Introduction
No sensible person denies the fact of climate change or indeed the fact that climate is warming at this time. It would indeed be rather odd if it were not. We are in the midst of an interglacial warm period, one of many which are embedded in a cyclic succession of cold periods, some of them ice-ages, which have repeated inexorably many tens of times during the past 1.5 to 2 million years.
The fact of man-made global warming is more controversial, but as noted in Section 5 (Calculating CO 2 emissions and saving), whether or not one accepts the tenets of a simple, one-factor CO 2 -driven model of climatic warming it can be shown that wind power in particular cannot provide a significant or cost effective means of displacing CO 2 emissions, or limiting fossil fuel consumption sufficiently to alter climate.
However the assumption that man-made CO 2 will cause the world to become a warmer place is advanced as a prime reason for limiting the burning of fossil fuel. One approach has been the introduction of several sources of renewably generated electricity. At the moment wind power is the fastest growing of these.”
Everyone agrees that the climate has been warming, that CO2 is likely to have a part in it, and that the Sun’s influence is also evident. What is not agreed is the part which each plays, or indeed the contribution of gases such as methane. The science that would settle the argument has not been done, and it will take a long time and cost a great deal of money. This is not intended to be an argument on one side or the other, but a review (as at April 2008).
These References and extracts are in no particular order.
1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm
This is the “Technical Summary” of the 4 th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, produced in November 2007. It is a 74-page .pdf file containing a lot of colour graphics, is 18 Megabytes in size and takes several minutes to download. It contains most of the IPCC’s technical arguments which lead to their conclusion that humans have been responsible for some of the climate warming of the last 100 years.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf
This is the “Summary for Policy Makers”, a shorter version of the Technical Summary (18 pages and about 5Mb).
2. The Chilling Stars – A Cosmic View of Climate Change. Henrik Svensmark & Nigel Calder
Icon Books. First Edition 2007, Second Edition (updated) 2008. £6.99 from Amazon
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/reader/1840468157/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-page provides sample pages of this book on the Amazon website
The following is a review of the book from the Amazon website:
So what did (does?) cause ice ages? , 4 Dec 2007
By |
Mr. Nicholas J Robertson ( Kent , UK ) - |
Henrik Svensmark's theory is that high-energy cosmic rays originating in the destruction of stars in other parts of our galaxy substantially explain the changes in the world's temperature throughout its history. Ice ages and hot periods, as well as shorter lived warming and cooling events (like the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age) are explained by the combination of our solar system's proximity to areas in the galaxy where cosmic activity is highest and the cycle of our Sun's magnetic activity (and thus its ability to protect us from those rays). How? Such cosmic rays - charged sub-atomic particles - stimulate the creation of low-level clouds, and those clouds cool the Earth by reflecting heat back into space. Svensmark does not duck the issue - he states that this effect explains most warming and cooling, leaving only a secondary role for changes in CO2, however caused. Such warming that has occurred over the last century was caused by unusually high magnetic activity of the Sun keeping cosmic radiation away, meaning fewer clouds and a warming world.
This book is written by Svensmark and Nigel Calder, a scientific journalist. It is highly readable and the science well explained. The book is made easier by the fact that the argument is explained in the overview at the start, and each chapter is preceded by a short summary. One quibble is that although there are chapter references at the back, it is not possible to identify the origin of all the bold assertions Svensmark and Calder make.
Svensmark has had his scientific critics; many are catalogued by name. Many, such as Bert Bolin, a Swedish professor of meteorology and member of the IPCC, abused his developing theory because it was "naive and dangerous" - it did not comply with the developing consensus that global warming is man made through the agency of CO2, and that to deny this was to encourage further complacency by self indulgent politicians and ordinary folk. Such attempts to stifle research do not reflect well on the scientists involved. The book gives the impression that he has won over many outright critics and many other scientists who similarly sought explanations for global temperature changes in extra-terrestrial sources but who posited different mechanisms.
Certainly, if you are inclined to wonder, there is ample evidence that Svensmark is working with many scientific colleagues - he is no lone crank - and even where he is not actively working with others his theories have found supporting evidence from other work in other fields - including work that was being undertaken without any obvious connection to climate change research. Although primarily a theoretical physicist, he conducted experiments in the basement of his Danish National Research Centre, apparently demonstrating the cloud forming effectiveness of muons, or high-energy electrons. It seems to me that he and his colleagues have made their case well, quite the contrary to the impression given by Inge Brede Johannessen below. Nor, Mr Listen, is there anything remotely polemic about it! In 2010 an experiment at CERN may provide further evidence of the physics of the basic process. But for the global warming consensus this experiment, originally devised by another scientist and blocked, the book suggest, by physicists unwilling to expose themselves to the criticism of the global warming consensus, might have taken place five years ago.
If your mind is open to the questions (a) is the planet warming? And, if so, (b) why? and (c) how much? then this is a book for you. The science is not that difficult to understand, though if you are a layman like me then you have I think to be modest enough to admit that you probably couldn't identify any scientific howlers in the book, let alone in the Svensmark and colleagues' scientific papers listed in the back. As I write the world's great and good have jetted off to Bali to discuss climate change "mitigation", and most of that mitigation will involve restricting CO2 emission. As others such as Bjorn Lomborg have pointed out, the cost of such a restriction may be the loss of much of the economic growth, and the alleviation of poverty, that would otherwise happen. It is always worth considering whether we have identified the right enemy - or even whether there is an enemy at all. Besides, we all know about ice ages: have you ever wondered what actually caused them?
3. AN Appeal To Reason: A Cool Look At Global Warming by Nigel Lawson is published by Duckworth on April 10 at £9.99. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=557374&in_page_id=1770
This article is reproduced below. Nigel Lawson, a member of the House of Lords and a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. The article is in fact a summary of his book:-
By NIGEL LAWSON - Last updated at 11:47am on 5th April 2008
Over the past half-century, we have become used to planetary scares. In the late Sixties, we were told of a population explosion that would lead to global starvation.
Then, a little later, we were warned the world was running out of natural resources. By the Seventies, when global temperatures began to dip, many eminent scientists warned us that we faced a new Ice Age.
But the latest scare, global warming, has engaged the political and opinion-forming classes to a greater extent than any of these.
The readiness to embrace this fashionable belief has led the present Labour Government, enthusiastically supported by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, to commit itself to a policy of drastically cutting back carbon dioxide emissions - at huge cost to the British economy and to the living standards not merely of this generation, but of our children's generation, too.
That is why I have written a book about the subject.
Now, I readily admit that I am not a scientist; but then neither are the vast majority of those who espouse the currently fashionable madness. Moreover, most of those scientists who speak with such certainty about global warming and climate change are not climate scientists, or Earth scientists of any kind, and thus have no special knowledge to contribute.
Those who have to take the key decisions aren't scientists either. They are politicians who, having listened co the opinions of relevant scientists and having studied the evidence, must reach the best decisions they can - just as I did when I was Energy Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's first government in the early Eighties.
But science is only part of the story. Even if the climate scientists can tell us what is happening, and why they think it is happening, they cannot tell us what governments should be doing about it. For this, we also need an understanding of the economics: of what the economic consequences of any warming might be, and, if there is a problem, the best way of dealing with it.
First, then, what is happening? Given that nowadays pretty well every adverse development in the natural world is automatically attributed to global warming, perhaps the most surprising fact about it is that it is not, in fact, happening at all. The truth is that there has so far been no recorded global warming at all this century.
The world's temperature rose about half a degree centigrade during the last quarter of the 20th century; but even the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research - part of Britain's Met Office and a citadel of the current global warming orthodoxy - has now conceded that recorded temperature figures for the first seven years of the 21st century reveal there has been a standstill.
The centre now officially expects global warming to resume at some point between 2009 and 2014.
Maybe it will. But the fact that the present lull was not predicted by any of the complex computer models upon which the global warming orthodoxy relies is clear evidence that the science of what determines the world's temperature is distinctly uncertain and far from "settled".
>> Read the full article at www.countryguardian.net/Nigel Lawson article.pdf
or at the Daily Mail link quoted above
5. There are indications that there has been a levelling off of the global temperatures since 1998, and has dropped sharply in the last year.
Blog: Science Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Michael Asher (Blog) - February 26, 2008 12:55 PM
World Temperatures according to the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop over the last year.
Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas , Florida , Mexico , Australia, Iran , Greece, South Africa , Greenland , Argentina , Chile -- the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.
Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.
Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.
Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.
Update 2/27: The graph for HadCRUT (above), as well as the linked graphs for RSS and UAH are generated month-to-month; the temperature declines span a full 12 months of data. The linked GISS graph was graphed for the months of January only, due to a limitation in the plotting program. Anthony Watts, who kindly provided the graphics, otherwise has no connection with the column. The views and comments are those of the author only.