As a researcher, I don’t accept “facts” as truth unless there is empirical evidence offered. That evidence needs to be proven as more than coincidence for me to accept it. Having spent my entire career in science, research, and technology and being a lay environmentalist, it might come across as contradictory for me to say that I believe that Al Gore’s global warming alarmism is, well, just that. There just isn’t any real compelling evidence that our planet is going into a man made climate crisis.
Alarmists claim that every “credible” scientist agrees that we are experiencing global warming. Certainly, every credible scientist agrees that we are in a global warming period. But, is it man made?
Global warming occurs naturally and our current period of global warming is part of the earth’s natural climatic cycles. The most significant and long-lasting natural process that affects our climatic cycles is the change in total solar irradiance (TSI) from the sun. Global warming increased significantly from 1910 to 1950 and can be directly correlated to a well documented increase in the TSI. Despite the fact that CO2 levels were on a sharp increase, there was a cooling period from 1950 through the 1970s, again directly proportional to the TSI. Some of you may recall reading magazine articles in the 1970s predicting that we were at the doorsteps of the next ice age. From the 1970s through the 1990s, temperatures increased do to another increase in the TSI. And contrary to what alarmists are telling you, we are now in a cooling period that started in 2002 – again because of a decrease in the current TSI.
Previously used climate models and the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change
(IPCC) didn’t take TSI into proper account and were based on temperature
increases seen in the 1990s. At the time the whistle was blown on man made
global warming, the TSI was poorly understood and many scientists believed that
the TSI was a constant rather than variable. More recent studies demonstrate
that TSI is variable and alone accounts for as much as 69 percent of global
warming. [See Scafetta, N. and West, B. J., “Is Climate Sensitive to Solar
Variability?” Physics Today 61 no. 3 (2008)]. There are a number of other
variables originating from natural causes that factor in as well.
Recent studies aimed at understanding atmospheric CO2 levels look to our oceans.
The oceans are an enormous CO2 sink. When ocean temperatures increase, the
oceans are not able to hold as much CO2 and releases vast quantities of the gas
into the atmosphere. As the oceans cool, atmospheric CO2 is reabsorbed. These
studies show that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are an effect of global warming
rather than the cause. The cause is the TSI and land mass reflectivity. [see
Takahashi, T., S. C. Sutherland, C. Sweeney, A. Poisson, N. Metzl, B. Tilbrook,
N. Bates, R. Wanninkhof, R. A. Feely, C. Sabine, J. Olafsson and Y. C. Nojiri
(2002) Global sea-air CO2 flux based on climatological surface ocean pCO2, and
seasonal biological and temperature effects. Deep-Sea Res. Pt. II 49,
1601-1622.]
There is an increasing understanding that there are significant natural processes
that govern global warming that, until now, have been poorly understood and
overlooked in the global warming models cited by global warming alarmists. Based
on the latest climatological studies, man’s offset to the earth’s normal
temperature extents amounts to no more than 10% of the natural variability
observed between glacial and interglacial periods in the past 350,000 years. Our
present global temperature is 6.4 deg. F cooler than the highest temperatures of
past interglacial periods according to the NOAA paleoclimatic database. Assuming
that our global temperatures were to rise to past interglacial highs, man’s
affect on the increase would be somewhere between .6 and 1.2 degrees F.
Global warming is real but man’s contribution to it is has been greatly
overestimated according to newer studies. In the face of these newer studies,
the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) has backed away from its
predictions of sea level rise to occur by 2100 (of one foot). Many “credible”
scientists are now backing away from the extreme alarmism in an effort to save
their credibility.
Spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to “fight” global warming makes
no sense whatsoever. I watch with total disbelief as our elected officials
attempt to legislate carbon footprint taxes and push fear driven agendas (like
the Kyoto Protocol) all in the name of a completely misguided notion that man
somehow caused global warming and could stop it if we’re willing to revert back
to the stone age. Throwing such enormous money and resources at "fighting"
global warming will only ruin the economies of first-world nations and will not
make any noticeable impact.
As an environmentalist, I think we need to transition to clean, sustainable, and
renewable energy as soon as we can. It is only good for the air we breathe, the
water we drink, and it is in the interest of the soventry and long term economy
of our nation to do so. We need to make that transition for the right reasons
and not following a path of sensationalized mass hysteria.