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| Mother Nature is cooling Earth; we don’t need Obama’s plan | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: 4 Aug 2013, 02:18 PM (58 Views) | |
| Audi-Tek | 4 Aug 2013, 02:18 PM Post #1 |
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Mother Nature is cooling Earth; we don’t need Obama’s plan. President Barack Obama has shrilly reissued his call for a high-priority war on carbon to stop global warming. This follows his 2008 presidential campaign threat of bankrupting any new coal power plant. While the U.S. has had recent success in lowering carbon output, we have not yet found out just how President Obama intends to carry out his threat, nor how accomplishing his goals would be affected by the rapid build-up of coal plants in China and India, by far the world’s largest new human sources of carbon. I must presume that his dicta are based on the results of four reports of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), beginning in 1990, arguing that increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere because of the burning of fossil fuels is the principle cause of the warming in the 20th and 21st centuries. We anxiously await the fifth, due out in 2014. The president should realize, however, that reliable climate scientists have pointed out serious deficiencies in the Grand Circulation Models used in calculations for these reports. Perhaps the most glaring of these is the discrepancy between the panel’s predictions of increasing global temperatures vis a vis observations that during the past 16 years there has been no statistically significant rise in average global temperatures despite rapidly rising CO2 concentrations. Yet the mainstream press continues to cite the dire consequences of global warming — e.g., see the threat mosquitoes make as a result of global warming, The New Mexican (“Mosquitoes pose greater threat as global temperatures rise,” July 13). Some may point to the extreme temperatures this year in the Southwest as evidence of global warming, but they should realize that at any given time, some places might be colder than usual and others might be warmer — these observations are local and not global. Countering these observations are some data for the past winter summarized in a report by Dr. Jay Lohr, Environment and Climate News, July 2013, for example: • The UK experienced cold of 5 to 10 degrees C below normal; Germany reported its coldest winter in 208 years; Russia had its largest snowfall in 134 years. • In the U.S., 3,318 sites reported the lowest winter temperatures ever recorded; every province of Canada experienced similar records. • Average U.S. winter temperatures in the 21st century have been lower by 1.45 degrees Celsius; • Weak magnetic fields (few sunspots) in the sun observed during the Little Ice Age ( minimum temperature occurring about A.D. 1650) are considered to be responsible for the cooling. While correlation does not prove causality, no other reasonable explanation for the extreme cold spell has been posed. We are now at the end of Solar Cycle 24 with the weakest magnetic field in 50 years. For Solar Cycle 25, sunspots are expected to be extraordinarily few, promising a further cooling of the Earth. While it is true that slow warming and a rise in atmospheric CO2 have been observed on average over the last century or two, this can be explained by the degassing of the oceans, huge sinks of both thermal energy and absorbed CO2. Recall that historically, global temperature changes have preceded atmospheric carbon dioxide changes, with lags averaging some 600 years because of the huge heat content of the oceans, again showing that CO2 is not the villain. Our egress from the Little Ice Age should be reflected in rising temperatures. Recently, studies have estimated that the rising CO2 has come largely from ocean degassing and to a somewhat smaller extent from decay of organic and mineral matter plus from volcanic eruptions, leaving about 6 percent due to human activity. If Obama’s plans are put into effect, he should get no credit for cooling the Earth; very likely, somebody else — Mother Nature — has beat him to it. By William Keller William E. Keller, Ph.D., retired after 38 years at Los Alamos national lab, lives in Santa Fe. Source and link ........... http://www.santafenewmexican.com/opinion/my_view/article_ebf459a4-59e4-5d5e-a889-e7ec8cf07e36.html#.Uf5S9YVMQ9Q.twitter |
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9:56 AM Jul 11