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Global Warming:
A Scientific Overview
By James M. Taylor
Senior Fellow, Environment Policy
The Heartland Institute
Presented at the Pittsburgh Association of Petroleum Geologists & Society of
Petroleum Engineers Joint Meeting – Radisson Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA
May 1, 2008
The Earth’s Temperature Is Always Fluctuating
• Past 10 years: Slightly cooling
• Prior 20 years: Warming
• Prior 30 years: Cooling
• Prior 90 years: Warming
• Prior 900 years: Cooling
• Prior 900 years: Warming
20th Century Temperature and Carbon Dioxide
• Years Temps Carbon Dioxide
• 1900-1945 Rising Minimal
• 1945-1977 Cooling Rising
• 1977-1998 Rising Rising
• 1998-2008 Cooling Rising
Scientists Consensus
• 19,000 scientists say no crisis (oism.org)
• 500 climate scientists surveyed by Institute of
Coastal Research
– Survey question: “Natural scientists have
established enough physical evidence to turn the
issue of global climate change over to social
scientists for matters of policy discussion.”
– Less than half agreed
Scientific Consensus
IPCC Flaws
• Not 2,600 “scientists”
• Selected by political bodies, not scientific bodies
• Greepeace, Environmental Defense in: William
Gray out
• Only a handful of lead authors produce final
document
• Over 10,000 critical comments
Extraterrestrial SUVs?
• Global warming on Earth
• Global warming on Mars
• Global warming on Jupiter
• Global warming on Pluto
• Global warming on numerous planetary
moons
Doubling CO2 = Only 1.1 Degree Warming
• 3 Major Assumptions in Alarmist Models:
• 1) Humidity Should Increase
• 2) Upper Level Clouds Should Increase
• 3) CO2 Stays in Atmosphere for Centuries
Aqua Satellite Has Confirmed
• 1) Humidity is DECLINING
• 2) Upper Level Clouds are DECLINING
• 3) (CO2 Stays in Atmosphere for Only 5 to 7
years)
Antarctica
• “Antarctic Warming Alarms Scientists - Most
Serious Thaw Since End Of Last Ice Age 12,000
Years Ago” – CBS News headline, May 14,
2002
• “A canary in the coal mine” of global warming
– An Inconvenient Truth
Antarctica: The Truth
Antarctica is in a prolonged and dramatic cold
spell. Temperatures have been dropping 1.2
degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1978. -
Nature magazine, Jan. 13, 2002
Antarctica: The Truth
“The decline is alarming. … These cooling
repercussions may have a long-term effect.” –
Antarctic Researcher Diana Wall, Colorado
State University: Nature, Jan. 13, 2002
Antarctica: The Truth
“Mass gains from accumulating snow,
particularly on the Antarctic Peninsula and
within East Antarctica, exceed the ice dynamic
loss from West Antarctica.” - July 2006,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society
The Arctic
• CNN.com (Sept. 15, 2007)– A “steady,
worldwide decline in ice cover” … is “an early
warning of a changing climate.”
• Asserts glaciers from the Arctic, Greenland,
Antarctica, Mt. Kilimanjaro have been
vanishing due to global warning
The Arctic
“All time low record” merely means since
1979, when satellites first began measuring
Arctic sea ice
The Arctic
• Clearly much warmer during World War II
• Squadron of P-38 and B-17 bombers found
under 268 feet of snow and ice
The Arctic
"Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind
patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded
it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then
sped its flow out of the Arctic. … When that
sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly
melted in the warmer waters.” - NASA, Oct. 4,
2007
The Arctic
NASA: Since October 2007, Arctic sea ice has
grown faster than at any point in recorded
history.
Mt. Kilimanjaro
Associated Press, May
14, 2007:
“Global warming [is] …
the glaciers of Mt.
Kilimanjaro
disappearing.”
“Planes used to take
people through
Kilimanjaro to see the
snows, now it's only at
the very top.”
Mt. Kilimanjaro
Nature magazine online, November 24, 2003:
“Although it’s tempting to blame the ice loss
on global warming, researchers think that
deforestation of the mountain’s foothills is
the more likely culprit. Without the forests’
humidity, previously moisture-laden winds
blew dry. No longer replenished with water,
the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial
sunshine.”
Mt. Kilimanjaro
American Scientist, July-August 2007:
“Warming fails spectacularly to explain the behavior of the glaciers and plateau ice on Africa's Kilimanjaro massif.”
“The disappearing ice cap of the ‘shining mountain,’which gets a starring role in the movie, is not an appropriate poster child for global climate change.”
“Kilimanjaro, a trio of volcanic cones that penetrate high into the cold upper troposphere, has gained and lost ice through processes that bear only indirect connections, if any, to recent trends in global climate.”
Drought
Environmental News Service, April 5, 2007:
“Global Warming Brings Perpetual Drought to
U.S. Southwest”
Drought
International Journal of Climatology, July
2004: Study of soil moisture throughout the
Northern Hemisphere. “The terrestrial surface
is both warmer and effectively wetter … A
good analogy to describe the changes in these
places is that the terrestrial surface is literally
becoming more like a gardener’s
greenhouse.”
Drought
“An increasing trend is apparent in both
model soil moisture and runoff over much of
the U.S. … This wetting trend is consistent
with the general increase in precipitation in
the latter half of the 20th century. Droughts
have, for the most part, become shorter, less
frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the
country over the last century.” - Geophysical
Research Letters, May 25, 2006
Drought
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) website: “A number of
tree-ring records exist for the last two
millennia which suggest that 20th century
droughts may be mild when evaluated in the
context of this longer time frame.”
Drought
Climatic Change, July 2007: During the Little
Ice Age, there occurred three “very large-scale
drought[s] more severe and sustained than
any witnessed during the period of
instrumental weather observations” [i.e., the
20th century].
Drought
What we see from the scientific record is that
droughts have become less frequent and less
severe during our recent global warming.
Asserted trends to the contrary are decidedly
short term, limited in geographic reach, and
quite minor when compared to droughts that
have dominated colder climatic conditions.
Hurricanes
USA Today, March 31, 2008: “Hurricanes and
other weather events are expected to last
longer and be more intense. That would mean
bigger storm surges, more damage to
buildings and roads, and contaminated food
and water.”
Hurricanes
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), November 29, 2005, regarding Hurricane Katrina and active 2005 hurricane season: "NOAA attributes this increased activity to natural occurring cycles in tropical climate patterns near the equator. … NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming."
Hurricanes
“We don’t see any new trend. There’s no link
to global warming that you can see at all.” –
Dr. Chris Landsea, National Hurricane Center,
May 1, 2007
Hurricanes
Geophysical Research Letters, April 18, 2007:
Global warming will cause more upper
atmosphere wind shear, which will prevent
hurricanes from forming. “The environmental
changes found here do not suggest a strong
increase in tropical Atlantic hurricane activity
during the 21st century."
Hurricanes
• Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, March 2008: “A new technique for deriving hurricane climatologies from global data, applied to climate models, indicates that global warming should reduce the global frequency of hurricanes…” – Kerry Emanuel, lead author
• Mixed results regarding intensity. Perhaps a small increase in intensity in some areas.
Hurricanes
How does the media report such a finding? --
Science Daily, April 19, 2008: “Climate Change
Likely to Intensify Storms, New Study
Confirms”
Greenland
New York Times, Jan. 16, 2007: “All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks —“lonely mountains” in Inuit — that were encased in the margins of Greenland’s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.”
Greenland
2006 study, Journal of Geophysical Research:
Researchers at the Danish Meteorological
Institute reported that temperatures during
the last two full decades in Greenland were
colder than any decade since the 1910s.
Greenland
• December 2005, Journal of Glaciology:
Scientists analyzed 10 years worth of data and
reported, “the Greenland ice sheet is thinning
at the margins and growing inland, with a
small overall mass gain.”
Africa
BBC News Online, August 20, 2002:
• “Global Warming Threatens Africa”
• “Reduced rainfall in the semi-arid Sahel region
south of the Sahara desert is another example
of the effects of pollution and climate change
on Africa in the WWF report.”
• Incorporated into “An Inconvenient Truth”
Africa
• New Scientist, September 18, 2002:
– “Africa’s deserts are in ‘spectacular’ retreat.”
– “The southern Sahara desert is in retreat, making
farming viable again in what were some of the
most arid parts of Africa. ... Burkina Faso, one of
the West African countries devastated by drought
and advancing deserts 20 years ago, is growing so
much greener that families who fled to wetter
coastal regions are starting to go home.”
Africa
Africa is currently “experiencing an unusually
prolonged period of stable, wet conditions in
comparison to previous centuries of the past
millennium. … The patterns and variability of
20th century rainfall in central Africa have
been unusually conducive to human welfare
in the context of the past 1400 years.” -
Geology, January 1, 2007
Africa
This phenomenon of a greening planet is not limited to the southern Sahara desert. Satellite data from 1981-1999, reported in the September 16, 2001 issue of Journal of Geophysical
Research, found an 8-to-12 percent increase in vegetation across North America and Eurasia. A subsequent comment in the same journal, Journal of Geophysical Research, concluded that a concurrent rise in atmospheric CO2 was primarily responsible for the increased vegetation.