World is Green

Andrew Bolt points to the astrophysicist Nir Shaviv and his work on cosmic rays.

Shaviv refuses to get worked up: “The hysteria surrounding the concept of ‘global warming’ will fade over the years,” he says. “People will see that the apocalyptic forecasts are not coming true. Today there is no fingerprint attesting that carbon dioxide emission causes a rise in temperature. A Grad missile that falls in Sderot should be more cause for concern.” Back to the Ice Age Last Wednesday, Shaviv was featured in a documentary broadcast on Channel 8, “The Cloud Mystery,” alongside Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark, a physicist whose pioneering experiments conducted in Copenhagen revealed how changes on the sun’s surface and cosmic rays are what affect climate, and not the polluting gases from manmade sources.

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While he was living in Toronto, one of his colleagues asked him how supernovae (the explosion of massive stars) affect the earth. Shaviv examined the question seriously; his conclusions reinforced the argument that charged energy particles called cosmic rays, which are affected by the sun’s activity, are what affect the earth’s climate. Shaviv explains it as follows: “The sun’s activity is cyclical. When it’s more active, the wind that blows from it is stronger and then fewer cosmic rays reach the earth. Cosmic rays cause ions to be produced in our atmosphere, which are one of the factors required for the creation of the surface upon which clouds form, primarily above the ocean’s surface. When there are fewer ions, the clouds that are formed are composed of large drops. Clouds of this type are less white and refract less of the sun’s rays outward, and so the heat is preserved and the earth gets warmer.”

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“The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with arms,” Shaviv continues. “We traverse one of these arms every 145 million years. If the sun’s cyclical changes translate into a shift of one degree on earth, then the changes when we traverse such an arm, close to supernovae, will be on the order of 10 degrees, which is a huge amount. When you look at the geological record of the earth, you see that in the past 100 million years, there were periods with ice at the Poles and periods without ice. I demonstrated in the article that the Ice Ages correlate chronologically with our traversing the arms of the Milky Way. In other words, every 145 million years there is an Ice Age. The conclusion is that cosmic rays affect the earth’s temperature on long time-scales, too.”

An example of what he is talking about,

Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.

via Richard S. Lindzen: The Climate Science Isn’t Settled – WSJ.com.

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

via Bret Stephens: Climategate: Follow the Money – WSJ.com.

First, where did this number 2035 (the year when glaciers could vanish) come from?

According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493!

So we have a raging debate about impending glacier melt-down because of sloppiness of some IPCC authors! Further, according to Kotlyakov, the present glacier area of some 500,000 km2 could shrink to 100,000 km2 and this could happen NOT in 2035 but in 2350, if the current rate of warming continues. Also this estimated glacier area and its shrinkage does not include internal drainage basin of central Asia with an estimated area of some 40,000 km2 .

Let us now look at the statement that Himalayan glaciers are receding faster than in any other part of the world. How true is this statement?

Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University Peterborough Ontario Canada ) who has analyzed shrinkage rates of many glaciers also refutes the IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers are shrinking faster than in any other part of the world. A recent news item from Science ( V 326 13 November 2009, p.924) cites Prof Jeffrey Kargel’s ( University of Arizona USA) study which suggests that many glaciers in the Karakoram Mountains ( straddling India and Pakistan) have stabilized or undergone an aggressive advance in recent years.

Among many important conclusions drawn by Raina in his comprehensive report, the following statement best describes the present state of the Himalayan glaciers: Glaciers in the Himalayas, over the past 100 years, behave in contrasting ways. Some glaciers (e.g. Sonapani) have retreated by as much as 500m in the last 100 years, while others ( e.g.  Kangriz) have retreated just by an inch or so during the same period.

via Global Warming And Glacier Melt-Down Debate: A Tempest In A Teapot?” – A Guest Weblog By Madhav L Khandekar « Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr..

Thanks to Andrew Bolt for the link.

A great discussion on ABC on the leaked emails with Aynsley Kellow. He is a Professor and Head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania and expert reviewer for the the United Nation’s IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change and Key Vulnerabilities.

He talks frankly about the issues and the future of climate science and public policy because of the revelations of the emails.

via Climate science: The leaked emails – Counterpoint – 30 November 2009.