Tag: Global Warming

Freon Fix Fries The Climate

This is not the funny kind of irony: Scientists say the chemicals that helped solve the last global environmental crisis — the hole in the ozone layer — are making the current one worse.

The chemicals, called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), were introduced widely in the 1990s to replace ozone-depleting gases used in air conditioners, refrigerators and insulating foam. They worked: The earth’s protective shield seems to be recovering.

But researchers say what’s good for ozone is bad for climate change. In the atmosphere, these replacement chemicals act like “super” greenhouse gases, with a heat-trapping power that can be 4,470 times that of carbon dioxide.

Now, scientists say, the world must find replacements for the replacements — or these super-emissions could cancel out other efforts to stop global warming.

via CFC Replacements Intensify Climate Concerns Continue reading “Freon Fix Fries The Climate”

Russia Could Benefit From Global Warming

I suspect it will be epic fail all around – especially after 2025. This is because by then much more powerful trends in resource depletion, climate change and technological growth will be coming into play. The end of cheap hydrocarbon based energy threatens an end to global economic growth and collapse into the Olduvai Gorge. Numerous positive feedback mechanisms such as methane clathrate releases and saturation of traditional carbon sinks will intensify global warming. We will be reaching limits to growth on multiple fronts and industrial civilization will be in peril. As one of the few countries to benefit from global warming, Russia may become host to hundreds of millions of climate refugees.

via Russia Blog: Rite of Spring: Russia’s Fertility Trends. Continue reading “Russia Could Benefit From Global Warming”

North Pole Still Melting

Arctic Sea Ice Drops to 2nd Lowest Level on Record | LiveScience
In spite of a shift to what climatologists call the cold phase of a cycle in the North Pacific Ocean called the “Pacific Decadal Oscillation,” or PDO, giving Alaska an unusually cold and wet summer and a record breaking Winter, Summer sea ice last year shrunk to about 1.65 million square miles, nearly 40 percent less than the long-term average between 1979 and 2000. Most climate modelers predict a continued downward spiral, possibly with an Arctic Ocean that’s ice free during summer months by 2030 or sooner. Most of the Ice loss has been on the pacific side, while the Atlantic had a major build of new ice last winter.

Krenz said the announcement Tuesday showed that last year’s record low sea ice was not an anomaly. As ice covers fewer square miles of ocean, he said, warming will accelerate.”It’s going to accelerate climate change through changes in the reflectance of the Arctic,” he said. “It’s going from bright ice to a much darker ocean.”More square miles of dark ocean will absorb more heat. More warmth will accelerate melting of Arctic permafrost, allowing organic matter now frozen to melt and add to the greenhouse gas problem, he said.”That allows for the breakdown of that by bacteria and other organisms that release CO2 or methane, depending on how the breakdown occurs,” he said.

Other authors claim that this is a normal Decadal Arctic Oscillation.

Climate Panic

Björn Lomborg: | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
It is hard to keep up the climate panic as reality diverges from the alarmist predictions more than ever before: the global temperature has not risen over the past 10 years, it has declined precipitously in the last year and a half, and studies show that it might not rise again before the middle of the next decade. With a global recession looming and high oil and food prices undermining the living standards of the western middle class, it is becoming ever harder to sell the high-cost, inefficient Kyoto-style solution of drastic carbon cuts.

A much sounder approach than Kyoto and its successor would be to invest more in research and development of zero-carbon energy technologies – a cheaper, more effective way to truly solve the climate problem. Continue reading “Climate Panic”

Has Global Warming Become Religion?

Global View – WSJ.com
But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world’s oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that “80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters,” according to a report by NPR’s Richard Harris. A discussion of the various measurement models.

The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere’s coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.

This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn’t evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist, or that global warming isn’t happening. It does mean it isn’t science.

No Warming Yet This Century

The REAL inconvenient truth: Zealotry over global warming could damage our Earth far more than climate change | the Daily Mail
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”.

Skeptics on Human Climate Impact Seize on Cold Spell

Skeptics on Human Climate Impact Seize on Cold Spell – New York Times
According to a host of climate experts, including some who question the extent and risks of global warming, it is mostly good old-fashioned weather, along with a cold kick from the tropical Pacific Ocean, which is in its La Niña phase for a few more months, a year after it was in the opposite warm El Niño pattern.

If anything else is afoot — like some cooling related to sunspot cycles or slow shifts in ocean and atmospheric patterns that can influence temperatures — an array of scientists who have staked out differing positions on the overall threat from global warming agree that there is no way to pinpoint whether such a new force is at work.

Tree Ring Evidence Reverses Findings

DailyTech – Reseacher: Arctic Temperatures “Not Especially Warm”

Grudd’s results contradict his earlier reconstructions of Arctic temperatures, which demonstrated significantly cooler temperatures prior to 1900. The difference, he claims, is due to more accurate scanning of samples, along with a better understanding of how tree ring widths and density respond to temperature changes.

Grudd, of Stockholm University’s Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, compared both tree ring width and maximum density, to construct the most accurate data yet seen for the region. He found a sharp warming trend since the year 1900. However, over the entire period, several such warming events were seen with temperatures in at least four periods (AD 750, 1000, 1400, and 1750) all equally warm or warmer than at present.

Most surprising of all, he noted, when taken as a whole temperatures in the Arctic have actually declined 0.3 degrees over the past 1,000 years. As Grudd himself says, temperatures at present are “not especially warm.”

The full temperature record also reveals why the last 100 years has appeared unusual — the year 1900 was actually the coldest of the entire period.