New study says threat of man-made global warming greatly exaggerated

A peer-reviewed climate change study released Wednesday by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change finds the threat of man-made global warming to be not only greatly exaggerated but so small as to be “embedded within the background variability of the natural climate system” and not dangerous.
Armed with the new findings, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee grilled administration environmental policy officials about the economic consequences of its aggressive regulatory crackdown on the fossil fuel industry.
The 1,000 page study was the work of 47 scientists and scholars examining many of the same journals and studies that the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC) examined, producing entirely different conclusions.
"This volume provides the scientific balance that is missing from the overly alarmist reports from the IPCC, which are highly selective in their review of climate science," the authors write.
The study was done under the auspices of the Heartland Institute, which claims it "has no formal attachment to or sponsorship from any government or governmental agency."
The Heartland Institute’s president, Joseph Bast, said of the study, "The big issue in the global warming debate is how large is the human impact on climate. And this report shows that it is very small, that natural variability, the variability that's caused by natural cycles of the sun and other factors, way outweigh anything the human impact could have."
The report comes in advance of the expected release later this month of a new U.N. report on climate change. Leaked drafts of that report show surface temperature increases have been statistically insignificant for the last 15 years, and that Antarctic sea ice is increasing, not decreasing.
In addition, new satellite measurements of Arctic sea ice show it has increased this year.
At the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing Wednesday, Republicans particularly wanted to know what President Obama planned to do to address those fossil fuel workers who've lost their jobs as a result of administration policy.
In a major address at Georgetown University last June, Obama promised there would be a special plan for those workers.
"So I would ask either one of you what are the special plans in the president's action plan to help address these people who are losing their jobs, " Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) asked EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
"I'm not familiar with the details of those plans, but I am familiar from reading the climate action plan that the president sees this as both a challenge and an economic opportunity," McCarthy replied.
That exchange led to a testy retort by Ralph Hall (R-Tex.). "You got a better answer than I received from Mrs. McCarthy about a year ago before the science committee," Hall told McCarthy. "I may have asked you a question you didn't like and your answer was, ‘I'm not in the business of creating jobs.’”
Committee Democrats, along with McCarthy and Moniz, set out to counter Republican skepticism about the impact of climate change.
"The evidence is overwhelming and the science is clear," said Moniz. "The threat from climate change is real and urgent. The basic science behind climate change is simple. Carbon dioxide makes the earth warmer, and we are admitting more and more of it into the atmosphere."
Moniz added that any stabilization of surface temperatures in recent years was an indication of a "hiatus" of global warming, not an end to global warming.
Told of Moniz's remarks, astrophysicist Willy Soon, one of the NIPCC's leading scientists, reacted incredulously. "So tell us when is it going to rise again?” he asked. “This is a question that not only me, as a scientist, is asking , but all the lay persons should begin asking."
The Heartland Institute's Bast told Fox News that there are no climate models used by proponents of global warming that predict a lull in warming.
"Point to the model that predicted this hiatus," he said. "No increase in violent weather , no increase in hurricanes. All of this and we're still supposed to believe the models... models they picked because they supported their political interests, not because they represented good science."


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/09/19/new-study-says-threat-global-warming-greatly-exaggerated/#ixzz2fS3btOlb

Climategate II: leaked emails show struggle to deal with warming lull



Scientists working on a landmark U.N. report on climate change are struggling to explain why global warming appears to have slowed down in the past 15 years even though greenhouse gas emissions keep rising.
Leaked documents obtained by The Associated Press show there are deep concerns among governments over how to address the issue ahead of next week's meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Climate skeptics have used the lull in surface warming since 1998 to cast doubt on the scientific consensus that humans are cooking the planet by burning fossil fuels and cutting down CO2-absorbing forests.
The IPCC report is expected to affirm the human link with greater certainty than ever, but the panel is under pressure to also address the recent lower rate of warming, which scientists say is likely due to heat going deep into the ocean and natural climate fluctuations.

I think to not address it would be a problem because then you basically have the denialists saying, 'Look the IPCC is silent on this issue,"' said Alden Meyer, of the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists.

In a leaked June draft of the report's summary from policy-makers, the IPCC said the rate of warming in 1998-2012 was about half the average rate since 1951. It cited natural variability in the climate system, as well as cooling effects from volcanic eruptions and a downward phase in solar activity.

But several governments that reviewed the draft objected to how the issue was tackled, in comments to the IPCC obtained by the AP.

Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10-15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries.

The U.S. also urged the authors to include the "leading hypothesis" that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean.

Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for any statistics. That year was exceptionally warm, so any graph showing global temperatures starting with 1998 looks flat, because most years since have been cooler. Using 1999 or 2000 as a starting year would yield a more upward-pointing curve.

Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for skeptics.

Many skeptics claim that the rise in global average temperatures stopped in the late 1990s and their argument has gained momentum among some media and politicians, even though the scientific evidence of climate change is piling up: the previous decade was the warmest on record and, so far, this decade is even warmer. Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice melted to a record low last year and the IPCC draft said sea levels have risen by 7.5 inches since 1901.

Many researchers say the slowdown in warming is related to the natural ocean cycles of El Nino and La Nina. Also, a 2013 study by Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research found dramatic recent warming in the deeper oceans.

Stefan Rahmstorf, a German climate scientist, said it was possible that the report's authors were feeling pressured to address the warming slowdown because it's received so much attention recently.

"I think a lot of the interest in this topic in the science community has been triggered by the public debate about it," said Rahmstorf, who was a reviewer for the report's chapter on sea levels.

Jonathan Lynn, a spokesman for the IPCC, declined to comment on the content of the report because it hasn't been finalized, but said it would provide "a comprehensive picture of all the science relevant to climate change, including the thousands of pieces of scientific research published since the last report in 2007 up to earlier this year."

The IPCC draft report says it's "extremely likely" that human influence caused more than half of the warming observed since the 1950s, an upgrade from "very likely" in the last IPCC report in 2007.

The panel also raised its projections for sea level rise to 10-32 inches by the end of the century. The 2007 report predicted a rise of 7-23 inches.
Continued carbon emissions at or above current rates "would induce changes in all components in the climate system, some of which would very likely be unprecedented in hundreds to thousands of years," the IPCC said in the draft. A final version will be presented at the end of the panel's meeting in Stockholm next week.

The IPCC's conclusions are important because they serve as the scientific underpinnings of U.N. negotiations to rein in emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. A global climate treaty is supposed to be adopted in 2015.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/09/20/warming-lull-since-18-haunts-climate-change-authors/#ixzz2fS5UoPm6

Planet good for another 1.75 billion years, scientists say



Earth could continue to host life for at least another 1.75 billion years, as long as nuclear holocaust, an errant asteroid or some other disaster doesn't intervene, a new study calculates.
But even without such dramatic doomsday scenarios, astronomical forces will eventually render the planet uninhabitable. Somewhere between 1.75 billion and 3.25 billion years from now, Earth will travel out of the solar system's habitable zone and into the "hot zone," new research indicates.

These zones are defined by water. In the habitable zone, a planet (whether in this solar system or an alien one) is just the right distance from its star to have liquid water. Closer to the sun, in the "hot zone," the Earth's oceans would evaporate. Of course, conditions for complex life including humans would become untenable before the planet entered the hot zone. [The Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth]
But the researchers' main concern was the search for life on other planets, not predicting a timeline for the end of life on this one.
The evolution of complex life on Earth suggests the process requires a lot of time.
Simple cells first appeared on Earth nearly 4 billion years ago. "We had insects 400 million years ago, dinosaurs 300 million years ago and flowering plants 130 million years ago," lead researcher Andrew Rushby, of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, said in a statement."Anatomically modern humans have only been around for the last 200,000 years so you can see it takes a really long time for intelligent life to develop."
Rushby and his colleagues developed a new tool to help evaluate the amount of time available for the evolution of life on other planets: a model that predicts the time a planet would spend in its habitable zone. In the research, published today (Sept. 18) in the journal Astrobiology,they applied the model to Earth and eight other planets currently in the habitable zone, including Mars.
They calculated that Earth's habitable-zone lifetime is as long as 7.79 billion years. (Earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old.) Meanwhile, the other planets had habitable-zone lifetimes ranging from 1 billion years to 54.72 billion years.
"If we ever needed to move to another planet, Mars is probably our best bet," Rushby said in a statement. "It's very close and will remain in the habitable zone until the end of the sun's lifetime 6 billion years from now."
While other models have been developed for Earth, they are not suitable for other planets, he added.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/09/19/how-much-longer-can-earth-support-life/#ixzz2fS9Yf2u4

Actually 200,000 years is hardly a tick in the great universal clock so man really hasn't been around all that long.

*****SMILE*****

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyTfbtZeGeU

 

The "Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change" is basically a guy named Fred Singer.

Fred Singer also sees no link between smoking and cancer.  Nor does he see any link between sun exposure and skin cancer.  So it is no surprise that he sees no link between things like human activities and climate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer

According to climatologists and supposedly enlightened progressive liberals changes in solar radiation has no effect on global warming therefore it doesn't need to be accounted for when talking about global warming.

*****CHUCKLE*****

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rdF7o08KXw

 

boards of FL wrote:The "Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change" is basically a guy named Fred Singer.

Fred Singer also sees no link between smoking and cancer.  Nor does he see any link between sun exposure and skin cancer.  So it is no surprise that he sees no link between things like human activities and climate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer

And the IPCC was totally debunked when the University of East Anglia went down the Global Warming tubes in a blaze of glory. As you know, Dr. Bob Jones and the University of East Anglia were the source of the figures used by IPCC.

If man is increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere. Please share with us all, as I am sure we are all interested, how much has the percentage of CO2 in our atmosphere increased in say the past 150 years? In other words, if the percentage of CO2 150 years ago was 5%, is it 5.5% today? Or maybe 7%? If it has an effect on the atmosphere, there must be much more today than 150 years ago, right?

The UN sees it as way to tax the world, especially the United States and redistribute our wealth. President Barack Hussein Obama, as you well know, also dreams of the redistribution of wealth.

ZVUGKTUBM wrote:I have difficulty supporting the arguments in favor of global warming. I greatly fear the social-engineering the global warming activists are trying to implement, which would put serious controls on many aspects of modern life. To me, this movement is more about controlling humanity than it is about saving the planet.

Z, this is where you and I agree 110%

I wish you would acknowledge that the gov running everyones healthcare is also the same controlling humanity maneuver, because it is.

They are so called doing all these things for your own good. 

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-climate-change-uncertainty-20130923,0,791164.story

Climate scientists, meanwhile, have had a different response. Although most view the pause as a temporary interruption in a long-term warming trend, some disagree and say it has revealed serious flaws in the deliberative processes of the IPCC.

One of the most prominent of these critics is Judith Curry, a climatologist who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was involved in the third IPCC assessment, which was published in 2001. But now she accuses the organization of intellectual arrogance and bias.

"All other things being equal, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere will have a warming effect on the planet," Curry said. "However, all things are never equal, and what we are seeing is natural climate variability dominating over human impact."

Curry isn't the only one to suggest flaws in established climate models. IPCC vice chair Francis Zwiers, director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium at the University of Victoria in Canada, co-wrote a paper published in this month's Nature Climate Change that said climate models had "significantly" overestimated global warming over the last 20 years — and especially for the last 15 years, which coincides with the onset of the hiatus.

The models had predicted that the average global surface temperature would increase by 0.21 of a degree Celsius over this period, but they turned out to be off by a factor of four, Zwiers and his colleagues wrote. In reality, the average temperature has edged up only 0.05 of a degree Celsius over that time — which in a statistical sense is not significantly different from zero.

I side with the consensus of the scientific community on this one.  That said, if new data sways the opinion of the scientific community, I would sway with it.  Point being, as new information and new discoveries come to light, theories have to be rethought or reworked.  I have no problem with this, however, this is the fundamental difference between those who currently side with science versus those who say global warming simply doesn't exist.  I am willing to change my mind.  The rest of you are not.  Pkrbum will never believe that global warming exists, even if it one day becomes possible to irrefutably prove as much.  A supernatural being claiming to have created the entire universe could appear before a republican and say "I am god, and I am telling you that global warming is a real thing", and the Pkrs, Vectors, and Markles would still disagree.

The models don't fit the data as well as they do the agenda. Finally they're forced to admit variables as I've said all along.

Again... we wouldn't have advanced so far as a species if not for this wonderful warming trend. We're really quite fortunate.

boards of FL wrote:I side with the consensus of the scientific community on this one.  That said, if new data sways the opinion of the scientific community, I would sway with it.  Point being, as new information and new discoveries come to light, theories have to be rethought or reworked.  I have no problem with this, however, this is the fundamental difference between those who currently side with science versus those who say global warming simply doesn't exist.  I am willing to change my mind.  The rest of you are not.  Pkrbum will never believe that global warming exists, even if it one day becomes possible to irrefutably prove as much.  A supernatural being claiming to have created the entire universe could appear before a republican and say "I am god, and I am telling you that global warming is a real thing", and the Pkrs, Vectors, and Markles would still disagree.

No one here is saying that climate change doesn't happen. That being said what they are saying is that your theologian 'climatologists' who have fudged the figures in their collected data are misguided alchemists. This is why those in the scientific community who are not considered part of your elite theologian 'climatologist' group are distancing themselves from your inquisitional dogma.

Every true scientist, and those of us that have a science background, know that if the data doesn't fit the theory the theory is incorrect and has to go back to the drawing board for a total rethink and rewrite.

*****CHUCKLE*****

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpO_oVtXCa4