Irresponsible journalism?

[DavidMcK]

I'm reading a condensed version of this week's 'Time' magazine cover story (the sky is falling!) from this website: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/26/coverstory/index.html

Does anybody have the technical knowledge to refute the main points of this story?

David

[Roger Bissell]

David, the best intellectual ammunition I have found on this so far is a piece by Dennis T. Avery (senior fellow for the Hudson Institute) that appeared this morning (Mar. 31) in the Orange County Register. I tried to "google" his op-ed essay, but it hasn't been picked up by the system yet, so I'm typing it in for your information. (I recommend that anyone wanting to follow up on Avery's views on the causes and effects of climate change google these words (without quotes): dennis t avery global warming, and check out the first several hits.)....REB

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Global-warming blame on thin factual ice (Mar. 31)

Time magazine devotes the cover of its April 3 edition to the "near-certainty" that humans are causing dangerous global warming. However, Time offers evidence only of a warming, which could be either man-made or natural.

Based on historic and geophysical evidence, Time's new cover story is likely to be as wrong as its 1974 cover story touting global cooling. Newsweek did one the next year.

Neither magazine understands the moderate, natural climate cycle that history tells us has dominated the past 2000 years of Earth's temperature variations:

In the 1980s, we were surprised by the first long ice cores from both Greenland and the Antarctic, which gave us 400,000 years of the Earth's detailed temperature history in their ice layers. We had expected to find the big ice ages and the warm interglacial period like our own. We had not expected to find a moderate, natural 1,500-year cycle running through it all, even through the big ice ages.
The natural warmings raise Earth's temperatures 1 to 2 degrees C at the latitude of New York for 400 to 800 years. The coolings that follow drop our temperatures 1 to 2 degrees below the mean for a similar length of time.
Since then, scientists have found the 1,500-year cycle in tree rings, cave stalagmites and the microfossils of seabed sediments. Prehistoric villages moved up and down the Alps and andes mountainsides while glaciers worldwide advanced and retreated, all in time with the cycle.
The North American pollen database shows nine complete reorganizations of our trees and plants in the past 14,000 years, or a cycle every 1,650 years. In my home state of Michigan, pollen shows the numbers of warmth-loving beech trees yielding first to the cold-tolerant oaks and then to cold-adapted pine trees. Currently, with the world 150 years into the Modern Warming, the pine trees are being discouraged, the oaks are proliferating, and the beech trees are waiting another turn. [save the beech trees! Hands off global warming!...REB]
The solar-created carbon and berylliunm isotopes in the ice tell us the cycle is linked to a similar cycle in the sun's irradiance. We had known for centuries that the coldest parts of the Little Ice Age occurred when there were virtually no sunspots. Now, space satellites are documenting small variations in what we used to think was an unchanging sun.
Time magaine has no such hard evidence to support human-induced warming. Theory says more carbon-dioxide gas will mean warmer temperatures, but no one knows whether the CO2 "X-factor" is tiny or huge. The modest net warming since 1940 argues against a big CO2 factor. So does the erratic warming pattern, with a cooling from 1940 to 1979 and then a spurt of warming.
A warming driven by industrial CO2 should have started after 1940, and increased strongly and steadily. The climate models all assume a big CO2 factor, without evidence.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims to have found a "human fingerprint," but has offered no evidence to support the claim.
The evidence is all on the side of the natural cycle.
Time's cover story seems over-heated. The UN panel's widely publicized scenario of an 11-degree C warming driven by CO2 seems frantic.

[DavidMcK]

Thanks Roger, for taking the time to type a response, that was helpful. Meanwhile I've found two books that might help my grasp of the issues: 'Satanic Gases' and 'The Skeptical Enviornmentalist'.

David

[L W HALL]

If you haven't already done so you might want to do a search for the "Hockey Stick Model" on which a lot of the claims about global warming were based.

Later evidence was presented that indicates their were some basic flaws in the math used to compute graphs for the predictions.

Here is a link to one article from 2004 put out by "Technology Review" in which this is discussed. I haven't looked for anything new in a while so I am not sure if there are new twists to this or not.

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/0...uller101504.asp

L W

[Charles R. Anderson]

Another useful book for perspective on the issues of global warming is Meltdown by Patrick J. Michaels (CATO Institute, Washington, DC, 2004).

[SaulOhio]

George Reisman has been posting on the subject a lot lately, saying that there will be climate change no matter what we do, and the correct response is to produce more energy in order to adapt through industry and technology.

http://www.georgereisman.com/blog/