Timothy Birdnow

Here are a pair of articles from the Heartland Institute worth reading:

SCIENTIST MANN SAYS SCIENCE UNNECESSARY TO PROVE HUMAN CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate scientist Michael Mann has given up trying to justify climate alarmism by pointing to scientific evidence, stating at a meeting of the Democratic platform-drafting committee, data and models "increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious. The Washington Times quotes Mann saying, "Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change ... [but] these tools … increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle.”

What Mann counts as an obvious or visible sign or human-caused climate change is puzzling to me. Scientific evidence is mounting daily to show the climate is less sensitive to carbon dioxide and natural factors play a greater role in climate change than alarmists like Mann have claimed. In addition, the weather events (the evidence of our senses) cited by Mann as showing "the signal of climate change is no longer subtle, it is obvious” – hurricanes, flooding in Texas and South Carolina, the California drought, and heat waves in Arizona – are either not historically unusual or actually contradict climate disaster predictions.

Neither droughts nor extreme rainfall events are outside historic norms, polar bear populations are stable or growing as is ice extent in Antarctica, and the United States is experiencing a nine-year "hurricane drought” of Category 3 storms starting in 2006, beating the previous mark of eight years from 1861–1868, the longest such streak since such recording began in 1851.

Dr. Mann, where is this human-caused climate change of which you speak?

SOURCE: Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/27/michael-mann-climate-scientist-data-increasingly-u/

NEW CARBON DIOXIDE – CLIMATE RELATIONSHIP PROPOSED

A new study in Science Direct offers "a simple and novel proposal” for the causes of ice ages and interglacial cycles, and for the relationship between carbon dioxide and major climate shifts.

According to the study, shifts between ice ages and interglacials are caused by an interplay among carbon dioxide, dust, and Earth’s albedo. During glacial periods, the northern ice sheets reflect back so much sunlight global temperatures are driven down, and over millennia increasing amounts of carbon dioxide are sequestered in the oceans with atmospheric concentrations reaching a critical minima of approximately 200 ppm. Low carbon dioxide combined with arid conditions causes a die-back of temperate and boreal forests and grasslands, with ensuing soil erosion generating dust storms that, over time, result in dust deposition on the northern ice sheets, reducing the sunlight they reflect back into space. As dust-laden ice-sheets warm, they undergo rapid melting, forcing the climate into an interglacial period during which carbon dioxide levels rise.

The critical point to note is this: Should this research prove true, the relationship between carbon dioxide and warming is just the opposite of alarmists’ predictions. According to the study:

Ice age [carbon dioxide] reductions coincide with an increase in ice sheet extent and therefore an increase in global albedo, and this should result in further cooling of the climate. But what actually happens is that when carbon dioxide reaches a minimum and albedo reaches a maximum, the world rapidly warms into an interglacial. A similar effect can be seen at the peak of an interglacial, where high CO2 and low albedo results in cooling.

Put that in your climate models and see what happens!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:35 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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