Edward Teller, go to hell!

Actually, he’s been dead since 2003, but I’d send him to hell anyway.

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

Edward Teller (original Hungarian name Teller Ede) (January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Jew-Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”, even though he claimed that he did not care for the title.^[1]

Teller is best known for his work on the American nuclear program, specifically as a member of the Manhattan Project during World War II, his role in the development of the hydrogen bomb, and his long association with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (which he co-founded and served as a director). He invited contention in the 1950s by his controversial testimony in the security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos colleague Robert Oppenheimer, and thus became ostracized by much of the scientific community. He continued to find support from the U.S. government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program.

In his later years, he became especially known for his advocacy of controversial technological solutions to both military and civilian problems, including a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using thermonuclear explosives. He was a vigorous advocate of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, though he was accused of overselling the feasibility of the project. Over the course of his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality, and is considered one of the inspirations for the character Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 movie of the same name.^[2] He was also awarded with an Ig Nobel Prize in 1991 for his peace proposals, such as the Star Wars weapons system.

In 1942, Teller was invited to be part of Robert Oppenheimer’s summer planning seminar at the University of California, Berkeley for the origins of the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to develop the first nuclear weapons. A few weeks earlier, Teller had been meeting with his friend and colleague Enrico Fermi about the prospects of atomic warfare, and Fermi had nonchalantly suggested that perhaps a weapon based on nuclear fission could be used to set off an even larger nuclear fusion reaction. Even though he initially explained to Fermi why he thought the idea would not work, Teller was fascinated by the possibility and was quickly bored with the idea of “just” an atomic bomb (even though this was not yet anywhere near completion). At the Berkeley session, Teller diverted discussion from the fission weapon to the possibility of a fusion weapon—what he called the “Super” (an early version of what was later known as a hydrogen bomb).^[6]

In 1946, Teller participated in a conference in which the properties of thermonuclear fuels such as deuterium and the possible design of a hydrogen bomb were discussed. It was concluded that Teller’s assessment of a hydrogen bomb had been too favourable, and that both the quantity of deuterium needed, as well as the radiation losses during deuterium burning, would shed doubt on its workability. Addition of expensive tritium to the thermonuclear mixture would likely lower its ignition temperature, but even so, nobody knew at that time how much tritium would be needed, and whether even tritium addition would encourage heat propagation. At the end of the conference, in spite of opposition by some members such as Robert Serber, Teller submitted an unduly optimistic report in which he said that a hydrogen bomb was feasible, and that further work should be encouraged on its development. Fuchs had also participated in this conference, and transmitted this information to Moscow. The model of Teller’s “classical Super” was so uncertain that Oppenheimer would later say that he wished the Russians were building their own hydrogen bomb based on that design, so that it would almost certainly retard their progress on it.^[10]

Following the Soviet Union’s first test detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949, President Truman announced a crash development program for a hydrogen bomb. Teller returned to Los Alamos in 1950 to work on the project. Teller quickly grew impatient with the progress of the program, insisted on involving more theorists, and accused his colleagues of lacking imagination. This worsened his relations with other researchers. None of his designs (or anyone else’s), however, were yet workable. Bethe thought that had Teller not pressed for an early H-bomb test, the Russians’ own development might possibly have been slowed, particularly as the information Klaus Fuchs gave them contained many incorrect technical details that rendered a workable H-bomb infeasible. Russian scientists who had worked on the Soviet hydrogen bomb have claimed that they could see that the early ideas were infeasible as well as anyone else who had looked at them did, and also claimed that they developed their H-bomb wholly independently.^[12]

In 1950, calculations by the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and his collaborator Cornelius Everett, along with confirmations by Fermi, had shown that not only was Teller’s earlier estimate of the quantity of tritium needed for the H-bomb a low one, but that even with a higher amount of tritium, the energy losses in the fusion process would be too great to enable the fusion reaction to propagate. However, in 1951, after still many years of fruitless labor on the “Super,” an innovative idea from Ulam was seized upon by Teller and developed into the first workable design for a megaton-range hydrogen bomb. The exact contribution provided respectively from Ulam and Teller to what became known as the Teller–Ulam design is not definitively known in the public domain, and the exact contributions of each and how the final idea was arrived upon has been a point of dispute in both public and classified discussions since the early 1950s.^[13]

In an interview with Scientific American from 1999, Teller told the reporter:

“I contributed; Ulam did not. I’m sorry I had to answer it in this abrupt way. Ulam was rightly dissatisfied with an old approach. He came to me with a part of an idea which I already had worked out and difficulty getting people to listen to. He was willing to sign a paper. When it then came to defending that paper and really putting work into it, he refused. He said, ‘I don’t believe in it.’“^[3]

The rift between Teller and many of his colleagues was widened in 1954 when he testified against Robert Oppenheimer, former head of Los Alamos and member of the Atomic Energy Commission, at Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing. Teller had clashed with Oppenheimer many times at Los Alamos over issues relating both to fission and fusion research, and during Oppenheimer’s trial he was the only member of the scientific community to label Oppenheimer a security risk.

After a public hearing, the authorities agreed with Teller. Oppenheimer’s security clearance was eventually stripped, and Teller was treated as a pariah by many of his former colleagues. In response, Teller began to run with a more military and governmental crowd, becoming the scientific darling of conservative politicians and thinkers for his advocacy of American scientific and technological supremacy. After the fact, Teller consistently denied that he was intending to damn Oppenheimer, and even claimed that he was attempting to exonerate him. Documentary evidence has suggested that this was likely not the case, however. Six days before the testimony, Teller met with an AEC liaison officer and suggested “deepening the charges” in his testimony.^[26] It has been suggested that Teller’s testimony against Oppenheimer was an attempt to remove Oppenheimer from power so that Teller could become the leader of the American nuclear scientist community.^[27]

Teller promoted increased defense spending to counter the perceived Soviet missile threat. He was a signatory to the 1958 report by the military sub-panel of the Rockefeller Brothers funded Special Studies Project, which called for a $3 billion annual increase in America’s military budget.^[30]

For some twenty years, Teller advised Israel on nuclear matters in general, and on the building of a hydrogen bomb in particular.^[37] In 1952, Teller and Oppenheimer had a long meeting with Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv, telling him that the best way to accumulate plutonium was to burn natural uranium in a nuclear reactor. Starting in 1964, a connection between Teller and Israel was made by the physicist Yuval Neeman, who had similar political views. Between 1964 and 1967, Teller visited Israel six times, lecturing at Tel Aviv University, and advising the chiefs of Israel’s scientific-security circle as well as prime ministers and cabinet members. At each of his talks with members of the Israeli security establishment’s highest levels he would make them swear that they would never be tempted into signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 1967 when the Israeli program was nearing completion, Teller informed Neeman that he was going to tell the CIA that Israel had built nuclear weapons and explain that it was justified by the background of the Six-Day War. After Neeman cleared it with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Teller briefed the head of the CIA’s Office of Science and Technology, Carl Duckett. It took a year for Teller to convince the CIA that Israel had contained nuclear capability; the information then went through CIA Director Richard Helms and then to the US president. Teller also persuaded them to end the American attempts to inspect the Negev Nuclear Research Center in Dimona.

Teller suffered a heart attack in 1979, which he blamed on Jane Fonda; after the Three Mile Island accident, the actress had outspokenly lobbied against nuclear power while promoting her latest movie, The China Syndrome (a movie depicting a nuclear accident which had coincidentally been released only a little over a week before the actual incident.) In response, Teller acted quickly to lobby in favor of nuclear energy, testifying to its safety and reliability, and after such a flurry of activity suffered the attack. Teller authored a two-page spread in the Wall Street Journal which appeared on July 31, 1979, under the headline “I was the only victim of Three-Mile Island”, which opened with:

“

On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.[38]

”

The next day, The New York Times ran an editorial criticizing the ad, noting that it was sponsored by Dresser Industries, the firm which had manufactured one of the defective valves which contributed to the Three Mile Island accident.^[39]

In the 1980s, Teller began a strong campaign for what was later called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), derided by critics as “Star Wars,” the concept of using ground and satellite-based lasers, particle beams and missiles to destroy incoming Soviet ICBMs. Teller lobbied with government agencies—and got the sanction of President Ronald Reagan—for his plan to develop a system using elaborate satellites which used atomic weapons to fire X-ray lasers at incoming missiles— as part of a broader scientific research program into defenses against nuclear weapons. However, scandal erupted when Teller (and his associate Lowell Wood) were accused of deliberately overselling the program and perhaps had encouraged the dismissal of a laboratory director (Roy Woodruff) who had attempted to correct the error.^[39] His claims led to a joke which circulated in the scientific community, that a new unit of unfounded optimism was designated as the teller; one teller was so large that most events had to be measured in nanotellers or picotellers. Many prominent scientists argued that the system was futile.

Despite (or perhaps because of) his hawkish reputation, Teller made a public point of noting that he regretted the use of the first atomic bombs on civilian cities during World War II. He further claimed that before the bombing of Hiroshima he had indeed lobbied Oppenheimer to use the weapons first in a “demonstration” which could be witnessed by the Japanese high-command and citizenry before using them to inflict thousands of deaths. The “father of the hydrogen bomb” would use this quasi-anti-nuclear stance (he would say that he believed nuclear weapons to be unfortunate, but that the arms race was unavoidable due to the intractable nature of Communism) to promote technologies such as SDI, arguing that they were needed to make sure that nuclear weapons could never be used again (Better a shield than a sword was the title of one of his books on the subject).

However, there is contrary evidence. In the 1970s, a letter of Teller to Leo Szilard emerged, dated July 2, 1945:

“Our only hope is in getting the facts of our results before the people. This might help convince everybody the next war would be fatal. For this purpose, actual combat-use might even be the best thing.”^[40]

So here we have a two-faced man who cheated one of his colleagues out of credit he was due and backstabbed another to gain more influence and prestige before political and military leaders. He may have been a scientist, but he was also a horrible man whose work could have destroyed the whole world. FUCK HIM!

Climategate, continued

It is becoming increasingly obvious to me that the issue of climate change has taken an ugly turn. See my previous blog entry.  After reviewing the issue of Climategate very carefully, I have come to the following conclusions.

1. The behavior of the scientists involved in the matter was indeed unethical and they should be disciplined over it. The head of the CRU, Phil Jones, should resign and he and other staff members, such as Keith Briffa, should be stripped of their credentials. So should Michael Mann, who is not a staff member of the CRU but was heavily involved with it, as the stolen e-mails from the CRU make clear.
2. The entire field of dendroclimatology (the process of determining past climate from tree rings) has been thrown into disrepute and should no longer be regarded as a critical support for the man-made global warming hypothesis. And the “hockey stick” graph that was a product of it is no longer credible enough to be anything beyond a speculation based on questionable interpretation of data.
3. Efforts to combat global warming, at least for the next few years, should be limited to voluntary efforts by the people. Government coercion opens a big can of worms, especially when the science of climate change is so uncertain.
4. Even in the absence of evidence from tree rings, the evidence for the man-made global warming hypothesis remains strong, though not as compelling as I previously thought.
5. Even if there were NO evidence for global warming, or even if climate change of any kind was not an issue in science, it is imperative that we gradually stop using fossil fuels and build a new energy infrastructure that will be based entirely on renewable and non-polluting sources. Otherwise, the days of our modern technical civilization are numbered.

That is all for now.

Climategate, what it really means.

Earlier this month, someone, appearantly from Russia, hacked into the e-mail server of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and stole hundreds, perhaps thousands of e-mails dating back as far as 1996, and made a file out of them on his own server in Russia. The hacker then passed those emails to global warming denialists, who then made them public. Hacking into private computer files and stealing the items within them is a crime, and thus the e-mails obtained would not be admissible in any American court of law, for that would be rewarding illegal behavior (Not even the police or the FBI could legally do such a thing without a warrant or a subpoena, let alone any private citizens.). Then denialists picked through the e-mails and cherry-picked a few out of context passages to try to “prove” that the entire man-made global warming hypothesis (MMGWH) was a fraud.

Thus we have now seen the depths the denialists will go to attack their targets; most of them are willing to commit crimes and/or condone those crimes committed by others to advance their cause. Yet they have the gall to demand that, on the basis of the stolen e-mails, the writers of the e-mails should by charged with fraud and imprisoned. That is sheer hypocrisy. Read my last blog entry about the character flaws and other questionable issues of Isaac Newton, including his bitter battle with his rival, Gottfried Leibniz, over who had invented calculus first. The backstabbing and intrigue involved was indeed disgraceful on Newton’s part, but that would not discredit his other scientific work, let alone any work by others relating to the same subjects Newton worked on.

Here are other commentaries made about this event on other websites:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack-context/

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/11/22/806704/-Trickn

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2009/11/23/why-climategate-aint-nothing/

http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2009/11/leaked_climate_change_document.php

http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/11/the_hacked_climate_science_ema.php

http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/11/hacked_emails_tree-ring_proxie.php

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/11/climate_gate_the_latest_scanda.php

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/11/those_cru_emails_in_full.php

http://scienceavenger.blogspot.com/2009/11/analysis-of-hacked-global-warming-e.html

http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-do-the-hacked-CRU-emails-tell-us.html

At most, the scientists whose e-mails were stolen were guilty of “groupthink”, willing to engage in underhanded tactics to defeat their opponents for the sake of a good cause. But then again, so are promoters of most political parties. Scientists are people too, and are thus as flawed in their characters as any other. Such behavior should be condemned, but that does not automatically debunk the findings of the scientists responsible for the behavior, let alone the work of others not even associated with the CRU. It takes the actual application of the scientific method to do that.

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

Let’s look at what the e-mails highlighted so far by global warming denialists do NOT refer to:

1. No direct communications from  Al Gore.
2. No communications with other leaders of the Democratic Party in the United States.
3. No references to the chemical properties or increasing amounts of greenhouses gases.
4. No marching orders from agencies of the United Nations, not even the IPCC.
5. No plots to actually murder or injure denialists.
6. No references to direct measuments of temperatures.
7. No explicit admission by anyone that the man-made global warming hypothesis is a hoax.

What we do find are:

1. Attempts to account for uncertainties in the gathered data of temperture proxies.
2. Awareness that such uncertainties generate doubt, so they discuss smoothing them over in public presentations.
3. Bitter attacks on and attempts to discredit denialists
4. A threat to delete raw data rather than allow a  certain denialist access to it.

The sort of things that result from scientists (or anyone else, for that matter) under constant scutiny and attack from opponents they deeply distrust.

Let’s assume that the research of this one institution was found to be not reliable. Well, since most of the questionable e-mails were about temperature proxies (tree rings, ice cores) referring to periods of time long ago, we could simply replicate the studies with new proxies. Denialists that hounded the climatologists for the “raw data” to support their claims could have gone into the field and gathered and analyzed their own sets of raw data instead. They never do! And I would recommend that just such a thing be done again. There are plenty of tree rings and ice cores that could be taken in the future to confirm or debunk the claims made by the climatologists of the CRU.

And the other findings, such as the known chemical properties of greenhouse gases, the fact that they are increasing in the atmosphere, the fact that deforestation and burning fossil fuels lead to such an increase, the increase in global average temperatures,  and the shrinking of the Arctic ice cap, all support the MMGWH and can only be explained by it. Denialists can attempt to explain all that away, but only in defiance of the known laws of chemistry and physics. Of course, if you want to beleive that nearly ALL the scientists in the world for hundreds of years have been part of a conspiracy to promote a scam, be my guest. Just don’t expect me to take you seriously!

Could Isaac Newton be discredited?

Here are some little known and damaging facts about the scientist who supposedly discovered the law of gravity, among other achievements.

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

When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabus Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough. The young Isaac disliked his stepfather and held some enmity towards his mother for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins committed up to the age of 19: “Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.”^[10]

Newton later became involved in a dispute with Leibniz over priority in the development of infinitesimal calculus. Most modern historians believe that Newton and Leibniz developed infinitesimal calculus independently, although with very different notations. Occasionally it has been suggested that Newton published almost nothing about it until 1693, and did not give a full account until 1704, while Leibniz began publishing a full account of his methods in 1684. (Leibniz’s notation and “differential Method”, nowadays recognized as much more convenient notations, were adopted by continental European mathematicians, and after 1820 or so, also by British mathematicians.)

Starting in 1699, other members of the Royal Society (of which Newton was a member) accused Leibniz of plagiarism, and the dispute broke out in full force in 1711. Newton’s Royal Society proclaimed in a study that it was Newton who was the true discoverer and labeled Leibniz a fraud. This study was cast into doubt when it was later found that Newton himself wrote the study’s concluding remarks on Leibniz. Thus began the bitter Newton v. Leibniz calculus controversy, which marred the lives of both Newton and Leibniz until the latter’s death in 1716.^[26]

He was elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. In that day, any fellow of Cambridge or Oxford had to be an ordained Anglican priest. However, the terms of the Lucasian professorship required that the holder not be active in the church (presumably so as to have more time for science). Newton argued that this should exempt him from the ordination requirement, and Charles II, whose permission was needed, accepted this argument. Thus a conflict between Newton’s religious views and Anglican orthodoxy was averted.^[27]

When Robert Hooke criticised some of Newton’s ideas, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. Newton and Hooke had brief exchanges in 1679-80, when Hooke, appointed to manage the Royal Society’s correspondence, opened up a correspondence intended to elicit contributions from Newton to Royal Society transactions,^[34] which had the effect of stimulating Newton to work out a proof that the elliptical form of planetary orbits would result from a centripetal force inversely proportional to the square of the radius vector (see Newton’s law of universal gravitation – History and De motu corporum in gyrum). But the two men remained generally on poor terms until Hooke’s death.^[35]

With the Principia, Newton became internationally recognised.^[43] He acquired a circle of admirers, including the Swiss-born mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, with whom he formed an intense relationship that lasted until 1693, when it abruptly ended, at the same time that Newton suffered a nervous breakdown.^[44]

In the 1690s, Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal interpretation of the Bible. Henry More’s belief in the Universe and rejection of Cartesian dualism may have influenced Newton’s religious ideas. A manuscript he sent to John Locke in which he disputed the existence of the Trinity was never published. Later works – The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) and Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733) – were published after his death. He also devoted a great deal of time to alchemy (see above).

Newton was also a member of the Parliament of England from 1689 to 1690 and in 1701, but according to some accounts his only comments were to complain about a cold draught in the chamber and request that the window be closed.^[45]

In April 1705 Queen Anne knighted Newton during a royal visit to Trinity College, Cambridge. The knighthood is likely to have been motivated by political considerations connected with the Parliamentary election in May 1705, rather than any recognition of Newton’s scientific work or services as Master of the Mint.^[47]

After his death, Newton’s body was discovered to have had massive amounts of mercury in it, probably resulting from his alchemical pursuits. Mercury poisoning could explain Newton’s eccentricity in late life.^[51]

Historian Stephen D. Snobelen says of Newton, “Isaac Newton was a heretic. But … he never made a public declaration of his private faith — which the orthodox would have deemed extremely radical. He hid his faith so well that scholars are still unravelling his personal beliefs.”^[6] Snobelen concludes that Newton was at least a Socinian sympathiser (he owned and had thoroughly read at least eight Socinian books), possibly an Arian and almost certainly an antitrinitarian^[6]. In an age notable for its religious intolerance there are few public expressions of Newton’s radical views, most notably his refusal to take holy orders and his refusal, on his death bed, to take the sacrament when it was offered to him.^[6]

In his own lifetime, Newton wrote more on religion than he did on natural science. He believed in a rationally immanent world, but he rejected the hylozoism implicit in Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. Thus, the ordered and dynamically informed Universe could be understood, and must be understood, by an active reason. In his correspondence, Newton claimed that in writing the Principia “I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity”.^[66] He saw evidence of design in the system of the world: “Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice”. But Newton insisted that divine intervention would eventually be required to reform the system, due to the slow growth of instabilities.^[67] For this Leibniz lampooned him: “God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.”^[68] Newton’s position was vigorously defended by his follower Samuel Clarke in a famous correspondence.

In a manuscript he wrote in 1704 in which he describes his attempts to extract scientific information from the Bible, he estimated that the world would end no earlier than 2060. In predicting this he said, “This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.”^[81]

As warden of the Royal Mint, Newton estimated that 20% of the coins taken in during The Great Recoinage were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convictions of the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult to achieve; however, Newton proved to be equal to the task.^[84] Disguised as an habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself.^[85] For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton was made a justice of the peace and between June 1698 and Christmas 1699 conducted some 200 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers and suspects. Newton won his convictions and in February 1699, he had ten prisoners waiting to be executed.^{[citation needed]}

Now, if I were looking for reasons to reject Newton’s scientific work, I could refer to such things and say, “AHA! He hated his mother and stepfather, used his connections to bend the rules to his favor, stole ideas from a rival and libeled him, had mental breakdowns, was a religious extremist, was a politician,  and used his power put people to death! Maybe all his scientific work was worthless!”

But I wouldn’t do that, because the scientific work can and should stand on its own, regardless of anything else Newton did. All that needs to be done, if you doubt the validity of his work, is to start from scratch and test everything he did via experimental data that can be reproduced by others.

An excellent proof that global warming today is man-made

One of the expected proofs of the man-made global warming hypothesis is that, because  carbon dioxide (CO2) is lower in the atmosphere, the increased amounts of it will result in the lowest level of the atmosphere warming and the higher levels cooling. If most of the recent warming was due to the Sun, we would expect all levels of the atmosphere to warm equally. 

http://www.wunderground.com/education/strato_cooling.asp

{{{ By Jeffrey Masters, Ph.D. — Director of Meteorology, Weather Underground, Inc.

Global temperatures in 2006 were the third coldest on record in the lower stratosphere, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Only 1997 and 2000 had colder temperatures since record keeping began in 1979 (Figure 1). Why is this important? Well, the stratosphere is that layer of the upper atmosphere approximately 14-22 km (9-14 miles) above the surface that contains our protective ozone layer. The main reason for the recent stratospheric cooling is due to the destruction of ozone by human-emitted CFC gases. Ozone absorbs solar UV radiation, which heats the surrounding air in the stratosphere. Loss of ozone means that less UV light gets absorbed, resulting in cooling of the stratosphere. Cooling of the stratosphere results in the formation of more polar stratospheric clouds, which require very cold temperatures to form. The presence of these clouds allows even more ozone destruction to occur, since the reactions responsible for ozone destruction occur much faster in clouds than in dry air. Thus, the recent cooling of the stratosphere allows high levels of harmful UV light to reach the surface. As CFC gases begin to decline in coming years thanks to banning of these substances in 1987, the stratosphere should start to warm, and ozone levels will recover.   Figure 1. Global lower stratospheric departure of temperature from average since 1979, as measured by satellites. The large spikes in 1982 and 1991 are due to the eruptions of El Chicon and Mt. Pinatubo, respectively. These volcanos ejected huge quantities of sulphuric acid dust into the stratosphere. This dust absorbed large quantities of solar radiation, heating the stratosphere. Image credit: National Climatic Data Center. Greenhouse gases also cause stratospheric cooling However, this recovery of the ozone layer is being delayed. A significant portion of the observed stratospheric cooling is also due to human-emitted greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. Climate models predict that if greenhouse gases are to blame for heating at the surface, compensating cooling must occur in the upper atmosphere. We need only look as far as our sister planet, Venus, to see the truth of this theory. Venus’s atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide, which has triggered a run-away greenhouse effect of truly hellish proportions. The average surface temperature on Venus is a very toasty 894 °F! However, Venus’s upper atmosphere is a startling 4-5 times colder than Earth’s upper atmosphere. The explanation of this greenhouse gas-caused surface heating and upper air cooling is not simple, but good discussions can be found at Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and realclimate.org for those unafraid of radiative transfer theory. One way to think about the problem is that the amount of infrared heat energy radiated out to space by a planet is roughly equal to the amount of solar energy it receives from the sun. If the surface atmosphere warms, there must be compensating cooling elsewhere in the atmosphere in order to keep the amount of heat given off by the planet the same. As emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, their cooling effect on the stratosphere will increase. This will make recovery of the stratospheric ozone layer much slower. Greenhouse gases cause cooling higher up, too Greenhouse gases have also led to the cooling of the atmosphere at levels higher than the stratosphere. Over the past 30 years, the Earth’s surface temperature has increased 0.2-0.4 °C, while the temperature in the mesosphere, about 50-80 km above ground, has cooled 5-10 °C (Beig et al., 2006). There is no appreciable cooling due to ozone destruction at these altitudes, so nearly all of this dramatic cooling is due to the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Even greater cooling of 17 °C per decade has been observed high in the ionosphere, at 350 km altitude. This has affected the orbits of orbiting satellites, due to decreased drag, since the upper atmosphere has shrunk and moved closer to the surface (Lastovicka et al., 2006). The density of the air has declined 2-3% per decade the past 30 years at 350 km altitude. So, in a sense, the sky IS falling! What about global warming being caused by the sun? Some scientists have theorized that increases in solar output are responsible for a significant portion of the observed global warming. For instance, Scafetta & West (2006) estimated that 25-35% of the global warming in the 1980-2000 period was attributable to solar variability. Other scientists disagree, finding no evidence of global warming due to solar activity changes since the 1940s. Since any increase in solar radiation would heat both the lower and upper atmosphere, the observed drop in upper atmospheric temperatures in the past 30 years argues against a large portion of the observed greenhouse effect being caused by solar variability. The observed cooling of the upper atmosphere in recent decades is strong evidence that the warming at Earth’s surface is due to human-emitted greenhouse gases. It should also give us additional confidence in the climate models, since they predicted that this upper atmospheric cooling would occur. }}}

Damning evidence of fraud by Nils Axel-Morner

Nils Axel-Morner is a global warming denialist who has claimed that sea-level rises predicted by supporters of global warming are not happening and even that sea levels were higher in the historical past.

First, check out this blog entry from Tim Lambert:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/the_australians_war_on_science_42.php

{{{Category: The War on Science
Posted on: November 8, 2009 1:23 PM, by Tim Lambert

Despite her training in law, Janet Albrechtsen was not able to figure out that the Copenhagen treaty wasn’t going to impose a COMMUNIST WORLD GOVERNMENT, so you just know that she has no chance in hell of understanding a scientific question. Albrechtsen claims that it is a “fact” that “Sea levels have remained constant for the past 30 years”. Study the graph below from the CSIRO to see that measurements from tide gauges and satellites contradict this claim.

So how did Albrechtsen get it so completely wrong? Well, her authority, Nils Axel-Morner, completely ignored all direct measurements of sea-level from tide gauges and satellites. Simply really. Details in a previous post.

Graeme Readfearn (who, like Albrechtsen, works for News Limited) observes

wasn’t inquisitive enough to find out that Morner is treated like something of a joke among most oceanographers and quaternary scientists.

Albrechtsen tries to invest Morner with some authority because of his association with INQUA, but Readfearn gets a statement from the president of INQUA:

Dr Morner was, quite some time ago, president of one of INQUA’s commissions, indeed, the commission on sea-level changes. That commission no longer exists, as such, but is now part of our Commission on Coastal and Marine Processes. Dr Morner’s views concerning sea-level change are his own and are not endorsed by the current Executive Committee of INQUA, nor have previous INQUA Executive Committees endorsed Dr Morner’s views. On several occasions INQUA has requested of Dr Morner that he not inadvertently represent his views on sea-level change as if they have some connection with INQUA.}}}

OUCH! How embarrassing! Oh, wait….denialists have no sense of embarrassment. Nowhere does this become more obvious than in the testimony that Nils Axel-Morner gave to the British House of Lords on March 30, 2005.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12we18.htm

With the TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite mission in 1992, we now have new means of recording actual sea level changes. The record from 1992 to early 2000 (Fig 4) lacks any sign of a sea level rise; it records variability around zero plus a major ENSO even in year 1997.

  When we three years later have the same record extended into year 2003 on the Webb, a tilt has been introduced. This tilt does not originate from the satellite altimetry readings, however, but represents an inferred factor from tide-gauge interpretations. In order to get back to true satellite data, we have to tilt the whole record back to its original data of Fig 4. When this is done, there is no sea level rise to be seen—only a variability around zero plus a number of high-amplitude ENSO oscillations (Fig 5). This is why I in Fig 3 conclude that the sea level remained stationary at around zero for the last 10-15 years (as further discussed in Mörner, 2004a and 2005).

  The tide-gauge introduced into the satellite data on the Webb seems to violate observational facts at sites spread all over the globe; not least our NW European data covering both uplifted areas (Fennoscandia, Scotland) as subsiding areas (the North Sea).

From 2000 to the present, we have run a special international sea level project in the Maldives including six field sessions and numerous radiocarbon dates. Our record for the last 1,200 years is given in Fig 6. There are no signs of any on-going sea level rise. It seems all to be a myth.

 How the hell is it that denialists are willing to accuse the makers of the “hockey stick” graphs of faking data, yet they never noticed anything from their own people like THAT?! Morner did not provide any proof that the land in question was sinking! He merely ASSUMED it!

Tide gauges are indeed based on sea levels relative to land, so if the land is rising or sinking, it will indeed affect their measurments of sea levels. It reminds me of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Even with tide gauges, you can get a more accurate reading of sea levels by taking readings from dozens of places around the world, taking into account that it is unlikely that all those locations are rising or sinking at the same rate.

Satillite readings of sea levels may seem more accurate than tide gauges, but even satillites can be affected by variations in their orbits. It’s the same issue as satillites taking temperature readings vs temperature readings based on the ground. There is no ABSOLUTE accuracy in any measurement.

In 2007, other scientists took Mörner’s claims and cut them to pieces.

http://www.imedea.uib.es/goifis/OTROS/VANIMEDAT/documentos/intranet/Bibliography/Nerem_et_al_Global_Planet_Change_2007.pdf

We feel compelled to respond to the recent article by Mörner (2004) because he makes several major errors in his analysis, and as a result completely misinterprets the record of sea level change from the TOPEX/Poseidon (T/P) satellite altimeter mission. One major criticism we have with the paper is that Mörner does not include a single reference to any altimeter study, all of which refute his claim that there is no apparent change in global mean sea level (GMSL) [see Cazenave and Nerem, (2004) for a summary]. The consensus of all other researchers looking at the T/P and Jason data is that GMSL has been rising at a rate of 3.0 mm/year (Fig. 1) over the last 13 years (3.3 mm/year when corrected for the effects of glacial isostatic adjustment (Tamisiea et al., 2005)).

Mörner gives no details for the source of the data or processing strategy he used to produce Fig. 2, other than to say it is based on “raw data”. Because the details of the analysis are not presented in his paper, we are left to speculate on how this result could have been obtained, based on our years of experience as members of the T/P and Jason-1 Science Working Team. Mörner was apparently oblivious to the corrections that must be made to the “raw” altimeter data in order to make correct use of the data.

As with any satellite data set, calibration and validation of the data must be performed after launch to determine if there are any instrumental errors, find the source of those errors, and evaluate their behavior over time. Satellite altimetry is somewhat unique in that many adjustments must be made to the raw range measurements to account for atmospheric delays (ionosphere, troposphere), ocean tides, variations in wave height (which can bias how the altimeter measures sea level), and a variety of other effects. In addition, the sea level measurements can be affected by the method used to process the altimeter waveforms, and by the techniques and data used to compute the orbit of the satellite. Early releases of the satellite Geophysical Data Records (GDRs) often contain errors in the raw measurements, the measurement corrections, and the orbit estimates that are later corrected through an on-going calibration/validation process defined by the T/P and Jason Science Working Team.

The original release of the T/P GDRs (as well as some subsequent re-releases) contained several errors that directly affect GMSL change. Based on our experience with these issues, and the shape of Fig. 2 in Mörner3s paper, we believe that he used the original release of the T/P GDRs with no attempt to correct for two significant errors. One of the errors is caused by a drift in the TOPEX Microwave Radiometer (TMR). It was first observed in sea level via a comparison to tide gauges (Chambers et al., 1998; Mitchum, 1998), and was verified to be caused by the TMR via comparisons to other orbiting microwave radiometers and radiosondes (Keihm et al., 2000). It caused a drift of nearly −1.2 mm/year in measured GMSL until early 1998, and then a bias of −5 mm. A second major error was introduced when the redundant TOPEX altimeter was turned on in early 1999 due to degradation in the original instrument (Chambers et al., 2003). Since the electronics of the redundant altimeter were different, it caused an apparent bias in the GMSL measurement related to the Sea State Bias (SSB). The sense of the bias was such to cause an incorrect sudden drop in GMSL from the end of 1998 to the beginning of 1999 of nearly 10 mm. This drop is apparent in Fig. 2 of Mörner’s paper (and in comparison to tide gauge data (Mitchum, 2000)). This error is removed when an updated SSB model is applied (Chambers et al., 2003). Data with these corrections applied are available from both the U.S. and French processing centers, as well as products to correct the original GDRs.

When care is taken to make these corrections, the rate of sea level change over the entire T/P mission is 3.0± 0.4 mm/year (http://sealevel.colorado.edu), 3.3 mm/year when corrected for the change in ocean volume due to glacial isostatic adjustment (Tamisiea et al., 2005). In light of this, the statement by Mörner that “This means that this data set does not record any general trend (rising or falling) in sea level, just variability around zero plus the temporary ENSO perturbations” is completely false and is based on his erroneous data processing. Mörner’s paper completely misrepresents the results from the T/P mission, and does discredit to the tremendous amount of work that has been expended by the Science Working Team to create a precise, validated, and calibrated sea level data set suitable for studies of climate variations. Finally, Mörner ignores substantial other oceanographic (e.g. Levitus et al., 2001; Antonov et al., 2002; Munk, 2003; Willis et al., 2004) and cryospheric (e.g. Dyurgerov and Meier, 2000; Rignot et al., 2003; Krabill et al., 2004; Thomas et al., 2004) evidence of sea level rise which corroborate the altimeter observations.

Yikes! When someone in science gets smacked down like that, his career is effectively OVER!

And yet that loon just wrote the following open letter to the President of the Maldives attacking him for making efforts to raise public awareness about climate change. The Maldives, being low islands, would be among the first areas of Earth to be affected by rising sea levels caused be global warming. Since Morner lives in Sweden, not the Maldives, his arrogance is amazing!

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/OpenLetter.doc.pdf

Mr. President,

 

You have recently held an undersea Cabinet meeting to raise awareness of the idea that global sea level is rising and hence threatens to drown the Maldives. This proposition is not founded in observational facts and true scientific judgements, Accordingly it is incorrect.

Therefore, I am most surprised at your action and must protest to its intended message.

In 2001, when our research group found overwhelming evidence that sea level was by no means in a rising mode in the Maldives, but had remained quite stable for the last 30 years, I thought it would not be respectful to the fine people of the Maldives if I were to return home and present our results in international fora. Therefore, I announced this happy news during an interview for your local TV station. However, your predecessor as president censored and stopped the broadcast.

(Dale Husband: Actually, this is exactly how con artists faking science operate; they avoid the process of peer review through publishing in science journals and go directly to the public with their claims, which they present as fact to decieve the scientifically illiterate. I’m amazed he would admit to this publicly!)

Let me summarize a few facts (see Fig. 1, and evidence presented in Mörner, 2007):

(1) In the last 2000 years, sea level has oscillated with 5 peaks reaching 0.6 to 1.2 m above the present sea level.

(2) From 1790 to 1970 sea level was about 20 cm higher than today.

(3) In the 1970s, sea level fell by about 20 cm to its present level.

(4) Sea level has remained stable for the last 30 years, implying that there are no traces of any alarming on-going sea level rise.

(5) Therefore, we are able to free the Maldives (and the rest of low-lying coasts and island around the globe) from the condemnation of becoming flooded in the near future.

Of course, if he HAD submitted his findings to peer review, that submission would have had to include details of how he got his measurements, so that others could reproduce them. Until that is done, he has no right to call what he claimed “facts”. I am especially curious as to how he could have measured sea levels at the Maldives over the past 1,2oo years without tide gauges or satillite data.

Even more damning, Mörner promotes the pseudoscience known as water dowsing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils-Axel_M%C3%B6rner

Mörner has written a number of works claiming to provide theoretical support for dowsing. [2] He was elected “Deceiver of the year” by Föreningen Vetenskap och Folkbildning in 1995 for “organizing university courses about dowsing…”^[2]. In 1997 James Randi asked him to claim The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, making a controlled experiment to prove that dowsing works.^[12] Mörner declined the offer.^[13]

This man is not a true scientist, if he ever was. He is a fraud!

Growing Earth nonsense

Neal Adams, a comic book artist, has claimed that the Earth and other solid bodies have grown in the past, based on how certain areas can be fit together by “shrinking”.

Here are other videos showing other worlds that supposedly “grew”, such as Mars, Ganymede and Europa (moons of Jupiter) and the Earth’s Moon.

Here, Neal Adams claims that water would have flooded Pangea and vacated part of the Pacific basin.

What’s wrong with these claims? First, if a planet grew larger, it would either have grown hollow or it would have accumulated matter. Matter could not have appeared out of nothing, because that would have violated the law of conservation of mass.

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

Analysis of earthquake waves show no hollow areas deep under the Earth, and the presence of a solid core. The amount of matter necessary to come from outside to grow the Earth would have left evidence in the form of many huge impact craters, spanning whole continents. There are no such craters on Earth.

Second, what happened to all the water that supposedly existed back when the continents were together on the smaller Earth? Did it not exist? Was the whole Earth flooded?

Third, why are proponents of the growing Earth theory so hostile to the idea of subduction? That would explain the Andes Mountains of South America and the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean basin, among many other places on Earth. And it violates no known physical laws at all. A growing Earth should have NO such trenches!

Finally, water on an Earth with a supercontinent named Pangea wouldn’t move as far as Adams claims. The center of gravity would move only slightly because the Earth’s core is much denser than the rock and water above it. The shift of the ocean water would have been  much less, and while the supercontinent may have been partly flooded, it would still have been far more land than shallow seas.

Accusing Al Gore of hypocrisy

Take a look at this paper:

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/OCregGoreHypocrisy051609.pdf

May 16, 2009 

 

 

 

 

Al Gore’s Hypocrisy Astounding 

 

By Jay Ambrose  

 

 

 

Here’s the first thing you shouldn’t do in front of Al Gore: Be skeptical about catastrophic, human-caused global warming. He will rip your reputation apart, just as he once did to reputable, honorable scientists in congressional hearings. (1)

 

Here’s the second thing you shouldn’t do in front of Al Gore: Ask him whether he himself might have the kind of conflict of interest that he takes for granted in others. For heaven’s sake, do not get into the question of whether he might make a lot of money with the passage of a global warming cap-and-trade tax that he has been fighting for. (2)

 

Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee thought it might be interesting to find out. (3) After all, Gore is associated with a venture capital company that has invested about $1 billion in companies that just might make a bundle should cap-and-trade become law. So she asked if he would benefit.

Emitting a sigh made infamous in a debate way back when, Gore first replied that “a green economy . . . is good for all of us.” He then said yes, he was a partner in the venture capital company, adding quickly and emphatically that “every penny” he made from environmental investments went to the non-profit Alliance for Climate Protection. (4)

With a smirk on his face, he huffed that no one who knew him would ever think he had been working on the global warming issue for 30 years for “greed.” (5) When Blackburn said she wasn’t making accusations, he said, “I understand exactly what you’re doing, Congresswoman. Everybody here does.”

Blackburn called it quits at about that point, although she could have noted that Gore was founder and chairman of the non-profit group he mentioned. She could have explored whether some of the money he gives to the group redounds to him in other ways, such as expense-paid trips. She could also have gotten into reports that his net worth is now $100 million, when it was put at $2 million when he left politics. (6) She could have pursued the tax advantages of his charitable donations.

But she didn’t, and I think it is just as well she didn’t. The money Gore’s made since he was vice president seems to come mostly from Internet ventures and speeches given at $175,000 a whack, and I doubt seriously that his campaign on global warming has anything much to do with money. The man is a true believer, or so I believe.

And yet, his hypocrisy is astounding. While he cannot believe anyone could ever conceivably have reason to question his motives, he has never hesitated to question the motives of those who differed with him. In that case, you were bought out by ExxonMobil (7) or are an equivalent of Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi-scheme swindler.

Congressional hearings he conducted in 1992 have been described as inquisitorial show trials. One victim, Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, has written about scientists being “in the crosshairs” of Gore, who “tried to bully” them into changing “their views and supporting his climate alarmism.” (8) Lindzen also refers to a failed Gore effort to “enlist Ted Koppel (then a TV host) in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists.”

Lindzen is viewed by some as one of the nation’s foremost climatologist. Unlike Gore – whose movie and slide show have been rife with error (9) - he knows what he is talking about, probably a major reason Gore won’t debate him. Lindzen years ago did about $10,000 worth of work as a witness for fossil-fuel companies. There was nothing wrong with that, and he clearly was not corrupted by it. (10)

Whatever Gore believes, the global warming debate is not over, (11) but what should be over is waging it as an ad hominem contest in which science itself is hurt along with scientists whose arguments should be weighed on their merits.

(The numbers in parentheses are not in the original paper, but are added by me to direct the readers to my responses.)

 

1. Assumption. What if Gore’s opponents were not so honorable?
2. If it is a tax, then it will be going to the government, not Al Gore. Oops!
3. Here’s the classic Republican vs Democrat dichotomy.
4. Which Gore founded. Of course, if that bothers the skeptics, would it have been better for Gore to wait for someone else to have founded it? Even so, he most likely would have been given a leadership position within it.
5. Based on the fact that Gore gave up running for President or any other public office after 2000.
6. Here we find a double standard: Environmentalists are not expected to make money from their work. Why don’t critics of Gore also go after ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company and therefore one of the world’s worst pollutors? It made BILLIONS in 2008!  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/30/exxon-mobil-reports-recor_n_162468.html
7. See this: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/exxon-secrets
8. Gee, what did Gore do, threaten to have Lindzen dragged into a back alley and beaten?  If not, this sort of hyperbole is just silly.
9. Alleged errors by denialist sources. Slight inaccuracies can be improved, but most of Gore’s statements were as accurate as one could have reasonably expected, given the uncertainties that climate science by nature must allow for.
10. Assumption.
11. No, it will never be over as long as there are denialists out there, just as the Creationism-evolution controversy will last as long as there are Creationists.

Comparing apples with oranges in climate denialism

World Climate Report is one of those blogs that is dedicated to global warming denialism. Here is a recent entry there:

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/10/20/baffling-island/

There is a bit of press covering a just-published paper that concludes that the current climate and ecological conditions in a remote lake along the north shore of Canada’s Baffin Island are unique within the past 200,000 years—and anthropogenic global warming is the root cause. Which of course, spells t-r-o-u-b-l-e.

Somehow, that temperatures there were several degrees higher than present for a good third of the past 10,000 years and that there has been virtually no temperature trend in the area during past 50 years—the time usually associated with the greatest amount of human-caused “global warming”—was conveniently downplayed or ignored.

Go figure.

Some denialists have suggested that the loss of insect life in the lake referred to was caused by DDT. This is extemely unlikely for three reasons:

1. There are hardly any farmlands on Baffin Island, so there would be little reason to spray DDT there to kill insect pests.
2. DDT has been largely banned since the 1970s.
3. Insects exposed to low levels of pesticide tend to evolve resistance to it over time.

In their zeal to discredit the research at the Baffin Island lake, the writers of World Climate Report appear to commit fraud.

Figure 1 shows the summer (June, July August) average temperature from the weather station located at Clyde, Northwest Territory, which is located on Baffin Island very near the site of the lake. There is no trend here from 1943 to 2008, the period of available data. The most remarkable events are a couple of very cold summers and one very warm summer—all in the 1970s. Summers in the most recent decade are little different than summers in the 1950s—hardly a sign that human-caused “global warming” has made environmental conditions there particularly unique.

Figure 1. Summer (JJA) average temperature from Clyde, N.W.T. from 1953-2008 (data source: NASA GISS)

But when you actually go to the original source, you find:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=403710900006&data_set=2&num_neighbors=1

Surface Temperature Analysis – Station Data

THAT’S NOT EVEN REMOTELY THE SAME CHART!

Even more rediculous is comparing the temperatures of a TOWN (air that moves freely) with those of a LAKE (water in a confined location). That’s truly like comparing apples with oranges. The physics involved would be very different. with heat accumulating in the lake but not the town.

Why did the climate of Baffin Island appear to change so little, despite global warming?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baffin_Island#Climate

Baffin Island lies in the path of a generally northerly airflow all year round, so like much of eastern Canada, has an unusually cold climate. This brings very long, cold winters and foggy, cloudy summers, which have helped to add to the remoteness of the island. Spring thaw arrives much later than normal for a position straddling the Arctic Circle; around early June at Iqaluit in the south-east to early/mid July on the north coast where glaciers run right down to sea level. Snow, even heavy snow occurs at any time of the year, although is least likely in July and early August. Average annual temperatures at Iqaluit are around −8.5 °C (17 °F), compared with Reykjavík,^{[maps 10]} around 5 °C (41 °F), which is at a similar latitude.^[7]

Sea ice surrounds the island for most of the year, and until recently, only disappeared completely from the north coast for short unpredictable periods in August, if at all. At present, the sea is only clear of ice off Iqaluit from mid to late June until the end of September.

Most of Baffin Island lies above the Arctic Circle and all the communities from Pangnirtung northwards are subject to Polar night and the midnight sun. For example, the eastern community of Clyde River experiences continuous sunlight from May 14 to July 28, a period of 2½ months. In addition the long period from April 26 until May 13 and from July 29 until August 16 when twilight is the darkest part of the day means the community has just over 3½ months of light. In the winter the sun sets November 22 and does not rise again until January 19 of the next year. However, unlike places such as Alert, twilight occurs for at least 4 hours a day.

So World Climate Report has disgraced itself beyond any credibility!

A flawed and misleading video about global warming

This is a video made by the Cassiopeia Project, an web based institution made to teach science to the masses via creative videos. This particular one tackles the global warming issue:

There are many flaws with that video, revealing a profound bias:

1. Regardless of the oceanic temperatures of the past 3000 years, our civilization is so highly adapted to the specific climate of the late 20th Century that any significant change, of either warming or cooling, would have disasterous economic and social consequences for us.
2. The video repeats the denialists’ assumption that the Medival Warm Period was warmer than present global temperature averages, by using a cherry picked sample of the ocean (the Sargasso Sea) rather than all of global temperatures. I addressed this unconfirmed claim directly in http://circleh.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/debunking-the-mwp-myth/ and in http://circleh.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/hockey-stick-graphs-again/.
3. A slight increase in global temperatures would indeed itself not be noticable, but the consequences, including melting the ice caps, altering weather patterns and the rise in sea levels, would certainly be noticable after a century or so.
4. U.S surface temperature records, which are about 2% of the Earth’s surface and mostly land, are misleading. Earth’s entire surface is mostly ocean. We are talking about GLOBAL warming, not just U S land warming.
5. The short term ice cap growth since 2006, as well as the drop in temperatures in 2007-2008, is due to the Sun going quiet since 2005. That does not negate the previous warming and ice cap shrinkage of the past several decades. The Sun could start roaring again at any time.
6. The increase in Antarctic ice was explained here:  http://circleh.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/those-terrible-twins-of-climate-change-co2-and-h2o/  “In the southern hemisphere, global warming has had less of an effect, and this can be explained by geography. There is far more land up north than down south. Land radiates heat, while oceans absorb it. Also, the Arctic Ocean is water surrounded by warmer land, while Antarctica is frigid land surrounded by cold oceans that insulate it from warmer regions. So it stands to reason that the Arctic Ocean will melt long before the Antarctic does, and that there may even be some increase in Antarctic ice for the reasons I explained above.”
7. Extremely cold weather reports of the past few years are actually explained by the odd combination of  CO2 and H2O interactions. http://circleh.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/those-terrible-twins-of-climate-change-co2-and-h2o/  “The process begins with the slight increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere known to be caused by human emissions. Because CO2 traps slightly more heat, it also causes more water to evaporate. Water vapor (H2O) is also a greenhouse gas, so that causes a feedback loop, in which the temperature increases further, causing more water to evaporate. In the summer months, the result is much hotter weather than you might expect from CO2 alone.  But H2O has an opposite effect in winter. As temperature drops, the increased amounts of H2O forms clouds, which block sunlight and thus cool the earth further. Winters will be even colder than one would expect, plus there would be increased precipitation, including snow……..The solar activity has dropped, while the CO2 levels have remained high AND the H2O levels are also high. The end result: Warm summers and VERY COLD WINTERS!“
8. The video claims that water vapor is a far more important greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But that is not true, because water vapor forms clouds in certain concentrations and temperatures that actually block sunlight and thus act to cool the Earth, providing a counter to the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. By contrast, CO2 never forms clouds and thus can ONLY be a greenhouse gas. See here: http://circleh.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/icecap-a-group-of-fake-climate-experts/ ”Suppose you have a planet with an atmosphere composed exactly like Earth’s, with water oceans and a yellow dwarf sun as well. Thus, its atmosphere would indeed have both CO2 and H2O, complete with clouds and typical weather patterns. Suddenly, all the CO2 is removed from the atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect it provides, the temperature drops quickly. The relative humidity skyrockets. In some areas, it exceeds 100%, and when that happens, clouds form, increasing the planet’s cloud cover. The clouds block and reflect the sunlight, further cooling the air below them as well as the surface. Precipitation results and the atmosphere loses most of its H2O as well. So the atmosphere becomes colder and drier, until finally the planet is locked in an ice age, which it can never recover from unless CO2 is added. Even the oceans will be frozen up. Now, we add the CO2 back. With CO2 trapping heat once more, ice begins to melt. Then water begins to evaporate. As water evaporates, the H2O kicks in with its own greenhouse effect, resulting in more ice melting. Eventually, the oceans are restored, and the atmosphere returns to what it was. H2O alone on Earth cannot keep the planet warm enough to sustain life, because at certain temperatures and concentrations in the atmosphere it forms clouds which act as cooling agents, and on land below a certain temperature it forms ice, which also reflects light. CO2 must be the trigger for the greenhouse effect of both substances to operate properly on Earth.”
9. ANY CO2 added to the atmosphere by humans would be an amount that nature would not be adding. The idea that only a small precentage increase in CO2 is nothing to worry about is illogical once the concept of balance of nature is understood.
10. The greenhouse effect of CO2 and H2O is explained further here: http://circleh.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/carbon-dioxide-and-its-greenhouse-effect/  ”Another thing to consider is how serious the greenhouse effect of Earth’s atmosphere really is. Without it, Earth’s average temperature would be about -18 degrees C, which is about 32 degrees C different from Earth’s actual average temperature (14 degrees C). Again, people who are not scientifically trained have difficulty grasping this, since they think of temperatures below “room temperture” (18 to 24 degrees C) as being cold. But in fact, it is quite warm compared to most of the universe. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, a leftover remnant of the Big Bang, is about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, which is itself about −273 degrees C. Thus an object recieving radiation from no other source would still have a temperature of -270.45 degrees C. The Earth recieves radiation from the Sun that by itself adds about 252 degrees C to its temperature. That’s a LOT of heat! The greenhouse effect adds only about 1/8th more heat to Earth. But that is still enough to make the difference between a frigid, lifeless planet and one with oceans filled with life.”
11. Since growing human populations around the world have destroyed vast areas of forest around the world to build cities and roads and establish farms and ranches, there is less plant mass to absorb the extra CO2 we have generated. The video shows a misleading chart indicating that U.S. forests have increased. Again, THE U.S. IS NOT THE WORLD!
12. Isn’t it obvious that if animal life increased in proportion to plant life, since animals breath out CO2, the CO2 levels would also remain high? Also, did the makers of that video not consider that human population are still growing, putting more and more pressure on land use? Farm plants that  absorb CO2 will be eaten by humans, who breath out CO2.
13. The last assertion, denying that there is any evidence that CO2 was, is, or will be a cause of global warming, is a flat out lie! http://circleh.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/challenge-to-global-warming-denialists/ ”You want evidence for global warming?  How about these:  First, there is the known heat retaining properties of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. This results from the gases being transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared radiation (a.k.a. heat). If you think that is a falsehood, do your own experiments with samples of CO2 to prove it does not retain heat. The scientists who established the greenhouse effect and later connected it to the concept of global warming were Joseph Fourier in 1824, John Tyndall in 1858, and Svante Arrhenius in 1896. Now, if you think you can debunk all the work those three did so long ago, knock yourself out.  Second, there is the confirmation of the greenhouse effect going to extremes on a planetary scale, with the Soviet Venera probes sent to the planet Venus in the 1960s. If you think all that data the probes sent us was faked, prove it! Then there is the recorded increase in CO2 levels since the 1950s. Can you prove that such an increase never happened?”

We need to appeal to a less biased court! Especially after seeing the sources the videos makers relied upon:

Most of those are denialist propaganda sources, not peer-reviewed science journals! And those science sources that are reliable have been cherry-picked. What a disgrace!