Best regards,
feju

The direct impacts of climate change on water-precipitation, storm events, stream flow, aquifer recharge, etc.-are already being felt and have major implications for the environment, human health, economics, politics, and overall development. We are being forced to address these issues now and will need to plan for current and future changes.

The insidious consequences of reports like this is that they attempt to deny not just human-induced climate change but also any responsibility to take action to deal with the consequences. This issue is bigger than global warming: it involves all aspects of climate, energy use, economic development, lifestyle choices, trade, politics, technology, the environment, and so on. The real agenda of deniers like Inhofe is to promote “business-as-usual”, which we clearly cannot do, regardless of GHG impacts on global temperature. This is why, as Al Gore has famously stated, global warming is the biggest moral issue facing the world in the 21st century. It goes beyond climate science and fossil fuel energy use.

I am especially sceptical when any politician proclaims a new crisis. I immediately reach for my wallet and guard my freedom. Follow the money, carbon footprint trading (an oxymoron if ever I’ve heard one), the supposed solution will only serve to enrich the privileged few at enormous expense and loss of freedom for the rest of us.

I can already envision the Carbon Footprint Police raiding homes to discover contraband “energy consuming devices” that have not been registered for their carbon footprint and display the appropriate carbon footprint Stamp Tax.

Does anybody remember the Boston Tea Party?

1) Provide evidence that the deviation is statistically significant (which it’s not)
2) Offer a plausible cause for the 2007 change in the trend”

Who argues anything about significance? What has been said is that we have had no sea level increase for 3 years. To prove that true, you only need to look at the blue, 60-days-averaged line, and see that it has no point above that of the begining of 2006.

[JR: Rest of comment deleted for obvious reasons. The 60-day-averaged line is utterly irrelevant. Do you even understand what you are saying? The actual data clearly shows that sea levels have continued to rise! Who are you going to believe, readers, another denier, or your own lying eyes. Deniers categorically refuse to accept data averaging over time -- since that clearly shows the planet keeps warming. Now one of you has the gall to come here and pick out a selectively irrelevant short-term averaging and say it replaces actually data. This is so absurd I would have expected it from a writer for The Onion. You have joined the very small, select group on permanent moderation. Congrats -- only people who have written something egregiously dis-informing win that prize!]

I’m sorry that Barry has taken the approach that my discussions are all the same and not to be responded too. I am sorry Barry if I have caused offence in any way. If so it was certainly not intended. I am just trying to stimulate debate on the science, the physics, of Green House gases, and not speak in generalities. Climate is changing – warming and just now cooling. What we need to know is why!

If the models on which we rely have the correct inputs, they surely must be able to chart the global temperatures from 1990 to 2008 using the known parameters from the previous century. I have not been able to obtain from anyone a demonstration that they are able to do that. They will need the parameters from 2008 to predict 2009, from 2009 to predict 2010 ….. or probably shorter steps of a month or so to take them in a sequence to 2020, 2050, 2100. If they are as yet unable to determine the parameters for 2009, how will they make it even to 2012. Could anyone answer that question for me. Perhaps I am misunderstanding something vital to the problem.

What I was also hoping for was to receive some definitive comments on the green house effect as a physical phenomenon, not just the assumption which is fed into the models coming directly from the theory of Fourier (1850) and Arrhenius (1895). This hypothesis was formulated 25 years before the advent of quantum theory and the sophsticated experiments on the optics and dynamics of gases which show quite different behaviour from that assumed by Arrhenius. Sure the details should be debated, but one needs to use the physics and results from more useful experiments. All Arrhenius knew was that CO2 absorbed radiation in bands centred at about 4.7, 10.6 and 14.8 microns – nothing more. Try for an indication of what is required from a crude draft document.

Assuming a net input of heat into the atmosphere as is done in the modelling, is invariably going to lead to “warming”, inspite of feedbacks or anything else. Taking the process a step further and including the radiative cooling effects of green house gases in the stratosphere, may or may not lead to an overall warming or cooling. Green house gases are the ones mainly reponsible for cooling the upper atmosphere, and hence indirectly the earth, where there is no water vapour. Heating of the atmosphere is mainly through the evaporation of water vapour over the oceans which cover 70% of the globe followed by about 20% through contact between air and the earth’s surface.

About 10-15 % is radiated and all of this is already absorbed by various green house gases before it reaches the tropopause. It is then redistributed via collisions to kinetic energy of the air molecules i.e. it heats the air the same as contact and evaporation. Then what? Convection takes the warmed air up to the stratosphere and elsewhere of course, but the bit that reaches the stratosphere is cooled by radiation from the green house gases in a reversal of the GHG warming.

(The collisions excite the GHG which then radiates in all directions. What goes down is soon reabsorbed to start again, what goes up escapes to space and cools the earth. Most of the cooling is because of carbon dioxide since the oter dominant GHG, water vapour is absent from the stratisphere because of cooling. Increased CO2 gives increased cooling. )

So whether GHGs warm or cool depends on some difficult calculations. It has not been properly treated and having written to Barry Brooks, various modelers including our CSIRO Climate Science Group, I have not been able to obtain any information on a modern treatment of the Green house effect upon which our future economy will stand or fall. Barry, to his credit, replied to me saying he was a biologist and therefore unable to help, but to try a physicist. Others are vague and unforthcoming. I had hoped to be rewarded with some useful SCIENTIFIC comments from this group. It is not helpful to the debate for either of us to argue in terms of generalities such as “the world is now cooling in 2008 therefore CO2 is not to blame” or equally “the polar ice is melting, therefore it must be carbon dioxide.” Basic science, physics of gases is what is required here and elsewhere. I would hope sometime to be able to stimulate such a debate and get right away from all the name calling and dismissive rhetoric on both sides. The IPCC report, 2007 AR4 Chapter 8 lists a number of important parameters which the models cannot handle – clouds, El Nino and La Nina which are accepted as the three most important internal and natural phenomena in determining both weather and climate. The El Nino and La Nina are just the extremes of a cyclical change of unknown periodicity. In a 100 year time frame, there will be only very short periods when there is not some semblance of either a La Nina or an El Nino. At present this means that the models do not handle well the climate over an extended period when these dramatic natural changes are taking place. Or again, am I msissing something?
John L Nicol