NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

The author of the study in question, Dr. Roy Spencer (of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, not of NASA) – a longtime global warming skeptic with many flawed publications on his CV – didn't help matters by hyping the study on his personal website and through a UAH press release.

But while the rightwing media had a field day announcing (yet again) the end of global warming, real scientists read Spencer's paper and found gaping holes in his analysis.

And today, the editor of Remote Sensing, which published the paper, resigned to take responsibility for what he called a failure of the journal's peer-review process.

Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science. Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims. Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell [1] that was recently published in Remote Sensing is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published. After having become aware of the situation, and studying the various pro and contra arguments, I agree with the critics of the paper. Therefore, I would like to take the responsibility for this editorial decision and, as a result, step down as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Remote Sensing.

With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements, e.g., in a press release of The University of Alabama in Huntsville from 27 July 2011 [2], the main author’s personal homepage [3], the story “New NASA data blow gaping hole in global warming alarmism” published by Forbes [4], and the story “Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?” published by Fox News [5], to name just a few. Unfortunately, their campaign apparently was very successful as witnessed by the over 56,000 downloads of the full paper within only one month after its publication. But trying to refute all scientific insights into the global warming phenomenon just based on the comparison of one particular observational satellite data set with model predictions is strictly impossible. Aside from ignoring all the other observational data sets (such as the rapidly shrinking sea ice extent and changes in the flora and fauna) and contrasting theoretical studies, such a simple conclusion simply cannot be drawn considering the complexity of the involved models and satellite measurements.

...

In other words, the problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents. This latter point was missed in the review process, explaining why I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal. This regrettably brought me to the decision to resign as Editor-in-Chief―to make clear that the journal Remote Sensing takes the review process very seriously.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, requires companies to disclose material consequences [PDF] of projected climate change on their business. The Department of Defense [PDF] has identified that climate change "may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict," as it "contribute[s] to food and water scarcity ... [and increases] the spread of disease." A study for Congress, co-chaired by a retired Navy admiral, "concluded that climate change is a 'threat multiplier' that adds new and unpredictable dangers to global physical and political stability." In addition, the Supreme Court legally recognized that climate change is occurring in its Massachusetts vs. EPA decision. Justice John Paul Stevens stated that:



Outside the United States government, various other organizations recognize the reality of climate change. The Vatican sent a representative to the UN Conference on Climate Change to promote "an effective mitigation and adaptation to ongoing climate change." Following the Copenhagen meeting, the Pope "denounced the failure of world leaders to agree to a new climate change treaty." The insurance community has identified climate change as a threat to many geographic areas. In fact, Munich Reinsurance recognized the threat of climate change as early as 1973 [PDF]. This recognition has now spread throughout the insurance industry. Some insurance companies simply will not insure areas facing increased threats by natural disasters induced by climate change.

Received: 24 May 2011; in revised form: 13 July 2011 / Accepted: 15 July 2011 / Published: 25 July 2011

I’m a bit skeptical myself. I’d argue that conservatives and libertarians should strongly support regulation to reduce carbon pollution, since pollution by one entity invariably infringes upon the rights of others (including property rights), and no entity has a constitutional right to pollute. It does not put America on the road to serfdom to suggest that the federal government has a compelling interest in protecting the country from ecological damage. If anything, it puts America on the road to common sense.

Since reconsidering climate science, I’ve had a number of debates with conservative and libertarian friends, who oppose government regulation of carbon emissions in part because they believe those regulations will cost too much. Of course regulations cost; limiting ecological damage and preserving public health requires money. The issue is whether those costs are moral to impose. If no entity has a constitutional right to pollute, and if the federal government has a compelling interest in reducing carbon pollution, then how can those costs not be moral?

There are only four reasons conservatives reject the scientific verdict on climate—absolute scientific ignorance, support of or support from fossil fuel interests, unrestrained contempt for Al Gore, and rigid ideological opposition to virtually any form of government regulation. Sometimes it’s hard to determine which reason is the biggest factor in climate denial. Yes, the pecuniary pleasures proffered by petroleum promoters have a lot to do with the “It’s all a hoax!” hooey from the right. Yet scientific ignorance might play a bigger role than money when it comes to conservative climate callousness.

Climate science isn’t simple to make simple. It’s hard to explain in a 30-second sound bite how global warming makes hurricanes more dangerous, the role it plays in increasing the intensity of snowstorms, the risk it poses to oceans, to wildlife, to us. It’s tough to make some folks comprehend that human beings can affect the climate by virtue of their activities. The very concept scares people. Science scares people.

I know what it’s like to have a fear of science. I loathed science classes in high school and college, and could not wait for those classes to be over. Chemistry, biology and the natural world were above my pay grade, so to speak. I felt mentally lost in those science classes, thrown for a loop, unable to relate to what was being discussed in any way. I loathed science as much as I loved literature.

It was quite easy for me to buy into Rush Limbaugh’s denigration of science; it was a contempt I already shared. Limbaugh—who often talked of how much he hated school—promoted the idea that scientists didn’t really know what they were talking about, that they were just making up mumbo-jumbo with no relevance to the real world. That’s how I felt. What did my science teachers know, anyway?

Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man. One of the report’s authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: “I think it is such a blatant falsification.”

The research was conducted by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which invented the World Wide Web, built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and now has constructed a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreates the Earth’s atmosphere. The climate study involved scientists representing 17 of Europe’s and America’s premiere research institutes. The results demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that can grow and seed clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere; the temperatures then fall as the density of the clouds increase. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere; the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

RWNJ's are dismissing the resignation of that editor. Because it doesn't mean the paper is wrong.


And then today...

Nature Journal of Science Discredits Global Warming

That's the headline at BigGov. And that post is spreading all over the Right Wing blogs.





there's more here:
http://biggovernment.com/cstreet/2011/0 ... al-warming


I'm no scientist. The abstract of the paper is greek to me. It's here:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 10343.html


But, I did watch this short video. I don't think this experiment said anything like the Big Gov writer spun. The video is here:

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1370582

other resources:

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/ ... 081102.asp

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressRel ... 5.11E.html


And this guy wrote a one sentence explanation:



http://bemused-leftist.livejournal.com/112956.html


The press release (PDF):
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressRel ... 9JUL11.pdf

Now that press release doesn't say what that Big Gov guy says.


Maybe i have the wrong experiment?

To be honest, I have doubts about the height of influence of man on global warming. I just do not know (and I suppose no one knows) how big this influence is compared to the "natural" causes.

That there is a very fast changement of climate no honest person can deny. Look at the glaciers one hundred years ago compared to today.

But - we had changes like this in very recent history. Around the year 1000 AD people from Iceland came to the south of Greenland and did farming there. They even were the first European settlers in America - the north of Canada which they called "Vinland = Winecountry". 500 years later they were extinct by a climate change which made farming impossible. Now their climate returns to the year 1000 AD.

Has the planet never been "so populous"?

I guess if you are anthropocentric that would be true, but the total mass of termites on the planet weighs more than human beings do. And in terms of vertebrates I suspect there was also a higher total mass of dinosaurs during some epochs, belching and excreting carbon by products.

In any event, I do trust scientific consensus that man is possibly causing and certainly contributing to and accelerating whatever global warming is now occurring.

But man is not the only species on the planet to be doing so. Just the most conscious, most prolific and least restrained.

Has the planet never been "so populous"?

I guess if you are anthropocentric that would be true, but the total mass of termites on the planet weighs more than human beings do. And in terms of vertebrates I suspect there was also a higher total mass of dinosaurs during some epochs, belching and excreting carbon by products.

In any event, I do trust scientific consensus that man is possibly causing and certainly contributing to and accelerating whatever global warming is now occurring.

But man is not the only species on the planet to be doing so. Just the most conscious, most prolific and least restrained.

This was actually posted while I was pounding that last post of mine out on my iPad, but I think it's a great illustration of what I was saying.

Yes, everything that turns sugars into energy will excrete CO2 as a result. (Even plants.) There are some organisms that toss out other greenhouse gasses, such as methane. But they really aren't the problem.

Under normal processes, the bulk of that CO2 is taken in by plants and algae and converted back to sugars. There is very little net change in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere - some gets added by volcanism, some gets removed through conversion to geological processes, the rest cycles around and around.

The problem is that we are taking a shitload of carbon that was removed from the atmosphere-biosphere carbon cycle and dumping it all back in at once.

The rain forests also act as a carbon sink, although a temporary one. Once a tree dies, the carbon it has bound up in itself is released back into the atmosphere, unless it is bound up again in a new tree. The termites are just part of the process, eating rotting wood. The problem is when man turns trees into rotting wood, sawdust and the like and doesn't replace them. The termites have a field day, of course.

Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Resigns Over Global Warming

Published September 14, 2011

| FoxNews.com

The global warming theory left him out in the cold.

Dr. Ivar Giaever, a former professor with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, abruptly announced his resignation Tuesday, Sept. 13, from the premier physics society in disgust over its officially stated policy that "global warming is occurring."

The official position of the American Physical Society (APS) supports the theory that man's actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide.

Giaever does not agree -- and put it bluntly and succinctly in the subject line of his email, reprinted at Climate Depot, a website devoted to debunking the theory of man-made climate change.

"I resign from APS," Giaever wrote.

Giaever, an 82-year-old Norwegian, sent an e-mail to APS official Kate Kirby announcing his abrupt resignation. He said he "cannot live with the statement" on global warming, and said that global temperature had been "amazingly stable."

Giaever is one of the most prominent scientists named in the 2007 Minority Report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (updated in 2009) originally citing support of 400 "dissenting scientists", and growing to 700. He was also one of more than 100 co-signers in a March 30, 2009, letter to President Barack Obama which criticized his stance on global warming.

Don't worry about the earth, worry about humanity on the earth.

Arctic ozone loss at record level

Ozone loss over the Arctic this year was so severe that for the first time it could be called an "ozone hole" like the Antarctic one, scientists report.

About 20km (13 miles) above the ground, 80% of the ozone was lost, they say.

The cause was an unusually long spell of cold weather at altitude. In cold conditions, the chlorine chemicals that destroy ozone are at their most active.

It is currently impossible to predict if such losses will occur again, the team writes in the journal Nature.