Among the issues most commonly discussed are individuality, the rights of the individual, the limits of legitimate government, morality, history, economics, government policy, science, business, education, health care, energy, and man-made global warming evaluations. My posts are aimed at intelligent and rational individuals, whose comments are very welcome.

"No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it." Ayn Rand

"Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." Ayn Rand

"The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice', but integrity." Ayn Rand

For "a human being, the question 'to be or not to be,' is the question 'to think or not to think.'" Ayn Rand

26 March 2008

The Cooling Oceans and Unwarmed Atmosphere

When I brought up FireFox to check my e-mail this afternoon, I was greeted with a Yahoo video on the collapse of a part of the Wilkens Ice Shelf on the Western Peninsula of Antarctica of an ice area the size of Manhattan. It was said that at least one scientist said this is further proof of Global Warming. Well, there has long been a focus on this peninsular region of Antarctica due to loss of ice and, indeed, this part of Antarctica has lost ice for years. However, this area is a very small part of Antarctica and the vast majority of Antarctica has been increasing its ice mass for many years!

A couple of interesting commentaries have just surfaced which I would direct your attention to. In the first, Lorne Gunter wrote in the National Post in Canada, about the ocean temperature readings made in great proliferation by 3,000 Argo buoys since they were first deployed in 2003. They drift in the oceans at a depth of 2,000 meters and then about every 10 days they spend 6 hours rising to the surface, taking temperature data in each layer of the sea, and they broadcast their data to satellites, before sinking back to a 2000 meter depth. What have these ocean monitors found since 2003? There has been a slight cooling of the average ocean temperature! Given that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise, this is a bit of a problem for the Man-is-wrecking-the-Earth-with-greenhouse-gases crowd. Apparently, 80 to 90% of the global warming due to CO2 is supposed to be warming of the oceans, which are then supposed to heat the atmosphere. This article also notes that NASA has 8 weather satellites that take 300,000 temperature readings every day all over the earth, compared to a mere 7,000 measurements by Earth ground stations, [too often located near population centers.] The satellites over 30 years have found only a 0.14 degree Centigrade per decade temperature increase on average.

Christopher Pearson wrote an interview with Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia published in The Australian. Marohasy notes that referenced to 1998, the earths average temperature has since fallen and if you take 2002 as your reference point, the temperature has been about constant since then. Then she notes that the NASA Aqua satellite launched in 2002 has provided data on temperature, cloud cover, and water vapor which contradicts a key assumption of the global warming computer models. The models have all thought that increasing CO2 would produce warming, which would produce more water vapor, [and since 95% of all greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor,] this would lead to accelerated heating of the atmosphere. WRONG! The Aqua satellite data shows that the increase in water vapor leads to a counteracting cooling. Thus, in engineering terms, the assumed positive feedback is really a negative feedback. [This reduction of the CO2 greenhouse effect is presumably due to increased cloud cover with increased water vapor and the reflection of considerable radiation of the sun back into space by the clouds.]

[These brackets indicate my additional comments relative to the information in these articles.]

Thanks to Robert Tracinski who pointed these two articles out in his TIA Daily.

It will be fascinating to watch the process of many of the careless, and often immoral, scientists backing away from their errors and this emotional declaration that man is ruining the earth by using fuels that create CO2. The response of the politicians will be even more interesting and more important. They have so many plans to ride roughshod over the rights of the individual in the name of saving the planet and thereby some elite portion of the animal kingdom, which will largely not include the human part. Should cooling continue, we will hear that we must prepare for the coming Ice Age and that this will require fascist socialist control of all human activity by an international government! Scaremongers are very resourceful and they will not hesitate to convince the People to give up their rights as the only way to prevent one crisis or another. The fascist have long used the fears induced by crises, often made up, to mobilize the people in one common effort, while minimizing their tendency to use reason. This technique has been taught in fascist and socialist circles for more than 100 years and used by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, Lenin, FDR, Hitler, Kennedy (The Missile Gap, etc.), LBJ, and Clinton (Its the economy, stupid!, even as the economy was improving already from a much smaller dip than I Feel Your Pain Clinton made it out to be.)

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