So, I can remember sitting in the corporate cafeteria in Minneapolis in 1998. I remember eating my pizza and reading the Star Tribune.
I was fascinated by an article that was discussing the warming of the temperatures and the impact it would have on Minnesota. It would turn the northern pine forests into grasslands. Even a shift in a few degrees would be enough to change the way the landscape looked and behaved. It would take years, but the impact would be unmistakeable.
I also remember discussing this with friends and family. Some would disagree that we were getting warmer [though I felt things were changing even as a kid; we were getting much less snow as I grew older], others felt that while we were warming, the degree of warming would not cause the changes being discussed. Others yet felt that yes, we were warming, but the pattern was predictable. Nature changes.
Now fast forward to the current Global Warming debate. I have always been interested in the topic and did my own reading. Over time I’ve landed on the “Denier” side of the dabate. And I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable there.
Until I bumped into Coyote. Double Ivy, small business owner and Libertarian.
He has shown me the light to my current views on Global Warming:
- The earth is currently warming.
- Climate often goes through cycles of warming and cooling.
- CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
- Greenhouse gases contribute to making the planet warmer than it might otherwise be.
- Man has contributed to the current levels of CO2.
- Some of the warming we are experiencing is due to man.
He often takes time to explain that while we are warming, we are always warming less than the alarmist’s models would have predicted. This is largely due to the fact that warming due to CO2 is not a “Positive feedback” process. That is, each additional PPM of CO2 contributes less to the level of warming, not more.
Anyway, the Coyote had a great piece today on the methods of the alarmists. The post is worth reading just for that. However, I wanna focus on the recent drought in Russia that so many felt was an indication of our continued polluting of the world.
However, much less sexy and certainly less reported is this:
“In summary,” to quote Dole et al., “the analysis of the observed 1880-2009 time series shows that no statistically significant long-term change is detected in either the mean or variability of western Russia July temperatures, implying that for this region an anthropogenic climate change signal has yet to emerge above the natural background variability.” Thus, they say their analysis “points to a primarily natural cause for the Russian heat wave,” noting that the event “appears to be mainly due to internal atmospheric dynamical processes that produced and maintained an intense and long-lived blocking event,” adding that there are no indications that “blocking would increase in response to increasing greenhouse gases.”
We’ll never see Al Gore make a really scary movie about the dangers of Global Warming Alarmism I bet.