Ongoing Developments

28 March 07 Editorial Snippet . . .
An avalanche of informed and authoritative counterarguments against the claim that mankind is the cause of any provable increase in world temperatures is coming from France, Russia, Scandinavia, Asia, universities, laboratories, 6h grade students.*

. . . Lori Broesamle responds
An extremist of any kind does very little good.  But I ask, if one is going to die at some point would it make sense to speed the process?  To say that mankind has had no effect on making the environment less livable in a healthy was just means common sense has been abandoned.  If I added a little pollution to your water system each day, just a little, do you not think that over time your water would not be unsafe for your body?  It is unfair to sensationalize  the debate just for the attention and thereby skip over what needs to be accomplished.  I would say thank you to those who are trying to make the world a healthier place for all, now as much as can be done, and in the future for the generations we would like to arrive in a healthy world.

Which number is true?
Because so many different groups and governments collect environmental data, and use different computer models, it is currently impossible to compare results about such data as ocean temperatures, wind speeds, and rates of deforestation. Now, a new intergovernmental organization called Group on Earth Observations is developing a "one-stop shop" to make such comparisons practicable. -- Jan 07

U.S. Senate committee debunks global warming
"A Skeptic's Guide to Debunking Global Warming Alarmism: Hot & Cold Media Spin Cycle: A Challenge to Journalists who Cover Global Warming" is the very long title of a 64-page booklet released by Senator James Inhofe (Oklahoma Republican), the outgoing chairman of the Senate's Environment & Public Works Committee.

Naming such publications as the New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, the booklet claims to see a media-promoted alarmist scientific "consensus" which is increasingly being shattered by an accumulation of authoritative challenges. -- Dec 2006

Fair and Balanced re global warming?
National Public Radio hangs up on scientist 

Contact: Sean Tuffnell of the National Center for Policy Analysis, 972-308-6481 or sean.tuffnell@ncpa.org

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 /U.S. Newswire/ -- David Deming, an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma and an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), testified this morning at a special hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The hearing examined climate change and the media. Bellow are excerpts from his prepared remarks.

"In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.

"I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." "The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the "Little Ice Age" took hold in the 14th century. ... The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be "gotten rid of."

"In 1999, Michael Mann and his colleagues published a reconstruction of past temperature in which the MWP simply vanished. This unique estimate became known as the "hockey stick," because of the shape of the temperature graph. "Normally in science, when you have a novel result that appears to overturn previous work, you have to demonstrate why the earlier work was wrong. But the work of Mann and his colleagues was initially accepted uncritically, even though it contradicted the results of more than 100 previous studies. Other researchers have since reaffirmed that the Medieval Warm Period was both warm and global in its extent.

"There is an overwhelming bias today in the media regarding the issue of global warming. In the past two years, this bias has bloomed into an irrational hysteria. Every natural disaster that occurs is now linked with global warming, no matter how tenuous or impossible the connection. As a result, the public has become vastly misinformed."

The NCPA is an internationally known nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute with offices in Dallas and Washington, D. C. that advocates private solutions to public policy problems. NCPA depends on the contributions of individuals, corporations and foundations that share our mission. The NCPA accepts no government grants. -- Dec 2006

Water vapor is a global warming threat 
In the 20 Sep 06 update of VersagiVoice, I suggested that the water vapor generated by using hydrogen or natural gas-fired fuel cells to drive internal combustion engines world result in icy windshields and roads, in winter, and a sauna environment during traffic jams, in summer. Now comes word that the internationally authoritative American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers Society (ASHRAE) "has recognized water vapor as a greenhouse gas." 

As part of the discussion in the October 2006 edition of the ASHRAE Journal, one professional engineer reminds his colleagues that "It is the forces exerted by the sun and planets that overwhelmingly control our climate. . . . Of all greenhouse gases (GHG) produced, it is water vapor that governs the GHG phenomenon, not CO2, with 99.9% of all water vapor produced by nature. . . . Man's GHG contribution is insignificant." -- 20 Oct 06

Choose your poison?
Decades ago, I was one of many nationally recognized pundits re energy matters. So I appeared on television and was interviewed on radio about everything from solar energy through windmills to biomass, and I was among those who speculated that a hydrogen economy would be our salvation. The "pure" concept of a hydrogen economy includes using massive solar power to electrolyze sea water to generate massive amounts of hydrogen and oxygen, then using the hydrogen as the world's basic fuel for everything from automobiles  to power generation.

Now we are hearing that there may really be hydrogen-fueled cars in our future -- in this case using a fuel cell to generate the hydrogen.

Imagine. 
During a rush-hour backup on 75 and 696, cars will exhaust water vapor, and we won't be surrounded by stinky hydrocarbon exhaust. Instead, we will be in a 20-mile long sauna bath. In winter, the water vapor will freeze on our car windows and on the pavement, adding excitement to our drive.

In energy as in most of life, there are no perfect solutions. There are only trade-offs. -- 20 Sep 06  

Greenland's glaciers have been shrinking for 100 years
The suggestion that ice melting of Greenland's glaciers is not a recent phenomenon comes from a Danish report of a study of Greenland's glaciers from t he end of t he 19th century. "70% of the glaciers have been shrinking regularly since the end of the 1880s at the rate of around eight meters per year," the report states. Shrinkage ebbed and flowed over the decades, and the study found, for example, that "The effect of the rising temperatures in the 1920s and 1930s" became visible dozens of years later. A general conclusion: Glacier shrinking is "the result of the atmosphere's natural warming, following volcanic eruptions for example and greenhouse gases created by human activities which have aggravated the situation further." --Breitbart.com, 21 Aug 2006

Fighting global warming now may not be rational
Deciding that there "simply are no apocalypses in the offing," world economists and officials have put the current importance of global warming below: 

• preventing HIV/AIDS

• malnutrition

• free trade

• malaria

Looking for measurable, rational answers to worldwide concerns during two separate meetings, world leaders calculated that for every $1 spent preventing HIV/AIDS, $40 in social benefits would result. For each $1 spent to abate global warming, even if it is a real threat, "25 cents worth of good" might result.

Not a rational choice to give high priority to global warming, the world leaders decided. -- Aug 2006

The global warming hockey stick is broken
Environmentally aware readers are familiar with the controversial "hockey stick" graph which supposedly proves that global warming is a real threat. That graph has several times been challenged [See] and now comes a further challenge from three independent statisticians who contend that the methodology (read: statistical manipulation) used to generate the hockey stick "would produce hockey sticks from even random, trend-less data."

The controversy is more than academically important: Major economic decisions could be made based on dubious research embedded in the hockey stick," suggests the Wall Street Journal. -- Aug 2006

Does the hockey stick graph prove global warming?
Militant, as opposed to reasonable environmentalists have made much of a graph of world  temperatures over the centuries which assumes the shape of a hockey stick. The militants would have us believe that the computer-generated data-plot proves global warming. Not all environmental scientists agree.S

Global Warming, reasonably considered
Although authoritatively disputed, there are indications of global warming. Not nearly as clear is the contention that human activity is causing the apparent warming. Only two or three decades ago, Time and Newsweek were leading the scare campaign about a coming ice age. At the time, no respectable source had the arrogance to suggest either that human activity had caused the predicted ice age or that humans could do anything to reverse it.

Geneticist and science historian C. D. Darlington, describing the geological era termed Pleistocene, has written of: " . . . a succession of ice ages, five major spells broken by four warmer ages and themselves varying by small oscillations." Macro climate changes have occurred naturally for eons, including the one theorized to have resulted in the extinction of dinosaurs. I wonder what the dinosaurs did to cause the ice age which killed them all. -- July 06

Al Gore & His Global Warming Warning
The reviews of Gore's movie, as a movie, range from 4-star praise to ridicule. The reviewers/critics opine on everything from the global warming warning itself to the inclusion of so much Gore biography that it is hard not to suspect the message is more political than scientific.

Gore joins those previous alarmists who proclaim dates-certain when catastrophe will overcome us; Gore gives us 10 years before it will be "too late." 

About the message itself, the debate continues, despite Gore's contention that there is almost unanimous scientific agreement about both the amount of global warming and about its cause. The most comprehensive overview of doubters I've so far found appeared in Canada Free Press. Naming scientists and scientific groups, the lengthy piece by Tom Harris expands on several points. Among them:

• "Gores' circumstantial arguments are so weak they are pathetic," says a spokesman for the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia. 

• Many of those whom Gore describes as "climate experts" are not climate scientists at all; they work with insects, plants, polar bears and all that they can really tell us is the effect of changes in the local environment they are working in.

• There is much questionable modifying of computer models, with input being varied with the intention of proving an already decided point.

• There is a good correlation over the ages between the earth's temperature and the brightness of the sun, over which mankind has neither control nor effect.

• Even now, in Antarctica more snow is accumulating than melting off, a region which has "survived warm and cold events over millions of years."

• Warming which has been measured may not be global at all. "Massive areas of cooling" are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea . . ." the list continues.

Back to that Australian source, speaking of Gore: " The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."

VersagiVoice has previously reviewed The Skeptical Environmentalist, which looks at junk science in much of the environmental movement, not just global warming. 

Radon scare is unjustified
For almost 40 years, I monitored and reported about the alleged risk of lung cancer from exposure to radon in normal life. I was reminded of that by the recent announcement of Radon Awareness Month or some such.

While editor of an internationally circulated business newspaper serving the hvac industry (heating, ventilating, air-conditioning), I several times asked my worldwide readers -- who included architects, engineers, contractors, universities, medical facilities, manufacturers, chemical companies, distributors, libraries -- to report any clinical evidence they might encounter of non-occupational lung cancer caused by radon. None was ever reported.

In later decades, serving mechanical contractors directly, part of my responsibility was to encourage them to enter any market in which indoor air quality (IAQ) problems required their skills. Those same practitioners regularly deal with residential/commercial/industrial IAQ problems related to such pollutants as asbestos, ozone, volatile solvents, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide. During those years, I invited academic and medical researchers to address the contractors. Time after time, the speakers engaged in what I call "statistical speculation," extrapolating from a few questionable assumptions to reach unsupportable conclusions. Each time, I publicly asked the speaker to cite clinical data for non-occupational lung cancer caused by radon. There were none.

Lung cancer is a serious occupational hazard for workers in uranium mines, where radon concentration is high and exposure is both intensive and extensive. But at the levels found, if found at all, in typical home basements or in warehouses or offices, radon is not a cancer risk, despite the alerts and warnings from such as the American Lung Association and from producers of not-always-reliable radon-testing kits. -- Jan 2006

On or from this page

The world is coming to an end -- again

National Public Radio hangs up on scientist

Water vapor is a global warming threat 

Is hydrogen economy the answer?

Greenland's glaciers have been shrinking for 100 years

Fighting global warming now may not be rational

Hockey Stick wrong?

Ice Ages vs. Warm Spells

The Al Gore Show

Radon is not a threat

Lomborg: The Skeptical Environmentalist

Civil War among Environmentalists

Environmentalist magazine counters VersagiVoice