Global Warming: A Scientific Overview

Transcription

1 Presented at the Pittsburgh Association of Petroleum Geologists & Society of Petroleum Engineers Joint Meeting Radisson Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA May 1, 2008 Global Warming: A Scientific Overview By James M. Taylor Senior Fellow, Environment Policy The Heartland Institute

2 The Earth s Temperature Is Always Fluctuating Past 10 years: Slightly cooling Prior 20 years: Warming Prior 30 years: Cooling Prior 90 years: Warming Prior 900 years: Cooling Prior 900 years: Warming

3 Temperatures Since 2003

4 20 th Century Temperature and Carbon Dioxide Years Temps Carbon Dioxide Rising Minimal Cooling Rising Rising Rising Cooling Rising

5 Holocene Temperature History

6 Earth s Temperature History

7 A Poster Child of Unethical Deceit

8 McIntyre, McKitrickRevision

9 Solar Output: An Embarrassing Truth

10 Scientists Consensus 19,000 scientists say no crisis (oism.org) 500 climate scientists surveyed by Institute of Coastal Research Survey question: Natural scientists have established enough physical evidence to turn the issue of global climate change over to social scientists for matters of policy discussion. Less than half agreed

11 Scientific Consensus Not 2,600 scientists IPCC Flaws Selected by political bodies, not scientific bodies Greepeace, Environmental Defense in: William Gray out Only a handful of lead authors produce final document Over 10,000 critical comments

12 Extraterrestrial SUVs? Global warming on Earth Global warming on Mars Global warming on Jupiter Global warming on Pluto Global warming on numerous planetary moons

13 NASA Aqua Satellite

14 Doubling CO2 = Only 1.1 Degree Warming 3 Major Assumptions in Alarmist Models: 1) Humidity Should Increase 2) Upper Level Clouds Should Increase 3) CO2 Stays in Atmosphere for Centuries

15 Aqua Satellite Has Confirmed 1) Humidity is DECLINING 2) Upper Level Clouds are DECLINING 3) (CO2 Stays in Atmosphere for Only 5 to 7 years)

16 Antarctica Antarctic Warming Alarms Scientists -Most Serious Thaw Since End Of Last Ice Age 12,000 Years Ago CBS News headline, May 14, 2002 A canary in the coal mine of global warming An Inconvenient Truth

17 Antarctica: The Truth Antarctica is in a prolonged and dramatic cold spell. Temperatures have been dropping 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since Nature magazine, Jan. 13, 2002

18 Antarctica: The Truth The decline is alarming. These cooling repercussions may have a long-term effect. Antarctic Researcher Diana Wall, Colorado State University: Nature, Jan. 13, 2002

19 Antarctica: The Truth Mass gains from accumulating snow, particularly on the Antarctic Peninsula and within East Antarctica, exceed the ice dynamic loss from West Antarctica. -July 2006, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

20 Antarctica: The Truth

21 Antarctica: The Truth

22 The Arctic CNN.com(Sept. 15, 2007) A steady, worldwide decline in ice cover is an early warning of a changing climate. Asserts glaciers from the Arctic, Greenland, Antarctica, Mt. Kilimanjaro have been vanishing due to global warning

23 The Arctic All time low record merely means since 1979, when satellites first began measuring Arctic sea ice

24 The Arctic Clearly much warmer during World War II Squadron of P-38 and B-17 bombers found under 268 feet of snow and ice

25 The Arctic "Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters. -NASA, Oct. 4, 2007

26 The Arctic

27 The Arctic NASA: Since October 2007, Arctic sea ice has grown faster than at any point in recorded history.

28 Associated Press, May 14, 2007: Mt. Kilimanjaro Global warming [is] the glaciers of Mt. Kilimanjaro disappearing. Planes used to take people through Kilimanjaro to see the snows, now it's only at the very top.

29 Mt. Kilimanjaro Nature magazine online, November 24, 2003: Although it s tempting to blame the ice loss on global warming, researchers think that deforestation of the mountain s foothills is the more likely culprit. Without the forests humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine.

30 Mt. Kilimanjaro American Scientist, July-August 2007: Warming fails spectacularly to explain the behavior of the glaciers and plateau ice on Africa's Kilimanjaro massif. The disappearing ice cap of the shining mountain, which gets a starring role in the movie, is not an appropriate poster child for global climate change. Kilimanjaro, a trio of volcanic cones that penetrate high into the cold upper troposphere, has gained and lost ice through processes that bear only indirect connections, if any, to recent trends in global climate.

31 Drought Environmental News Service, April 5, 2007: Global Warming Brings Perpetual Drought to U.S. Southwest

32 Drought International Journal of Climatology, July 2004: Study of soil moisture throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The terrestrial surface is both warmer and effectively wetter A good analogy to describe the changes in these places is that the terrestrial surface is literally becoming more like a gardener s greenhouse.

33 Drought An increasing trend is apparent in both model soil moisture and runoff over much of the U.S. This wetting trend is consistent with the general increase in precipitation in the latter half of the 20 th century. Droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the country over the last century. -Geophysical Research Letters, May 25, 2006

34 Drought National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website: A number of tree-ring records exist for the last two millennia which suggest that 20 th century droughts may be mild when evaluated in the context of this longer time frame.

35 Drought Climatic Change, July 2007: During the Little Ice Age, there occurred three very large-scale drought[s] more severe and sustained than any witnessed during the period of instrumental weather observations [i.e., the 20 th century].

36 Drought (U.S. precipitation NCDC)

37 Drought What we see from the scientific record is that droughts have become less frequent and less severe during our recent global warming. Asserted trends to the contrary are decidedly short term, limited in geographic reach, and quite minor when compared to droughts that have dominated colder climatic conditions.

38 Hurricanes USA Today, March 31, 2008: Hurricanes and other weather events are expected to last longer and be more intense. That would mean bigger storm surges, more damage to buildings and roads, and contaminated food and water.

39 Hurricanes

40 Hurricanes National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), November 29, 2005, regarding Hurricane Katrina and active 2005 hurricane season: "NOAA attributes this increased activity to natural occurring cycles in tropical climate patterns near the equator. NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming."

41 Hurricanes We don t see any new trend. There s no link to global warming that you can see at all. Dr. Chris Landsea, National Hurricane Center, May 1, 2007

42 Hurricanes Geophysical Research Letters, April 18, 2007: Global warming will cause more upper atmosphere wind shear, which will prevent hurricanes from forming. The environmental changes found here do not suggest a strong increase in tropical Atlantic hurricane activity during the 21st century."

43 Hurricanes Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, March 2008: A new technique for deriving hurricane climatologiesfrom global data, applied to climate models, indicates that global warming should reduce the global frequency of hurricanes Kerry Emanuel, lead author Mixed results regarding intensity. Perhaps a small increase in intensity in some areas.

44 Hurricanes How does the media report such a finding? -- Science Daily, April 19, 2008: Climate Change Likely to Intensify Storms, New Study Confirms

45 Tornadoes An Inconvenient Truth claims global warming is causing more tornadoes

46 Tornadoes

47 Greenland New York Times, Jan. 16, 2007: All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks lonely mountains in Inuit that were encased in the margins of Greenland s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.

48 Greenland 2006 study, Journal of Geophysical Research: Researchers at the Danish Meteorological Institute reported that temperatures during the last two full decades in Greenland were colder than any decade since the 1910s.

49 Greenland December 2005, Journal of Glaciology: Scientists analyzed 10 years worth of data and reported, the Greenland ice sheet is thinning at the margins and growing inland, with a small overall mass gain.

50 Greenland

51 Greenland Temperatures must warm SOMETIME. We hope. When it does, keep Babe Ruth in mind.

52 Africa BBC News Online, August 20, 2002: Global Warming Threatens Africa Reduced rainfall in the semi-arid Sahel region south of the Sahara desert is another example of the effects of pollution and climate change on Africa in the WWF report. Incorporated into An Inconvenient Truth

53 Africa New Scientist, September 18, 2002: Africa s deserts are in spectacular retreat. The southern Sahara desert is in retreat, making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa.... Burkina Faso, one of the West African countries devastated by drought and advancing deserts 20 years ago, is growing so much greener that families who fled to wetter coastal regions are starting to go home.

54 Africa Africa is currently experiencing an unusually prolonged period of stable, wet conditions in comparison to previous centuries of the past millennium. The patterns and variability of 20 th century rainfall in central Africa have been unusually conducive to human welfare in the context of the past 1400 years. - Geology, January 1, 2007

55 Africa This phenomenon of a greening planet is not limited to the southern Sahara desert. Satellite data from , reported in the September 16, 2001 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research, found an 8-to-12 percent increase in vegetation across North America and Eurasia. A subsequent comment in the same journal, Journal of Geophysical Research,concluded that a concurrent rise in atmospheric CO2 was primarily responsible for the increased vegetation.

56 Any Questions? James M. Taylor