Global Warming News - July 2008

Real News Stories To Share With Global-Warming Skeptics

United States:
The month began with heavy snowpack remaining in some mountainous areas. On Hidden Lake Trail atop Logan Pass in Glacier National Park, snow covered the popular route several feet deep in places. A slow melt this year left many of Glacier's trails still snowbound, and they did not open until mid-July or later. “What I'm trying to figure out is, do I believe it's the eighth of July and not the eighth of June?”, wondered park ranger Doug Follett, who for 50 years has worked the mountain trails.


Hiking in Glacier National Park - July 8.

“We had no clue it would be like this,” said Nancy Normand, who was visiting from Oregon. “I can't believe all this snow. It's pretty incredible for the middle of July.” Dawson Ingram came from Louisiana to fish for trout, but after slogging over snow for most of an hour he gazed down on the lake - “all frozen over. Just ice everywhere. I guess it's not a normal July.” But that, Follet said, raises a very interesting question: What, exactly, is normal?

“I wouldn't call this year normal,” the veteran ranger said, “but I wouldn't call it abnormal, either. We've had some snow up here in the past, as I recall.” The problem, in fact, isn't really snow at all, but lack of melt. “It's been an exceptional melt year, not an exceptional snow year,” said Jack Potter. “The total snowfall wasn't that impressive, but it just didn't melt out. It's really persisted.”

A virtual tour of park trails, reviewed at Glacier's informational Web site, told the story. Up at Stoney Indian Campground, “winter conditions” were expected right into early August. From there to the pass above were “hazardous conditions. Steep snow slopes. Ice axe and crampons recommended.” At Otokami Lake, rangers warned the “campground (is) unrecognizable and covered by five feet of snow.” Triple Divide Pass had “numerous very treacherous snowbanks,” and at Two Medicine Pass, the trail is so buried rangers warn a “map (is) recommended to get there.” Six feet of white persisted at Sperry Chalet, and nearly that at Granite Park Chalet.


Typical example of river rafting.

The late snow and slow melt-off also resulted in longer rafting seasons in some places. In Colorado for example, Paul Siratovich kayaked stretches of the Eagle River and Homestake Creek in mid-July that kayakers normally abandon by the end of June. He said he hoped to kayak the steep drops of Homestake, near Red Cliff, and the boulder-laden Eagle River through the Gilman Gorge, south of Minturn, until August. “It’s been a phenomenal season,” said Siratovich.

Water levels on the Eagle and Colorado rivers haven’t stayed this high this late in the summer since 1957, said Greg Kelchner, owner of Timberline Tours. This was the first Fourth of July in a decade, for example, that Timberline guides took customers on trips on the Eagle River, said Kelchner, whose Eagle-based business — which he has owned since 1971 — has thrived this year.

Scientific Opinion:

APS Forum, "Considerable Presence" of Skeptics: The American Physical Society (APS) is an organization which represents nearly 50,000 physicists. One unit within the APS is the 'Physics and Society Forum'. According to a recent post, the forum's editor Jeffrey Marque states, "There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution." As a result, the Forum is initiating a debate on the issue of global-warming. It opened the debate with the publication of two papers, one pro and one con.

Lord Monckton

Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley submitted a paper which concludes that climate sensitivity (the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause) has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

According to an article at Daily Tech, Monckton says in an e-mail, "I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC's 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central 'climate sensitivity' question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method."

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton's paper an "expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and "extensive errors". Monckton, who was the science advisor to Britain's Thatcher administration, says natural variability is the cause of most of the Earth's recent warming. "In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years... Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth."

David Evans, New Evidence Against Global-Warming: According to a story in The Australian, David Evans says that there is new evidence against man-made global-warming...

...since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Dr. Evans

Dr. David Evans is a mathematician who was a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005. He devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. He wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector. FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. He's been following the global warming debate closely for years.

Evans points to the following four "most basic salient facts" against man-made global-warming:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the "urban heat island" effect. Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust.

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.
--Dr. David Evans, No Smoking Hot Spot