Singer et all have estimated the total contribution to the greenhouse effect to be a mere 0.28% due to the totality of human activity. The human CO2 contribution is roughly half of this miniscule amount. Water vapor is by far the dominant effect at 95% of the total.
CO2 is not chemically reactive. The EPA declared it a "pollutant" only after several states and "green lobby" groups sued for it. In a narrow 5-4 2007 Suprement court ruling, the court gave no scientific opinion but ruled that the EPA was the official government entity which carried the authority to make such a determination. While "CO2" was a word appearing in the ruling, there is no reference anywhere to other greenhouse gases, including water. This was a temporary victory. There are two GOP inititaives in both Houses of congress to remove EPA's authority to declare CO2 a pollutant - but is opposed by Democrats.
THE SEMINAL SCIENTIFIC PAPER on this appears in the Library tab of the ICECAP website: "Falsification of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effects within the Frame of Physics" by Gerlich and Tscheuschner (Sep 2007) - 114 pages and 204 references. If you read this and can follow the math at just a top level, you'll be convinced that there's no such thing as a greenhouse effect - unless one believes in a perpetual motion machine (thus ignoring the second law of thermodynamics).
For the landmark book on the subject of climate history and its implications, read "Heaven and Earth, Global Warming - the Missing Science" by Ian Plimer (2009).
Why do I have to be a defined as a "denier" or as an "alarmist"?
A little tale:
Joe was a creative and successful Engineer. In his spare time he enjoyed his hobbies of studying global warming and betting on NFL football games. This year he was doing especially well on his football picks until he decided to go for broke and make a huge bet. He picked the Pats over the Ravens in the playoffs and now owed his mob connected bookie $500,000 . He was in a panic when he heard that knock on the door. The rest was just a blur.
Joe awakens with a splitting headache and finds himself lying in a pool of water in his basement. His arms are free, but his feet are encased in a block of cement. Looking around he discovers the source of the water. The pipes have been broken and the water level in his basement is quickly rising. He is doomed!
What should Joe do?
A) Only make bets he can cover.
B) Use the pen in his pocket protector to mark the rising water level on the wall and write a diary about what is sure to be his torturous end as result of his gambling.
C) Ignore the rising water and wait for help.
D) Use all of his strength to try and pry the grate off the basement floor drain to increase the flow of the drain even though it's obvious that volume of water rushing in is greater than what the drain can handle.
What happens to Joe?
Joe is an Engineer so it's in his nature to look for solutions beyond the obvious and those that are offered by the "establishment". As a result, Joe crawls to his tool box, removes his sledge hammer from the bottom drawer, smashes the cement, frees himself, and gets the heck out of the basement.
Here it is again. Every few weeks this post is re-sent in the Design News Daily Update emails, as it was today. UBM is just repeating this underlying lie that a handful of "distinguished scientists" whom we should trust (presumably because they're like we are--ignorant scientists?), tell us not to worry about global warming. Have you bothered to provide equal weight to the much larger group of real climate scientists that tell us we have literally everything in the world to be worried about?
Mr. Murray, you are defending these distinguished scientists because they are being "scorned." Really?? Is that all this is about? I thought it was about the future of our planet and whether or not we are destroying it. If we are, then no less than the survival of human civilization may hang in the balance. Are you really so sanguine about our future and care more about protecting the reputations of these 16 people? What if the 16 non-climate scientists are wrong and the 98% of the thousands of real climate scientists are right? Shouldn't we trust the overwhelming majority more than the 16 outliers who aren't climate scientists? Even Dick Cheney posed a very unlikely threat that would be very grave in its outcome to be one that should be treated as though it's a certainty.
How is this fair and balanced reporting, Mr. Murray? You merely place doubt, give us a feel good excuse to believe the doubt, and then repeat the publication of the post over and over again. Do you call yourself a person of science?
Whether we cause it or not the climate will change. Will we cause the change to come sooner or later? Where is it written that Nature is going to treat us any better on its own than it will with our impact? Whether we cause change or not there is nothing that says what change we do cause is better or worse than what would be happening otherwise. We are a long way from understanding our environment well enough to say that we can change it. We are likely to find out a 100 years from now that everything we are doing to prevent global warming is doing more harm than good. We can pretty much depend on politicians to turn any threat of a disaster into a real one. Ethanol comes to mind. Climate change is not likely to over take the damage we do to each other any time soon.
Climate change seems to have few of the halmarks of science and many of the halmarks of a new religion.
Science has always been a matter of presenting an idea, presenting how one went about making their conclusions and exposing it to others to examine and experiment with to see if the hypothesis holds up under the scrutiny of others. The so-called scientists on the global warming side seem to have used the approach that their ideas are so in-controvertable that there should be no examining of their methods and formulas by others and that others who would dare question them are not true scientists. True science requires that the hypothesis and methods be questioned. True science requires that evidence that does not support your hypothesis be examined fully, not dismissed because it doesn't fit your orthodoxy.
The problem is that science has allowed itself to be perverted for the benefit of politics. Instead of being independant it has become so dependent on the political process that it no longer funtions as science, but as another propaganda tool to fit the local political winds.
Dear William. Yes, I know I just said that the slowly rising sea level may not be a world ending catastrophy. However, note that we will be forced to move hundreds of millions of people, some entire nations, to new areas, over times like a few decades. While this is not so bad a problem handled in small numbers over a long time, it does demand we plan how to handle it when the millions in Jakarta need our help with a 100 mile long sea wall, and when florida is hit by a shocking series of hurricanes in a short time.
I suspect though, that all the ocean level, even the storms by themselves, is just the spark at the edge. The real problem is an unpredictable weather pattern, and drying (especially followed by drenching rains) that make even irrigation a hard task. It comes down to food and water. A lot of this world depends rather directly on the water available, and the expected rains. Perhaps we should all put our investments into massive third world (and perhaps some first world as well) irrigation and storm water impoundment projects?
Hi. Just to clean up a few points. Except for our ancient ruins, our cities average less than 100 years. Mostly a lot less. Look at it as replacement time. Most or our buildings are used for around 50 years, then torn down and replaced with bigger and better. Ignoring all the many other variables, we could just raze and rebuild gradually as the sea rises. Some sites will be more exposed to wave and storm action and there will surely be important costs for that, but I would not want to oversell the size of the calamity. Most of us are not now living where we were born, so I think as long as the rate slow, the world as a whole would hardly notice. Not as important as war and famon.
Yes we are massivly dumping CO2 into the air. We are also making major changes to the distribution and temperature of surface fresh water, the range and distribution of plants and animals, and airborn aerosols (smokes and the like). Think of the world wide impact of warming the fresh water over large regions, replacing trees with grasses, and grazing grasses to bare soil, and nitroginating the oceans. The Algae bloom from the end of the mississippi by itself may seem ignorable, but add enough such stimulus from our many farms/yards in many rivers and streams, and we are contributing much more than just CO2. In fact some of these effects may be balancing the effects of the CO2. If that balance should run out of steam at the extreemum, we will get a period of much more rapid change. That scares me. I like to eat, and I do not want to have to pay $5 for an ear of scraggly corn.
On the good side of all this, we are wicked smart and can figure out how to survive and even live well under much more dificult conditions. Will we? That is a nasty hard question. I wish I was more confident in our good sense, but I do not see any good reason to take it for granted.
The 3D printing revolution seems to have a knack for quickly moving technology ahead by way of collaborative effort and even a little friendly competition -- all of course in the name of scientific advancement.
Advantech has launched a new series of motion-control I/O modules to meet the increased demands that come with more distributed industrial systems that require control of a growing number of axes and devices.
Using almost 200 light-emitting diodes in the front and back of the new 2014 CTS, Cadillac designers are showing how LEDs can change the character of a vehicle.
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