Global Warming Redux: Part 6,428

The National Weather Service has issued a warning for parts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire:

FROST ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 2 AM TO 8 AM EDT MONDAY
UNTIL 11:00PM EDT
Urgent - Weather Message National Weather Service Taunton MA 300 PM EDT Sun Sep 16 2007

Western Franklin MA-Eastern Franklin MA-Western Hampshire MA- Western Hampden MA-Eastern Hampshire MA-Eastern Hampden MA- Cheshire NH-Western And Central Hillsborough NH- Including The Cities Of...Charlemont...Greenfield...Orange... Chesterfield...Blandford...Amherst...Milford...Northampton...Springfield... Jaffrey...Keene...Peterborough...Weare
...Frost Advisory Remains In Effect From 2 AM To 8 AM EDT Monday...

A Large High Pressure System Will Move Over The Region Tonight. This Will Allow For Clear Skies And Light Winds...With Low Temperatures Reaching 33 To 36 Degrees Across The Advisory Region By Daybreak Monday. This Will Make Conditions Favorable For Frost... With A Few Locations Possibly Reaching Freezing Briefly Around Daybreak. [emphasis added]

When I looked at the calendar for tomorrow, it says September 17, 2007 and in my part of the country, we still have weather reaching the low to high 90s. How could Eastern Mass and Western New Hampshire be that cold so I queried a friend living in that neck of the woods and she says that this is and has always been common, wearing warm coats to school, dragging them behind after school because it's too hot to wear them.

But, that can't be, after all we are in the midst of (shudder) Global Warming and thus, weather like this should be delayed until say November, or even perhaps October but NOT September! Could they be wrong? Nah, not possible, after all a consensus of scientists have decreed we are all gonna toast. Well, something like that because even a non scientist with stature, Al Gore, said before congress that the "...earth has a fever."

Well, the fact is that they are wrong, at least as to the cause and most likely to the degree as well. Granted there is a warming of the earth, but it preceded the build up of CO₂, not the other way around.

...CO2 trace lagged the temperature curve by about a millennium. This confounds the greenhouse theory prediction. CO2 couldn’t be the cause of past global temperature increases! [source]

So, is this the proof that the consensus folk have it wrong? Well, not necessarily, lets see if more proof of calamitous claims are false, not that one necessarily proves the other.

For example, The 1987 Montreal Protocol On Substances That Deplete The Ozone Layer (Montreal Protocol) turns 20 this year. Remember that one, the hole in the ozone layer over antarctica was growing and growing and growing and we were all going to die of melanoma?

The international treaty to protect the ozone layer turns 20 this year. But is there really much reason to celebrate?

Environmentalists have made numerous apocalyptic predictions over the past several decades, virtually none of which has come to pass. Yet each time, the greens and their political allies proclaim victory, arguing that their preventive prescriptions averted disaster.

[...]

...The lurid predictions of ozone depletion-induced skin cancer epidemics, ecosystem destruction and others haven’t come true, for which Montreal Protocol proponents congratulate themselves. But in retrospect, the evidence shows that ozone depletion was an exaggerated threat in the first place. As the treaty parties return to Montreal for their 20th anniversary meeting it should be cause for reflection, not celebration, especially for those who hope to repeat this “success story” in the context of global warming.

The treaty came about over legitimate but overstated concerns that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs, a then-widely used class of refrigerants) and other compounds were rising to the stratosphere and destroying ozone molecules. These molecules, collectively known as the ozone layer, shield the earth from excessive ultraviolet-B radiation (UVB) from the sun. The Montreal Protocol’s provisions were tightened in 1990 and again in 1992, culminating with a CFC ban in most developed nations by 1996.

So what do we know now? As far as ozone depletion is concerned, the thinning of the ozone layer that occurred throughout the 1980s apparently stopped in the early 1990s, too soon to credit the Montreal Protocol. A 1998 World Meteorological Organization report said that, “since 1991, the linear (downward) trend observed during the 1980s has not continued, but rather total column ozone has been almost constant ...”

However, the same report noted that the stratospheric concentrations of the offending compounds were still increasing through 1998. This lends credence to the skeptical view, widely derided at the time of the Montreal Protocol, that natural variations better explain the fluctuations in the global ozone layer.

What, more catastrophizing by concerned scientists? Hard to believe isn't it? Well, not if you are old enough to remember the "predicted Ice Age that should have arrived by now. Now, I will admit that the "scare" was mostly predicted by Newsweek and National Geographic without much scientific report, but the fact remains that "scare stories" sells and sells well. And if enough selling takes place, then you get some political critter passing out grants to "study" the problem and when money becomes available, all kinds of scientists jump on that bandwagon to keep the money flowing. If you are a GW supporter, you will immediately point to the folk that are labeled deniers and say they are taking oil company money but you can't deny that others are taking government money.

And so we are in a quandary, the sun is heating up, so are Mars, Venus and other planets and we haven't been shipping CO₂ to those planets so it seems plausible that the sun's activity may be a large portion of the current "GW" scare. Occam's Razor and all that! "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem." or the law of parsimony (in English) "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." which is essentially what the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham implied: "The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness")."

Toast anyone?

Posted by GM Roper at September 16, 2007 11:18 PM