Text 27480, 157 rader
Skriven 2007-02-25 21:53:43 av John Hull (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 27478 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Global Warmning
=======================
What nobody evers seems to get is that if the Greenland icecap melted enough to
raise sea level an average of 15 inches, it likely would trigger another ice
age.  Why?  Because that much fresh water would cause the Gulf Stream to shut
down by disrupting the salinity of the "pump" that makes the current work.

That would plunge the northern hemisphere into the freezer, and cause the
Arctic glaciers to start moving south across Canada, northern Europe and
Siberia.  The net effect is that sea levels would go down as the ice sheets
grew.



Jeff Binkley -> All wrote:
 JB>
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjI4NTc0YWMzNTA3ZjRmYmJiMDRjNmI5MGEwZTFhM2

 JB> E=


 JB> Inconvenient Truths
 JB> Novel science fiction on global warming.

 JB> By Patrick J. Michaels

 JB> This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his
 JB> global-warming
 JB> documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science fiction.


 JB> The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very
 JB> serious, very
 JB> soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenlands 630,000 cubic
 JB> miles of
 JB> ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet
 JB> by the
 JB> year 2100.

 JB> Wheres the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent
 JB> Policymakers Summary from the United Nations much anticipated compendium
on
 JB> climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes
 JB> medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level
of
 JB> between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gores film exaggerates the
 JB> rise
 JB> by about 2,000 percent.

 JB> Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the
 JB> concentration
 JB> of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly. Atmospheric
 JB> methane concentration hasnt changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel
 JB> Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCCs methane emissions
 JB> scenarios as quite unlikely.

 JB> Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.s new projection is about 30-percent
 JB> lower
 JB> than it was in its last report in 2001. The projections include a
 JB> contribution
 JB> due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica for the rates
 JB> observed
 JB> since 1993, according to the IPCC, but these flow rates could increase or
 JB> decrease in the future.

 JB> According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005,
 JB> Greenland
 JB> was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing that by 630,000
 JB> yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100,
 JB> shows
 JB> that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century.

 JB> Was is the operative word. In early February, Science published another
 JB> paper
 JB> showing that the recent acceleration of Greenlands ice loss from its huge
 JB> glaciers has suddenly reversed.

 JB> Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find any
 JB> support for Gores hypothesis. Instead, theres an unrefereed editorial by
 JB> NASA
 JB> climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal Climate Change  edited
by
 JB> Steven Schneider, of Stanford University, who said in 1989 that
 JB> scientists had
 JB> to choose the right balance between being effective and honest about
global
 JB> warming  and a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences
 JB> that was only reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr.
 JB> Hansen.

 JB> These are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to do
 JB> something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami. And given
 JB> that
 JB> Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago, the real clock
 JB> must be
 JB> down to eight years!

 JB> It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with politicians
 JB> about
 JB> various solutions for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled
 JB> by every
 JB> signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per
 JB> half-century. Thats too small to measure, because the earths temperature
 JB> varies
 JB> by more than that from year to year.

 JB> The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto  i.e.,
 JB> less than
 JB> nothing  for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which themselves
 JB> will have
 JB> only a minor effect out past somewhere around 2075. (Imagine, as a thought
 JB> experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to dictate our energy policy for
 JB> today).

 JB> Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes that we
 JB> replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over
 JB> the
 JB> next decade. But its well-known that even if we turned every kernel of
 JB> American
 JB> corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual
gasoline
 JB> consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too
 JB> small to
 JB> measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to
 JB> burn up
 JB> its food supply to please a political mob.

 JB> And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol
 JB> efficiently,
 JB> only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation.
 JB> Even
 JB> the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of gasoline would only reduce
 JB> our total
 JB> emissions by 7-percent below present levels  resulting in emissions about
 JB> 20-percent higher than Kyoto allows.

 JB> And theres other legislation out there, mandating, variously, emissions
 JB> reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050. How do we get there if we
 JB> cant
 JB> even do Kyoto?

 JB> When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient.
 JB> And its
 JB> not just Gores movie thats fiction. Its the rhetoric of the Congress and
 JB> the
 JB> chief executive, too.

 JB>   Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the
Cato
 JB> Institute and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global
 JB> Warming
 JB> by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.

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