marklynas.orgGood news of the week 13 November 06
The severe drubbing given by US voters to the Republican party at last week’s mid-term elections removes two of the most notorious climate deniers from their Congressional positions of power. First to walk the plank will be Republican Richard Pombo, who lost his seat in the House of Representatives. Pombo had previously spent much of his time trying to gut the Endangered Species Act, and was a virulent opponent of greenhouse gas controls.
In the Senate, James Inhofe remains in the chamber but will lose his chairmanship of the powerful Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It was during Inhofe’s chairmanship that he called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and invited the sci-fi writer/climate denier Michael Crichton to testify as an ‘expert witness’ in front of the committee.
He will likely be replaced by California Democrat Barbara Boxer, who has a much more encouraging record on environmental issues, and promises to prioritise climate change – perhaps even by pressing for a national version of Arnie’s California carbon reduction plan.
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Mark,
Mark,
I do not believe that it is fair to claim that Mr. Pombo was “trying to gut the Endangered Species Act” (ESA). I do believe that the ESA requires modification. The intent of the ESA was to preserve genetic diversity. The current regulatory fabric perverts that intent by its overly enthusiastic naming of new species. The regulations grant species status to subsets of species that express certain genes when living under special environmental conditions. These subsets are called endangered species even though all members of the species at large have the genetic ability to express the same attributes if exposed to the same environmental conditions. The result is that the ESA protects specialized environments rather that protecting genetic diversity.
For example, all tigers have genes, which can produce white tigers. During ice ages, white tigers thrive and become common while orange and black tigers do not thrive and become rare. Protection of a few white tigers does not protect genetic diversity.
New information published by the Royal Society adds credence to the theory that solar variations are responsible for the ongoing warming. The paper describes experiments that simulate the effects of cosmic rays – high-energy protons ejected by distant supernova- on low-altitude cloudiness. The paper (see http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/(dnudhtyafjsi4xfpodgue445)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,11,45;journal,133,133;linkingpublicationresults,1:102023,1) and an additional paper by the lead author (see http://spacecenter.dk/xpdf/influence-of-cosmic-rays-on-the-earth.pdf) make the case that solar variation alone could be responsible for almost all of the warming that has occurred during the past 100 years. You can read a description of the experiment that demonstrates that cosmic rays do increase cloudiness at http://spacecenter.dk/xpdf/sky-experiment_2.pdf.
The observations support the theory that increased solar activity, i.e. sunspots, occurs simultaneous with high solar wind and strong solar electromagnetic fields, which combine to deflect cosmic rays away from earth. Fewer cosmic rays mean fewer low level clouds. The net effect is to multiply the increased solar radiation that occurs during periods of high sunspot activity by decreasing the albedo of the earth, thereby increasing warming far beyond that which the increased radiation would cause.
In the additional paper cited above, Svensmark makes the point that the decrease in cloudiness that occurred during the past 5 years is sufficient to have caused an increased solar load in the lower atmosphere of 1.2 watts per square meter. Compare that to the 1.4 watts per square meter that IPCC attributes to “the greenhouse effect of all of the increase in carbon dioxide in the air since the Industrial Revolution.”
This theory is intriguing because it also explains some of the observed data that the IPCC models cannot explain. For example, decreased cosmic rays should decrease low-level cloudiness. Reduction of low-level clouds should increase the surface temperature, which agrees with current observations. The observation that the surface is warming faster than the high altitudes is a major problem for the models, which predict that the higher altitudes and latitudes should warm faster. The cosmic ray theory also would explain why some high altitude glaciers, Kilimanjaro, for example, appear to be waning but not warming. Decreased cloudiness leads to decreased precipitation, which starves the glaciers.
The earth’s climate is warming. Anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are unlikely to be the cause of that warming. Reductions of carbon dioxide emissions will have no effect on solar activity or on our climate.