Astronaut speaks out on global warming

Former astronaut speaks out on global warming
By Associated Press | Sunday, February 15, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Around the Nation

SANTA FE, N.M. - Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn’t believe that humans are causing global warming.

"I don’t think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect," said Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York.

Schmitt contends that scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.

"They’ve seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming," Schmitt said.

Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration.

Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making."

Williams said Heartland is skeptical about the crisis that people are proclaiming in global warming.

"Not that the planet hasn’t warmed. We know it has or we’d all still be in the Ice Age," he said. "But it has not reached a crisis proportion and, even among us skeptics, there’s disagreement about how much man has been responsible for that warming."

Schmitt said historical documents indicate average temperatures have risen by 1 degree per century since around 1400 A.D., and the rise in carbon dioxide is because of the temperature rise.

Schmitt also said geological evidence indicates changes in sea level have been going on for thousands of years. He said smaller changes are related to changes in the elevation of land masses — for example, the Great Lakes are rising because the earth’s crust is rebounding from being depressed by glaciers.

Schmitt, who grew up in Silver City and now lives in Albuquerque, has a science degree from the California Institute of Technology. He also studied geology at the University of Oslo in Norway and took a doctorate in geology from Harvard University in 1964.

In 1972, he was one of the last men to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 17 mission.

Schmitt said he’s heartened that the upcoming conference is made up of scientists who haven’t been manipulated by politics.

Of the global warming debate, he said: "It’s one of the few times you’ve seen a sizable portion of scientists who ought to be objective take a political position and it’s coloring their objectivity."

___

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/general/view.bg?articleid=1152427

Moonbat

We keep hearing that anyone who denies global warming is a problem that can and must be dealt with cannot be a Democrat. If this is indeed true, then there may be credence to the idea that the fear of global warming and the response to that fear are indeed political constructs.

only a pinhead could say any of that nonsense with a straight face.

Here's what I have so far:

Where is there any room to disagree?

Suggested re-wording:

"You're arguing against straightforward thermodynamics. From about 1650 to about 1850 Earth experienced what is known as "The Little Ice Age" to many parts of the world, especially the Northern Hemisphere. Post 1850, the Earth started returning to warmer global temperatures closer to, but still not equaling the prior warmer era known as the Medieval Warm Period or Medieval Climate Optimum. Therefore, it is only natural that the Earth has warmed over the last 150 years."

I.e., the crux of the argument and the science.

I.e., the crux of the argument and common sense.

In the past, similar abrupt changes in Earth's atmospheric carbon store caused mass-extinction events. But those releases occurred over thousands of years, with significantly smaller quantities of carbon emitted.

Humans have loaded the atmosphere with much more carbon, over a much shorter time span, than a typical flood basalt event.

What physical mechanism do you propose that would make the climate system insensitive to such a perturbation this time around?

Richard A. Kerr (2001) It's Official: Humans Are Behind Most of Global Warming
Science 2001. 291: 566 (commentary and summary of recent research)

J. E. Harries, H. E. Brindley, P. J. Sagoo, R. J. Bantges (2001). Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997. Nature 410: 355 - 357

T. P. Barnett, D. W. Pierce, R. Schnur (2001). Detection of Anthropogenic Climate Change in the World's Oceans. Science 292: 270-274.

S. Levitus, J. I. Antonov, J. Wang, T. L. Delworth, K. W. Dixon, and A. J. Broccoli (2001) Anthropogenic Warming of Earth's Climate System. Science 292: 267-270.

D. J. Karoly, K. Braganza, P. A. Stott, J. M. Arblaster, G. A. Meehl, A. J. Broccoli, and K. W. Dixon (2003) Detection of a Human Influence on North American Climate. Science. 302: 1200-1203

B. D. Santer, M. F. Wehner, T. M. L. Wigley, R. Sausen, G. A. Meehl, K. E. Taylor, C. Ammann, J. Arblaster, W. M. Washington, J. S. Boyle, and W. Brüggemann (2003) Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes. Science. 301: 479-483

P. A. Stott, D. A. Stone and M. R. Allen (2004) Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003. Nature 432: 610-614

J. Hansen, L. Nazarenko, R. Ruedy, M Sato, J. Willis, A. Del Genio, D. Koch, A. Lacis, K. Lo, S. Menon, T. Novakov, J. Perlwitz, G. Russell, G. A. Schmidt N. Tausnev (2005) Earth's Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications. Science. 308: 1431 – 1435

T. P. Barnett, D. W. Pierce, K. M. AchutaRao, P. J. Gleckler, B. D. Santer, J. M. Gregory, and W. M. Washington (2005) Penetration of Human-Induced Warming into the World's Oceans. Science. 309: 284-287

M. Lockwood and C. Frohlich (2007) Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature. Proc. R. Soc.doi:10.1098/rspa.2007.1880 Published online

the existence of the Little Ice Age?

and killing parts of the ocean?

and tearing down millions of acres of forest to grow food to feed cattle?

and driving hundreds of otherwise strong species to extinction?

Approximately equal to one flood basalt event per year. And it only took one of those to cause a mass extinction in the geological past.

...I suggest, in all sincerity, that you read a college-level textbook on climate science. I always recommend Ray Pierrehumbert's excellent Principles of Planetary Climate: http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/ClimateBook/ClimateBook.html.

The draft is free online. I guarantee that it's a much more valuable use of your time than reading ClimateAudit.

And we most certainly can't put it in a labrartory and test it.

But we can put CO2 in the labrartory and test its radiative forcing.

There's your straightforward thermodynamics right there.

And we most certainly can't put it in a labrartory and test it.

But we can put CO2 in the labrartory and test its radiative forcing.

There's your straightforward thermodynamics right there.

Milanković first proposed his theory of glacial cycles in the 1930s, and subsequent research has shown that the theory stands up to observation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Problems

No doubt he made a good contribution to science but there's a lot, a whole lot, we don't know about global weather cycles.

For example, there are good theories for the "transition problem" and "effect exceeds cause" questions.

The transition problem was well explained by Barry Saltzmann in 1994 by using the long-term drawdown of atmospheric carbon due to carbonate weathering to drive a nonlinear model of climate state. He exactly reproduced the timing and periodicity of the transition.

The effect-exceeds-cause question is largely answered by invoking the short-term feedback of deglaciation and microbial release of the soil carbon store.

This is not to say we don't have much to learn about the climate system, but our knowledge is much better than most people think.

As always, I suggest reading a college-level textbook to learn the science. This one's free online: http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/ClimateBook/ClimateBook.html. I guarantee you'll find it a rewarding experience.