The slant of the program was to show that the decline in the public's concern about climate change was largely due to organised political activy paid for by various right wing pressure groups.This effort could not have succeded had the world warmed as predicted by the IPCC and the ecoleft environmentalists. The real earth has been in a cooling phase since about 2003.
Because of the Urban Heat Island effect and the thermal inertia of the oceans Sea Surface Temperatures are the best measure of global trends. These show that the global warming trend ended in about 2003. There has been no net warming since 1997 since when CO2 has risen 8.5% with no global temperature increase. Since 2003 the trend is negative. The current decline in the solar magnetic field strength is so marked as to suggest a possible coming Maunder Minimum (Little Ice Age) and the phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation suggests a likely 20 - 30 year cooling phase. For the next 30 years or so cooling is more likely than warming .Beyond that we know too little to make any actionable predictions.A colder dryer earth would,however be much more harmful to world food production than a warmer wetter one.
Any journalist or TV producer interested in the facts should have done due diligence because all the basic data is easily available on the web. Instead you rely on presenting the opinion of advocates of the competing viewpoints but continually kept emphasising the statistically ridiculous notion of a 97% consensus for AGW.
Clearly Frontline did no due diligence on this nonsense.
Lawrence Solomon said:
"This number will prove a new embarrassment to the pundits and press who use it. The number stems from a 2008 master’s thesis by student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman at the University of Illinois, under the guidance of Peter Doran, an associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences. The two researchers obtained their results by conducting a survey of 10,257 Earth scientists. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers — in the end, they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that pundits now tout."
for a full discussion see http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/01/03/lawrence-solomon-97-cooked-stats/
There is a real need for a reputable news organisation - Frontline? to undertake a truly objective analysis of the current state of what we know about climate science - based on the empirical data and not on the political propaganda productions of the IPCC
Some time back I asked people if they could explain how the required thermal energy gets into the surface of Venus. At least 98% of all incident Solar radiation is absorbed by the thick atmosphere there, so the Sun does not heat the surface significantly with direct radiation.
ReplyDeleteNo one on any climate blog has provided the correct answer, so I guess it's time to explain what does happen.
The thermal gradient in an atmosphere evolves even in still air. We have proof that it does in over 800 experiments by Roderich Graeff, and it is logical that it would if you consider my thought experiment about a cylinder divided into three sections. If the top and bottom sections are a vacuum and then gas is released from the middle section by removing the dividers, then, at thermodynamic equilibrium, there has to be a cooler temperature at the top and warmer at the bottom. If KE were homogeneous, then the extra PE in the molecules at the top would cause a general propensity for some gas to move downwards gaining KE as it does so. After all, each individual molecule has mass, and thus has KE (as we know) and also PE. So it must obey Newton’s laws in free flight between impacts.
The Venus surface would not be as hot if all convection moved away from the surface. If that happened we have no explanation as to how the required energy gets into the Venus surface. Because IPCC and cohorts could not conceive this heat transfer by convection, they postulated that back radiation could do the job of raising Earth’s surface 33 degrees, and the surface of Venus by about 500 degrees. But 10W/m^2 of direct solar radiation reaching the Venus surface could hardly produce much back radiation anyway! Surface bound heat transfer by convection is the missing link which we have all been looking for, and no one it seems has previously described this as being the only explanation.
We must understand that diffusion of KE (even in still air) sets the gradient of the thermal plane in an atmosphere. Then any additional heat absorbed from the Sun (such as when night becomes day) will spread out over that thermal plane (moving away from the source in all 3D directions) just as if it were the level surface of a lake receiving rain (extra water) in some section of the lake. This is the only way we can explain how energy moves up the thermal gradient and into the surface of Venus. Radiation cannot transfer heat from the cooler atmosphere, but non-radiative convection can flow towards the surface over the thermal plane whose gradient is set by diffusion of KE in a gravitational field.