[ RadSafe ] The Great Global Warming Swindle

[Kai Kaletsch]

I agree with what Otto said and I'm not particularly alarmed about global warming. Living in Canada, its a bit of a stretch to try to convince me that shorter, warmer winters are a bad thing.

However, given that we all agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, I think it is a fair question to ask: How much would the temperature increase if we keep increasing our CO2 output at the current rate (assuming no change in solar activity etc)? Unfortunately, the global warming skeptics have not provided a quantitative answer. If the answer depends on inputs that we don't know, then give me a range of possibilities (and, if possible, probabilities).

I don't like questions like: How much of our 0.2C temperature increase since 1940 is due to industrial CO2 releases? 

To some people, this implies that all individual contributing factors have to be less than 0.2C. Of course, this does not follow logically. You could have a 2.2C warming due to CO2, offset by a 0.2C cooling because of reduced solar activity (please correct me if I'm wrong, but, if I remember the graph correctly, the current level of solar activity is still less than the 1940 peak, while the current temperatures are higher) and a 1.8C cooling due to emissions that block sunlight. (For most of the time since the industrial revolution, we have emitted fairly little CO2 and lots of other pollution, like SO2 and particulate. In the west, we have only recently started to reduce these. Other places in the world are still emitting a lot of that stuff.)

Regards,
Kai
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Otto G. Raabe 
  To: Blaine Howard ; Kai Kaletsch 
  Cc: radsafe at radlab.nl 
  Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2007 3:23 PM
  Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] The Great Global Warming Swindle


    March 17, 2007

  According to MIT Professor Richard Lindzen, one of the National Research Council global warming panelist and lead author on the new UN report: "Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and some agreement, the science is by no means settled. We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth. But-- and I cannot stress this enough -- we are NOT in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future."

  Unfortunately the press and those who wrote so-called "summaries" of the UN report did not understand or wanted to ignore how little is truly known! Sunspot activity does correlate almost perfectly with mean earth temperatures over the last 150 years, so it seems clear that it is unlikely that there is a meaningful anthropomorphic factor associated with the average temperature of the earth. Also, an increase of only 0.5 degrees Celsius in 100 years is not alarming.

  Otto


  **********************************************
  Prof. Otto G. Raabe, Ph.D., CHP
  Center for Health & the Environment
  University of California
  One Shields Avenue
  Davis, CA 95616
  E-Mail: ograabe at ucdavis.edu
  Phone: (530) 752-7754   FAX: (530) 758-6140
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