Re: A response to Jerry Cohen's reasonable request

["Jerry Cohen" <jjcohen@PRODIGY.NET>]

Jim,

    While I appreciate the extensive thought and effort that you gave

in response to my inquiry, I still cannot buy your arguments. I believe

that Singer has it right when he concludes that we have such poor

understanding of what effects climatology, that it is irresponsible and

foolhardy to implement economically disastrous policies that could

likely have little, if any, effect on what is perceived to be a problem.

    For example, you state-

>He went so far as to complain that the Swedish

> Academy had political motives for awarding the Nobel Prize for Chemistry

> to Rowland, Molina, and Crutzen for their work on ozone depletion.  He

> has apparently since been persuaded to abandon the more extreme aspects

> of that position, but still argues that non-ozone-hole ozone depletion

> has turned around at 4% depletion.  He does not credit the Montreal

> agreement for that turn around.<



    How can you be sure that the turn-around in ozone deletion would not

have

occurred even without changes in CFC policies? From what I have seen, the

"evidence"  on CFC's effects on atmospheric ozone levels is not convincing.

    One thing we can certainly agree upon is that the climate has a profound

effect on mankind. However, I doubt that the reverse is true. One thing that

we know about the climate is that it fluctuates. This will no doubt continue

to be the case with or without the intervention of man. In this regard,

consider

a blunder made by the USSR in the 60's. Perhaps you may recall the concern

about the receding levels in the Caspian Sea due to declining flows in

theVolga

River and other streams feeding the Sea. They determined that it would be a

good idea to divert water from their northward flowing rivers which feed the

Arctic Ocean where it does little good, into the southern flowing Volga

thereby

increasing flow into the Caspian. Significantly large amounts of time, money

and were expended toward this project. However, it was later determined that

the climate

in the area fluctuated on a ~50 year cycle and they were simply going

through a dry spell. The project was dropped and subsequently,

the climate did change of its own accord and the problem went away.

However, it is now believed that if they had gone  ahead with the diversion

project, and it had succeeded, the fertile areas of  the Ukraine (their

"breadbasket")    would have become a swamp.

My point is that it really pays to know what you are doing before embarking

into policies and programs with an uncertain outcome, especially when they

would have known adverse effects in other areas.

    While I have no problem with the climatological data gathered in recent

decades, that still seems to be such a small snipet of time that I am

unconvinced that, as was the case with the Caspian fiasco, we are not

seeing what could be a normal fluctuation in climatological cycles.

As I mentioned in a previous message, a few decades is but a fleeting moment

in the climatological history of the planet.

    Finally, I am bothered by the implication that climatological changes

are, or could be the result of human intervention. Please keep in mind that

the dire predictions of anthropogenic climate effects are only the result of

theoretical  modeling calculations. Depending on one's assumptions, almost

any result is possible (GIGO). I really don't believe that, on

a planetary scale, we are all that powerful. Compared, for example to

volcanic

eruptions, man's effects are rather puny. Blaming man for climatic change

seems like blaming the rooster for the sunrise.





-----------------------------------------------------------------

> I wasn't the one who raised the issue of 17,000+ scientists subscribing

> to the dissident position on global warming.  I merely pointed out that

> there is no way of telling which or how many of the non-fraudulent

> signatories of the petition are actually scientists.

>

> Singer has an impressive C.V.

>

> One of my problems with Singer is that he has been writing lawyer's

> briefs rather than objective reviews of the science.  Some of his

> positions seem to be ideologically rather than scientifically

> determined.  In the late 80s, Singer was one of the few scientists

> taking the position that CFCs were not causing depletion of

> stratospheric ozone.  He went so far as to complain that the Swedish

> Academy had political motives for awarding the Nobel Prize for Chemistry

> to Rowland, Molina, and Crutzen for their work on ozone depletion.  He

> has apparently since been persuaded to abandon the more extreme aspects

> of that position, but still argues that non-ozone-hole ozone depletion

> has turned around at 4% depletion.  He does not credit the Montreal

> agreement for that turn around.

>

> Somewhat more seriously, he misrepresents climate science, even some

> parts that are ridiculously easy to check.  Long after it ceased to be

> true, Singer has been writing that the satellite temperature record

> shows the atmosphere to be cooling.  He did that a few months ago in a

> letter to the editor of the WSJ (which is currently lost among my rather

> disorganized climate literature), but also in an interview appearing in

> the 31 January 2000 issue of the New American, available online at

> <www.thenewamerican.com/tna/01-31-2000/vol16no03_environment.htm>.

> Singer writes "Data from earth satellites in use since 1979 do not show

> any warming.  But eventually, they probably will because carbon dioxide

> and other greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere."

>

> The first sentence is both flat wrong and disingenuous on several

> levels.  First off, the statement was true until the end of 1997, but

> false since the end of 1998.  Second, there are four major temperature

> datasets.  Two of them, the Global Historical Climate Network (U.S.) and

> the Jones et al. (UK) datasets provide surface temperatures -- both land

> and marine.  The Angell radiosonde dataset provides results of

> radiosonde measures at five or six altitudes in the troposphere and

> stratosphere for 63 stations with measurements dating back to 1958

> (actually, I have had the Parker et al. radiosonde dataset recommended

> to me, but have not yet tried to chase it down).  The fourth dataset is

> comprised of MSU satellite measurements from all over the world for the

> period of 1979 to the present.  [MSU stands for microwave sounding units]

> The instruments on the MSU satellites basically listen to the

> temperature-dependent screams of oxygen atoms on several different

> radio band frequencies.  The two major datastreams that have be coming

from the

> scientists analysing these data (John Christy of U of Alabama -

> Huntsville and Roy Spencer of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center) are

> a weighted average (weighted over a range of altitudes) temperature for

> the lower stratosphere and a weighted average temperature for the lower

> troposphere.  These data are measuring something quite different from

> the other datasets, something to keep in mind when you see them compared

> with analyses of the other datasets.









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