Blithe Spirit, the Blog

“It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong,” he said. “But they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out. I don’t care about grants.”

This is world-class meteorologist Dr. Wm. Gray in a speech at U. of N. Carolina.  Global warming, he said, is not man-made.  Grants are the thing for too many, he is saying.

Dennis Byrne caught Sen. Durbin (D.-IL) in a politically correct but factually incorrect statement the other day.  He wrote an EPA official suggesting BP would break U.S. law if it discharged further into Lake Michigan, as Indiana has said it may.

Byrne cited the Clean Water Act allowing exception to the no-more-discharging part, “to accommodate important economic or social development,” which is a key argument.  How important is oil anyway?

Durbin also got carried away in saying Greenland will melt 2 to 5 degrees by 2100 and raise sea level 6.5 to 13 feet, citing a UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projection.  However, says warming skeptic (I should say debunker) Patrick J. Michaels,

The IPCC makes no such forecast . . .  [I]t projects that the melting of Greenland will cause a rise in sea levels of between half an inch and 4.5 inches by 2100.

Even in an Al Gore scenario, sea level would rise 8 inches.

Maybe Durbin has always had trouble with that inch-foot difference, from back in grade school.  In that case, should he be allowed to drive?

Organic food requires more land and more manure.  More cultivated land means more Co2, and so does more manure — it’s the cow-fart effect, you know.  Thus Robert Wager, a technician at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo BC Canada, on TCS Daily.  He concludes:

The public is calling for “greener” options in every industry. But when it comes to agricultural CO2 emissions, the “greener” option may not be what people think.

What if carbon dioxide didn’t cause global warming but it was the other way around?  What a fine kettle of carp that would be.  But that’s how the world has worked, to judge by one of the trusted recorders that led to our present panic-stricken state.

The temporal resolution of the ice core data improved [since the late 90s]. By 2004 we knew that in past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about 800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon. Causality does not run in the direction I had assumed in 1999 — it runs the opposite way!

Oops.  This is part of a most interesting, concise debunking by mathematician David Evans, a computer and electrical engineer, in his “I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train.”

This [late 90s] evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon emissions.

“Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit.”

The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too.

And thereby hangs a tale.  Follow the politics, follow the money.