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		Cool Thinking on Climate Change ...and some comments on Al Gore's disaster movie! Wednesday, 9th May 2007 1. Which came first, the CO2 or the temperature? Al Gore's film shows dramatic graphs of temperature and CO2 levels over very long periods, and the match is undeniable. What he fails to mention is that the CO2 graph lags the temperature by about 800 years. The conclusion is inescapable: the temperature drives the CO2, not vice versa. And we have a plausible mechanism to explain the effect. At higher temperatures, the oceans give up dissolved CO2 to the atmosphere. At lower temperatures, they tend to re-absorb it. Current CO2 levels are by no means unprecedented, and may be partly the result of the Mediaeval Warm Period around 1200 AD. 2. Global Warming? Or Local Warming? Predictive climate models can be made to produce almost any result you want, by changing initial conditions and assumptions. But they all agree on one thing: CO2-driven warming should have its maximum effect in the high atmosphere. The problem is, we have data from both satellites and weather balloons showing that there is less warming at 10km than at the surface. A key prediction of the CO2 hypothesis fails. In fact the warming we observe is primarily in the Northern Hemisphere (though not everywhere), and is primarily a surface effect. Local warming, not global warming. 3. Increasing CO2, diminishing effect Al Gore, and the media, seem to assume that doubling CO2 levels means doubling the greenhouse effect. Not so. In fact CO2 only blocks out-going radiation in a narrow wave-band, and when we've blocked 100% of it, extra CO2 makes no difference. We're being asked to accept huge and increasing economic damage, to achieve progressively smaller and smaller climate effects. It's a law of diminishing returns. 4. In the seventies, it was global COOLING! The world has warmed slightly in the last 30 years, but it cooled steadily in the previous forty. In the seventies, scientists and alarmist media were warning of the imminent on-set of the next Ice-Age, with a mile of ice over Chicago. If you project short-term trends indefinitely, you get a silly answer. Look for more global cooling scare stories around 2040 -- or perhaps earlier. 5. It was the Sun what done it! Cyclical changes in solar radiation have a dramatic and consistent effect on terrestrial climate. The solar wind affects the earth's magnetic field, the extent of cosmic radiation reaching the earth, and hence cloud formation and temperature. Through the 20th century, temperatures correlate well with solar activity, very poorly with CO2 levels. NASA reports that Mars is also suffering from "global warming", although it has no 4x4s, again suggesting that the sun, not human activity, may be the cause. 6. The glaciers are melting. Or not. Glaciers are always advancing and retreating. Every year they calve ice-bergs. If you just film the retreats, it makes a scary movie, but it's not evidence. In fact the great bulk of the world's ice is in Antarctica, and recent research shows that the ice mass in Antarctica is in fact growing, not melting. 7. Polar bears are doing just fine Despite Al Gore's claims, polar bear ("ursa maritimus") populations in the Arctic have grown substantially in the last twenty years, and guess what, they seem to be doing best in the areas where the cold has eased a little, worse in colder areas. And by the way, polar bears are amongst the best mammalian swimmers. Al Gore may not know this, but no healthy bear would drown for lack of an ice floe. 8. Sea levels are rising -- send for the life jackets! Sea levels have been rising a few inches a century as long as records have been kept, and apparently since the end of the last Ice Age. The rate of rise has been steady, although it seems to have slowed slightly during the 20th century. Talk of sudden or catastrophic rises in sea level are alarmist nonsense. Long-term changes in sea level result mainly from thermal expansion of the oceans, which occurs very slowly over many centuries. 9. Don't fret about Kilimanjaro Al Gore makes great play of the reducing ice-cap on Kilimanjaro. What he doesn't mention is that local weather stations report static or even slightly declining temperatures in recent decades. The shrinking ice-cap results from reduced precipitation, probably caused by deforestation undertaken by local farmers. It's not a global warming effect. 10. Why did average global temperatures rise in the 90s? It just may have had something to do with the dozens of Siberian weather stations that went out of business in the chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Take out a large number of cold-weather stations, and the average goes up.