This “news” is 30 years old.
Fossil Fuel Curbs May Speed Global Warming: Scientists
LONDON (Reuters) – Cutting down on fossil fuel pollution could accelerate global warming and help turn parts of Europe into desert by 2100, according to research to be aired on British television on Thursday.
“Global Dimming,” a BBC Horizon documentary, will describe research suggesting fossil fuel by-products like sulfur dioxide particles reflect the sun’s rays, “dimming” temperatures and almost canceling out the greenhouse effect.
The researchers say cutting down on the burning of coal and oil, one of the main goals of international environmental agreements, will drastically heat rather than cool climate.
“When the cooling affect goes away — and it must do because particles like sulfur dioxide are damaging to humans — global warming will be much stronger,” climate change scientist Dr Peter Cox told Reuters on Wednesday.
This really is nothing new. In the 1970’s the environmentalists were peddling the theory that all the pollution would go up into the air and stop the sun light from hitting earth. That wold reduce the light needed to grow crops and we were all going to die. (Have you ever noticed every time an environmentalists says anything, it ends with ‘and we’re all going to die’?)
I’ll never forget it, it scared the hell out of me in the third grade.
Then those same “scientists” (term used very loosely) said just a few years later that the earth would warm because of the same pollution. Then after Gulf War I they said the pollution would make us cold again.
(some of my regular readers may want to sit down for this part)
This is why I, a Green Peace member who married a PETA member, left the environmental movement. They have no clue what the earth will do, if anything, but they do know the solution, halt capitalism.
If they can’t tell me the temperature next Tuesday, how can they tell me what it will be 100 years from now?
OOPS: In my rushing around tonight, I forgot my manners. I got this from Mark Jaquith
Saw this one on Yahoo Science newsfeed last week. The comments were HILARIOUS!! Every lefty was sure this was a Halliburton-funded study.
Actually, their conclusion was we should use even less energy than earlier proposed by cutting all CO2 emissions as well. I’m beginning to notice a distinct Luddite quality to enviro crowd.
Anyway, did anyone see the scientist on Fox News about this? I think it was on Brit Hume’s show. Guy came off very reasonable, very knowledgable. He had 3 basic assertions:
1) Climatology studies show temperature change is very even. Gobal temperatures have increased by 3/4 of 1 degree over the last 70 years, and that rate should stay the same for the next 70 years, based on the central tendencies of computer modeling.
2) The effect of such a temperature change on sea level is to raise them 4-5 inches. That’s what it was the last 70 years, that’s what it should be for the next 70.
3) The impact of this is negligible.
nonsense the ocean at best has risen 1/2 inch in the last 60 years and that is from personal observation at the Jersey shore…
Just finished Michael Crichcon’s “State of Fear”. He petty much takes the whole envronmental movement apart. Most interesting is an extensive bibliography of books he used to research the novel.
Informative & good read.
Just want to challenge an assumption the mass media seems to constantly put forward: Global Warming will lead to more deserts. First, deserts are created not by the average temperature of a region, but rather by their average rainfall. Second, a higher global temperature means more evaporation. More evaporation means more clouds. More clouds means more rainfall. The converse of this is true in regards to Global Cooling. Do you think it’s just coincidence that deserts exploded at the same time as the ice age?
Actually, I was quite thrilled when they were pushing “we’re all heading for another ice age and going to die!” I always wanted to ride a wooly mammoth.
And I just bought my first SUV (a sweet Blazer). Cool!
SCREW “riding” them, julie. I want a rack of ribs like Fred Flintstone used to get at the drive-through.
J.
Damn….and here I was hoping it would get all tropical here in Ak. I miss a real beach. Oh well…Hawaii is just a five hour flight away. BTW…I drive a Blazer and I wish I could get rid of it. I owe about two thousand more than it is worth and I keep having to put money into it to keep it running. Thousand bucks right before Christmas for new ball joints,rocker arm,and brakes.
I talked to a patient of mine the other day about his job of measuring pollution in the atmosphere around the state. He said one of the biggest amounts of stuff floating down to us up here is from Polands Industry.
Rich, something I noticed in my five years in Fairbanks was that the overwhelming majority of vehicles left abandoned in the ditch immediately after a heavy snowfall, were SUVs and other 4WD vehicles. My wife and I put studded tires on our front-wheel-drive cars every winter, and drove very carefully. The only time either one of us ever got seriously stuck was in our own driveway, which is probably what kept us out of any ditches.
says anything, it ends with ‘and we’re all going to die’?)
Actually, isn’t is more like “AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!”
The issue with SUV’s being abandoned in the snow has nothing to do with SUV’s being any worse in the snow, it’s just that idiots think that having an SUV automatically means they can do things they normally cannot. Kind of the way that there’s always some asshat camped in the left lane on a highway under the mistaken impression that going 40 in the left lane is somehow faster than 40 in the right one. A person who knows how to drive in the snow can get a Pinto through a blizzard. Someone who doesn’t have a clue ain’t getting a Hummer through a light dusting. To put it another way, it’s just another aspect of the size versus skill debate.
Well, I can tell you what the temperature will be 100 years from now. It will be hotter, or colder, or the same. See, I’m a bloody genius!
Jay: Didn’t that cause his car to tip over? If so, you will definitely need a SUV and Michael Moore riding shotgun.
This is the sort of thing which may be funny now and not later. It would actually be better if we had any say about whether the Earth was going to continue to get warmer over time, especially if we knew the right thing to do to moderate the warming trend.
Meteorology/climatology is pretty bad about predicting the future, but it is pretty good about telling us about current and past trends. There is absolutely no doubt that a global warming trend has been going on for at least 8000 years. We are now reaching the point where the Northern ice cap is expected to melt during the summer.
The other reality is that the Earth’s climate is prone to rapid shifts after long periods of relative stability. Just because we can’t predict which outcome is more probably, doesn’t mean that our wholesale inadvertent tampering with the balance of natural systems isn’t having an effect. Logic suggests that we are accelerating the Earth towards an instability point, and not away from it.
Overall there is plenty of hard evidence that we are on the verge of a major climatic shift. Unfortunately, the climatologists can’t really predict which way it will swing. In one scenario, in the lifetimes of our children or at worst grand children, the Earth will undergo an explosive warming trend which will lead to near melting of the glacial ice sheets. The Sahara and the south western desert will turn green again, and Europe and the Northern US will become semi-arid. In another, the North Atlantic Ocean current will shut down due to the reduced salinity of the oceans resulting from all of the melt water, leading rapidly to the start of a new ice age.
I don’t find it all that humorous that the climatologists can’t get their predictions to agree. This is in reality more evidence that the system is unstable, so that small changes can have relatively large effects, making the final outcome difficult to predict. But to emphasize my other point, the Earth’s climate changes over time, sometimes very rapidly in a short period of time, and there may be litttle we can do about it.
Julie, no SUV. Too high a center of gravity. Gimme a regular car. And as for ballast… not Moore. Gimme John Rhys-Davies or, if he’s busy, Kevin Smith.
Or if it tips anyway, it’ll be worth it.
J.
Crowscape speaketh: Just want to challenge an assumption the mass media seems to constantly put forward: Global Warming will lead to more deserts.
I hate to be in the position of defending climatology here (especially here), but climatology doesn’t say we will have more deserts, just that the deserts will shift farther north. Also, their models do account for the increased evaporation rates resulting from warmer ocean temperatures…. I think this is partly responsible for shifting the dry belts north.
THere is nothing wrong with the science of climatology, in terms of its underlying physical principles. It is built on well-understood physics. The problem is that it is trying to predict a marginally stable system, as I mentioned in my previous post.
Carrick: Are you telling me there is nothing scientific about the groundhog seeing it’s shadow means 6 more weeks of winter?
I hate to be in the position of defending climatology here (especially here), but climatology doesn’t say we will have more deserts
Perhaps not, but the media says it all the time, which is why I adressed them, and not climatologists.
Well, I can tell you what the temperature will be 100 years from now. It will be hotter, or colder, or the same. See, I’m a bloody genius!
You could even drop the “the same” part and still be safe. If the temperature goes up .0000543 degrees, you can still call that an increase. If you really want to wow them… give numbers.
“I assert that the temperature of the globe will change between 0.001 and 34 degrees PER YEAR until we ban SUVs! …and we’re all gonna die.”
apologies to Robert Frost:
Some say the world will end in fire
Others say in ice
All I want to know is this
Darwinian or ID vice?
In other words, is this our own [lack of] intelligent design cum Dr. Kevorkian, or Judgement Day?
Greenpeace? PETA!?
Crap, my brain just jumped out of my ear.
The issue with SUV’s being abandoned in the snow has nothing to do with SUV’s being any worse in the snow, it’s just that idiots think that having an SUV automatically means they can do things they normally cannot.
That’s reasonable, especially since the annual population turnover in the Fairbanks area is one in seven. A friend of mine always put it this way: “One out of every seven drivers you’re sharing the road with, has never driven in a Fairbanks winter before.”
It stands to reason a lot of them are driving SUVs.
The thing that makes me mad about the enviro-nut stuff is that it is pawned off on trusting children as gospel truth. The combination of abuse of trust, fear-mongering and guilt is powerful for a first-grader faced with an “expert” preaching that we shouldn’t cut down trees, need to use less water, and that the earth is getting warmer and warmer.
Of course they believe it! It’s a zoo keeper telling them about fish. And then they own it – this huge weight that if they don’t do all these things (and get the rest of their family to do it too) that the world will be ruined and it’s all their fault.
I’ve spent about 2 hours (so far) trying to undo the damage that one visiting “expert” did. Poor kid is at a crisis of belief point – who does she believe? Me or the “expert”?
Well guess I am doing my part with my big tank of an SUV.
As for SUV’s on the side of the road-when we drove South from NH to KY through OH at Christmas, I don’t remember seeing a single SUV on the side of the road. Lots of abandoned cars though-everywhere. Although, I agree that SUV’s do not mean you can drive in any and all weather conditions.
As for the global warming thing-I remember watching some movie in middle school about how horrible our future was going to be. If I remember right, the land should all be dried up, and there should be a massive food shortage and water shortage blah blah blah. It was kind of a scary movie, but almost everything they predicted hasn’t played out.
I am also someone who at one point considered myself “an environmentalist.” You can’t study biology or even regard fresh air and clean waters/beaches, etc. (compared to the opposites) and not sympathize, empathize with groups or others who present these simple arguments: “we want a clean environment,” and such (among many others, trees, open space, wilderness…etc.).
BUT, after finding out that many of the larger “environmental” activist groups are fronts for investors among Democrats and who use the varioius ploys to gain sympathy for other causes (and often covertly), much less the violent groups and behaviors by some, I now find their plethora of mail and various ongoing pleas for funding to be completely offensive.
Yes, a warming environment can and will, if taken to a certain point, usher in another ice age. It’s a process but mostly you have to understand certain complex functions, particularly the carbon cycle, to get that and most in the environmental groups don’t. They just want this, don’t want that and mostly many of them really truly hate human beings and the needs by humans.
I just hate pollution of ground water, air, our oceans and abuses of other living species, but as to the “environmental” politics, they seem to have a lot of money for big buildings and a lot of mail and postage and websites and such, but they always really, really need a lot more. I don’t see the results, often and that’s a problem for me as a consumer.
It’s just a case of accontability. Someone’s spew into shared resources affects others and that’s the problem for many of the rest of us…cigarettes and trash all over the beach, sewage in the oceans, ocean floor trawling, crud in the air we breathe, deforestation without land management…the list goes on BUT many of the environmental groups and yes, people like that, well, I agree with you, Paul.
Maybe the reason that the coming next ice age isn’t being recognized by some is because that means they’ll have to accept total world domination by the white man again.
O.K., that was a bad joke.
I agree as to Michael Crichton’s book, “A State of Fear.” Excellent read.
ANOTHER thing — it’s important to this issue — that these so-called environmental ploys miss, and entirely, is that we as a species could reduce ourselves to modest numbers, abandon all use of petroleum and never, ever eat flesh again or chop down a tree, any tree, for anything, and the Earth’s orbit around the sun could wobble a tiny, tiny bit and presto, Ice Age, or Sudden Overheat.
There are many things that have potential to negatively affect our environment, the whole planet even, but the enviromental movement focuses on politics, mostly, based on scaring kids and new home owners and car buyers.
The thing about SUVs is that they consume far more in resources to operate in normal highway/around town use than passenger vehicles. They’re trucks in frame and engine with a modified chassis but still trucks. Such that, the average driver doesn’t need a truck to haul soccer balls and bags o’ groceries and get to Acme Manufacturing and then back home five days a week.
So, an SUV isn’t a realistic vehicle to operate, and it does pollute by several means (as do other trucks, ahem) when compared with a passenger vehicle. SUVs also bypass the restrictions of use and taxation when used as passenger vehicles, which they aren’t, but still get a pass and cause greater highway maintenance costs, among other things, than do passenger vehicles.
So, if everyone who actually NEEDED to drive an SUV/truck onditions did, and everyone else who didn’t NEED to drive an SUV/truck did not, it’d be a more efficient world. It’s just that trucks are often more fun to drive, so there.
Once most people have to contend with the operational costs of an SUV/truck when used for general transportation, though, they then reduce their consumption to a passenger vehicle, being the smart furry large mammals that we are.
-S- brings up a good point. When it comes to global warming and ice ages, how do we know just how much is really due to humans behavior? What were humans doing back in the 13th (or was it 14th) century that caused the mini ice age? They sure enough weren’t driving SUV’s.
Humans certainly contribute to pollution-and we should strive to be as clean as possible, but a volcano erruption can cause atmoshpheric problems as easily as an SUV.
Also, as a driver of an SUV (large family, two dogs, and a great big hill to drive up in NH led us to the decision to purchase one), I admit that I probably drive less now than I used to, when I drove a mini van (like I said large family, our options are limited to anything that carries 6 or more passengers).