Re: Greenland Ice Sheet Growing:What Makes an Ice Age?
- From: "Planetoid" <pro_american@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 17 Jun 2006 04:48:23 -0700
What's Worse? Global Warming or Global Cooling?
By Michael Betsch
CNSNews.com Editorial Assistant
August 08, 2001
(CNSNews.com) - Many scientists and politicians continue to blame
modern-day industrial emissions as the leading cause of a problem known
as global warming, but a spokesman for the conservative environmental
group Greening Earth Society warns that volcanoes pose another
environmental threat -- global cooling -- a problem that is often
ignored.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS), in a study commissioned by the
Bush administration, labeled the fossil fuel emissions produced by
factories and automobiles the leading cause of global warming. Senators
Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) also teamed up
recently to call for a comprehensive cap on America's production of the
gases that are believed by many to cause a greenhouse effect on the
earth.
However, a volcano, according to Ned Leonard of the Greening Earth
Society, "is an example of one of those huge natural sources of the
greenhouse gases that get overlooked. They put a lot of ash in the air,
but that falls out pretty quickly. But the sulfates, you know, they get
injected pretty high up, so they're going to be affecting [the] climate
for a while."
In recent comments, McCain blamed U.S. industries for producing
"approximately 25 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions," and
stated that the U.S. "has a responsibility to cut its emissions ..."
"I don't think there's any doubt that if you continue to build up
greenhouse gases, the earth will warm," said Dr. Robert C. Balling,
Director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University. "The
big question there is, by how much?"
However, Balling does not share Lieberman's and McCain's views on
global warming.
"The dinosaurs walked the earth and it was much warmer than it is today
and there were no humans back then driving around in SUVs," Balling
said.
"Historically, it's been shown that major volcanic eruptions have a
cooling effect on the planet for a year or two. If you go back and look
at Krakatoa for example back in 1808, I mean these [eruptions] had a
tremendous cooling effect on the planet."
Regarding the current eruption of Italy's Mt. Etna, Balling said, "It
is not up to that level yet (Krakatoa), but even in the last 10 years,
we've seen some volcanic eruptions come along and cool down the earth."
A volcanic eruption can "dirty up the stratosphere -- that blocks
incoming radiation ands cools the earth," he added.
Chip Knappenberger, a senior researcher with New Hope Environmental
Services at the University of Virginia, also studies how volcanoes
affect the global climate. "The largest climate effect that volcanoes
have today is by explosive eruptions that blast a lot of material high
into the stratosphere, say five to eight miles up," said the senior
researcher.
"And when you get materials up there like dust, it stays up there for a
long time because it's out of the active weather zone. So, you have
material that doesn't get rained out or scrubbed out of the atmosphere
very easily, so it stays up there for a year or two or three or four."
Knappenberger summarized that "those dust particles act to reflect back
incoming solar radiation. So basically, you put a reflective layer
around the earth and it reflects incoming sunlight and what happens is
it leads to a cooling of the surface."
"So [with] major eruptions like Mt. Pinatubo [in the Philippines] back
in May of 1991 -- you can see a cooling signal if you look at global
temperatures for a year or two or three after that explosive eruption,"
Knappenberger explained. "You need something that has enough force to
actually eject material that high. You need to get it up there many
thousands of feet -- many thousands of feet to have any sort of climate
effect that's not just local."
Leonard added that major volcanoes such as Pinatubo and Krakatoa are
"obviously belching more CO2 into the air than the industrialized
nations would, over some period of time, certainly over the course of
years."
Balling supports President Bush's refusal to sign the Kyoto
international global warming treaty, a decision that triggered a lot of
criticism of the president from Democrats and environmentalists here in
the U.S. and from the leaders of other nations who signed off on the
Kyoto Protocol.
"I think everyone recognizes that even if the United States had been on
board and even if everyone participated fully, you still don't have
much of a climate impact by the middle of the next century. The impact
of adhering to the Kyoto protocol is on the order of .03 degrees that
we save the earth," Balling said.
"The idea that they're somehow going to spare the earth of global
warming because of Kyoto is crazy," said Balling. "And everyone knows
that. It's not a secret."
Critics of the Kyoto global warming treaty argue that the deal has a
misnomer, that it isn't global since some of the world's leading
polluters like China, India and Mexico are exempt from having to reduce
their industrial emissions.
Balling also believes environmentalists exaggerate the problem of
global warming.
"If they haven't noticed, there were ice ages long before humans got
here. And the ice ages somehow came and went and came and went,"
Balling said. "The earth would warm up and we even had a climate
optimum a thousand years ago where the temperature of the earth would
have been two degrees warmer than today and I don't think anyone
believes the humans did it."
Knappenberger believes global cooling is as much a reality as global
warming.
"If you look at these paleo-climate records, where they push back
temperatures maybe 1,000 years on annual resolution ... now they're not
from thermometers, they're from tree rings and coral rings and glaciers
.... you see that temperatures from about 1,000 years ago up to about
1900 declined. So there was a 900-year decline in temperatures and then
there was a rise in the last 100 years," he said.
"So if you were going to make some sort of prognostication of what the
next 100 years might be, well nine out of the last 10 hundred years,
there's been a temperature decline. So at least you would think you
might entertain some notion that there's a possibility that the
temperature might decline."
The studies that McCain and Lieberman base their conclusions on do not
factor in volcanic eruptions. "One of the problems that I have with
something like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and
looking at these scenarios of what the future climate of the earth's
going to be like in a hundred years," Knappenberger explained, "is that
none of these scenarios ever show you what might happen if the earth is
cooler in a hundred years."
"And you might [ask], how could the earth be cooler in a hundred years?
Well, all sorts of natural things might conspire to make [it] cooler in
a hundred years," Knappenberger said. "Maybe we have a couple of
volcanoes go off, the sun goes through various cycles and all sorts of
various things that can happen."
Knappenberger noted that, "All the projections in climate are coming
from computer generated models." He added, "The only thing that
computers are interested in is that they change the CO2 concentration.
But, they don't fire off volcanoes every once and a while in the
model."
Balling explained that in reality, "volcanic eruptions are going to
come and go forever and they'll perturb the pattern and make it
difficult to identify the warming signal." Further, he noted that "the
sun is not perfect. It varies its output. That's a complication we have
to look for."
Numerous attempts were made to discuss 'global cooling' with
environmental organizations such as the Union of Concerned Scientists,
Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental
Defense Fund and the Global Climate Coalition. The groups either did
not return telephone calls or refused comment when contacted.
Former Vice President Al Gore's book, Earth in the Balance,
acknowledges the influence volcanoes have had on planetary climate and
weather, specifically the 1815 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia. Gore
describes the worldwide cooling effect that Tambora had, noting, "The
Great Subsistence Crisis caused by the cold spring in 1815 and
throughout the next 18 months led to a flood of immigrants from Maine,
New Hampshire and Vermont flowing into the western frontier and the
south states."
Gore, however, warns his readers, "In the course of a single generation
we are in danger of changing the makeup of the global atmosphere far
more dramatically than did any volcano in history, and the effects may
persist for centuries to come."
In defiance of those already onboard the global warming bandwagon,
Balling laughed. "You can pass all the Kyotos you want and volcanoes
don't care."
Shawn wrote:
Planetoid wrote:
Have you been duped by a mass of propaganda about global warming? 21st
Century Science & Technology Editor Laurence Hecht explains why the
Earth is poised to enter a new glaciation.
Except for all the data showing that the Earth is warming.
Ice accumulation near the poles? Sure, could result from increased
precipitation in those areas due to climate changes. Not shocking.
Greenhouse effects are also a part of the climate, along with orbital
changes. Only crackpots argue that atmospheric CO2 hasn't been rising
due to human sources, or that this gas is *not* a significant greenhouse
contributor. The amount of induced change is still arguable.
Currently, ocean rise I've read about is due to thermal expansion of the
warming ocean waters, rather than ice cap melting.
Shawn
.
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