Al’s latest global warming whopper

Al Gore's defense of global-warming hysteria in Sunday's New York Times has many flaws, but I'll focus on just one whopper — where the "Inconvenient Truth" man states the opposite of scientific fact.

Gore says, "The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States."

It's an interesting theory, but where are the facts? According to "State of the Climate" from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "Global precipitation in 2009 was near the 1961-1990 average." And there was certainly no pattern of increasing rain and snow on America's East Coast during the post-1976 years, when NOAA says the globe began to heat up.

So what was it, exactly, that Gore's nameless scientists "have long pointed out"? A 2008 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Climate Change and Water," says climate models "project precipitation increases in high latitudes and part of the tropics." In other areas, the IPCC reports only "substantial uncertainty in precipitation forecasts."

In other words, the IPCC said that its models predicted some increases in rain or snow — not observed them. And only in high latitudes or the tropics, which hardly describes New York or Washington, DC.

In fact, recent research actually contradicts Gore's claims about "significantly more water moisture in the atmosphere." In late January, Scientific American reported: "A mysterious drop in water vapor in the lower stratosphere might be slowing climate change," and noted that "an apparent increase in water vapor in this region in the 1980s and 1990s exacerbated global warming."

The new study came from a group of scientists, mainly from the NOAA lab in Boulder. The scientists found: "Stratospheric water-vapor concentrations decreased by about 10 percent after the year 2000 . . . This acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000 to 2009 by about 25 percent." Specifically, the study found that water vapor rising from the tropics has been reduced, because it has gotten cooler there (another inconvenient truth). A Wall Street Journal headline summed it up: "Slowdown in Warming Linked to Water Vapor."

Moisture in the lower stratosphere (about 8 miles above the earth's surface) has been going down, not up.

Aside from clouds, water vapor accounts for as much as two-thirds of the earth's greenhouse-gas effect. Water vapor traps heat from escaping the atmosphere — but clouds have the opposite effect (called "albedo") by reflecting the sun's energy back into space. And snow on the ground from the IPCC's predicted precipitation in high latitudes would have the same cooling effect as clouds.

What the new research suggests is that changes in water vapor may well trump the effect of carbon dioxide (only a fraction of which is man-made) and methane (which has mysteriously slowed since about 1990). This raises an intriguing question: Since the Environmental Protection Agency declared that it has the authority to regulation carbon emissions because of their presumed effect on the global climate, why hasn't the EPA also attempted to regulate mist and fog?

SOURCE

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don't forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

2 comments:

  1. It's all about control. For all their talk about "Global Warming" and "carbon taxing," you'll notice something funny from the liberals. They've stopped talking about solar power! It's not for shortcomings of the technology. Thanks to the brilliant work of Israeli researchers, that is getting closer than ever to the productivity of other fuel sources. It's about control.

    Think about this: The government controls almost every single source of the power we rely on.

    Almost every drop of oil, coal, natural gas, and similar commodities that are used to generate power on a large scale, is under the constant authority and monitoring of the government. Nuclear power, now embraced by Obama, is even more tightly government-controlled. The government can (and does) at any moment cut off power to any household, neighborhood, or whole city or region, that it wants to. Whether it is over a payment dispute or for "roadwork."

    A hundred years ago the government had no such power. But then, in the 1930's, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats directed the centralized, government controlled, electrification of most of the USA.

    And there's more! The government can actually track you and monitor your activities through your energy use! Over a decade ago, people growing marijuana in their own home could be tracked and arrested by the amount of electricity they used, and their patterns of use. This ability has only grown over time. With current power usage tracking technology, the government knows when you run your dishwasher, when you microwave some popcorn, and when you turn on a television or a computer.

    It doesn't stop when you leave your house. Drive a car? The government knows when you gas up, and how much. And since the government knows what kind of car you drive, they know how far you're driving it. Pay by cash? Gas stations have cameras, and they catch your license plate too. Why do you think it's illegal to obscure your license plate, and many states now make you have them on both front and back?

    But there's just one kind of power that the government can't track, and that is because it's everywhere. That's solar. The left has shut up about solar power because it's something they can't tax, can't monitor, can't cut off. A populace dependent on a government for the electric power it requires is under the control of the government.

    And here's another thing that the government, nor any government-controlled energy business, is not going to tell you. You can make your own solar panels, or your own solar array from off the shelf cells and panels. You can take yourself entirely out of the eye and out from under the heel of government-controlled power sources, without putting a penny in the pocket of the government.

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  2. "The left has shut up about solar power because it's something they can't tax, can't monitor, can't cut off."

    Valid point anon and as you point out, once something turns out to actually work, the left suddenly go really cold on it.

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