Lots of new studies being published, and ignored by the MSM, that underline just how much we do not know about our environment and the weather, much to the chagrin of the global warming zealots. Nature writes about a new study that questions the holes in the ozone layer:
As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.
Long-lived chloride compounds from anthropogenic emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are the main cause of worrying seasonal ozone losses in both hemispheres. In 1985, researchers discovered a hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic, after atmospheric chloride levels built up. The Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1987 and ratified two years later, stopped the production and consumption of most ozone-destroying chemicals. But many will linger on in the atmosphere for decades to come. How and on what timescales they will break down depend on the molecules’ ultraviolet absorption spectrum (the wavelength of light a molecule can absorb), as the energy for the process comes from sunlight. Molecules break down and react at different speeds according to the wavelength available and the temperature, both of which are factored into the protocol.
So Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere – almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.
"This must have far-reaching consequences," Rex says. "If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being." What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.
~~~"Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart," says John Crowley, an ozone researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.
This one questions the studies done that reconstructs temperatures from the past:
In 2006, an article appeared in Science magazine reconstructing the temperature of the Northern Hemisphere back to 800 AD based on 14 smoothed and normalized temperature proxies (e.g., tree ring records). Osborn and Briffa proclaimed at the time that “the 20th century is the most anomalous interval in the entire analysis period, with highly significant occurrences of positive anomalies and positive extremes in the proxy records.” Obviously, concluding that the Northern Hemisphere has entered a period of unprecedented warmth is sure to make the news, and indeed, Osborn and Briffa’s work was carried in papers throughout the world and was loudly trumpeted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that publishes the journal Science.
A recent issue of Science contains an article not likely to receive any press coverage at all. Gerd Bürger of Berlin’s Institut für Meteorologie decided to revisit the work of Osborn and Briffa, and his results raise serious questions about the claim that the 20th century has been unusually warm. Bürger argues that Osborn and Briffa did not apply the appropriate statistical tests that link the proxy records to observational data, and as such, Osborn and Briffa did not properly quantify the statistical uncertainties in their analyses. Bürger repeated all analyses with the appropriate adjustments and concluded “As a result, the ‘highly significant’ occurrences of positive anomalies during the 20th century disappear.” Further, he reports that “The 95th percentile is exceeded mostly in the early 20th century, but also about the year 1000.” Needless to say, Gerd Bürger is not going to win any awards from the champions of global warming – nothing is more sacred than 20th century warming!
This one questions the constantly harped on mantra from the environazi’s that CO2 is the be all and end all of global warming:
Carbon dioxide did not cause the end of the last ice age, a new study in Science suggests, contrary to past inferences from ice core records.
"There has been this continual reference to the correspondence between CO2 and climate change as reflected in ice core records as justification for the role of CO2 in climate change," said USC geologist Lowell Stott, lead author of the study, slated for advance online publication Sept. 27 in Science Express.
"You can no longer argue that CO2 alone caused the end of the ice ages."
Deep-sea temperatures warmed about 1,300 years before the tropical surface ocean and well before the rise in atmospheric CO2, the study found. The finding suggests the rise in greenhouse gas was likely a result of warming and may have accelerated the meltdown — but was not its main cause.
The study does not question the fact that CO2 plays a key role in climate.
"I don’t want anyone to leave thinking that this is evidence that CO2 doesn’t affect climate," Stott cautioned. "It does, but the important point is that CO2 is not the beginning and end of climate change."
And Joel Schwartz refutes a recent study that alleges smog levels will continue to rise in the future:
A couple of weeks ago I showed how the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) worked with a group of university and government scientists to mislead Americans into thinking that ozone smog levels will rise in the future. The report, Heat Advisory: How Global Warming Causes More Bad Air Days, is an update of a report NRDC first released in 2004. Dan Lashof, the Science Director of NRDC’s Climate Center, responded to my critique last Friday. Here are my comments on Lashof’s response. You can scroll to the bottom to see Lashof’s response in its entirety.
The central point of my original critique is that NRDC and its team of outside climate and health scientists misled reporters and the public by claiming that ozone levels will be higher in the 2050s than they are today and that climate change will be the cause of this increase in ozone. I showed that in reality NRDC generated an appearance of increasing ozone by assuming higher emissions of ozone-forming pollutants in the future. Climate change is a minor factor compared to assumptions about ozone-forming emissions, but NRDC and its scientists obscured this fact. Dan Lashof doesn’t dispute this central conclusion, but he does continue NRDC’s history of evasive and misleading claims about Heat Advisory’s assumptions and about future ozone-forming emissions.
Rather than acknowledge that NRDC vastly exaggerated future ozone-forming emissions, Lashof equivocates: “While we would expect significant reductions in precursor emissions over the next decade there are no reliable estimates of precursor emissions extending to the mid 21st century. Thus different research projects use different sets of assumptions to project future precursor emissions. The project on which Heat Advisory is based kept anthropogenic ozone precursor emission levels constant as a way of evaluating the effect that climate change alone could have on ozone concentrations.”
~~~In reality, ozone-forming emissions will continue to drop and most will be eliminated long before 2050. A couple of EPA news items provide additional evidence on how much emissions have dropped and will continue to drop due to existing regulations. First, the NOx Budget Trading Program has eliminated most NOx emissions from industry and power plants during the last few years.
~~~EPA has for years been issuing and implementing a steady stream of regulations like these—regulations that cover everything from power plants, to motor vehicles, industrials facilities, consumer products, and just about everything else you can imagine. These regulations will eliminate the vast majority of remaining air pollution emissions during the next two decades or so.
Environmental groups closely follow, comment on, and lobby over the development, adoption, and implementation of these regulations, and know that they have been eliminating large amounts of air pollution emissions and will continue to do so. Nevertheless, these same environmental groups routinely tell Americans that air pollution is worsening, that the Clean Air Act has been "gutted" and "rolled back", and that emissions are rising.
~~~Despite the large declines in air pollutant emissions during the last few decades and the large declines coming over the next couple of decades, NRDC assumed that ozone-forming emissions in the 2050s will be the same as they were back in 1996 (more than 30% greater than current emissions). When challenged on this, NRDC’s Dan Lashof lamely asserted "While we would expect significant reductions in precursor emissions over the next decade there are no reliable estimates of precursor emissions extending to the mid 21st century."
What does all this mean? It means that no matter what the environazi’s try to tell us, the debate is NOT OVER. 30 years ago it was global cooling, now its global warming. I question the motives of people who try to get people hysterical over a science that is not complete. What is the purpose of this whole cottage industry of global warming zealots trying to sell a incomplete science to the average joe and call it proven fact. Is it to enrich companies that come up with "new and improved" energy sources? Is it to get more grants to specific schools and think tanks?
The debate is not over yet these people try to tell us it is.
Somehow I don’t believe they have the planets well being at heart here.
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