Setting the record straight on global warming

Oregon physicist says he reviewed Rep. Matt Wingard's speech for accuracy

  • Published: 3/12/2010 4:37:52 PM
Gordon Fulks
Editor’s note: Rep. Matt Wingard delivered a speech on the floor of the Oregon Legislature last month on the topic of global warming. Later, he was accused of plagiarizing the speech from the Washington Times by BlueOregon.com. Wingard responded by saying that he had the speech reviewed by several scientists before delivering it to his fellow legislators. Gordon Fulks contacted the Spokesman last week. He is one of the scientists who reviewed the speech for scientific accuracy before it was presented.
Fulks stated, “Although the basic speech was derived from a Washington Times editorial, we made several suggestions to improve the science and tone down the rhetoric. To his credit, Rep. Wingard incorporated all of our improvements. I was impressed that Matt, who is not a scientist, sought comments from those of us who are to make sure that he presented only the most scientifically accurate material.”
Fulks is a physicist known most recently for his opinion pieces on global warming published in The Oregonian. One of them, titled “Global warming: Climate orthodoxy perpetuates a hoax,” criticized Gov. Kulongoski for forcing state climatologist George Taylor out of his position at Oregon State University for expressing doubts about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

Before state Rep.Matt Wingard gave his recent speech on global warming to the Oregon House, he knew that he would come under strident political attack for speaking out. That is why he asked several PhDs to double check his speech for scientific accuracy. I’m the physicist who did the fine tuning and am happy to explain some of the real science that Simon Springall attacks as “factually wrong in every respect”(March 3, Wilsonville Spokesman).

Non-scientists sometimes have difficulty understanding that science is never determined by political authorities like Al Gore or by their bureaucratic allies in government agencies and scientific societies who benefit from vast federal funding.

Although 31,000 American scientists, 9,000 of us with PhDs, signed the Oregon Petition Project objecting to global warming hysteria, science is likewise not determined by popular vote. Although one of the signers was the late Edward Teller, one of the great physicists of the 20th century, and another was MIT Professor Richard Lindzen, who is widely acknowledged as the greatest meteorologist alive today, science is never “settled,” even by the best and brightest.

Science is ultimately determined only by real evidence from credible sources.

The great scandal known as "ClimateGate" revealed that scientists at the very top of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), both British and American, were compensating for their lack of honest evidence linking man-made carbon dioxide to global warming by doctoring data, refusing to reveal analysis techniques, and bullying any who got in their way. The released emails showed that they were also conspiring with the scientific societies to silence critics.

Hardly a week goes by without more revelations of wrongdoing and more calls for re-evaluation of climate data.

A recent re-evaluation of U.S. temperature data suggests that there was little or no net warming over the last century. NASA GISS analysis purporting to show global warming really shows localized warming due to urbanization. We know that the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s were about as warm as the 1990s, and both were largely caused by an ocean oscillation known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

Global temperature declined during the 1940s and stayed down for three decades until an abrupt shift to the warm mode of the PDO in 1977 known as the “Great Pacific Climate Shift.” Since the dawn of the satellite era in 1979, far better measurements of global temperature reveal significant variations in response to sea surface temperatures and large volcanic eruptions but not carbon dioxide.
(http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ )

Since the huge El Nino of 1998, the average global temperature has declined slightly in concert with the total energy content of the oceans. The new ocean data comes from the ARGO array of 3,175 deep sea diving buoys distributed throughout the world’s oceans. Because these declining temperatures are completely at odds with all U.N. climate simulations, they are ignored by alarmists, except of course in their private e-mails.

Polar sea ice varies on a seasonal basis and in response to ocean cycles. Over the relatively short satellite era, Arctic sea ice reached a low in 2007 at about the same time Antarctic sea ice reached a high. Today, the situation is as Rep. Wingard stated: very near normal. (http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/-cryosphere/ )

Polar bears are doing just fine, as they have during warmer periods in the past, such as the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods. Polar bear populations have increased five-fold since 1940.

Anyone who has lived in a hot humid climate knows that water vapor is by far the primary greenhouse gas.
Carbon dioxide is a very minor player in our climate. Its real importance is as the gas of life, directly responsible for all green plants and hence all animals on this planet. That makes it highly beneficial.
Rep. Wingard is certainly correct that “the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming is dead, and it needs to be buried.” I wish others were as well informed.

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artesian from Toronto, OntarioCanada
3/13/2010 4:29:16 AM

As a geologist I am very comfortable with the multiple working hypothesis - I would like someone to start examining the other ideas out there. The Danes have been on the case for a long while, studying the sun. Who would have thought the sun would be involved in warming? The first paper to read is Friis-Christensen and Lassen (Science; 1991) If you can find the entire issue in the reference library, you will see the editor’s comment referred to this paper as hitting the ball into the anthropogenic court. The causation is under scientific review, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome. The correlation broke down when Pinatubo erupted in 1991; my tomatoes did not ripen that summer either. Is this the exception that proves the rule? The important correlation between warming and cooling is the sunspot peak frequency, not the actual number of spots. However, we all realize correlation is not causation. Sunspot peak frequency proxies for the rise and fall of the sun’s magnetic field. Cosmic radiation is currently at its highest ever measured because the sun and earth’s magnetic shields are down; climate is changing. The climate celebrities, however, are linking climate and the carbon economy. Maybe not evil; just wrong.The third ranking gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves rapidly in cold water and bubbles rapidly out of warm water. CO2 has been rising and Earth and her oceans have been warming. However, the correlation trails. Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center has experiments scheduled for the Hadron collider to test his basement experiment. Elevated solar flux (> 10 protons per cc) appears to cause fog in the Great Lakes and clouds too. The hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center goes as follows: quiet sun allows the geomagnetic shield to drop. Incoming galactic cosmic ray flux creates more low-level clouds, more snow, and more albedo effect as more is heat reflected resulting in a colder climate. An active sun has an enhanced magnetic field that induces Earth’s geomagnetic shield response. Earth has fewer low-level clouds, less rain, snow and ice, and less albedo (less heat reflected) producing a warmer climate. That is how the bulk of climate change likely works, coupled with (modulated by) sunspot peak frequency there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, all the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, as they have been for this century, all the planets cool.Many answers yield many new questions: the change in cloud cover is only a small percentage, and the ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that.Although the post 60s warming period appears to be over, warming and attendant humidity have allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with more clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years. We can likely kick much of the carbon economy sometime late the twenty-first century, but we must not rush to judgement for the wrong reason. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat. Nothing unusual is going on except for the Orwellian politics. In other words, it is probably not the heat; it is likely the humidity.
 
simons from Wilsonville
3/15/2010 9:31:52 PM

Artesian, This is all disproved, there's no correlation between 'cosmic solar rays' which are actually trending downwards, and global temperatures, which are trending upwards. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/recent-warming-but-no-trend-in-galactic-cosmic-rays/ Meanwhile global temperatures have been rising for the last 40 years http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/2007climatechange.html But I suppose your comments are in keeping with the post above. I'm just not sure if you folks agree there's warming, or agree with Wingard who said earth is actually cooling (which against all accepted scientific reports). 13 US federal agencies (including USDA, DOD, DOE, DOT, EPA, The Department of the Interior, US Geological Survey, NASA, NOAA and NIST) describe what is happening with Climate Change. see http://www.globalchange.gov




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