February 11, 2007

Climate Report Less Grim, But Upsetting

Folks in Paris got the shivers one night recently when President Jacques Chirac turned off decorative lights on the Eiffel Tower for five minutes.

The electricity-saving stunt heralded a report by the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC).

U.S. Senators Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Barbara Boxer and John McCain – presidential hopefuls all – endorsed it. Their mantra: “This is an issue whose time has come!” To this, one could add: “And gone.”

The U.N. says 500 “invited scientists” labored mightily at Paris. Proponents set attendance at 2,500 -- including assorted diplomats and environuts from 13 countries. Two final reports are promised this year.

The interim report reduces its earlier estimate of human influence on warming by one-third. Mainstream media seem to have overlooked this salient observation.

The new conclusion changes the predicted sea-level rise over the next century to 17 inches – considerably less that Sen. Al Gore’s lopsided Kyoto Treaty prediction of 20 to 30 feet.

Folks building on beaches and canals in Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte routinely put down 9 to 12 feet of fill before laying a foundation. Why not panicky New Yorkers?

It is interesting to note that carbon dioxide emissions from oil and coal burning apparatus are a small fraction of “green house” gasses smothering life as we know it.

A 1995 IPCC report said 90 billion tons of carbon – as carbon dioxide – annually circulate between the earth’s oceans and atmosphere. Another 60-billion tons exchange between vegetation and the atmosphere.

Robert Essenhigh, professor of Energy Conservation at Ohio State University, last year stated: “Global warming is a natural process that could begin to reverse itself in 10 to 20 years.”

He expanded his premise in an issue of the American Chemical Society Journal. “A much greater amount of carbon dioxide enters and leaves the atmosphere in the natural cycle of water exchange from – and back into – sea algae and vegetation.”

Grass, plants, forests, seaweed and algae need to assimilate carbon dioxide to produce the starch, sugar and oxygen upon which all living creatures depend.

Essenhigh asserts: “Compared to man-made emissions of 5 to 6 billion tons per year, natural sources account for about 95 percent of all atmospheric carbon dioxide. This is an indicator of rising temperatures -- not the cause.”

He cites data by Cambridge University biologists Shackleton and Opdyke. They found global temperatures have oscillated with an average less than one degree –together rising gradually over the last million years. The 100-year oscillations varied 5 to 10 degrees.

Concludes Essenhigh: “Today, we are simply near a peak in the current cycle that started about 25,000 years ago with retreat of the last ice age.” He says the Arctic Ocean acts as a giant temperature regulator.

“When the Arctic Ocean is frozen over, as it is today, it prevents evaporation of water that would otherwise escape to the atmosphere and then return as snow. When there is less snow, the cap may start to shrink – as it is now doing.

Once enough water is available from the ocean, snows begin to replenish the ice cap. As Arctic ice and land glaciers expand, global temperature starts to reverse. Earth starts re-entry into a new ice age.

Floating ice – frozen water with a little air – has no effect on ocean volume.

Essenhigh estimates Earth may reach a peak in the current temperature profile within the next 20 years.

Human history supports the fluctuating cold and warm periods between tropical and ice age periods. All are coordinated with Earth’s slow wobble and Sun’s nuclear furnace.

Don’t laugh. Remember the medieval “Little Ice Age” that wiped out Iceland farm colonies. And the archeological discovery a few months ago of tropical animal bones on Antarctica.

We may grow pineapples in Canada and hunt polar bears in Florida before we come full cycle again. Undoubtedly there will be a gaggle of Chicken Littles screaming, “The sky is falling!”

By Lindsey Williams, columnist for Sun Coast Media Group newspapers