Global warming: wrong?!
by Vinay Gupta • March 9, 2008 • Science, The Global Picture • 3 Comments
Miskolczi’s story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution — originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today — ignored boundary conditions by assuming an “infinitely thick” atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.
So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference … but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.
NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. “Money”, he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.
Miskolczi resigned in protest, stating in his resignation letter, “Unfortunately my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results.”
His theory was eventually published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in his home country of Hungary.
The conclusions are supported by research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last year from Steven Schwartz of Brookhaven National Labs, who gave statistical evidence that the Earth’s response to carbon dioxide was grossly overstated. It also helps to explain why current global climate models continually predict more warming than actually measured.
The equations also answer thorny problems raised by current theory, which doesn’t explain why “runaway” greenhouse warming hasn’t happened in the Earth’s past. The new theory predicts that greenhouse gas increases should result in small, but very rapid temperature spikes, followed by much longer, slower periods of cooling — exactly what the paleoclimatic record demonstrates.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=10973
What do you think?
it could be climate instability leading to cooling – at least that’s what i recall reading at http://williamcalvin.com/
Even so, the ice is melting around the world, driven seemingly by a sharp rise in oceanic temperatures. Of course, the prediction was that a rise in atmospheric temperatures would be the driving force, but this isn’t true, and this is so far unexplained. Is it a rise in volcanic activity? Or is it something more subtle that we do not understand? Regardless, we are all going to have to deal with a significant rise in ocean levels real soon if Greenland doesn’t stop melting from beneath at the rate it currently is, and so quibbling over the cause seems kind of silly when we might be feeling the effects so soon. We need to start thinking of solutions to the effects of the climate change now, rather than continuing to delude ourselves into thinking that we can change something that we don’t understand. Note: I am not suggesting we just continue doing everything the same, because that would only magnify the disaster when it comes. But building up energy sources that don’t need to be shipped to ports that will soon be closed, building inland cities to house the millions of environmental refugees, and developing crop plans for unpredictable climates could be the difference between life and death for millions, and we could be doing all of that right now.
Regardless of whether the science in question has merit (on which I’m thoroughly unqualified to comment), I think it would be hysterically ironic if NASA would now suddenly be suppressing scientific research in a pattern diametrically opposed to what they tried to pull off just a few years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen
As for conspiracy theories, the amassed forces wanting to shut out and suppress “inconvenient truths” are surely as of yet much more entrenched and well-funded than any “alarmist science for the sake of funding”, as implied here.