Published: August 21, 2008 08:52 pm            

Letter to the editor - Friday, Aug. 22, 2008

Earth cooled quickly in ’07

I also stand by my claim in an earlier letter that the climate has not warmed since 1998. The Climatic Research Center of the University of East Anglia in England has excellent graphs going back to 1850 of climate temperature and it does indeed show that there has been no warming since 1998. California meteorologist Anthony Watts says January 2008 was the second coldest January in 15 years. Australian geophysicist Phil Chapman, and first foreigner to become a U.S. astronaut, says, “All four agencies that track earth’s temperature [the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy Group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems in California] report that it cooled by about 0.7 C in 2007. “This,” he says, is “the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.”

This would be a good time to point that the global warming alarmists use ground based weather station temperature measurements. Anthony Watts has taken on a project to check ground based weather stations in the U.S. So far he and his volunteers have checked over 500 of the more than 1,200 stations and found that almost 70 percent of them do not meet specs anymore because of development. They are too close to buildings, some on roof tops, etc. However, satellite and weather balloon data agree quite nicely even though different technologies are employed. The satellite record goes back to 1979, according to NASA. There is a petition project in which 31,000 scientists have signed in opposition to the global warming theory. Do a Google search on “petition project.”

The International Panel on Climate Change indeed is a political body. The Washington Times reported that the findings of Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, who was hired by Congress to do an independent study of the IPCC fourth report, “found significant problems with the methods of statistical analysis used by the researchers and with the IPCC’s peer review process. In a recent National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), Kesten Green and J. Scott Armstrong found that it could only be established that the IPCC followed 17 of the 127 principles that must be followed to establish a truth. The most glaring one is that politics be kept out of it. Politicians appointed the ‘scientists’ to the IPCC and the final report was written in collaboration with the politicians and subject to their approval.”

The solar sun cycle has not been discredited. Many are concerned about the late start of cycle 24. Rather than go into long explanations, see the Web site http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/02/sun_days_will_never_be_the_sam.html and follow links and key words. Also get the bibliography.

The gas with by far the greatest effect on the climate temperature is water vapor. It is not totally clear yet whether it is a net contributor or detractor to global temperature rise. Most likely it is the controller of it. We all have experienced its effects many times. It is colder on a clear winter night than on a cloudy one because the clouds (of water vapor) prevent the earth’s heat from being radiated into space. In the daytime it is cooler because it prevents the sun’s warming rays from reaching the earth. This process is not totally understood but it is clearly a feedback mechanism for moderating the extremes of temperature of the earth.

I have created a bibliography of Web links, which details all I have put in this article plus much more. If you would like a copy of it, send a blank e-mail to jvbobcat-ktrib@yahoo.com and it will automatically be sent. It will also include this letter with the things in it that I had to remove to get to an acceptable length for the Tribune to publish it. I will keep it open for 10 days assuming it does not swamp my computer, then it will be killed.

James D. Boyd, Ph.D.

Galveston

        

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