Greenhouse effect

Created By: hayden

Last Modified: 10/05/06

Stingray on Inconvenient Truth

Al Gore and some inconvenient truths about global warming

Global warming has become a big issue over the past few months with the release of Al Gore's idiotic movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Just two days ago, as a matter of fact, Bill Clinton blamed the increasing number of hurricanes on “Republican policies.” While the press is fawning over the movie and Gore, they have once again neglected — or refused — to do their research. It turns out there are quite a few inconvenient truths for Al Gore and his movie.

“The evil Republicans are destroying the solar system!”

History is overwhelmingly inconvenient for Gore. The earth's temperature, CO2 levels, and other environmental conditions are well within the norm for the past 1,000 years and don't even show up as a blip on the screen for the past 50 million years. Wild weather swings are the norm in our planet's history and we are living in an exceptionally stable climatic period.

While our ancestors were spearing woolly mammoths and painting cave walls, the climate was wobbling wildly. A few centuries of warm, wet, calm climate alternated with a few centuries of cold, dry, windy weather. The climate jumped between cold and warm not over centuries, but in as little as a single year. Often, conditions “flickered” back and forth between cold and warm for a few decades before settling down.

Remember that 1,000 years ago the Vikings were growing grapes in Greenland. Now the area where they lived is too cold to sustain any reasonable amount of agriculture. Perhaps there were some evil proto-Republicans around 1,000 years ago to cause the global cooling.

A really, really inconvenient truth for Gore is that all scientists agree that we're in a period of increased solar activity. The sun, of course, provides all of the heat for earth except the insignificant amount generated by humans. The heat from the sun has increased over the past 100 years and especially over the past 20 years.

According to observations by V. Ramanathan, B. R. Barkstrom, and E. F. Harrison, clouds have a net cooling effect of -17 W/m² . Svensmark and Friis-Christensen conclude from the diminution of this cooling effect between 1986 and 1990 that the solar irradiance has increased by about 1.5 W/m² within these three and a half years. A change of this order is quite remarkable, since the total radiative forcing by carbon dioxide accumulated since 1750 has been estimated by the IPCC not to go beyond 1.5 W/m² . This means that cosmic rays, strongly modulated by solar activity, achieve an effect within three and a half years for which the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere needs centuries. This shows clearly to what extent the greenhouse effect has been overestimated in comparison with the solar contribution to climate change, which turns out to be the most important factor.

From:

http://www.mcculloughsite.net/stingray/2006/06/13/al-gore-and-some-inconvenient-truths-about-global-warming.php

Rusty Humphries

(Al Gore does not believe in) The Sun of God

Posted: June 19, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Who, besides Al Gore, would be surprised that Mars' ice caps are shrinking? And how about this: Jupiter is brewing up new, monster, hurricane-like storms because of measured increases in Jovian temperatures. Why is it I don't believe "greenhouse gases" are at fault?

Here's the deal, one of God's great creations – the Sun – is going through another one of its on-again, off-again solar cycles. Sometimes it burns a little brighter, other times it emits a little less energy. The result? Every planet in our solar system either gets a little warmer or cooler depending on our sole energy source. The massive furnace in the center of our solar system is pretty consistent, but it isn't perfectly constant.

From:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50701

Link: Michelle Malkin

CEI

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced two 60-second television spots focusing on the alleged global warming crisis and the calls by some environmental groups and politicians for reduced energy use.


"Energy" WMV: Hi - Low Quicktime: Hi - Low	"Glaciers" WMV: Hi - Low Quicktime: Hi - Low

From:

http://streams.cei.org/

Al Gore and Greenhouse Effect

Ask Mr. Science

The moral flaws of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

By Gregg Easterbrook
Posted Wednesday, May 24, 2006, at 6:05 AM ET

A scene from An Inconvenient Truth

Relax: The Al Gore movie has no sex scene. Gore is the only presidential candidate who has made out on national television, so this was a legitimate worry. Otherwise, An Inconvenient Truth could use some action. Maybe a chase scene through the winding streets of Davos. Maybe Gore parachuting off a skyscraper as he shoots at American Petroleum Institute commandos aboard a helicopter. Instead, we get a 100-minute PowerPoint presentation interrupted by outtakes from campaign ads, plus shots of Gore apparently rendered despondent by the weight of his environmental knowledge.

As someone who has come to the view that greenhouse-effect science is now persuasive, I'm glad Gore made a movie that will help average voters understand the subject. An Inconvenient Truth is worthy in content, admirable in intent, and motivated by the sense of civic responsibility Hollywood on the whole has abandoned. About two-thirds is a quasi-documentary of Gore presenting to an audience the greenhouse slide show he's been giving for nearly 20 years. (I attended an early effort, in the late 1980s.) Mostly we see Gore talking and pointing at charts, interspersed with detours into the former vice president's political career: the Florida recount, Gore's stump-speech telling of his son's auto accident and his sister's tragic death from lung cancer. The political sequences have all the heft of a video press release: Time and again we are shown crowds looking adoringly at Gore, or cheering him on. And Katherine Harris may be a natural disaster, but what's she doing in a movie about climate change? If director Davis Guggenheim wanted to film a biography of Gore, he should simply have done so.

When Gore isn't being applauded, Guggenheim presents him as alone and melancholy: walking alone, musing alone, standing alone in a darkened barn. The scenes are meant to convey our inability to imagine the burden the former vice president bears. But they make the political part feel contrived, since Gore scarcely suffers solitude; he has a wonderful, loving family and participates in many public causes.

From:

http://www.slate.com/id/2142319/

Ozone in the atmosphere

The Role of Ozone

Ozone: Good Up High, Bad Nearby

�Good� Ozone is found in the stratosphere. �Bad� Ozone is a pollutant in the troposphere. For more information on �Good� and �Bad� Ozone, see the Environmental Protection Agency�s Web site:Environmental Protection Agency

Actually, there are two �ozone problems,� and both are linked to the greenhouse effect in some ways. The first problem is the pollution of the lower atmosphere, called the troposphere, with ozone which largely results from photochemical reactions involving man-made emissions from industry and automobiles ("smog" or "photo-smog"). This ozone (the chemical formula for ozone is O₃) is "bad" because it produces respiration problems in people and damages plants. The link to the greenhouse effect is that the same activities which release most of the carbon dioxide also release most of the nitrogen-oxide gases which provide the source materials for making ozone when the Sun shines brightly. In addition, ozone itself is a greenhouse gas.

The second problem � the one usually thought of when referring to the �ozone problem� � concerns the ozone layer in the lower stratosphere, centered on about 20 km up. The stratosphere has about ten times more ozone than the troposphere. This ozone is �good,� because it intercepts much of the UV radiation from the Sun which is close to the violet (called UV(B)) and which would otherwise reach the surface of Earth and bother people, animals and plants. The link to the greenhouse story emerges because global warming in the troposphere leads to cooling in the stratosphere (by mechanisms which need not concern us here) and this cooling favors the destruction of ozone within the ozone-rich layer.

The Ozone Hole

The "ozone hole" was first discovered in Antarctica by Joseph Farman and colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey in 1985. They observed the radiation coming from the Sun and noting the increase in UV(B) radiation. This increase is especially strong during the southern spring (September and October), when an "ozone hole" develops. (Similar observations were first made by NASA scientists using satellite sensors. However, these scientists doubted what their instruments told them, because the observations were entirely unexpected and out of the ordinary.)

The ozone loss in the Antarctic has to do with photochemical reactions favored by the presence of certain types of ice particles on whose surface unstable chlorine compounds are produced from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a family of long-lived industrial gases whose molecules can work their way up through the troposphere and end up in the stratosphere. The unstable chlorine compounds deliver the chlorine which helps destroy ozone, when sunlight returns to the Antarctic after the long winter. The chemical reactions were worked out by Paul Crutzen and other scientists studying atmospheric chemistry.

The Ozone Depletion Process

Step 1. CFCs originate entirely from human activities. They are chemically inert, that is, they do not normally react with anything they come in contact with. This is one important reason why they were so useful for many commercial applications. However, being inert, they stay in the atmosphere for a long time. Step 2. CFCs rise into the ozone layer in the stratosphere. Step 3. In the stratosphere, high-energy UV radiation from the Sun breaks apart the CFC molecules, providing a source of free chlorine (Chlorine, or Cl, is the chloro-part of chlorofluorocarbons). Step 4. The free chlorine atoms react with ozone, helping to convert it to plain molecular oxygen (which does not intercept UV). In the process, the chlorine only acts as a helper and is preserved for additional reactions. Through its "catalytic" action (= chemical helper action) a single chlorine atom can destroy up to 15,000 ozone molecules. In this manner even minute quantities of CFCs reaching the stratosphere can have disastrous effects on the ozone layer there. Step 5. A depleted ozone layer means that more UV radiation can get through. Step 6. Increased exposure to UV radiation has negative consequences for humans, animals and plants.

Schematic of the ozone depletion process in the stratosphere, Steps 1-6 are explained in detail in the text below.

When it became clear that ozone was being destroyed on a large scale, international agreements (like Montreal Protocol) were made to phase out the chlorofluorocarbon compounds which are responsible for the damage to this shield. Following these agreements, the concentration of the ozone-destroying gases has leveled off, and they are expected to decrease in the future.

The phasing out of these gases also will prevent an increase of the greenhouse effect from this source, although proposed replacements for the CFCs, while less dangerous to the ozone layer, are as powerful in terms of their greenhouse potential as are the CFCs themselves.

A great site on the Ozone Hole for teachers: Centre for Atmospheric Sciences You�ll even see movies of the ozone hole developing over Antarctica.

From:

http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/10_1.shtml

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