Global Warming

Separating Fact From Fiction

Human use of fossil fuels has increased the amount of greenhouse gases, in particular, carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is essential to life on earth. Moreover, the greenhouse effect is important to life on earth in that the greenhouse gases help retain energy near the surface that would otherwise escape to space. Based on ideas about how climate works, the small additional energy resulting from the air's increased carbon dioxide content should warm the planet.

One key scientific question is: What has been the response of the climate thus far to the small amount of energy added by humans from increased greenhouse gases in the air? To prove the reliability of their future forecasts, computer simulations need verification by testing past, well-documented temperature fluctuations. New federal investment in technology, especially that of space-based instrumentation, has helped address the issue of observed response of the climate to the air's increased greenhouse gas concentration. Two capitol tests of the reliability of the computer simulations are the past decades of surface temperature and lower troposphere change.

Desertification

Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change

Back in the 1970s, the United Nations media machine propagated the idea that massive desertification was occurring in the African Sahel as a consequence of a unique combination of human and climatic impacts and that something had to be done to stop it.  Today, the same entity warns us of another impending disaster - CO2-induced global warming, with both drought and floods at one and the same time - and again, mankind is asked to stop it.

Is the new claim correct?  Was the old one ever true?  Let's see what some recent scientific studies have revealed about the gloom and doom that was yesteryear's "global warming."

Chilling News for Global Warming

By Robert C. Balling Jr.

Greening Earth Society Science Advisor

"Only days before Americans cast their votes in the November 2000 election, media coverage across the country proclaimed the year could turn out to be the warmest on record in the United States. Yet, even as Florida’s ballot chad were being dimpled, temperatures were dropping to record lows across most of the country. By year’s end, not only did we have a for-certain President-elect, we also knew November and December to be the coldest on record."

Report to the Greening Earth Society "The Surface Record: ‘Global Mean Temperature’ and how it is determined at surface level"

By John L. Daly

Greening Earth Society Science Advisor

May 2000

Measuring Surface Temperature

"The ‘surface record’ comprises the combined average of thousands of thermometers in every country, worldwide, recording temperatures in standard, white, louvered boxes called Stevenson Screens. The boxes usually are mounted one meter above the ground. They mostly are placed where there are suitable people to read and maintain them, e.g. post offices in town and city centers, airports, pilot stations, lighthouses, radio/TV stations, farms, and cattle stations. By far the majority is located in towns and cities."

The Chilling Effects of the Kyoto Protocol

"At the United Nations conference on global warming in Buenos Aires in early November, developing countries greeted the Kyoto Protocol with a virtual deep freeze, rejecting its proposal for voluntary controls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But that rejection, beyond what the pundits expected, didn’t stop the Clinton Administration from signing a flawed agreement based on faulty science and which, if implemented, would leave all the heavy lifting to developed countries like the United States.

The Kyoto Protocol calls for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2012, an overall reduction of 37 percent. What, if implemented, will such drastic measures mean to Americans?" Go to the Source

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