This is a very useful presentation of simple graphs illustrating all aspects of the global warming and carbon demonization scams. Well worth printing in colour for close study:

By H. Leighton Steward:
http://www.nal-jsc.org/Climate_Change_Symposium_Leighton_Steward_Presentation.pdf [PDF, 7.4 MB]

Ocean acidification is like the Castle Ghost – everyone is scared of it but no one has seen it.

Dozens of learned articles and millions of media words tell us that ocean acidity has increased alarmingly since man started using carbon fuels. The worry is that the carbon dioxide being generated by man’s industry is dissolving in the ocean thus creating acidic water. And the computer models forecast that, by some future date, sea shells and corals will be dissolved or killed by the acidic ocean and/or the associated global warming.

However a close look at the chemistry of the oceans and the evidence provided by past records and present observations reveals that the open ocean is alkaline and never acidic, except locally near active submarine volcanic vents. It is deceptive to suggest that sea life is threatened by “the rising acidity of the oceans”. The oceans are still quite alkaline. Nothing unusual or abnormal has yet been detected. Other conclusions are:

• The pH of the oceans varies naturally from place to place and time to time, depending on temperatures and the activities of plant and animal life. It is impossible to determine a meaningful figure for “average” ocean acidity (pH). It is also impossible to say with any certainty that average ocean pH has changed because of man’s use of carbon fuels. Such “measurements” are an exercise in guided guess-work. (“What would you like the answer to be?”)
• It is a myth that acidic waters necessarily kill aquatic life. Rain water is slightly acidic and many fresh water lagoons, swamps and reed beds are also acidic. Nevertheless, aquatic life flourishes in these wetlands.
• The oceans have a huge capacity resist being destabilised by changes in temperature or composition of the atmosphere. Whenever there is a change, the reactions of other chemicals or life in the sea act to moderate and even reverse those changes. Oceans cover about 71% of the Earth’s surface and the hydrosphere contains over 300 times the mass of gases in the atmosphere. The oceans thus have a huge capacity to buffer any variations in heat content or gas content emanating from the thin veil of atmospheric gases. The effect of man’s supposed 3% contribution to the tiny 0.039% of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s thin atmosphere would not register a long-term effect in the massive oceans.
• Cold ocean currents from the deep ocean periodically up-well to the surface. These currents are rich in dissolved carbon dioxide and other chemicals and decayed organic matter. Where this cold nutrient-rich water surfaces, there is a staggering profusion of aquatic life.
• Oceans have an unlimited ability to remove carbon dioxide from their waters and store it in thick beds of shells and corals, limestone, chalk, dolomite, magnesite, siderite, marls, methane hydrate and oil shales. Fresh water swamps and lakes on land have also laid down massive deposits of coal and lignite formed from carbon dioxide extracted from the atmosphere. Many of these deposits were laid down when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was far higher than it is today.
• Carbon dioxide present in the oceans is essential to plant life and current very low levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the ocean are limiting plant growth. All animal life depends on these plants. Man’s mining and industrial activities are harmlessly recycling some of this valuable carbon dioxide from natural limestones and hydrocarbons buried in the dead lithosphere, back to the living biosphere.
• Corals are hardy and adaptable and have survived for 500 million years. During that time they have had to cope with warm eras, ice ages, extinction events, eras of massive volcanic activity, dramatic rising and lowering in sea levels and eons of time when levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were far higher than today.
• A very recent extensive study of the Great Barrier Reef concluded that the changes forecast under the “business as usual greenhouse gas emissions” were unlikely to cause great harm to the reef.
• Any change in global temperature or the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will cause life on land and in the ocean to adjust and adapt. However, on balance, a warmer world with more plant food in the atmosphere and a more vigorous water cycle is very beneficial for the biosphere. The killer climates are associated with ice ages when the atmosphere is cold and dry, the sea levels are much lower and much of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in vast lifeless sheets of ice.
• There is no justification to use the baseless fear of “acidification of the oceans” as an excuse for a massive dislocation of our transport, food and energy industries. We should instead be focussing on real pollution problems (such as man’s rubbish floating in the oceans) and/or on preparing to cope with real and likely natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, floods, fires, cyclones and droughts).

To see a full report on “The Acid Ocean Bogey Man” by Viv Forbes with illustrations and explanations see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/acid-ocean-bogeyman.pdf [PDF, 1.2 MB]

Further reading: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/25/ocean-acidification-natural-cycles-and-ubiquitous-uncertainties/

By Dr. Robert Brown,
Physics Dept. Duke University

One of many, many problems with modern climate research is that the researchers seem to take their thermal reconstructions far too seriously and assign completely absurd measures of accuracy and precision, with a very few exceptions. In my opinion it is categorically impossible to “correct” for things like the UHI (Urban Heat Island) effect — it presupposes a knowledge of the uncorrected temperature that one simply cannot have or reliably infer from the data. The problem becomes greater and greater the further back in time one proceeds, with big jumps (in uncertainty) 250, 200, 100 and 40 odd years ago. The proxy-derived record from more than 250 years ago is uncertain in the extreme, with the thermal record of well over 70% of the Earth’s surface completely inaccessible and with an enormously sparse sampling of highly noisy and confounded proxies elsewhere. To claim accuracy greater than 2-3 K is almost certainly sheer piffle, given that we probably don’t know current “true” global average temperatures within 1 K, and 5K is more likely.

See the full post on: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/04/global-annualized-temperature-full-of-snip-up-to-their-eyebrows/

At presentation to a seminar at the British House of Commons recently, Professor Lindzen clarified what the debate over climate change is really about.

“It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is.
“It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is.
“It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should.
“The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest.

For the whole presentation see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/lindzen-reconsidering-the-climate-change-act.pdf [PDF, 1.7 MB]

For another summary see: http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/22/is-catastrophic-global-warming-like-the-millenium-bug-a-mistake/

Prof Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT.

It’s all about the sun, not about carbon dioxide:

Sadly, following the example of our dear leader, lying is becoming an art form in our over-governed country as the power freaks seek to add even more layers of taxation and regulation over our lives.

Even photographic images are manipulated to hide the truth and promote the lie.

Every time the new carbon tax is mentioned on ABC and SBS television, the word dioxide is as invisible as the gas itself.

But what is visible, and which looms large in the background to every story, are billowing white clouds coming from the towers.

But carbon dioxide is invisible. So all we can see must be smoke or water vapour, neither of which comprise the dreaded carbon dioxide.

In the news following the PM’s courageous attempt to maintain her steady-as-she-sinks course, a brief glimpse of Australia’s dirtiest power station, Loy Yang, showed the station’s magnificent smoke stacks in all their glory, but not a sign of any smoke. So the next close-up was carefully framed to show only the chimneys to the top of the structures – can’t have people asking why there were no visible emissions.

The only people supporting a carbon (dioxide) tax must be the lounge lizards glued to the deceptive images on their screens. They should walk out into the fresh air and hop on their bikes to visit these unfairly maligned energy supply installations and take note of the clear skies above and the verdant foliage flourishing and feeding from the abundant carbon dioxide plant food which is emitted from these wonderful structures.

John McRobert BE (Civ)
Brisbane Qld Australia

Read on for the answer: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/coal-story.pdf’ [PDF, 90 KB]

Volcanoes emit enormous volumes of the two main “greenhouse gases” – water vapour and carbon dioxide.

Erupting volcanoes are big news these days. There are over 1500 active volcanoes which are above sea level and many of these show signs of current activity including explosions, lava flows, gaseous emissions and tremors. On average, there are about five eruptions per year that are above sea level.

However, few people realise that there are more than 200,000 known submarine volcanoes, many of which are active. It is reasonable to estimate that there could be a total of 3 million submarine volcanoes.

Carbon dioxide and methane are abundant gases in the earth’s mantle and they are being continually released to the atmosphere. Volcanic carbon dioxide cannot be distinguished from the carbon dioxide produced by burning carbon fuels like coal.

There are very large deposits of methane calthrate on the continental shelf and lakes of frozen carbon dioxide in the deep ocean. Just one new eruption or earthquake can mobilise these into the atmosphere.

We are continually told about the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but almost all of the world’s carbon dioxide recording stations are beside active volcanoes such as Mauna Loa, Kilauea and Raoul Island. Is the rise merely nature’s breath?

All of this says, we have no idea how much carbon dioxide nature is adding to the atmosphere. The models used to justify the war on carbon start with dream-time forecasts of world economic activity. These figures drive forecasts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which are linked to assumptions and complex formula in a big black box that spits out forecasts of global temperature for a century ahead. No one but an Australian Climate Commissioner could take any notice of these forecasts.

Timothy Casey, an experienced geologist, has produced a well reasoned article entitled Volcanic Carbon Dioxide. It is worth reading at: http://carbon-budget.geologist-1011.net/

The truth about greenhouse gases and the dubious science of the climate crusaders.

By William Happer

Will Happer is a physicist at Princeton University. This article appeared in the internet magazine First Things under the title The Truth About Greenhouse Gases.

“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.

I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant to keep our land, air, and waters free of real pollution, particulates, heavy metals, and pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life. Our bodies are made of carbon. A normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 (the simplest chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere) per day. Before the industrial period, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 270 ppm. At the present time, the concentration is about 390 ppm, 0.039 percent of all atmospheric molecules and less than 1 percent of that in our breath. About fifty million years ago, a brief moment in the long history of life on earth, geological evidence indicates, CO2 levels were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished abundantly.

To read the rest of this article, click: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-truth-about-greenhouse-gases.

Volcanoes emit huge quantities of the main greenhouse gases – water vapour and carbon dioxide. They also affect wind patterns and put large amounts of other gases like sulphur dioxide and particles of ash, smoke and dust.

All of these have a dramatic effect on the weather events and the biosphere.

For an article on this subject by Wyss Yim of the University of Hong Kong, see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/yim-volcanoes-water-vapour.pdf [PDF, 418 KB]

Philip Wood has a degree in Arts Law, experience in international finance, is an ex-merchant banker and now Managing Director of a minerals processing and industrial waste recycling company.

Companies like this are depend heavily on reliable cheap energy, which has led Philip and his team become directly interested in the science, economics and politics of alleged man-made climate change, a hypothesis that increasingly burdens the energy sector. In so doing, Philip has become deeply doubtful of today’s regular doomsday headlines and futile expensive solutions to the non-existent problem of global warming.

For a series of dramatic graphs that cover all aspects of the climate debate, see, copy and spread around this presentation by Philip: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/a-cool-look-at-global-warming.pdf [PDF, 3.7 MB]