'You can spit, have same effect as doubling the carbon dioxide'

A major new scientific study concludes the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on worldwide temperatures is largely irrelevant, prompting one veteran meteorologist to quip, "You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide."

Meteorologist Reid Bryson

That comment comes from Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, who said the temperature of the earth is increasing, but that it's got nothing to do with what man is doing.

"Of course it's going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we're coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we're putting more carbon dioxide into the air."

"Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust," declared astronomer Ian Wilson after reviewing the newest study, now accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research.

The project, called "Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth's Climate System," was authored by Brookhaven National lab scientist Stephen Schwartz.

"Effectively, this (new study) means that the global economy will spend trillions of dollars trying to avoid a warming of (about) 1.0 K by 2100 A.D.," Wilson wrote in a note to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Sunday.

He was referring to the massive expenditures that would be required under such treaties as the Kyoto Protocol.

"Previously, I have indicated that the widely accepted values for temperature increase associated with a double of CO2 were far too high, i.e. 2-4.5 Kelvin. This new peer-reviewed paper claims a value of 1.1 +/- 0.5 K increase," he added.

Bryson's and Wilson's comments were among those from a long list of doubters of catastrophic, man-made global warming, assembled by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and posted on a blog site for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Another leader, Ivy League geologist Robert Giegengack, chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, said he doesn't even consider global warming among the top 10 environmental problems.

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"In terms of [global warming's] capacity to cause the human species harm, I don't think it makes it into the top 10," he said. "[Former Vice President Al Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun's heat. That's just wrong … It's a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa. It's hard for us to say CO2 drives temperature. It's easier to say temperature drives CO2."

Gore made – and stars in – a film about purported global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," that won an Oscar. It has become mandatory for students in many high schools and colleges.

Former Vice President Al Gore wrote and stars in 'An Inconvenient Truth'

However, the studies assembled by Inhofe's team said that's not necessarily so, according to the scientists.

"If we were to stop manufacturing CO2 tomorrow, we wouldn't see the effects of that for generations," Giegengack said.

"Carbon dioxide is 0.000383 of our atmosphere by volume (0.038 percent)," said meteorologist Joseph D'Alea, the first director of meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chief of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecast.

"Only 2.75 percent of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic in origin. The amount we emit is said to be up from 1 percent a decade ago. Despite the increase in emissions, the rate of change of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa remains the same as the long term average (plus 0.45 percent per year)," he said. "We are responsible for just 0.001 percent of this atmosphere. If the atmosphere was a 100-story building, our anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor."

Former Harvard physicist Lubos Motl added that those promoting the fear of man-made climate changes are "playing the children's game to scare each other."

"By the end of the (CO2) doubling, i.e. 560 ppm (parts per million) expected slightly before (the year) 2100 – assuming a business-as-usual continued growth of CO2 that has been linear for some time – Schwartz and others would expect 0.4 C of extra warming only – a typical fluctuation that occurs within four months and certainly nothing that the politicians should pay attention to," Motl explained.

Joel Schwartz, of the American Enterprise Institute, said, "there's hardly any additional warming 'in the pipeline' from previous greenhouse gas emissions. This is in contrast to the IPCC, which predicts that the Earth's average temperature will rise an additional 0.6 degrees C during the 21st Century even if greenhouse gas concentrations stopped increasing," he added.

"Along with dozens of other studies in the scientific literature, [this] new study belies Al Gore's claim that there is no legitimate scholarly alternative to climate catastrophism. Indeed, if Schwartz's results are correct, that alone would be enough to overturn in one fell swoop the IPCC's scientific 'consensus,' the environmentalists' climate hysteria, and the political pretext for the energy-restriction policies that have become so popular with the world's environmental regulators, elected officials, and corporations. The question is, will anyone in the mainstream media notice?" AEI's Schwartz concluded.

The Senate committee assessment said 2007 could go down in history "as the 'tipping point' of man-made global warming fears."

Meteorologist Joseph Conklin, of the website Climate Police said "global warming" is disintegrating.

"A few months ago, a study came out that demonstrated global temperatures have leveled off. But instead of possibly admitting that this whole global warming thing is a farce, a group of British scientists concluded that the real global warming won't start until 2009," Conklin wrote.

However, a United Nations scientist, Jim Renwick, recently conceded that climate models do not account for the variability in nature, and so are not reliable. And Conklin noted the U.S. National Climate Data Center has compiled data that shouldn't be used, because its reporting points are located on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels and even attached to hot chimneys, a methodology that is "seriously flawed."

WND has previously reported on significant doubts about global warming.

Last September, a leading U.S. climate researcher claimed there's a decade at most left to address global warming before environmental disaster takes place, but the federal government issued a report showing the year 1936 had a hotter summer than 2006.

"The average June-August 2006 temperature for the contiguous United States (based on preliminary data) was 2.4 degrees F (1.3 degrees C) above the 20th century average of 72.1 degrees F (22.3 degrees C)," said the NOAA report. "This was the second warmest summer on record, slightly cooler than the record of 74.7 degrees F set in 1936 during the Dust Bowl era. This summer's average was 74.5 degrees F. Eight of the past ten summers have been warmer than the U.S. average for the same period."

WND also reported on NASA-funded study that noted some climate forecasts might be exaggerating estimations of global warming.

The space agency said climate models possibly were overestimating the amount of water vapor entering the atmosphere as the Earth warms.

The theory many scientists work with says the Earth heats up in response to human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, causing more water to evaporate from the ocean into the atmosphere.

In addition, WND reported that Dr. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, maintains there has been little or no warming since about 1940.

"Any warming from the growth of greenhouse gases is likely to be minor, difficult to detect above the natural fluctuations of the climate, and therefore inconsequential," Singer wrote in a climate-change essay. "In addition, the impacts of warming and of higher CO2 levels are likely to be beneficial for human activities and especially for agriculture."

Source: WorldNetDaily