For years I’ve been saying that one likely reason for the apparent rise in temperatures after the 1970s was the introduction of anti-pollution measures in the 1970s. The logic seemed simple: evaporative pan measurements had shown a reduction in evaporation that seemed to correlate with pollution levels and it seemed there was a strong connection between pollution and the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth … and of course the greens had taken this whole scenario to its absurd extreme with doomsday nuclear winter which was supposedly the inevitable result of any nuclear explosion.
Well, now it appears “global dimming” or particular cooling or whatever it could be called, is back in vogue … not to explain the apparent increase in temperatures due to clean air legislation, but to explain the lack of predicted warming … which was predicted because CO2 HAD TO BE THE CAUSE OF THE WARMING … and because CO2 has continued going up without warming temperatures, the charlatans now have to find an excuse.
‘During the Chinese economic expansion there was a huge increase in sulphur emissions,’ Dr Robert Kaufmann, of Boston University, told the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
But:
But it is thought temperatures will rise again now China is tackling air pollution by installing equipment to scrub out sulphur particles.
Some have suggested that injecting sulfur compounds into the atmosphere might help ease global warming by increasing clouds and haze that would reflect sunlight, but an earlier study concluded that would be a bad idea. (Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2011297/Coal-burning-China-cools-planet.htm)
So let’s Summarise:
- When temperatures appeared to rise from 1970-2000, this had to be be CO2 because nothing else could explain it … so they invented a mythical multiplier to scale up the known effects of CO2 to make it match the huge temperature change they appeared to measure
- When temperatures stopped warming after 2000, this was continued warming
- Now that temperatures have failed to warm for more than a decade and they can no longer hide their failures, they are trying to invent a new reason to explain why it hasn’t cooled (which is not solar because that would divert funding away from them) … so they now claim the reason their predictions failed was because there is now too much pollution from China, NOT: the reason we had so much warming was due to reducing pollution in the industrialised west from 1970s onward.
This is the great problem with basing your science on concensus … concensus is such a democratic notion, everyone counts: although the editors of the big journals and the elite of the science institutions that determine who gets ahead and who doesn’t obviously count more.
But the reality, is that science is a monarchy: there is only one vote that counts, and that vote is the “mother nature” aka the data!
Addendum
The Daily Mail has a real cracker of a piece today and I quote:
Whatever happens now, whether it is hot or cold, whether we get heatwaves or record snowfalls, floods or droughts, sooner or later we hear those familiar little voices piping up to tell us that the blame for all these ‘extreme weather events’ still lies on ‘disruption’ to the climate caused by the sinful activities of mankind.
Apologies: WordPress is playing up on my PC, so I’ve added URLs but not links.
I like to frequent science and atheist blogs such as RD.net and Pharyngula. The vast majority of commenters are very much in the AGW camp but one or two mildly sceptical voices are starting to appear. On this particular subject, the view of sceptics that this sounded like desperate straw clutching by alarmists, was swiftly dismissed. One commenter suggested that a warmer climate might not be a bad thing and that more Co2 in the atmosphere made plants grow better. He was quickly put right by having it pointed out to him that plants grown in a Co2 rich atmosphere have far less nutrition in them. I have a feeling that this is complete bollocks but don’t know enough about the subject to be sure.
So, pollution in the Northern Hemisphere causes the Southern Hemisphere to cool down:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vnh/from:1998/plot/hadcrut3vnh/from:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3vsh/from:1998/plot/hadcrut3vsh/from:1998/trend
Colur me sceptic. I think we are up against something far bigger than some soot and SO2 from China.
The problem is that the observational results don’t agree with the models. Not that this should be surprising since linear models can’t cope with chaotic systems.
Not to mention the fact that there has been some skulduggery with models – just google the comments on Forster and Gregory’s work. Climate etc has some good comments.
You are right in being suspicious that “plants grown in a Co2 rich atmosphere have far less nutrition in them” I have a degree in Horticulture and that statement is pulled from some ignorant sods nether region, had I used such a statement while earning my degree I would have failed miserably.
Basically;
Carbon dioxide is a key reactant in photosynthesis,
Carbon and oxygen are absorbed from the air, six molecules of water plus six molecules of carbon dioxide produce one molecule of sugar plus six molecules of oxygen, Plants control the amount of sugar it needs through stomata by regulating the amount of Carbon it absorbs from the atmosphere, basically the plant takes what it needs dependent on the mineral nutrients available in the growing media to grow healthy and strong usually the maximum amount is adsorbed during times when the plant is competing for sunlight.
Other mineral nutrients including water are obtained from the soil.
Primary macronutrients: nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K)
Secondary macronutrients such as calcium (Ca), sulphur (S), magnesium (Mg) and Silicon (Si)
and trace minerals: boron (B), chlorine (Cl), manganese (Mn), iron (Fe), zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), molybdenum (Mo), nickel (Ni), selenium (Se), and sodium (Na).
Any such claim can be easily researched online from respectable sources, the whole process is pretty well understood which is why such claims never last long and are as ignorant as they sound, Maximum levels of Co2 are beneficial to plant life, I’d even go so far as to say all organic life.