I am the Guy On The Internet who QUESTIONS Global Warming. rpenner is correct: I am a nut... a 73-year old has-been with nothing to do.

I have lived long enough, however, to have observed the scientific community deviate over some popular notion-of-the-day on several occasions in the past.

Here is a prime example: Remember the "Y2K Problem". The public was suckered. Many scientists were suckered. Many computer scientists suckered the public, and they made millions and millions of dollars as a result. To wit:

It has been 10 years since the initial concern and the eventual over-reaction to the Y2K Problem began. Y2K was going to be a national and global disaster. There were reports that even some kitchen appliances would stop operating. Soldier of Fortune magazine ran an article suggesting the food supplies, fuel, arms and ammunition which should be stockpiled by the survivors to prepare for the anticipated disorder and anarchy which was certain to occur.

I don't recall any of the thousands of computer science experts coming forward to assert the limited magnitude of the Y2K Problem and the unjustified concern, overreaction, and unnecessary expenditure that was taking place... The experts were too busy making money from the Y2K Problem. The total cost of the work done preparing for Y2K is estimated at 300 billion dollars ($300,000,000,000).

Italy did very little to prepare for Y2K and Italy had very little Y2K Problem.
USA spent billions preparing for Y2K and USA had very little Y2K Problem.

In 1975, there was a great concern about the Global Cooling crises.
In 2009, there was a great concern about the Global Warming crises.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Use caution, lads.

James T. Conklin, P.E.
Longwood, FL 32779

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2009...mate_skepti.php
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2009/05/..._literature.php

The original poster is questioning nothing. Instead, the original poster is working a a (possibly unwitting) cog in a propaganda machine which is not fact-based. Same tired distortions, distractions and lies. Denialists of all stripes resort to such tactics because they wish to impose their views upon the universe instead of looking at evidence.

"Knowledge is power; Nature, in order to be commanded must be obeyed." Bacon, 1620.

Let's look at some of these old-fashioned examples of denialism in the rough order in which the original posted re-used them.

• In 1988 Hansen predicted dire warming over the next decade and he was off by 300%. Why in the world should we listen to the same doom and gloom from him today? (We Don't Know Why It's Happening: We Can't Be Sure, Modeling: Scenarios, Urban Myths, Non Scientific, Specious)
• Temperatures plummeted over the last year (2007-2008). If you look at this data from the Met Office Hadley Centre you can clearly see that in one year alone global temperatures dropped .6oC, an amount equal to the entire warming over the 20th century claimed by the IPCC. (There's nothing happening: Contradictory Evidence, Temperature, Extreme Events: Temperature Records, Misinformed, Cherry Picking, Naive, Specious)
• The current warming is just part of a natural cycle. (Climate Change is Natural: It's Part of a Natural Change, Temperature, FUD, Specious) With Graph Intact
• According to the IPCC, 150 billion tonnes of carbon go into the atmosphere from natural processes every year. This is almost 30 times the amount of carbon humans emit. What difference will any reductions we try to do make? (Climate Change is Natural: It's Part of a Natural Change, Climate Forcings: Greenhouse Gases, Misinformed, FUD, Naive)
• The alarmists were predicting the onset of an Ice Age in the 70's, now it's too much warming! Why should we believe them? (We Don't Know Why It's Happening: We Can't Be Sure, Temperature, Misinformed, Urban Myths, Non scientific, Specious)
• It was way colder than normal today in Wagga Wagga, this is proof that there is no Global Warming. (There's nothing happening: Contradictory Evidence, Temperature, Extreme Events: Temperature Records, Cherry Picking, FUD, Naive)
• Some stations, in the US for example, show cooling trends. If there really were global warming, it would be warming everywhere. (There's nothing happening: Contradictory Evidence, Temperature, Cherry Picking, FUD, Naive) With Pictures still working
• Global Warming is just a hoax perpetrated by environmental extremists and liberals who want an excuse for more big government. (There's nothing happening: No Consensus, Scientific Process, Non scientific, Silly)
• The Antarctic Ice sheets are actually growing, which would not be happening if Global Warming were real. (There's nothing happening: Contradictory Evidence, Cryosphere: Sea Ice, Misinformed, Cherry Picking, FUD, Specious)

nobody knows or reads what they say...

I am the Some Guy On the Internet Denies Global Warming... who is a nut.

My thanks to rpenner. You are a good moderator. I did read all of the scienceblogs.com/illconsidered rebuttals to my common Global Warming skeptic arguments.

I will now state something that has never been seen on that website or written by anyone who is making money from the Global Warming Crisis:

I learned many things. I was wrong about several things. Many things that I had claimed were in error or subject to debate. I had been misled about several of my claims. I apologize for diluting the time of rpenner and everyone who is more knowledgeable than myself. BUT, I have not cost the nation any unwarranted concern, perturbation, inconvenience, or money.

"This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." -- William Shakespeare

I am an engineer not a scientist. As such, I have a practical approach to solving problems. I can discern the futility of separating fly feces from pepper.

I am frustrated by people who do not know the difference between degrees Centigrade and Centigrade degrees, or the difference between temperature and heat, or are oblivious to the laws of thermodynamics, or believe that hydrogen is an obvious and plentiful clean fuel for cars.

rpenner: I did offer a questioning (not denying) evaluation of the ARCTIC ICE MELTING phenomenon. Arctic ice melting, and the poor polar bears, is the most ubiquitous evidence of Global Warming refered to by the media. I observed Arctic ice melting from the standpoint of (1) A Mechanical Engineer, (2) The Sea Ice, (3) The Arctic Ocean, (4) A Frozen Shrimp, and (5) again as a Mechanical Engineer. I then proposed an alternative cause for Arctic Ice Melting.

James T. Conklin, P.E.
Longwood, FL 32779

"Global Warming" At A Glance

http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Look.html

The world's temperature is a difficult metric to capture. This webpage provides
6 data charts and 57 data graphs from: UAH MSU | RSS MSU | NCDC | GISTEMP |
Hadley CET | Armagh | Hadley CRUG | Radiosonde balloon | SIDC SSN | and more.

The webpage confirms that the percent of fly feces in the pepper is directly proportional
to the number of data, charts, and graphs required to define it.

"Global Warming" In One Sentence

The single graph which defines Global Warming is
the measured Global Temperature Anomaly vs. Time.

This is the One Sentence which defines Global Warming:

"Global Warming" consists of a positive Temperature Anomaly of
0.5 Centigrade Degrees between 1978 and 2008 (30 years),
or +0.017 Centigrade Degrees per year.

That, people, is equivalent to some fly feces in the pepper.
Plot Global Temp data in degrees rather than tenths of degrees
and Al Gore's hockey stick becomes a broom stick.

James T. Conklin, P.E.
Longwood, FL 32779


The Hockey Stick Graph: http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipc...wg1/fig2-20.htm
Note that the data ends in 1999.

Personally I think it's safe to say that the global warming on Mars is not manmade.

Is it still warming up?

The Mars atmosphere is 95.3% CO2.
The temperature at 1.5 Meters from the surface was measured at -17C to -107C.

Mars would not have Global Warming if its atmosphere was 100% CO2.

James T. Conklin, P.E.
Longwood, FL 32779

Thank you for admitting to 'Nut.' Previously this thread was subtitled 'Not yet proven not a Nut' with the default assumption that you were not a nut. But as you prefer the label 'nut' to 'not a nut,' I need no longer tax myself trying to prove the original assumption.

You claim to "not cost the nation any unwarranted concern, perturbation, inconvenience, or money" and yet you adopt the classic tactics of the denialist, the concern troll, and the agitprop. You claim, ludicrously to only ask questions, and yet you spread decade-old lies without even the basic honesty to indicate the source they were copied from. This is a foul in honest debate which is as glaring as an engineer at trial concluding that a load-bearing bridge was properly designed because of (2/5)MR².

"I can discern the futility of separating fly feces from pepper." Moronic use of an American colloquialism by an alleged engineer. Every chemist could do this with chromatography. Every competent engineer could envision an automated spectrographic or other electronic means of discriminating them and subsequently sorting the co-mingled specks. And as a practical matter, the whole purpose of a board of health inspection is to ensure that even in the most rundown restaurant this is not an actual problem. But science quibbles like the ones you bring us with specious facts and silly misconceptions are actual fly specks and not anything like human knowledge of climate change. Scientific theories have to explain all observations within their domain of applicability, and you seem to have trouble with even defining the basics of this domain.

Please demonstrate these alleged arctic undersea volcanoes dumped enough BTUs (or Joules) into the ocean to melt the millions of square kilometers of ice. You propose an invisible cause for a visible effect, when we have a visible, modeled, and consistent cause. Yes, there are some volcanoes, but on the BTU scale they are negligible and not proximate to the melting ice.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/...arctic-sea-ice/
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq.html#volcanoes

Your "Global Warming at a Glance" post once again confuses temperature with climate.

And as for the Hockey Stick graph, published in January 2001, it has data up through 1999 -- how is that important? See Figures 1b and 2.20 of http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipc...tar/wg1/005.htm

But if you want better data, don't rely on 10-year old graphs.

And your Mars post once again confuses temperature with climate with climate change.

Please do not get unpleasant and offensive, Dr. Robin.
You called me an "alleged engineer". That was not kind.
You went on to explain in detail how you could separate
fly feces from pepper. You are much better than I am.

BUT... You did not and cannot deny the truth of my statement:

"Global Warming" consists of a positive Temperature Anomaly of
0.5 Centigrade Degrees between 1978 and 2008 (30 years),
or +0.017 Centigrade Degrees per year.

This is the definition of the "Global Warming" crisis,
and a paradigm for Occam's razor.

I thought that a moderator was supposed to foster constructive input
and sincere dialogue... not trash a contributor and belittle his input.

Jim Conklin

It's my job to water the flowers and pull on the weeds.

You really haven't responded to anything with a fact-based argument.

If you are a HVAC engineer, here's some simple figures for you to chew on:

Now that you have abandoned your dispute of whether global warming exists, you are trying to ridicule the size of the effect. But given the weight of just the atmosphere, the heat capacity of dry air, and the figure you quoted, you are talking of an imbalance of Earth's energy balance of at least 2.6 Terawatts.

But what with water and land heating up as well, the actual number is much higher. (Perhaps some kind soul will look up the number from one of the climate models to tell us.) It's something like the order the entire energy budget of humanity which Wikipedia cites at about 15 TW.

It's still a small fraction of the 174,000 TW of sunlight the Earth intercepts constantly (about half of which is reflected by clouds reducing the amount which hits ground to about 89,000 TW), but as you now admit that the Earth's energy budget is out-of-whack, what possible purpose does it serve to pooh-pooh the magnitude of the figure.

But instead of thinking about what your read about and coming up with reasonable counters, you just copied the most batshit-crazy stuff off the Internet, some of which is a decade old. You don't come across as reasonable. You look like you haven't considered this issue from any angle other than "I don't want to believe it."

Note that all the words in all my posts have been my own words except
when citing, quoting, or naming references.

I scored 90% on the Global Warming Test. Everyone should take it: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/GlobWarmTest/start.html

I was not aware that Global Warming may increase nighttime temperatures,
but daytime temperatures will not increase as a result of Global Warming.

Question: Is the following quote just more batshit-crazy stuff off the Internet?

"Generally understood, but rarely publicized is the fact that 95% of the
greenhouse effect is due solely to natural water vapor. Of the remaining 5%,
only 0.2% to 0.3% of the greenhouse effect (depending on whose numbers you use)
is due to emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases from human sources."

The quote above is from: [URL=http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/global_warming.html]

Please, everyone who knows the facts, weigh in on that question.

P.S. "Water vapor" as quoted above is technically incorrect language.
The author is referring to "super-heated steam"... unsaturated H2O gas.

James T. Conklin (not embarrassed to use my name)

174,000 TW of sunlight falls onto Earth. While some might be reflected by clouds, all that hits the surface must be re-emitted by blackbody radiation to space for the Earth to be at constant average temperature. But this is currently out of balance by a measurable amount.

Every climate scientist and any chemist or physicist who spends even 15 minutes thinking about it will realize that without a greenhouse effect, the Earth's distance from the sun would render the Earth's average surface temperature at 255 Kelvin, -18 Celsius, 0 Fahrenheit.

Lots of people know that water vapor is a greenhouse gas. But water vapor is also responsible for cloud formation, which cuts the sunlight hitting the Earth's surface by about half. Every chemist or physicist knows that water vapor is chemically water and has an equilibrium amount in the air which is controlled by temperature. You refer to water vapor as 'superheated steam' in the jargon of steam engine engineers but because local conditions of temperature and pressure are changing (weather) the local definition of 'saturated' is subject to change. Since both weather and climate researchers use the water vapor, your attempt to criticize their entire fields is specious and silly.

Carbon dioxide and methane on the other hand do not condense out of Earth's atmosphere at anything like Earth's average surface temperature. Their hydro-, geo- and bio-chemistry proceed at various rates and are proper subjects for scientific study. Those studies indicate that Man has increased the amount of carbon dioxide by about 35%. This drives up global equilibrium temperature, which causes the equilibrium amount of water vapor to rise. So talking about water vapor being a more powerful greenhouse gas is a red herring, since there is no water vapor knob for mankind to twiddle and the discussion is about the CO2 knob.

Daytime temperatures have, do, and will rise due to global warming. Just because the sun is in the sky doesn't mean that the ground isn't still trying radiate heat into space. So on that point your test maker is wrong.

Isolating and pooh-poohing mankind's contribution to CO2 as a percentage of a total global warming effect is specious and unscientific when the 35% increase of CO2 results in more water vapor in the air, and does not address where the final equilibrium climate of Earth will be at. You have conceded that the average temperature is rising, which means this equilibrium is not yet achieved.

IS "WATER VAPOR" A GREENHOUSE GAS?



Webster's Dictionary

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vapor

Vapor: "1: diffused matter (as smoke or fog) suspended floating in the air and impairing its transparency"
____________________

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Engineering
http://mhprofessional.com/getpage.php?c=en...CFQZeswodsFrK3A

Vapor: "A gas at a temperature below the critical temperature, so that it can be liquefied by compression, without lowering the temperature."
____________________

Water Phase Changes:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/phase.html

The Temperature vs. Enthalpy graph for Water shows how water is transformed from a liquid into a gas by the addition of heat. The process of transforming water from a liquid to a gas is called vaporization. As a Mechanical Engineer, in school and in practice, I was taught to refer to water during the process of vaporization as transforming from liquid water to water vapor (wet steam) to saturated steam to super-heated steam (dry steam).

"Water Vapor", by its engineering definition, is a mixture of liquid and gas. Example: Clouds.

James T. Conklin, P.E.
Longwood, FL 32779

That's pathetic. Dictionaries don't define words, they give examples of how words have been used.

In both weather and climate jargons, water vapor is a term of art -- jargon specific to those fields. Looking up water and vapor separately is not always helpful in deciphering a term of art.



And you know you are being unhelpful because definition 2a of your Webster source above is "a substance in the gaseous state as distinguished from the liquid or solid state"

So you've gone from denial of the existence of man-made global warming to pooh-poohing it's importance to witless pettifoggery and dictionary abuse. You present us with sub-standard evidence as if that was going to contradict the consensus opinion which is based on all the evidence. In short, the universe does not conform to your position.

So why do you even have a position?

IS "WATER VAPOR" A GREENHOUSE GAS?



Thank you, rpenner, you pulled too hard on this "weed".
In your haste to belittle me, you have proved my point with your own words.

You said it: WATER VAPOR IS NOT A GREENHOUSE GAS. IT IS CLOUDS.

James T. Conklin (Proud to use my name.)

Where did rpenner say that water vapor is not a greenhouse gas?

Where does it say the two are mutually exclusive?

If it reflects and scatters sunlight in the atmosphere and absorbes infrared, it's a greenhouse gas.

Pettifoggery: U R DOIN IT RONG!

Summing Up On What Is "Water Vapor"

My engineering practices are Pettifoggery. [Moderator: Since engineering and non-climate-science dictionary definitions of 'water vapor' need not apply to the use of the term within climate science, yes. Since your first source also defined vapor as gas (def 2a), then this was considered a FAIL in the vernacular of PWND/FAIL l33t speak.]
Global Warming science is Art. [Moderator: 'Term of art' has a definition in law, A word or phrase that has special meaning in a particular context. (West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2.) FAIL]

In Oceania, the dictionary was continually revised by the Party. Until...
War became Peace.
Freedom became Slavery.
Ignorance became Strength. [Moderator: Exactly what you are doing.]

After 10 years in the aerospace industry in rocket propulsion,
I worked 30 years in the sewer rehabilitation industry.
Yes, I got my hands dirty... very and often.
You can have the last word. Mock me. [Moderator: Our average reader is already astute enough to obviate the need for me to do so. But I have not mocked you. I have taken your outrageous stance as an agitprop quite seriously. It's what you say that I mock, because what you say is irrational and not fact-based.]

James T. Conklin [Moderator: Who can't even be bothered to explain the basis for his actions. Who lies when he suggests he is here just to ask questions. Who has not yet once given a demonstration of why his engineering background gives him any insight whatsoever into the global climate.]

This is thread titled, "Some Guy On the Internet Denies Global Warming" on forum= 22.



Statistics Needed

The Deniers -- Part I

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post – Canada

Published: Tuesday, November 28, 2006
In the global warming debate, there are essentially two broad camps. One believes that the science is settled, that global warming is serious and man-made, and that urgent action must be taken to mitigate or prevent a future calamity. The other believes that the science is far from settled, that precious little is known about global warming or its likely effects, and that prudence dictates more research and caution before intervening massively in the economy.

The "science is settled" camp, much the larger of the two, includes many eminent scientists with impressive credentials. But just who are the global warming skeptics who question the studies from the great majority of climate scientists and what are their motives?



Many in the "science is settled" camp claim that the skeptics are untrustworthy -- that they are either cranks or otherwise at the periphery of their profession, or that they are in the pockets of Exxon or other corporate interests. The skeptics are increasingly being called Deniers, a term used by analogy to the Holocaust, to convey the catastrophe that could befall mankind if action is not taken. Increasingly, too, the press is taking up the Denier theme, convincing the public that the global-warming debate is over.



In this, the first of a series, I examine The Deniers, starting with Edward Wegman. Dr. Wegman is a professor at the Center for Computational Statistics at George Mason University, chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, and board member of the American Statistical Association. Few statisticians in the world have CVs to rival his (excerpts appear nearby).



Wegman became involved in the global-warming debate after the energy and commerce committee of the U.S. House of Representatives asked him to assess one of the hottest debates in the global-warming controversy: the statistical validity of work by Michael Mann. You may not have heard of Mann or read Mann's study but you have often heard its famous conclusion: that the temperature increases that we have been experiencing are "likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years" and that the "1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year" of the millennium. You may have also heard of Mann's hockey-stick shaped graph, which showed relatively stable temperatures over most of the last millennium (the hockey stick's long handle), followed by a sharp increase (the hockey stick's blade) this century.



Mann's findings were arguably the single most influential study in swaying the public debate, and in 2001 they became the official view of the International Panel for Climate Change, the UN body that is organizing the worldwide effort to combat global warming. But Mann's work also had its critics, particularly two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who published peer-reviewed critiques of their own.



Wegman accepted the energy and commerce committee's assignment, and agreed to assess the Mann controversy pro bono. He conducted his third-party review by assembling an expert panel of statisticians, who also agreed to work pro bono. Wegman also consulted outside statisticians, including the Board of the American Statistical Association. At its conclusion, the Wegman review entirely vindicated the Canadian critics and repudiated Mann's work.



"Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported," Wegman stated, adding that "The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable." When Wegman corrected Mann's statistical mistakes, the hockey stick disappeared.



Wegman found that Mann made a basic error that "may be easily overlooked by someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr. Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimate studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians." Instead, this small group of climate scientists were working on their own, largely in isolation, and without the academic scrutiny needed to ferret out false assumptions.



Worse, the problem also applied more generally, to the broader climate-change and meteorological community, which also relied on statistical techniques in their studies. "[I]f statistical methods are being used, then statisticians ought to be funded partners engaged in the research to insure as best we possibly can that the best quality science is being done," Wegman recommended, noting that "there are a host of fundamental statistical questions that beg answers in understanding climate dynamics."



In other words, Wegman believes that much of the climate science that has been done should be taken with a grain of salt -- although the studies may have been peer reviewed, the reviewers were often unqualified in statistics. Past studies, he believes, should be reassessed by competent statisticians and in future, the climate science world should do better at incorporating statistical know-how.



One place to start is with the American Meteorological Society, which has a committee on probability and statistics. "I believe it is amazing for a committee whose focus is on statistics and probability that of the nine members only two are also members of the American Statistical Association, the premier statistical association in the United States, and one of those is a recent PhD with an assistant-professor appointment in a medical school." As an example of the statistical barrenness of the climate-change world, Wegman cited the American Meteorological Association's 2006 Conference on Probability and Statistics in the Atmospheric Sciences, where only eight presenters out of 62 were members of the American Statistical Association.



While Wegman's advice -- to use trained statisticians in studies reliant on statistics -- may seem too obvious to need stating, the "science is settled" camp resists it. Mann's hockey-stick graph may be wrong, many experts now acknowledge, but they assert that he nevertheless came to the right conclusion.



To which Wegman, and doubtless others who want more rigourous science, shake their heads in disbelief. As Wegman summed it up to the energy and commerce committee in later testimony: "I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn't matter because the answer is correct anyway. Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science." With bad science, only true believers can assert that they nevertheless obtained the right answer.



Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

Email: Lawrence Solomon@nextcity.com.



THE CV OF A DENIER

Edward Wegman received his Ph.D. degree in mathematical statistics from the University of Iowa. In 1978, he went to the Office of Naval Research, where he headed the Mathematical Sciences Division with responsibility Navy-wide for basic research programs. He coined the phrase computational statistics, and developed a high-profile research area around this concept, which focused on techniques and methodologies that could not be achieved without the capabilities of modern computing resources and led to a revolution in contemporary statistical graphics. Dr. Wegman was the original program director of the basic research program in Ultra High Speed Computing at the Strategic Defense Initiative's Innovative Science and Technology Office. He has served as editor or associate editor of numerous prestigious journals and has published more than 160 papers and eight books.

[The original storyline[s] is given as www.canada.com/]

The above 'Denier' profile has been{at least stored} on my computer since Sunday, July 08, 2007. Yesterday, I did a little follow-up...

www.aviso.oceanobs.com/en/missions/future-missions/cryosat/index.html
first satellite Cryosat was lost on launch, on October 8, 2005, due to an anomaly in the launch sequence. A replacement will be launched in November 2009.

More information on the mission (Esa website)

Whoops...wrong part number. This is the one I followed up to find if the satellite mentioned had already launched. Evidently no,

Launch on 2009/11/16
End Date "three-and-a half-year mission"
Altitude 717 km
Inclination 92°
Repetitivity 369 days with 30 day sub-cycle



Polar Scientists On Thin Ice

The Deniers -- Part IV

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post – Canada

Published: Friday, December 15, 2006


A great melt is on in Antarctica. Its northern peninsula -- a jut of land extending to about 1,200 kilometres from Chile -- has seen a drastic increase in temperature, a thinning of ice sheets and, most alarmingly, a collapse of ice shelves. The Larsen A ice shelf, 1,600 square kilometres in size, fell off in 1995. The Wilkins ice shelf, 1,100 square kilometres, fell off in 1998 and the Larsen B, 13,500 square kilometres, dropped off in 2002. Meanwhile, the northern Antarctic Peninsula's temperatures have soared by six degrees celsius in the last 50 years.


Antarctica represents the greatest threat to the globe from global warming, bar none. If Antarctica's ice melts, the world's oceans will rise, flooding low-lying lands where much of the world's population lives. Not only would their mass migration spawn hardships for the individual families retreating from the rising waters, the world would also be losing fertile deltas that feed tens of millions of people. This chilling scenario understandably sends shudders through concerned citizens around the world, and steels the resolve of those determined to stop the cataclysm of global warming.


But much confounding evidence exists. As one example, at the South Pole, where the U.S. decades ago established a station, temperatures have actually fallen since 1957. Neither is Antarctica's advance or retreat a new question raised by the spectre of global warming: This is the oldest scientific question of all about the Antarctic ice sheet.


Enter Duncan Wingham, Professor of Climate Physics at University College London and Director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling. Dr. Wingham has been pursuing this polar puzzle for much of his professional life and, but for an accident in space, he might have had the answer at hand by now.


Dr. Wingham is Principal Scientist of the European Space Agency's CryoSat Satellite Mission, a $130-million project designed to map changes in the depth of ice using ultra-precise instrumentation. Sadly for Dr. Wingham and for science as a whole, CryoSat fell into the Arctic Ocean after its launch in October, 2005, when a rocket launcher malfunctioned. Dr Wingham will now need to wait until 2009 before CryoSat-2, CryoSat's even more precise successor, can launch and begin relaying the data that should conclusively determine whether Antarctica's ice sheets are thinning or not. Apart from satellite technology, no known way exists to reliably determine changes in mass over a vast and essentially unexplorable continent covered in ice several kilometres thick.


But CryoSat was not the only satellite available to polar scientists. Dr. Wingham has been collecting satellite data for years, and arriving at startling conclusions. Early last year at a European Union Space Conference in Brussels, for example, Dr. Wingham revealed that data from a European Space Agency satellite showed Antarctic thinning was no more common than thickening, and concluded that the spectacular collapse of the ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula was much more likely to have followed natural current fluctuations than global warming.


"The Antarctic Peninsula is exceptional because it juts out so far north," Dr. Wingham told the press at the time. As well, scientists have been drawn to the peninsula because it is relatively accessible and its climate is moderate, allowing it to be more easily studied than the harsh interior of the continent. Because many scientists have been preoccupied with what was, in effect, the tip of the iceberg, they missed the mass of evidence that lay beneath the surface.


"One cannot be certain, because packets of heat in the atmosphere do not come conveniently labelled 'the contribution of anthropogenic warming,' " Dr. Wingham elaborated, but the evidence is not "favourable to the notion we are seeing the results of global warming".


Last summer, Dr. Wingham and three colleagues published an article in the journal of the Royal Society that casts further doubt on the notion that global warming is adversely affecting Antarctica. By studying satellite data from 1992 to 2003 that surveyed 85% of the East Antarctic ice sheet and 51% of the West Antarctic ice sheet (72% of the ice sheet covering the entire land mass), they discovered that the Antarctic ice sheet is growing at the rate of 5 millimetres per year (plus or minus 1 mm per year). That makes Antarctica a sink, not a source, of ocean water. According to their best estimates, Antarctica will "lower [authors' italics] global sea levels by 0.08 mm" per year.


If these findings are validated in future by CryoSat-2 and other developments that are able to assess the 28% of Antarctica not yet surveyed, the low-lying areas of the world will have weathered the worst of the global warming predictions: The populations of these areas -- in Bangladesh, in the Maldives, and elsewhere -- will have found that, if anything, they can look forward to a future with more nutrient-rich seacoast, not less.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.
Email: Lawrence Solomon@nextcity.com.

CV OF A DENIER:

Duncan Wingham was educated at Leeds and Bath Universities where he gained a B.Sc. and PhD. in Physics. He was appointed to a chair in the Department of Space and Climate Physics in 1996, and to head of the Department of Earth Sciences in October, 2005. Prof. Wingham is a member of the National Environmental Research Council's Science and Technology Board and Earth Observation Experts Group. He is a director of the NERC Centre for Polar Observation & Modelling and principal scientist of the European Space Agency CryoSat Satellite Mission, the first ESA Earth Sciences satellite selected through open, scientific competition.

well the planet is 4.5 billion years old we have had ice ages an shifts in weather before.

global warming is possible i guess but tis could just be the planets natural course