NASA Image: Oil Slick in the Gulf of Mexico

On Saturday, June 19, 2010, oil spread northeast from the leaking Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil appears as a maze of silvery-gray ribbons in this photo-like image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

The location of the leaking well is marked with a white dot. North of the well, a spot of black may be smoke; reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say that oil and gas continue to be captured and burned as part of the emergency response efforts.

The large image provided above is at MODIS’ maximum spatial resolution (level of detail). Twice-daily images of the Gulf of Mexico are available from the MODIS Rapid Response Team in additional resolutions and formats, including a georeferenced version that can be used in Google Earth.

• References
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2010, June 20). Deepwater Horizon Incident, Gulf of Mexico. National Ocean Service, Office of Response and Restoration. Retrieved June 21, 2010.

NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey

NASA Prepares for Potentially Damaging 2011 Meteor Shower

By Leonard David | Space.com…

NASA is assessing the risk to spacecraft posed by the upcoming 2011 Draconid meteor shower, a seven-hour storm of tiny space rocks that has the potential to ding major Earth-orbiting spacecraft like the crewed International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope.

The meteor shower risk assessment is actually more art than science, and there has been some variation in the projected intensity levels of the 2011 Draconids by meteoroid forecasters. But spacecraft operators are already being notified to weigh defensive steps.

Current meteor forecast models project a strong Draconid outburst, possibly a full-blown storm, on Oct. 8, 2011, according to William Cooke of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The Draconids do present some risk to spacecraft, Cooke confirmed. They could potentially become the next significant event in low-Earth orbit as far as meteoroids are concerned, he added.

Cooke and Danielle Moser of Stanley, Inc., also of Huntsville, presented their Draconid data at Meteoroids 2010 – an international conference on minor bodies in the solar system held May 24-28 in Breckenridge, Colo. The conference was sponsored in part by NorthWest Research Associates/CoRADivision, NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research.

Less flashy, but risk exists

The yearly Draconids are not known for their bright meteor displays, Cooke said.

Predicted intensity rates for 2011 span an order of magnitude, he added, with maximum Zenithal Hourly Rate, or ZHR, ranging from a few tens to several hundred as viewed by a single observer.

A Marshall Space Flight Center Meteoroid Stream Model based on radar and optical observations of past Draconid showers suggests that the maximum rate will be several hundreds per hour.

So why the worry?

Cooke said that a significant fraction of spacecraft anomalies produced by shower meteoroids are caused by electrostatic discharges when meteoroid meets satellite.

And while no spacecraft electrical problems were reported during the strong Draconid outbursts of 1985 and 1998, he said that the lack of past anomalies should not be taken as carte blanche for satellite operators to ignore in 2011.

The chance of electrical anomalies is low, however, due to the Draconids slow speed, Cooke pointed out.

“We’re already working with NASA programs to deal with spacecraft risk,” Cooke said. “I imagine when the word gets out there will be a Draconid outburst, I’ll get the usual calls from comsat companies as well as government space programs,” he told SPACE.com.

Out on the limb

The International Space Station is heavily armored against orbital debris.

That being the case, “we don’t expect anything to go wrong there,” Cooke said.

However, the Draconids will appear above the Earth’s limb making it a spectacular looking out-the-windows celestial show for the space station crew.

“I have no concerns about the space station. Even if the Draconids were a full-scale meteor storm I would be confident that the space station program would take the right steps to mitigate the risk,” Cooke said.

The most radical step would be to reorient the space station, Cooke said.

“But frankly, given the flux levels, I don’t think they are going to have to do that,” he added. “But that’s their call. I’ll give then the flux levels and they’ll make the decision.”

One measure that space station officials could take, he added, is not to perform spacewalks during the shower.

For the Hubble Space Telescope, if its operators deem the risk high enough, they will point the observatory away from the Draconid radiant – the point from which the shower appears to emanate.

“Any time you take a mitigation strategy, like changing a spacecraft’s attitude or turning off high-voltage, that incurs risk as well,” Cooke said.

Caution is key

Each spacecraft is unique, and components have differing damage thresholds, so programs are encouraged to conduct analyses to determine whether or not mitigation strategies are necessary for their vehicles ahead of next year’s Draconids.

Cooke said that the spacecraft threat from meteor showers in the past – particularly the 1998 Leonids – produced more hype than hypervelocity impacts.

“We really didn’t understand what was going on,” he added. “Now we have a much better feel. But the Leonids did sensitize spacecraft operators to worry about meteor showers. Perhaps, sometimes, they worry more than they should.”

In early 2011, Cooke said that he’ll be revising his Draconid prediction – also making use of data from other forecasters around the globe – which will be released to spacecraft operators.

“There’s also an awful lot of windage in there too,” Cooke added. “We’re like the weather reporters…our forecast changes…and the general trend is always downward,” Cooke said.

Still, caution is the watchword.

“Because we can now forecast them, we have a way of putting it. If you are hit by a sporadic [meteor], it’s an act of God. If you are hit by a shower meteoroid, it’s an act of negligence,” Cooke said.

Article from: Space.com

What’s Wrong With the Sun?

From: newscientist.com…

Sunspots come and go, but recently they have mostly gone. For centuries, astronomers have recorded when these dark blemishes on the solar surface emerge, only for them to fade away again after a few days, weeks or months. Thanks to their efforts, we know that sunspot numbers ebb and flow in cycles lasting about 11 years.

But for the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged for nearly a hundred years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise. “This is solar behaviour we haven’t seen in living memory,” says David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The sun is under scrutiny as never before thanks to an armada of space telescopes. The results they beam back are portraying our nearest star, and its influence on Earth, in a new light. Sunspots and other clues indicate that the sun’s magnetic activity is diminishing, and that the sun may even be shrinking. Together the results hint that something profound is happening inside the sun. The big question is what?

The stakes have never been higher. Groups of sunspots forewarn of gigantic solar storms that can unleash a billion times more energy than an atomic bomb. Fears that these giant solar eruptions could create havoc on Earth, and disputes over the sun’s role in climate change, are adding urgency to these studies. When NASA and the European Space Agency launched the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory almost 15 years ago, “understanding the solar cycle was not one of its scientific objectives”, says Bernhard Fleck, the mission’s project scientist. “Now it is one of the key questions.”

Sun behaving badly

Sunspots are windows into the sun’s magnetic soul. They form where giant loops of magnetism, generated deep inside the sun, well up and burst through the surface, leading to a localised drop in temperature which we see as a dark patch. Any changes in sunspot numbers reflect changes inside the sun. “During this transition, the sun is giving us a real glimpse into its interior,” says Hathaway.

When sunspot numbers drop at the end of each 11-year cycle, solar storms die down and all becomes much calmer. This “solar minimum” doesn’t last long. Within a year, the spots and storms begin to build towards a new crescendo, the next solar maximum.

What’s special about this latest dip is that the sun is having trouble starting the next solar cycle. The sun began to calm down in late 2007, so no one expected many sunspots in 2008. But computer models predicted that when the spots did return, they would do so in force. Hathaway was reported as thinking the next solar cycle would be a “doozy”: more sunspots, more solar storms and more energy blasted into space. Others predicted that it would be the most active solar cycle on record. The trouble was, no one told the sun.

The latest solar cycle was supposed to be the most active on record. The trouble was, no one told the sun

The first sign that the prediction was wrong came when 2008 turned out to be even calmer than expected. That year, the sun was spot-free 73 per cent of the time, an extreme dip even for a solar minimum. Only the minimum of 1913 was more pronounced, with 85 per cent of that year clear.

As 2009 arrived, solar physicists looked for some action. They didn’t get it. The sun continued to languish until mid-December, when the largest group of sunspots to emerge for several years appeared. Finally, a return to normal? Not really.

Even with the solar cycle finally under way again, the number of sunspots has so far been well below expectations. Something appears to have changed inside the sun, something the models did not predict. But what?

The flood of observations from space and ground-based telescopes suggests that the answer lies in the behaviour of two vast conveyor belts of gas that endlessly cycle material and magnetism through the sun’s interior and out across the surface. On average it takes 40 years for the conveyor belts to complete a circuit (see diagram).

When Hathaway’s team looked over the observations to find out where their models had gone wrong, they noticed that the conveyor-belt flows of gas across the sun’s surface have been speeding up since 2004.

The circulation deep within the sun tells a different story. Rachel Howe and Frank Hill of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, have used observations of surface disturbances, caused by the solar equivalent of seismic waves, to infer what conditions are like within the sun. Analysing data from 2009, they found that while the surface flows had sped up, the internal ones had slowed to a crawl.

These findings have thrown our best computer models of the sun into disarray. “It is certainly challenging our theories,” says Hathaway, “but that’s kinda nice.”

It is not just our understanding of the sun that stands to benefit from this work. The extent to which changes in the sun’s activity can affect our climate is of paramount concern. It is also highly controversial. There are those who seek to prove that the solar variability is the major cause of climate change, an idea that would let humans and their greenhouse gases off the hook. Others are equally evangelical in their assertions that the sun plays only a minuscule role in climate change.

If this dispute could be resolved by an experiment, the obvious strategy would be to see what happens when you switch off one potential cause of climate change and leave the other alone. The extended collapse in solar activity these past two years may be precisely the right sort of test, in that it has significantly changed the amount of solar radiation bombarding our planet. “As a natural experiment, this is the very best thing to happen,” says Joanna Haigh, a climatologist at Imperial College London. “Now we have to see how the Earth responds.”

The climate link

Mike Lockwood at the University of Reading, UK, may already have identified one response – the unusually frigid European winter of 2009/10. He has studied records covering data stretching back to 1650, and found that severe European winters are much more likely during periods of low solar activity (New Scientist, 17 April, p 6). This fits an emerging picture of solar activity giving rise to a small change in the global climate overall, yet large regional effects.

Another example is the Maunder minimum, the period from 1645 to 1715 during which sunspots virtually disappeared and solar activity plummeted. If a similar spell of solar inactivity were to begin now and continue until 2100, it would mitigate any temperature rise through global warming by 0.3 °C on average, according to calculations by Georg Feulner and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. However, something amplified the impact of the Maunder minimum on northern Europe, ushering in a period known as the Little Ice Age, when colder than average winters became more prevalent and the average temperature in Europe appeared to drop by between 1 and 2 °C.

A corresponding boost appears to be associated with peaks in solar output. In 2008, Judith Lean of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC published a study showing that high solar activity has a disproportionate warming influence on northern Europe (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 35, p L18701).

So why does solar activity have these effects? Modellers may already be onto the answer. Since 2003, spaceborne instruments have been measuring the intensity of the sun’s output at various wavelengths and looking for correlations with solar activity. The results point to the sun’s emissions of ultraviolet light. “The ultraviolet is varying much, much, much more than we expected,” says Lockwood.

Ultraviolet light is strongly linked to solar activity: solar flares shine brightly in the ultraviolet, and it helps carry the explosive energy of the flares away into space. It could be particularly significant for the Earth’s climate as ultraviolet light is absorbed by the ozone layer in the stratosphere, the region of atmosphere that sits directly above the weather-bearing troposphere.

More ultraviolet light reaching the stratosphere means more ozone is formed. And more ozone leads to the stratosphere absorbing more ultraviolet light. So in times of heightened solar activity, the stratosphere heats up and this influences the winds in that layer. “The heat input into the stratosphere is much more variable than we thought,” says Lockwood.

Enhanced heating of the stratosphere could be behind the heightened effects felt by Europe of changes in solar activity. Back in 1996, Haigh showed that the temperature of the stratosphere influences the passage of the jet stream, the high-altitude river of air passing from west to east across Europe.

Lockwood’s latest study shows that when solar activity is low, the jet stream becomes liable to break up into giant meanders that block warm westerly winds from reaching Europe, allowing Arctic winds from Siberia to dominate Europe’s weather.

The lesson for climate research is clear. “There are so many weather stations in Europe that, if we are not careful, these solar effects could influence our global averages,” says Lockwood. In other words, our understanding of global climate change could be skewed by not taking into account solar effects on European weather.

Just as one mystery begins to clear, another beckons. Since its launch 15 years ago, the SOHO spacecraft has watched two solar minimums, one complete solar cycle, and parts of two other cycles – the one that ended in 1996 and the one that is just stirring. For all that time its VIRGO instrument has been measuring the total solar irradiance (TSI), the energy emitted by the sun. Its measurements can be stitched together with results from earlier missions to provide a 30-year record of the sun’s energy output. What this shows is that during the latest solar minimum, the sun’s output was 0.015 per cent lower than during the previous lull. It might not sound like much, but it is a hugely significant result.

We used to think that the sun’s output was unwavering. That view began to change following the launch in 1980 of NASA’s Solar Maximum Mission. Its observations show that the amount of energy the sun puts out varies by around 0.1 per cent over a period of days or weeks over a solar cycle.

Shrinking star

Despite this variation, the TSI has dipped to the same level during the three previous solar minima. Not so during this recent elongated minimum. Although the observed drop is small, the fact that it has happened at all is unprecedented. “This is the first time we have measured a long-term trend in the total solar irradiance,” says Claus Fröhlich of the World Radiation Centre in Davos, Switzerland, and lead investigator for the VIRGO instrument.

If the sun’s energy output is changing, then its temperature must be fluctuating too. While solar flares can heat up the gas at the surface, changes in the sun’s core would have a more important influence on temperature, though calculations show it can take hundreds of thousands of years for the effects to percolate out to the surface. Whatever the mechanism, the cooler the surface, the less energy there is to “puff up” the sun. The upshot of any dip in the sun’s output is that the sun should also be shrinking.

Observations suggest that it is – though we needn’t fear a catastrophe like that depicted in the movie Sunshine just yet. Back in the 17th century French astronomer Jean Picard made his mark by measuring the sun’s diameter. His observations were carried out during the Maunder minimum, and he obtained a result larger than modern measurements. Was this simply because of an error on Picard’s part, or could the sun genuinely have shrunk since then? “There has been a lot of animated discussion, and the problem is not yet solved,” says Gérard Thuillier of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France.

Any dip in the sun’s output means that the sun is shrinking. Observations suggest that it is, though they are”controversial

Observations with ground-based telescopes are not precise enough to resolve the question, due to the distorting effect of Earth’s atmosphere. So the French space agency has designed a mission, aptly named Picard, to return precise measurements of the sun’s diameter and look for changes.

Frustratingly the launch, on a Russian Dnepr rocket, is mired in a political disagreement between Russia and neighbouring Kazakhstan. Until the dispute is resolved, the spacecraft must wait. Every day of delay means valuable data being missed as the sun takes steps, however faltering, into the next cycle of activity. “We need to launch now,” says Thuillier.

What the sun will do next is beyond our ability to predict. Most astronomers think that the solar cycle will proceed, but at significantly depressed levels of activity similar to those last seen in the 19th century. However, there is also evidence that the sun is inexorably losing its ability to produce sunspots (see “The sunspot forecast”). By 2015, they could be gone altogether, plunging us into a new Maunder minimum – and perhaps a new Little Ice Age.

Of course, solar activity is just one natural source of climate variability. Volcanic eruptions are another, spewing gas and dust into the atmosphere. Nevertheless, it remains crucial to understand the precise changeability of the sun, and the way it influences the various regional patterns of weather on Earth. Climate scientists will then be able to correct for these effects, not just in interpreting modern measurements but also when attempting to reconstruct the climate stretching back centuries. It is only by doing so that we can reach an unassailable consensus about the sun’s true level of influence on the Earth and its climate.

“266 days without sunspots in 2008″

“18 billion tonnes of matter thrown into space by a coronal mass ejection”

The sunspot forecast

Although sunspots are making a belated comeback after the protracted solar minimum, the signs are that all is not well. For decades, William Livingston at the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, has been measuring the strength of the magnetic fields which puncture the sun’s surface and cause the spots to develop. Last year, he and colleague Matt Penn pointed out that the average strength of sunspot magnetic fields has been sliding dramatically since 1995.

If the trend continues, in just five years the field will have slipped below the threshold magnetic field needed for sunspots to form.

How likely is this to happen? Mike Lockwood at the University of Reading, UK, has scoured historical data to look for similar periods of solar inactivity, which show up as increases in the occurrence of certain isotopes in ice cores and tree rings. He found 24 such instances in the last few thousand years. On two of those occasions, sunspots all but disappeared for decades. Lockwood puts the chance of this happening now at just 8 per cent.

Only on one occasion did the sunspot number bounce back to record levels. In the majority of cases, the sun continued producing spots albeit at significantly depressed levels. It seems that the sunspot bonanza of last century is over.

Stuart Clark’s latest book is The Sun Kings (Princeton). He blogs at stuartclark.com

Source: newscientist.com

A Planet on the Backburner

The mothballing of Australia’s CPRS ( http://www.theage.com.au/business/rudd-delays-carbon-scheme-until-2012-20100427-tp29.html ), a scheme at best symbolic in nature, heralds the success of the massive anti-climate science disinformation campaign waged on the pages of the conservative media. Other sections of the media, including the ABC, maintain a “balance”. Where 2+2=4, and if the party in George Orwell’s 1984 decrees “2+2=5″, the media’s “balanced” approach suggests “2+2=4.5″

Day-in and day-out the media trots rising and falling interest rates, the All-Ord index, GDP growth percentages and footy scores, failing to report the atmospheric CO2 growth rate on which future global temperatures depend, last recorded as 391 ppm (parts per million) at Mouna Loa and rising at a rate of about 2.02 ppm per-year (2009) ( http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo), ( http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_growth), ( http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm).

The shelving of the CPRS represents the stark difference between those who call for 11th hour attempts to stem the unfolding climate catastrophe and those who propose to continue in business as usual. Unfortunately the atmosphere is not waiting for human decision. Summing up the implications of the current collapse of the great ice sheets, rise of sea level, migration of climate zones toward the poles and intensification of extreme weather events, a joint communiqué by the world’s academies of science states: ( http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/G8+5energy-climate09.pdf )

“However, climate change is happening even faster than previously estimated; global CO2 emissions since 2000 have been higher than even the highest predictions, Arctic sea ice has been melting at rates much faster than predicted, and the rise in the sea level has become more rapid. Feedbacks in the climate system might lead to much more rapid climate changes.”

Evidenced by accelerating ice melt rates, as reported by NASA

“The most detailed satellite information available shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica are shrinking and in some places are already in runaway melt mode.  A new study, using 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite, calculates changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges, where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003 ( http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/26/nature-dynamic-thinning-of-greenland-and-antarctic-ice-sheets-glacier/ )  ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32985250/ns/us _news-environment/).

As reported recently by the Australian CSIRO and BOM: ( http://www.csiro.au/files/files/pvfo.pdf)
“Australia will be hotter in coming decades. Australian average temperatures are projected to rise by 0.6 to 1.5 ºC by 2030. If global greenhouse gas emis­sions continue to grow at rates consistent with past trends, warming is projected to be in the range of 2.2 to 5.0 ºC by 2070” and “Much of Australia will be drier in coming decades”

Lost on people and governments is the reality of a world with “2.2 to 5.0^oC by 2070”, a development which exceeds the glacial-interglacial climates (Figure 1) and climate conditions since 2.8 million years ago, signifying an environmental calamity which defies contemplation, where our children will need to survive ( http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/), including:

Accentuation of current trends ( http://www.csiro.au/files/files/pvfo.pdf), where much of southern, southwestern and southeastern Australia will become prone to cycles of increasingly severe droughts and bushfires, while the north and corridors in west-central and eastern Australia suffer floods.
At mean global temperatures above 2^oC a large part of the Greenland and west Antarctica ice sheets would melt, leading to sea level rise on the scale of many meters ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126).

The loss of regular Himalayan snow-fed river flow in southern and southeast Asia, replaced by low river levels and intermittent floods which, when combined with sea level rise, inundate river delta and low river valleys (Yangtze, Yellow River, Mekong, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus), which can only result in hundreds of millions of refugees. ( http://news.discovery.com/earth/black-soot-himalayas-glaciers.html , http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070327113346.htm).

As one of the world’s top per-capita emitters, as well as major exporter of coal, Australia bears responsibility. Ironically the current stream of coal export ships may lead to a future influx of refugee boats compared to which the current influx would pale into insignificance.

By 2012, when the CPRS may, or may not, be resurrected from the mothballs, CO2 levels would have risen by about 6 parts per million, edging toward 400 ppm, or 460 ppm CO2-equivalent (including methane), which approaches the upper stability limits of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets ( http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06588.html ).

“We’re simply talking about the very life support system of this planet.”
(Joachim Schellnhuber, Director, Potsdam Climate Impacts Institute, advisor to the German government).

Figure 1.

Temperature anomaly and the radiative forcing (Watt/m2) due to the rise in greenhouse gases, during the last 420,000 years, showing the 3.5 Watt/m2 anomaly since the 19th century. After Hansen et al. 2007 and 2008.

Al Qaeda’s Top Gun

An examination of the documentary record reveals a clear pattern of willful deception on the part of the 9/11 Commission with regard to alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour in an apparent effort to manipulate the facts to suit the official theory.

Hani Hanjour is the hijacker who flew Ameri can Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001, according to the official account of terrorist attacks. “The lengthy and extensive flight training obtained by Hani Hanjour throughout his years in the United States makes it reasonable to believe that he was the pilot of Flight 77 on September 11″, concluded FBI Director Robert S. Mueller.[1] The story is that while Hanjour had difficulties learning to fly at first, he persevered, overcame his obstacles, and became an extraordinary enough pilot to be able to precisely hit his target after performing a difficult flight maneuver.

The New York Times, for instance, asserted that “Mr. Hanjour overcame the mediocrity of his talents as a pilot and gained enough expertise to fly a Boeing 757 into the Pentagon.”[2] The Washington Post similarly suggested Hanjour had the requisite skills, reporting that “Federal records show that a Hani Hanjoor obtained a commercial pilot’s license in April 1999 with a rating to fly commercial jets.”[3]

The 9/11 Commission expanded upon this narrative in its final report. It noted that Hanjour first came to the United States in 1991 to study English, then again in 1996 “to pursue flight training, after being rejected by a Saudi flight school. He checked out flight schools in Florida, California, and Arizona; and he briefly started at a couple of them before returning to Saudi Arabia.” In 1997, after returning to Arizona, he “began his flight training there in earnest. After about three months, Hanjour was able to obtain his private pilot’s license. Several more months of training yielded him a commercial pilot certificate, issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in April 1999.”[4]

Subsequently, “Hanjour reportedly applied to the civil aviation school in Jeddah after returning home, but was rejected.” By the end of 2000, Hanjour was back in the U.S. and “began refresher training at his old school, Arizona Aviation. He wanted to train on multi-engine planes, but had difficulties because his English was not good enough. The instructor advised him to discontinue but Hanjour said he could not go home without completing the training. In early 2001, he started training on a Boeing 737 simulator at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Mesa. An instructor there found his work well below standard and discouraged him from continuing. Again, Hanjour persevered; he completed the initial training by the end of March 2001.”[5] A footnote in the report asserts that Hanjour was chosen specifically for targeting the Pentagon because he was “the operation’s most experienced pilot.”[6]

John Ashcroft told reporters early in the investigation, “It is our belief and the evidence indicates that flight training was received in the United States and that their capacity to operate the aircraft was substantial. It’s very clear that these orchestrated coordinated assaults on our country were well-conducted and conducted in a technically proficient way. It is not that easy to land these kinds of aircraft at very specific locations with accuracy or to direct them with the kind of accuracy, which was deadly in this case.”[7]

A pilot with a major carrier for over 30 years told CNN that “the hijackers must have been extremely knowledgeable and capable aviators”.[8] An air traffic controller from Dulles International Airport told ABC News, “The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane. You don’t fly a 757 in that manner. It’s unsafe.”[9]

CBS News suggested that according to its sources, Flight 77, “flying at more than 400 mph, was too fast and too high when it neared the Pentagon at 9:35. The hijacker-pilots were then forced to execute a difficult high-speed descending turn. Radar shows Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes. The steep turn was so smooth, the sources say, it’s clear there was no fight for control going on. And the complex maneuver suggests the hijackers had better flying skills than many investigators first believed. The jetliner disappeared from radar at 9:37 and less than a minute later it clipped the tops of street lights and plowed into the Pentagon at 460 mph.”[10]

The Washington Post similarly noted that the plane “was flown with extraordinary skill, making it highly likely that a trained pilot was at the helm”. Hanjour was so skilled, in fact, that “just as the plane seemed to be on a suicide mission into the White House, the unidentified pilot” – later identified as Hanjour – “executed a pivot so tight it reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver.”[11] The Post reported in another article that “After the attacks … aviation experts concluded that the final maneuvers of American Airlines Flight 77 – a tight turn followed by a steep, accurate descent into the Pentagon – was the work of ‘a great talent … virtually a textbook turn and landing,’”.[12]

According to the report of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) cited by the 9/11 Commission, information from the flight data recorder recovered from the Pentagon crash site and radar data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) show that the autopilot was disengaged “as the aircraft leveled near 7000 feet. Slight course changes were initiated, during which variations in altitude between 6800 and 8000 feet were noted. At 9:34 AM, the aircraft was positioned about 3.5 miles west-southwest of the Pentagon, and started a right 330-degree descending turn to the right. At the end of the turn, the aircraft was at about 2000 feet altitude and 4 miles southwest of the Pentagon. Over the next 30 seconds, power was increased to near maximum and the nose was pitched down in response to control column movements. The airplane accelerated to approximately 460 knots (530 miles per hour) at impact with the Pentagon. The time of impact was 9:37:45 AM.”[13]

The NTSB created a computer simulation of the flight from the flight data recorder information showing that the plane was actually at more than 8,100 feet and doing about 330 mph when it began its banking turn at 9:34 am.[14] At that point, the alleged pilot Hanjour could have simply decreased thrust, nosed down, and guided the plane into what would have been 29 acres, or 1,263,240 square feet of target area – the equivalent of about 22 football fields.[15] From this angle, proverbially speaking, it would have been like trying to hit the side of a barn. Hanjour could have guided the plane into the enormous roof of the building, including the side of the building where the office of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was located, and where he happened to be that morning.[16]

Instead, the plane began a steep banking descent, circling downward in a 330-degree turn while dropping more than 5,600 feet in three minutes before re-aligning with the Pentagon and increasing to maximum thrust towards the building. The nose was kept down despite the increased lift from the acceleration, while flying so close to the ground that it clipped lamp posts along the interstate highway before plowing into the building at more than 530 mph, precisely hitting a target only 71 feet high, or just 26.5 feet taller than the Boeing 757 itself.[17]

In other words, by performing this maneuver, Hanjour reduced his vertical target area from a size comparable to the height of the Empire State Building to an area just 5 stories high. Instead of descending at an angle and plowing through the roof and floors of the building to cause the greatest possible number of casualties, including possibly taking out the Secretary of Defense, Hanjour hit wedge 1 of the Pentagon, opposite to Rumsfeld’s office, which happened to be under construction, and where the plane, travelling horizontally, had to penetrate through the steel- and kevlar-reinforced outer wall of the building’s southwest E-ring in addition to the numerous additional walls of the inner rings of the building.[18]

But even more problematic than the question of why Hanjour would perform this maneuver is the question of how he performed it. Perhaps the most incredible thing about this, the official account of what happened to Flight 77, is that Hani Hanjour was in reality such a horrible pilot that he had trouble handling a light single-engine aircraft and even just one month before the attacks was rejected at two different schools because he was judged too incompetent to rent a plane and fly solo.

As the Los Angeles Times ironically put it, “For someone suspected of steering a jetliner into the Pentagon, the 29-year-old man who used the name Hani Hanjour sure convinced a lot of people he barely knew how to fly.”[19]

The Legend Unraveled

According to an FBI chronology for Hani Hanjour cited by the 9/11 Commission, Hanjour first travelled to the U.S. in 1991 on a visa issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia under the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor”, in order to attend the University of Arizona’s Center for English as a Second Language. After returning to Saudi Arabia, he was again issued a visa at Jeddah in March, 1996. Back in the U.S., he attended classes at the ELS Language Center in Oakland, California from May until August. For a week in September, he took ground training lessons at the Sierra Aeronautical Academy Airline Training Center (SAAATC). From the end of September until mid-October, he purchased flight instruction from Cockpit Resources Management (CRM) in Scottsdale, Arizona. He then returned to Saudi Arabia once more.[20] The Washington Post reported that according to Hanjour’s brother, Yasser, “Hanjour applied for a job at the state-owned Saudi Arabian Airlines but was told that he lacked sufficient grades…. He said the company told him it would reconsider his application only if he acquired a commercial pilot’s license in the United States.”[21] Yasser characterized Hanjour “as a frustrated young Saudi who wanted desperately – but never succeeded – to become a pilot for the Saudi national airline.”[22]

Hanjour made plans to return to the U.S. and was issued a third visa in Jeddah in November 1997. His visa application contained red flags that should have resulted in his visa being denied. He failed to write in the name and address of the school he would be attending and provided no proof, as required by law, that he could furnish financial support for himself.[23] With that application accepted, he reentered the U.S. and took pilot training from CRM again in December.[24]

It was at this time that, according the 9/11 Commission, Hanjour began his training “in earnest”. But in reality, while at CRM, Hanjour never finished coursework required to get his certificate to be able to fly a single-engine aircraft.[25] The New York Times reported that “he was a lackadaisical student who often cut class and never displayed the passion so common among budding commercial airline pilots”.[26] ABC News reported that when he returned to CRM that December, “He was trying for his private pilot’s license”, but according to one of his instructor’s, he “was a very poor student who skipped homework and missed flights.”[27] The school’s attorney said that when Hanjour reapplied again later in 2000, “We declined to provide training to him because we didn’t think he was a good enough student when he was there in 1996 and 1997.”[28] The school’s owner described him as a “weak student” who “was wasting our resources”.[29] He said “One of the first accomplishments of someone in flight school is to fly a plane without an instructor. It is a confidence-building procedure. He managed to do that. That is like being able to pull a car out and drive down the street. It is not driving on the freeway.” Although it normally took three months for students to earn their private pilot’s certificate, Hanjour “did not accomplish that at my school.” He added that “We didn’t want him back at our school because he was not serious about becoming a good pilot.”[30] The Chicago Tribune reported that at CRM, “A flight instructor said Hanjour left an impression by being unimpressive. ‘He was making weak progress,’ said Duncan Hastie, president of CRM.”[31]

Hanjour switched schools, and from the end of December 1997 until April 1999, took flight lessons from Arizona Aviation in Mesa, Arizona.[32] There, too, the 9/11 Commission’s own evidence contradicts the characterization that Hanjour was training “in earnest”. An FBI document cited by the Commission stated that “Hanjour often participated in flying lessons for a one to two weeks [sic] and then would disappear for weeks or months at a time.” The school “often had to call Hanjour in an effort to get Hanjour to pay his bill.”[33]

Buried in the footnote for the paragraph suggesting Hanjour began training “in earnest”, the 9/11 Commission report acknowledged that “Hanjour initially was nervous if not fearful in flight training” and that “His instructor described him as a terrible pilot.”[34] FBI documents cited by the Commission reveal that witnesses from the school told investigators that “Hanjour was a terrible pilot. Hanjour had difficulty understanding air traffic control, the methods for determining fuel management and had poor navigational skills.” The FBI was told by one witness that “the only flying skill Hanjour could perform was flying the plane straight”, and that “he did not believe Hanjour’s poor flying skills were due to a language barrier.” He was “a very poor pilot who did not react to criticism very well. Hanjour was very, very nervous inside the cockpit to the point where Hanjour was almost fearful.”[35]

In April 1998, Hanjour applied for his private pilot certificate with a single-engine rating, but he failed his test. One of the tasks documents show he would need to be reexamined for was “coordinated turns to headings” [36] He tried again later that same month and this time received his private pilot certificate under the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor”, with an “Airplane Single Engine Land” rating.

In an apparent attempt to bolster the misleading characterization that Hanjour began training “in earnest”, the 9/11 also stated that it took only “Several more months” to obtain his commercial pilot certificate. In fact, it took Hanjour another year of training before he managed to obtain that second certificate. On April 15, 1999, the FAA issued a commercial pilot certificate to him under the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor”.[37] The certificate was issued by Daryl M. Strong, an independent contractor for the FAA, with an “Airplane Multiengine Land” rating. To obtain the certificate, Hanjour’s records show he flew his check ride in a Piper PA 23-150 “Apache”, a four-seat twin-engine plane, which Hanjour was in command of for 14.8 hours of the 27 hours completed for the test.[38]

Contrary to the Washington Post’s assertion that this certificate allowed him “to fly commercial jets”, in fact it only allowed him to begin passenger jet training. Hanjour did so, only to fail the class.[39] As the Associated Press reported, the “certification allowed him to begin passenger jet training at an Arizona flight school despite having what instructors later described as limited flying skills and an even more limited command of English.”[40]

Furthermore, there remains an open question about whether Hanjour was actually qualified to receive that certificate in the first place. According to Heather Awsumb, a spokeswoman for Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS), a union that represents FAA employees, “The real problem is that regular oversight is handed over to private industry”, since private contractors “receive between $200 and $300 for each check flight. If they get a reputation for being tough, they won’t get any business.”[41]

To obtain a commercial pilot license, the applicant must “Be able to read, speak, write, and understand the English language.” It seems highly dubious that Hanjour met that qualification, as the 9/11 Commission itself acknowledges that his English skills were inadequate. The certificate does not allow its holder to fly any commercial aircraft, but is issued for “the aircraft category and class rating sought”. Hanjour only trained in light propeller planes like the single-engine Cessna and twin-engine Piper, and had never flown a jet aircraft.[42]

Additionally, commercial pilot certification is different from the Airline Transport Pilot certification held by airline captains. To obtain a commercial certificate with a multi-engine rating, Hanjour only needed to log in 250 hours of flight time, whereas to obtain an Airline Transport Pilot certificate, pilots are required to log 1,500 hours.[43] Needless to say, having the ability to control a Cessna 172 or Piper Apache propeller plane does not translate into the ability to handle a Boeing 757 jetliner – and Hanjour could barely do the former.

Anyone unfamiliar with pilot certification could easily make the mistake of thinking a “commercial pilot license” meant Hanjour was qualified to fly a jet airliner, a conclusion reinforced by the Washington Post’s false assertion that his certificate allowed him “to fly commercial jets”. The 9/11 Commission report reinforced that false impression, only vaguely hinting at the truth six paragraphs later by saying that Hanjour subsequently “wanted to train on multi-engine planes”. But the Commission then further obfuscated that truth by asserting that this was merely “refresher” training (a matter to which we will return).

Hanjour again left the country on April 28, 1999. [44] As the 9/11 Commission report observed, when he returned to Saudi Arabia to apply in the civil aviation school in Jeddah, he was rejected.[45] He subsequently began making preparations to return to the U.S. once again.[46] In September 2000, Hanjour was denied a student visa after indicating that he wanted to remain in the U.S. for three years, and yet listed no address for where he intended to stay in Arizona.[47] But he tried again for a student visa under the name “Hani Hanjour” later that same month. This time, he wrote that he wanted to stay for one year instead of three, and listed a specific address in California, not Arizona, where he said he was going on his first application. Despite these obvious red flags, he was issued the visa. [48]

He entered the U.S. in December and took more flight lessons that month at Arizona Aviation. From February until mid-March, he attended Pan Am International Flight Academy, also known as Jet Tech International, in Mesa, Arizona.[49]

It was upon his return to Arizona Aviation in 2000 that the 9/11 Commission stated he wanted “refresher” training on multi-engine planes but was advised to discontinue “because his English was not good enough.” The implications are that Hanjour was merely brushing up on skills he had already achieved through previous flight training, and that the only reason he was advised not to continue was because of his poor language skills. But turning to the report’s footnote, it reads: “For his desire to train on multi-engine planes, his language difficulties, the instructor’s advice, and his reaction, see FBI report of investigation, interview of Rodney McAlear, Apr. 10, 2002.”[50] That document reveals that McAlear worked not for Arizona Aviation, but rather “instructed Hani Hanjour in ground school flight training at Jet Tech in the early 2001.”[51] The 9/11 Commission, by misleadingly suggesting that this occurred at Arizona Aviation, apparently intended to bolster the claim that this was “refresher” training by making it sound as though this occurred at Hanjour’s old school, when the truth is that it occurred when he was at a different school he’d never been to before.

The 9/11 Commission was also deceiving the public suggesting that the sole reason Hanjour was not able to complete his training on multi-engine planes was because his English wasn’t good enough. As already noted, an instructor at Arizona Aviation thought his earlier failings there were due primarily to his poor flight skills, and not because of his language inadequacies. More importantly, again, this training actually occurred at Jet Tech. Turning to the documentary record, an article in the New York Times entitled “A Trainee Noted for Incompetence” noted, his instructors there “found his piloting skills so shoddy and his grasp of English so inadequate that they questioned whether his pilot’s license was genuine”. As a result, they actually reported him to the FAA and requested confirmation that his certificate was legitimate. The staff there “feared that his skills were so weak that he could pose a safety hazard if he flew a commercial airliner.” Marilyn Ladner, a vice president at the academy, told the Times, “There was no suspicion as far as evildoing. It was more of a very typical instructional concern that ‘you really shouldn’t be in the air.’” [52]

As already discussed, it remains an open question whether Hanjour was actually qualified to hold his commercial pilot certificate. It was at this time, as the Associated Press reported, that “Federal aviation authorities were alerted in early 2001 that an Arizona flight school believed one of the eventual Sept. 11 hijackers lacked the English and flying skills necessary for the commercial pilot’s license he already held, flight school and government officials say.”[53] The manager of JetTech said, “I couldn’t believe he had a commercial license of any kind with the skills that he had.”[54]

Whereas the 9/11 Commission suggested that, because he “persevered”, Hanjour “completed the initial training”, thus leading the public to the conclusion that his skills had advanced accordingly, the Times offered a very different account:  ”Ultimately administrators at the school told Mr. Hanjour that he would not qualify for the advanced certificate. But the ex-employee said Mr. Hanjour continued to pay to train on a simulator for Boeing 737 jets. ‘He didn’t care about the fact that he couldn’t get through the course,’ the ex-employee said. Staff members characterized Mr. Hanjour as polite, meek and very quiet. But most of all, the former employee said, they considered him a very bad pilot. ‘I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon,’ the former employee said. ‘He could not fly at all.’”[55]

Another Times article similarly noted that when Hanjour enrolled in February 2001 “at a Phoenix flight school for advanced simulator training to learn how to fly an airliner, a far more complicated task than he had faced in earning a commercial license”, his “instructors thought he was so bad a pilot and spoke such poor English that they contacted the Federal Aviation Administration to verify that his license was not a fake”.[56]

According to FAA inspector Michael Gonzales, when Pan Am International Flight Academy contacted the FAA to verify that Hanjour’s license was valid, “There should have been a stop right then and there.” The Associated Press reported that Gonzales “said Hanjour should have been re-examined as a commercial pilot, as required by federal law.”[57] But that was not done. Instead, the FAA inspector who “even sat next to the hijacker, Hani Hanjour, in one of the Arizona classes” and “checked records to ensure Hanjour’s 1999 pilot’s license was legitimate” concluded that “no other action was warranted” and actually suggested that Hanjour get a translator to help him complete his class. “He offered a translator,” said the school’s manager, who “was surprised” by the suggestion. “Of course, I brought up the fact that went against the rules that require a pilot to be able to write and speak English fluently before they even get their license.”[58]

As with the fact that multiple visa applications from Hanjour should have been denied, the 9/11 Commission made no mention of any of this. One would think that a commission tasked with investigating the events of 9/11 with the goal of assessing what went wrong and fixing the system to prevent any loss of life in the future would have looked into who issued Hanjour visas in Jeddah and why the red flags were ignored. One would think that misconduct from FAA officials and contractors that allowed a terrorist to improperly obtain certification to fly a plane would also not be outside of the purview of the investigation – yet the Commission’s report is absolutely silent on this.

Turning to the footnote for the claim that Hanjour “completed” training at Jet Tech, one can read (emphasis added): “For his training at Pan Am International Flight Academy and completion by March 2001, see FBI report ‘Hijackers Timeline,’ Dec. 5, 2003 (Feb. 8, 2001, entries…)”. But turning to that source, the FBI timeline does not state that Hanjour “completed” the training, only that he “ended” the course on March 16.[59] The truth is that, as the Washington Post reported, “Hanjour flunked out after a month” at Jet Tech.[60] Offering corroboration for that account, the Associated Press similarly reported that “Hanjour did not finish his studies at JetTech and left the school.”[61]

The 9/11 Commission additionally noted that Hanjour had later gone to Air Fleet Training Systems in New Jersey and “requested to fly the Hudson Corridor” along the Hudson River, which passed the World Trade Center. He was permitted to fly the route once, “but his instructor declined a second request because of what he considered Hanjour’s poor piloting skills”, the Commission admits. However, the report continues, “Shortly thereafter, Hanjour switched to Caldwell Flight Academy in Fairfield, New Jersey, where he rented small aircraft on several occasions during June and July. In one such instance on July 20, Hanjour – likely accompanied by Hazmi – rented a plane from Caldwell and took a practice flight from Fairfield to Gaithersburg, Maryland, a route that would have allowed them to fly near Washington, D.C. Other evidence suggests Hanjour may even have returned to Arizona for flight simulator training earlier in June.”[62]

But here, the pattern of deception continues by omission of other relevant facts. The report does not explain that when Hanjour was permitted to fly the Hudson Corridor in May of 2001, unlike his subsequent rental flights, it was with an instructor on a check ride, and not a solo flight.[63] By saying his instructor there “considered” Hanjour’s skills to be poor, the 9/11 Commission implied this was merely a subjective judgment, but that others considered him perfectly capable. Although it would have been a standard practice, there’s no indication from FBI records that Caldwell actually required him to go on a check ride before renting the plane. Even more significantly, the 9/11 Commission omitted altogether the fact that, while Hanjour was allowed to rent from Caldwell Flight Academy, he was rejected yet again by yet another school shortly thereafter that the record shows did require a check ride.

In August 2001, less than one month before 9/11, Hanjour took flight lessons at Freeway Airport in Bowie, Maryland.[64] As the New York Times observed, Hanjour “still seemed to lack proficiency at flying”. When he showed up “asking to rent a single-engine plane”, he attempted three flights with two different instructors, and yet “was unable to prove that he had the necessary skills” to be allowed to rent the plane. “He seemed rusty at everything,” said Marcel Bernard, the chief flight instructor at the school.[65] The Washington Post similarly reported that to “the flight instructors at Freeway Airport in Bowie”, Hanjour “was just a bad pilot.” And “after supervising Hanjour on a series of oblong circles above the airport and Chesapeake Bay, the instructors refused to pass him because his skills were so poor, Bernard said. ‘I feel darn lucky it went the way it did,’ Bernard said, crediting his instructors for their good judgment and high standards.”[66] The London Telegraph also reported that Hanjour claimed to have 600 hours of flight time, “but performed so poorly on test flights that instructors would not let him fly alone.”[67] Newsday reported that when flight instructors Sheri Baxter and Ben Conner took Hanjour on three check rides, “they found he had trouble controlling and landing the single-engine Cessna 172.”[68] The Los Angeles Times reported, “‘We have a level of standards that we hold all our pilots to, and he couldn’t meet it,” said the manager of the flight school. Hanjour could not handle basic air maneuvers, the manager said.”[69]

The deception does not end with this rather egregious omission. As noted, the 9/11 Commission also suggested that Hanjour obtained further training in a flight simulator, again, in an apparent attempt to exaggerate his training. But a review of the records shows that the preponderance of evidence indicates Hanjour was actually in New Jersey throughout the time period in question in June. FBI records show that on May 31, 2001, after having been rejected at Air Fleet Training Systems, Hanjour rented a Cessna 172 at Caldwell Flight Academy, where he “made an error taxing [sic] the airplane upon his return.” On June 6, he rented a single-engine aircraft. The FBI placed him in Paterson, New Jersey, on June 10. Then he rented a plane again on June 11, 18, and 19. The FBI has Hanjour (along with Nawaf Al-Hazmi) obtaining a mailbox at Mailboxes, Etc. in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on June 26, and opening a bank account and making an ATM withdrawal in New Jersey on June 27.[70]

Somewhere in there, the 9/11 Commission would have the public believe that “evidence suggests” Hanjour again trained on a simulator in Arizona. To begin with, the simulator at the Sawyer School of Aviation in Phoenix was for small aircraft and was nothing like the cockpit of a Boeing 757 – another fact omitted by the Commission.[71] But this perhaps becomes a moot point when one realizes that the evidence shows Hanjour never left New Jersey. Turning to the footnote for this claim, the Commission stated that documents from Sawyer “show Hanjour joining the flight simulator club on June 23, 2001″. But, the footnote acknowledges, “the documents are inconclusive, as there are no invoices or payment records for Hanjour, while such documents do exist for the other three” who joined the club at that time. The actual evidence thus demonstrates clearly that while Hanjour may have signed up (something which may have been possible over the phone or via the internet), he did not actually attend. The footnote further acknowledges that “Documentary evidence for Hanjour, however, shows that he was in New Jersey for most of June, and no travel records have been recovered showing that he returned to Arizona after leaving with Hazmi in March.”[72]

The second piece of “evidence” that “suggests” Hanjour took further flight simulator training is a Sawyer employee who “identified Hanjour as being there during that time period, though she was less than 100 percent sure.” The FBI document cited in the footnote for that claim was obtained by Intelwire.com, but it is almost entirely redacted, so it’s impossible to verify the actual nature of this eyewitness testimony.[73] But another document cited further into the same footnote also refers to the eyewitness from Sawyer, who described the four men who had joined the club. The first “UNSUB” (unidentified subject) was “short and stocky”. The second was 5’9″-5’10″, 170 pounds, and “medium build”. The third was 5’8″, 170 pounds, and “medium build”. And the fourth was 5’6″-5’7″ with a beard and mustache. Other eyewitness descriptions for Hanjour offered in the same FBI document have him as being no more than 5’6″ (one witness from Arizona Aviation, the document notes, “confirmed that he was only about 5’0″ tall”), 140-150 pounds, and very slight and thin, with short, curly hair. This clearly rules out the first three subjects, leaving only the detail-lacking fourth description as being the only one possibly matching Hanjour’s description. But the details given are far too vague to suggest a positive identification, particularly given the witness’s own admission that she wasn’t sure if it was Hanjour.[74]

Even more significantly, that same FBI document reveals that it was not during the FBI’s initial interview with the witness that she identified that fourth “unsub” as Hanjour, as the 9/11 Commission report implies by citing the report from the FBI’s initial interview for that claim in the footnote. Rather, it was later, during a second interview that occurred after the names and images of the hijackers had been shown repeatedly in the media that she picked Hanjour’s out of a photo lineup. The FBI summary of that later interview states that according to the witness, Hanjour “has the same general characteristics and is very similar appearing as the person she saw at Sawyer…. However, she could not be 100% sure.”[75]

The third and final piece of “evidence” is another witness who identified Hanjour as being “in the Phoenix area during the summer of 2001″, citing the FBI document just discussed, which is redacted enough that this claim cannot be readily verified. But the document does show additionally that Hanjour’s membership was good only from June 23 until August 8, at which time it expired.[76]

Thus, the 9/11 Commission would have the public believe that sometime after June 19, Hanjour went from the east coast to Arizona without leaving any paper trail (i.e. airline or car rental records, ATM withdrawals, etc.), signed up for a two-week flight simulator club on June 23 without leaving any record he ever actually paid or even showed up (whereas records did exist for other members), only to change his mind and return again to be back in New Jersey with Nawaf Al-Hazmi three days later. In other words, what the evidence actually suggests is that the eyewitness testimony is unreliable and that, contrary to the Commission’s assertion, Hanjour never left New Jersey during that time.

There is a clear pattern of misleading and untruthful statements in the 9/11 Commission’s final report that cannot be dismissed as mere error. Rather, the evidence is incontrovertible that the Commission willfully and deliberately sought to present a falsified story of the alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour; not to relate the facts to the public, but rather to cement a legend in the public mind; not to investigate and draw conclusions based on the facts, but to start with a conclusion – the official account of 9/11 – and manipulate the facts to suit the government’s own conspiracy theory.

The Fiction Perpetuated

The mainstream media has dealt with the problematic nature of the official story in a number of ways. As already seen, one method has simply been to exaggerate characterizations of Hanjour’s competence. The official story as related by the New York Times that Hanjour “overcame the mediocrity of his talents” is not merely unsupportable by the evidence, but stands in stark contrast to the available known facts. The legend is also maintained by the mainstream media through false claims, such as the Washington Post’s assertion that Hanjour’s pilot certificate allowed him to fly commercial jets. While the Los Angeles Times suggested Hanjour “convinced a lot of people he barely knew how to fly”, the underlying assumption of the article was that, despite his apparent ineptitude in the cockpit, he really did know how to fly. The public is apparently supposed to believe that he was merely pretending to be an incompetent pilot even though he was actually quite skillful. The mainstream media have a tendency to mock and ridicule anyone who dares even to just question the official narrative, all the while putting forth such utter absurdities as this.

As the evidence surfaced that Hanjour was not the pilot extraordinaire the public was initially told he must have been in order to carry out the attack on the Pentagon, another narrative began to emerge. While most of the mainstream media simply ignored the evidence, or, as in the case of the New York Times, drew conclusions that were contradicted by some of their own reporting. In no small part due to the 9/11 Commission report’s findings, the fiction remained firmly embedded in the minds of the public that Hanjour, through determination and perseverance, overcame all obstacles in order to acquire the skills necessary to pilot Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

There was, however, at least some acknowledgment of the major hole in that theory. A few media reports did acknowledge that Hanjour was a horrible pilot and that all evidence demonstrated that he never “overcame his mediocrity”. But rather than calling the official theory into question in doing so, these accounts simply offered a revisionist account in order to maintain the legend.

Gone was the story that the hijackers’ “capacity to operate the aircraft was substantial”, that the attacks were “conducted in a technically proficient way”, that “It is not that easy to land these kinds of aircraft at very specific locations with accuracy or to direct them with the kind of accuracy, which was deadly in this case”. No more was the expert opinion that “the hijackers must have been extremely knowledgeable and capable aviators”, that Flight 77’s final maneuver was “a difficult high-speed descending turn”. Vanished was the view that Flight 77 “was flown with extraordinary skill”, even so that it “reminded observers of a fighter jet maneuver”, that this was evidence of “a great talent” in the cockpit.

In the place of that conventional wisdom, the new narrative that began to emerge in some accounts was that it really wasn’t that difficult a maneuver after all, and even a novice pilot like Hani Hanjour – or anyone who’s ever flown a small aircraft and perhaps spent some time playing a flight simulator game, for that matter – could have, with just a bit of luck, pulled it off.

The New American presented this new narrative by quoting Ronald D. Bull, a retired United Airlines pilot, as saying, “It’s not that difficult, and certainly not impossible.” But Bull was apparently not speaking specifically with regard to the Pentagon, as he then added, “If you’re doing a suicide run, like these guys were doing, you’d just keep the nose down and push like the devil.” In this case, Bull seems to have had the attacks on the World Trade Center, and not the Pentagon, in mind. Moreover, even if Bull also had the Pentagon in mind, he was obviously only considering a situation where the pilot was flying in a straight line towards his target. Thus, if he was also speaking with regard to the Pentagon, he was quite apparently uninformed as to the actual flight path the plane took.

Similarly quoted was George Williams, a pilot for Northwest Airlines for 38 years, who said, “I don’t see any merit to those arguments [that Hanjour couldn’t have flown Flight 77 into the Pentagon]. The Pentagon is a pretty big target and I’d say hitting it was a fairly easy thing to do.” [77] It’s true that the Pentagon was a very big target. But Williams was apparently similarly aware, when he was asked to comment, of the plane’s final descending maneuver; or of the fact that this maneuver put the plane on a path that reduced the margin to a mere 26.5 feet (a few feet lower, the plane crashes into the ground; a few feet higher, the plane overshoots the target); or that the plane wasn’t flying at a constant airspeed, but was rather accelerating rapidly, thus creating more lift that needed compensating for with subtle precision in order to stay within that margin for error; or that the plane wasn’t just ambling along at something near landing speed, but was screaming along at an incredible 530 mph. To put that into perspective, cruising speed for airliners is about 600 mph at 30,000 feet of altitude, where the air is less dense. At sea-level that would be equivalent to about 300 mph hour, about double safe landing speed. A velocity of 530 mph at sea-level would be supersonic speed if it were possible to maintain at cruising altitude.[78]

In both cases, the expert pilots seem to assume that Hanjour simply lined up the hijacked plane and flew a straight line into the building at a speed at which an aircraft could more easily be controlled by an inexperienced pilot. Needless to say, neither pilot’s statements accurately reflect the actual situation with regard to Flight 77. There is no indication that the New American bothered to fill either Bull or Williams in on the specifics of what Flight 77 actually did when it sought them out to “debunk” the assertion that Hanjour wasn’t a capable enough pilot to have pulled it off.

Offering a similar revisionist account, airline pilot Patrick Smith, writing for Salon, said that it was one of “the more commonly heard myths that pertain to the airplanes and their pilots” that “the terrorist pilots lacked the skill and training to fly jetliners into their targets. This is an extremely popular topic with respect to American 77. Skyjacker Hani Hanjour, a notoriously untalented flier who never piloted anything larger than a four-seater, seemed to pull off a remarkable series of aerobatic maneuvers before slamming into the Pentagon.” Smith’s answer to this was simply to flip conventional wisdom on its head. He opined that “If anything, his loops and turns and spirals above the nation’s capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the Pentagon squarely he needed only a bit of luck, and he got it, possibly with the help from the 757’s autopilot. Striking a stationary object – even a large one like the Pentagon – at high speed and from a steep angle is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon’s lawn.” Hanjour had all the skill that was required, Smith suggested, adding “You can learn it at home.”[79]

So, according to this narrative, Hanjour’s “textbook” “fighter jet maneuver” in a Boeing 757 is evidence that he was a “shitty pilot” and any pilot wannabe with some rudimentary training and maybe just a little bit of luck could have done it. It was easier to hit a target merely 5 stories high at a nearly horizontal angle (“obliquely” as Smith misleadingly claims), than to simply point the nose down to hit a target the size of 22 football fields. These remarks are perhaps not so much the result of an attempt to challenge conventional wisdom as they were simply demonstrative that Smith made very little effort to actually understand the actual nature of Flight 77’s final flight path before writing that it is a “myth” that Hanjour was not a pilot capable of having performed that maneuver. His characterization of Hanjour’s final maneuver as “loops and turns and spirals” indicates that Smith was generalizing without having any real concept of what Flight 77 actually did in its final minutes. A further indication that Smith really just didn’t know what he was talking about was his suggestion that Hanjour “possibly” had “help from the 757’s autopilot” in pulling off those final maneuvers, which is both patently ridiculous and demonstrably false.

The German magazine Der Spiegel also made the rare attempt to actually address this issue, but found it sufficient enough merely to opine that “This is not difficult to accomplish” and similarly suggesting practically anyone could do it since it was “a maneuver that can be practiced with any flight simulator software.”[80] End of discussion.

The public was originally told that attack on the Pentagon obviously required a fairly high level of sophistication in the cockpit. It was conventional wisdom that being able to maneuver a large jetliner required a certain level of training, a certain level of skill. The public was then told that Hanjour was the pilot among the 19 hijackers who had the most training and the greatest piloting skill. As the facts emerged and it became evident that Hanjour did not have the requisite level of skill, the government chose to manipulate the evidence in order to maintain its theory. The 9/11 Commission served to cement the legend of Hani Hanjour into history, and the mainstream media, for the most part, accepted and maintained that legend even when much of their own reporting revealed facts that contradicted it. In a few cases, there was acknowledgment that Hanjour was a “shitty” pilot after all, but in such cases the official account was still maintained by throwing common sense out the window and reversing the original consensus that it must have taken a skilled pilot to have performed that final, fatal maneuver.

Perhaps this revisionist retelling of the official story is the correct one. Perhaps the conventional wisdom that it would actually take a skilled pilot to competently control a large jetliner is really wrong. Perhaps it’s true that any second-rate pilot who has trouble controlling even a Cessna-172 could get into the cockpit of a Boeing 757 and do what Hani Hanjour is said to have done. Or, on the other hand, perhaps the revisionist account is just as much nonsense as the story that Hanjour “persevered” and “overcame his mediocrity”.

Whichever the case, many questions about the events of 9/11 remain to this day unanswered, despite the appointment of the 9/11 Commission ostensibly to investigate and provide answers to those questions. And whichever the case, the conclusion is inescapable that the 9/11 Commission deliberately attempted to deceive the public about the piloting capabilities of Hani Hanjour.

Why?

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[1] Statement for the Record FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry, September 26, 2002 <http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/092602mueller.html>.

[2] Jim Yardley and Jo Thomas, “For Agent in Phoenix, the Cause of Many Frustrations Extended to His Own Office”, New York Times, June 19, 2002 <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/19/national/19ARIZ.html?pagewanted=all>.

[3] “FBI Names 19 Men as Hijackers”, Washington Post, September 15, 2001; Page A01 <http://old.911digitalarchive.org/crr/documents/1127.pdf>.

[4] “Working Draft Chronology of Events for Hijackers and Associates”, FBI, November 14, 2003 (hereafter “FBI Hijackers Timeline”), p. 41. The complete FBI timeline is available for download online. See: “Newly Released FBI Timeline Reveals New Information about 9/11 Hijackers that Was Ignored by 9/11 Commission”, HistoryCommons.org, February 14, 2008 <http://www.historycommons.org/news.jsp?oid=140393703-423>. The timeline reads: “FAA issued Commercial Pilot certificate #2576802 to [redacted] [sic].” The “[sic]” is in the original. Why the name “Hani Saleh Hanjoor” is redacted is unclear.

[5] The Final Report of the National commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, pp. 225-227 (hereafter “9/11 Commission Report”).

[6] 9/11 Commission Report, p. 530 (see footnote 147).

[7] Global Security, September 14, 2001.

[8] “Hijackers ‘knew what they were doing’”, CNN, September 12, 2001 <http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/12/hijackers.skills/>. The quote is CNN’s paraphrase of what the flight expert told them.

[9] “‘Get These Planes on the Ground’: Air Traffic Controllers Recall Sept. 11″, ABC News, October 24, 2001 <http://web.archive.org/web/20011025074733/http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/2020/2020_011024_atc_feature.html>.

[10] “Primary Target: 189 Dead Or Missing From Pentagon Attack”, CBS News, September 21, 2001 <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/09/11/national/main310721.shtml>.

[11] Marc Fisher and Don Phillips, “On Flight 77: ‘Our Plane is Being Hijacked’”, Washington Post, September 12, 2001; Page A01 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14365-2001Sep11>.

[12] Steve Fainaru and Alia Ibrahim, “Mysterious Trip to Flight 77 Cockpit”, Washington Post, September 10, 2002 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/13/AR2007081300752_pf.html>.

[13] “Flight Path Study – American Airlines Flight 77”, NTSB, February 19, 2002 <http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB196/index.htm>.

[14] A copy of the NTSB video was obtained by the group Pilots for 9/11 Truth <http://pilotsfor911truth.org/>. It is available for viewing on YouTube <> (accessed April 8, 2010).

[15] “The Pentagon”, GlobalSecurity.org <http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/pentagon.htm> (accessed April 8, 2010).

[16] Don Van Natta and Lizette Alvarez, “A Hijacked Boeing 757 Slams Into the Pentagon, Halting the Government”, New York Times, September 12, 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/us/day-terror-attack-military-hijacked-boeing-757-slams-into-pentagon-halting.html>.

[17] “The Pentagon”, Great Buildings Online <http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/The_Pentagon.html> (accessed March 27, 2010). Boeing 757 Technical Specifications from Boeing.com <http://www.boeing.com/commercial/757family/technical.html> (accessed Marcy 27, 2010).

[18] “DoD News Briefing on Pentagon Renovation”, Department of Defense, September 15, 2001 <http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1636>.

[19] Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2001.

[20] “FBI Summary about Alleged Flight 77 Hijacker Hani Hanjour”, Scribd.com <http://www.scribd.com/doc/13120414/-FBI-Summary-about-Alleged-Flight-77-Hijacker-Hani-Hanjour> (accessed April 6, 2010; herafter “FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour”). This document was cited by the 9/11 Commission. The National Archives  and Records Administration (NARA) possesses the Commission’s records and has released many documents to the public. See: “9/11 Commission Records”, NARA <http://www.archives.gov/legislative/research/9-11/index.html> (accessed March 28, 2010). Many of the released records are available online at Scribd.com. See: “9/11 Document Archive”, Scribd.com <http://www.scribd.com/911DocumentArchive> (accessed March 28, 2010).

[21] Washington Post, September 10, 2002.

[22] Charles M. Sennott, “Why bin Laden plot relied on Saudi hijackers”, Boston Globe, March 3, 2002 <http://www.boston.com/news/packages/underattack/news/driving_a_wedge/part1.shtml>.

[23] Joel Mowbray, “Visas that Should Have Been Denied”, National Review Online, October 9, 2002 <http://old.nationalreview.com/mowbray/mowbray100902.asp>.

[24] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[25] Thomas Frank, “Tracing Trail of Hijackers”, Newsday, September 23, 2001 <http://web.archive.org/web/20050314224950/911research.wtc7.net/cache/disinfo/deceptions/nynewsday_sep23.html>

[26] David W. Chen, “Man Traveled Across U.S. In His Quest to Be a Pilot”, New York Times, September 18, 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/18/us/nation-challenged-suspect-man-traveled-across-us-his-quest-be-pilot.html>.

[27] “Who Did It? FBI Links Names to Terror Attacks”, ABC News, October 4, 2001 <http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/540045/posts>

[28] Newsday, September 23, 2001.

[29] “Hanjour an unlikely terrorist”, Cape Cod Times, October 21, 2001.

[30] Carol J. Williams, John-Thor Dahlburg, and H.G. Reza, “Mainly, They Just Waited”, Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2001 <http://web.archive.org/web/20010927120728/http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-092701atta.story>.

[31] V. Dion Haynes, “Algerian man didn’t try to hide, neighbors say”, Chicago Tribune, October 2, 2001 <>.

[32] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[33] “FBI Summary of Information, Lofti Raissi”, January 4, 2004 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2004-01-04-FBI-summary-Lofti-Raissi.pdf>.

[34] 9/11 Commission Report p. 520.

[35] FBI Summary of Information, Lofti Raissi.

[36] Hanjour’s FAA airman documentation from the 9/11 Commission records released by NARA are available online at Scribd <http://www.scribd.com/doc/13120915/Airman-Records-for-Alleged-911-Hijacker-Hani-Hanjour> (accessed March 28, 2010).

[37] “FBI Summary about Alleged Flight 77 Hijacker Hani Hanjour”, Scribd.com <http://www.scribd.com/doc/13120414/-FBI-Summary-about-Alleged-Flight-77-Hijacker-Hani-Hanjour> (accessed April 6, 2010; herafter “FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour”). This document was cited by the 9/11 Commission. The National Archives  and Records Administration (NARA) possesses the Commission’s records and has released many documents to the public. See: “9/11 Commission Records”, NARA <http://www.archives.gov/legislative/research/9-11/index.html> (accessed March 28, 2010). Many of the released records are available online at Scribd.com. See: “9/11 Document Archive”, Scribd.com <http://www.scribd.com/911DocumentArchive> (accessed March 28, 2010).

[38] Hanjour’s FAA airman records are available online at Scribd <http://www.scribd.com/doc/13120915/Airman-Records-for-Alleged-911-Hijacker-Hani-Hanjour> (accessed March 28, 2010).

[39] Kellie Lunney, “FAA contractors approved flight licenses for Sept. 11 suspect”, Government Executive, June 13, 2002 <http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0602/061302m1.htm>.

[40] “Report: 9/11 Hijacker Bypassed FAA”, Associated Press, September 30, 2004 <http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91553&page=1>.

[41] Government Executive, June 13, 2002.

[42] The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 12. The report notes that “To our knowledge none of them [the hijackers] had ever flown an actual airliner before.”

[43] Code of Federal Regulations, Title 14, Sections 61.123, 61.129. Present requirements in these regards are the same as they were when Hanjour obtained his certificate. See the version revised as of January 1, 1999: <http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_99/14cfr61_99.html>.

[44] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[45] See also: FBI Hijackers Timeline,

[46] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[47] National Review Online, October 9, 2002.

[48] National Review Online, October 9, 2002.

[49] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[50] 9/11 Commission Report, p. 521-522.

[51] “FBI FD-302, James Charles McRae”, April 10, 2001 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2001-09-17-FBI-FD302-james-charles-mcrae.pdf>.

[52] Jim Yardley, “A Trainee Noted for Incompetence”, New York Times, May 4, 2002 <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/04/us/a-trainee-noted-for-incompetence.html>.

[53] “FAA Probed, Cleared Sept. 11 Hijacker in Early 2001”, Associated Press, May 10, 2002 <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,52408,00.html>.

[54] David Hancock, “FAA Was Alerted To Sept. 11 Hijacker”, CBS News, May 10, 2002 <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/10/attack/main508656.shtml>.

[55] New York Times, May 4, 2002.

[56] Jim Yardley and Jo Thomas, “For Agent in Phoenix, the Cause of Many Frustrations Extended to His Own Office”, New York Times, June 19, 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/19/us/traces-terror-fbi-for-agent-phoenix-cause-many-frustrations-extended-his-own.html>.

[57] Associated Press, September 30, 2004.

[58] Associated Press, May 10, 2002.

[59] FBI Hijacker’s Timeline, p.123.

[60] Washington Post, September 10, 2002.

[61] Associated Press, May 10, 2002.

[62] 9/11 Commission Report, p. 242.

[63] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[64] FBI Timeline for Hani Hanjour.

[65] New York Times, September 18, 2001.

[66] Brooke A. Masters, Leef Smith, and Michael D. Shear, “Dulles Hijackers Made Maryland Their Base”, Washington Post, September 19, 2001; Page A01 <http://old.911digitalarchive.org/crr/documents/1124.pdf>.

[67] “Piecing together the shadowy lives of the hijackers”, Telegraph, September 20, 2001  <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1341136/Piecing-together-the-shadowy-lives-of-the-hijackers.html>.

[68] Thomas Frank, “Tracing Trail of Hijackers”, Newsday, November 24, 2004 <http://web.archive.org/web/20050314224950/911research.wtc7.net/cache/disinfo/deceptions/nynewsday_sep23.html>

[69] Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2001.

[70] FBI Hijackers Timeline, pp. 150, 154, 156-157, 161-162, 166-167.

[71] Jacques Billeaud, “More Arizona ties to terror suspect”, Associated Press, September 20, 2001.

[72] 9/11 Comission Report, p. 529. The document cited by the 9/11 Commission was obtained by Intelwire.com. “FBI Memorandum, Sawyer Aviation records”, October 12, 2001 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2001-10-12-FBI-memo-sawyer-aviation.pdf>.

[73] “FBI FD-302, Interrogation of Tina Beth Arnold (Sawyer Aviation)”, FBI, October 17, 2001 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2001-10-17-FBI-FD302-tina-beth-arnold.pdf>.

[74] “FBI Summary of Information, Lotfi Raissi”, FBI, January 4, 2004 <http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2004-01-04-FBI-summary-Lofti-Raissi.pdf>.

[75] FBI Summary of Information, Lotfi Raissi.

[76] FBI Summary of Information, Lotfi Raissi.

[77] William F. Jasper, “9-11 Conspiracy Fact & Fiction”, The New American, May 2, 2005.

[78] “Airplane Flight: How High? How Fast?”, NASA <http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sflight2.htm> (accessed April 17, 2010). Relative airspeed is calculated by the equation B d v² = W, where factor B depends on the profile of a given set of wings (larger wings produce more lift), d is air density, v is velocity, and W is the airplane’s weight. At 30,000 feet, air density is about ¼ that at sea level, allowing an airliner to double its speed to produce the same amount of lift.

[79] Patrick Smith, “Ask the pilot”, Salon, May 19, 2006. <http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2006/05/19/askthepilot186>.

[80] “What Really Happened: The 9/11 Fact File”, Der Spiegel, December 20, 2006 <http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,451741,00.html>.

As sea level rises so does the level of climate change denial

“We’re simply talking about the very life support system of this planet.”  (Joachim Schellnhuber, Director, Potsdam Climate Impacts Institute, advisor to the German government).

The release of more than 320 billion tons of carbon (GtC) from buried early biospheres, adding more than one half of the original carbon inventory of the atmosphere (~590 GtC) to the atmosphere-ocean system, has triggered a fundamental shift in the state of the atmosphere at a rate of 2 ppm CO2/year, a pace unprecedented in the geological record with the exception of the effects of CO2 released from craters excavated by large asteroid impacts.

Recent paleoclimate studies, using multiple proxies (soil carbonate δ13C, boron/calcium, stomata leaf pores), indicate that the current CO2 level of 388 ppm and CO2-equivalent level of 460 ppm (which includes the methane factor), commits warming above pre-industrial levels to 3 to 4 degrees C in the tropics and 10 degrees C in polar regions [1], leading to an ice-free Earth.

Such conditions existed in the early Pliocene (5.2 Ma) and mid-Pliocene (2.8 Ma) Pliocene, about the time Australopithecine bipeds were emerging from tropical forests [2]. Pliocene climates changed gradually and pre-historic humans responded through migration. There is nowhere the 6.5 billion of contemporary humans can go, not even the barren planets into the study of which space agencies have been pouring more funding than governments allocated for environmental mitigation to date [3].

It appears difficult to explain to the public and politicians that, at 460 ppm CO2-equivalent, the climate is tracking close to the upper stability limit of the Antarctic ice sheet, defined at approximately 500 ppm [4]. Once transcended, mitigation measures would hardly be able to re-form the cryosphere, which serves as the Earth’s thermostat, from which cold ocean and wind current emanate – keeping lower latitudes cool. Once the ice melts the atmosphere-ocean system shifts to greenhouse Earth conditions such as existed about 15 Ma (mid-Miocene), before 40 Ma (Eocene), and much of the Cretaceous (141 – 65 Ma), when only small burrowing mammals could live on land.

About 2.8 Ma, the mid-Pliocene, temperatures rose by at least 3 degrees C above pre-industrial and sea levels rose by 25+/-12 meters [5]. About 15 million years ago the rise of CO2 to near~500 ppm resulted in global temperatures about 4 degrees C above pre-industrial level and sea level by about 40 meters. Since the early 20^th century the rate of sea level rise increased from about 1 mm/year to about 3.5 mm/year [6] (1993 – 2009 mean rate 3.2+/-0.4 mm/year (Figure 1).

The world is in a lag period, when the consequences of human greenhouse gas emissions and land clearing are increasingly manifest, including atmospheric energy levels which drive hurricanes and is shifting climate zones toward the poles, with consequent desertification of temperate zones, i.e. southern Europe, southern Australia, southern Africa. The desiccated forests become prey to firestorms, such as in Victoria and California.

Global warming is modulated by the ENSO cycle, including relatively cool La-Nina phases (Figure 2). Studiously ignorant climate change deniers, who would like to call themselves “sceptics”, use these cycles to claim “global cooling” [7]. In contravention of basic laws of thermodynamics (Stefan-Boltzmann law, Kirchoff law) which underlie the infrared absorption/emission resonance effect of greenhouse molecules, they invoke the role of short-lived (9 days average atmospheric residence) water vapour but neglect the long-term effects (centuries to millennia) of the well-mixed CO2 and nitric oxides. The increased frequency of the El-Nino is tracking toward conditions of permanent El-Nino, free from the effects of polar-derived currents (Humboldt Current, California Current). Such conditions existed about 2.8 Ma ago [8] (Figure 3).

Climate change is appropriately described as a global oxygenation event affecting geological carbon deposits as well as the present biosphere. At 2 ppm/year the scale of carbon oxidation exceeds the highest recorded geological rate of 0.4 ppm/year, recorded at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary at 55 Ma when about 2000 GtC were burnt, triggering an extinction of species [4].

Hopes for a meaningful binding agreement in Copenhagen, described as “the most important meeting in the history of the human species.” (Joachim Schellnhuber), and for a supposed presidential “Messiah” to wave the magic wand, collapsed in December, 2009, in the sorry mess of vested and tribal interests.

The international system required to protect the lives of the young and future generation is failing. According to the Global Carbon Project “Carbon emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and land use changes reached almost 10 billion tonnes in 2007” [9]. Those who deny the reality of climate change around the globe seek uncertainties in future climate projections, cf. dates of Himalayan glacier melt or Amazon deforestation. This ignores the evidence for dangerous climate trajectories even where the precise dates of future events can not be determined, namely, Himalayan glaciers melt may precede or postdate 2035. Presumably the claims of “conspiracy” on the part of the scientific world include the pioneers of atmospheric physics (Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius and Guy Chalendar), as well as those who defined the basic thermodynamic laws of the greenhouse process (Stefan, Bolzmann, Kirschner)?

Most of all those who criticise the IPCC ignore the fact that, to date, the IPCC reports have UNDERESTIMATED ice melt rates, sea level rise, feedback effects and the proximity of tipping points, not least the looming release of hundreds of GtC as methane from permafrost, lake sediments and bogs.

Governments continue to pour the planet’s dwindling resources into wars (US$1.4 trillion in 2008) and bank bailouts (US$0.7 trillion).  Entertainment and media are projected to cost US$2 trillion in 2011. Between 1958 and 2009 the US (NASA) spent US$823 billion on space exploration searching among other for water and microbes on other planets [10]. Now they have found water on Mars and the Moon, while pH of the terrestrial oceans has declined between 1751 and 1994 by 0.075 (8.179 to 8.104) [11], threatening the marine food chain.

Good planets are hard to come by

1. Pagani M. et al. 2010.   http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n1/abs/ngeo724.html
2. deMenocal P.B. 1995. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/270/5233/53
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA Budget#Annual _budget.2C_1958-2008;
4. Zachos J.C. et al. 2008 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06588.html
5. Haywood M. and Williams M. 2005. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118652116/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
6. Rahmstorf S. 2007. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1135456 http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
7. Easterling D.R. and Wehner M.F. 2009. http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL037810.shtml
8. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;312/5779/1485
9. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/26/2374776.htm
10. http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/09/24/nasa-finds-water-ice-in-mars-craters/ http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/09/24/new-evidence-of-water-on-the-moon/
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

The Lungs of the Earth

The recent warning by Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact: “We are simply talking about the very life support system of this planet” [1] is consistent with the lessons arising from the history of the Earth’s atmosphere/ocean system. A rise of CO2-e (CO2-equivalent, including the effect of methane) above 500 ppm and of mean global temperature toward and above 4 degrees C, projected by the IPCC [2], Copenhagen [3] and Oxford [4] scientific reports, as well as reports by the world’s leading climate science bodies (NASA/GISS, Hadley-Met, Potsdam Climate Impact Institute, NSIDC, CSIRO, BOM), would transcend the conditions which allowed the development of agriculture in the early Neolithic, tracking toward climates which dominated the mid-Pliocene (3 Ma) (1 Ma = 1 million years) and further toward greenhouse Earth conditions analogous to those of the Cretaceous (145–65 Ma) and early Cenozoic (pre-34 Ma).

Lost all too often in the climate debate is an appreciation of the delicate balance between the physical and chemical state of the atmosphere-ocean-land system and the evolving biosphere, which controls the emergence, survival and demise of species, including humans.

By contrast to Venus, with its thick blanket of CO2 and sulphur dioxide greenhouse atmosphere, exerting extreme pressure (90 bars) at the surface, or Mars with its thin (0.01 bar) CO2 atmosphere, the presence in the Earth’s atmosphere of trace concentrations of greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, nitric oxides, ozone) modulates surface temperatures in the range of -89 and +57.7 degrees Celsius, allowing the presence of liquid water and thereby of life.

Forming a thin breathable veneer only slightly more than one thousand the diameter of Earth, and evolving both gradually as well as through major perturbations with time, the Earth’s atmosphere acts as the lungs of the biosphere, allowing an exchange of carbon gases and oxygen with plants and animals, which in turn affect the atmosphere, for example through release of methane and photosynthetic oxygen.

An excess of carbon dioxide in the lungs triggers a need to breath. When the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere rises above a critical threshold, the climate moves to a different state. Any significant increase in the level of carbon gases triggers powerful feedbacks. These include ice melt/warm water interaction, decline of ice reflection (albedo) effect and increase in infrared absorption by exposed water. Further release of CO2 from the oceans and from drying and burning vegetation shifts global climate zones toward the poles, warms the oceans and induces ocean acidification.

The essential physics of the infrared absorption/emission resonance of greenhouse molecules has long been established by observations in nature and laboratory studies, as portrayed in the relations between atmospheric CO2 and mean global temperature projections in Figure 1.
The living biosphere, allowing survival of large mammals and of humans on the continents, has developed when CO2 levels fell below about 500 ppm some 34 million years ago (late Eocene). At that stage, and again about 15 million years ago (mid-Miocene), development of the Antarctic ice sheet led to a fundamental change in the global climate regime.

About 2.8 million years ago (mid-Pliocene) the Greenland ice sheet and the Arctic Sea ice began to form, with further decline in global temperatures expressed through glacial-interglacial cycles regulated by orbital forcing (Milankovic cycles), with atmospheric CO2 levels oscillating between 180 and 280 ppm CO2 [5]. These conditions allowed the emergence of humans in Africa and later all over the world [6].
Humans already existed 3 million years-ago, however these were small clans which, in response to changing climates migrated to more hospitable parts of Africa and subsequently Asia [6]. About 124 thousand years ago, during the Emian interglacial, temperatures rose by about 1 degree C and sea levels by 6-8 meters.

The development of agriculture and thereby human civilization had to wait until climate stabilized about 8000 years ago, when large scale irrigation along the great river valleys (the Nile, Euphrates, Hindus and Yellow River) became possible.

Since the industrial revolution humans dug, pumped and burnt more than 320 billion tons of carbon which accumulated as the result of biological activity during 400 million years. 320 billion tons of carbon is more than 50% the carbon concentration of the original atmosphere (540 billion tons). As a consequence the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by about 40%, from 280 to 388 ppm.

The world is now witnessing a dangerous shift in the state of the atmosphere-ocean system, an extremely rapid change from the interglacial condition of the Holocene, which began about 11,700 years-ago, to conditions analogous to those of the mid-Pliocene when mean global temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees C higher, and sea levels about 25+/-12 meters higher, than the early 20th century.

In terms of the combined effects of CO2, methane and nitric oxide, the rise of greenhouse gases has reached about 460 ppm CO2-equivalent (CO2-e) (Figure 1), only slightly below the 500 ppm level which correlates with the maximum stability of the Antarctic ice sheet.
The current rate at which CO2 is rising, 2 ppm per year, is unprecedented in the recent history of the Earth, with the exception of the onset of greenhouse atmospheric conditions following major volcanic episodes and asteroid and comet impacts, which led to the large mass extinctions in the history of the Earth (end-Ordovician, end-Devonian, end-Permian and Permian-Triassic boundary, end-Triassic, end-Jurassic, end-Cretaceous) (Figure 2).
Further rise of CO2-e above 500 ppm and mean global temperatures above 4 degrees C can only lead toward greenhouse Earth conditions such as existed during the Cretaceous and early Cenozoic (Figure 2).

At 4 degrees C advanced to total melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets leads to sea levels tens of meters higher than at present.

Since the 18th century mean global temperature has risen by about 0.8 degrees C. Another 0.5 degrees C is masked by industrial-emitted aerosols (SO2), and further rise ensues from current melting of the ice sheets and sea ice, with loss of reflection (albedo) of ice and gain in infrared absorption by open water, leading to feedback effects.

The polar regions, actinv as the “thermostats” of the Earth, are the source of the cold air current vortices and the cold ocean currents, such as the Humboldt and California current, which keep the Earth’s overall temperature balance, much as the blood stream regulates the body’s temperature and the supply of oxygen.

Unfortunately climate change is not an abstract notion, with consequences manifest around the globe in terms of (1) Polar ice melt; (2) Sea level rise; (3) Migration of climate zones toward the poles; (4) Desertification of temperate climate zones; (5) Intensification of hurricanes and floods, related to increase in the level of atmospheric energy; (6) acidification of the oceans; (7) Destruction of coral reefs [2-4].

Which is why the European Union and in recent international conferences defined a rise by 2.0 degrees C as the maximum permissible level. A dominant scientific view has emerged that atmospheric CO2 levels, currently at 388 ppm, need to be urgently reduced to below 350 ppm [5]. This is because, a rise of CO2 concentration above 350 ppm triggers feedback effects, which include:

1. Carbon cycle feedback due to warming, which dries and burns vegetation, with loss of CO2. With further warming, the onset of methane release from polar bogs and sediments is of major concern.
2. Ice/melt water interaction feedbacks: melt water melts more ice, ice loss results in albedo loss, exposed water absorb infrared heat.

Because CO2 is cumulative, with atmospheric residence time on the scale of centuries to millennia, it may not be possible to stabilize or control the climate through small incremental reduction in emission and avoid irreversible tipping points [7].
Humans can not argue with the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere. Time is running out. What is needed are global emergency measures, including:

1. Urgent deep cuts in carbon emissions by as much as 80%.
2. Parallel Fast track transformation to non-polluting energy utilities – solar, solar-thermal, wind, tide, geothermal, hot rocks.
3. Global reforestation and re-vegetation campaigns, including application of biochar.

Business as usual, with its focus on the annual balance sheet, can hardly continue under conditions of environmental collapse. Governments, focused on the next elections, need to focus on the survival of the next generation

Good planets are hard to come by.

1. http://ecoworldly.com/2009/10/02/is-the-us-climate-illiterate/ ;    http://www.nature.com:80/climate/2009/0911/full/climate.2009.106.html ;
2. IPCC 2007 AR4 – http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.htm
3. Copenhagen Synthesis Report  http://www.anu.edu.au/climatechange/content/news/copenhagen-synthesis-report-released-today/
4. Oxford 28-30 October, 2009 meeting http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/programme.php
5. Hansen et al. 2008. Target CO2: Where Should humanity aim? http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf ; Glikson, A.Y., 2008. Milestones in the evolution of the atmosphere with reference to climate change. Aust. J. Earth Sci. 55 no. 2. http://www.zeroemissionnetwork.org/files/MILESTONES_19-6-07.pdf
6. deMenocal, P.B. African climate change and faunal evolution during the Pliocene-Pleistocene. Earth and Plant. Sci. Lett, Frontiers, 6976, 1-22, 2004 http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~peter/Resources/Publications/deMenocal.2004.pdf
7. Lenton et al., 2008. Tipping points in the Earth climate system. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080204172224.htm
8. Royer et al., 2004. CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate. GSA Today; v. 14; no. 3, doi: 10.1130/1052-5173
9. Berner et al., 2007. Oxygen and evolution. Science 316, 557 – 558. http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/bishop/Teaching/A%20Biol403-2008/Readings/Oxygen%20Berner%20Ward%202007.pdf

After all I am a Proper Zionist Jew

I am a Holocaust survivor…

Yes, I am a survivor, for I have managed to survive all the scary accounts of the Holocaust: the one about the soap (1), the one about the lamp shades, the one about the camps, the mass shooting, the one about the gas (2) and the one about the death march (3). I just managed to survive them all.

In spite of all these fear inflicting stories, that were purposely installed in my soul since I opened my eyes for the first time, I have become a functional and even a successful human being. I somehow survived the horror against all odds. I even manage to love my neighbour. In spite of all these fearful, traumatic indoctrination I miraculously  managed to master my cheering alto saxophone rather than the sobbing violin.

In fact, I have already decided that in case the Queen, or any other member of the Royal Family should ever consider to make me into a ‘Sir’ for my bebop achievements, or even for facing Zionist barbarism with my bare pen, I will immediately change my surname from Atzmon to Vive, just to become the first and only Sir Vive.

I am also totally against Holocaust denial

I clearly resent those who deny the genocides that are taking place in the name of the Holocaust. Palestine is one example, Iraq is another and the one that is set for Iran, is probably too scary to contemplate.

The Holocaust is a relatively new religion (4). It lacks mercy or compassion, instead it promises revenge through retribution. For its followers, it is somehow liberating because it allows them to punish whoever they like as long they gain some pleasure. This may explain why the Israelis ended up punishing the Palestinians for crimes that were committed by Europeans. It is rather clear that the newly emerging religion is not just about ‘eye for an eye’; it is actually an eye for thousands and thousands of eyes.

A month ago, while visiting in Auschwitz, Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak left a note in the official visitors book: ‘a strong Israel is both the comfort and the revenge’(5). No one could summarise the aspiration of the religion any better. The Holocaust religion doesn’t offer redemption. It is a crude violent manifestation of sheer collective brutality. It cannot resolve anything, for aggression can only lead to more and more aggression. In the Holocaust religion there is neither room for peace or grace. Take it from Barak, revenge is where they find comfort.

To deny the danger posed by the Holocaust religion and its followers is to be complicit in a growing crime against humanity and against every possible human value.

I am also in total support of the Jewish National Project

Some believe that after 2000 years of ‘phantasmic Diaspora’ Jews are indeed entitled to an imaginary ‘national home land of their own’. The Zionists apparently meant it sincerely. The Jewish state is now realistic enough to have turned the entire Middle East into a ticking bomb.

Reviewing the Israeli record of crimes against humanity in the last six decades doesn’t leave much room for speculation. We are dealing here with a pathological sinister society. Hence, as much as some of us may agree that Jews should enjoy a hypothetical right for a land of their own, planet Earth is certainly not the ideal location for such an affair.

Hence, I would urge NASA to join in and to make a special effort to find a suitable alternative planet for the Zionist homeland in outer space or even in another galaxy. The Galactic Zionist project would signify the immediate move from ‘promised land’ to ‘promised planet’. I would enthusiastically stress that rather than searching for ‘a land with no people for a people with no land’, what we really want is a ‘lonely planet’. It can even be a ‘desert’ for they claim to know how to make the desert bloom. In a planet of their own the galactic Zionists wouldn’t need to oppress anyone, they wouldn’t ethnically cleanse either, they wouldn’t have to lock the indigenous people in concentration camps, for there won’t be any indigenous people around to abuse, starve, murder and cleanse. They wouldn’t have to pour white phosphorous over their neighbours for there won’t be any neighbours. I would highly recommend NASA to search for a planet with very low gravity just to make it light for people to wander around. After all, we want the new galactic Zionists to enjoy their futuristic project as much as the Palestinians and many others may enjoy their absence.

So here I am, a proper Jew after all: I am a survivor, I oppose Holocaust denial, I support the Jewish national aspiration. Even the chief Rabbi of Britain cannot ask for more than that.

(1) Acknowledged recently to be a ‘myth’ by the Israeli holocaust museum Yad Vashem

(2) A historical fact protected by European Law.

(3) A slightly confusing narrative. If the Nazis were interested in annihilating the entire European Jewish population as suggested by the orthodox Zionist holocaust narrative, then it is rather ambiguous as to just what led them to march what was left of European Jewry, into their crumbling Nazi fatherland at a time when it was clear that they were losing the war. The two narratives i.e. ‘annihilation’ and ‘death march’, seem to oppose each other. The issue deserves further elaboration. I would just suggest that the reasonable answers I have come across may severely damage the Zionist holocaust narrative.

(4) The Israeli Philosophy professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz was probably the first to define the holocaust as the ‘new Jewish religion’.

(5) http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3790707,00.html

Global Warming Accelerating While the U.S. Backpedals

Two recent studies have shocked the world in regard to global warming. A phenomenon that was to happen “possibly in our lifetime” has evolved into a threat capable of transforming the world in ten years time.

A recent, extensive study of the northern polar ice caps released by climate expert Professor Peter Wadham, concluded that the Arctic Ocean would be “mostly” ice free in 10 years during the summer months.

This study is a stunning compliment to research done by NASA at the South Pole, which noted that ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003. The research concluded that the rate of melting is accelerating, creating a “runaway effect.”

As ice sheets melt, less sun is reflected back into outer space, and is instead absorbed into the ocean — known as the Albedo Effect — further accelerating the pace of oceanic warming.

The consequences will be devastating.

The International Institute for Environment and Development has studied the possible effects of rising ocean levels, and concluded that one eighth of the world’s urban population would become “climate refugees,” creating the largest displacement of people in world history. The most vulnerable countries are China (144 million displaced), India (63 million) and Bangladesh (62 million), while lower on the list are Japan (30 million) and the United States (23 million).

Not only will massive amounts of people become homeless, but the changing climate is expected to create other environmental and social crises internationally. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA):

In Africa, “…between 75 million and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change.” And: “…access to food, in many African countries and regions is projected to be severely compromised by climate variability and change.”

In Latin America: “Changes in precipitation patterns and the disappearance of glaciers are projected to significantly affect water availability for human consumption, agriculture, and energy generation.”

The EPA also outlines the negative effects of climate change in Europe, North America, Asia, and the rest of the world. Global warming is truly an international phenomenon requiring the cooperation of the world’s people and resources.

In response to the arctic ice melting, the U.S. and Europe have begun cooperating…militarily — under the NATO umbrella. They see the melting ice not as social calamity, but as a corporate-profit opportunity. United Press International (UPI) reported that U.S. Navy Admiral James Savridis remarked that, “…climate change, which is melting ice around the polar cap, is opening trade routes and access to billions of barrels of oil. That, in turn, could lead to competition and friction…” (October 10, 2009).

The friction is between NATO and Russia, which also has corporations eager to exploit the raw materials and trade routes an iceless arctic will offer. UPI reports, “Russia sent a submarine to the Arctic seafloor in February to symbolically plant a flag and announced in March that it would establish military bases along the northern coastline.”

Melting polar ice caps should inspire the world to unite in cooperation, but the world today is dominated by giant corporations based in different nations, all obsessed with short-term profits.

Obama has not publicly discussed the arms race in the arctic, and has instead focused on climate change speeches full of idealism, but lacking content. Like Bush before him, Obama is putting “U.S. [corporate] interests” ahead of the interests of everybody else.

The influence of U.S. corporations has hampered environmental progress for years: under Bill Clinton, the Senate voted unanimously (95-0) against signing the Kyoto Protocol — the inadequate international treaty aimed at lowering greenhouse gasses. The Senate stated that the treaty “would result in serious harm to the economy [corporations] of the United States.”

Without the participation of the United States and China — the world’s two biggest polluters — the Kyoto Protocol became a pointless exercise.

Now, Obama is posing as an environmental advocate looking to right the wrongs of the past. In reality, his “vision” for addressing climate change would be laughable, if the situation were not so dire.

The “Cap and Trade” environmental bill that Obama is encouraging Congress to pass mirrors the insufficient methods of the Kyoto protocol, with added loopholes. U.S. taxpayers will be expected to pay billions to give corporations “allowances” to pollute; corporations can “trade” their allowances to more-polluting corporations or Wall Street banks eager to profit from these new forms of corporate stock.

Greenpeace, like other environmental organizations, condemned the Cap and Trade bill, saying that the “…bill will actually spur a new generation of nuclear and coal-fired power plants to the detriment of real energy solutions.”

More evidence of Obama’s fraudulent environmentalism is his attitude towards the upcoming international climate change conference in Copenhagen. Here, it was hoped that the standards of Kyoto Protocol would be improved while also including all the worst polluting countries in the world.

The Guardian newspaper recently reported that the Obama Administration was working to undermine the Copenhagen conference. This is being accomplished by the demand for a whole new structure for the treaty, which would destroy the years of planning that created the Kyoto Foundation. The Guardian reported, “it could take several years to negotiate a replacement framework…” (September 15, 2009), effectively pushing any environmental solutions into the unknown future.

Another way the U.S. is disrupting the Copenhagen process is by demanding that there be no international mechanism to hold nations responsible for fulfilling their treaty obligations. The Guardian reported, “the US is pushing instead for each country to set its own rules and to decide unilaterally how to meet its target.” This way, any polluting U.S. corporation that disagrees with Copenhagen’s standards may rely on easily purchased U.S. congressmen to bail them out.

To hold such an obstinate attitude in the face of climate collapse is almost beyond comprehension. As a famous socialist once pointed out, the corporate elite are “Tobogganing to disaster with its eyes closed.” Their blindness, however, has a practical foundation. This class of people can see only the profits in front of their faces; they care nothing about the world around them, as they’ve successfully gated themselves off from it. As the world enters a period of immense turmoil, they’ve sequestered themselves in private paradises.

Thus, it is doubtful that even the loophole-ridden Cap and Trade bill will be passed or that anything of substance comes out of Copenhagen. Even if this meager progress were made, it would be mostly symbolic. Both tactics are completely inadequate to deal with the speed and severity of climate change; “reducing greenhouse gasses” will not do the trick at this point — the structure of our economy itself needs to be drastically changed.

First, big oil and big coal — along with other anti-change/polluting corporations — need their wings clipped. Having such socially-valuable industries run by private corporations has greatly advanced climate destruction. Their immense power allows them the freedom to destroy the earth while throwing cash in all directions to have their agendas fulfilled at the expense of everybody else. They should instead be run as public utilities.

Ultimately, the industrial basis for an alternative energy superstructure needs to be created. Only by doing this can we seriously address the needs of the planet. Transforming our giant auto plants — many laying idle — into producers of solar panels, windmills, electricity–producing buoy’s, high-speed trains, electric busses and cars, etc., while massively investing in new research and technology to deal with climate change, is the only realistic way to drastically change direction in the time allotted.

Such a solution, however, is outside the reach of a capitalist economy, whose only motivation is profit. Drastically changing society’s direction is not in the interest of those who benefit from the current version. All honest environmentalists will likely agree that such a system needs replacing. We can no longer allow giant corporations — accountable only to big shareholders — have the final say over all crucial economic and social issues. The resources of society need to be controlled by society, so we can cooperate effectively to deal with the largest crisis our species has ever faced.

Planetary Boundaries

The CO2 <350 PPM Upper Limit of Human Habitats…

Climate change is tracking toward levels which transcend the planetary boundaries which allowed the development of humans over the last 3 million years [1]. These limits have already been crossed in terms of the rise in greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, Nitric oxide) and extensive loss of species [1]. Given lag effects, looming threats include (A) ocean acidification and phosphorous flux, collapse of coral reefs and the marine food chain; (B) availability of freshwater; (C) conversion of natural forests to cropland, i.e. the Amazon; (D) ozone depletion; (E) atmospheric aerosol loading and (F) chemical pollution by metals, plastics, radioactive nuclei etc.

The rate of climate change since the mid-1970s, at up to ~2 ppm CO2 per-year, reaching 388 ppm CO2 and ~460 ppm CO2-equivalent (including methane), is leading toward ~1.5 degrees C mean global temperature rise relative to pre-industrial time. This results in carbon cycle and ice/water feedback processes, with consequent (A) extreme rates of polar ice melting, including the Arctic Sea, Greenland, West and East Antarctica [2], which threatens accelerated sea level rise; (B) a progressive shift of climate zones toward the poles, extending the tropics as indicated by intensified cyclones and floods, and enlarging desert regions as manifested by extreme droughts and fires, including in Australia.

The consequences for human habitats include loss of arable land, fresh water supplies and extreme weather events. The loss of Himalayan snow and thereby decreased river flow, coupled with a failure of the monsoon and sea level rise, threatens more than one billion people in south and southeast Asia. As the polar regions warm [3], the release of methane from the many hundreds of billions of tons of carbon stored in permafrost and shallow lakes and seas, is underway.

Reports by the world’s leading climate research organizations (Hadley-Met, Tyndall, NASA/GISS, Potsdam, NSIDC, CSIRO, BOM), and in thousands of papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, demonstrate the anthropogenic origin of climate change since the industrial revolution, accelerating since the mid-1970s, beyond reasonable doubt [4]. The Australian continent, dominated by subtropical arid zones, is in particular danger from extending tropical floods in the north and progressive desertification and fires in the south.

Humans and species can adapt to gradual changes in the environment, and our prehistoric ancestors were able to migrate over much of the world through extreme glacial-interglacial changes. This is not the case with the 6 billion members of present-day civilization, anchored as they are to coastal and valley agricultural lands. The consequences of the extreme rise rate of CO2 at 2 ppm/year will greatly complicate adaptation.

In my view an upper limit of 450 ppm CO2, proposed by a range of reports by government organizations, including the Garnaut Review [5] and the Australian Government White Paper [6], can not be sustained, for the following reasons:

A. The atmosphere has already transcended the CO2-equivalent (including the forcing of methane) level of 460 ppm.

B. A level of 450 ppm CO2 is a mere ~40 ppm below the upper boundary of ~500 ppm, which is the upper limit of stability of the Antarctic ice sheet, formed about 34 million years ago. In the Pliocene, 3 million years ago, a CO2 level of 400 ppm led to temperature rise of about 2–3 degrees C and sea level rise of 25+/-12 meters.

C. There is no evidence that the climate can be “stabilized” at such high level of greenhouse-induced forcing. Due to carbon cycle feedback loops and feedbacks related to ice melt/water interaction, CO2 level of 450 ppm may lead to yet higher greenhouse levels, high temperature levels and possible tipping points.

D. Not taken into account in many projections are looming emissions of methane, which are already taking place under atmospheric CO2 levels of 388 ppm, or CO2-e levels of 460 ppm.

In the view of leading US climate scientists there is no alternative to attempts at reducing atmospheric CO2 levels to below 350 ppm as soon as possible [8]. In my view, only a combination of (A) deep urgent cuts in carbon emissions; (B) fast-track development of clean renewable energy systems; (C) an intensive reforestation campaign; (D) application of a range of biosequestration measures, including chemical sequestration and carbon draw-down methods, may be able to prevent further carbon cycle and ice melt feedback effects from triggering dangerous tipping points [9] with tragic consequences.

1.      Schellnhuber, Oxford meeting, 28-30.10.09 http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/programme.php
2.       British Antarctic Survey, 23.9.09
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/press/press_releases/press_release.php?id=989
3.       Polar regions have warmed by a mean of up to 4 degrees Celsius since the mid-20th century (NASA/GISS). http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
4.       Contrary arguments, by a handful of climate change denialists, are unreferenced or derived by deceptive alteration of scientific data.
5.       Garnaut Review. http://www.garnautreview.org.au/domino/Web_Notes/Garnaut/garnautweb.nsf
6.       White Paper/CPRS http://www.climatechange.gov.au/whitepaper/index.html
7.       Copenhagen Synthesis Report http://www.anu.edu.au/climatechange/content/news/copenhagen-synthesis-report-released-today/
8.       Hansen et al. 2008. Target CO2: Where Should humanity aim? http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf
9.       Lenton et al., 2008. Tipping points in the Earth climate system. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080204172224.htm

21st Century Climate Blueprints

Perspective from the recent History of the Atmosphere…

The Earth surface temperature reflects the net balance between incoming solar (shortwave) radiation and outgoing terrestrial (long wave) radiation (Kiehl and Trenberth, 1997 [1]).  The severe disturbance of the energy balance of the atmosphere ensuing from the emission of over 320 billion tons of carbon since 1750 threatens a shift in the state of the atmosphere/ocean system to ice free greenhouse Earth conditions.  Based on the recent Copenhagen Synthesis Report [2], climate change trends at the top range of IPCC 2007 projections [2], and the identification of tipping points in the recent history of the atmosphere/ocean system (i.e. at 14 – 11 and 8.2 thousand years-ago [3]), the scale and pace of 21st Century climate changes [4] require re-consideration of mitigation and adaptation strategies.

1. The combined CO2 and methane level in the atmosphere is fast tracking toward a level of 500 ppm, which defines the approximate onset of the East Antarctic ice sheet [5], the upper climate range which allowed the development of habitats where large mammals flourished from about 40, and in particular 34 million years ago, and hominids appeared from about 7 million years ago [6] (Figure 1). Feedbacks from the carbon cycle, including release of methane from permafrost, polar sediments and bogs, and feedbacks from ice melt/warm water interaction dynamics, accelerate this process.  In view of the cumulative nature of CO2 in the atmosphere, at current growth rates of about 2 ppm per-year, rising above the combined CO2 + methane level of 450 ppm [7], the atmosphere/ocean system is fast tracking toward conditions similar to those of an ice-free Earth.

2. The scale of such greenhouse event may, or may not, bear an analogy to the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) event about 55 million years ago [8], including release of large volumes of methane.  Recent methane release from Siberian permafrost, lakes and shallow sediments [9].

3.  Due to hysteresis (retardation of effect after cause), the effects of temperature rise, superposed ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) cycles (Figure 2), melting of Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheets [10], sea level rise [11], possible collapse of the North Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation [12], and potential tipping points (Figure 3), lag behind CO2 rise by as yet little-specified periods.  A shift of the climate system through a transitional stage is occurring at present and is associated with extreme weather events [13].

4. With a mean global temperature rise of about 0.8 degrees C since 1750, plus a rise of about 0.5 degrees C masked by sulfur aerosols emitted by industry [14], plus temperature rise due to ice albedo loss and infrared absorption by water [10], in particular the Arctic Sea, global warming is potentially near 1.5 degrees C. At this rate, conditions which existed on Earth about 2.8 million years ago (mid-Pliocene +2 to 3 degrees C; Sea level rise of 25+/-12 meters) [6] could be reached within time frames of a few decades.

5. The unique nature of the “experiment” Homo sapiens is conducting with the atmosphere through the emission of 319 billion tons of carbon by 2007 [15], and the consequent extreme rise in atmospheric CO2 of about 2 ppm/year, two orders of magnitude faster than during the last glacial termination [16], counsels caution.

John Holdren, Obama’s science advisor, compared global warming to “being in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”

Should humanity choose to undertake all possible mitigation and adaptation efforts in an attempt at slowing global warming down, or even reversing it, steps need to include:

1. Urgent deep reductions in carbon emissions, on the scale of at least 5 percent of emissions per year, relative to 1990 (Anderson and Bows, 2008 [7]).

2. Global reforestation efforts in semi-arid and drought-effected regions, among other providing employment to millions of people.

3. Construction of long-range water conduits from flood-affected to drought-stricken regions (an even more important task than designing Broadband networks…).

4. Urgent development of atmospheric CO2 draw-down methods, including CO2-sequestering vegetation, soil carbon enrichment, sodium-based CO2 capture (a technology no more complex than space projects technologies and financially not more expensive than military expenditure).

5. Rapid transition to clean energy (solar-thermal, hot-rock, hydrogen, wind, tide, photovoltaic) and transport systems (electric vehicles).

It is possible that, in order to gain time, some governments may opt for geo-engineering efforts, including stratospheric injection of sulfur aerosols (simulating volcanic eruptions) [17], likely over polar regions, meant to temporarily raise the Earth albedo while other measures are undertaken.

The alternative to urgent fast tracked mitigation efforts does not bear contemplation.

References

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4. Lenton, T.M., et al., 2008. Tipping points in the Earth system. PNAS, 105, 1786–1793 _ www.pnas.org_cgi_doi_10.1073_pnas.0705414105; http://researchpages.net/ESMG/people/tim-lenton/tipping-points/.  http://www.pnas.org/content/105/6/1786.abstract;  Easterling and Wehner, 2009. Is the climate warming or cooling? Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L08706 (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL037810.shtml);  Eby, M., et al., 2009. Lifetime of Anthropogenic Climate Change: Millennial Time Scales of Potential CO2 and Surface Temperature Perturbations, J. Climate, 22, 15 May 2009; Dakos, V., et al., 2008. Slowing down as an early warning signal for abrupt climate change. PNAS, 105, 14308–14312.  (www.pnas.org_cgi_doi_10.1073_pnas.0802430105.  Slowing down as an early warning signal for abrupt climate change ); Stipp, D., 2004. The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare: the climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues. Http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/02/09/360120/index.htm.
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6. de Menocal, P.B., 2004. African climate change and faunal evolution during the Pliocene-Pleistocene. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 220, 3–24; Dowsett, H.J., et al., 2005. Middle Pliocene sea surface temperature variability. Paleoceanography, 20, PA2014;  Haywood, A., Williams, M., 2005. The climate of the future: clues from three million years ago. Geology Today, 21 (4), 138–143.
7. Anderson, K., Bows, A., 2008. Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. London, doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138; Global Carbon Project (http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/).  Hansen, J.R. et al., 2006, Global temperature change. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 101, 16109–16114.  Hansen, J.R., 2007. Climate change and trace gases. Philosophical Transactions Royalk Society London, 365A, 1925–1954; Hansen, J., et al., 2008. Target CO2: where should humanity aim? http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126.
8. Gingerich, P. D., 2006. Environment and evolution through the Paleocene — Eocene thermal maximum. Trends Ecol. Evolution 21, 246–253;  Sluijs, A.,et al., 2007 Subtropical Arctic Ocean temperatures during the Palaeocene/ Eocene thermal maximum. Nature, 441, 610–613.
9. Walter, K.M., Smith, L.C., Chapin, F.S., 2005. Methane bubbling from Siberian thaw lakes as a positive feedback to climate warming. Nature, 443, 71–75.

10.  Chen, J.L., Wilson, C.R., Blankenship. D.D., Tapley, B.D., 2006. Antarctic mass rates from GRACE. Geophysical Research Letters 33, L11502;  Frederick, T.R. E., Krabill, S. Martin, C., 2006. Progressive increase in ice loss from Greenland. Geophysical Research Letters 33, L10503, doi:10.1029/2006GL026075;  Hanna, H., Huybrechts, P., Janssens, I., Cappelen, J., Steffen, K., Stephens A., 2005. Runoff and mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet: 1958–2003. Journal Geophysical Research, 110, D13108;  NASA 2006. Greenland ice loss doubles in past decade, raising sea level faster, news release, 16 Feb. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/ Nasa News/2006 /2006021621775.html;  National Snow and Ice Data Centre [NSIDC], 2008. http://nsidc.org/NSIDC, 2008, http://nsidc.org/news/press/20080325_Wilkins.html;  Steffen, K., Huff R., 2002. A record maximum melt extent on the Greenland ice sheet in 2002. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado at Boulder, CO 80309-0216);  Steffen, K., Nghiem, S.V., Huff, R., Neumann, G., 2004. The melt anomaly of 2002 on the Greenland Ice Sheet from active and passive microwave satellite observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 31 (20), L2040210.1029/ 2004GL020444;  Steffen, K. and Huff, R., 2002. A record maximum melt extent on the Greenland ice sheet in 2002. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado at Boulder;  Velicogna, I., Wahr, J. 2006. Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass Loss in Antarctica, Science, 311.

11.  Rahmstorf, S.R., 2006. A Semi-Empirical Approach to Projecting Future Sea-Level Rise. Science, 315, 368–370;  Church, J.A., White, N., 2006. A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise. Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826, 2006. http://www.pol.ac.uk/psmsl/author_archive/church_white/GRL_Church_White_2006_024826.pdf;

12.  Bryden, H.L., et al., 2005. Slowing of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation at 25N. Nature 438, 655–657.

13.  Rising natural disasters and insurance costs between 1950 and 2006: Values in $billion. Source: http://www.draeger-stiftung.de/HG/internet/SD/pdf/charts_hoeppe.pdf;  Webster, P.J., Holland, G.J., Curry, J.A., Chang, H.R., 2005. Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment, Science, 309, 1844–1846.

14.  IPCC 2007 SPM-2. http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf;  http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/07/aerosols-chemistry-and-climate/;

15.  Raupach et al., 2007. Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO₂ emissions.  PNAS June 12, 2007 vol. 104 no. 24 10288-10293. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/24/10288/suppl/DC1;

16.  Glikson, A.Y., 2008. Milestones in the evolution of the atmosphere with reference to climate change. Aust. Journal Australia Earth Science, 55, 125–140

17.  http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=d97echlg1&show_article=1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_air_capture;  Lenton, T. M., N. E. Vaughan, N.E., 2009. The radiative forcing potential of different climate geoengineering options. http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/2559 /2009/acpd-9-2559-2009.pdf

Figure 1.

Top: Atmospheric CO2 and continental glaciation 400 Ma to present.

Vertical bars mark the timing and palaeo-latitudinal extent of ice sheets. Plotted CO2

records represent five-point running averages from each of the four major proxies:

stomata leaf pores, phytoplankton, Boron, pedogenic carbonates.

Middle: Global compilation of deep-sea benthic foraminifera ¹⁸O isotope records from 40 Deep Sea Drilling Program and Ocean Drilling Program sites updated with high-resolution records for the Eocene through Miocene interval.

Bottom: Detailed record of CO2 for the last 65 Myr. The range of error for each CO2 proxy varies considerably, with estimates based on soil nodules yielding the greatest uncertainty. Also plotted are the plausible ranges of CO2 from three geochemical carbon cycle models. (After figure 6, http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/ AR4WG1_Print_Ch06.pdf)

Figure 2. One realization of the globally averaged surface air temperature from the ECHAM5 coupled climate model forced with the SRES A2 greenhouse gas increase scenario for the 21st century. Easterling and Wehner (2009). Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L08706 (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL037810.shtml

Figure 3.  Map of potential policy-relevant tipping elements in the climate system, overlain on global population density. Subsystems indicated could exhibit threshold-type behavior in response to anthropogenic climate forcing, where a small perturbation at a critical point qualitatively alters the future fate of the system. They could be triggered this century and would undergo a qualitative change within this millennium We exclude from the map systems in which any threshold appears inaccessible this century (e.g., East Antarctic Ice Sheet) or the qualitative change would appear beyond this millennium (e.g., marine methane hydrates). Question marks indicate systems whose status as tipping elements is particularly uncertain. Lenton, T.M., et al., 2008. Tipping points in the Earth system. PNAS, 105, 1786–1793 _ www.pnas.org_cgi_doi_10.1073_pnas.0705414105

Noah’s Arc Revisited

AN ALLIANCE OF PRO-CARBON SCEPTICS AND

FUNDAMENTALISTS IS RETARDING 11^TH HOUR ATTEMPTS

AT MITIGATION OF DANGEROUS CLIMATE CHANGE

Andrew Glikson

Earth and paleoclimate scientist

Australian National University

ABSTRACT

Mammals have only been able to attain large dimensions on land once atmospheric CO2 concentrations declined toward c. 500 ppm during the Eocene (56-34 million years ago) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal), with related cooling of c.5 degrees C, formation of the Antarctic ice sheet and decline of sea levels by c.70 meters. current atmospheric carbon gas levels (CO2 – 387 ppm; CO2+CH4 >450 ppm equivalent) threaten fast-tracking toward the top of ice age conditions.

(http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_etal_2.pdf ;  http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf ; https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/droyer/web/publications.htm ;

DOI: 10.1126/science.1059412 ; doi:10.1038/nature06588 ; http://earth.geology.yale.edu/~berner/#Publications ; http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;292/5517/686 ; http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06588.html.

In the wake of current global warming to temperatures as high as 4 – 6 degrees C, humans, having endured the sharp climate upheavals of the Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles (+5 degrees Celsius; 120 meter sea level rise), are likely to survive in sheltered environments, including clouded tropical mountain valleys, high elevation islands and sub-Arctic latitudes.

Under global warming on the scale of several degrees Celsius, the future of civilization, hinging on extensive agriculture in temperate climate zones prone to severe droughts, on cultivation in low river deltas prone to sea level rise, and on irrigation of mountain snow-fed rivers, is less clear.

A.  A CLIMATE UPDATE

The progression of global warming through warm/cold pulsations (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL037810.shtml) (Fig. 2A) and related climate projections (Fig. 2B), in part associated with the ENSO cycle and the sun spot cycle, allows sceptics to advance false hopes of “global cooling”, which affect the pressure for deep cuts in carbon emissions and development of alternative clean power utilities.  Few scientists endeavor to communicate the realities of accelerating climate change, and those who do discover governments hardly listen, proceeding with policies guided by anything but the latest evidence. Unfortunately:

1. Current climate change is now exceeding the maximum natural greenhouse radiative forcing level of the last 2.8 million years by 38% based on CO2 alone (387 ppm) and by 53% based on CO2+methane (450 ppm CO2-equivalent). Up-to-date studies define the upper atmospheric forcing limit of the Antarctic ice sheet at about 500 ppm CO2. Due to carbon cycle feedbacks and ice/water interaction feedback, this threatens accelerated collapse of polar ice and rapid meter-scale sea level rises within time frames shorter than originally projected by the IPCC, as reported by Hansen et al. 2008 and 2007 (http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_etal_2.pdf ;  http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf).

2. The threat of irreversible tipping points in the climate system is more urgent than has been envisaged by the IPCC-2007 Report, as indicated by Lenton et al., 2008 (http://researchpages.net/ESMG/people/tim-lenton/tipping-points/) and recent studies of the vulnerability of the atmosphere and ice sheets during the most recent history of the Earth (Steffensen et al., 2008) (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;1157707v1?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=J.P.+Steffensen&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT).

3. In view of the cumulative long residence nature of CO2, reduction of emission is no longer sufficient to avert positive Carbon feedbacks, notably release of methane from permafrost and from bogs, with consequent climate runaway process.

4. Based on the above, Hansen et al. 2008 indicate the maximum CO2 level allowable should be defined at 350 ppm. As this level has already been exceeded, to avert climate crisis, every effort should be made to develop rapid CO2 atmospheric draw-down technology, such as already exists in principle, including chemical capture and fast-growing CO2-sequestering vegetation. CO2 being a cumulative long-residence time gas, the latter may be unable to mitigate global warming to extents illustrated in Figure 2B.

Figure 2A. Irregular progression of global warming correlated with the ENSO (El Nino – La Nina) cycle and sun spot cycle. (Easterling and Wehner, 2009, Is the climate warming or cooling, Geophysical Research Letters, v. 36, L08706, doi:10.1029/2009GL037810, 2009)  (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009 /2009GL037810.shtml)

Figure 2B. One realization of the globally averaged surface air temperature from the ECHAM5 coupled climate model forced with the SRES A2 greenhouse gas increase scenario for the 21st century. (Easterling and Wehner, 2009, Is the climate warming or cooling, Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 36, L08706, doi:10.1029/2009GL037810, 2009)   (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL037810.shtml)

B. CLIMATE FICTIONS WITH REFERENCE TO PLIMER’S

“HEAVEN AND EARTH“

Nothing could result in a greater collective sigh of relief had it been shown current global warming is a transient anomaly or, in the very least, not caused by humans. Such a discovery, once verified, would have resulted in more than one Nobel Prize.

The difference between ambit claims and science being a meticulous review and verification system, by choosing non-scientific media platforms, repeating the same long-discarded arguments ad-infinitum, and not facing to direct debates, the sceptics’ approach amounts to a rejection of the scientific method. The latest example is Plimer’s the book “Heaven and Earth” (http://www.connorcourt.com/catalog1/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=7&products_id=103) and related media articles.

A long road leads from Galileo, persecuted by the Church for unearthing a new truth, to sceptics obtaining backing from a Cardinal (“Climate Change pauses” by Cardinal George Pell. http://www.sydney.catholic.org.au/people/ archbishop/stc/2009/2009524_ 1018.shtml).  It is a wonder how a scientist who fought creationism tooth and nail (http://creation.com/plimer-case-main-points), and a cardinal reported to be “comfortable with intelligent design” (http://www.cardinalrating.com/cardinal_75__article_2092.htm) find themselves in the same camp denying human-driven global warming.

Having spent years trying to refute an alleged discovery of relics of Noah’s Ark relics on Mount Ararat (http://creation.com/plimer-case-main-points) (Figure 3), a story echoing sea level rise associated with increased temperatures (c.1 degrees Celsius) in the early Holocene (c.10,000-6000 years-ago) (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf), Plimer questions the post-19^th century acceleration of sea level (from 0.11 to 0.35 cm/year) which is consistent with global temperature rise of more than 0.8 degrees C (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/). Once account is taken of (A) the masking effect of industrial short-lived aerosols, and (B) albedo reduction of the Arctic Sea ice and other parts of the cryosphere, radiative forcings since 1750 approach the equivalent of near-1.5 degrees C (http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/2843).

In an attempt to negate the critical role of over 305 billion tons of emitted carbon during the 19^th – 21^st centuries, Plimer questions the established relations between the carbon gases and climate through time, demonstrated by multi-proxy studies (https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/droyer/web/publications.htm ;

DOI: 10.1126/science.1059412 ; doi:10.1038/nature06588 ; http://earth.geology.yale.edu/~berner/#Publications), and further suggests a supposedly beneficial nature of current rise of CO2 and temperature (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25552775-7583,00.html ; http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25429080-7583,00.html).

Many of the questions raised by Plimer are answered in the comprehensive synthesis of peer-reviewed geological and paleo-climate literature of the IPCC AR4 2007 report, which states (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf):

“Climate has changed on all time scales throughout Earth’s history. Some aspects of the current climate change are not unusual, but others are. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has reached a record high relative to more than the past half-million years, and has done so at an exceptionally fast rate. Current global temperatures are warmer than they have ever been during at least the past five centuries, probably even for more than a millennium. If warming continue unabated, the resulting climate change within this century would be extremely unusual in geological terms. Another unusual aspect of recent climate change is its cause: past climate changes were natural in origin (see FAQ 6.1), whereas most of the warming of the past 50 years is attributable to human activities.”

Plimer rejects the IPCC (“The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism. It is unrelated to science” (http://www.connorcourt.com/catalog1/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=7&products_id=103 , p. 20).  He further dismisses climate scientists despite hundreds of their peer-reviewed papers, for example where he states: “No evidence is provided for this statement and no signatory to this letter has published anything to support this claim” (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25552775-7583,00.html ; http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25429080-7583,00.html) (http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/05/01/scientists-speak-out-coal-fired-power-stations-are-responsible-for-global-warming/). Plimer claims “No critic has argued science with me. I have just enjoyed a fortnight of being thrashed with a feather” but has not to date responded in any detail to critiques of his book, i.e. by Enting, Brook, Vernon, Ashley, Sandiford (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25552775-7583,00.html ;  http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25429080-7583,00.html)

To bring examples of only a few points in the debate (Plimer is cited in inverted comas):

1.      “So depleted is the atmosphere in CO2, that horticulturalists pump warm CO2 into glasshouses to accelerate plant growth.”  The greenhouse glasshouse analogy is irrelevant as plants need to be constantly watered in these artificial environments  (http://www.greenhousegrowing.co.uk/WateringDampingDown.html) as distinct from open space agriculture and habitats. Plimer overlooks the fact that CO2 levels of the atmosphere, which oscillated between 180 and 280 ppm since 2.8 million years ago, are inherent in the natural environment in which current biodiversity and humans have evolved.  The sharp departures from the maximum atmospheric composition of 280 ppm of the last 2.8 million years to 387 ppm is leading mid-Pliocene-like conditions with temperature rise of 2-3 degrees C leading to sea level rise by 25+/-12 meters (http://www.geo.wvu.edu/~kammer/g231/readings/ClimateoftheFuture.pdf ; http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/pliocene/)

2.      “Carbon dioxide is an odourless, colourless, harmless natural gas. It is plant food. Without carbon, there would be no life on Earth“. Here Plimer makes two cardinal mistakes:

(A)   Once the balance of atmospheric composition changes, as it has through geological times, plants and organism adapt, but only over extended time periods. Sharp changes, as induced by volcanic, impact or greenhouse crises, lead to mass extinction of species (http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061631634/Under_a_Green_Sky/index.aspx  ; http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/04/fossil-climate.html ; http://www.gsa.org.au/ajes/ajes2005.html#4-5 ; http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V61-4GCX1MR-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=8aae6e7978f2eeaaaaaf7212b44f140c).

(B)   The current rise in CO2 of c.2 ppm/year and of temperature (c.0.017C/year) by about an order of magnitude faster than the mean rise during the last glacial termination (c.0.002C/year) and faster than the 55 Ma greenhouse extinction event (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06588.html) threatens similar consequences as the latter event.

3. “The main greenhouse gas has always been water vapour. Once there is natural global warming, then CO2 in the atmosphere increases.” ((http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25552775-7583,00.html ; http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25429080-7583,00.html). The opposite is the case: Whereas carbon gases have a long residence time and may be derived from buried geological sources, water vapor constitutes transient feedback. Thus, water vapor occur at very low concentrations over the fastest warming parts of Earth, namely the polar regions and deserts.

4. “Ice cores show CO2 increases some 800 years after temperature increase so why can’t an increase in CO2 today be due to the medieval warming (900-1300)?”  According to the IPCC-2007 4AR report mean global temperatures during the Medieval Warming Period were less than 20^th century warming (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf ; p. 469). The post-industrial increase in CO2 of over 40% the maximum of Pleistocene interglacial periods is clearly related to the industrial emission of over 305 billion tons of carbon and can not be compared to the medieval warm period, during which no anomalous CO2 rise is recorded (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf ; Fig 6.4]).  The lag of CO2 rise behind temperature during glacial terminations is related to the dominant role of forcing by ice melt/water interaction followed by CO2 feedbacks from warming oceans and drying vegetation (http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_etal_2.pdf ;  http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf)

5.      “Some 85 per cent of volcanoes are unseen and unmeasured yet these heat the oceans and add monstrous amounts of CO2 to the oceans. Why have these been ignored?”  Not so. Comparisons between the St Helens (1980), El-Chichon (1982), Pinatubo (1991, 93) and other eruptions and the Mauna Loa atmospheric CO2 trend (http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/) display no marked signatures of these volcanic eruptions.

6.      “Why have there been five significant ice ages when CO2 was higher than now?”  The atmospheric CO2 range during the Oligocene – Holocene range, measured from proxies (stomata fossil plant pores, carbon and boron isotopes, sodium minerals, alkenones), indicate CO2 levels below 500 ppm (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06588.html?message=remove ; doi:10.1038/nature06588). Previous ice ages include Jurassic, Carboniferous-Permian and Devonian glaciations with CO2 a few hundred ppm (https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/droyer/web/publications.htm ;  DOI: 10.1126/science.1059412 ; doi:10.1038/nature06588 ; http://earth.geology.yale.edu/~berner/#Publications). Studies of Ordovician paleoclimate remain inconclusive in this respect

7.      “Computer models using the past 150 years of measurements have been used to predict climate for the next few centuries. Why have these models not been run backwards to validate known climate changes?” Not so. Extensive climate modeling has been conducted on past climate changes, for example of the mid-Pliocene by the USGS (http://www.geo.wvu.edu/~kammer/g231/readings/ClimateoftheFuture.pdf ; http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/pliocene/).

8.      “I would bet the farm that by running these models backwards, El Nino events and volcanoes such as Krakatoa (1883, 535), Rabaul (536) and Tambora (1815) could not be validated.”  Climate projections do not include the effects of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, nor do they need to as volcanic aerosol effects are short term, whereas the volcanic CO2 effect is relatively minor.

9.      Several examples have been presented of inconsistencies between diagrams included in “Heaven and Earth” and original data sources (http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/04/23/ian-plimer-heaven-and-earth/).

In praising the “merit” of global warming, Plimer overlooks the causes of past mass extinction of species, triggered by environmental changes at a pace with which organisms could not cope. These included large-scale volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts and runaway methane release, such as occurred at 55 million years ago (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06588.html?message=remove ; doi:10.1038/nature06588).

C.  A MEDIEVAL CLIMATE

the On the 15th June, 2009, Senator Steve Fielding, leader of “Family First”  will cast a vote deciding whether the Australian government is allowed to take a first tentative step, be it woefully inadequate, to honor its election commitment of “the highest moral issue of our times (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,25037352-7583,00.html?from=public_rss).

Fielding is undertaking his own “open mind” “exploration” of climate science. (http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2588715.htm ; http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2588747.htm).  Never mind that top climate research institutions world-wide (Hadley-Met, Tyndale, GISS-NASA, Potsdam, CSIRO, BOM, NSIDC) have already concluded dangerous human-driven climate change is tracking toward mean temperatures of +2, +4 and even +6 degrees C (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf). (Figure 2B).

Straight out of meetings at the Heartland Institute, supported by the American Enterprise Institute, which received $1,625,000 from Exxon-Mobil between and 1998 and 2005 (http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=heartland_institute_1), Fielding states “So far I don’t think there’s been a real debate about the science” and “Let’s actually explore that“.  Can it be that Senator Fielding’s “exploration” may in anyway be affected by his view of the Greens, expressed as “The Greens are in the extreme camp and like any fanatical group, they’re locked into ideology” (http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25585267-661,00.html).

Following in the footsteps of Cardinal George Pell who, for several years, has been referring to environmentalists as “Scaremongering” and “zealots” (http://globalwarming-factorfiction.com/2007/02/19/scaremongers/), with “hysteric and extreme claims about global warming are also a symptom of pagan emptiness” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pell), stating: “The science is more complicated than the propaganda“.

Setting themselves as arbiters of science, assuming the role ancient Egyptian priests in predicting the flow of the Nile, the rains, solar and lunar eclipses, with one exception: The Egyptian priests conducted their own astronomical and water level measurements.

Fielding states “They (the “skeptics”) have actually got models that show that the solar energy, in other words, the energy from the sun has a higher direct link with global temperatures than carbon emissions. And this is going back, not only over the last 10 years, but hundreds of years” (http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2588747.htm).

In his climate “exploration” Fielding may not be aware that since the mid-20th century the role of the sun was limited to the 11 years sunspot cycle, oscillating at +/- 0.1 degrees Celsius. (http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf), compared to mean temperature rise due to greenhouse warming of about +0.6 degrees Celsius (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ ; http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf). Stateing “And they were putting forward some science and some evidence and some facts that were questioning whether CO2 is actually driving global warming.” (http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2588715.htm), nor does he appear to be aware of the basic physics and chemistry of the infrared greenhouse effect (http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm).

D.  Conclusions

1. Currently the atmosphere is tracking toward conditions of the Pliocene, c.2.8 million years ago, when CO2 levels of c.400 ppm and temperature rises of 2 to 3 degrees led to sea level rises of c.25+/-12 meters.

1. With open-ended carbon emissions, the rise of temperature at experimentally determined climate sensitivity rates (3+/-1.5 degrees C per doubling of CO2 levels) (http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_etal_2.pdf ;  http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf) can only result in a shift in the Earth’s climate state to pre-ice age conditions, including major sea level rise, akin to conditions during which the dinosaurs thrived for 200 million years, a period three orders of magnitude longer than “sapiens”.

1. A well financed alliance of neoconservatives, fossil fuel executives, ex-tobacco lobbyists (http://www.desmogblog.com/s-fred-singer), fundamentalists, right wing journalists and sceptics who operate outside the scientific peer-review system, receiving near-exclusive publicity in large parts of the media, disseminate untruths and doubt which are welcome by (A) those of prefer to live in denial of dangerous climate change; (B) those who would not understand the scientific method; and (C) provide governments with excuses to delay weak 11^th hour attempts at carbon constraints.

1. The motivation of those who continue to disseminate dangerous untruths which can only result in the continuous rise of atmospheric CO2 levels and temperatures, shifting the atmospheric state during which humans evolved over the last 2.8 million years, defies contemplation

Having endured the sharp climate upheavals of the Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles, humans are likely to survive in suitable environments, including clouded tropical mountain regions, high elevation islands and cool high latitudes regions. Hinging on extensive agriculture in temperate climate zones, prone to severe droughts, on cultivation in low river deltas, prone to sea level rise, and on irrigation of mountain snow-fed rivers, the future of civilization under global warming on the scale of several degrees Celsius is less clear.

Figure 3. “Noah’s Ark”. Mount Ararat area.

Heresy of the First Order: We are the “Third Chimpanzees”

By Jason Miller

“On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.” – Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) from “Dreams and Facts”

Russell’s nihilistic characterization of Homo sapiens injects some much-needed perspective into a world in which our species of intellectually evolved primates suffers a collective delusion of grandeur. In “Dreams and Facts,” Russell further savages our God-complex with the powerfully humbling reminder that our solar system is but “an infinitesimal speck” and the Earth a mere “microscopic dot.” He does apply some soothing salve to our wounded egos with the observation that, “No man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness,” but his decimation of our grossly-overinflated sense of importance remains intact.

While I don’t suffer from deep-seated self-hatred and I’m not an alienated misanthrope who has isolated himself from the rest of humanity, I’m penning this brief jeremiad as a deconstruction of our species. And I’m not going to dilute my critique by extolling the real and imagined virtues of Homo sapiens. Pollyanna has fled the building. If you are too deeply immersed in our culture of narcissism to take a moment to gaze upon a collective image of humanity far more hideous and repulsive than Dorian Gray, stop reading and sprint for the television. You might get lucky and catch Paris Hilton’s latest escapade.

My objective here is to storm the parapets of narcissism, assail the bulwarks of speciesism, and batter our increasingly vulnerable ego fortress called anthropocentrism. Centuries ago, Galileo insisted that the Sun didn’t revolve around the Earth. Today there is a growing movement of people, including me, who are equally insistent that the universe doesn’t revolve around human beings.

What God would choose THIS species?

Ultimately, aside from Russell’s “big picture” description of human beings as “tiny lumps of impure carbon and water,” even within the scope and context of Earth and its inhabitants, we have a decidedly distorted and unjustifiably high opinion of our significance and importance. While we collectively view ourselves as “God’s chosen species” we are nothing more than primates with an evolved intellect and a capacity for complex communications. Yet despite the facts that the same anthropocentrasizing myths that inform us of our “divine qualities” also clearly remind us of our human frailties (i.e. Adam and Eve and original sin) and that we share 96% of our DNA with chimpanzees, by and large we still collectively conclude that we are superior to all other animals. Paralleling the widely reviled “master race” mindset propagated by von List, Schopenhauer and Nazi propagandists, most of humanity tenaciously embraces the equally repulsive idea that we are the “master species.”

The reality is that the Homo sapiens branch of the evolutionary tree held the potential to bear the most succulent and nutritious fruit, capable of nurturing the Earth and perpetuating its capacity to sustain the precious commodity of life. Yet at some point something went horribly awry. The apples of humanity over-ripened, their worm-ridden flesh withering and rotting into a pulpy mass of mucous-like, repulsive goo. We Homo sapiens have betrayed the great promise inherent in our powerful intellect, as we long ago became a huge liability rather than an asset to the Earth and its other inhabitants.

There is certainly no rational argument to counter the assertion that human animals are capable of performing many highly complex and amazing intellectual, aesthetic, and technologically-assisted feats. Yet we fetishize our intelligence to such an extent that we minimize or utterly dismiss the astounding capabilities of other animals.

It is true that wolves will never employ calculus to determine rates of change or the volume of a solid. Baboons will never compose Shakespearean sonnets or dance ballets. And dolphins will never build light-weight, aerodynamic, jet-powered vehicles to enable themselves to fly. However, without technological assistance, humans will never fly like bats and birds, echolate like dolphins, detect electrical fields emitted by other beings like sharks, use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate like birds, sniff out one particular grain of sand on a beach like a dog, or communicate over distances of two miles like elephants.

In our self-congratulatory, self-worshipping cultural schema of human supremacy, we devalue nonhuman animals and discount those capabilities they possess that are superior to ours. It is heresy of the first order to suggest that even a dog, despite being man’s best friend, could possibly exist as an equally respected sentient being and rise above the status of property, no matter how sentimental people may get about “their” pets. Why? Because if nonhuman animals ceased to be legally and morally (according to the dominant culture) subject to our perverse desire to subjugate, dominate, objectify, and exploit nearly every other being on the planet, our diseased means by which we’ve organized our existence, often referred to as “civilization,” would collapse in favor of a radical alternative.

Roboticize them

If we stopped denying that nonhuman animals are as worthy of unfettered and unexploited existences as we are, not to mention our disregard for their sentience, we would obliterate our guilt-assuaging rationalizations for slaughtering them and eating their rotting flesh, reducing them to machine-like entities used to mass produce milk and eggs, gunning them down for “sport” (imagine a duel in which only one person was allowed to have a weapon), performing barbaric laboratory experiments on them in Mengele fashion, employing myriad psychologically and physically torturous tactics to train them to perform for us, “deploying” them as stand-ins for enemy soldiers in cruel, murderous tests performed by the military, and much more.

Rather than acknowledging the growing body of knowledge that demonstrates that we are just scratching the surface in comprehending the complexity of the emotional, intellectual and social lives of other animals (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/minding-the-animals-ethology-and-the-obsolescence-of-left-humanism/), it is far more convenient, and in fact essential, for the dominant culture of speciesism and anthropocentrism to define nonhuman animals as the complex organic automatons that Descartes described. “Robots” don’t think, feel a range of emotions, or socialize with other robots. Therefore they cannot suffer and there can be no moral objection to exploiting them. So goes the “logic.”

At what cost?

Yet despite the fact that many Homo sapiens have little or no concern about the moral implications of the holocaust we are visiting upon other animals or our rape of the Earth, bending nonhuman animals and nature to our will is producing a fierce backlash that is impacting all of us.

In Averting the China Syndrome (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/averting-the-china-syndrome-response-to-our-critics-and-the-devotees-of-fundamentalist-pacifism/),
which I co-wrote with Steve Best, we summarized the hell we’ve brought upon ourselves, other animals and the Earth:

“In just 10,000 years, a millisecond of geological time, Homo sapiens civilization, embodied by the repulsively rapacious paradigm of Western speciesist capitalism and anthropocentrism has managed to push the planet to the brink of ecological collapse. Droughts, violent hurricanes, melting ice caps, drowning polar bears, increasing hunger, food riots, diminishing supplies of potable water, species of plants and animals disappearing at an alarming rate, and a host of other frightening events are unfolding more quickly than scientists can even document. Scientists throughout the world are warning of a rapidly narrowing window of opportunity for averting a catastrophic level of climate change, and NASA scientist James Hansen warned newly elected President Obama that he has “four years to save Earth” through a radical shift in US energy policies or face the real potential of ecological breakdown reaching a crucial tipping point.”

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Which is the ugliest species of all?

Our childish collective belief that we are superior to other animals, which many Homo sapiens will fight tooth and nail to defend, is both delusional and a sign of a deep psychological insecurity. Some even revel in the illusion that we are at the “top of the food chain,” not realizing that we exist in a food web or that both human activities and human over-population are straining that web to its limits and beyond.

The sad reality is that we are 6.5 billion self-absorbed, self-destructive, and rapacious primates (the “third chimpanzees actually,” as asserted by Jared Diamond http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Chimpanzee) running amok in an orgy of buying and consuming a nearly infinite number and array of toys, gadgets, gizmos, baubles, trinkets, clothes, autos, yachts, houses, planes and on and on to the extent that to take it all in would leave one’s head spinning like a roulette wheel in Vegas; gorging upon all manner of factory “farmed,” processed, industrialized, and genetically modified “food;” creating inestimable tons of repulsively stinking “solid waste” that we cram so tightly into canyon-sized garbage dumps (euphemistically called land-fills) that it won’t decompose for tens of thousands of years; pouring, leaking, or trickling millions upon millions of gallons of sludge, sewage, toxic waste, and hazardous chemicals into streams, rivers, lakes, oceans and the ground-water; felling old-growth and rain forests with the furious rapidity of Paul Bunyan suffering a meth-induced psychosis; waging perpetual wars and thereby contaminating and obliterating vast swatches of the Earth and wreaking havoc upon myriad ecosystems; sucking vast quantities of liquefied dinosaur remains from the Earth to feed our addictions to our smog-emitting shiny metal boxes on wheels and to industrial agriculture, a planet-raping evil that has allowed the “third chimpanzee” population to grow exponentially; maintaining vast arsenals of nuclear weapons, which could at any moment annihilate hundreds of millions of humans and other animals and plunge the Earth into a dismal nuclear winter; and more. Documenting all of the outrageously reckless, selfish, and destructive activities of Homo sapiens would require a tome so large that publishing it would take a sizable notch out of one of the rapidly vanishing old-growth forests.

“Man vs. Nature”

However, being the clever little bipedal primates that we are, we have erected an artificial world within the natural world, which affords us comfort and protection and serves to shield us, for now at least, from much of the damage inflicted on the Earth by our obscenely orgiastic existence. We utilize concrete, asphalt, mortar, brick, steel, engines, computers, and a host of other materials, mechanizations, and technologies to maintain a multiply layered barrier between us and the rest of nature, content in the “knowledge” that we are unique, special, and superior to the extent that the Earth and its other inhabitants are mere objects we can use and abuse at our discretion.

Our houses, offices, schools, and cars, in which many of us spend most of our time, are hermetically sealed and “climate-controlled,” shielding us from the “deleterious effects” of direct interaction with nature. We drive and walk mostly on pavement. Our gargantuan cities and their sprawling suburbs continue to sprout up faster than fungi on a compost pile in a windowless barn, knocking out those annoying trees that block our view of the horizon; asphalting over the unkempt, insect-infested meadows; and filling up all that wasted, undeveloped land with cul-de-sac upon cul-de-sac of McMansions, row upon row of strip malls, and two convenience stores, a McDonalds, a Wendy’s and a Pizza Hut on the corner of every newly paved street. DuPont promised us better living through chemistry and they delivered a slew of disinfectants, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and various and sundry other weapons in the war to keep the feral elements at bay. Most of us participate in an economy which employs division of labor and money, further alienating us from the rest of the planet. As technology and corporations, our principal means of “fending off nature” advance and proliferate, we become more and more partitioned off from nature in a sad amplification of the alienated way in which we exist on Earth.

Television (the opiate of the masses that Marx couldn’t have foreseen) entertains, indoctrinates, desensitizes, and pacifies us. It also serves as the primary emotional and intellectual moat around our castle of artificiality. Recognizing that they capture the attention and arrest the thinking of billions of us for several hours a day, seven days a week, the corporations that determine the content of television programming take full advantage of this opportunity to ensure that consumerism, the worship of wealth, narcissism, and many other pathologies (which both the programmers and the programees have been indoctrinated to believe are “normal”) continue to infect our diseased psyches, thus enhancing their profits and preventing many of us from catching even a glimpse of the world that hasn’t been distorted by the labyrinth of funhouse mirrors that pervades our consciousness.

Yes, we’ve been naughty little chimps and no matter how furiously we work to wallpaper over the murder, mayhem, destruction, and contamination we leave in our wake, and no matter how stridently we deny our culpability for the impending ecocide, animal holocaust, and omnicide, the wallpaper inevitably sags and tears away and our denials wear thin as a razor’s edge, exposing the unbearable truth that one shitty little simian species is on the verge of extinguishing itself, millions of other species, and, quite possibly, the Earth’s capacity to sustain life.

We are all complicit to some degree. And it impacts us, whether we admit it or not. Our souls are stained a deep crimson with the rivers of blood of the slaughtered, shot, tortured, skinned, beaten, and disemboweled; our ears are deafened by the cacophonous din of the desperate cries of the defenseless who endure a lifetime of agony for our momentary pleasures; our noses are assaulted by the appalling stench of legions of rotting corpses, mountains of fetid garbage, acrid smoke belching from billions of smokestacks and tailpipes, and all the other noxious and nauseating smells of industrial civilization; and our psyches are strained beyond their limits by the intense cognitive dissonance born of maintaining the self-delusion that we are essentially good as we participate in the constant gang rape of the Earth and nearly all its other inhabitants by our 6.5 billion strong troop of “third chimpanzees.”

Those corporate whores who are still chanting denials that humanity is killing the planet can rally under the banners of idiotic demagogues like Senator James Inhofe and industry shills like David Martosko of the Center for Consumer Freedom, trumpeting the virtues of industrial civilization until the cows come home and die, but their efforts to perpetuate the culture of Thanatos will ultimately be thwarted in one of three ways:

1. Those of us who oppose them will prevail in the prolonged struggle for the total liberation (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/total-liberation/) of humans, other animals, and the Earth.

2. As the battle rages and corporatism persists, Mother Nature will eradicate Homo sapiens from the Earth, much as our immune system eliminates a virus.

3. Worshippers of profit, property, and themselves will prevail over liberationists and nature, artificially sustaining human “life” on a dystopic techno-hell of a planet bereft of potable water, flora, or fauna, before finally exhausting the last of their plundered resources, expiring with a pathetic whimper, and having successfully “achieved” omnicide and ecocide.

So ask yourself, fellow “third chimp,” what’s more important? Our egos and our comfort, or the perpetuation of life on Earth?

The Road To Two Degrees Celsius

THE ROAD TO THE EU’S +2 DEGREES C MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE LIMIT

(Figures and table in the attached pdf file)

According to the IPCC AR4-2007 report [1] a total anthropogenic greenhouse factor, equivalent to +2.3 degrees C, is masked by a compensating aerosol albedo effect (mainly sulphur from industrial emissions) equivalent to -0.9C (without land clearing albedo gain and ice melt albedo loss) (Table 1).  Once the short-lived aerosols dissipate, adding the reflectance loss of melting polar ice (where maximum warming of up to 4 degrees C occurs; Figure 2), mean global temperatures track toward +2 degrees C, considered by the European Union to be the maximum permissible level.

From Table 1, subtracting the aerosol masking effect, the magnitude of the 1750 – 2005 mean forcing at ~3 Watt/m2 is approaching 50% of the total last glaciation termination of 6.5+/-1.5 Watt, not accounting for developments since 2005. This includes the reduction in albedo due to melting of Arctic Sea ice and other parts of the cryosphere.

Since the mid-1990s the mean global temperature trend has become increasingly irregular, representing an increase in climate variability with global warming, as reflected by variations in the ENSO cycle and oscillating ice melt and re-freeze cycles. The solar sunspot cycle effect is at about +/-0.1 degrees C, an order of magnitude less than greenhouse forcing. Sharp peaks include the 1998 El-Nino peak (near +0.55C) and the 2007 La Nina trough (near -0.7C) [2]. Mean global temperature continued to rise during 1999-2005 by about 0.2C (Figure 3).

The effects of this warming on the cryosphere include:

(A) Reduction in the Arctic Sea multi-year ice cover from about 4.2 to 2.5 million square km during 2000-2009 [3] (Figure 4).
(B) Increase in Greenland September ice melt area from 350,000 to 550,000 square km during 1997-2007 [4] (Figure 5).
(C) Warming of the entire Antarctic continent by 0.6C and of west Antarctic by 0.85C during 1957-2006 [5], reflected by collapse of west Antarctic ice shelves [6] (Figure 6).

Variations in temperature and sea ice cover around Antarctica are effected by the shrinking polar wind vortex and tropospheric and stratospheric ozone layer conditions, resulting in geographic and temporal variability in sea and land ice cover.

Ongoing global warming may lead to the release of methane from permafrost, collapse of the North Atlantic Thermohaline current, high-energy weather events and yet little-specified shifts in atmospheric states (tipping points) [7]

This experiment by Homo “sapiens” is a novel one. Developments may include periods of cooling, as may be indicated by the current slow-down of Greenland glaciers. In a recent paper by Dakos et al. (2008) abrupt climate changes in the past are shown to have been preceded by quiet periods [8].

Pseudo-skeptics use such short-term variability, for example slowing down of Greenland glaciers, to argue “global cooling” and thereby a “justification” for further carbon emissions [9].

Armed with the “new truth” promulgated in “Heaven and Earth: global warming – the missing science“, complete with hundreds of elementary science errors [10], a fundamental attack appears to take place on the scientific method as such [11].

The implications of climate change for ecosystems are illustrated in the new book “Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming” by Anthony Barnosky, of Yale University, who states: “I think probably the biggest cause for worry is we really are seeing the disappearance of whole ecological niches, which means extinctions.” [12].

Despite intensified warnings from the Copenhagen climate conference [13], as a self-fulfilling prophecy Rudd’s “great moral issue of our time” [14] is being relegated to secondary priority [15], if that.

More recently the pro-carbon lobby is using a new tactic: “jobs” [16], a novel angle for big business traditionally concerned with profits as much as with social welfare, at times regarding unemployment as a convenient lever to lower wages and conditions [17].

The warning of “jobs” means that, rather than accept the global concern for the survival of future generations and biodiversity, which demands urgent (as well as job-creating) transformation from polluting utilities to alternative energy industries, workers will be just fired – a threat held over the head of governments with one eye on the next elections.

Basically they still don’t get it.

Given that warnings by scientists have proven mostly correct, as contrasted with watered-down reports percolating upward through bureaucracies, there is little evidence the Rudd government is listening to the recent dire warnings by climate scientists [18].

The decline by CSIRO to report directly to the recent Senate climate inquiry [19], reminiscent of the Howard era [20], has only been saved by the courage of individual scientists, one of whom compared Labor’s targets to ‘Russian roulette with the climate system with most of the chambers loaded‘.

[1]  http://www.ipcc.ch/ ; SPM.2.
[2]  http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif
[3]  http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/arctic_thinice.html
[4]  http://nsidc.org/data/virtual_globes/
[5]  http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20090121/
[6]  http://nsidc.org/news/press/20080325_Wilkins.html
[7]  http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2009/02/timothy-m-lenton-et-al-pnas-105-6.html ; http://researchpages.net/ESMG/people/tim-lenton/tipping-points/.
[8] http://www.indiana.edu/~halllab/L577/Topic3/Dakosetal_2008_PNAS.pdf
[9] http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/01/23/glacier-slowdown-in-greenland-how-inconvenient/
[10] http://www.connorcourt.com/catalog1/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=7&products_id=103 ; http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/05/ian_enting_is_checking_plimers.php ;  http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/04/23/ian-plimer-heaven-and-earth/ ; http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,25433059-5003900,00.html ;  http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/05/05/plimer-wants-to-talk-science-ok-here-goes/,
[11] http://australianconservative.com/main-site/category/policy/environment/page/2/
[12] http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=21540
[13] http://climatecongress.ku.dk/newsroom/congress_key_messages/
[14] http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,25037352-7583,00.html?from=public_rss
[15] http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2009/04/24/doolittle-and-delay/
[16] http://apo.org.au/commentary/economy-versus-climate-where-do-we-spend-next,
[17] http://www.stwr.org/multinational-corporations/multinational-corporations-mncs-beyond-the-profit-motive.html.
[18] http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=28&ContentID=139318 ;   http://wotnews.com.au/like/7_australian_climate_scientists_forecast_an_end_to_coal/3359286/.
[19] http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2543405.htm
[20] http://www.safecom.org.au/csiro-silence.htm
[21] http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abstracts/2008/Hansen_etal.html

Key Climate Science Problems In Plimer’s “Heaven and Earth’

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts”
(Senator Daniel Moynihan)

Bold claims as if the science is “missing” from the extensive research conducted by the world’s premier research bodies (Hadley-Met, NASA, Potsdam-Oceanographic, CSIRO, Tindall, national academies of science), reported in thousands of peer-reviewed science journal papers and complied by International and government panels (IPCC, Stern, Garnaut) [2], which amount to attempts at reinvention of the basic tenents of physics and chemistry of climate science, need to be backed by evidence.

This Plimer’s book “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science” [1] does not achieve.

The book overlooks the effects of more than 305 billion ton of carbon (GtC) emitted since the 18th century, nearly 42% of the total atmospheric inventory of 750 GtC, which pushed CO2 levels to 387 ppm, 38% higher than the maximum of 280 ppm of the last 2.8 million years of glacial-interglacial Earth history [3]. The consequent increased in the energy level of the atmosphere (1.6 Watt/m2 ~1.2 degrees C) (IPCC-2007), once the masking effects of emitted sulphur aerosols are taken into account, are manifest around the globe [2].

Further to numerous errors indicated earlier (http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/04/23/ian-plimer-heaven-and-earth/), Plimer’s book claims current global warming is a natural event consistent with climate variability through time and attributed primarily to the sun, through:

(1) The book negates the well documented consistent relations between climate and carbon gases, which through Earth history resulted in temperature changes in the range of several degrees C [4], including abrupt climate changes and related mass extinction of species [5].

(2) The book exaggerates the effects of the sun. However, since the 18th century the overall rise of solar insolation accounts for no more than 0.12 Watt/m2 (about 0.1 degrees C), an order of magnitude less than the CO2 greenhouse effect [5]. A marked rise in insolation by about 0.3 Watt/m2 during the first half of the 20th century stabilized since the 1970s at +/-0.1 degrees according to the 11 years sunspot cycle, a period during which Earth warmed by about 0.6 degrees C due to the rise in CO2 [6].

Thus, Solanki et al. 2005 state: “Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades [6].

(3)  The book attempts to discredit national and international climate research reports, primarily the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to which the world’s leading climate scientists have contributed. By contrast, as shown by the tracking of CO2, temperature and sea level rises since 2001 at the top of IPCC projections [7], the IPCC reports appeared to err on the conservative end.

Lost in current climate wars is an appreciation of the sensitive balance between the physical and chemical state of the atmosphere and the biosphere, which has controlled the emergence, survival and demise of species, including humans, and whose disruption resulted in abrupt climate shifts and mass extinction of species.. During human history even minor global mean temperature changes of +/-0.3 degrees C resulted in regional droughts and the collapse of agriculture, such as along the great river valleys the Nile, Euphrates, Indus and Yellow River.

The book underestimates the sensitivity of the atmosphere to external forcings, such as posed by massive injections of greenhouse gases with related carbon cycle and ice melt/water feedback effects. Leading US climate and paleoclimate scientists state: “Large, abrupt, and widespread climate changes with major impacts have occurred repeatedly in the past, when the Earth system was forced across thresholds. Although abrupt climate changes can occur for many reasons, it is conceivable that human forcing of climate change is increasing the probability of large, abrupt event.” [8])

The book takes little account of the intimate relations between the greenhouse effect and the history of the atmosphere. By contrast to Venus, with its thick blanket of greenhouse gases, or Mars with its thin atmosphere, the modulation of the Earths atmosphere by trace Carbon gases, CO2 and methane, allows surface temperatures in the approximate range of -50 to +50 degrees C, presence of liquid water and thereby of life. Significant increase in the level of carbon gases triggers powerful feedbacks. These include ice melt/warm water interaction feedback, further release of CO2 from the oceans and drying/burning vegetation, shifts of climate zones toward the poles, reduced capacity of the oceans to absorb CO2 and ocean acidification, documented by the IPCC.

The Antarctic ice sheet formed some 34 million years ago when temperatures plunged associated with decline of CO2 levels below 500 ppm [9]. Combined with methane, current CO2-equivalent levels are tracking toward 440 ppm. Large land-based mammals, whose breathing mechanism is adapted to glacial-interglacial climates, did not exist on a greenhouse Earth warmer by several degrees C relative to the present.

About 3 Ma-ago, CO2 rise to about 400 ppm and temperature rise by about 2 to 3 degrees C resulted in sea level rise of 25+/- 12 meters. About 124 thousand years ago, during the Emian interglacial, mean global temperatures rose by about 1 degrees C and sea levels by 6 to 8 meters [10]. These relations indicate a ratio of sea level rise to temperature rise of at least 5 metres/1 degree C. With mean temperatures tracking at the top of the IPCC projections toward 2 – 4 degrees C later in the century, low fertile delta regions and urban coastal population world-wide will be flooded. So much for the “beneficial” global warming promulgated in the book.

Continuing emissions of CO2 reaching levels as high as 400 ppm, as at 3 million years ago, or 500 ppm as at 34 million years ago, embodies a similar logic as open-ended influx of acid into the oceans, rationalized by the fact seas were acid during past periods of Earth history.

That East Antarctic is still holding its ice does not justify further emission of hundreds of billion tons of carbon before this last part of the cryosphere is lost.

Carbon emission reductions aimed at an upper temperature level of 2 degrees C [11] may overlook carbon cycle, including methane, ice melt feedback effects, and possible climate tipping points. Ideas as if Homo sapiens can alter and transcend the physical and chemical boundaries of the atmosphere-ocean-land-biosphere system which allowed its development in the first place, are founded on a misunderstanding of the geological evolution and the present state of the Earth system and are dangerous.

Dr Andrew Glikson
Australian National University
5 May, 2009
______________________________________________________________________________________________

[1] “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science” by Ian Plimer. Connor Court Publishing, 2009)

[2] http://www.ipcc.ch/; http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html; http://www.garnautreview.org.au/CA25734E0016A131/pages/home; http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/sternreview_index.htm; http://americasclimatechoices.org/; http://books.nap.edu/collections/global_warming/index.html

[3] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5768/1747; http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL027817.shtml; http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V62-414P195-5&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=2f2cfd319d56a702ab8adb95773bd442;

[4] http://www.pnas.org/content/105/2/407.full?ck=nck; http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/FACULTY/POPP/Royer%20et%20al.%202004%20GSA%20Today.pdf; http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/292/5517/686?siteid=sci&ijkey=NBnP2T9W00vlw&keytype=ref; ; http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126

[5]  ; Keller, 2005 (AJES v. 52 No 4 and 5);  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V61-4GCX1MR-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=8aae6e7978f2eeaaaaaf7212b44f140c; ; ;

[6]; http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7012/abs/nature02995.html
[7] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;316/5825/709
[8] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/299/5615/2005; http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V62-414P195-5&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=2f2cfd319d56a702ab8adb95773bd442;

[9] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v451/n7176/full/nature06588.html

[10] http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008EO490001.shtml; http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/28/12/1063

[11] (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7242/full/nature08017.html)

Climate Myths?

Responses by Andrew Glikson to Andrew Bolt’s article “10 climate myths” (Herald Sun 29-4-09)
(http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20090429-Climate-myths-Glickson-v-Bolt.html)

Andrew Bolt today presented 10 climate change “myths”. (http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_the_10_warming_myths/?source=cmailer).

Here is my response to each. Essentially, the “skeptics” are searching for short annual or biannual changes, rather than looking at decade-scale trends. Failing to understand that science is a self-correcting discipline, they hope that, if and when they find minor errors or uncertainties (such as always exist) the entire scientific edifice behind the idea of climate change will collapse.

By the fact that the so-called “climate change skeptics” are attempting to refute every single direct observation and measurement in nature, as well as the basic physics and chemistry of the atmosphere, indeed climate science as a discipline, they reveal a resistance to the scientific method as such.

MYTH 1 — THE WORLD IS WARMING:

BOLT: Wrong. It is true the world did warm between 1975 and 1998, but even Professor David Karoly, one of our leading alarmists, admitted this week “temperatures have dropped” since – “both in surface temperatures and in atmospheric temperatures measured from satellites”. In fact, the fall in temperatures from just 2002 has already wiped out a quarter of the warming our planet experienced last century. (Check data from Britain’s Hadley Centre, NASA’s Aqua satellite and the US National Climatic Data Centre.)

Some experts, such as Karoly, claim this proves nothing and the world will soon start warming again. Others, such as Professor Ian Plimer of Adelaide University, point out that so many years of cooling already contradict the theory that man’s rapidly increasing gases must drive up temperatures ever faster.

But that’s all theory. The question I’ve asked is: What signs can you actually see of the man-made warming that the alarmists predicted?

GLIKSON: As has been projected by climate science over the last 20 years, the increase in atmospheric energy level associated with global warming results in greater variability, including: greater frequency and stronger amplitude of the ENSO (El-Nino – La-Nina) cycle and extreme weather events (hurricane intensity, floods, extreme droughts and fires) and, most particularly, rapid melt rates of large parts of the Arctic Sea ice, Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and shelves — as is in fact happening around the world, including the recent Australian droughts, mega-bush fires and floods Australia.

MYTH 2 — THE POLAR CAPS ARE MELTING :

BOLT: Wrong. The British Antarctic Survey, working with NASA, last week confirmed ice around Antarctica has grown 100,000 sq km each decade for the past 30 years. Long-term monitoring by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports the same: southern hemisphere ice has been expanding for decades.

As for the Arctic, wrong again. The Arctic ice cap shrank badly two summers ago after years of steady decline, but has since largely recovered. Satellite data from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre this week shows the Arctic hasn’t had this much April ice for at least seven years. Norway’s Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre says the ice is now within the standard deviation range for 1979 to 2007.
GLIKSON: This claim is inconsistent with the numerous reports by NASA and the National Ice and Snow Data Centre ( NSIDC) regarding the Arctic Sea ice, Greenland and West Antarctica (References: here; here; here; here), while the entire Antarctic ice sheet (east and west) has warmed over the last 50 years by 0.12 degrees C per decade and west Antarctica by 0.17 degrees C per-decade, including major polar warming anomalies where mean temperature rises over the last 10 years reached levels 3 to 4 degrees higher than during 1951 – 1980.

MYTH 3 — WE’VE NEVER HAD SUCH A BAD DROUGHT:

BOLT: Wrong. A study released this month by the University of NSW Climate Change Research Centre confirms not only that we’ve had worse droughts, but this Big Dry is not caused by “global warming”, whether man-made or not.

As the university’s press release says: “The causes of southeastern Australia’s longest, most severe and damaging droughts have been discovered, with the surprise finding that they originate far away in the Indian Ocean.

“A team of Australian scientists has detailed for the first time how a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean Dipole – a variable and irregular cycle of warming and cooling of ocean water — dictates whether moisture-bearing winds are carried across the southern half of Australia.”

GLIKSON: The development of the Indian Ocean dipoleis related to the current La-Nina ENSO phase and the development of turbulence northwest of Western Australia, resulting in strong southeast-directed air currents. The warming of these currents as they pass over inland Australia result in the dry warm winds which created the conditions for the tragic Victorian fires, as confirmed by CSIRO.

MYTH 4 — OUR CITIES HAVE NEVER BEEN HOTTER:

BOLT: Wrong. The alleged “record” temperature Melbourne set in January – 46.4 degrees – was in fact topped by the 47.2 degrees the city recorded in 1851. (See the Argus newspaper of February 8, 1851.)
And here’s another curious thing: Despite all this warming we’re alleged to have caused, Victoria’s highest temperature on record remains the 50.7 degrees that hit Mildura 103 years ago. South Australia’s hottest day is still the 50.7 degrees Oodnadatta suffered 37 years ago. NSW’s high is still the 50 degrees recorded 70 years ago.

What’s more, not one of the world’s seven continents has set a record high temperature since 1974. Europe’s high remains the 50 degrees measured in Spain 128 years ago, before the invention of the first true car.
GLIKSON: Isolated extreme weather events occurred throughout history, but the rapid rise in mean global temperatures since early 20 ^th century (+ 0.8 degrees C, or 1.3 degrees C once the masking effect of emitted sulphur aerosols is accounted for), and related shift of global climate zones by hundreds of km toward the poles , exacerbate these events, including droughts. Climate “skeptics” consistently confuse the weather for the climate, cite isolated weather events and decline to look at decade-scale climate trends, as explained among others in Pittock’s authoritative books.

MYTH 5 — THE SEAS ARE GETTING HOTTER:

BOLT: Wrong. If anything, the seas are getting colder. For five years, a network of 3175 automated bathythermographs has been deployed in the oceans by the Argo program, a collaboration between 50 agencies from 26 countries. Warming believer Josh Willis, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reluctantly concluded: “There has been a very slight cooling . . .”

GLIKSON: Check NASA’s website and find out that ocean surface temperatures have been rising through the last few decades (for example by 0.2 to 1.0 degrees C in most areas during 2000-2009 relative to 1951-1980), while lesser areas cooled by -0.2 to -0.5 mostly in the Pacific Ocean, partly in connection with La-Nina phases. Sea surface temperature increases around Australia are reported by CSIRO (” Ocean warming on the rise “), stating: “The team of Australian and US climate researchers found the world’s oceans warmed and rose at a rate 50 per cent faster in the last four decades of the 20th century than documented in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report (IPCC AR4).

MYTH 6 — THE SEAS ARE RISING:

BOLT: Wrong. For almost three years, the seas have stopped rising, according to the Jason-1 satellite mission monitored by the University of Colorado.

That said, the seas have risen steadily and slowly for the past 10,000 years through natural warming, and will almost certainly resume soon.

But there is little sign of any accelerated rises, even off Tuvalu or the Maldives, islands often said to be most threatened with drowning.

Professor Nils-Axel Moerner, one of the world’s most famous experts on sea levels, has studied the Maldives in particular and concluded there has been no net rise there for 1250 years.
Venice is still above water.

GLIKSON: From about 9000 years ago sea level have risen by about 15 metres (Siddall et al, 2003: Nature, 423: 853-853). Rates of sea level rise rose from a mean of 0.11 cm/year during 1870 -1970 to a mean of 0.25 cm/year during 1970 – 2006 and are currently rising at 0.35 cm/year , confirmed by both tide gauge measurements ( US Geological Survey ) and satellite measurements.

MYTH 7 — CYCLONES ARE GETTING WORSE:

BOLT: Wrong. Ryan Maue of Florida State University recently measured the frequency, intensity and duration of all hurricanes and cyclones to compile an Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index.

His findings? The energy index is at its lowest level for more than 30 years.

The World Meteorological Organisation, in its latest statement on cyclones, said it was impossible to say if they were affected by man’s gases: “Though there is evidence both for and against the existence of a detectable anthropogenic signal in the tropical cyclone climate record to date, no firm conclusion can be made on this point.”

GLIKSON: Cyclone intensity, related to sea surface temperatures, has risen according to Webster et al. 2005, who observe “We examined the number of tropical cyclones and cyclone days as well as tropical cyclone intensity over the past 35 years, in an environment of increasing sea surface temperature. A large increase was seen in the number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5. The largest increase occurred in the North Pacific, Indian, and Southwest Pacific Oceans, and the smallest percentage increase occurred in the North Atlantic Ocean. These increases have taken place while the number of cyclones and cyclone days has decreased in all basins except the North Atlantic during the past decade.

MYTH 8 — THE GREAT BARRIER REEF IS DYING:

BOLT: Wrong. Yes, in 1999, Professor Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, our leading reef alarmist and administrator of more than $30 million in warming grants, did claim the reef was threatened by warming, and much had turned white.

But he then had to admit it had made a “surprising” recovery.

Yes, in 2006 he again warned high temperatures meant “between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef could die within a month”.

But he later admitted this bleaching had “minimal impact”. Yes, in 2007 he again warned that temperature changes of the kind caused by global warming were bleaching the reef.

But this month fellow Queensland University researchers admitted in a study that reef coral had once more made a “spectacular recovery”, with “abundant corals re-established in a single year”. The reef is blooming.

GLIKSON: That the Great Barrier Reef is suffering from elevated temperatures, increased acidity and coral bleaching is beyond dispute as has been observed by numerous studies, including the University of Queensland, the Marine Park Authority and the Australian National University.

MYTH 9 — OUR SNOW SEASONS ARE SHORTER:

BOLT: Wrong. Poor snow falls in 2003 set off a rash of headlines predicting warming doom. The CSIRO typically fed the hysteria by claiming global warming would strip resorts of up to a quarter of their snow by 2018.

Yet the past two years have been bumper seasons for Victoria’s snow resorts, and this year could be just as good, with snow already falling in NSW and Victoria this past week.

GLIKSON: Typically climate skeptics will look at annual or biannual changes rather than longer term decade-scale trends, and this applies to the ever shortening snow seasons in the Australian snow fields.

MYTH 10 — TSUNAMIS AND OTHER DISASTERS ARE GETTING WORSE:

BOLT: Are you insane? Tsunamis are in fact caused by earthquakes. Yet there was World Vision boss Tim Costello last week, claiming that Asia was a “region, thanks to climate change, that has far more cyclones, tsunamis, droughts”.

Wrong, wrong and wrong, Tim. But what do facts matter now to a warming evangelist when the cause is so just?

And so any disaster is now blamed on man-made warming the way they once were on Satan. See for yourself on http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm the full list, including kidney stones, volcanic eruptions, lousy wine, insomnia, bad tempers, Vampire moths and bubonic plagues. Nothing is too far-fetched to be seized upon by carpetbaggers and wild preachers as signs of a warming we can’t actually see.

Not for nothing are polar bears the perfect symbol of this faith – bears said to be threatened by warming, when their numbers have in fact increased.

Bottom line: fewer people now die from extreme weather events, whether cyclones, floods or blinding heatwaves.
Read that in a study by Indur Goklany, who represented the US at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “There is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk.”

So stop this crazy panic.

First step: check again your list of the signs you thought you saw of global warming. How many are true? What do you think, and why do you think it?

Yes, the world may resume warming in one year or 100. But it hasn’t been warming as the alarmists said it must if man were to blame, and certainly not as the media breathlessly keeps claiming.

Best we all just settle down, then, and wait for the proof­ the real proof. After all, panicking over invisible things is so undignified, don’t you think?

GLIKSON: This point is answered in the reference to Webster et al . 2005 above, showing the frequency of category 4 and 5 cyclons has increased during the last decade.

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