july 2009 issue
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Readers’ Forum
Australian Academic and Many Others
Do Not Support the IPCC Stance
We welcome Readers’ Forum letters of interest to the professions. Send them to George Lee, glee@apega.ca. Keep them to 300 words or less — longer letters published at the editor’s discretion. Letters represent the opinions and not necessarily the expertise of writers. The PEGG reserves the right to edit or reject any letter.
Re: Dissenters on Climate Change Causes Introduce Errors, by Harvey A. Buckmaster, P.Eng., P.Geoph., Readers’ Forum, The PEGG, June 2009.
Dr. Buckmaster and anyone else interested in the fundamentals of radiation physics should read the paper Climate Change by Dr. John Nicol of James Cook University, Australia.
The consensus up to 1975 was that we were heading into another ice age as the temperatures were dropping while the CO2 was rising. I note that there is no explanation for how increasing concentrations are harmful. Since the atmospheric concentrations in the past have been as high as 7,200 and 4,500 p.p.m. on separate occasions and the world did not self-destruct, I find the dire predictions at 400 p.p.m. amusing.
A vast amount of research has shown that when CO2 increases by 300 p.p.m., the abundance of all green plant life increases by an average of 40 per cent. If increasing the world’s agricultural production is considered harmful, I am afraid that that logic escapes me. The recommended level for greenhouses is 1,000 p.p.m. for optimum productivity, an Ontario government study says.
The argument is nonsensical that the temperature fluctuations from 1750 to 1975 — which were of the same order of magnitude as from 1975 to 1998 — were due to effects other than CO2. The rise from 1975 to 1998 was due to CO2 alone, this argument contends.
How the drop in temperature from 1998 to the current date can be characterized as highly correlated with rising CO2 levels again defies all logic.
The notion that global temperatures are controlled by so-called greenhouse gases is pure fantasy. Our temperature is controlled by the sun and our proximity to it, the oceans and the gyrations of the warm and cold currents and upwellings, the cloud cover which shields us from the sun and the loss of radiation at the top of the atmosphere, which maintains the equilibrium with the incoming solar radiation.
Aerosols, which are not gases, account for 77 per cent of the temperature increase due to our atmosphere. Water vapour is 16 per cent and CO2 seven per cent.
The statement that “the various CO2 atmospheric absorption bands reflect most of the radiation coming from the Earth back to Earth” is contradicted in the paper by Dr. Nicol I cited above.
A standard inference is that the number of skeptics in the scientific community is a small fraction. That is not the case. In fact 32,000 degreed U.S. scientists, of whom 9,000 were PhDs, signed the Oregon Petition. Last year, 600 testified before the minority senate committee.
Letters have been sent to the UN signed by 100 top climatologists and scientists. Dr. Vincent Grey was a peer reviewer of all four reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I suggest people read Dr. Grey’s comments on the content and peer review process of the IPCC.
This is only a small sample of the list of eminent scientists who disagree profoundly with the IPCC conclusions.
Barry Moore, P.Eng.
Calgary
Reader Appreciates
Call for Articles
On Mitigation
Re: Climate Change, An Invitation for Debate, The PEGG, June 2009.
I commend APEGGA on taking the initiative to invite members to submit articles “on the potential to decrease any environmental impact and on energy conservation processes.”
Now that we have spent years arguing in Readers’ Forum about whether global warming is taking place and caused by humans, I think many members would be happy to also see a debating and sharing of ideas on how to move towards the future.
Henning Rasmussen, P.Eng.
Gibsons, B.C.
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