Global Warming Books

Posted on August 7, 2007. Filed under: Blogroll, Books, Climate, Economics, Links, Politics, Quotations, Rants, Raves, Resources, Reviews, Science, Taxes, Technology | Tags: climate change, global warming, Green Socialism, greens, Myth of Man-Made Climate Change, The Deniers |

Suggested books, a review and article on global warming worth read:

The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud by Lawrence Solomon

Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed

red_hot_lies

Book TV: Chris Horner “Red Hot Lies”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW-pMcf6WX8

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism by Christopher C. Horner.

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Yearsby Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery

Professor Fred Singer on Climate Change pt 1

Professor Fred Singer on Climate Change pt 2

Global Warming: A Guide to the Science Edited by Willie Soon

The Role of the Sun in Climate Change

by Douglas V. Hoyt, Kenneth H. Schatten, Kenneth H. Shatten

The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change
by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder

Henrik Svensmark on Global Warming (part 1)

Henrik Svensmark on Global Warming (part 2)

Henrik Svensmark on Global Warming (part 3)

Henrik Svensmark on Global Warming (part 4)

Henrik Svensmark on Global Warming (part 5)

Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media

by Patrick J. Michaels

Patrick J. Michaels is research professor of environmental studies at the University of Virginia and senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute. He is past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, winner of the American Library Association’s worldwide competition for public service writing, and an author of the 2003 climate science “Paper of the Year,” awarded by the Association of American Geographers

Fred Singer summary is worth posting in full:
The Great Global Warming Swindle
March 19, 2007
S. Fred Singer
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has met its match: a devastating documentary recently shown on British television, which has now been viewed by millions of people on the Internet. Despite its flamboyant title, The Great Global Warming Swindle is based on sound science and interviews with real climate scientists, including me. An Inconvenient Truth, on the other hand, is mostly an emotional presentation from a single politician.

The scientific arguments presented in The Great Global Warming Swindle can be stated quite briefly:

1. There is no proof that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from human activity. Ice core records from the past 650,000 years show that temperature increases have preceded—not resulted from—increases in CO2 by hundreds of years, suggesting that the warming of the oceans is an important source of the rise in atmospheric CO2. As the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapor is far, far more important than CO2. Dire predictions of future warming are based almost entirely on computer climate models, yet these models do not accurately understand the role or water vapor—and, in any case, water vapor is not within our control. Plus, computer models cannot account for the observed cooling of much of the past century (1940–75), nor for the observed patterns of warming—what we call the “fingerprints.” For example, the Antarctic is cooling while models predict warming. And where the models call for the middle atmosphere to warm faster than the surface, the observations show the exact opposite.

The best evidence supporting natural causes of temperature fluctuations are the changes in cloudiness, which correspond strongly with regular variations in solar activity. The current warming is likely part of a natural cycle of climate warming and cooling that’s been traced back almost a million years. It accounts for the Medieval Warm Period around 1100 A.D., when the Vikings settled Greenland and grew crops, and the Little Ice Age, from about 1400 to 1850 A.D., which brought severe winters and cold summers to Europe, with failed harvests, starvation, disease, and general misery. Attempts have been made to claim that the current warming is “unusual” using spurious analysis of tree rings and other proxy data. Advocates have tried to deny the existence of these historic climate swings and claim that the current warming is “unusual” by using spurious analysis of tree rings and other proxy data, resulting in the famous “hockey–stick” temperature graph. The hockey-stick graph has now been thoroughly discredited.

2. If the cause of warming is mostly natural, then there is little we can do about it. We cannot control the inconstant sun, the likely origin of most climate variability. None of the schemes for greenhouse gas reduction currently bandied about will do any good; they are all irrelevant, useless, and wildly expensive:

Control of CO2 emissions, whether by rationing or elaborate cap–and–trade schemes
Uneconomic “alternative” energy, such as ethanol and the impractical “hydrogen economy”
Massive installations of wind turbines and solar collectors
Proposed projects for the sequestration of CO2 from smokestacks or even from the atmosphere

Ironically, even if CO2 were responsible for the observed warming trend, all these schemes would be ineffective—unless we could persuade every nation, including China, to cut fuel use by 80 percent!

3. Finally, no one can show that a warmer climate would produce negative impacts overall. The much–feared rise in sea levels does not seem to depend on short–term temperature changes, as the rate of sea–level increases has been steady since the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. In fact, many economists argue that the opposite is more likely—that warming produces a net benefit, that it increases incomes and standards of living. Why do we assume that the present climate is the optimum? Surely, the chance of this must be vanishingly small, and the economic history of past climate warmings bear this out.

But the main message of The Great Global Warming Swindle is much broader. Why should we devote our scarce resources to what is essentially a non–problem, and ignore the real problems the world faces: hunger, disease, denial of human rights—not to mention the threats of terrorism and nuclear wars? And are we really prepared to deal with natural disasters; pandemics that can wipe out most of the human race, or even the impact of an asteroid, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs? Yet politicians and the elites throughout much of the world prefer to squander our limited resources to fashionable issues, rather than concentrate on real problems. Just consider the scary predictions emanating from supposedly responsible world figures: the chief scientist of Great Britain tells us that unless we insulate our houses and use more efficient light bulbs, the Antarctic will be the only habitable continent by 2100, with a few surviving breeding couples propagating the human race. Seriously!

I imagine that in the not–too–distant future all the hype will have died down, particularly if the climate should decide to cool—as it did during much of the past century; we should take note here that it has not warmed since 1998. Future generations will look back on the current madness and wonder what it was all about. They will have movies like An Inconvenient Truth and documentaries like The Great Global Warming Swindle to remind them.

S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist, is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and former founding Director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service.He is author of Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate(The Independent Institute, 1997).

“Hot Talk, Cold Science is immensely enjoyable. In assessing the possibility of global warming from increasing greenhouse gases, Dr. Singer examines diverse theoretical and empirical studies and presents the results in an accessible and highly readable book. By carefully weighing the evidence, Singer shows that the case for significant and catastrophic global warming remains unverified. On the contrary, the climate record to date manifests at most a small human-caused global warming. Furthermore, there are gross gaps in knowledge about climate change science that prevent present computer simulations from yielding reliable projections of future climate change. Given the lack of knowledge on all the relevant causes of climate change and the slow pace of projected warming by the computer simulations, Singer argues a cautious course of adaptation and cost effective mitigation.”
—SALLIE BALIUNAS, Astrophysicist, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory; Deputy Director, Mount Wilson Observatoryhttp://www.independent.org/store/book_detail.asp?bookID=42

Fighting climate ‘fluff’

Physicist Freeman Dyson knows from long experience that models containing numerous fudge factors are worthless

“…The “fluff,” Prof. Dyson explains, comes from climate-change models that predict all manner of catastrophe. The models count for naught as predictive tools.

“I have studied their climate models and know what they can do,” Prof. Dyson says. “The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.”

Prof. Dyson explains that the many components of climate models are divorced from first principles and are “parameterized” — incorporated by reference to their measured effects.

“They are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behaviour in a world with different chemistry, for example in a world with increased CO2 in the atmosphere,” he states.

Prof. Dyson learned about the pitfalls of modelling early in his career, in 1953, and from good authority: physicist Enrico Fermi, who had built the first nuclear reactor in 1942. The young Prof. Dyson and his team of graduate students and post-docs had proudly developed what seemed like a remarkably reliable model of subatomic behaviour that corresponded with Fermi’s actual measurements. To Prof. Dyson’s dismay, Fermi quickly dismissed his model

In desperation, I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, ‘How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?’ I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, ‘Four.’ He said, ‘I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann [the co-creator of game theory] used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.’ With that, the conversation was over. …”

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=985641c9-8594-43c2-802d-947d65555e8e

Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death (Hardcover

Environmental Overkill: Whatever Happened to Common Sense?

Dixy Lee Ray

Cool it – The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide To Global Warming

Bjørn Lomborg

“…Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered to stop global warming will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world’s temperature for hundreds of years. Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and assuring and maintaining a safe, fresh water supply-which can be addressed at a fraction of the cost and save millions of lives within our lifetime. He asks why the debate over climate change has stifled rational dialogue and killed meaningful dissent. …”