Even National Public Radio Questions Global Warming

http://www.capoliticalnews.com/s/spip.php?article584
Posted 23 March 2008

You know that Al Gore is in trouble when National Public Radio starts reporting on the "end" of Global Warming. NPR is reporting on the "Inconvenient Myth", global warming, the Pet Rock of our generation.

Many have lost jobs, inflation has increased, food and energy prices have skyrocketed, due to the Halloween scare of global warming. On Thursday night Brian Williams of NBC, just the mainstream media, did a full story on the toxic waste mandated to go into your home. Even supporters of CFL light bulbs are horrified by the mercury content, and the $2,000 cost of cleaning up the waste after a bulb breaks.

Do you have $2,000 to clean up a hazardous waste if a seven year old breaks it? Do you want to put your seven year in health danger due to hazardous waste, caused by government?

This story shows how the science shows global warming may now be turning into global cooling. In other words, nature is taking its natural course-this is not man made-no matter how powerful Al Gore thinks he is (and wealthy by selling this canard). We need to be good stewards of our environment, but that doesn't mean allowing forests to be burned because we refuse to cut old trees and thin the forest.

Pass this to your friends, let them know the "worst" is over, and dig out your sweaters.

The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat

by Richard Harris, NPR, 3/19/08

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on.

That becomes clear when you consider what's happening to global sea level. Sea level rises when the oceans get warm because warmer water expands. This accounts for about half of global sea level rise. So with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That's a lot.

Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

"But in fact there's a little bit of a mystery. We can't account for all of the sea level increase we've seen over the last three or four years," he says.

One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded - and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.

But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?

Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.

That can't be directly measured at the moment, however.

"Unfortunately, we don't have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they've been playing during this period," Trenberth says.

It's also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it's possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don't know about. It's an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate.

"I suspect that we'll able to put this together with a little bit more perspective and further analysis," Trenberth says. "But what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board."

Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.

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