hot off the press..

something for global warming skeptics

Those superstitious, alarmist, tree-hugging wankers, the American Geophysical Union have just produced two news releases detailing about-to-be-published studies, one from Europe, one from the U.S. The European study by scientists in the Netherlands, the U.K. and Germany argues that their research plays a new card in the climate-change scenario: that while greenhouse gases contribute to increases in global temperature, the reverse is also true, that higher temperatures exacerbate the release of greenhouse gases. The team focused on what's known as the Little Ice Age, the period from the mid-1500s to the mid-1800s when temperatures in Europe — and around the world — were significantly cooler. At the same time, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fell. Taking these data as the basis for a link between temperature and CO{-2} release, the scientists then try to guess how much the effect of temperature on gas release would be.

It wasn't encouraging. They claim that this positive feedback, the connection between warming and gas release, will raise the stakes significantly. Where previous models of future warming might have predicted an increase of x degrees, they now think it will be x + ?

.. In the views of the astonishingly persistent global warming skeptics, this could be just one more bogus, alarmist piece of unreliable science. Here's something curious though. The American Geophysical Union sends out a second report on the same day, this one authored by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California, the oldest of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Labs. In this case, the scientists analyzed a timeline of Antarctic ice cores spanning 360,000 years and, like the European team, looked closely at the associated swings of temperature and carbon dioxide. Again they found that as the globe warmed from heightened solar radiation, greenhouse gases increased as a result, causing more warming etc., etc...