Schoneveld’s Recent Comments

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  Come on Dessler, speak up!

  Dear Andrew,

  You are obliged to respond to manacker's very reasonable posts.
  If you keep silent you implicitly surrender to his views. This wouldn't be a surprise to me because I can't find anything wrong with his line of reasoning. But for an official Gristmill contributor like yourself it must be hard to swallow. Maybe we could use some ad homs to shut him up. Couldn't we find out whether manacker is paid by Exxon.Mobile or another right wing think tank? Wouldn't that immediately make his views suspect? How can one be a climate change skeptic and be a genuine person at the same time. Isn't that indeed a contradiction in terms?
  JoSullivan58 at least dares to argue (unconvincingly in my view) but Dessler should not stay on the sideline.

  Chris

  If you cannot place me in any box read my Bio.

  On More bogus climate skepticism posted 1 year, 10 months ago 227 Responses

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  Not just La Nina, also Solar Cooling.

  There is some potentially good news looming around the corner for us concerned "eco-friends". I know, we are usually a bunch of pessimists with little confidence in the good intentions of mankind when there is buck to be made. That's why we cannot imagine that those who are skeptical of the catastrophic climate change are not funded or supported by some right wing think tank or by the  Exxon-Mobiles of this world. But, in our heart we know that not all skeptical scientists, amongst them many respectable professors, could possibly be greedy disingenuous opportunists who would give up their scientific integrity for some sinister ulterior motive.

  So let's, for a change, be receptive to some positivism and consider the possible effects of solar cycle 24 that just (on 4 January 2008) officially commenced. Solar cycles have a periodicity of around 11 years. The intensity of these cycles vary and some scientists believe there is a good correlation between intensity and global temperatures. For instance, the Maunder Minimum, a series of low intensity cycles some centuries ago, is being linked to the Little Ice Age. The fact that solar cycle 24 arrived almost a year later than expected could indicate that this cycle will be a less intense one, in other words it could herald the beginning of a cooler era.  

  Of course, we wouldn't want the world to go through another 17th century-like cold era. Although we think that global warming is catastrophic, another Little Ice Age is not something we would be looking forward to either. We like it the way we know it. Climate change - in whatever direction - is undesirable because it would require adaptation, which would be costly. In the extreme, one could say that 6 meter of sea level rise is economically as devastating as having all the cities in Northern America and Northern Europe covered by a kilometer of ice, like was the case in the last glacial.  

  So now comes the positive twist. If indeed the next solar cycles are of low intensity causing global temperatures to drop, the thing that could avert a "catastrophe" is the continuing emission of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. With a bit of luck the two effects cancel each other out. That would mean that it would save us the giant cost of looking for more expensive alternative energy sources right away and, more importantly, we don't have to deny the poorer nations the cheaper fossil fuels that have served us so well in the last 100 years or so. But as long as we don't know for sure whether a cooling trend is on its way, we should keep on talking and continue organizing mega-conferences with ten thousands of participants to ensure the world that we take the problem of climate change seriously.

  Of course there is the remote chance that the evil climate change deniers are correct and that man-made CO2 is not causing any major global warming. After all, we know that CO2 increase is logarithmically related to temperature rise. Only the feedbacks that we have introduced in our climate models can reinforce the otherwise progressively diminishing effect of increasing CO2 concentrations.

  The industry-funded deniers are already pointing out that global temperatures have stabilized or even dropped since 1998 despite a continuing increase in CO2. For them this is a demonstration of the theoretically diminishing greenhouse effect and a disproval of the feedback models of the IPCC climatologists. If the deniers are right, no global warming disaster will result from our present wasteful life style. Instead, we should prepare for a global cooling trend, at least if solar cycles are indeed becoming less intense and their effect on temperature confirmed. The good news is that the media can continue speculating about future disasters and the 2500 IPCC scientists are assured of continued governmental support in order to derive at a consensus position on global cooling. On In 2008, globe will cool down a bit -- but still be bloody hot, say researchers posted 1 year, 10 months ago 4 Responses

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  Oil Shales and Tar Sands

  With an oil price of over100$/barrel the Orinoco (Venezuela) and Athabasca (Canada) tar sands (with technically recoverable oil reserves of some 500 billion barrels assuming a 10% recovery factor) are becoming more and more economically attractive.

  The same applies to oil shales (predominantly located in the US: Green River Formation) which are believed to contain double the amount of recoverable oil (some trillion barrels of oil).

  So the high oil price has helped to basically more than double the world's economically extractable reserves (from about one trillion barrels to 2.5 trillion barrels, which would represent some 100 years of current production).

  If you cannot place me in any box read my Bio.

  On One-hundred-dollar oil posted 1 year, 10 months ago 17 Responses

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  climate refugees???

   "Scientific" conclusions of this caliber are the hallmark of alarmism and damage the reputation of the climate change science.

  Fist of all,  water in a mangrove is in communication with the sea (it is situated in the tidal zone of the coastal strip). Since the melting of local glaciers has no measurable effect on sea level the submergence of these islands are unrelated to glacier melting.

  Secondly, the Bengal delta is subject to isostatic crustal movement caused by increased sedimentary load, in turn causing the submergence of islands, a common geological phenomenon.

  Maybe it is time to educate the readers of this blog about the concept of "relative sea level change" with the emphasis on "relative". The present-day worldwide "absolute" eustatic sea level rise of some 2 mm per year is a futile event compared to local sea level changes which are often more dramatic but unrelated to  ice melt or thermal expansion of warming ocean waters.

  Locally observed changes are always the result of tectonics or isostatic movements of the earth's crust and never due to eustatics.  In contrast to the Bengal delta, Stockholm is experiencing a relative uplift of 10 mm per year due to glacial isostatic adjustments, a rebound from the disappearance of the last glacial ice load.  Also the East Pacific coastline shows a relative uplift of 1 mm per year (or an absolute vertical crustal uplift of 3 mm per year). The recent earthquake in the Saloloms, a tectonic event, has even pushed up some islands by a couple of meters.

  Furthermore, progressive upward coral growth around many coral islands will be able to compensate for relative sea level rise and therefore Tuvalu or the Maldives are not necessarily doomed by the projected maximum eustatic sea level rise of 58 cm in the next century (provided humans don't damage the fringing reefs). As we all know, an atoll exists by virtue of this process.
  On Climate refugees and Wi-Fi pollution posted 1 year, 10 months ago 4 Responses

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  References?

  Could you give me the reference so that I can check whether they indeed used silly arguments like that? I have never heard any scientist denying that the gradual rise in CO2 is not man -made. The argument has  always been that there is a logarithmic relationship rather than a linear one so that further CO2 increase has progressively less effect on warming the atmosphere.On 'Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans'--Not even close ... posted 2 years, 10 months ago 31 Responses