The Volokh Conspiracy

Polar Bear Panel at AEI

Hard to imagine they'll talk at all about government policy. I imagine they'll growl a bit, stamp their paws and demand raw fish.

Sam Hall--That's why they scare me.

And don't even get me started on the dangers of bi-polar bears!

Why isn't Stephen Colbert on the panel? He surely if anyone has important things to say about the creatures....

Colbert has never actually clarified whether his "godless killing machines" remark applies to polar bears and I seem to recall him struggling to resist being overcome by the overwhelming cuteness of Knut the baby polar bear.

Don't forget to mention that this can be used to effectively cut all foreign aid. Since this is a global problem with global causes, feeding starving people in Zimbabwe is contributing to global warming, and is thus illegal for the US government to undertake due to ESA. Look on the bright side and think of all the things which can be stopped by proper use of the ESA and a determination that global warming is causing a species to be endangered - federal highway funds, not anymore. Heck you can pretty much shut down the entire federal government with this ruling.

"I'm not sure where you're posting from, but it's too freakin hot in Virginia (and likely, D.C.) to do anything, much less roam the streets in search of prey."

Dallas, and it is 90+ here.

We could put them in the Senate Office Building, certainly it has good AC. Of course, putting them on that diet would be considered abuse.

We could put them in the Senate Office Building, certainly it has good AC. Of course, putting them on that diet would be considered abuse.

This would trigger a headline on Instapundit along the lines of:

"Solution Found to Congressional Earmark Abuse"

Sorry to detour from the line of humorous posts here (they are amusing), but on a serious note, what if the scientific consensus on global warming is right, but the reliance upon a "greenhouse gas" mechanism as a primary cause of that warming is just plain wrong? There is some solid scientific opinion that the reliance upon a "greenhouse gas" mechanism for global warming is just wrong, as it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. See here -- http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0707.1161v2 After all, given the HUGE volume of CO2 dissolved in ocean water, and the basic physics that more CO2 can be dissolved in cold water than in warm water (even a layman with access to a can of Coke can see the effect of warming the Coke in reducing the liquid's ability to hold dissolve gases), it is not only possible, but highly likely, that increases in atmospheric CO2 levels are a result of rising water temperatures in the Oceans. Thus it is quite possible that rising atmospheric CO2 levels are a result, not a cause, of global warming. If in fact there are other major causes of global warming (like, say, the trillions of BTUs of heat put directly into the atmosphere every day by Americans running their air conditioners, the trillions of BTUs of heat generated by running car engines, direct heat loss from light bulbs, ovens, toasters, etc., etc.), and the direct emission of CO2 and other so-called greenhouse gases are either not contributing to global warming, or contributing in only a very minute way, then the policy implications are enormous. Congress should stop wasting time and money trying to limit or control the release of greenhouse gases (and quit paying taxpayer funds for wholly ficticious "carbon credits"), and focus on those things that will make a difference in the mechanisms that are responsible for global warming, like research to increase the efficiency of internal combustion engines so that less heat is lost to the atmosphere, or geothermal air conditioning so that the heat energy removed from inside air is pumped into heat sinks in the ground rather than into the atmosphere.

As usual, DiverDan is right, and Eli Rabett is wrong.

Don't believe it? then look at the statement co-authored by 32,000+ physical scientists, including climatologists, meteorologists and physicists:

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

Contrast these 32,000 legitimate scientists with the fifty-one [51] scientists on the UN's IPCC payroll, who claim that CO2 causes catastrophic global warming.

Hmm, how many of those 32K were climatologists Smokey, and how many were dentists. Wanna bet the dentists outnumber the climatologists?

Still, perhaps I should have send Dan a bit more information. You can find a very nice, but old summary of the issue in Jan Schloerer's FAQ.

Ralph Keeling's work on oxygen is described at this website

Logical science is a good place to go to see the strong level of understanding that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations is not a good thing. Of course, is you want to discount the

1. Academia Brasileira de Ciéncias,Brazil
2. Académie des Sciences, France
3. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Italy
4. Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
5. National Academy of Sciences, United States of America
6. Royal Society of Canada, Canada
7. Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, Germany
8. Science Council of Japan, Japan
9. Academy of Science of South Africa, South Africa
10. Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
11. Indian National Science Academy, India
12. Academia Mexicana de Ciencias, Mexico
13. Royal Society, United Kingdom

feel free. That pretty much reflects on you.

Hmmmm.

1. The IPCC has several times adjusted downward their doomsday predictions concerning the effects of global warming.

2. Average global temperatures topped out in 1998. The IPCC has acknowledged that global warming has actually *not* been happening for the past 8 years.

3. Atmospheric CO2 during this time has continued to increase.

4. The computer models that are the primary basis for global warming arguments largely use CO2 to create *water vapor*. This is because water vapor is many times more effective as a global warming "gas" than CO2.

5. You can't scare anybody by screaming about too much water vapor in the atmosphere. But you can scare people about CO2 because they don't know about the shell game going on.

What I find continually amusing is that liberals are so much in favor of the Theory of Evolution that they want it taught in schools.

But are utterly opposed to it's actual implementation in nature.

What I find continually amusing is how partisan nuts continue to

- opine on "evolution" (really a bundle of related theories that, for the most part, have nothing to do with abiogenesis, which seems to be the big bugbear for creationists) when they very clearly don't understand what they're talking about,
- like to chime in suggesting that, for instance, polar bears should move south and get a job washing dishes at Denny's or something, and
- paint all "liberals" with the same brush (I'm a libertarian voting Democratic because I happen to, you know, like my civil liberties).

But please, carry on. I'll pop some corn and watch.

Diver, a good, though technical description of how greenhouse gases result in a warmer surface can be found in Ray Pierrehumbert's on line text book, or in a somewhat (and I warn you, only somewhat) simpler form in an arXiv article by Arthur Smith.

What you have said about greenhouses and the greenhouse effect, is a popular strawman.

Let me try an overly simplified version of the technical argument.

1. The total energy emitted by the earth has to equal the total energy absorbed from the sun. The only mechanism for either of these processes is radiation through/to space
2. The earth radiates in the infrared, the sun radiates at much shorter wavelengths, principally in the visible.
3. It gets colder the higher you go in the troposphere and the density of molecules is lower.
4. From 3 the rate of radiation from IR active (greenhouse gas, GHG) molecules (CO2, H2O, CH4) is lower the higher you go (hotter things radiate more, see Stefan-Boltzmann law, more molecules radiate more).
5. In the atmosphere below 100 km there is always a local effective temperature, thus the absorbtivity of the GHGs equals its emissivity (Kirchhoff's law)
6. Greenhouse gases are IR absorbers/emitters. They effectively block radiation escaping to space at wavelengths they absorb EXCEPT at high enough levels where the gas density is low and the radiation can escape directly to space without being absorbed by other GHG molecules(this is about 7 km which is still in the troposphere).
7. Because radiation to space is blocked at IR wavelengths where GHGs (and clouds) absorb, the surface has to warm so that radiation can increase in unblocked areas of the spectrum and escape to space.
8. This means that there will also be increased radiation in regions of the spectrum where greenhouse gases absorb which will warm the atmosphere but cannot escape to space because it is absorbed in the atmosphere and scattered back to the surface, warming the surface yet further.
9. As the atmosphere warms, the areas of the spectrum where the greenhouse gas molecules absorb widens as more energetic levels of the GHG are populated (The link points to on line software, which you can model this yourself)

Mechanism 1. Increasing the amount of GHGs widens the spectral regions where they absorb and narrows the windows where radiation can escape to space. To maintain balance with incoming solar, the atmosphere and surface warm further

Mechanism 2. As GHG mixing ratio increases, the effective level at which the Earth can radiate to space at the wavelengths emitted by the GHGs climbs, but because of the cooling with altitude and the lower density, to maintain the same radiation rate and balance the solar input the new higher level at which the earth radiates has to warm, and to do this the entire troposphere and the surface have to warm.

Since the increase of CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and other GHGs are known to be caused by humans, so must an increase in surface temperature driven by these mechanisms.

Does the greenhouse effect operate by the same mechanism as greenhouses? No (except if you think of one blocking off energy loss by closing regions of the spectrum for radiative loss, and the other blocking off energy loss by stopping convection) Hope this helped.

Eli
Rabett
could
not
be
more
WRONG.