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Richard C. Savage of Franktown writes:

As a meteorologist, I am surprised by Kevin Trenberth’s distortions of fact ("Speakout,” 24 Oct). For example, Trenberth claims “.... water vapor accounts for about 60 percent of the greenhouse effect, and carbon dioxide accounts for 26 percent....” In the IPCC reports Trenberth partly authored, the total greenhouse effect is 324 watts/square meter. The “changed greenhouse effect” Trenberth refers to is 1.6 w/sq m, or less than 1 percent - not 26 percent. The rest is due to water vapor and naturally produced greenhouse gases. The water vapor creates more than 98 percent of the greenhouse warming, which totals 59 degrees F. The “changed greenhouse effect” contributes about 0.3 degrees F.
Trenberth’s claim that anything he says can be “proved” by climate models - his own or anyone else’s - are nonsense. The models can’t even “prove” climatic events that have happened, within living memory, such as the steady decline of US annual temperatures from 1960 to 1980, while carbon dioxide increased steadily in the postwar boom. There were crop failures in the American Midwest in the 1970’s, due to cold, and many climatologists forecast a returning Ice Age. The warmest year in American history was 1934 - not Gore’s claims of 1998. (NASA made a mistake.) And hurricane numbers and intensity have declined over the last fifty years - in contradiction to Trenberth’s hysteria.
Trenberth also defends Gore’s ridiculous prediction of a sea level rise of 20 feet - saying merely that Gore failed to put a time frame for this to happen. Trenberth also puts no time frame on it - since it would take thousands of years. Long before then, Earth will be back in another Ice Age. And, as Trenberth knows, Antarctica is gaining ice, not losing it.
This “manmade global warming” nonsense is Trenberth’s rice bowl - a rice bowl that costs the US taxpayer $5 billion each year. No wonder he defends his junk science.

This letter has not been edited.

READER COMMENTS

R Savage strikes me as somebody who knows what his talking about. Al Gore doesn’t.

Mr. Savage,no facts please.There is liberals on this post and they will be offended.

Global Warming, as is currently being packaged by the environuts, is nothing but intellectual sasquatch for the weak-minded and gulllible who need to "feel good" about someting that isn't happening.

Please take your "carbon credit" religon with you back to your flying saucer and then return home. The moonbats miss you. We earthlings are tired of your sorry brand of road-apples.

Savage strikes Uno as someone who knows what he is talking about.

Savage: :And, as Trenberth knows, Antarctica is gaining ice, not losing it."

From Fox News, and we all know whose side its on:

"Joining the growing list of places on this planet that are melting, Antarctica is losing some 36 cubic miles of ice every year, scientists said today."

From Science Daily:

"Antarctic Ice Sheet Losing Mass, Says University Of Colorado Study
ScienceDaily (Mar. 2, 2006) — University of Colorado at Boulder researchers have used data from a pair of NASA satellites orbiting Earth in tandem to determine that the Antarctic ice sheet, which harbors 90 percent of Earth's ice, has lost significant mass in recent years."

From Nature News:

"Antarctica is shrinking
"Gravity survey shows overall loss in ice.
First Greenland, and now Antarctica. Research shows that both of these massive ice sheets are getting smaller."

There are many more such entries at Google's Antarctic Ice.

Savage: "The water vapor creates more than 98 percent of the greenhouse warming, which totals 59 degrees F. The “changed greenhouse effect” contributes about 0.3 degrees F."

Indeed, you see statements like this:

"About 95 percent of the greenhouse effect (search) — the atmospheric warming due to the trapping of solar energy that makes life possible on Earth — is due to water vapor, 99.999 percent of which is of natural origin.
The other 5 percent of the greenhouse effect is due to carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other miscellaneous gases.
Although carbon dioxide is the most dominant of these gases by volume, comprising about 99.4 percent, the other gases trap more heat. So the contribution of carbon dioxide to the 5 percent of the greenhouse effect not due to water vapor is much less than 99.4 percent — it's about 72 percent.
Carbon dioxide, therefore, is responsible for roughly 3.6 percent of the greenhouse effect (5 percent, representing the percentage of the greenhouse effect not due to water vapor, multiplied by 72 percent, representing the percentage of that 5 percent due to carbon dioxide).
But carbon dioxide is produced both naturally and by humans. About 97 percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide is natural, in fact. Only about 3 percent is from human activity.
That means that only about 0.11 percent of the greenhouse effect (that is, 3 percent of 3.6 percent) is due to human releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Put another way, about 99.89 percent of the greenhouse effect has nothing to do with carbon-dioxide emissions from human activity.
Factoring in the other greenhouse gases, the total human contribution to the greenhouse effect is about 0.3 percent. In other words, about 99.7 percent of the greenhouse effect is due entirely to nature."

And you see statements like this:

"Water vapor (H2O) causes about 60% of Earth's naturally-occurring greenhouse effect. Other gases influencing the effect include carbon dioxide (CO2) (about 26%), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and ozone (O3) (about 8%). Collectively, these gases are known as greenhouse gases. The greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide is specifically known as the Callendar effect."

"Each greenhouse gas has its own important role in trapping the sun's heat, the most significant of which is water vapor. On a clear day, water vapor can comprise 60 to 70 percent of the greenhouse effect. Next in line, carbon dioxide contributes an additional 25 percent."

But Savage, who I guess claims to be a scientist, takes into consideration only the first statement above, and ignores those contradicting it. I consider that more political than scientific.

I can't find the exact quote, but I assume that Gore said that the sea level could rise, not twenty feet, but as much as twenty feet by the year 2100 if there were a the collapse of a major ice sheet in Greenland or in West Antarctica. But, while these ice sheets apparently are melting, the possibility of a collapse by2100 apparently is pure fiction.

There is an article in Reason.com which is very critical of Gore for exaggerating. It states:

"Well, the "consensus" of climate scientists as represented in the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that sea level is likely to rise between 4 inches to 35 inches with a central value of 19 inches. Nineteen inches is not nothing and is 3 times greater than the sea level rise the world experienced during the 20th century, but Manhattan and most of Florida will most likely still be above water in 2100. A new study in Science concluded if temperatures rose steeply that the Greenland ice sheet might melt away in 500 to 1000 years."

My impression is that if or when there is such a collapse the 20 feet may be a modest figure, but not something to worry about for a few hundred years.

Al Gore is frequently excoriated, including by Savage, for stating that 1998 was the warmest year. Bear in mind that he did that after 20095 had been widely tagged as the warmest year and before NASA said it changed its mind. An awful lot of people did the same thing. It was an entirely fair comment at the time it was made but you won't see Savage or other political (not scientific) GW opponents admitting that.

Savage: "This “manmade global warming” nonsense is Trenberth’s rice bowl - a rice bowl that costs the US taxpayer $5 billion each year."

Savage will not cite anything to support that statement because there isn't anything to support it. There are a lot of companies putting in new technology to reduce energy costs and emissions but these reductions have more to do with clean air requirements than global warming.

Uno said adoringly:

"R Savage strikes me as somebody who knows what his talking about.'

Thanks for saving me the trouble of reading the letter Uno, anything that receives your endorsement can only be pure idiocy, and therefore a waste of my time.

Actually Truth, the biggest manmade pollution and ecological disasters happened in WW2, and nature recovered quite nicely. Back than Al Gore and his cronies would of predicted otherwise, with every oil spill from warships and every bomb going off kicking dust into the atmosphere. The fact is that no one knows for sure how much of the climate change is man made. I agree that we shouldn’t waste energy (tell that to Las Vegas), but it should be a personal choice and not government regulation like the left wants.

Eastern Antarctica does get more snow, not ices, but that comes from the melting of the West side. Near the Ross Ice Shield.

Snow does pack down into ice, but I doubt any reasonable scientist would say "Antarctica is gaining ice.". Too broad a statement.

As a "meteorologist" the author should know better than to try to refute scientific conclusions and consensus WAY out of his league.

We've debunked the "models are inaccurate" and the "water vapor" myths here many times over.

You Deniers are starting to repeat yourselves.

Come up with some new myths worthy of debunking or put away the tinfoil hats.

And Colorado was once tropical and dinosaurs roamed the wetlands. The Earth is constantly changing. Any idiot that thinks Man can stop or change it needs to invest in Algore's carbon credits. Europe was covered with ice once as was America. So what is the "proper" climate?

Richard C. Savage:

The models can’t even “prove” climatic events that have happened, within living memory, such as the steady decline of US annual temperatures from 1960 to 1980, while carbon dioxide increased steadily in the postwar boom. There were crop failures in the American Midwest in the 1970’s, due to cold, and many climatologists forecast a returning Ice Age. The warmest year in American history was 1934 - not Gore’s claims of 1998. (NASA made a mistake.)

And who equates US temperatures to global temperatures?

Man can't affect nature? Who do you think got rid of the billions of acres of forest around the world the last few hundred years? Nature didn't have a chance.

"Actually Truth, the biggest manmade pollution and ecological disasters happened in WW2, and nature recovered quite nicely."

Except for a little hole in the ozone layer (currently the size of the continental US).

Savage complains about $5 billion being spent annually on climate researh by our government. Some of that $5 billion annually is spent trying to disprove human involvement in global temperature changes. Just watch Sen. Imhoffe (R-Okla.) and his pals on C-Span2. How about the $500 billion that has been added to the national DEBT over the past 6 years? Now THAT's scary.

CL, "And who equates US temperatures to global temperatures?"

The same GW zealots who extrapolated those same US temperatures to the rest of the world before the mistake was discovered.

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