Looking for a solution to global warming? Maybe start clear-cutting many of the world's forests, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher says.

The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs oversight subcommittee made it clear during a Wednesday hearing that he doesn't believe in man-made global warming.

But if it were true — and most of the world's scientists agree it is — Rohrabacher said he's hit on an answer by tackling the 80 to 90 percent of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions "generated by nature itself": Namely, yank down old trees and get rid of the rotting wood in rainforests.

"Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rainforests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?" the California Republican asked Todd Stern, the top U.S. climate diplomat and lead witness at the hearing. "Or would people be supportive of cutting down older trees in order to plant younger trees as a means to prevent this disaster from happening?"

Stern promised to deliver a technical expert from the State Department to get at the heart of Rohrabacher's questions. But he also tried to correct the record by pointing out that the focus of global warming policy actually centers on keeping the world's trees standing, especially in places like the Amazon, Congo and Indonesia.

He didn't bite on the merits of Rohrabacher's argument that trees cause global warming, which was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's much-lampooned statement that trees cause pollution.

"I didn't want to be commenting on stuff I'm not expert on," Stern said afterward, adding: "If he wants to talk about the effect of rotting wood or whatever, we're happy to have someone come up who knows about it. I don't."

Jay Gulledge, a senior scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said Rohrabacher is correct that 80 to 90 percent of gross greenhouse gas emissions do come from nature, with humans producing the rest. But it's that small percentage that is changing the Earth's climate — not to mention that trees help absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in huge quantities.

"How he's using it is totally off the wall," Gulledge said. "It's beyond the pale. It makes no sense."

Dana Rohrabacher voiced support for the Taliban when they seized power in the 1990s, visiting Afghanistan when it came under their control, saying that the Taliban would provide "stability", and eliminate threats to the United States. He also claimed the Taliban "intend to establish a disciplined, moral society". He said he believed complete Taliban control over Afghanistan would be a "positive development", that they were "devout traditionalists, not terrorists or revolutionaries", and that "sensationalist" media coverage of the Taliban's introduction of Sharia law was "nonsense".

On April 10, 2001 it was revealed that Rohrabacher met with top Taliban leader Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, a foreign minister who directly advised Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in Doha, Qatar, where they discussed possible American assistance to the Taliban, including financial aid. Dana masked his secret meeting by claiming he was going to the "Free Markets and Democracy" conference. Dana received money from the Islamic Institute to conduct his negotiations with the Taliban, and was "impressed" by the Taliban. Dana also said, "Listen! Hold on! I am a bigger expert on Afghanistan than any member of Congress."

After the September 11 attacks, he back-tracked from his previous statements, blaming the Clinton administration for the rise of the Taliban, saying that Clinton had "ignored" alleged "advice" Dana offered to not negotiate with the Taliban. Dana claimed: "...I said if we didn't do anything about the Taliban, we would pay a dear price." The Orange County Weekly called his statement "a fraud", after exposing his friendly relationship with the Taliban.

Dana had personally met Bin Laden while he was in Afghanistan to support the Afghan mujahideen. Dana also had friendly relationships with numerous figures in the Islamic world linked to Bin Laden. Rohrabacher's diplomatic outreaches to the Taliban were possibly illegal under the Logan Act, which forbade individual citizens to perform policy reserved for secretaries of state. After 9/11, several of Rohrabacher's fellow Republicans attempted to cover up his Taliban negotiations, claiming he bumped into them in a hallway, when Dana himself admitted that he conducted "high level" negotiations, and arranged the meeting.

In 2004 several of Rohrabacher's Jewish supporters voiced concern over his relationships with radical Islamist organizations linked to Al Qaeda. Some of the organizations received Saudi and Qatari money.

Given what we know now, there is almost no way that the feared large temperature rise is going to happen. Mr. Lewis comments: "Taking the IPCC scenario that assumes a doubling of CO2, plus the equivalent of another 30% rise from other greenhouse gases by 2100, we are likely to experience a further rise of no more than 1°C."

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm. It will actually do net good—that much the IPCC scientists have already agreed upon in the last IPCC report. Rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland's ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.


Some of the best recent observationally based research also points to climate sensitivity being about 1.6°C for a doubling of CO2. An impressive study published this year by Magne Aldrin of the Norwegian Computing Center and colleagues gives a most-likely estimate of 1.6°C. Michael Ring and Michael Schlesinger of the University of Illinois, using the most trustworthy temperature record, also estimate 1.6°C.

The big question is this: Will the lead authors of the relevant chapter of the forthcoming IPCC scientific report acknowledge that the best observational evidence no longer supports the IPCC's existing 2°-4.5°C "likely" range for climate sensitivity? Unfortunately, this seems unlikely—given the organization's record of replacing evidence-based policy-making with policy-based evidence-making, as well as the reluctance of academic scientists to accept that what they have been maintaining for many years is wrong.
...

There is little dispute among scientists about how much warming CO2 alone can produce, all other things being equal: about 1.1°-1.2°C for a doubling from preindustrial levels. The way warming from CO2 becomes really dangerous is through amplification by positive feedbacks—principally from water vapor and the clouds this vapor produces.

It goes like this: A little warming (from whatever cause) heats up the sea, which makes the air more humid—and water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas. The resulting model-simulated changes in clouds generally increase warming further, so the warming is doubled, trebled or more.

That assumption lies at the heart of every model used by the IPCC, but not even the most zealous climate scientist would claim that this trebling is an established fact. For a start, water vapor may not be increasing. A recent paper from Colorado State University concluded that "we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data." And then, as one Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a senior role in combating climate change admitted to me the other day: "We don't even know the sign" of water vapor's effect—in other words, whether it speeds up or slows down a warming of the atmosphere.

Climate models are known to poorly simulate clouds, and given clouds' very strong effect on the climate system—some types cooling the Earth either by shading it or by transporting heat up and cold down in thunderstorms, and others warming the Earth by blocking outgoing radiation—it remains highly plausible that there is no net positive feedback from water vapor.

If this is indeed the case, then we would have seen about 0.6°C of warming so far, and our observational data would be pointing at about 1.2°C of warming for the end of the century. And this is, to repeat, roughly where we are.

freeman2 wrote:A financial expert talks to one scientist and overturns the work and beliefs of thousands of scientists? Meanwhile, Greenland melts...