James Powell is obviously not a scientist or he would know that in science, one swallow does make a summer. As Einstein said, it didn't matter how many scientists agreed with him as it would take only 1 to show he was wrong. James Powell then does "science by motivation". Aha says James, see he is worried about Russia's fossil fuel income, so we can ignore his science. But the same argument can be made about the Global Alarmist whose income depends on finding global warming problems. That's how they get funding for further research. It's now notorious that scientists who want research funding have got to somehow link what they want to study to "OMG it's probably the Global Warming and CO2".
The scientific paper looks perfectly fine. James Powell was not able to make a valid critique.
The Dissenting Paper
In the new study, the one paper that rejects man-made global warming is "The Role of Solar Activity in Global Warming," by S. V. Avakyan. It appeared in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2013, Vol. 83, No. 3, pp. 275–285. Dr. Avakyan is "Head of the Laboratory of Aerospace Physical Optics at the Vavilov State Optical Institute and a leading researcher of the RAS Central (Pulkovo) Astronomical Observatory."
DOI=10.1134/S1019331613030015, WoS # =000321517800013
The abstract reads:
The author associates the recently observed climate warming and carbon dioxide concentration growth in the lower atmospheric layers with variations of solar–geomagnetic activity in global cloud formation and the significant decrease in the role of forests in carbon dioxide accumulation in the process of photosynthesis. The contribution of the greenhouse effect of carbon-containing gases to global warming turns out to be insignificant.
A clue to the author's motivation comes on the first page of the article, where he writes,"The switch of world powers first to decreasing the use of fossil fuel and then to carbon-free energy within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol may lead to economic collapse for Russia as a consequence of the reduction and, probably, even loss of the possibility to sell oil and natural gas on the world market."
Dr. Avakyan addresses the two main facts that any theory of global warming must explain: over the last 100 years or so, both CO2 levels and global temperatures have risen and by about the same relative amount. Mainstream science attributes this to cause and effect: namely, the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric CO2 absorbs rising heat radiation and redirects some of it back down to raise the temperature at the Earth's surface. Dr. Avakyan's paper attributes the known temperature rise to the effect of solar geomagnetic activity on clouds, and the known rise of CO2 to the carbon not absorbed due to expanding deforestation, desertification, and urbanization, and the resulting lessening of photosynthesis. The paper is complicated and we will have to wait until the article has been out longer for the experts to weigh in. For now, one swallow does not a summer make.
© 2011 James L. Powell E-mail Me
Mqurice |
