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QaR
October 2009 
Yes, Virginia, scientists WILL lie to you!
Dale Husband
Please examine carefully this credible looking news story:
http://www.dailyinterlake.com/articles/2009/03/23/featured_story/featured_story_8762218474_01.txt
{{{ Physicist counters climate-change models
Ed Berry is making some noise about climate change, and he's singing a different tune than former Vice President Al Gore and his "Inconvenient Truth."
Berry, 73, an accomplished atmospheric physicist who recently moved to the Flathead Valley from Sacramento, Calif., was among about 700 scientists who attended the International Conference on Climate Change in New York City March 7-10. Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the group has decidedly different views on climate change than Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC consensus asserts that the influence of human-produced greenhouse gases will cause a warming trend with dire environmental consequences.
The prevailing conclusion at the New York conference, according to Berry, is that "the global warming hypothesis is dead, scientifically."
The conference, he noted, was attended by high-profile scientists and figures such as former NASA astronaut and U.S. Sen. Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, whom Berry has known since he was an undergraduate at Caltech University.
"It seems every few years we run into each other," he said. "We were good friends from Caltech all the way through."
Berry noted that the attendance of 700 scientists at the conference "is just a drop in the bucket" of the growing ranks of scientists who disagree with IPCC conclusions.
"There's a big list of scientists that in just the last year have changed their minds," Berry said. "The momentum is in our direction."
But politics, he said, are still thoroughly dominated by global warming alarmists and major media that advance their views.
"Clearly, Al Gore is good at what he does," Berry conceded, adding that it is now up to scientists with different views to make them known.
Since moving to the Flathead, Berry has been publicly engaged on the topic, writing letters to the editor and speaking to groups, using a lengthy PowerPoint presentation that is basically an outline for a book he is writing.
"What I'm after is making it comprehensive but simple because I'm aiming at the general public rather than scientists," he said of the book.
Berry insists that the models used to support the warming theory produce faulty predictions because they cannot account for all of the dynamics influencing the atmosphere.
They cannot account for ever-changing greenhouse gases, radiation, solar energy and ocean currents. One of the greatest omissions from climate modeling, Berry said, is they do not account for the incredibly dynamic influences of cloud cover, a subject he knows well.
After Caltech, Berry went on to earn a master's degree in physics from Dartmouth College, and then a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Nevada.
His doctoral thesis involved measuring and predicting the formation of the smallest water molecules into raindrops.
He was the chief scientist and manager of the airborne research facility at Nevada's Desert Research Institute, where he developed instrumentation technology for aircraft in monitoring the atmosphere.
He recalls one aircraft radar innovation in 1972 that produced the largest radar image of a hurricane up to that time.
Berry also managed for a period the National Science Foundation's weather modification program, which involved cloud-seeding research. He was involved with a research project that for the first time identified how cities, filled with heat-radiating concrete and asphalt, actually modify the weather.
For Berry, studying the atmosphere wouldn't be complete without actually getting into it.
He started as a glider pilot and later became a powered airplane pilot. He got involved in competitive sailing with his wife, eventually winning major national and North American regattas.
Throughout his educational and work experience, Berry says he is most grateful for the pre-eminent scientists who taught him how to approach problem solving, going all the way back to learning under the renowned Linus Pauling at Caltech.
"It isn't the things you learn," Berry said. "It's how you learn to think."
Berry has deep concerns about the political direction for climate-change policies, particularly a cap-and-trade system that is likely to come from Washington, D.C. It is a system that will produce a bureaucracy and it will essentially amount to a tax on energy production and consumption.
It was a major topic at the conference in New York, where economists projected the economic impacts.
"People have different numbers, but they are all big," Berry said of those impacts.
"It's going to affect the cost of energy significantly," he adds, in a regressive fashion impacting low-income energy consumers the most. }}}
Note especially this part: "One of the greatest omissions from climate modeling, Berry said, is they do not account for the incredibly dynamic influences of cloud cover, a subject he knows well."
Berry is a flat-out liar. How do I know? Because of this:
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf
This is the paper, published waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1896 by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, that first described the way carbon dioxide (called carbonic acid there) causes warming.
Start reading from page 12 to page 14, where clouds and their effects are decribed in some detail.
And if you want more:
Clouds, Clouds, Clouds
http://www.ucar.edu/news/features/clouds/
{{{Artificial clouds and climate change
The water vapor in jet engine exhaust condenses to form the long, thin artificial clouds known as contrails
LeMone is also chief scientist of GLOBE, which conducted the Fall 2004 Contrail Count-a-Thon, a cloud and contrail experiment, in collaboration with NASA on October 14 and 15. Students around the world observed and reported their counts of contrails, the artificial clouds formed from the water vapor in jet aircraft exhaust, as well as associated clouds.
Climatologist David Travis (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater) and colleagues demonstrated the importance of contrails to climate by studying the contrail-free skies over the United States in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, when flights over U.S. airspace were grounded. They compared satellite imagery collected September 11-13 with 30 years of cloud-cover data and assembled a history of the temperatures across North America at the same time of year for the same period.
When they compared the 30-year record to temperature readings for September 2001, they found that contrails are narrowing the range of temperature between day and night, making average days cooler and average nights warmer than would otherwise occur.
The contrast between daytime and nighttime temperatures grew from 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) larger under the clear skies following September 11. Regions where contrails are usually present showed the greatest change.
Learn More
Post-Sept. 11 skies offer clues to contrails, climate change
The cooling effect of contrails adds another variable to the puzzle of climate change at regional and global levels.
More pieces of the cloud-climate puzzle
The aircraft-free skies after September 11 were an unusual event that let scientists directly observe how contrails affect climate. Usually scientists must use computer models (sophisticated software that mimics the atmosphere) to study the cloud-climate interplay.
Incorporating clouds into the models is vital because of their role in regulating climate. Low, thick clouds reflect solar radiation back into space and cool Earth's surface. High, thin clouds warm the planet by allowing sunlight to pass through them, yet trapping some of the outgoing infrared radiation emitted by Earth. Clouds remove gases and particles from the atmosphere through precipitation, and they are also at the center of some of the atmosphere's most critical chemical reactions.
Capturing clouds in climate models is no easy task, however. "Many of the important actions in clouds take place on distance scales of a few meters to tens of kilometers or smaller and evolve on time scales of a few seconds to a few hours," explains Phil Rasch, an NCAR climate modeler. "These features can't easily be represented accurately in global models. We have to start making approximations, and the approximations aren't yet very good."
The complexity of cloud physics is another challenge. "There are some processes associated with clouds that we just don't understand well enough to model," Rasch says. "There's a constant effort to improve the approximations. We look for problems in our formulations, try to figure out how they manifest themselves in the climate model, and improve the approximations when we find a solution."
Meanwhile, observational specialists like NCAR's Andrew Heymsfield fly instruments on balloons and aircraft into clouds to learn more about cloud ice and other structures. What they're learning will improve the treatment of clouds in both small- and large-scale models.
Learn More
New probes paint a wet picture
of high-altitude cirrus
These refinements make their way into such tools as the recently updated Community Climate System Model. Scientists at NCAR and elsewhere use the model to project climate up to 100 years or more into the future.}}}
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