NASA Study Finds That Burning Fossil Fuels Cools the Planet

I’ve never disparaged someone who believes in man-made global warming, even though I have my fair share of doubts about that idea. For the most part, the people who believe that the world is warming due to human activity, are not stupid. They, just like everyone else in the world, are just trying to draw the best conclusions based on what they feel is the best data available to them.

However, there is one characteristic these people have that often bothers me. They’re incredibly sure of themselves.

They expect everyone in the world to change their behavior based on incomplete data. They think it’s complete, but it’s not. They assume that science is infallible, and that the conclusions science has drawn so far are the indisputable truth. They try to predict the future of an inherently chaotic system with the best information that is available to them, even though that information is constantly changing, along with the standards used to gather that information (not to mention data that has been cherry picked or falsified).

In short, they are drawing a definite conclusion about global warming, when at best they should be considering it a mere possibility. And obviously, conclusions and possibilities are two very different things. Their biggest fault, is that they think they have it all figured it out, when they don’t. Case in point:

Major theories about what causes temperatures to rise have been thrown into doubt after NASA found the Earth has cooled in areas of heavy industrialisation where more trees have been lost and more fossil fuel burning takes place.

Environmentalists have long argued the burning of fossil fuels in power stations and for other uses is responsible for global warming and predicted temperature increases because of the high levels of carbon dioxide produced – which causes the global greenhouse effect.

While the findings did not dispute the effects of carbon dioxide on global warming, they found aerosols – also given off by burning fossil fuels – actually cool the local environment, at least temporarily.

The research was carried out to see if current climate change models for calculating future temperatures were taking into account all factors and were accurate.

So how does pollution and deforestation manage to cool local climates? Apparently, both can reflect sunlight away from the Earth.

The spokesman said it was “well known” that aerosols such as those emitted in volcanic eruptions and power stations, act to cool Earth, at least temporarily, by reflecting solar radiation away from the planet.

He added: “In a similar fashion, land use changes such as deforestation in northern latitudes result in bare land that increases reflected sunlight.”

Kate Marvel, a climatologist at GISS and the paper’s lead author, said the results showed the “complexity” of estimating future global temperatures.

This should have been considered decades ago, and frankly it’s baffling that nobody factored this into their climate models before. It’s been widely known for decades that particulate matter can prevent sunlight from entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Granted, one of the authors of the study explained that the data on this factor has only been available for ten years.

However, that kind of makes these scientists look worse. They had to have known that there was more to this whole situation than just Co2, but because they couldn’t measure the aerosols, they chose to ignore them. They drew conclusions and treated man-made global warming as gospel, long before all the facts were in. Now that a few more facts are in, they have to admit that many of their previous models were way off.

NASA researchers at GISS accomplished a first ever feat by calculating the temperature impact of each of these variables—greenhouse gases, natural and manmade aerosols, ozone concentrations, and land use changes—based on historical observations from 1850 to 2005 using a massive ensemble of computer simulations.

The spokesman said: “Analysis of the results showed that these climate drivers do not necessarily behave like carbon dioxide, which is uniformly spread throughout the globe and produces a consistent temperature response; rather, each climate driver has a particular set of conditions that affects the temperature response of Earth.

“Because earlier studies do not account for what amounts to a net cooling effect for parts of the northern hemisphere, predictions for TCR and ECS have been lower than they should be.

“This means that Earth’s climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide—or atmospheric carbon dioxide’s capacity to affect temperature change—has been underestimated, according to the study.”

So does this new information completely disprove global warming? By itself, no. But it does say something that we all need to take to heart. The people who so fervently believe that man-made global warming is real, are making a lot of assumptions based on information that is not complete. It makes you wonder, what other factors are they not considering?