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Index of Subjects Dr Brian Pratt is a geology professor at Univ Saskatchewan, and one of ~100 signatories to a recent Cato Institute advertizement addressed to Obama, which has ~4 lines synthesizing a few arguments presented against the idea of extreme future global climate change. The Cato Inst ad states briefly that that the IPCC & Al Gore-type climate change predictions are not backed up by the existing science -- in essence, they are wrong or unproven. See: http://www.cato.org/special/climatechange/alternate_version.html The ad says that `The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior.` This is reflected in Dr. Pratt`s views bluntly expressed in his 2-page article, cited by Lois: `temperature and regional variations in the last few decades do not track rising CO2 concentration.` For opinions that the `libertarian` Cato Inst is a mouthpiece for corporate aims and is funded by major global corporations (e.g. tobacco companies) with perhaps an axe to grind in resisting government regulation, see: http://world.std.com/~mhuben/cato.html or, better: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/apr/01/cato-institute/cato-institutes-claim-global-warming-disputed-most/ The opinion shared by Dr. Pratt and Cato that global temperature has not increased in the last decade (as supposedly predicted by the doomsaying modellers) is apparently approximately correct, but is misleading and rendered pointless e.g. by the recent NCDC-NOAA (2008) Annual Report: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2008/ann/global.html This shows that the actual average surface and troposphere temperatures have fluctuated, with spikes and troughs in the data since 1958-2008 (see RATPAC graph in NCDC report above), but the fitted trend is inexorably upwards at 0.12-0.15 degrees C per decade. Another graph there gives 100 years of data, and there`s a nicer graph showing steady temperature rise over a long period also in: http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=41 which was excerpted from: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/ Only by dishonestly cherry-picking a selected decade from these data are you able to state that the temperature has been stationary or gone down -- not the point when you have 50 years of data that does NOT show this overall. See politifact blog above. Dr. Pratt self-describes himself as professionally competent to assess climate data, so it is surprising that he would endorse the Cato `last-decade` ploy to disguise the overall multi-decade data trend. He also makes surprising comments that CO2 absorbs hardly any `heat` (presumably meaning infrared radiation, IR) -- but I thought the point was not that it absorbs IR but that it reflects back IR that has got inside the atmosphere, trapping it so that it stays here and warms up the ground and sea (the gas itself isn't what stores the heat, having relatively little heat capacity compared to the mass of the Earth). There's other dubious stuff that I'll let someone else have a go at, and Brian has already drawn attention to the strangely intemperate, unprofessional tone of his article. Steve ------------------------------------- Quoting Lois Codling <loiscodling@hfx.eastlink.ca>: A good article on global warming on page 10 of the Professional > Engineers of Saskatchewan magazine. > > http://www.apegs.sk.ca/adx/aspx/adxGetMedia.aspx?DocID=2879,16,1054,1061,Documents&MediaID=4272&Filename=Edge119-final.pdf > > My husband suggested this one. > > Lois Codling
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