I went to a talk today on Global Warming - and human's impact (or not) on the subject.

The gentleman that gave the presentation has a book at:
http://www.sepp.org/books/hotcold.html You can kinda read a summary of the talk there.

He is renowned astrophysicist S. Fred Singer.

He had some interesting points - Satellite data does not support Global warming - The surface temperatures in places are rising, but not in the atmosphere - he presents a hypothesis that the surface temps are going up due to 'urban heating' - he showed a graph of the different counties in California that had been researched by someone else - it was classified into 3 types of counties - populations 1 million +, 100,000 - 1,000,000 and less than 100,000.

The temps in these counties went up the most in the 1 mil+ counties, up a bit in the 100,000 counties and did not go up in the counties of less than 100,000.

Another interesting study that was done was to measure the carbon dioxide levels on the west coast and then on the east coast - thinking they would get higher as you go from west to east (given the prevailing winds) - but the opposite was found - it got lower as it went east - so there is some carbon dioxide absorption happening as it crosses the North American continent!

Some other interesting tidbits:
There is no obvious connection between CO2 and temperatures
There were Ice ages with co2 content 2000% what we have today
Water Vapor is 95% of the greenhouse effect, not CO2
We're really due for an ice age now...

All in all it was an interesting presentation.

Canie