Posted by
Catmman on Thursday, August 30, 2007 4:11:30 PM
How can that be? Why hasn't it been reported?
Great story from
Newsbusters:On Tuesday, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration announced that "Greenhouse gases likely accounted for more than half of the widespread warmth across the continental United States last year."
Yet, NOAA ignored the fact that the primary GHG global warming alarmists point to as the cause for rising temperatures, carbon dioxide emissions, actually declined in 2006.
Regardless, let's first look at the announcement from NOAA (emphasis added):
Greenhouse gases likely accounted for more than half of the widespread warmth across the continental United States last year, according to a new study by four scientists at NOAA's Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colo. Last year's average temperature was the second highest since record-keeping began in 1895. The team found that it was very unlikely that the 2006 El Niño played any role, though other natural factors likely contributed to the unusual warmth. The findings will appear September 5 in the Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.
The NOAA team also found that the probability of U.S. temperatures breaking a record in 2006 had increased 15-fold compared to pre-industrial times because of greenhouse gas increases in Earth's atmosphere.
Before we look at the CO2 emissions, isn't it interesting that a naturally occurring El Niño, which many climatologists view as key to warming cycles in the northern hemisphere, was discounted as the culprit?
And here is the best part of this. Read on...
Yet, most important is how NOAA ignored the May 2007 report from the Energy Information Association concerning CO2 emissions for 2006 (emphasis added throughout):
U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions declined in absolute terms -from 5,955 million metric tons (MMTCO2) in 2005 to 5,877 MMTCO2in 2006, a 1.3 percent decrease
Emissions from natural gas and petroleum fell 1.7 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively, while coal emissions declined 0.9 percent
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- Energy intensity (energy consumed per $ real GDP) fell by over 4.0 percent, as total energy demand declined 0.9 percent while the economy grew by 3.3 percent
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- The total carbon intensity of the economy (CO2 per$ real GDP) fell by 4.5 percent, as the carbon intensity of the energy supply (CO2 per Btu of energy) fell in addition to the decline in the energy intensity
- The 2006 decline in carbon intensity is the largest since 1990 and the 4th largest since 1949
Pretty delicious, wouldn't you agree? But there's more:
Factors that helped the Energy-CO2 Emissions Decline
- Weather conditions were favorable for emission reductions in 2006 as both heating degree-days and cooling degree-days were lower than in 2005
- As 2006 enjoyed a mild winter, heating degree-days were down 7.4 percent
- In addition, the summer of 2006 was cooler than the summer of 2005 and cooling degree-days declined almost 1 percent
So explain to me if rising CO2 is responsible for rising temperatures, and CO2 emissions declined in 2006, how could 2006 be hotter than 2005, and how could it be caused by CO2?
Use this on you eco-nazi neighbor and score one for common sense.