as we all freeze to death...

I found these two stories on Accuweather.com's climate blog. I am now plaigerizing them for your reading enjoyment as I try to type this while I can't feel my fingers (no heat inside here in Florida and it's *&%$#@! COLD! 30's and 40's may sound great to the rest of you but when you have no heat and have not felt such temps in many years it's cold) So where's Al Gore now? What about Copenhagen? I previously joked about God's sense of humor regarding this but it's getting a tad out of hand with frost on my car and in my yard and becoming an early morning norm and no change in sight.

This is just what the CIA needs to be doing now, right?

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6, 2010

Climate Scientists and CIA Collaboration Revived

Climate scientists are once again collaborating with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in effort to use their assets such as spy satellites and classified sensors to study changes in clouds, Arctic sea ice, glaciers, deserts and tropical forests, according to a New York Times article.

The C.I.A. runs the program and arranges for the scientists to draw on federal surveillance equipment, including highly classified satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office.

The Bush administration had previously shut down this collaboration.

Scientists, Dr. Norbert Untersteiner, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in polar ice said, "have no way to send out 500 people" across the top of the world to match the intelligence gains, adding that the new understandings might one day result in ice forecasts, in a statement to the Times.

About 60 scientists -- mainly from academia but including some from industry and federal agencies-- run the effort's scientific side. All have secret clearances. They obtain guidance from the National Academy of Sciences, an elite body that advises the federal government, according to the New York Times.

Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences and a member of the monitoring team, said to the Times that the program was "basically free."

Dr. Untersteiner of the University of Washington said to the NYT that in June the government posted some imagery results from that assessment on the Web sites of the United StatesGeological Survey (USGS) in an area known as the Global Fiducials Library, which advertises itself as an archive of intelligence images from scientifically important sites.

And there's more...

TUESDAY, JANUARY 5, 2010

Airborne Fraction of Man-Made Atmospheric CO2 has not Increased in past 150 Years

A recent study from the University of Bristol (UK) by Wolfgang Knorr suggests that the airborne fraction of man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) has not increased during the past 150 years.

Knorr reanalyzed atmospheric CO2 and emissions data since 1850 and considers uncertainties in the data, according to ScienceDaily.

It is shown that with those uncertainties, the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has been 0.7 +/- 1.4% per decade, or close to and not significantly different from zero (no trend). I would like to know what those uncertainties are.

Only 40-45% of emitted CO2 stays in the atmosphere, according to the Knorr report. But, other recent studies suggest the possibility that the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems have started loosing part of their ability to sequester a large proportion of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

Climate models currently assume that the amount of airborne CO2 from man-made emissions is increasing and will continue to do so, which is a key part of their long term predictions.

The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

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Update: A friend has kindly supplied the link to the full study.

Also, I apologize for the misleading title. I try to keep the titles as short as possible for space reasons, but doing that sometimes causes trouble and a completely misleading statement. My apologies for my sloppy effort. I have changed the title. Brett.

So where's ALGOREnow? Maybe he could come here and talk to warm my numb fingers while I type (and listen to music through headphones to drown out his idiotic words.) Just in case you don't believe I plaigerized these, here's the link so you can read them for yourselves and double check to make sure I didn't change anything!!http://global-warming.accuweather.com/