Archive for November 2010
The notion that our carbon dioxide emissions are causing the oceans to warm at an alarming rate making glaciers flow faster into the sea (Staying afloat in a sinking world, Bangkok Post, November 24, 2010) is logically and scientifically flawed in many ways. I would like to cite only one of them and it has to do with the Argo Project. It was launched with much fanfare about six years ago. Thousands of robotized floats were installed in oceans around the globe to measure “just how fast the ocean is warming”. By their own reckoning, these measurements provide the most accurate and comprehensive sea temperature data available to them. Yet, mysteriously, the hype went out of the Argo Project almost as soon as it was implemented. Not only that, the Argo data are apparently being shunned by climate scientists who prefer the old measuring devices whose inadequacy was apparently the reason that they had sought funding for Argo. NASA’s JPL, the keepers of the Argo data, admitted that it is because there are no trends in the temperature or salinity data from the Argo floats. Had the data showed the kind of warming they had hoped to find, the media would have been inundated with that information. The fundamental bias in climate science is that data that do not support its presumptions are not considered valid.
During 2005 and 2006 the global warming press was abuzz with news about the Argo project – a global effort by climate scientists to cover the earth with thousands of robotized buoys to measure sea temperature. The new devices would aid global warming scientists to “gain new information on the heat trapped in the oceans” and “really track how the ocean is warming” (Sea robots aid climate research, ABC Online, abc.net.au, November 16, 2006).
The initial deployment of the measuring stations was completed in 2007 and more than 3 years have now elapsed but we have not heard from the climate scientists about the new information they have found about how the oceans are trapping heat and warming. The line has gone dead. Could it be that they did not find what they had spent all the money and effort to find? It is clear from the language that the effort was not an unbiased study to discover whether the oceans were warming but only to confirm that it was warming and to hand skeptics a slam dunk but instead of silencing skeptics with the new data, climate scientists appear to have forgotten about the Argo Project and are now pushing land temperatures.
Cha-am Jamal
Thongchai Thailand 