Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

The purpose of my Notes on Climate Change is to point out some serious deficiencies in the recent IPCC Report. I would like to emphasize: (i) natural components are important and significant, so that they should not be ignored, (ii) it is insufficient to study climate change on the basis of data only from the last 100 years, (iii) it is difficult to make conclusions about causes of the temperature rise since 1975 until we can understand the rise from 1910 to 1940, (iv) the present GCM modelings are an attempt to simulate the IPCC hypothesis that the present warming (0.7°C/100years) is caused by the greenhouse effect, and thus, (v) because of these deficiencies, their future prediction is unreliable and uncertain.

If most of the present rise is caused by the recovery from the Little Ice Age (a natural component) and if the recovery rate does not change during the next 100 years, the rise expected from the year 2000 to 2100 would be roughly 0.5°C. Multi-decadal changes would be either positive or negative in 2100. This rough estimate is based on the recovery rate of 0.5°C/100 years during the last few hundred years. Note that this value is comparable with what IPCC hypothesize as the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect shown by GCMs should be carefully re-evaluated, if the present rise (0.7°C/100 years) contains significant natural components, such as those I suggest.

http://www.iarc.uaf.edu/people/indiv/iarc_all_staff.php?photo=sakasofu

You are confusing short term trends caused by short term cycles with the long term trend. You have been told this repeatedly. You refuse to accept it. It doesn't change facts however.

If you look at your charts, the long term trend of temperature is UP.
The long term trend of CO2 is UP.
That means they correlate. There is no other scientific interpretation possible.

http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/climate.php

Why do you think Syun-Ichi Akasofu doesn't want to publish his paper in a professional journal? Many papers use previous work to reach their conclusions. Perhaps Mr Akasufu realizes publishing his work means it would be peer reviewed and shown to be lacking because he didn't use ALL the papers but only carefully selected to reach his conclusions.

Smooth negotiations are key
Gao Feng, the UN Framework on Climate Change’s director of legal affairs, expects that wealthier, industrialised nations will agree to additional emissions reductions, while emerging economies are likely to offer long-term commitments on future reductions. However, what shape those commitments should take, and what share of the responsibility developing countries should shoulder, is still unclear.

If developing countries have the flexibility to take voluntary action now, he says, new technology and capital from developed countries will help them build their capacity for clean energy and emissions cuts, making it much easier to negotiate binding targets later on. Smooth negotiations are the key.

On the argument that faster-growing developing countries like China and India should also accept binding emission reduction targets, Gao said this might not be realistic.”No-one should expect developing countries to accept emission cuts as early as Copenhagen. This simply won’t happen.”

http://www.climatemediapartnership.org/reporting/features/curbing-climate-change-whats-in-it-for-china/

Public Financing or Offsets? How Best to Fund Clean Tech for Developing Nations
by L.D. Gussin
The International Energy Agency states in its 2008 World Energy Outlook that global energy demand will likely increase 45% by 2030. Developing countries led by China and India will account for 97% of the related rise in carbon dioxide emissions, and by 2030, they will supply 67% of the energy-related CO2 that enters the atmosphere.

Using 450 atmospheric parts per million (ppm) of CO2 as the ceiling for effective climate change mitigation, the Energy Outlook concludes:

[Developed] countries alone cannot put the world onto a 450-ppm trajectory, even if they were to reduce their emissions to zero.

In post-Kyoto negotiations, developed and developing countries have generally split on what the world should do about this fact. While there is a consensus that the CO2 footprint of economic growth must be greatly reduced, the sides differ on how the costs of this makeover should be divided.

Both Japan and Canada, for instance, in proposals for the December UN climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen, ask the more advanced developing countries to accept 2020 CO2 reduction targets " and so some of the economic burden.

China, calling developed nations the historic cause of climate change, instead asked them to bear nearly all of the near term costs of mitigation, by reducing their CO2 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. Todd Stern, the lead U.S. negotiator, calls this target politically impossible, domestically (as it would quickly raise energy prices steeply) and so a “prescription for stalemate.”

Yet, echoing China, India's negotiating position is that:

Developing countries may, on a voluntary basis, propose mitigation actions ... provided full costs are met by developed countries.

In the face of this conflict, it helps to remember that the practical means of mitigation have largely been worked out in the decade Kyoto has been in force. A low carbon energy platform, suited to developed countries and more advanced developing countries, is beginning to deploy:

• Demand-side efficiencies gained through weatherization and lighting improvements and then by giving consumers behind the meter controls.

• Supply-side efficiencies wrung from power grids by adding real time controls and modernized transmission and distribution systems.

• Transportation efficiencies gained by switching out petroleum for electrical power, biofuels, and digital controls.

• Power grids switching out their primary feedstocks of carbon-heavy coal for renewable portfolios as well as (perhaps, later) nuclear energy and decarbonized coal.
With this mitigation platform in view, the issue becomes how to fund what is largely technology capacity building and deployment in developing countries.

Accepting, as has been done since Kyoto, that developed nations will for a long time bear the brunt of mitigation costs (regardless of when and to what degree developing nations come to accept climate change responsibilities), two funding models have emerged.

In one model, the taxpayers of developed nations (to be blunt) provide the capital. In the other, private funds raised in emissions markets supplement this public sector funding. It seems useful to ask which of these models can, decade after decade, best succeed.

A $100-200 Billion Transfer of Wealth

A 2009 Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) study, “Fairness in Global Climate Change Finance,” calls the various estimates of incremental mitigation costs in developing countries that it has surveyed unsatisfactory, due to the many unknown variables. It finds, though:

a convergence in the most recent estimates at $100B-$200B [per annum] for developing world costs. ... It is perhaps [also] significant that developing countries in the UN negotiations have called for $200B-$400B [adding in estimates for adaptation aid] per annum.

To put these estimates in context: in 2007, U.S. foreign aid spending for development, humanitarian and emergency food aid totaled $12.7billion. President Obama, while pledging to double foreign aid from 2009 levels by 2012, only requested a 10% increase in his 2010 budget.

Early Models for Publicly Financed Mitigation

Two mechanisms, one supplementing the other, are being used to help developing nations begin to use carbon mitigation strategies " the technologies introduced above, as well as a set of forestry and agricultural practices, which are the main tools so far.

The first has governments, development banks, and NGOs building investment funds. The second seeks to supplement this essentially public financing with a commodities emissions market (and related offset program) that additionally brings in private capital. Both are in their early days and controversial.

The Global Environment Facility, launched by the World Bank in 1991, with 178 partners, typifies the public sector approach. To date it has provided $8 billion in grants and leveraged $32 billion in co-financing for 2,200 mitigation projects in 165 countries. The methods that it and other public sector entities employ include policy-based loans and grants, loan guarantees, debt financing, risk sharing mechanisms and equity investments.

Yet, balanced against need, investment sums like $8 billion over eighteen years are not nearly enough. In the most significant response to this shortfall, donors led by the World Bank launched Climate Investment Funds (CIF) in 2008, with a grant of $6.1 billion. This first CIF funding round was intended as an interim measure to scale up assistance to developing countries and strengthen the knowledge base in the development community, giving evidence that the financing answers are at most starting to emerge.

Engaging Private Finance Through Emissions Markets

Kyoto introduced a market mechanism to help reduce emissions in both developed and developing countries. The European Union, a Kyoto proponent, launched its Emissions Trading System (ETS) in 2005, fusing an emissions cap and market with a mechanism for flowing emissions abatement funds to developing countries.

The ETS in theory " its first iteration being like a hugely buggy beta software release " sets caps for member nations, tightens them regularly and distributes “allowances” (for free or via auctions) to big emitters like power plants. An emitter that is above its cap can use allowances it owns or buys to offset penalties; if under its cap, an emitter can sell or save its allowances. As with any market, third party investors can bring private capital into the system.

Today, in addition to ETS, there is one regional U.S. carbon market, two being planned, and discussions toward a U.S. federal market. Markets are also being planned or tested in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Technology transfer is achieved via “offsets.” An emitter above its cap can (in addition to buying allowances) get carbon credits by funding otherwise unfunded domestic or international mitigation projects. Credits offset emitter fines. So offsets do three things, at least in theory. They let developed nation emitters who sit above their caps pay fines in least cost ways. They fund mitigation in low income domestic areas and in developing nations. And they bring private investors to the system.

Since 2005, 1,350 ETS offset projects have been approved; 3,000 more are in the pipeline. They accrued $9.5 billion in investments. More pertinently, as these are the tiny numbers of a beta project, offsets (focusing now on the developing world), like emissions markets in general, have prominent critics and also supporters.

Writes Patrick McCully, Executive Director of International Rivers:

The world's biggest carbon offset market, the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism [CDM], is a global shell game that is increasing emissions behind the guise of promoting sustainable development.

Writes Joe Romm of The Center For American Progress and ClimateProgress.org:

[Offsets] deserve to be called rip-offsets because it is far from clear how many of them represent real reductions.

Both critics cite a 2008 paper on international carbon offsets by Stanford's David Victor and Michael Wara. Phase 1 of CDM is corrupt and inefficient, the authors say. It is stifled by bureaucracy, easily gamed by participants, and an easy target for speculators. These and other faults lead them to conclude:

between a third and two thirds of emission offsets under the [CDM] ... do not represent actual emission cuts
any offset market of sufficient scale ... will involve substantial issuance of credits that do not represent real emissions reductions

The first-mover EU ETS, though, remains committed to offsets. By 2020, it says, it will generate €40 billion per annum each for EU and international mitigation projects. Its 2009 paper addressing the Copenhagen discussions simply states:

the CDM should be reformed

A March 2009 paper by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), also addressing Copenhagen, is more elaborative:

IETA strongly supports the continued operation, reform and expansion of the Kyoto Protocol’s flexible [emissions trading] mechanisms ... which have been key to jump-starting emission reduction activities in the private sector globally as well as facilitating the flow of technology and know-how to, between, and within developing countries.

Here, then, are questions to ask when reviewing emissions markets and offsets as mitigation tools: What is the plan for raising per annum contributions of $200 billion-plus for technology transfer? Can the Phase 1 “beta” offset mechanisms be effectively reformed? Can emissions markets attract enough timely private sector capital to even make a difference?

http://solveclimate.com/blog/20090511/public-financing-or-offsets-how-best-fund-clean-tech-developing-nations

It is a fact that CAD (i.e., CO2 Atmospheric Density) has been monotonically increasing over the last 100 years.

It is a fact that AAGT (i.e., Average Annual Global Temperature) has not been monotonically increasing over the last 100 years. Sometimes over that period it has increased and sometimes it has decreased. The AAGT 11 and 22 year trends have also been fluctuating over the last 100 years. However, its 100 year trend is an increasing trend.

Those facts imply there are other factors that affect AAGT much more than does CAD.

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif

Average Annual Global Temperature 1850-2008

Ouch, what has to hurt is when you read the abstract and see it doesn't claim "Global Warming NOT Man-Made".
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2008JD011637.shtml


It says that the tropical troposphere temperatures closely follow the Southern oscillation. It says nothing about WHY the oceans have warmed. It only shows that the air temperatures reflect the ocean temperatures within about 70%.

What about the other 28%?
What about the warming of the oceans?
The crickets are starting to chirp Possum because I am sure you won't have an answer.

The article Possum tried to misuse shows why temperature hasn't gone up monotonically. Temperature fluctuates with the ocean Southern Oscillation. But the temperature within those fluctuations has gone up.

let me put this in something you can understand ican.

Suppose you are flying over a series of hills. As you go over the top of the hill the distance to the ground is less than the distance to the ground when you are over a valley. If you are on a steady climb as you pass over the hills at times the distance to the ground will increase and at times it will decrease but you are obviously climbing. Would you argue that you are NOT climbing steadily because the ground below you is varying in its elevation?

Of course not!

But I would argue that I am climbing or descending to a specific altitude above "standard sea level," because of the pitch of my airplane and my variable use of engine power. I certainly would not, for example, base my climb or descent above "standard sea level" solely on the density and movements of the atmosphere, or on the rise and fall of sea tides.

In this example, altitude above the center of the earth is analogous to temperature above absolute zero. The reference point "standard sea level" is analogous to the average annual global temperature over the last 100 years.

By the way, in aviation, "standard sea level" is that point at which atmospheric pressure is 29.92 lbs per square inch. More often than not the atmospheric pressure at an actual sea level is higher or lower than that, and the actual average annual global temperature is higher or lower than its average over the last 100 years.

But you will ignore the pitch and engine power when you say there is no increase in temperature? Thanks for admitting as much.

Aren't you glad ican isn't your pilot? LOL

Describing China as a nation that is both developed and developing, Stern said the “stark reality” of climate change is that the world “cannot avoid dangerous levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere without very significant action by China.”

Stern clarified that the United States is not expecting China to make an absolute reduction of its current emissions; rather the U.S. hope is that China will be able, over a period of years, to reduce significantly emission levels from those currently projected if the nation continues “business-as-usual” operations. He cited a “general range” of emissions, with 445 to 460 parts of carbon dioxide per million parts of air as a desirable target.

“I am quite sympathetic to the challenge that the Chinese are facing,” Stern said. “When we were industrializing, nobody told us how many " how much we could put up into the air, because nobody understood it at that point. … They do have a different challenge, and not only them but other developing countries. And yet there’s no choice; it’s got to be done. So that’s what’s hard. That’s what makes this a really difficult but quite critical issue.”



Read more: http://www.america.gov/st/energy-english/2009/June/20090612171605abretnuh0.4731104.html#ixzz0NqXibZk6

ReutersChina says rich nation CO2 cuts key to Copenhagen
Wed Jul 29, 2009 8:21am EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) - Rich nations must agree to large, measurable cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions, if the world is to set a framework to tackle global warming at U.N.-led talks in December, a senior Chinese official said on Wednesday.

Xie Zhenhua, a deputy chief of the National Development and Reform Commission who steers climate change policy, told the official Xinhua agency that commitment from industrialized countries was crucial to a deal in Copenhagen in December.

"The Chinese side believes that in Copenhagen...the key to success is to decide large, quantifiable mid-term emission-cutting targets for the developed nations," the Xinhua article paraphrased Xie saying.

He was speaking after the United States and China signed a deal that promises more cooperation on climate change, energy and the environment without setting firm goals.

China's position criticized

Moglen also criticized China's position, which draws the line at any limits that might affect its economic expansion, although it argues that developed nations should accept a full 40 percent cut.

"There is a discordance here," said Moglen. "China is saying on one hand that we need to use the most demanding targets, and yet they are also saying that they are not about to put at risk their economic growth." Instead, developing countries should pursue growth in new environmental technologies, he said.

But Michael Levi, director of the energy security and climate change program at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said criticism of the U.S. legislation authored by Democratic Representatives Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts has focused too much on the 2020 numbers.

"We're not going to see a U.S. commitment to cut its emissions by 40 percent," Levi told RFA. "The United States knows that, the other developed countries know that, and China knows that. The fundamental goal is to make deep reductions in the long term."

"What matters is that the short-term commitments show that we're on a path to achieving that, and that's where we should be focusing," Levi said.

US-China Climate Deal Elusive
By Michael Lelyveld
2009-06-22

To get support for his bill, Mr. Waxman was forced to water down the cap in early years to please rural Democrats, and then severely ratchet it up in later years to please liberal Democrats. The CBO's analysis looks solely at the year 2020, before most of the tough restrictions kick in. As the cap is tightened and companies are stripped of initial opportunities to "offset" their emissions, the price of permits will skyrocket beyond the CBO estimate of $28 per ton of carbon. The corporate costs of buying these expensive permits will be passed to consumers.

The biggest doozy in the CBO analysis was its extraordinary decision to look only at the day-to-day costs of operating a trading program, rather than the wider consequences energy restriction would have on the economy. The CBO acknowledges this in a footnote: "The resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap."

The hit to GDP is the real threat in this bill. The whole point of cap and trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans will use less. These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment. Some companies will instead move their operations overseas, with the same result.

When the Heritage Foundation did its analysis of Waxman-Markey, it broadly compared the economy with and without the carbon tax. Under this more comprehensive scenario, it found Waxman-Markey would cost the economy $161 billion in 2020, which is $1,870 for a family of four. As the bill's restrictions kick in, that number rises to $6,800 for a family of four by 2035.

Note also that the CBO analysis is an average for the country as a whole. It doesn't take into account the fact that certain regions and populations will be more severely hit than others -- manufacturing states more than service states; coal producing states more than states that rely on hydro or natural gas. Low-income Americans, who devote more of their disposable income to energy, have more to lose than high-income families.


Opinion Journal_Wall Street Journal-Friday, June 26, 2009

Has global warming stopped?
David Whitehouse

Published 19 December 2007

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 and every year since 2001'.

Global warming stopped? Surely not. What heresy is this? Haven’t we been told that the science of global warming is settled beyond doubt and that all that’s left to the so-called sceptics is the odd errant glacier that refuses to melt?

Aren’t we told that if we don’t act now rising temperatures will render most of the surface of the Earth uninhabitable within our lifetimes? But as we digest these apocalyptic comments, read the recent IPCC’s Synthesis report that says climate change could become irreversible. Witness the drama at Bali as news emerges that something is not quite right in the global warming camp.

With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 " there has been no warming over the 12 months.

But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask? No.

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming " the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.

In principle the greenhouse effect is simple. Gases like carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere absorb outgoing infrared radiation from the earth’s surface causing some heat to be retained.

Consequently an increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases from human activities such as burning fossil fuels leads to an enhanced greenhouse effect. Thus the world warms, the climate changes and we are in trouble.

The evidence for this hypothesis is the well established physics of the greenhouse effect itself and the correlation of increasing global carbon dioxide concentration with rising global temperature. Carbon dioxide is clearly increasing in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s a straight line upward. It is currently about 390 parts per million. Pre-industrial levels were about 285 ppm. Since 1960 when accurate annual measurements became more reliable it has increased steadily from about 315 ppm. If the greenhouse effect is working as we think then the Earth’s temperature will rise as the carbon dioxide levels increase.

But here it starts getting messy and, perhaps, a little inconvenient for some. Looking at the global temperatures as used by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK’s Met Office and the IPCC (and indeed Al Gore) it’s apparent that there has been a sharp rise since about 1980.

The period 1980-98 was one of rapid warming " a temperature increase of about 0.5 degrees C (CO2 rose from 340ppm to 370ppm). But since then the global temperature has been flat (whilst the CO2 has relentlessly risen from 370ppm to 380ppm). This means that the global temperature today is about 0.3 deg less than it would have been had the rapid increase continued.

For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased.

The explanation for the standstill has been attributed to aerosols in the atmosphere produced as a by-product of greenhouse gas emission and volcanic activity. They would have the effect of reflecting some of the incidental sunlight into space thereby reducing the greenhouse effect. Such an explanation was proposed to account for the global cooling observed between 1940 and 1978.

But things cannot be that simple. The fact that the global temperature has remained unchanged for a decade requires that the quantity of reflecting aerosols dumped put in our atmosphere must be increasing year on year at precisely the exact rate needed to offset the accumulating carbon dioxide that wants to drive the temperature higher. This precise balance seems highly unlikely. Other explanations have been proposed such as the ocean cooling effect of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation or the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

But they are also difficult to adjust so that they exactly compensate for the increasing upward temperature drag of rising CO2. So we are led to the conclusion that either the hypothesis of carbon dioxide induced global warming holds but its effects are being modified in what seems to be an improbable though not impossible way, or, and this really is heresy according to some, the working hypothesis does not stand the test of data.

It was a pity that the delegates at Bali didn’t discuss this or that the recent IPCC Synthesis report did not look in more detail at this recent warming standstill. Had it not occurred, or if the flatlining of temperature had occurred just five years earlier we would have no talk of global warming and perhaps, as happened in the 1970’s, we would fear a new Ice Age! Scientists and politicians talk of future projected temperature increases. But if the world has stopped warming what use these projections then?

Some media commentators say that the science of global warming is now beyond doubt and those who advocate alternative approaches or indeed modifications to the carbon dioxide greenhouse warming effect had lost the scientific argument. Not so.

Certainly the working hypothesis of CO2 induced global warming is a good one that stands on good physical principles but let us not pretend our understanding extends too far or that the working hypothesis is a sufficient explanation for what is going on.

I have heard it said, by scientists, journalists and politicians, that the time for argument is over and that further scientific debate only causes delay in action. But the wish to know exactly what is going on is independent of politics and scientists must never bend their desire for knowledge to any political cause, however noble.

The science is fascinating, the ramifications profound, but we are fools if we think we have a sufficient understanding of such a complicated system as the Earth’s atmosphere’s interaction with sunlight to decide. We know far less than many think we do or would like you to think we do. We must explain why global warming has stopped.

David Whitehosue was BBC Science Correspondent 1988"1998, Science Editor BBC News Online 1998"2006 and the 2004 European Internet Journalist of the Year. He has a doctorate in astrophysics and is the author of The Sun: A Biography (John Wiley, 2005).] His website

Now this, parados, is fun.

I'll describe in more detail what affects an airplane's altimeter reading besides pitch and power.

Instruments at airports continually record, compute, and report the proper altimeter setting for the conditions on the ground at the airport. The proper altimeter setting is equal to what these ground based instruments determine to be the equivalent sea level barometric setting. Then depending on barometric pressure at the airport, the airport instruments would report the equivalent sea level pressure. The approximate rule is that barometric pressure at the airport is one inch less than the barometric pressure at sea level for each 1000 feet the airport is above sea level. So for example, at Leadville, Colorado's airport elevation of approximately 10,000 feet above sea level, it's equivalent sea level pressure would be about 1o inches more than the actual barometric pressure at the airport.

The actual sea level barometric pressure varies with temperature and humidity. Likewise, depending on temperature and humidity at tha altitude of the airplane, its pitch, and power to gain more altitude at a desired rate will vary.

NOW BACK TO WHAT AFFECTS AVERAGE ANNUAL GLOBAL TEMPERATURE THE MOST

Let:
CAD = CO2 Atmospheric Density
SI = Solar Irradiation
AAECT = Average Annual Earth Core Temperature
HAD = H2O Atmospheric Density
AAGT = Average Annual Global Temperature

Facts about the last 100 years::
(1) CAD has been monotonically increasing;
(2) SI has been increasing and decreasing, but its 100 year trend is increasing;
(3) AAECT has been increasing and decreasing, but its 100 year trend is increasing;
(4) HAD has been increasing and decreasing, but its 100 year trend is increasing;
(5) AAGT has been increasing and decreasing, but its 100 year trend is increasing.

What is causing AAGT to increase and decrease, and have a 100 year increasing trend?
Perhaps it's CAD!
Perhaps it's SI!
Perhaps it's AAECT!
Perhaps it's HAD
Perhaps it's some combination of CAD, SI, AAECT, and HAD.

Which, CAD, SI, AAECT, or HAD, is the most significant cause of the 100 year trend in the increase of AAGT?

I do not know! But, because the greatest source of CO2 in the atmosphere is probably from the evaporation of ocean water, I bet the human contribution to the CAD increase is the least significant cause of the 100 year trend in the increase of AAGT.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=f80a6386-802a-23ad-40c8-3c63dc2d02cb

As of December 20, 2007, more than 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries have voiced significant objections to major aspects of the alleged UN IPCC "consensus" on man-made global warming.

So... are does Leadville's distance above sea level ever change? Does the distance of Leadville from the center of the earth change?

While Leadville's air pressure changes it doesn't mean that Leadville is getting farther from the center of the earth, does it ican?

If Leadville DID get farther from the center of the earth what would happen to it's relative air pressure compared to sea level?

Compare the air pressure over a year at Atlanta to that at Leadville. Can you tell that Leadville is higher than Atlanta because of the average air pressure?