E por falar em aquecimento global, melhor estar no inferno do que no paraiso, este bem mais quente...

Provado cientificamente.

Duvidam?

Vejam a demonstração aqui:

As temperaturas do paraiso e do inferno...

Pausa para... conhecimento inútil (ou talvez útil, para quem pretende se candidatar a um dos dois lugares, ou preferencialmente ao primeiro, como soe acontecer).
De minha parte, eu preferiria ficar no limbo, mas o diabo (ops!) é que o Vaticano eliminou, alguns anos atrás, essa categoria especial das possibilidades materiais para um cético como eu, o que já suscitou minha reclamação à época (mas pretendo reclamar outra vez).
Em todo caso, fiquem com uma historinha científica que me foi repassada pelos suspeitos de sempre, esses cientistas agnósticos, que tudo querem submeter às regras da investigação baconiana.
Não se respeita mais as alegorias, que diabo (ops!, again).
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Repassando, para os físicos de plantão:

O Paraíso é mais quente que o Inferno
via Bule Voador por Pedro Almeida em 17/12/10
Fonte: Radiação de Fundo
Editor: Pedro Almeida

A temperatura do Paraíso pode ser calculada de forma até que bem precisa. Nossa fonte e autoridade é a Bíblia, citando Isaías 30:26, que diz sobre o Paraíso o seguinte:

“E a luz da lua será como a luz do sol, e a luz do sol sete vezes maior como a luz de sete dias (…)”

Portanto, o Paraíso recebe da Lua tanta radiação quanto a Terra recebe do Sol, e, ainda por cima, recebe também 7 x 7 vezes mais radiação do que a Terra recebe do Sol (sete dias vezes sete vezes a radiação, igual a 49 vezes mais radiação). Somando, dá-se que o Paraíso recebe destes astros 50 vezes mais radiação que a Terra recebe, no total.

A luz que recebemos da Lua na Terra é 1/10.000 do que recebemos do Sol, portanto podemos ignorar esta parte, assumindo só recebermos radiação do Sol. Com estes dados, podemos calcular a temperatura do Paraíso: a radiação que é absorvida pelo Paraíso vai aquecê-lo até o ponto em que ele entrar em equilíbrio e o calor emitido por irradiação for igual ao calor recebido por irradiação, por unidade de tempo. Em outras palavras, o Paraíso perde 50 vezes mais calor que a Terra perde, por irradiação térmica. Isto implica que sua temperatura é maior que a da Terra, e pode ser calculada pela lei de quarta potência de Stefan-Boltzmann para radiação emitida/recebida por um corpo negro, em determinada temperatura, aplicada aos dois lugares e racionalizadas:

onde TP é a temperatura absoluta do Paraíso e TT é a temperatura absoluta da Terra, em Kelvins; jP e jT são os fluxos radiantes respectivos (em watts), que no caso do Paraíso é 50 vezes o da Terra, como mencionado pelo profeta (jP=50.jT).

A temperatura na Terra pode ser dita como sendo 300 K, aproximadamente (27° C). Resolvendo para TP, o valor de temperatura no Paraíso encontrado é de 798 K, ou 525° C.

A temperatura exata do Inferno não pode ser computada de forma similar, mas deve ser menos que 444,8° C, a temperatura na qual o enxofre vaporiza-se, transformando-se de líquido para gás. Para tal asserção, tomemos Apocalipse, 21:8, que diz:

“Mas, quanto aos medrosos, e aos incrédulos, e aos abomináveis, e aos homicidas, e aos adúlteros, e aos feiticeiros, e aos idólatras, e a todos os mentirosos, a sua parte será no lago ardente de fogo e enxofre, que é a segunda morte.”

Note que esta bela passagem inclui os ateus. Mas retomando nosso ponto, para que um lago seja constituído de enxofre derretido, é obviamente necessário que ele se encontre ainda na forma líquida e, portanto, abaixo de sua temperatura de ebulição, que é 444,8 ° C. Acima deste valor, haveria uma nuvem de vapor, e não um lago de enxofre.

Temos desta forma uma temperatura no Paraíso de 525° C. A temperatura no Inferno é inferior a este valor, 445° C aproximadamente.

Portanto, o Paraíso é mais quente que o Inferno.
Quod erat demonstrandum!

O besteirol da semana: ONU reitera que o homem aquece o planeta

ONU reitera que o homem aquece o planeta 

O novo estudo que o IPCC, o braço científico das Nações Unidas, divulga hoje mundialmente irá confirmar que o planeta está se aquecendo, que o nível do mar está subindo e subirá mais ao longo deste século, que as geleiras continuam diminuindo, que as secas e grandes chuvas serão mais frequentes - e que os cientistas têm ainda mais convicção que a responsabilidade por tudo isso é do homem. Os céticos a este argumento, porém, mal esperaram o documento ser lançado para criticar o trabalho do Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudança Climática, mais conhecido pela sigla em inglês IPCC. 

Comentário PRA: 

A solução é simplérrima: elimine-se o homem...

Pela sugestão: 

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Agua fria no aquecimento global: ceticismo cientifico sempre recomendavel

Nota liminar: mais um rascunho perdido nas catacumbas de meu blog, que ainda merece leitura, a despeito da divulgação tardia,

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Por definição, cientistas que merecem esse nome devem sempre exibir aquela espécie de ceticismo sadio que os leva a sempre desconfiar das explicações fáceis, das "teorias gerais" -- keynesianas ou outras -- e procurar mergulhar mais fundo no funcionamento dos fenômenos que estudam, para oferecer interpretações mais adequadas aos dados reais. Embarcar nas tendências do momento, seguir a "opinião geral" não deveria ser, em princípio, uma atitude responsável. Deve-se deixar tal tipo de comportamento para políticos, feiticeiros e outros palpiteiros atirando a esmo no que não viram para não acertar no que viram.

Eu sempre desconfio das causas únicas, ou exclusivas, de qualquer fenômeno natural ou social.

Deveria ser assim também com o aquecimento global.

Vejamos, em todo caso, um artigo que não deveria contentar Al Gore.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The Other Climate Theory

Anne Jolis

The Wall Street Journal, September 7. 2011

In April 1990, Al Gore published an open letter in the New York Times "To Skeptics on Global Warming" in which he compared them to medieval flat-Earthers. He soon became vice president and his conviction that climate change was dominated by man-made emissions went mainstream. Western governments embarked on a new era of anti-emission regulation and poured billions into research that might justify it. As far as the average Western politician was concerned, the debate was over.

But a few physicists weren't worrying about Al Gore in the 1990s. They were theorizing about another possible factor in climate change: charged subatomic particles from outer space, or "cosmic rays," whose atmospheric levels appear to rise and fall with the weakness or strength of solar winds that deflect them from the earth. These shifts might significantly impact the type and quantity of clouds covering the earth, providing a clue to one of the least-understood but most important questions about climate. Heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends.

The theory has now moved from the corners of climate skepticism to the center of the physical-science universe: the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN. At the Franco-Swiss home of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, scientists have been shooting simulated cosmic rays into a cloud chamber to isolate and measure their contribution to cloud formation. CERN's researchers reported last month that in the conditions they've observed so far, these rays appear to be enhancing the formation rates of pre-cloud seeds by up to a factor of 10. Current climate models do not consider any impact of cosmic rays on clouds.

Enlarge Image

CERN

A cutting-edge physics experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research has scientists' heads in the clouds.

Scientists have been speculating on the relationship among cosmic rays, solar activity and clouds since at least the 1970s. But the notion didn't get a workout until 1995, when Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark came across a 1991 paper by Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, who had charted a close relationship between solar variations and changes in the earth's surface temperature since 1860.

"I had this idea that the real link could be between cloud cover and cosmic rays, and I wanted to try to figure out if it was a good idea or a bad idea," Mr. Svensmark told me from Copenhagen, where he leads sun-climate research at the Danish National Space Institute.

He wasn't the first scientist to have the idea, but he was the first to try to demonstrate it. He got in touch with Mr. Friis-Christensen, and they used satellite data to show a close correlation among solar activity, cloud cover and cosmic-ray levels since 1979.

They announced their findings, and the possible climatic implications, at a 1996 space conference in Birmingham, England. Then, as Mr. Svensmark recalls, "everything went completely crazy. . . . It turned out it was very, very sensitive to say these things already at that time." He returned to Copenhagen to find his local daily leading with a quote from the then-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): "I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naïve and irresponsible."

Mr. Svensmark had been, at the very least, politically naïve. "Before 1995 I was doing things related to quantum fluctuations. Nobody was interested, it was just me sitting in my office. It was really an eye-opener, that baptism into climate science." He says his work was "very much ignored" by the climate-science establishment—but not by CERN physicist Jasper Kirkby, who is leading today's ongoing cloud-chamber experiment.

On the phone from Geneva, Mr. Kirkby says that Mr. Svensmark's hypothesis "started me thinking: There's good evidence that pre-industrial climate has frequently varied on 100-year timescales, and what's been found is that often these variations correlate with changes in solar activity, solar wind. You see correlations in the atmosphere between cosmic rays and clouds—that's what Svensmark reported. But these correlations don't prove cause and effect, and it's very difficult to isolate what's due to cosmic rays and what's due to other things."

In 1997 he decided that "the best way to settle it would be to use the CERN particle beam as an artificial source of cosmic rays and reconstruct an artificial atmosphere in the lab." He predicted to reporters at the time that, based on Mr. Svensmark's paper, the theory would "probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole" of 20th-century warming. He gathered a team of scientists, including Mr. Svensmark, and proposed the groundbreaking experiment to his bosses at CERN.

Then he waited. It took six years for CERN to greenlight and fund the experiment. Mr. Kirkby cites financial pressures for the delay and says that "it wasn't political."

Mr. Svensmark declines entirely to guess why CERN took so long, noting only that "more generally in the climate community that is so sensitive, sometimes science goes into the background."

By 2002, a handful of other scientists had started to explore the correlation, and Mr. Svensmark decided that "if I was going to be proved wrong, it would be nice if I did it myself." He decided to go ahead in Denmark and construct his own cloud chamber. "In 2006 we had our first results: We had demonstrated the mechanism" of cosmic rays enhancing cloud formation. The IPCC's 2007 report all but dismissed the theory.

Mr. Kirkby's CERN experiment was finally approved in 2006 and has been under way since 2009. So far, it has not proved Mr. Svensmark wrong. "The result simply leaves open the possibility that cosmic rays could influence the climate," stresses Mr. Kirkby, quick to tamp down any interpretation that would make for a good headline.

This seems wise: In July, CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Die Welt that he was asking his researchers to make the forthcoming cloud-chamber results "clear, however, not to interpret them. This would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate-change debate."

But while the cosmic-ray theory has been ridiculed from the start by those who subscribe to the anthropogenic-warming theory, both Mr. Kirkby and Mr. Svensmark hold that human activity is contributing to climate change. All they question is its importance relative to other, natural factors.

Through several more years of "careful, quantitative measurement" at CERN, Mr. Kirkby predicts he and his team will "definitively answer the question of whether or not cosmic rays have a climatically significant effect on clouds." His old ally Mr. Svensmark feels he's already answered that question, and he guesses that CERN's initial results "could have been achieved eight to 10 years ago, if the project had been approved and financed."

The biggest milestone in last month's publication may be not the content but the source, which will be a lot harder to ignore than Mr. Svensmark and his small Danish institute.

Any regrets, now that CERN's particle accelerator is spinning without him? "No. It's been both a blessing and the opposite," says Mr. Svensmark. "I had this field more or less to myself for years—that would never have happened in other areas of science, such as particle physics. But this has been something that most climate scientists would not be associated with. I remember another researcher saying to me years ago that the only thing he could say about cosmic rays and climate was it that it was a really bad career move."

On that point, Mr. Kirkby—whose organization is controlled by not one but 20 governments—really does not want to discuss politics at all: "I'm an experimental particle physicist, okay? That somehow nature may have decided to connect the high-energy physics of the cosmos with the earth's atmosphere—that's what nature may have done, not what I've done."

Last month's findings don't herald the end of a debate, but the resumption of one. That is, if the politicians purporting to legislate based on science will allow it.

Miss Jolis is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.

Aquecimento global: o debate continua entre paranoicos e climatericos...

O que segue abaixo é uma resposta a uma carta-artigo no Wall Street Journal -- que está claramente do lado dos "negacionistas" do aquecimento global, se assim lhe podemos chamar -- e que coloca um pouco mais de água quente na fervura fervente -- com perdão da redundância, mas necessária -- que aquece miolos, neurônios e as paixões dos envolvidos no debate esquizofrênico em torno da questão.
O material original pode ser encontrado neste meu post:

SEXTA-FEIRA, 27 DE JANEIRO DE 2012

Paranoicos do aquecimento global: acalmai-vos...

É, em síntese, o que dizem estes cientistas que assinam um artigo de opinião, na verdade um verdadeiro manifesto de apelo à razão, publicada na edição de hoje do Wall Street Journal.

No Need to Panic About Global Warming

Seguimos, portanto, com o debate.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Bickmore on the WSJ response

Filed under: 

• Climate modelling
 
• Climate Science
 
• Instrumental Record
 
• IPCC

 — group @ 24 February 2012

Guest commentary from Barry Bickmore (repost)

Real Climate: climate science from climate scientists, February 24 ,2012

The Wall Street Journal posted yet another op-ed by 16 scientists and engineers, which even include a few climate scientists(!!!). Here is the editor’s note to explain the context.

Editor’s Note: The authors of the following letter, listed below, are also the signatories of“No Need to Panic About Global Warming,” an op-ed that appeared in the Journal on January 27. This letter responds to criticisms of the op-ed made by Kevin Trenberth and 37 others in a letter published Feb. 1, and by Robert Byer of the American Physical Society in a letter published Feb. 6.

A relative sent me the article, asking for my thoughts on it. Here’s what I said in response.

Hi [Name Removed],

I don’t have time to do a full reply, but I’ll take apart a few of their main points.

1. The WSJ authors’ main point is that if the data doesn’t conform to predictions, the theory is “falsified”. They claim to show that global mean temperature data hasn’t conformed to climate model predictions, and so the models are falsified.
But let’s look at the graph. They have a temperature plot, which wiggles all over the place, and then they have 4 straight lines that are supposed to represent the model predictions. The line for the IPCC First Assessment Report is clearly way off, but back in 1990 the climate models didn’t include important things like ocean circulation, so that’s hardly surprising. The lines for the next 3 IPCC reports are very similar to one another, though. What the authors don’t tell you is that the lines they plot are really just the average long-term slopes of a bunch of different models. The individual models actually predict that the temperature will go up and down for a few years at a time, but the long-term slope (30 years or more) will be about what those straight lines say. Given that these lines are supposed to be average, long-term slopes, take a look at the temperature data and try to estimate whether the overall slope of the data is similar to the slopes of those three lines (from the 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports). If you were to calculate the slope of the data WITH error bars, the model predictions would very likely be in that range.


Comparison of the spread of actual IPCC projections (2007) with observations of annual mean temperatures
That brings up another point. All climate models include parameters that aren’t known precisely, so the model projections have to include that uncertainty to be meaningful. And yet, the WSJ authors don’t provide any error bars of any kind! The fact is that if they did so,you would clearly see that the global mean temperature has wiggled around inside those error bars, just like it was supposed to.
So before I go on, let me be blunt about these guys. They know about error bars. They know that it’s meaningless, in a “noisy” system like global climate, to compare projected long-term trends to just a few years of data. And yet, they did. Why? I’ll let you decide.
2. The WSJ authors say that, although something like 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that humans are causing “significant” global warming, there really is a lot of disagreement about how much humans contribute to the total. The 97% figure comes from a 2009 study by Doran and Zimmerman.
So they don’t like Doran and Zimmerman’s survey, and they would have liked more detailed questions. After all, D&Z asked respondents to say whether they thought humans were causing “significant” temperature change, and who’s to say what is “significant”? So is there no real consensus on the question of how much humans are contributing?
First, every single national/international scientific organization with expertise in this area and every single national academy of science, has issued a statement saying that humans are causing significant global warming, and we ought to do something about it. So they are saying that the human contribution is “significant” enough that we need to worry about it and can/should do something about it. This could not happen unless there was a VERY strong majority of experts. Here is a nice graphic to illustrate this point (H/T Adam Siegel).
But what if these statements are suppressing significant minority views–say 20%. We could do a literature survey and see what percentage of papers published question the consensus. Naomi Oreskes (a prominent science historian) did this in 2004 (see also herWaPo opinion column), surveying a random sample of 928 papers that showed up in a standard database with the search phrase “global climate change” during 1993-2003. Some of the papers didn’t really address the consensus, but many did explicitly or implicitly support it. She didn’t find a single one that went against the consensus. Now, obviously there were some contrarian papers published during that period, but I’ve done some of my own not-very-careful work on this question (using different search terms), and I estimate that during 1993-2003, less than 1% of the peer-reviewed scientific literature on climate change was contrarian.
Another study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 (Anderegg et al, 2010), looked at the consensus question from a different angle. I’ll let youread it if you want.
Once again, the WSJ authors (at least the few that actually study climate for a living) know very well that they are a tiny minority. So why don’t they just admit that and try to convince people on the basis of evidence, rather than lack of consensus? Well, if their evidence is on par with the graph they produced, maybe their time is well spent trying to cloud the consensus issue.
3. The WSJ authors further imply that the “scientific establishment” is out to quash any dissent. So even if almost all the papers about climate change go along with the consensus, maybe that’s because the Evil Empire is keeping out those droves of contrarian scientists that exist… somewhere.
The WSJ authors give a couple examples, both of which are ridiculous, but I have personal experience with the Remote Sensing article by Spencer and Braswell, so I’ll address that one. The fact is that Spencer and Braswell published a paper in which they made statistical claims about the difference between some data sets without actually calculating error bars, which is a big no-no, and if they had done the statistics, it would have shown that their conclusions could not be statistically supported. They also said they analyzed certain data, but then left some of it out of the Results that just happened to completely undercut their main claims. This is serious, serious stuff, and it’s no wonder Wolfgang Wagner resigned from his editorship–not because of political pressure, but because he didn’t want his fledgling journal to get a reputation for publishing any nonsense anybody sends in.[Ed. Seethis discussion]

The level of deception by the WSJ authors and others like them is absolutely astonishing to me.

Barry

PS. Here is a recent post at RealClimate that puts the nonsense about climate models being “falsified” in perspective. The fact is that they aren’t doing too badly, except that they severely UNDERestimate the Arctic sea ice melt rate.

Paranoicos do aquecimento global: acalmai-vos...

É, em síntese, o que dizem estes cientistas que assinam um artigo de opinião, na verdade um verdadeiro manifesto de apelo à razão, publicada na edição de hoje do Wall Street Journal.

No Need to Panic About Global Warming

There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy.

The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2012

Editor's Note: The following has been signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article: 

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about "global warming." Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Corbis

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

If elected officials feel compelled to "do something" about climate, we recommend supporting the excellent scientists who are increasing our understanding of climate with well-designed instruments on satellites, in the oceans and on land, and in the analysis of observational data. The better we understand climate, the better we can cope with its ever-changing nature, which has complicated human life throughout history. However, much of the huge private and government investment in climate is badly in need of critical review.

Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence.

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

Meio Ambiente: o ambientalista cetico e a conferencia de Durban

Global Warming and Adaptability

Any carbon deal to replace Kyoto would have a negligible impact on climate in coming decades.

By BJØRN LOMBORG

The Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2011

The Durban pit-stop in the endless array of climate summits has just ended, and predictably it reaffirmed the United Nations' strong belief that the most important response to global warming is to secure a strong deal to cut carbon emissions.

What is almost universally ignored, however, is that if we want to help real people overcome real problems we need to focus first on adaptation.

The Durban agreement is being hailed as a diplomatic victory. Yet it essentially concedes defeat, leaving any hard decisions to the far end of the decade when other politicians will have to deal with it. For nearly 20 years, the international community has tried to negotiate commitments to carbon cuts, with almost nothing to show for it.

Even most rich countries don't want to cut fossil fuels, because the alternatives are considerably more expensive. China, India and other emerging economies certainly do not want to, because putting the brakes on growth means consigning millions to poverty.

But even if such intractable issues could be magically resolved, any deal would have a negligible impact on climate. Even if we were to cut emissions by 50% below 1990-levels by 2050—an extremely unrealistic scenario—the difference in temperature would be less than 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit in 2050.

This goes against everything that carbon campaigners tell us. When Hurricane Katrina or other weather disasters devastate communities, we're told by advocates such as Al Gore that the effects of climate change are already being felt and it's time to commit to drastic carbon cuts.

Getty Images

It is worth noting that often these arguments are exaggerated for effect. Since Hurricane Katrina, the global accumulated cyclone energy index has declined to almost the lowest level since we started measuring such phenomena in the early 1970s. Global warming will probably make hurricanes slightly stronger but slightly less frequent, leaving the overall impact murky.

What we can say clearly is that if we want to help New Orleans or other at-risk areas, cutting emissions will have virtually no impact for many decades. Bolstering hurricane defenses through improved levees and wetlands could, however, make a world of difference.

This is even more true for hurricane impacts in Third World countries. When Hurricane Andrew hit Florida, it cost 10% of the state's GDP and killed 41 people. But when the similar-sized Hurricane Mitch hit Honduras, it cost the country two-thirds of its GDP and killed more than 10,000. Tackling hurricane impacts in developing countries is not about cutting carbon but about adaptation and economic growth to improve resilience.

This is true whether we look at hurricanes or at other problems exacerbated by global warming. It is often—correctly—pointed out that global warming will hit developing countries hardest. Malaria cases, for instance, will increase along with mosquito populations, while food production in many developing countries will decrease.

But getting an emissions deal in any of the future Durban meetings will do nothing to help either of these problems. Even if we halted global warming by the end of the century, we could expect to avoid only about 3% of world-wide malaria cases by 2100. What the billions afflicted by malaria in the world today need is access to treatment and better prevention through bed-nets and indoor spraying. This is adaptation.

When it comes to access to food, global warming is expected to be responsible for a 7% yield decrease in the developing world and a 3% yield increase in the developed world over this century. Yet this needs to be seen in the context of total developing world food production rising by about 270% over the same period.

Do we better help the developing world by making drastic carbon cuts today that might—in an ideal world—avoid a 7% yield drop, or by making higher-yielding varieties of crops available that could potentially generate drastic yield increases? These are questions we have to answer if we are to adapt to the reality of global warming in this century.

The first step in focusing on adaptation is measuring it. The Global Adaptation Institute, led by former World Bank Managing Director Juan Jose Daboub, publishes the Global Adaptation Index, which shows how vulnerable countries are to global warming and how prepared they are to tackle it. The challenge lies not merely in reducing vulnerability but also in getting the structures in place so governments and investors can tackle adaptation in the most effective manner possible. The good news is we can improve lives today while building the crucial infrastructure needed for tomorrow.

The climate will continue changing throughout this century. And we do need to fix carbon emissions smartly through technological innovation. But if our concern is with saving lives and helping the planet's most vulnerable populations, then we need to focus first on how we can build more resilient, adaptable communities.

Mr. Lomborg is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and "Cool It." He directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center and is an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School.