Physicist questions climate change finding
NEW ORLEANS–A York University professor has ignited a controversy by challenging a supposed prime example of man-made climate change – that jet condensation trails, know as contrails, act like clouds, cooling the Earth during the day and keeping it warmer at night.
Physicist William van Wijngaarden says he found no evidence to support this climate effect in Canadian temperature records for the contrail-free days immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
That contrasts with a 2002 study by U.S. researchers that concluded the temperature spread between day and night over the lower 48 states increased by 1.5C over long-term averages between Sept. 11 and 14 in 2001, when commercial air flights were mostly grounded over North America.
Those results initially reinforced theories that thin jet contrails may spread out over large areas for days, becoming invisible from the ground but still blocking infrared radiation, or heat…
The York researcher said he decided to double-check the U.S. findings because the claimed temperature rise was so large, almost equal to the global average temperature increase from greenhouse warming.
“If it was that big, then I ought to have been able to see it in Canada,” he said.
But when he examined the spread between day and night temperatures from 112 weather stations across Canada for Sept. 8 to 17 in 2001, there wasn’t a spike during the no-fly period.
In Canada, commercial flights were grounded entirely for 48 hours after the terrorist attacks and were about a third of normal levels for the next 24 hours.
Yet the diurnal temperature range for September 2001 across Canada fell well within the long-term average from 1977 to 2005.
The absence of any contrail effect held true even for the 34 weather stations in Canada below the 50-degree latitude, where jet flights are normally most intense… [more]
An explanation:
In 2002 some folks made the claim that jet contrails COOL the planet, as much as 1.5 degrees C, and that the absence of contrails immediately after 9/11 heated up the Earth that much.
In other words, the claim made was that Al Gore’s and other jets are responsible for keeping a lid on global warming.
Now, six years later, a Canadian physicist has refuted that claim, and apparently caused a controversy.
It seems that any lunatic GW theory is instantly adopted by the GW hysterics, and any scientific debunking of the lunacy is condemned as Hitlerian. Meanwhile, Al is flying around in his private jet doing his best to cool things off.
Maybe the best plan is for the governments of the world to give every human being a free jet plane, and then we can all fly around cooling the planet.