Japan Sweats for Global Warming

Green Kool Aid ManJapanese office workers are being forced to sweat in the name of global warming. But before Americans consume too much “Green” Kool-Aid and suffer a similar fate, they may want to consider this week’s global warming developments.

By Steven Milloy

The Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page story (Sep. 11) that Japanese offices are keeping summertime office temperatures at a “steamy 82 degrees Fahrenheit” to help Japan use less energy and reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.

Offices are now so uncomfortable that the traditional suit-and-tie dress code has been abandoned even though “82 degrees can only be comfortable if you’re thin, naked and stay still,” according to a Japanese physiology professor.

There is growing pressure not to complain about sweltering office environments as the proud but dutiful Japanese public is being conditioned to perceive air conditioning as “shameful,” according to the report.

Who should be sweating instead, however, are the climate alarmists, as the purported scientific basis of their campaign continues to melt from underneath them. A new study published in the journal Nature (Sep. 13) crafted to support the notion that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide drive increases in global temperature actually, if read carefully, casts further doubt on that idea.

The story begins in 2000 when the University of Ottawa’s Jan Veizer and others published a study in Nature reporting that their reconstruction (via fossil shells) of tropical sea surface temperatures for that last 550 million years only made sense if carbon dioxide were not the principle driver of climate variability on a geological timescale.

Veizer, along with Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, followed up the 2000 paper with a July 2003 study in GSA Today (a journal published by the Geological Society of America). That report said at least 66 percent and perhaps as much as 75 percent of the variance in the Earth’s temperature over the past 500 million years may be due to cosmic ray flux.

Obviously, none of this was good for ever-fragile climate hysteria and the alarmists struck back with the new Nature study, which, surprisingly, includes Veizer as a co-author.

The new study that uses a different method to reconstruct sea surface temperatures from fossil shells claims to report results that “are consistent with the proposal that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations drive or amplify increased global temperatures.”

So has Veizer participated in the debunking of his own work as the new study seems to imply? Hardly.

First, Veizer reluctantly told me the “text” of the Nature study, that is, the above-quoted conclusion, represented a “compromise” between the study’s disagreeing authors where Veizer’s side apparently did all the compromising for reasons that had little to do with the science.

While Veizer didn’t want to elaborate on the politics of the Nature study, he told me “not to take the tone of the paper as the definitive last word.”

Veizer went on to say that the new Nature study has not refuted his original study. The new study, in fact, appears to have confirmed the original study with respect to its most important point that the historical sea surface temperature data indicate atmospheric carbon dioxide does not drive global temperature.

Even if the new study proves to be valid, Veizer says, at most it reduces the statistical variation in sea surface temperature estimated by the original study. This correction, however, has little bearing on the nature of the carbon dioxide-temperature relationship.

Veizer says the basic pattern of reconstructed sea surface temperatures in both his original study and the new study remain inconsistent with notion that atmospheric carbon dioxide drives global temperatures.

Read the rest of this article at Fox News.

7 Responses to Japan Sweats for Global Warming

  1. Neil F. September 17, 2008 at 9:21 pm #

    I’m going to start calling APG believers global warming denialers. They are in complete denial faced with any evidence that their beliefs are wrong. When it happens you’ll know because they will stick their fingers in their ears and chant “la la la la la global warming is real la la la la la global warming is real la la la la la global warming is real la la la la la global warming is real la la la la la global warming is real”

  2. Dan McGrath September 18, 2008 at 8:08 am #

    Actually, it’s been my experience that when presented inconveniant facts or questions they can’t answer, the adherants of global warming dogma turn red, raise their voices and begin hurtling profanities and personal insults. Invariably, accusations of being paid by “big oil,” liberally peppered with “F-Bombs” get thrown into the rant. I’ve never seen the “la la la” routine, but the effect is the same.

  3. Rob N. Hood September 18, 2008 at 3:31 pm #

    So the work-place new dress code in Japan is come naked (or scantily dressed) in the summer to keep cool, and bear suits in the winter- all because the “Greens” have messed with their minds…. and we may, or may not, expect a little ice age, instead of Global-warming, even though the “Greens” of the seventies predicted this ice age and nobody believed them then, but now they do… And the fossil-fuel-lovers just sit back and ridicule anyone and everyone who questions how humans may be impacting the earth. Clear as Mississippi mud. I expect to see more articles about this little ice age on this site soon, and how we need to drill drill drill !!! But shouldn’t we conserve now now now to heat ourselves later later later when said ice age comeths? Just askin’. Sorry to not have included F-bombs, etc. And no red face here. I do like the “liberally peppered” part though. I like pepper.

  4. Neil F. September 18, 2008 at 5:45 pm #

    Dan: Ok, I concede you are correct. The effect is what I was trying to illistrate. My real experience is that they either change the subject, or stare at me as though I had just ate a baby, or somethin’. Of course I weigh about 250 lbs. and have an 18 in. neck, so most people think twice about spitting fury my way, but yeah, I have seen people have that reaction to others.
    The bottom line is that they are out of their minds. I think that is what we are both describing from different angles.

  5. Dan McGrath September 18, 2008 at 11:15 pm #

    If you make every possible prediction, you’ll always be able to say you were right. Just ignore all the times you were wrong.

  6. Rob N. Hood September 21, 2008 at 5:22 pm #

    Who’s ignoring the issue and looking right through who?? You didn’t respond to my idea, albeit with a little humor added in… or can’t ya’ll recognize humor anynmore?? Anyway, why shouldn’t we conserve what oil we actually own in such a way that will enable us to deal with serious future issues, none of which anyone can really predict. In other words, if you guys are trying to say that the earth is actually cooling and not warming, then why not prepare for that responsibly? That’s all I was trying to say. I really don’t see why you guys would be against such a mature and country-centered approach. So now tell me how insane I am, mushy headed, or whatever…

  7. Dan McGrath September 22, 2008 at 10:23 am #

    If CO2 warms the Earth, and we’re potentially heading into a new Ice Age, I think we better start thinking about how to put MORE CO2 into the atmosphere, yes?

    If (and this is a big IF) the Earth starts to cool dramitically, I would be so amused to see how the greens and socialists try to explain how we need to reduce energy use to stop the planet from going glacial.

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