USC geologists: humans cause 2% of warming

George Chilingarian, PhD is a professor of petroleum geology at University of Southern California (USC), the author of 53 books, and a Knight of Arts and Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Leonid Khilyuk, PhD is a consultant in mathematical modelling and a former boss of the Applied Math Department of the Kiev Technological University.

In their paper

• On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved?

published in Environmental Geology 50 (Springer-Verlag) in Summer 2006 they looked at various sources of changes of the global climate from a very unconventional perspective. They argue that the humans are responsible for 0.01 Celsius degrees of warming from the 0.56 Celsius degrees warming during the 20th century. Geophysical sources of temperature periodicity such as tectonic pressures and the solar factors are by 4-5 orders of magnitude more important than the anthropogenic effects, they argue in sentences that are hard to believe and that will be especially hard to believe for generic members of the climate science community where a strikingly contradictory hypothesis has recently become very popular.

Their estimate of the modulation of the temperatures due to the changing orbit of the Earth and its fluctuating eccentricity is 7.5 Kelvin degrees. Well, I would be careful before accepting any of these numbers, but it could be a mistake for the climate scientists not to look at their reasoning.

You will see many graphs of various quantities at geological timescales as well as the recent instrumental record plus the cooling in the last 1000 and 3000 years.




They calculate that the Kyoto protocol is an example how to achieve minimum results by maximum efforts and they recommend to abandon it as meaningless and harmful which is, in my opinion, uncontroversial even if some of the USC authors' intermediate steps - such as their replacement of the greenhouse effect by "direct heating" - look strange to me. ;-)

Comments by World Climate Report. A rebuttal by W. Aeschbach-Hertig. Unfortunately, I would agree with many points of the rebuttal...