Climategate: Shameless Science
Without a blush of shame, this week’s Science magazine just ran an article called “Contributions of stratospheric water vapor to decadal changes in the rate of Global Warming.” After wiping off the unnecessary words we’re left with: “Global Warming would be here — except for that damned water vapor.” It’s the “woulda coulda shoulda” of the True Believers.
Al Gore’s Ptolemaic epicycles are being rolled onto the scientific stage, to be piled higher and deeper until they fit the curve of real temperatures – a nearly flat line with a little bit of jitter. You could just turn it into a single equation: T = 70°F on an average day, for the average weather station around the world.
But … if you’ve been betting your whole career on planetary doom, you might try adding enough stratospheric water vapor to your predicted (but never observed) global warming, and yes, then your computer model can still explain why global warming ain’t happening.
Personally, I’d go for the flat line. It’s a lot simpler.
Oh, global warming is so 2009. Last year they told us it was already happening. Run for your lives, kids! It was “settled science.” Rational skeptics were “deniers” and James Hansen wanted them all in jail for “crimes against humanity.” Obama promised with that great messianic reverb on his woofers to “stop the seas from ri-ising!” ‘Cause … ’cause the polar bears were dying! Vanuatu was slipping under the ocean! And it’s all your fault! And we need the money! (That’s nine trillion dollars, according to Lord Nicholas Stern, the British economist who gave us the official price tag.)
Alas, now they’re telling us that Warmageddon has been postponed. Dr. Phil Jones testified that no warming has been observed for 15 years. But hellfire and brimstone are still a’comin’! You jest wait, Jed!
I sometimes wonder if Al Gore was scared as a young child by an Elmer Gantry revival meeting back in rural Tennessee. Maybe his Dad, Al Gore Sr., took little Al along for a little politickin’ at the tent meetin’, and he learned all about Hell and damnation from the preacher.
Early childhood trauma from too many raucous Tennessee revival meetings — it might explain a lot, including Al Jr.’s endless, fervent preaching about things he knows nothing about. This man can’t handle open-minded questions. He’s just like Elmer Gantry. Talk about rock-solid fundamentalism.
Dr. Roy Spencer has been one of the gutsy climate scientists pointing to water vapor as a temperature-modulating gas for a long, long time. It’s not a secret. Hot water vapor is what makes steam locomotives run, after all, and that choo-choo sound comes from letting off steam pressure, just like Mother Earth must somehow do to maintain reasonable temperature constancy over millions of years. The Earth can pump that steam into the atmosphere, and get a little convection cooling into the bargain. All that H2O has to be a big factor in the Earth’s heat budget. But not in the Gospel according to Al. There’s a lot more money in carbon than in water vapor.
>> “Dr. Phil Jones testified that no warming has been observed for 15 years”
I keep seeing this repeated on this site. It isn’t true. What Dr Jones said was that the “trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.” In other words, some warming has been observed over the 15 years, though not quite enough to call it statistically significant. But 15 years is really too short a period to expect that.
This claim about Phil Jones has been made and refuted so often around the internet that I’ve come to conclude that those who make it don’t actually care whether it is true or not. It damages the cause of AGW, and that’s enough.
Polar bears have existed less than 150,000 years. They split off from a population of brown bears due to climate change, developed and adapted rapidly to their new environment: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100301141848.htm
Their existence today will be NO different, as they are quite used to Natural climate change, which is what we are experiencing.
Just an aside… over 1000 peer-reviewed papers on the global nature of the Midieval Warm Period, can be found here: http://www.co2science.org/index.php
Even the good guys buy into the nonsense in some important ways. Everyone who takes temperature measurements then averages daytime and nightime temperatures and uses that as the raw data. It is not. Apparently, no one in climate science knows what “empirical evidence” or “empirical obsevation” means. The raw data should always be recorded as single temperature measurements, which are raw data, not as averages which are a contrivance sitting on top of raw data.
#1 Mr. Hall:
What Jones said was based on whose data? His claims, regardless, are, today, about as credible and non-biased as those of a British soccer fan about his team. Jones is a proven liar and a major debaser of science, especially with reference to the scientific method.
Hall’s commentary about a trend being “close to” significance reveals a dearth of comprehension regarding inferential statistics. Results either achieve significance at a given alpha, or they don’t. When they don’t, discussions about how they approached or got close to significance are entirely vacuous. Actual statisticians, as opposed to scientific charlatans like Jones, understand that sound statistical methods require data of a fixed minimal quality, and that results based on such data still reflect a given level of uncertainty. Data such as those adjusted, concealed, manipulated, and finally destroyed by Jones et alia, are the proverbial garbage in “garbage-in, garbage-out.” Reading tea leaves or chicken entrails is as scientific.
The elemental requirement of something that is presented as a “model” of something else is that it exhibits changes in response to inputs that approximate changes on the part of that which it ostensibly models. All – that means without exception – global warming models, when presented with real historical data, fail dismally to predict observed results within a very short time, months in the best case. Whatever they model, it’s not earth’s climate system.
AGW is a fraud, plain and simple. Global warming may be occurring, but humanity’s influence on the process is negligible.
“Extinctions happen”- true, but few of them have much to do with climate.
The single largest mass extinction in this planet’s history was the Chixulub Event about 65 million years ago, when an asteroid whammed into what is now the Gulf of Mexico’s southern end, throwing enough material into the atmosphere to blot out the sun for several decades, causing sufficient environmental changes to kill off most of the dinosaurs, till that point probably the most successful life-form on the planet. Please note that our ancestors, the mammals, were at the time ground-dwelling marsupials whose major concerns were not getting eaten- or just stepped on- by said dinosaurs.
Other, more recent extinctions in the past have had less to do with environment than with what might be called “biological competition”. For instance, all cheetahs on Earth are the products of a single “bloodline”, or DNA strain, from a single group of the high-speed felines that survived an outbreak of a strain of distemper in Africa about 15,000 years ago. There is also DNA evidence that humanity itself is descended from a single group of about 40 or so reproductive females in Africa about 50,000 years ago- also survivors of a similar epidemic situation.
By comparison, animals and humans have survived ice ages, post-ice age inundations, droughts, etc., with little more than minor casualties (“minor” here defined as “not enough to seriously threaten the gene pool”). Within recorded history, there have been events that came close enough to being global that they could have triggered an “environmental crisis” apiece, but even if they had, the impact on even civilization, let alone human survival, would have been relatively minor. Namely volcanic eruptions like Tambora in 1816, Krakatau in 1883, or even Mt. St Helen in 1980, all of which generated enough effluent that they could have potentially caused overall atmospheric cooling. The first two did in fact create cooling conditions even in Europe. Since both were in the Indonesian Archipelago, I think this counts as a “global effect”.
(BTW, cooling of the atmosphere is inherently more of a problem for agriculture than warming. It amazes me how few of the AGW gurus have enough background in agriculture to grasp this rather simple point.)
The bottom line is that not only our species, but animal and plant species as a whole, are generally resilient enough that climate change is less a threat than an inconvenience. The single greatest threat to species survival, no matter what “species” you’re talking about, is generally another species, usually microscopic in size, that decides that the non-microscopic species in question tastes good, or makes a good incubator for its own reproduction.
If the “enlightened elite” absolutely must worry about something to justify their existences in their own minds, they’d do better to worry about what microbes and viruses might be getting up to out in the boondocks- not whether humans are cranking out CO2.
clear ether
eon
The single largest mass extinction was the Permian Extinction, 250 million years ago. It was much larger than the KT extinction of 65 million years ago. The Permian extinction also was caused in large part by massive and relatively fast changes in climate and atmospheric composition; the kinds of changes AGW fools and liars squeal about but are not happening.
Also, mammals 65 million years ago were not all marsupials. Placental mammals were quite the norm, thank you very much.
Science Magazine now is a propaganda organ that happens to have real science in it now and then.
Very sad.
eon:
Directly to your point, I read an article yesterday at wired about a newly discovered strain of red rust fungus that finds our current varieties of wheat quite tasty. Unlike AGW, this truly sounds alarming.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_ug99_fungus/
>> “Hall’s commentary about a trend being “close to” significance reveals a dearth of comprehension regarding inferential statistics”
Possibly, but you’ve neatly ignored my point, as did the commenter attacking Dr Jones authority. So let me repeat myself, because it isn’t complicated: Dr Jones didn’t say what the article claimed. The one thing I’m sure we can agree on is that misrepresenting one’s opponents is a Bad Thing. Yes?
Which makes me wonder why I keep reading this untrue claim.
>> “Hall’s commentary about a trend being “close to” significance reveals a dearth of comprehension regarding inferential statistics”
Possibly, but in challenging my understanding you’ve neatly ignored by point (as did Spinoneone). What I understand isn’t the issue, what Dr Jones said is. And this article, with other articles here on Pajamas Media and elsewhere on the internet, misrepresents what he said.
The Earth’s atmosphere is just 0.038% carbon dioxide. That’s four onehundredths of a percent. Virtually nil.
We could quadruple that number with no noticable effect.
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Full Stop.
Science magazine is still trying to whistle past the biggest scientific graveyard in history.
Not to mention Scientific American, which up to the 60s was a valid popularizer of science as an honest look at the real world. It has since taken on the role of a leftist predictor of doom ‘resulting from’ capitalist economics, and needs a triple dose of scientific skepticism from every reader who seeks useful information.
This claim about Phil Jones has been made and refuted so often… It damages the cause of AGW, and that’s enough.
Phil Jones himself, in participating in the ‘Climategate’ emails with their collusion to suppress articles contrary to the gospel of AGW, has done even worse damage to the “cause” of AGW and its corollary political seizure of national economies.
Neither he nor James Hanson nor the other high priests of computer-predicted thermal horrors have got a clue about the prime attribute of a scientist, which is an intense skepticism of all theories. Or skepticism of the participants in a ‘hockey stick’ doomsday yarn, with the medieval warm period neatly edited out. And particularly, skepticism of predictions of chaotic system behavior like the weather for 100 years in advance. What simple faith in outrageous extrapolations!
It’s even stranger than that, because the high climate sensitivity claims depend on water vapor feedback, that is, it’s simply assumed that water vapor will magnify the effect of CO2 by a factor of 3 to 5. So the alarmists aren’t claiming that water vapor doesn’t have an effect; they’re claiming that the effect is all hot. It’s a form of cherry picking.
And speaking of evaporation . Water does not evaporate at a constant rate for each sguare mile of the earths surface area. It is a unpredictable rate varying with wind speed,temperature and dewpoint . It varies from night to day and it varies with depth and the mixing from sub surface currents.
To try to average out the effect this would have on forecasting is a significant problem. The scale is huge and even vapor imagery is not reliable because the saturation can only be approximated by the visible layer.
I don’t think a model can be created which could come close to 75% accuracy.
Richard Hall,
“don’t actually care whether it is true or not”… or indeed anything else, by the standards of the rest of the article.
Even more astonishing is that atmospheric pressure has remained stable for 500M years, and this has operated to keep the temperature relatively even.
Comment #5 by Die Fledermaus is right on, but can be taken a step further – Phil Jones couldn’t even get to a statistically significant result with fudged data! No one knows if global warming is happening or not – let alone CO2′s role – the data are too poor. The reasoning of AGW proponents is medieval.
>> “Phil Jones himself, in participating in the ‘Climategate’ emails with their collusion…”
Again, you’re ignoring my point. The point I’m making has nothing to do with Dr Jones’ standing as a scientis. That’s an entirely separate issue. My point is only that in this article an untrue statement is being made about what he has said, a statement that has been repeated here and in many other places around the internet. And that should give you pause: the case against AGW is so weak that it relies on the repetition of stuff which is at best mistaken?
Will Science magazine now change its name to “Science”?
The actual quote is “No statistically significant warming.” If it’s not “statistically significant” it amounts to zero, it’s within the realm of natural occurence, it could have occurred by chance. In other words he effectively said there has been no global warming in the past 15 years. The tiny amount of temperature increase you cite is basically worthless…..so give it up dude.
Not Elmer Gantry is behind Al Gore’s climate view but Armand Hammer who gave Gore’s father a big job after the Congressman who for years helped the Soviet agent of influence in effort to get credits for Moscow. Working for Hammer made Gore senior a wealthy man (see Edward Jay Epstein’s book) and this changed Gore junior’s life. Meanwhile, after Gorbachev left his post in Moscow he spent much of his time with his previously created Gorbachev foundation one of whose writs is international environmentalism of a kind that leads the West to downgrade its industrial infrastructure. If one reviews Gore Jr. role as VP in relation with the Soviets one can find evidence of Gore making a secret pact in JUne 1995 letting Moscow continue to deliver arms to Iran. VP Gore and PM Chernomyrdin were co-chairs of the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission. This last info comes from The New York Times.
Dr. Jones did say “statistically significant” when he backed off the the sky is falling statements. That is true. However, temperature recordings over the past ten years shows a decided drop in average surface temperatures, not an increase as Al & co. keep blathering. What Al, Dr. Jones, Dr. Hansen, & other chicken littles are guilty of, is gross exaggeration. They really have done the chicken little routine, in the extreme. That is the real problem. Conservation, recycling, alternative energy sources, etc., are all just fine with the population. So to assert that those who do not agree lockstep w/ the chicken little mantra are evil, is despicable, in the extreme.
The fact is, there are not enough wind locations, nor enough reliability that wind will blow strong enough &/or often enough to make up huge portions of our energy needs. The fact is, solar has applications, but not everywhere & as you go north its efficiency drops precipitously.
Solar & wind can only provide a maximum, and under extremely optimum conditions to boot, up to 20% of our current energy needs.
If fossil fuels are ended, where do we get the other 35% to 45% of our energy needs? Conservation & other energy savings measures will not make up that big a difference.
Not today. Not with the technology we have today. The technology needs to catch up & it will take up to 100 years for that to happen based on technological evidence available today.
In short, we need “bridge fuels” to sustain mankind or we must kill off a few billion. Wonder who is supposed to go first? How about Al???? Hm. That really was mean, huh?
We can use fossil fuels in the meantime by working to use them super efficiently. That is where our real research should be, ‘at this time.’
In addition, CO2 is not the guilty party. The real truth is, none of them know what really causes temperature fluctuations, dramatic or modest. Evidence suggest the sun is more culpable than any of the other possibilities, but the AGW crowd refuses to even contemplate that possibility. Why?
In the end, people like Maurice Strong & others are behind all of this. Even ten or more years ago they saw AGW as a means of imposing socialism on the world. One world government. They sought a reason to consolidate mankind & his government into a United Nations run operation.
The thought anyone would trust the Un to run anything, is comical to those who have watched this inept organization ruin much of what it has become involved with. From rape to stealing food, to oil deals, to wars, to genocides, & so much more, the UN really is a joke. An expensive and dangerous joke.
The UN wants the International Monetary Fund to begin collecting carbon taxes as soon as possible, even w/o an international agreement, because they need the funds to effect the changes.
In short, the UN wants a lucrative funding source that is independent of influence by dues paying member states. That way, nations like, America, can stipulate how the funds are to be used. The ‘decisions’ will be up to the unelected cabal of the UN.
Feel safer yet?
If Cap & Trade are passed, Al gore will be a billionaire in a short time. He is invested in the carbon trading commodity exchanges so he would get a cut for every transactions wherever he owns a share in the exchange. That is how he went from a net worth of approx. $3 million when he lost the presidency, to a current estimated net worth of over $100 million. He invested in the European exchanges. The carbon trading scheme that has not produced any reduction in carbon output from those nations. In fact, their outputs have trended up. All this while America, w/o a carbon trading scheme, has trended its CO2 output down.
Maybe, their system doesn’t work? Then again, maybe, its all smoke & mirrors & was never intended to work but to generate income of profits for those invested?!
America needs to stop Cap & trade & look for real & possible solutions that include using fossil fuels generated from sources located in America where profits will be reinvested back into America & not into terrorist sponsoring or syn pathetic nations.
Re: #7 – We don’t know what caused the Permian Extinction event. It was 250 million years ago and we really just don’t have any solid theories about what happened. To assert that we DO know what caused it, is wrong. Period. We have evidence, and some guesses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event
As Lord Monckton so succinctly put it:-
“There IS no MAN made Global Warming, there NEVER has been any MAN made Global Warming, there never WILL be any MAN made Global Warming”
So all these so called Scientists, Politicians and the Messiah Gore who claimed that the world was suffering almost irreversible runaway Global Warming (if we didn’t cap and Trade and fill their pockets with money of course) were talking complete unscientific biased BS and was a complete SCAM . That they now moderate their stupidity and BLATANTLY DECEITFULLY try and change ‘Global Warming’ to ‘Climate Change’ ( in an act of self preservation and a change that ONLY deranged moonbats and Green NAZIS fall for) matters not a jot.
Rakhiir,
Your point is well taken. Insert the word likely where needed.
Also, I recommend “Extinction – How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago”, by Douglas H. Erwin, a very thorough and well-written assessment of our current understanding of that long-ago debacle.
@ 20 by Richard Hall: Well I am reading the back and forth in this thread about the misquoting of Dr. Jones and wondering why Mr. Hall is so insistent on making this single narrow point. And then comes the answer – it proves in Mr. Hall’s mind that the entire case against AGW is “so weak”.
What about the thousands of other points being made against AGW? I guess they don’t mean a thing because the ethically challenged Dr. Jones may have been misquoted. Wow – how do you fight such nonsensical thinking?
co2 insanity wrote: ‘The actual quote is “No statistically significant warming.”’
I don’t want to be a pedant, but no it isn’t. The actual quote, made in response to the question “Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?” was “Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.”
That’s considerably more subtle than the bald statement that keeps getting bandied about.
To use what someone said to undermine their case is one thing. To (deliberately?) misrepresent what they said is quite another.
The movement for AGW is a big dark political entity. Did you vote the members of the UN’s IPCC into office? Have you ever been asked your thoughts and opinions about whether we should actually be funding their activities? If you had any say in the matter would you continue to support their activities, considering the (to date) number of debacles (gates) that have been identified in just the one document? How many gross errors does it take before you are known as totally unreliable?
http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/03/swindle-hoax.html
>> “…and wondering why Mr. Hall is so insistent on making this single narrow point”
Because if we can’t get clarity on this, there’s no hope of getting clarity on the much more complex issues of science. I’m very happy to argue the wider points, and in other contexts I have. On this occasion I just wanted to stay focussed because it seems to me a crucial point: Phil Jones is reputed to have said something he did not. It is being repeated so often around the internet (in three recent posts on PM, for example) that, to my mind it needs challenging.
There’s no basis for any sort of rational discussion if just making stuff up is an accepted technique.
So we see that once-respected “Science” magazine is just another Leftard propaganda rag, and that “Scientific American” has been taken over by fellow-travelers to promote the same statist, throw-back agenda. “Smithsonian” goggles at us like a fish from the same bubble.
The politicization of “Sci-Am” has been obvious for years, which is why I dropped my subscription but still buy on the newsstand for articles of interest, if I thumb through them and find some honest reporting. These people are like cancer cells. They’ll kill their hosts and die off eventually. In the meantime their shameless lies and distortions can’t sell a lot of magazines that pretend to be objective. I am not sure their smug editors know the difference.
Mr. Hall, you are making a big noise with this.
“Yes, but only just.” and “Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.”
If it is not statistically significant, then it has no reality at all which any one with even mild pretensions to a scientific mindset is bound to respect.
“Yes, but only just.” Mr. Jones is expressing a hope here, nothing with any objective reality.
“Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.” If Dr. Jones wants to cut his own throat by admitting they have no evidence of warming outside that expected in the natural variation–which is what he admits by saying they need to look at temps longer to have any statistical validity to the conclusions–he’s welcome to.
“Phil Jones is reputed to have said something he did not.”
He said what he said, what you quoted. He is deceiving others at least and perhaps himself to same there is nearly statistical significance to findings of warming–this isn’t horseshoes–close means nothing at all.
If there is no warming in the last 15 years–which the AGW climate models do not permit–then there is no AGW. He is admitting there is none to be proven by the usual standard of science.
He wants to use a political standard, one where he moves the goals posts where he needs them to be.
I know where he can put his standard.
Mr. Lewis, just think of climate change as a means to grab power, control and wealth and the “science” will make sense.
I quote: “Early childhood trauma from too many raucous Tennessee revival meetings — it might explain a lot, including Al Jr.’s endless, fervent preaching about things he knows nothing about. This man can’t handle open-minded questions. He’s just like Elmer Gantry. Talk about rock-solid fundamentalism.”
Unless you’ve got some biographical data to back up this silly bit of religious bigotry, I suggest you stay off the topic. Those remarks are about as sound as the attacks of global warmers on deniers.
Richard Hall is right.
We can’t let ourselves get caught up into one-liners, or single quote “gotcha’s”. Yes, Phil Jones quote is relevant to the discourse, but it’s not the End-all. It’s just one more reason we need to demand more studies, more peer-reviewed science, and more skepticism about AGW. DEMAND MORE! Make more phone calls and send emails to your senators and representative and ask them where they get their science.
Following is the absolute best rebuttal of the whole AGW scam I’ve come across so far; and best of all for the cognitively challenged, there’s nary a statistically significant anything to hide behind
Enjoy
A colloquial Icelandic view of the world is provided by Einar Vikingur in his series of papers on
CARBON AND OUR CLIMATE
Einar Vikingur
PART ONE —THE EARTH HAS THREE WALTZES
What I would like to do is to take you through my own journey from being an accepter to a resister on the role of carbon in our climate. I did not have a Road to Damascus moment; it came together gradually and in a sequence. Some stuff was almost incidental, sometimes from way in the past, but actually turned out to be relevant as I pieced the story together. In other words, I am not a bloke who read Ian Plimer and converted (never read him, as a matter of fact)—no, I did my own work. I have no truck with conspiracies, I think all concerned are well intentioned, and are generally people of passion and intellect. I am only interested in the science and what its conclusions should drive and that is good policy.
In this installment I will cover one angle, with much more entertainment to come. When I became wary of the explanations for climate change (and I accept that something is happening to our climate), I began to wonder about what had occurred as the planet’s climate altered in the past. Why had it gone through these wild cycles of hot and icy, and back and forth many times? One factor, which immediately appealed to me because the mechanics were real, calculable, and rather majestic, was what the whole earth did as it moved and rotated and generally carried on its business of being a molten core metallic rock flying about the sun. Further, it seemed to me that the sun itself had a place in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, and that arm itself was moving around the core of our galaxy. Come to think of it, the whole show was moving through a supposed void but one actually stuffed with gas clouds, particle streams, dust and the occasional burst or stream of radiation from supernovas (exploding stars), quasars and pulsars (both intense sources of energy) and various other interfering bits and bodies.
Whilst the picture as a whole is very complicated, what the earth itself does is quite simple and regular and it has been worked out with great exactitude. Of course I did know the basics of orbital mechanics, buried somewhere in my education, but I did not know that an engineer from Serbia, called Milankovitch, spent years around the time of WW1 working out the details of the earth’s orbital journey. What he described is no fantasy, not an issue anyone questions. What Milankovitch showed was that the amount of heat delivered to our planet by the sun varies in three precise cycles, the interaction of which produces a net result which changes constantly and which is affected by the uneven distribution of land between the earth’s two hemispheres.
Firstly, the earth’s orbit moves between being nearly circular to being slightly elliptical—I word it in this odd way because the change is very small. To put it another way, sometimes the circle is squeezed a little about its diameter and it takes about 100,000 years for the orbit to go through an entire cycle of changing shape. As it does so, there is a tiny but constant change in heat delivery to our planet.
Secondly, the earth’s axis is tilted a little, and the amount of tilt changes in a cycle of about 40,000 years—and it is this tilt which drives the seasons because it changes the amount of heat delivered to the two hemispheres as the earth rotates about itself and revolves around the sun (here the second cycle, tilt, interacts with the first cycle, orbital shape).
Thirdly, the axis itself wobbles like a toy top—so, not only is the tilt changing its angle, it is also wobbling in a cycle which takes about 20,000 years to complete.
So, here is the third cycle acting on the second cycle which is working in the first cycle. Since the three cycles have different lengths, the net result was tricky to compute at first but is now well understood.
The net effect is that heat delivered to the earth varies in way which can be calculated. However, this does not mean we know the precise result, and that is because the earth is not a perfect sphere with a uniform surface. The earth has land in all sorts of awkward places and shapes and elevations and it is covered by an atmosphere which is a chicken broth in one place and a pea soup in another (and vice versa tomorrow). Further effects are added from poorly understood sources such as solar spots, attenuation of solar radiation by interstellar gas clouds, reinforcing or damping feedback loops in the atmosphere—and so on.
However, we do know the imprecise result: sometimes it gets very cold for very long and we have ice ages. Sometimes it gets warmer and we have periods between ice ages. Sometimes it gets colder for a little while, and sometimes it gets warmer for a little while. This writer is an Icelander, and owes his existence to a warm period because his ancestors could settle Iceland at the start of such a period eleven centuries or so ago (and many of us died during a cold period five or six centuries later). And we did not even know about eccentric (!!) Serbian engineers….
The Milankovitch Cycles do not explain everything about our climate, but they do form a very important part of the story. For the layman and the scientist alike, they are a real, explainable, absolute, no contest, no argument factor in our climate. For me, in my journey of understanding what lay behind the hyperbole of the excited and the ignorant, they were a milestone of clarity. I did not have to believe in anything to accept that they were fundamental truth. Here endeth this first lesson—and the next one will be about tectonic plates.
That one is very interesting. No, it is amazing.
PART TWO —TECTONIC PLATES, GOBBLERS OF CARBON
In my first installment I described the Milankovitch Cycles, as I wanted to illustrate that at least one element in the long term fluctuations of the earth’s climate can be explained in a manner which brooks no contest from anyone.
This was an important lesson for me as I searched for the explanations in the climate change debate: they could be found. I next began to think about the element carbon, and all those terms bandied about such as the carbon cycle, poisonous carbon dioxide, carbon sequestration, and so on. Once again it was the fundamental long term stuff which might hold the answers, so I asked myself questions such as: “so what happens to all this stuff pouring out of coal power stations, volcanic vents, rotting trees, Mount Hekla in Iceland, my ridiculously powerful V8 car and the breathing of six odd billion people? Does it just bank up and lie in wait? Does it reappear in trees or dissolve in the sea, or what?” I did find the answer, and it lies in a surprising place. The answer showed me that what was generally described as the carbon cycle was actually just a little blippy sideshow in the bigger picture of how the earth works. But there is a real carbon cycle, and I’ll describe it.
Let’s start with Mount Hekla, which erupts every now and again and chucks out enormous amounts of lava and hot gases (including lots of carbon dioxide). The lava cools and becomes rocks, largely made from calcium silicon oxide. Over millions of years, this rock gets broken up and turned into pebbles and sand and eventually the calcium in it gets weathered away and dissolved. In raindrops and lakes and seas the calcium combines with carbon dioxide to form limestone deposits, and the shells of crabs, and coral reefs and so on.
Eventually, and think in tens of millions of years, everything becomes sludge on the sea floor and yet that stuff never seems to build up. Mount Hekla erupts because Iceland sits on a joint between two tectonic plates being driven apart by circulating molten rock kept hot by the radioactive decay of naturally occurring isotopes in the earth’s interior (also the energy source for geothermal power, incidentally). But the sea sludge finds itself one day at a different type of tectonic joint, where one plate is driven into the earth (taking the sludge with all this carbon dioxide locked up in limestone with it) and the other one stays on top. In the molten lava, the limestone combines with silicon again to make the same rocks, and then the earth releases lava and carbon dioxide out of Hekla (or Vesuvius) to do the circuit again for millions of years.
This is the carbon cycle which regulates the amount of carbon dioxide in circulation, but it works on timescales not easily grasped by a humanity which popped into existence microseconds ago in the geological way of thinking. It is also a cycle in which the quantities of material on the move dwarf anything we can do, including natural variations. The natural variations are a part of this control loop, which is regulating the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Control loops are called that because they are systems which can deal with variations, and this one plays a minor role in regulating temperature over geological time. Variations are a part of how such a process works. The system is driven by tectonic plates, which for decades were ridiculed by most of the scientific community, whose proponents were hounded and scorned, and some of whom died before the bleedin’ obvious entered the mainstream as a phenomenon which only a flat-earther now does not accept as the truth.
The level of carbon dioxide is rising, but it is easy to calculate the number of tonnes required to produce the increase, and to demonstrate that humans contribute perhaps only as much as a tenth of the increase. There is evidence which indicates some rise in average temperatures, except for the past seven years. Humans are making a contribution to the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, no question, and even a 10% contribution would be a very serious issue if carbon dioxide were connected with this temperature rise. The connection between carbon dioxide and temperature rise is what we will examine in the next installment. It is such a simple story that when I first grasped it, I discarded it. However, I dug a bit deeper and made sure I understood the science. I would like to try and explain it to you in the next part.
PART THREE—SO, WHAT IS THIS CARBON DIOXIDE STUFF?
In my first two installments, I covered off two factors influencing climate, neither of which explains the whole picture. I do not for a moment claim to be able to give you the whole picture; the best I can do is to lay out the things which are proven to be truth, and try and draw some conclusions from those things in aggregate. Having described what happens with heat when the earth moves about its business, and what happens in part with the regulating of that heat when the tectonic plates move about the earth’s surface, I think we should take a look at what carbon dioxide does in more detail. Since the world continually speaks about the wretched molecule (although most people know nothing about it), would a bit of information not be in order?
As governments everywhere rush to implement expensive measures to limit or cap release of the gas, should we not get to know the villain properly?
When sunlight is re-radiated off the earth, some of it is absorbed by the atmosphere. A molecule is hit by a bundle of energy which it can absorb; it wiggles about and bumps into other molecules
– and a bunch of excited molecules is what heat actually is. If the bundle of energy had just passed back out through the atmosphere, no heating would have occurred.
This trapping of heat is the greenhouse effect. Gases like oxygen and nitrogen (about 98% of the atmosphere) do not trap heat. Carbon dioxide, methane, water vapour and ozone do—they are greenhouse gases. In a box of our air containing ten thousand molecules, less than four of them are carbon dioxide. It is pretty difficult to excite the others, no matter how much energy you can absorb. So, would it make a difference if we doubled or tripled the number of carbon dioxide molecules?
The surprising answer is that it would not, and the reason is that carbon dioxide is very selective in the wavelength of energy it absorbs—it works only in a very narrow band. So, at any given moment, most of the tasty light for carbon dioxide is absorbed by a few lucky ones, and the rest of them just float around the place unexcited. If we add more of the stuff, a bit more energy gets absorbed, but mostly we just have more unexcited carbon dioxide doing nothing more than wait around to be absorbed by plants, or get dissolved in water, or combine forces with calcium to make limestone (and then get dragged into the roiling earth by a tectonic plate in a gazillion years). The bottom line is that not only is carbon dioxide an uncommon gas, it is a pretty poor absorber of energy.
Now, water vapour is another matter: it is ten times more common than our villain, and it absorbs energy across pretty well the entire spectrum. So, there is not only much more of the stuff, it works much harder as a greenhouse gas. It also forms clouds and rain (and this action releases heat, too), reflects light back out, back in—does all sorts of stuff carbon dioxide could never hope to do. Clouds and their unruly behaviour are one of the main reasons why climatic computer modelling is so difficult to do, incidentally. It is also instructive to note that cloud formation is also influenced by solar activity in an indirect sense—reduced emission of a wide spectrum of radiation from the sun permits increased penetration of cosmic rays (mostly particles; it is a historical misnomer) into the atmosphere, almost certainly increasing cloud formation.
As an aside, the earth’s magnetic field is what deflects harmful radiation and particles from reaching us. The magnetic field is influenced by the movement of gigantic quantities of molten metal in the earth, a movement which also drives the tectonic plates. The isotopes which provide the power were formed in nuclear reactions in the guts of stars which then turned supernova and distributed their material—and our own planet collected some as it coalesced out of dust clouds billions of years ago. Everything is connected, and there is rarely a single explanation for anything.
The paragraphs above can be backed up by numbers and calculations and graphs until the cows come home, none of which could be disputed. All the statements about absorption, rarity and heat release are undisputed facts of nature. What these facts scream at us is that it is impossible for carbon dioxide alone to heat up the atmosphere—this is such an important statement that I am going to reiterate a few things: There are not enough carbon dioxide molecules to do the job. The molecule does not absorb heat well, because it is fussy about wavelengths. There is a lot more water vapour than there is of the supposed miscreant. Water vapour is many times more effective as a greenhouse gas. Whatever heating is happening cannot be the work of carbon dioxide, except for a small portion. It is physically impossible. The physics does not make sense. Whatever is happening, carbon dioxide cannot be blamed for it. What’s more, the paradox is that the gas is actually plant food and having more of it promotes growth. Otherwise, why would greenhouse growers the world over pump into their greenhouses a carbon dioxide concentration several times that of the atmosphere?
I want to make an important point about cause and effect: if the earth is heating up and carbon dioxide levels are rising, that does not mean one is the cause of the other. All the spectacular reporting about changes to glaciers and coral reefs only shows that warming is taking place. It does not show what is causing the warming, and all the physics evidence demonstrates that the cause has to be something other than carbon dioxide. I do not say that burning fossil fuels in a profligate manner should continue, far from it. I just say that we cannot blame fossil fuels (I do wish we would plant more trees, though, for a thousand reasons!).
In the next instalment we should take a look at what carbon dioxide has done in the past, for which excellent data exists in many forms. Surely this is one instance where we must take heed of past performance.
PART FOUR—THE DEEDS OF CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE PAST
In the first three instalments we started with a Serbian engineer and his slide rule, and worked our way up to the physics of how carbon dioxide behaves in the atmosphere. What I would like to do now is return to geological time and what the gas has been getting up to as the climate has cycled through high and low temperatures. Surely this must be important, as carbon dioxide today is the same structure and is bound by the same laws as whatever of the gas was swirling around in the past. It is possible to reconstruct the temperature and carbon dioxide relationship with startling accuracy for the past half a million years or so, using ice cores drilled out of the glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland.
This work has been done several times, by different people in different places. The data has been analysed several times, in different ways by different researchers. The conclusion is consistent, and beyond dispute: temperatures rise, and about eight centuries later the level of carbon dioxide rises. The temperature increase precedes the rise in carbon dioxide, and it is therefore not possible for temperature to have been driven up by the gas. Further, I have explained why carbon dioxide is in any case a very inefficient greenhouse gas and could therefore not raise temperature easily—and I can also explain very plausibly why raised temperature increases the amount of gas in the atmosphere. As temperatures rise, from whatever cause, the oceans get warmer and this reduces the amount of gas which can be held in solution. The oceans therefore release the gas as a result of more heat—and that is the likeliest explanation as to why carbon dioxide concentration lags temperature increases.
As I worked through the science behind carbon and our climate, the ice cores data was for me a sort of a coup-de-grace for carbon dioxide as the cause of temperature increases. The data demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the major causal link between the two was the reverse of what was the generally accepted one. Heat causes carbon dioxide levels to rise. Carbon dioxide does not cause heat to rise, other than as a minor contributor. I found this situation utterly astonishing, once I became confident that I understood the facts, because entire governments, large bureaucracies, swathes of the scientific establishment and practically every commentator on the planet seemed not to have understood the facts. Not conjecture, not computer modelling with a thousand variables, not some reasonable hypothesis—no, just the plain unadorned facts.
To tell you the truth, I was startled by my conclusion. So, I looked at things from different directions, I checked my logic, I wondered whether there was something I had missed. However, because I tried to focus on science grounded in proven facts, I always came back to the same thing: carbon dioxide is a minor player, a sideshow in the global warming story. So why on earth were we all being told by so many clever and competent people that we were about to be engulfed by a cataclysm caused by this sideshow? And, incidentally, what is warming us up?
My last instalment will try and answer those questions. I am not confident about my answers, but I think I am on the right track. The one thing I am certain about is this: carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of global warming, and therefore humanity (whilst there are too many of us) is not to blame.
PART FIVE—WHAT THE WORLD SHOULD NOT DO (AND WHAT IT MIGHT CONSIDER DOING)
In my previous four epistles I have ranged through the carbon story in a very simple way—but that is not to say it was not a rigorous treatment. At every stage, since I was describing my own learning journey, I stuck to truth and fact and my conclusion was an astonishing one: in a world gone mad, I seemed to be sane!—was it possible for so many to be wrong?
Well, not only is it possible, it happened nine years ago with the Millennium Bug. We all remember—some dork in the Seventies (apparently) wrote code using 00 instead of 2000 for the date, and the result was to be doomsday when the clock struck midnight. All believed without a murmur, billions upon billions of dollars were spent on upgrading equipment and software, hundreds of thousands of boffins beavered away for years all over the world leading up to the magic moment—and nothing happened. At that time I was the Chief Information Officer for one of the country’s biggest corporations, and I had swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker. I had whipped everything up into a frenzy and spent millions of dollars of the shareholders’ money—and nothing happened. Along with everyone else, I had failed to dig until I found the facts. I was a member of the world’s biggest unintended con job and groupthink, just an unthinking member of the herd, and I have been ashamed of it ever since.
You reckon groupthink could not happen on carbon dioxide and global warming? And why not?—we have done it before, and recently, and it involved science and technology. Many have staked a lot on climate change and carbon emissions—they have become vested interests, captured by personal or institutional pride and a certainty borne of habit. But the facts have changed since the game began, and all need to have the courage to change with them. It will be easier for most than for the thousands of climate scientists who are now earning both a good living and a place in the sun (sorry….).
Worse still, the politicians and their bureaucrats are thick into this and many of them would find it extremely difficult to reverse positions even if they understood the facts and wanted to recant. And much worse, still, financial institutions the world over are sniffing out the money to be made out of carbon credits, permits trading, you name it and they’ll think of a fancier name still (something like ‘leveraged derivatives twice bonded and once removed’ ??)—and these institutions therefore have every reason to believe and encourage what is happening. This is what they are designed to do; it is their primary motive, unadulterated neither by kindness nor malice.
Let’s get this straight: some warming is happening—even though the measuring is dodgy and disputed, and the last seven years have been on a cooling trend, something is happening. The population is large, and we are making a real mess of our home—and the solution to population lies not in coercion of anyone but in the emancipation and education of women. We have chopped the trees down too much (I love trees). We are not investing enough in renewable energy, specifically on how to harness in a distributed way the ultimate source of all energy, the sun. We are using up resources fast. We should allow fish stocks to recover (I love marine creatures of all kinds), and stop dumping so much rubbish into the oceans and into landfill. We need to work against religious bigotry and the resulting violence, and we need to feed and govern and protect all people properly, on the basis of liberty and compassion.
What we should not be doing is wasting huge resources on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, because it would be on a problem which does not exist. The other ones do exist.
So, the world is warming. We have a choice between homing in on a non-existent problem, and thereby condemning half of the world’s people to continued poverty as they are forced to pay for expensive energy (the rich world’s prosperity is based on cheap fossil fuels), or we can adapt as the world changes its climate of its own accord. As we adapt, the cost and effort of a carbon focus and the economic dislocation it would cause could be redirected towards solving the problems we know to be real.
Incidentally, why is the globe warming (a little)? Well, the climate has fluctuated in the big sense (ice ages) many times, but it also fluctuates in a smaller sense, in that it has warmed and cooled appreciably often even during recorded history. What we are seeing now is such a fluctuation and the cause is probably a combination of things—a net warming as a result of the Milankovitch Cycle interactions, the solar system is perhaps coming slowly out of a very wispy interstellar gas or dust cloud which has been attenuating sunlight slightly, the sun is in a different part of its radiation cycles—and a myriad of other factors quite beyond the ken of men as yet are just lining up in a particular way for a little while. This is the sort of thing which has happened many times before, and will happen again. One thing is certain: carbon dioxide, loovly stuff, ain’t in it.”
Einar Vikingur Lesmurdie, Western Australia
teenav@internode.on.net