Pulling It All Together

I frequently see warmists dismiss skeptics as not scientific or even hostile to science. In their universe it seems that if you disagree with them you are unscientific.

The ironic part of this is disagreement is the cornerstone of science. Because after you publish your results, others are supposed to verify your findings or find fault with them. The mantra "the science is settled" is in reality a political statement, not a scientific one. As Einstein said, "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."

But let's look at what we know about the AGW theory. We know that AGW theory rests on the belief that warming is due to mankind and specifically mankind's use of fossil fuels which has increased the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The IPCC tells us this. But how did they come to that conclusion? I had no idea until I saw a slide presentation by Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT. Basically what the IPCC did was to use numerous climate models that showed natural variability could not account for the warming that was being experienced from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s. The problem with this is the models were not good representations of the actual climate but to make this conclusion you have to assume that they do accurately represent the climate.

As Dr. Lindzen stated that this "makes arguments in support of intelligent design sound rigorous by comparison. It constitutes a rejection of scientific logic, while widely put forward as being 'demanded' by science."

The IPCC's proof that mankind is causing global warming is inaccurate models that couldn't account for the warming so it had to be mankind's influence.

But if it isn't greenhouse gases what else could it possibly be? The other suspects include the sun (sunspot activity), cloud formation, cosmic rays, volcanic activity, deep ocean circulation, reductions in air pollution, and localized only heating caused by the Urban Heat Island Effect.

A second reason I find it difficult to worry about global warming also comes back to logic and common sense.

It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if you are looking for confirmations.

Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.

Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.

A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

In an early post I showed how global warming seems to forbid nothing.

• If you get more snow or less, that is compatible with AGW.
• If you get more hurricanes or fewer that is compatible with AGW.
• If glaciers are growing or shrinking, that is compatible with AGW.
• If you have droughts or floods, both are compatible with AGW.
• If you have warming or cooling (that's why they changed the name to climate change) it is compatible with AGW.

In short, nothing seems to disqualify AGW from being one of the causes of whatever calamity happens and this puts it into the category of being non-scientific.

Next up are the arguments scientific or political?

Back in 1989, future Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) Working Group 2 (WG2) lead author Stephen Schneider disclosed several tricks of the trade to Discover magazine:

"To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest." Schneider said.

And when Climategate happened we saw much more of this.

In November 1996 Geoff Jenkins was head of climate change prediction at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, part of the United Kingdom’s Met(eorological) Office (national weather service). He wrote to Phil Jones:

• " Remember all the fun we had last year over 1995 global temperatures, with the early release of information (via Australia), “inventing” the December monthly value, letters to Nature, etc., etc.? I think we should have a cunning plan about what to do this year, simply to avoid a lot of wasted time. "

Later in November 1996 Phil Jones wrote to Ray Bradley, Mike Mann, Malcolm Hughes, Keith Briffa, and Tim Osborn, regarding a diagram for a World Meteorological Organization Statement: and this is where we get the famous statement:

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temperatures to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

Jones revealed that Mann did not address this problem by making honest note of it in the paper that he and his co-authors pubished in Nature, but rather fraudulently substituted the real temperature data into the graphs, for the past twenty or forty years as required. This information would have greatly diminished the validity of Mann's study.

There are numerous other quotes from Climategate that show a disdain for the scientific method.

When you look at AGW science, feedback is the most important part of the AGW theory. They see the feedback (water vapor) as large and positive. But actual observation and measurement shows just the opposite.

Spencer et al. (2007) found a strong negative cirrus cloud feedback mechanism in the tropical troposphere. Instead of steadily building up as the tropical oceans warm, cirrus cloud cover suddenly contracts, allowing more OLR to escape. Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who directed the study, estimates that if this mechanism operates on decadal time scales, it would reduce model estimates of global warming by 75%.

Finally I find it ironic that warmist keep telling us the current lack of warming is only 12 years and therefore is too short a time to call it climate rather than weather. Yet the IPCC was created in 1988 after just 13 years of warming.

I will end with another Einstein quote. "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods."

AGW the Theory

With Climate Change in the news almost constantly, we are seeing one scandal after another regarding the proponents of the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Anthropogenic means man made and the theory of AGW says that the global warming we have experienced in the past 100 years is due to mankind and specifically our use of fossil fuels as our main energy source.

We will be looking at this over the next few days. Today I want to look at the theory and science behind AGW.

There has been climate change happening since the beginning of time on the earth. If you ask scientist about the melting ice in the arctic, they will tell you the usual part of this is that there is any ice at the two poles. For most of the geological history of the planet, the world was ice free.

At the same time there was a period when the earth was entirely covered by ice. This was known as the Cryogenian period and occurred between 850 and 630 million years ago. In recent history (the last 500,000 years) we’ve experience 4 ice ages each lasting approximately 100,000 years followed by 15,000 year interglacial periods when the planet warmed.

So back in the 1970s when we had experienced 30 years of cooling temperatures, there were some scientists who worried that we were entering another ice age, but then the temperatures started getting warmer.

In 1988 Dr. James Hansen, the head of GISS, testified before congress that the greenhouse gases mankind was emitting into the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels was causing a warming of the planet. He warned of dire results from this warming.

Here is what he was talking about. By burning fossil fuels mankind puts carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. CO2 is a greenhouse gas whose molecules will capture certain wavelengths of radiation converting them into energy that warms the molecule which in turn warms the planet.

The radiation from the sun is short wavelength radiation. It will pass easily through the atmosphere, but can be reflected back into space by cloud albedo. Low, thick clouds (such as stratocumulus) primarily reflect incoming solar radiation, causing it to have a high albedo, whereas high, thin clouds (such as Cirrus) tend to transmit it to the surface but then trap outgoing infrared radiation, causing it to have low albedo. It contributes to the greenhouse effect. Snow at the poles also has an albedo effect.

Radiation from the sun is absorb by the ground and then reradiated as long wave radiation. The long wave radiation can be absorbed by greenhouse gases. The energy in this radiation warms the greenhouse molecules which will release the radiation in all directions including back to earth thereby warming the surface again.

Greenhouse gases are important for life on earth. They raise the temperature of the planet. Without greenhouse gases the average temperature would be -18 degrees C versus the 14 degree C we actually experience. The main greenhouse gas is water vapor. We know that CO2 is also a greenhouse gas and one molecule will raise the temperature by X while the next molecule of CO2 will raise the temperature by X-a.

We know that CO2 as a greenhouse gas will increase the temperature by 1.2 degrees Centigrade every time you double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (it isn’t linear). This is agreed to by all and is the science that is “settled.” This is the first leg of the AGW theory.

The AGW theory says once the temperature starts to rise due to CO2, more water vapor will be put into the atmosphere as feedback. They see this addition water vapor actually breaking up the low level clouds and forming high level Cirrus clouds that will trap more heat. This in turn will raise the temperature even more and eventually (although the AGW supporters see this as happening soon) you will hit tipping points where permafrost starts to melt, bogs start to warm and all of these give up more and more greenhouse gases causing a runaway greenhouse effect which will raise the temperature even more, melt the ice at the poles and raise the ocean levels by 20 to 30 feet. It is from this that we find the disaster scenarios we keep hearing about in the press. This feedback is the second leg of the AGW theory.

Now to make the above scenario of runaway warming more real, we have to look back on the past and see if the warming we’ve experienced is unique (the Holocene period—approximately the last 10,000 years). Up until the late 1990s we had a temperature record (based on writing at the time and proxies) that said although we are experiencing warming mankind had experienced warming before in the Medieval Warm Period (MWP 800 AD to 1300 AD) the Roman Warm Period (200 AD to 500 AD), and Middle Holocene Period (5000 BC to 3000 BC).

Michael Mann and a number of scientists from the CRU at East Anglia University were all involved in Paleoclimatology focusing on the past 1000 years. Mann came out with his famous hockey stick graph which eliminated the MWP. He declared that any vestige of MWP was purely a localize weather event in Europe and the warming we’ve seen in the past 100 years is without precedent in the past 1000 years. This was the final leg of the AGW theory.

The last 10 to 15 years have not shown any real warming which is a problem for AGW supporters. But they counter this observation by saying the past decade was the warmest ever recorded (in the past 130 years). At the same time, they claimed global warming was happening even faster than they thought and used the melting of Ice in the Arctic to illustrate that point. Finally they said, the general consensus of climate scientists supports the AGW theory and anyone who disagrees is a “denialist.”

Next—The skeptics view of the theory of AGW