GLOBAL WARMING 19

The greatest problem with Global Warming is not ignorance – it is the presumption of knowledge. Mark Twain put it this way: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The chimerical Global Warming enthusiasts insist there is no more rational debate on the subject. The earth is warming rapidly and is human caused. Period; end of discussion. I am afraid I have to dissent from what I consider is such a self-serving and unsupportable position. What follows is a précis rather than a megillah of the historical and current evidence of global climate change. To write more might bore you and would certainly exhaust me.

Everyone and I mean everyone, who has looked at the data and the many who have not, agree that the earth is experiencing global warming and for those who have examined the historical record this warming has been going on since the end of the Little Ice Age circa 1850. There the agreement ends. I believe human and animal generated gases such as CO², SO², NO², methane, and other atmospheric contaminants have had, at most, only a minor effect on our climate. And by far the most abundant “greenhouse” gas is water vapor which is hardly a human caused pollutant. Over millions of years the earth has gone through myriad natural climate cycles. That is what we are going through now.

What is the scientific method for identifying, gathering, processing, and comparing current and historical climate data? In the last few decades global temperatures have been measured over enough of the land, sea, and atmosphere in order to have a high confidence level that they are representative. However, correlating these data with many fewer measurements made in the early and middle parts of the 20th century requires statistical adjustments. Now think about how these actual temperature measurements can be compared with proxy data such as ice cores, seabed sediments, boreholes, stalagmites, pollen, and tree rings covering the time periods hundreds and thousands of years ago before actual temperature measurements were available and you begin to appreciate the difficulty of establishing valid comparative temperatures.

As you know or could surmise, there has been a great deal of scientific effort, both valid and bogus, in processing and correlating these disparate data. The mathematical tools of probability and statistics are primarily used to fit these various actual and proxy data into a coherent picture of present and historical global weather. As an attachment to this essay there are three examples of the simplest types of probability and statistical problems which you might want to attempt to solve (answers and explanations will be provided upon request). The mathematical manipulations used to calculate and compare current and historical climate data are far more complicated and requires a more sophisticated understanding of probability and statistical methods to fully appreciate. The point is that not only is our weather highly complex, but the process of trying to quantify it and make sense out of historical comparisons is also complicated and sometimes inchoate and controversial. It is not straightforward and settled as the Global Warming fanatics would have it.

There is other than quantifiable evidence for historical climate change. Going back in time from approximately 12,000 years to more than a million years there is geological evident of glacial and interglacial cycles, especially in North America and Europe which implies large swings in temperature. During at least one of those interglacial times the ice may have almost wholly disappeared, under a climate somewhat warmer than the present one, as indicated by fossils contained in the deposits. No informed person that I am aware of disputes this. The apodictic conclusion which can be drawn is that humans can not be tagged with causing these climate changes.

Written evidence also exists for climate cycles over the past several hundred years encompassing the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, the Dark Ages, and the Roman Warming. While what has been written during these periods of climate changes can not be translated into definitive temperature numbers, it does strongly indicate these changes did take place. This indirect evidence is that summers were rainy, winters cold, and in many places temperatures too low for grain crops to mature. Famines and epidemics raged, and average life expectancy dropped 10 years (The Little Ice Age). The Vikings raised livestock on Greenland and sailed to North America. New cities were built all across Europe, and the continent’s population grew from 30 million to 80 million (The Medieval Warm Period). Food and population decreased and diseases increased due to cold and inclement weather (the Dark Ages). Their empire greatly expanded and there was general prosperity and a classical building boom (the Roman Warming).

In their 2007 book Unstoppable Global Warming authors S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery point out that between the roughly 100,000 year major ice age cycles the earth’s climate had been dominated by natural, shorter, irregular cycles. The most recent are the afore mentioned Roman Warming which started about 200 B.C., ending about A.D. 600 and paired with its other half, the Dark Ages, which ended in A.D. 900; the Medieval Warming ending in A.D. 1400, paired with the Little Ice Age which ended around 1850. These alternating periods of warmer and colder weather lasted from 300 to 800 years so the present warming trend may be with us for a few hundred years more. We had better learn to adjust to it without the histrionics and destructive economic policies advocated by Global Warming energumen. Mind you, according to the available information these cycles were not just monotonic periods of warm and cold, but simply warmer or colder than average with years where the weather went counter to the general trend.

Is there a correlation between warmer global temperatures and increases in the magnitude and/or frequency of hurricanes (called typhoons in the South Pacific), tornadoes, or thunderstorms? It would seem that given warmer global temperatures and hence warmer gulf waters, hurricanes might be more severe since the energy of hurricanes is increased by warmer waters. In fact there has been no measurable increase in the strength or frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, or thunderstorms in the last 50 years. The reporting of U.S. tornadoes has increased by a factor of ten in the past 50 years, but the number of severe tornadoes has not increased, therefore it appears that only the detection and reporting of tornadoes has increased. There has, on average, been more rain. Many researches have found that the amount of rainfall from thunderstorms has increased over most of the United States over the past century. This fits with the increased evaporation occurring as the rising 20th century temperatures have produced an “invigorating hydrological cycle.”

Global Circulation Models (GCMs) are the mega-stars of today’s climate and environmental research. The GCMs are three-dimensional computer models that attempt to pull together, and project into the future, all the major causes of climate change. These include jet streams in the upper atmosphere; deep ocean currents; solar radiation reflected back in space by ice sheets and glaciers; changes in vegetation; naturally changing greenhouse gas levels; eddies in the oceans that transfer heat laterally; number, type, and altitude of clouds in the skies; variations in radiant energy coming from the sun; plus dozens of other factors.

The models work from “first principles” such as the laws of thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, the carbon cycle, the water cycle, statistical and probability theory, and so forth. The models are so complex that they can only be run on supercomputers. Notable GCMs are located at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and Britain’s Hadley Centre.

One of the modelers’ key problems is that real-world long term climate changes are sensitive to small changes in surface conditions or solar radiation – so small that humans doing the computer input may not pick them up. And, if they do, they don’t know how to interpret the cumulative future changes the models will forecast over decades or centuries. Another major problem is that the GCMs provide smoothly varying results, but the records we have from ice cores, geology, and paleontology say past climate changes have often been major and abrupt.

The Earth’s surface thermometers are so heavily skewed by urban heat and land use changes that they may overstate U.S. surface warming by as much as 40%. The models have erroneously predicted a 20th century surge in Earth’s temperatures to match surging CO² concentrations in the atmosphere. It hasn’t happened. The degree of climate forcing assumed in the still unverified models is apparently far too high. The Greenhouse Theory also seems to be failing at the poles, where the warming was supposed to be earliest and strongest. The models say we should have seen warming several ºC at the poles since 1940 to reflect the major increases in atmospheric CO². Instead polar temperatures have been falling. However the biggest failing of the Greenhouse Theory may be in the troposphere, which seemingly should warm faster than the Earth’s surface. The opposite has happened; the troposphere has warmed much less than the earth’s surface. What explanation does the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC) offer for these major departures from its basic man-made warming contention? None.

There is a correlation of the sun’s energy output, the solar wind, and cosmic rays from outer space. Cosmic rays are thought to collude with particles or molecules in the atmosphere, leaving them electrically charged or ionized. These ionized particles then seed the growth of water droplets clouds. The clouds that form low in the sky are relatively warm and cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space. The sun continuously releases a stream of charged particles, the solar wind, which partially shields the earth from cosmic rays.

When the sun’s energy output is stronger and the solar wind blows more forcefully, as it has been in the past few decades, the earth is shielded more effectively from cosmic rays, therefore generating fewer low clouds and causing more warming. Conversely when the sun’s energy is lower and the solar wind weaker, more cosmic rays streak through our atmosphere causing more low clouds to form thereby cooling the planet.

In addition to the GCM computer models which, although complex, still demonstrably can not adequately account for our far more complex weather, is the famous or now infamous long term “Hockey Stick” global temperature chart. The climate study containing this temperature chart was first published in Nature magazine in 1998 by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes and is commonly called MBH98. This study calculated global temperatures back to A.D. 1400. A follow up paper called MBH99 added temperatures back to A.D. 1000 without recalculating post-1400 values; it simply extended the previous results to an earlier period.

As the name “Hockey Stick” implies the chart shows fairly uniform temperatures with a slight drop from 1400 until the start of the 20th century and then a sharp rise from 1900 until the present. Not only did the IPCC, but the mainstream news media, all of the environmental groups, the Hollywood elites, and the other human caused Global Warming advocates, including Al Gore, began using this study as prima-facie evidence that global temperatures have accelerated in the past few decades and are caused by greenhouse gases generated by industrialization. In late 2002 in trying to sell the Kyoto Protocol, the Canadian government repeatedly cited the Mann “Hockey Stick” temperature chart. In 2003 Stephen McIntyre began investigating the MBH papers, later joined by Patrick J. Michaels editor of the 2005 book Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming. Prior to this investigation absolutely nobody including the editors of Nature magazine had done any checking on either the original paper or the 1999 follow up. Do you still wonder why I am skeptical of the human caused Global Warming crowd?

McIntyre and Michaels contacted Michael Mann with questions about his methodology and source data. At first Mann co-operated, but he quickly changed his attitude as McIntyre and Michaels begin making slow albeit steady progress in deciphering what Mann, et.al. had done. Mann would say that the requested data were contained in previously cited sources (it never was), then he cut them off completely and would not answer their inquiries thereafter. When McIntyre and Michaels had complied the entire data set they believed was used in MBH98 they sent it all to Mann asking him for confirmation that these were the data actually used in MBH98. Mann replied that he was too busy to answer this or any other inquiries. Ironically one of the subsequent complains lodged against McIntyre and Michaels was that they did not consult Mann before publishing their critique. Of course Dr. Michaels had a ready answer: it was Mann who had cut the communications, not him.

In essence what McIntyre and Michaels had discovered (a much more complete explanation is contained in the book Shattered Consensus) was there were errors in the manipulation of the data; gross data collation errors; unexplained selection of some data sets and exclusion of others; unconventional extrapolation of data; and for all the subsequent usage of the results of the MBH98 paper it is conspicuous that the methodology used in that study has not been widely applied. Even Mann did not use it in subsequent papers. The data corrected and plotted by McIntyre and Michaels from 1400 A.D. to present do not show the “Hockey Stick” abrupt temperature rise in the 20th century. One can question whether the results of Mann, et. al. or McIntyre and Michaels are closer to the truth. What is not in question is that both the methodology and complete data set used by Mann, et. al. is not transparent while what McIntyre and Michaels did is.

As summarized by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery in their book Unstoppable Global Warming the weaknesses of the Greenhouse Theory of recent global warming are as follows:

First, CO² changes do not account for the highly variable climate we know the Earth has had in the past couple of millennia, including the Roman Warming, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming, and the Little Ice Age.

Second, the Greenhouse Theory does not explain temperature changes in the 20th century. Most of the current warming occurred prior to 1940, before there was much human generated CO² in the air. After 1940, temperatures declined until 1975 or so, despite a large increase in industrial CO², during that period.

Third, the early and supposedly most powerful increases in atmospheric CO² have not produced the frightening planetary overheating that the theory and climate models told us to expect.

Fourth, we must discount the official temperature record to reflect the increased size and intensity of today’s urban heat islands, where most of the official thermometers are located. We must take into account the changes of rural land use (forests cleared for farming and pastures, more intensive row-crop irrigated farming) that affect soil moisture and temperatures. When meteorological experts reconstructed U.S. official temperatures “without cities and crops”, using more accurate data from satellites and high-altitude weather balloons, about one-half the recent “official” warming disappeared.

Fifth, the Earth’s surface thermometers have recently warmed faster than the temperature readings in the lower atmosphere up to 30,000 ft. Yet the Greenhouse Theory says that CO² will warm the lower atmosphere first and then atmospheric heat will radiate to the Earth’s surface. This is not happening.

Sixth, CO² for at least 240,000 years has been a lagging indicator of global warming, not a causal factor. Studies within the last 15 years have revealed from ice cores that temperatures and CO² levels have tracked closely during the warmings after each of Earth’s last three ice age glaciations. However, the CO² changes have lagged about 800 years behind the temperature changes. Global warming has produced more CO² rather than CO² producing more warming. This accords with the physical reality that the oceans hold the vast majority of the planet’s carbon and the laws of physics let cold oceans hold more CO² gas than warm oceans.

Seventh, the Greenhouse Theory predicts that CO² driven warming of the Earth’s surface will start, and be strongest, at the North and South Polar regions. This is not happening either. A broadly scattered set of meteorological stations and ocean buoys show that temperature readings in the Arctic, Greenland, and the seas around them are colder today than in the 1930’s. Alaska has been warming, but researchers say this is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), not a broader Arctic warming pattern. The 20 to 30 year cycle of the PDO seems to have reversed again recently so Alaska may start cooling again.

In the Antarctic only the thin finger of the Antarctic Peninsula has been warming. Temperatures over the other 98% of the Antarctic continent have been declining slowing since the 1960’s, according to a broad array of Antarctic surface stations and satellite measurements.

Eighth, the scary predictions of planetary overheating require that the warming effect of additional CO² be amplified by increased water vapor in the atmosphere. Warming will indeed lift more moisture from the oceans into the air. But what if the moister, warmer air increases the efficiency of rainfall, and leaves the upper atmosphere as dry, or even drier, than it was before? We have absolutely no evidence to demonstrate that the upper atmosphere is retaining more water vapor to amplify CO².

Pollutants in the atmosphere can cause global weather changes depending on the type and quantity of the pollutants. When the Krakatoa volcano in the Sunda Strait half way between Sumatra and Java erupted in 1883 an estimated 25 km³ of rock, ash, pumice, and gases were injected into the atmosphere and caused a worldwide average drop in temperature of 1.2 Cº. Ash reached a height of 25 km. with the energy of the eruption estimated to be 200 megatons of TNT or 13,000 times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Global weather did not return to normal until 1888.

The Tambora volcano on Sumbawa Island, Indonesia erupted in 1815 causing a real catastrophic global weather change. It had four times the energy of Krakatoa with 100 km³ of rock, ash, pumice, and gases injected to a height of 43 km. This occurrence, near the end of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1400-1850), added to the misery of the general cold weather so that 1816 was called the year without a summer. New England experienced snow in July and August and in winter there were reports of birds falling out of the sky – dead from the cold. In Europe reddish colored snow (from the ash and pumice) fell in several places.

It would be a paralogistic stretch to infer from the above that greenhouse gases would have the same magnitude of influence on global weather and besides in these two cases the shielding of the sun’s energy had the effect of lowering global temperatures for several years.

Apparently the mainstream news media has infected much of the other media with their GW folderol. An article in the April 23rd 2007 issue of Business Week was a paean to the coming human caused GW disaster. It started out with this tendentious dreck: “Remember the arguments for not taking action against global warming? Just a few years ago the claim was: ‘There is no evidence the climate is changing.’ Then it became: ‘Well maybe it is, but humans aren’t to blame.’ That morphed into: ‘Warmer could be better, and we can easily adapt.’ And all along we heard that cutting emissions would cripple the economy – and wouldn’t make much difference because China and India weren’t on board.”

Such mendacious propaganda is topped by a statement from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) headquartered in Switzerland (you know, the organization with a cuddly little panda as it symbol). These Cassandras stated this week that we have just five more years, by 2012, before climate catastrophe overtakes us if we don’t end our environment polluting ways now. Sorry, they also state, no more building of nuclear power plants allowed. I find their claims rather droll even though these whackos are serious.

On the other side, at a meeting this past week, meteorologist Augie Auer said this: “Man’s contribution to greenhouse gases is so small we couldn’t change the climate if we tried. We’re all going to survive this. It’s going to be a joke in five years [a rather different take from the WWF’s five year catastrophic climate scenario]. A combination of misinterpreted and misguided science, media hype, and political spin has created the current hysteria and it is time to put a stop to it. It is time to attack the myth of global warming. Water vapour is responsible for 95% of the greenhouse effect, an effect which is vital to keep the earth warm. If we didn’t have the greenhouse effect the planet would be at -18 ºC, but because we do have the greenhouse effect it is +15 ºC. The other greenhouse gases: CO², methane, NO², and various others including CFC’s contribute only 5% of effect, CO² being by far the greatest contributor at 3.6%.

However, CO² as a result of man’s activities is only 3.2% of that, hence only 0.12% of the greenhouse gases in total. Human related methane, NO², and CFC’s make minuscule contributions of 0.066%, 0.047%, and 0.046%, respectively. That aught to be the end of the argument, then and there. We couldn’t do it [change the climate] even if we wanted to because water vapour dominates.”

The global warming crowd accuses the skeptics of being in the pocket of big oil and the auto industry by accepting money from them for their research. The GW skeptics respond, tu quoque, that far more money is sought and paid to the human caused global warming advocates through governmental, institutional, and private grants. A researcher from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland explained it this way: He said, “For example, if I apply for a grant to study the habits of ground squirrels in Northern Scotland my chances of receiving it are slim. If I simply add, ‘as it relates to global warming’ I would likely succeed.”

By all means read and listen to the people who believe current global warming is human caused, especially the ones who are climatologists or otherwise have specialized knowledge on the subject (not the Hollywood elites who are complete idiots). And even for laughs or for critical analysis, watch the Al Gore DVD, A convenient Falsehood (Do I have that title right?). Leaven this with a generous diet of what the scientific skeptics of human caused GW have to say – there are many of them and they have written a great deal on the subject despite the claims to the opposite by the agitprop myrmidons of Global Warming Doom. Then make your own informed opinion, even if tentatively, on this important issue.


QUESTIONS



1.) On day 1 the probability of rain is 50%; day 2 the probability is 20%; and day 3 the probability is 30%. What is the probability there will be rain on at least one of those days? No, the answer is not 100%.



2.) The probability of a rosebush not being watered is 2/3. Even if it is watered the probability that it withers is 1/2; if it not watered the probability that it withers is 3/4. The rosebush withers. What is the probability that the rosebush was not watered?



3.) What is the standard deviation of the following series of numbers:
9, 14, 33, -11, 27, 0, 55, -5, 6, 89 and what does it mean?