Recently an article was posted on the WUWT web site that contained this statement:

“CO2 and other GHG’s impede the transfer of LWIR energy to the top of the atmosphere where it is finally re-radiated into space. Without GHG’s, the lower atmosphere would be very cold . . . For those who doubt this, see” Roy Spencer’s post What If There Was No Greenhouse Effect?

I do; so I did. Unfortunately Spencer’s article is just a restatement of the same hypothetical but in the form of a “thought experiment” in which he describes what he imagines the temperature profile of the atmosphere would be if there were no “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere and no standing water on Earth that could evaporate into water vapor. He then attributes to the “greenhouse effect” the difference between what the temperature profile of the atmosphere actually is and what he imagines it would be if there were no “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere or standing water on the planet.

The problem with such “thought experiments” is that they exist purely in one’s mind and produce no empirical evidence. In short, they are not testable. We cannot, for example, remove all of the “greenhouse gases” from the atmosphere and rid the planet of standing water in order to test the veracity of Roy Spencer’s imaginary world. An axiom in science is that you cannot use a hypothetical to prove a hypothetical because an actual, physical, empirical experiment is needed to sort out the difference between what actually exists in the physical world and what only exists in the minds of men.

Karl Popper (1902–1994) stressed this point. “Popper stresses the problem of demarcation—sorting the scientific from the unscientific—and lays the demarcation criterion falsifibility, such that the unfalsifiable are unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory proved true by scientific method is pseudoscience.” 

But all is not lost. Even though Spencer’s “thought experiment” is untestable and therefore unscientific it does contain two postulates that can be tested empirically:

One of the significant errors commonly made by the advocates of catastrophic man-made global warming due to CO₂ emissions is the claim by the settled science proclaimers that radiation from a non-vacuum interface is the same as radiation from a surface into a vacuum. This error in the physics of radiation from the Earth’s surface results in an exaggeration of the cooling radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface and contributes to them positing a hugely larger back-radiation from greenhouse gases than can actually occur.

I have previously pointed out that the Stefan-Boltzmann Law actually only tells us the amount of radiation emitted by a surface into a vacuum. A surface in contact with another material will lose energy by other mechanisms, so one must apply the law of Conservation of Energy to determine the actual amount of radiation in many cases of material contact across an interface. In the case of the Earth’s surface, water is evaporated at the surface with a very substantial cooling effect. In addition, air molecules strike the surface and carry away heat gained in collisions with the surface. Despite these obvious problems with an unchanged surface emission of radiant energy into the atmosphere compared to that into a vacuum, the settled science proclaimers have in many cases steadfastly said that I am wrong. OK, so I will try to explain this in greater detail in this post.

Dear Chris,

Principia Scientific International salutes your tireless efforts in recent years in opposing the nonsense of man-made global warming. But to those of us who carefully study the history of climate alarmism you are the veritable “poacher turned gatekeeper.”

You have carefully styled yourself as “science adviser” to Margaret Thatcher during her tenure as British Prime Minister in the 1980’s. As the records show, back then the “Iron Lady” became the first world leader to promote what we now know as the man-made global warming scam. At that time you boasted you used “the first computer they had ever seen in Downing Street,” to perform “radiative-transfer calculations that indicated climate scientists were right to say some ‘global warming’ would arise as CO2 [carbon dioxide] concentration continued to climb.”

But as an armchair scientist you have been proved wrong. As the decades passed and CO2 levels rose by 40 percent we have seen global temperatures flatline for 16 years. Greenhouse gas predictions (and thus the science) are shown to be wrong.

We have to be careful to distinguish between latent heat and trapped heat, particularly in the sense that Anthropogenic Global Warmers use the term.

Latent Heat is used most often, following Joseph Black, to describe the change of state from ice, a solid, to water, a liquid, to steam, a gas (water vapour), which are all chemically of the same composition.

In order to clarify the difference to ourselves we may buy at a Supermarket a bag of ice. Let us open the bag and pour the contents into a large saucepan, put it on the stove, light the gas. Having applied x calories of heat the ice rapidly turns to water – it has changed from a solid to a liquid, chemical composition H2O.

If I continue to heat this pan of water until 100C, the water will turn to steam, a gas.Steam and water vapour are one and the same, except that the concentration in the atmosphere differs. Steam is clearly visible to the naked eye, whereas water vapour istransparent, though it can be seen on summer mornings as dew rising from the grass.

It is notable that steam rapidly loses its heat and quickly condenses. This demonstrates the volatility of gases. Hot water on the other hand will retain its heat for a long period compared to the gas, demonstrating heat capacity.

Of course, steam can be used to drive turbines and steam engines – the beginning of railways and the industrial age. We can use a bag of ice in order to learn about the Arctic. If we keep the bag in a cold store where the temperature is rarely if ever above zero C. the ice will barely melt at all. However put the same bag of ice in a bowl of tepid water, the ice will melt rapidly. This shows that Arctic Ice will melt, not from the atmosphere, as the AGWs seem to think, but as the result of warm currents of water.

The AGWs use the analogy of sunlight on a stationary car, with windows closed. They aver correctly that the temperature within the car will rise, and they call this ‘trapped heat’. What they omit to add is that this rise of temperature will only occur and continue while heat is being generated. Once the Sun goes down the heat rapidly disperses.

This demonstrates that all sensible heat has to be generated, that such heat is never trapped, but is either being generated or being dissipated. There is no steady state. In particular, there is no way that Carbon Dioxide can trap heat – such an idea is bizarre!

Here I hope I have demonstrated the difference between latent heat and sensible heat in a way that is comprehensible to the layman.

Anthony Bright-Paul

After providing exemplary unpaid service in helping this fledgling science association get off the ground Dr. Tim Ball steps down as Chairman after a personally very challenging two-year period. With 2013 shaping up as an exciting year of growth Principia Scientific International (PSI) expands our leadership team with the appointment of highly respected and established talent.

PSI’s new Chairman is Imperial College’s John Sanderson (photo, center). John is the immediate past president of the Royal College of Science Association, a physicist by training and an experienced and skilled administrator. John wishes to be more than just a figurehead as he helps guide our maverick organization forward as a credible alternative to established yet politicized science associations. John will focus on extending PSI’s reach, not only further into academia, but elsewhere where a truly independent voice on scientific issues needs to be heard.

Two new vice Chairmen: John Elliston & Pierre Latour

With PSI’s growing worldwide membership two new important positions have been created to cope with the demands of such diversity. Serving as Vice Chair (North) will be Dr. Pierre R. Latour, an internationally respected Chemical Engineer of few peers. Dr. Latour’s alma mater, Purdue University’s School of Chemical Engineering, has honored him with their Outstanding Chemical Engineer Award making him one of only 116 of the school’s 9,000 alumni to be so recognized. Pierre has published 68 papers, holds one U.S. patent, and was also Control magazine’s Engineer of the Year in 1999. 

Since joining us in 2011 Dr. Latour has taken a lead in shaping PSI’s policy on the applied sciences and engineering and he now assumes responsibility for guiding our development in North America and Europe.

John N.W. Elliston, a chemical geologist by training will be serving as Vice Chair (South) where he will have an open brief to expand PSI’s network of business and academic contacts throughout Australasia. In a long and successful career as manager, director and full time researcher John first distinguished himself at Peko-Wallsend Limited before engaging on a series of research contracts at CRA Exploration Pty. Limited. He has prepared 103 scientific papers and reports and is holder of the Order of Australia for his services to the Australian mining industry.

PSI wishes to thank all those other outstanding candidates who put their names forward for the above positions in what turned out to be a stunning pool of talent from which to choose. As an association that wishes to represent equally all members from academia and the applied sciences supportive of the traditional scientific method we trust our leadership balance struck between the applied and theoretical sciences will hearten all members.

Finally, we say a big thank you to outgoing Chairman, Dr. Tim Ball for the dignity, courage and humility he showed in the post and we wish him every success for the future.

 

There is a common misconception that the atmosphere warms the Earth and it is this misconception that is at the root of all the theories of Anthropogenic Global Warming, and that beloved offshoot of theirs, namely Climate Change.

It is commonly said that because the radiative power from the Earth system into space is the same as that of a black body with a temperature of about 255K and the observed average temperature of the Earth’s surface is about 14.5ºC or 287.65K, the surface of the Earth is nearly 33K warmer than it would be if there were no greenhouse effect.  The greenhouse effect is said to be due to infra-red active gases such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane gas, and nitrous oxide.

The problem with this argument is that while the Earth system is in radiative equilibrium with space, the surface of the Earth is not.  Thus, there is a complex relationship between the equilibrium temperature of the Earth’s surface and its equivalent radiative temperature as a black body radiator.  Some of the radiation into space is direct from the Earth’s surface, but most of it is from the infra-red active gases of the many layers of the atmosphere.

I have previously shown that the infra-red gases probably produce more cooling than warming.  Those arguments were not simple enough for most people to follow and they did not show what the amount of cooling of the Earth’s surface actually was.  I am going to show a surprisingly simple proof in this article that the infra-red gases, commonly called greenhouse gases, cause the surface temperature of the Earth to be much cooler than it would be if our atmosphere had no infra-red active gases in it.

Consider the following NASA energy budget of the Earth:

As I have discussed in an article called The Unsettled Earth Energy Budget, one should add a small amount of energy absorbed by the Earth’s surface due to back-radiation from the atmosphere.  My estimate for that back-radiation is about 1 to 2{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the solar insolation radiation at the top of the atmosphere.  Since other NASA Earth energy budgets put the amount of energy absorbed from the direct solar insolation at 48 or 49{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117}, let us only add the 1{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} back-radiation amount to the 51{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} absorbed solar insolation shown above.  In 2010, the average top of the atmosphere solar insolation was 1365.8 W/m².  The average solar insolation over the day at a spot on the rotating Earth is one-quarter this amount.

At equilibrium, the power absorbed by the Earth’s surface equals the power emitted by the Earth’s surface.  If the Earth’s surface were an interface with vacuum, the total emitted power is given by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law and we have the equilibrium condition:

P_abs = ε σ T⁴,

Where ε is the Earth’s surface emissivity, σ = 5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m²K⁴, and T is the average surface temperature of the Earth.  Thus we have:

P_abs = (1365.8/4)(0.52) = ε (5.6697 x 10^-8 W/m²K⁴)(287.65K)⁴

Solving the equation for ε, we find:

ε = 0.457

This is an emissivity somewhat less than half what most commonly is claimed for the Earth’s surface.

It is common to claim that emissivity is nearly black body-like, with 0.95 < ε < 0.98.  The claim is also made that like a near black body, the Earth both absorbs and emits a continuum of infra-red radiation in the mid- and far-infra-red ranges characteristic of a black body radiator with a temperature somewhere between 220 and 360K.  It is claimed that the absorptivity and the emissivity are matched as they would be in a black body radiator.  Yet, infra-red spectroscopy in the laboratory on common laboratory FTIR spectrometers show that the absorption spectra of water, minerals, soil, and plant materials are not at all similar to that of a black body.  The very characteristic spectra of these materials are used to identify them or similar materials.  Yet, there are those who claim that the emissivity of water which covers 71{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the Earth’s surface is in this near black body range and that so are the emissivity and absorptivity of most organic materials, such as plant materials.  Such a claim is inconsistent with the NASA Earth energy budget shown in the diagram above.

With an excellent discussion underway, unfortunately – but not surprisingly – Anthony Watts abruptly closed comments on his latest article attacking Principia Scientific International (PSI).  From his readers’ feedback it is clear Mr. Watts went off half cocked with his mischaracterization that PSI had  “misinterpreted” a revealing NASA press release about CO2, solar flares, and the thermosphere.

Mr Watts is probably aware that he has no valid response to many of the points made by PSI members in various papers and articles. 

Working overtime to hide that elephant with its umbrella is climatologist, Dr.Roy Spencer. Not only did a world-leading expert in thermodynamics, Dr. Pierre R Latour, point out Spencer’s errors with his ‘No, Virginia’ rebuttal to Spencer’s ‘Yes, Virginia’ blog post we’ve seen many other highly-respected scientists disagreeing with Dr. Spencer.

UC Berkeley Discredits Spencer’s Infinite Heat Sink

A look at a thermodynamics physics text from UC Berkley proves, using standard physics, that cold does not heat up warm even in the presence of “backradiation.” Problem #1023 shows that a radiation shield does not cause a source to become hotter if its radiation is trapped, and Problem #1026 shows that a sphere surrounded by a shell simply warms up the shell until the shell emits the same energy as the sphere, without requiring the sphere to become hotter and with the presence of backradiation. What Spencer, Watts, Willis, et al mistakenly believe, is that in order for something warm to heat up something cool, the warmer thing has to heat up itself! As absurd a proposition as an ice cream licking itself.

A recent study found “Emperor penguin body surfaces cool below air temperature.” The authors claim that the penguins’ plumage radiates heat which results in their surface temperature cooling below the ambient air temperature.

Obviously, we need more penguins to radiate excessive heat into space.

Perhaps the increase of the Antarctic’s ice cover in the last few years is the result of the (unexpected) increase in the number of emperor penguins? (You may remember that global warming, pardon me, I mean climate change was supposed to have them nearly wiped out by now). What else can we deduce from this study?

The Study

University of Glasgow scientist DJ McCafferty and five coworkers used thermal imaging photography to study the emperor penguins breeding colony of Pointe Geologie, in Terre Adelie, Antarctica, from 4 June to 29 June 2008. The results were recently reported in the journal Biology Letters. Using a thermal imaging camera they measured the body, head, flippers and feet temperatures of penguins from a distance of about 10 m. In a subsequent radio interview with CBC, McCafferty mentioned that they had taken “hundreds of images,” however their published data are for 40 observations on individual penguins only.

Authors’ Findings

For the 40 recordings published, the mean body (trunk) surface, air and ice temperatures were -21.9, -17.6 and -29.1 °C, respectively. Hence the mean air temperature was warmer than the penguins’ body temperature mean by approximately 4 °C.

What may really surprise you though is that these scientists did not bother to actually measure the air temperature at the colony’s location. They used temperature recordings at the Dumont d’Urville research station (66° 39’ 45’’ S, 140° 00’ 05’’E), a distance of approximately 2 km away and a formula to calculate from those records the air temperature at the penguins.

Authors’ Conclusions

“The penguins’ most outer surfaces of the body were colder than surrounding sub-zero air owing to radiative cooling. In these conditions, the feather surface will paradoxically gain heat by convection from surrounding air.” The laws of physics, of course, dictate the corollary, namely that the penguins’ surface cools the air.

My Conclusions

Either the world needs more penguins to cool the global warming (hysteria) or scientists who – with the same thermal imaging setup – actually measure the air temperature close to the penguins as well.

Or maybe the world needs fewer scientists spending their time measuring things of little or no merit.

In this article on his “WattsUpWithThat” (WUWT) website, Anthony Watts alleges that Principia Scientific International (PSI) whom he “truly dislikes giving any attention to” has done some “really bad mangling” and “completely misread the NASA study.” Sadly, for Mr. Watts his readership doesn’t agree with him. Comments on WUWT are currently running two to one in favour of PSI.

He points out patronisingly (as if we hadn’t noticed) that the NASA article was only talking about the thermosphere. Yet what does the PSI article repeatedly refer to? “Earth’s upper atmosphere” and “the thermosphere.”

And what does PSI deduce? “Greenhouse gases actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays.” Clearly we are only talking about the very harmful high intensity rays, such as those in a “burst of solar activity” early in March which NASA said delivered “26 billion kilowatt hours of energy from the Sun.” Obviously members of PSI know that the total percentage of Solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere and clouds is somewhere between 19{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} (as shown in the NASA diagram below) and the 33{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} calculated for moist cloudy regions in this paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Furthermore, when carbon dioxide absorbs such incident radiation, much of it is in the 2.7 micron band, for which each photon carries nearly four times the energy of typical 10 micron photons emitted from Earth’s surface. Notice also that the NASA diagram shows only 15{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} being absorbed by the atmosphere from upwelling radiation, so more is absorbed from incident radiation. That alone would appear to imply a net cooling effect for radiating molecules.   

So, clearly the atmosphere acts as an umbrella during sunlit hours, and yet Anthony Watts and many climatologists like to play down this cooling effect, if they even mention it. In his article Watts seems more concerned about throwing in slurring verbiage than debating the actual science. Most of the rest of his article is devoted to yet another outline of the radiative greenhouse conjecture of which we are all well aware.

Much of the absorption of incident Solar radiation is of course by water vapour and suspended water droplets, of which about 99{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} is in the troposphere, that being the lowest 10 to 17 Km of the atmosphere. This is discussed in Section 6 of my paper, Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics published in March 2012, and the graphic below (from Wikipedia) shows just how much is absorbed in various wavelengths.

Members of PSI (now numbering over 200) have long been aware that there is no valid atmospheric physics which can possibly prove that carbon dioxide could have any warming effect whatsoever. Hence we consider that this NASA article brings to light additional new information that, up in the thermosphere where water vapour has no significant role, carbon dioxide (and nitric oxide) are playing a sterling role in protecting humanity from what would almost certainly be deadly heat waves caused by sudden outbursts of coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun, such as occurred in March 2012. These ejections include both matter and radiation. The matter can collide with non-radiating molecules in the upper atmosphere, but the energy has to be transferred to radiating molecules (such as carbon dioxide) before it can be sent back to space.

Anthony Watts’ website, as well as others like the “Skeptical Science” and “Science of Doom” sites, clearly have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo – and the value of their domain names. All of them propagate what has now been shown to be blatantly incorrect physics, supposedly establishing that a radiative “greenhouse effect” somehow warmed the surface of the Earth by an average of 33 degrees, of which about 30 degrees is assumed to be due to water vapour and the rest mostly due to carbon dioxide.

The debate over whether petroleum is derived from dead fossils or from minerals has just been served fresh evidence from the deepest, darkest depths of the Pacific Ocean. The findings published in the journal ‘Science’ come as further food for thought supportive of those who say the established fossil fuel theory is wrong.

‘Science Daily,’ (March 14, 2013) showcases the findings in ‘Life Deep Within Oceanic Crust Sustained by Energy from Interior of Earth,’ whereby a team of scientists from Aarhus University are making a compelling new discovery 2.5 km deep in the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of North America. Principia Scientific International members have been among those at the forefront of the debate questioning whether oil more likely comes from rocks (abiogenic theory) rather than decayed organisms (fossil fuel theory). 

So this latest evidence from microbiologist Mark Lever and his Scandanavian team is creating a real stir. Dr. Lever’s team have been examining rock samples from the depths on board the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s research vessel JOIDES Resolution and finding evidence of life where it was once thought impossible – in rocks.

Dr. Lever reports, “We’re providing the first direct evidence of life in the deeply buried oceanic crust. Our findings suggest that this spatially vast ecosystem is largely supported by chemosynthesis.”

Dr Lever, formerly of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, is now a scientist at the Center for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University, Denmark. If confirmed, the findings are set to add further support to the theory first proposed by Russian scientists and then popularised in the West by Dr. Thomas Gold in his 1992 paper “The Deep Hot Biosphere” published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [1]

Lever, a specialist in sulphur-reducing and methane-producing organisms, says, “We collected rock samples 55 kilometres from the nearest outcrop where seawater is entering the basalt. Here the water in the basaltic veins has a chemical composition that differs fundamentally from seawater, for instance, it is devoid of oxygen produced by photosynthesis. The microorganisms we found are native to basalt,”

For decades Thomas Gold and many Russian scientists argued microbial life is widespread in the porosity of the crust of the Earth and down to depths of several kilometers, where ever rising temperatures set a limit. According to rock oil believers bacteria at such great depths is able to feed on the oil and this accounts for the presence of biological debris in hydrocarbon fuels. This, they argue, is why fossil fuel theorists need to resort to abiogenic theory for their position. By contrast Gold is backed by several thousand Russian peer-reviewed papers adamant that oil does come from rocks and is constantly being regenerated.

But, if you buy into the fossil fuel argument then, of course, you would also need to argue oil reserves are finite and ‘peak oil’ is a real concern (‘peak oil’ believers say oil reserves are fast depleting because of human extraction). But if you hold the view that abiogenic oil is more likely then there is little reason to fear humans are going to run out of oil reserves any time soon. Indeed, if oil is formed continuously from hydrocarbons in rocks then the name ‘petroleum,’ literally meaning ‘rock oil,’ is well chosen.

Back to Dr. Lever’s findings; this new ocean drilling program is showing that subsurface life obtains its energy not from photosynthesis but from chemical sources in fluids migrating upwards through the crust. As such, we can infer the mass of the deep biosphere may be comparable to that of the surface biosphere. If true, subsurface life may be widespread on other bodies in the solar system and throughout the universe, even on worlds unaccompanied by other stars. As in a previous PSI article we saw evidence that showed hydrocarbons have been identified on other planets which undermines the argument oil must come from decayed plants and other organisms.

In short, Dr. Lever’s findings may be confirmed as further validation of the about origin of natural hydrocarbons (petroleum and natural gas). As such, hydrocarbons would be shown to be not biology reworked by geology (as the traditional western fossil fuel view would hold), but rather geology reworked by biology, as argued by Thomas Gold, PSI mavericks and thousands of Russian scientists.

[1] Thomas Gold, 1999,The Deep Hot Biosphere, Springer,ISBN 0-387-95253-5

It is rare that any newly popularized book on climate gets resounding acclaim by those mavericks at Principia Scientific International (PSI). But Rupert Darwall’s ‘The Age of Global Warming’ is one such case. Darwall earns his three PSI cheers for taking a leaf out of their book and extolling Karl Popper’s more traditional scientific method above the politicized ‘post normal’ science that outgoing U.S. President Eisenhower warned us about in 1961.

And perhaps prominent figures in the climate skeptic community will wonder why such a tome from the ‘lukewarmist’ stable of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) should find PSI’s approval. Certainly it is true that in the heated climate debate there are three sides at war: the ‘alarmists’; the ‘lukewarmists’ and those ‘deniers’ of the greenhouse gas effect (GHE) assembled at PSI.

For those uninitiated on the finer points of this scientific schism we can simply say that the alarmists have long preached that humans are dangerously warming the planet thanks to industrial carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions;  the ‘lukewarmists’ disagree but concede CO2 must cause some warming, while the ‘deniers’ (Principia Scientific International) say there is no such GHE whatsoever because CO2 can only cool not warm.

It is true PSI may be congratulating Darwall in haste as we have only had those pre-publication excerpts to go on. He may well have passages inside his book proclaiming the glib but never proven Lawson mantra of “some” warming.  But there is no doubt that PSI will congratulate anyone who also champions the openness and rigor of the traditional scientific method as extolled by Karl Popper.

Perhaps without even knowing it Darwall and his colleagues at the GWPF are taking their tentative first steps towards seeing there is not a shred of real world evidence for their “some warming” claims. Dare we say it, perhaps they might even countenance applying Popperian principles to their beloved GHE and see no gas (apart from water vapor) can “trap” heat or act “like a blanket.”

So, dear reader, judge for yourself. Below we showcase an excerpt from Darwall’s book. To those who follow PSI publications they will instantly recognize Darwall’s words echo the writing of PSI Chairman, Dr. Tim Ball and essays by John O’Sullivan that pinpoint how, in the 1950’s, the American Meteorological Society proclaimed the GHE was bogus because all the infrared radiation assumed to be absorbed by CO2 is already absorbed by water vapor. Nonetheless, this anti-Popperian junk science was dusted down and re-packaged as “the greenhouse effect of gases and clouds” by an unscrupulous James Hansen in the 1980’s.

Rupert Darwall: The First Warmist * 
Financial Post, 13 March 2013

Unlike the blanket TV coverage NASA climate scientist James Hansen generated at his 1988 appearance before Congress, there were no cameras when British prime minister Margaret Thatcher addressed the Royal Society on 27th September 1988. Told that the prime minister’s speech was going to be on climate change, the BBC decided it wouldn’t make the TV news.

The speech had been a long time in the making. Flying back from visiting French president François Mitterrand in Paris in May 1984, Thatcher asked her officials if any of them had any new policy ideas for the forthcoming Group of Seven (G7) summit in London. Sir Crispin Tickell, then a deputy-undersecretary at the Foreign Office, suggested climate change and how it might figure in the G7 agenda. The next day, Tickell was summoned to Number 10 to brief the prime minister. The eventual result was to make environmental problems a specific item, and a statement in the London G7 communiqué duly referred to the international dimension of environmental problems and the role of environmental factors, including climate change. Environment ministers were instructed to report back to the G7 meeting at Bonn the following year, and duly did so.

Tickell’s interest in climate change dated from the mid 1970s. Influenced by reading Hubert Lamb’s book Climate History and the Modern World, Tickell took the opportunity of a one-year fellowship at Harvard to study the relationship between climate change and world affairs and wrote a book on the subject in 1977. By 1987, Tickell had been appointed Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations and informally was acting as Thatcher’s envoy on global warming, his position at the UN making him privy to gossip from other nations.

On two occasions, Thatcher recalled him from New York to brief her.

Tickell was always struck by her determined approach; in the world of politics, Thatcher was a woman in a man’s world and someone with scientific training in a non-scientific world. To meet the test, you had to know what you were talking about; if she challenged you, you needed to be sure of your ground; she could be remarkably vigorous, Tickell found. The prime minister wanted the government to grasp the importance of global warming.

Ministers were called to Number 10 for briefings by climate scientists. “You are to listen, not to speak,” the prime minister told them. Returning to England for his summer holiday in 1988, Tickell called on Thatcher and suggested she make a major speech on global warming. She thought the Royal Society would be the perfect forum for it. She spent two weekends working on the draft with George Guise, one of her policy advisors.

In the speech, Thatcher addressed the society as a scientist and a fellow who happened to be prime minister. Environment policy was her main subject. Action to cut power station emissions and reduce acid rain was being undertaken “at great and necessary expense,” she said, building up to her main theme. “The health of the economy and the health of the environment are totally dependent on each other,” implicitly rejecting the view of conventional economics of there being a trade-off between resources used for environmental protection which couldn’t be used to raise output or increase consumption. It was also clear that the G7’s endorsement of sustainable development had not been an oversight or meant to be taken lightly, as far as she was concerned. “The government espouses the concept of sustainable economic development,” she stated, although the new policy had not been discussed collectively by ministers beforehand or with Nigel Lawson, the chancellor of the exchequer.

Thatcher concluded her speech by referring to one of the most famous events in the Royal Society’s history, when in 1919 Arthur Eddington displayed the photographic plates taken during the total eclipse of the Sun earlier that year. The eclipse enabled Eddington to record whether light from distant stars was bent by the sun’s gravity and verify a prediction of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Cambridge philosopher Alfred Whitehead witnessed Eddington’s demonstration. The scene, tense as a Greek drama, he wrote, was played out beneath the portrait of Isaac Newton, the society’s 12th president, “to remind us that the greatest of scientific generalizations was now, after more than two centuries, to receive its first modification.” In Vienna, reports of it thrilled the 17-year-old Karl Popper. What particularly impressed Popper was the risk implied by Einstein’s theory, that light from distant stars would be deflected by the Sun’s mass, because it could be subjected to a definitive test: “If observation shows that the predicted effect is definitely absent, then the theory is simply refuted. The theory is incompatible with certain possible results of observation — in fact with results which everybody before Einstein would have expected.” These considerations led Popper to argue that the criterion for assessing the scientific status of a theory should be its capacity to generate predictions that could, in principle, be refuted by empirical evidence, what Popper called its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

Every “good” scientific theory is a prohibition. The more a theory forbids, the better it is. Scientists should therefore devise tests designed to yield evidence that the theory prohibits, rather than search for what the theory confirms. If we look for them, Popper argued, it is easy to find confirmations for nearly every theory. “Only a theory which asserts or implies that certain conceivable events will not, in fact, happen is testable,” Popper explained in a lecture in 1963. “The test consists in trying to bring about, with all the means we can muster, precisely these events which the theory tells us cannot occur.”

In 1988, proponents of global warming did not provide a similar black and white predictive test of the key proposition of global warming: the degree of warming with increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is therefore incapable of being falsified. The issue is not the capacity of carbon dioxide to absorb radiation in a test tube, which had first been demonstrated by John Tyndall in 1859, but the effect of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on the temperature of the atmosphere. An answer can only be derived from empirical observation.

Scientists Roger Revelle and Hans Suess’s characterization of mankind carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment, further illustrates global warming’s weakness as a scientific statement and its strength as a political idea. While prejudging the results of an experiment constitutes bad science, the proposition simultaneously generates powerful calls to halt the experiment before it is concluded. Yet questioning the science would inevitably be seen as weakening the political will to act. It created a symbiotic dependence between science and politics that marks 1988 as a turning point in the history of science and the start of a new chapter in the affairs of mankind.

Two years later, Mrs. Thatcher would address the UN: “We must have continued economic growth in order to generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment,” she told the General Assembly, “But it must be growth which does not plunder the planet today and leave our children to deal with the consequences tomorrow.”
In the past growth happened. Now it had to be the right sort.

*Excerpt from “The Age of Global Warming: A History,” published this month by Quartet Books, London.

As climatologists increasingly, albeit grudgingly, concede climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide approaches zero John Elliston publishes a telling paper on the UN’s disastrously wrong definition of a “Greenhouse Effect.” Aussie geoscientist Elliston, pulls no punches with a new study published this week (March 19,2013) by Principia Scientific International (PSI). [1]

In no uncertain terms, Elliston, author of several peer-reviewed papers, concludes that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on a definition of the “Greenhouse Effect” (AR4,page 946) which is “plain wrong.”

The definition and the accompanying diagrams below are the centerpiece of global warming science: the UN IPCC Assessment Report of 2007.

Elliston’s18-page analysis,‘Why not tell people about the disastrously wrong definition of “Greenhouse Effect” in IPCC Assessment Report 4,2007?’ pulls apart the IPCC’s iconic diagram (AR4, page 115) to reveal fundamental errors (shown below). The cartoon-like diagram is simplified to illustrate the flaws in their “Greenhouse Effect” concept.

Elliston found: “The statement in the definition that downward atmospheric radiation from the cold upper atmosphere “trap(s) heat” in the surface-troposphere system to result in higher temperatures and global warming is untrue.”

He goes on to clarify, “The idea that back-radiation or radiant heat from the very cold upper atmosphere results in increasing the temperature of the warmer air below contravenes at least two elementary laws of physics (Second Law of Thermodynamics and Stefan-Boltzmann Law).”

As Elliston indisputably points out, “cold things like the exceedingly cold upper atmosphere cannot radiate heat to result in warming much hotter air near the ground that is the climate we live in.”

Scientists, like other professionals, are increasingly aware that the UN, man-made global warming and forced mass human sterilization have long been lumped together in the name of “sustainable development.” That there is growing concern about this cannot be dismissed as mere conspiracy theorizing – it is based in fact. Indeed, no less than 178 nations gathered in 1992 at Rio de Janeiro at the first ever UN Conference on Sustainability and the Environment and rubberstamped the UN’s proposals on this.

 

More than 20 years on and the scientific arguments appear irredeemably tainted by politics. In this article we address some of the key issues and present the basic facts hoping it may serve as a guide for more informed rational discussion.

In essence,Agenda 21 is a UN program that references fears about our global environment as the rationale to advance three key UN policy documents: the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the Statement of principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests; and Agenda 21. Here the United Nations defines Agenda 21:

“Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.”

Not only is Agenda 21 of increasing concern to libertarians and many civil rights supporters it is having an impact in the scientific community as well. In 2009, as Lord Christopher Monckton revealed, global warming science had become the chosen vehicle to compel nations to cede their democratic sovereignty to the UN. Monckton warned that nowhere does the UN refer to the words “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” and independent scientists saw little, if any, merit in those scientific arguments that were touted as the catalyst for wholesale reforms of our modern industrial lifestyle.

The European Union (EU) has a new law forbidding the sale of any cosmetic product that contains an ingredient tested on animals. What does it mean for you?

Cosmetic Products

Cosmetic products are defined in this context as “substances or mixtures of substances intended to be placed in contact with the external parts of the human body (epidermis, hair system, nails, etc.) or with the teeth and the mucous membranes of the oral cavity with a view exclusively or mainly to cleaning them, perfuming them, changing their appearance, protecting them, keeping them in good condition or correcting body odours.”

In practice, these regulations apply to any toothpaste, sunscreen lotion, skin cream, hair shampoo, and anything else which may be used on your body’s surface or parts thereof. It does not matter whether any such substance or product had been shown to have no detrimental effect in any standard animal test. Nor would it matter if any such product may have proven beneficial effects.

Animal Testing

In the context of the new law, the term “animal” has not been defined. Perhaps a definition can be found elsewhere in the myriad of existing and new regulations. Nevertheless, the term animal here would certainly include rats and mice, rabbits and the proverbial guinea pigs.

Among the tests routinely undertaken for cosmetic products in the past were skin and eye irritation tests. They are performed on small patches of shaved skin of live rats or mice and the appearance or lack of rashes or inflammations are determined. Similarly, the rabbit eye irritation test (also termed Draize test) is checking for irritation of the mucous membranes of eyes.