What Happens to the Political Rhetoric on Global Warming When the Economy Slows?

By Eve Pearce, November 2012

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Governments, conglomerates, major organisations, small businesses, the average man or woman on the street and primary school kids in class have been listening to the apparent effects of global warming for many a year now. Everything from shock tactics to subtle manipulation has been tried by those who believe in the principle that our world is heating up to dangerous proportions – and it’s all our fault. This theory has been taken on board by politicians around the world who use ‘data’ in a manner more convenient for their manifestos, to introduce a whole new wealth of taxes that never used to exist and to ‘educate’ the next generation into believing that green house gases are the main cause of global warming.

HALLOWE’EN CELEBRATIONS: AN EPIC WEEK OF SUCCESS FOR PSI

It’s been an extraordinary week for PSI both in the news and behind the scenes. A dramatic twist in a high profile lawsuit, the publication of a new paper set to trigger a scientific paradigm shift, plus a membership surge bringing eminent scientists into the fold – including one Nobel Science Prize nominee.

The biggest media story concerns developments in the Climategate scandal involving disgraced Penn. State University researcher, Dr. Michael Mann and our very own chairman, Dr. Timothy Ball. It seems Ball is on the brink of a sensational courtroom victory over Mann, who first stole onto the world stage thanks to his ‘hockey stick’ graph trumpeted across the world in 2001 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Mann’s graph was widely cited as the smoking gun proving catastrophic man-made global warming.

Climate Sense and Nonsense

By Dr Martin Hertzberg , 29 October 2012

          The fear mongering hysteria contained in the proposed draconian measures for “carbon control” being advocated by some “climate scientists”, government agencies, and others concerned with “global warming / climate change” which is being attributed to human emission of Carbon Dioxide, requires a rational and scientific response.

          I served as a forecasting and research meteorologist while on active duty with the U. S. Navy. It was then that I first learned what climatologists and meteorologists have known for over a century and what the current crop of so-called “climate scientists”, EPA administrators, and those concerned with climate change apparently never learned: that weather and climate are controlled by natural laws on an enormous scale that dwarfs human activity. Those laws engender forces and motions in our atmosphere and oceans that are beyond human control. Weather and climate existed long before humans appeared on Earth, and will continue to exist in the same way long after we are gone.

Although these various explanations of the greenhouse effect have a similar theme they are different from one another in that they each invoke different laws of physics and thermodynamics to explain how “greenhouse gases” warm the planet. Some of these “laws” don’t even exist or are a complete impossibility.

1. The radiative surface combined with lapse rate

• GHG’s cause the atmosphere to emit OLR from a progressively higher and higher altitude. This forces the surface temperature to increase due to the lapse rate.

2. Back-radiative heating where cold radiation heats a warmer surface

• Radiation from a colder source and/or radiation scattered back from the same source will cause a temperature increase on a warmer object/same source (self-heating) because radiation doesn’t have to follow the Laws of Thermodynamics as we understand them for matter. Back-conduction is non-sensical and can’t increase temperature but radiation can do this.

A mathematical joke asks, “What do you get when you cross a mountain-climber with a mosquito?” Answer: “Nothing: you can’t cross a scalar with a vector.”

Non-mathematically minded readers may not get the ‘joke’ until later in this article. But when you do, you may feel it’s the most expensive ‘joke’ told, and it’s being played on you and me.

If you’ve ever followed the heated debate about man-made global warming you will know the cornerstone of that science is the so-called “greenhouse gas effect” (GHE). It is purported that rising human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of those so-called GHE gases, is dangerously adding to climate change. The chosen remedy of western governments: we must all pay more taxes, cut back our industrial emissions and invest in various questionable alternative energy schemes to avert a planetary crisis.

To this end, many a (government) climatologist or Greenpeace activist will regale you with the glib assertion that the GHE makes our planet  “33 degrees warmer than it would otherwise be.” But where does this “33 degrees” number come from and is it scientifically valid? Contrary to media hype this number is not “an observation” it is the product of a 30-year-old calculation from a team of researchers led by NASA’s Dr. James E. Hansen. It is a ubiquitous claim that the number “proves” the GHE is real. [1,2]

The August issue of Water 21, the official magazine of the International Water Association has an article by Lis Stedman on “Reports warn of climate change impact on oceans” that is highly misleading. [1]

Stedman provides a summary of an UN Development Programme (UNDP) report issued around the time of the Rio+20 conference earlier this year in Rio de Janeiro. To boost the message visually, the article is accompanied by a picturesque photo of three quaint-looking fishing boats with the caption “Fishing boats on the Bay of Bengal, where sea level rise is causing seawater intrusion into freshwater resources.”

Even though neither U.S. presidential candidate is talking up man-made global warming behind the scenes courts are hard at work making laws based on controversial greenhouse gas science.

 An undemocratic, largely unseen shift in American law is now taking place. You would never know it from the media facade but 2012 has witnessed an inexorable Big Green legal juggernaut driving across America. Judges not voters are at the wheel and by stealthy maneuvering we are being steamrollered by secret government diktat rather than electoral preference. It is happening away from the public political barometer because the mainstream media focuses voter minds on believing the race for the Whitehouse is all about the grassroots economy.

      Out of curiosity I ran some numbers related to ethanol production, which turns food into fuel.  To produce one gallon of ethanol about 22 pounds of corn (1) needs to be sacrificed.  22 lbs of corn contains about 10,560 calories, (2) which are enough calories to feed one person for about four days. (3) Therefore the calories sacrificed to make 90 gallons of ethanol could sustain one person for an entire year.  Since the US currently produces 10.6 billion gallons (4) of ethanol yearly, enough corn is being sacrificed each year for ethanol production in the United States to feed 117 million people.  This is occurring at the same time that the United States Department of Agriculture is reporting that over 50,000,000 people living in the United States are in “food-insecure households” (5) because their families do not have sufficient funds to purchase adequate amounts of food.

      The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandates that by 2022 36 billion gallons of biofuels will be produced in the United States.  15 billion gallons of this biofuel is expected to come from corn. (6) This will require the sacrifice of enough food to feed 166,000,000 people–over half the current population of the United States.  This doesn’t even take into consideration that it takes at least 2/3 gallon of fossil fuel, by the US Department of Energy’s own figures, to produce one gallon of ethanol. (7)  (Ethanol producers do not use ethanol to produce ethanol because it is too expensive.)

Why do ‘official’ climate scientists need spin doctors? Because they practice politics not science. Climategate like Watergate was completely undone by the cover up of disgraceful behavior disclosed in emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in November 2009.

The first 1000 emails included some selected to expose behavior unacceptable even without knowledge of climatology. Others show how the anthropogneic global warming (AGW) science was conjured. Exposure of CRU members was important because they dominated and controlled the major portions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports. The leaks achieved their objective of derailing the political program of the Conference of the Parties (COP) 15 in Copenhagen. The COP was in a bind because they’re starting point is IPCC science.

George Hadley (1685 – 1768), an Age of Enlightenment citizen, lawyer and amateur meteorologist made a major contribution to climatology through an interest in the Trade Winds. He worked inductively using ships weather logs to produce a theory about atmospheric circulation. Named after him, the Hadley cell is the only portion of the atmospheric circulation we understood in concept for 250 years. Its role is a major factor in global weather and climate yet is completely inadequately covered in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) computer models. The error in coverage exceeds any possible human impact and is one more factor causing consistently failed predictions.  

Figure 1: Schematic of the Hadley Cells; Where winds converge at the Equator is the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ).

The droughts that are occurring this year on the Great Plains are a true calamity, but to blame them on a “greenhouse gas” mediated “greenhouse effect” is improper from a scientific point of view, since the “greenhouse effect” is hypothetical warming said to be caused primarily by water vapor and droughts are caused by a lack of water vapor. Therefore, droughts and the “greenhouse effect” cannot occupy the same space at the same time—one requires the presence of water vapor and the other requires its absence.  I say that the “greenhouse effect” causes “hypothetical” warming because I recently completed a simple scientific study that demonstrates that an increased presence of water vapor is accompanied by a decrease in temperatures, but we will go over those results in a minute.

Claims of human produced CO2 causing climate change are based on output of computer models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Programmed to produce predetermined results their output is used for global and national policies on energy even though projections have been consistently wrong. Failures caused a switch from predictions to scenarios, but it didn’t help. Most recent scenarios projected increases between 1.3 and 2.8°C, but temperatures declined as CO2 increased. Since 2000 the trend is wrong and for the last five years is below the lowest IPCC projection.

Despite compelling experimental, real-world evidence to the contrary we expose over fifty junk science statements by leading authorities still claiming our atmosphere works like a greenhouse.

(Why Wood and Nahle were correct and Pratt was in error.)

Introduction

The famous experiment by Robert W. Wood, at John Hopkins University, with two carton boxes/greenhouses, in 1909, is being mentioned everywhere, and on many websites,* as simple experimental evidence proving the fallacy of the greenhouse gas effect theory (GHE).

According to the GHE theory, the small greenhouse with a glass cover had to reach a temperature of nearly 15°C higher than the other small greenhouse with a salt rock (halite) ceiling. This is because salt rock is a material which is “neutral” to infra-red, while glass can theoretically “trap” almost 80-85{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of infra-red outgoing from the heated bottom of the greenhouse, and significantly increase the temperature, by “backradiating” the infrared (IR) waves.

Nothing of that took place, and both greenhouses showed almost the same temperatures inside, with a discrepancy of “scarcely one degree”. For years this experiment was sufficient to dispel giving any scientific ground to the greenhouse gas effect theory. But several decades later, many GHE advocates “forgot” this experiment.

After the Skeptical Science blog publishes it’s critique of the recent paper by scientist Joseph E. Postma debunking the so-called greenhouse gas effect Postma posts another telling rebuttal. The full and unexpurgated version is provided below.

By Joseph E. Postma (Astrophysicist)

I have been asked to write a brief overview on the errors and misconceptions as presented on the so-called “Skeptical Science” blog. I’d first like to point out that the term “skeptical science” is an oxymoron and so it immediately calls into question what kind of person might use such a term. 

We immediately find the tag line “Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism”, which therefore identifies the site not as an actual science communication blog, but a political policy blog, and we thus have our answer to the previous question: it is not a site run by scientists (even if they may hold scientific degrees, does not mean they’re practicing or communicating legitimate science…knowledge of science in these typical cases is used to distort science from reality with the hopes that a scientifically illiterate populace will take it seriously, which they generally don’t), rather, it is a site run by agenda-makers. 

Is a nuclear renaissance around the corner?

It may just happen. For example, Japan has just announced its intention to restart some of their nuclear power plants (NPPs). France is planning to increase its electricity production by NPPs from currently 50% to 90% of its national needs. Pakistan, India and China are rapidly expanding their NPP construction programs. Even in the US, new NPPs are on the drawing boards and in the permitting stage.

Green Ideology

The green ideology, first conjured by The Green Party in Germany a few decades ago, saw nuclear power as its anathema. With large deposits of coal, and cheap oil from the Mid-East, there was no shortage of electricity to drive the economy. Still, Germany built 17 NPPs which have provided steady power for the past four decades.