Government-funded climate science is entering its death throes yet governments still want to tax carbon dioxide at the latest international climate conference in Doha. With no global warming trend for 15 years what does the latest science say about the “greenhouse gas effect” and ‘heat trapping gases’?
Science is fast entering a new climate of realism about carbon dioxide. Eight leading scientists from Principia Scientific International (PSI) were among the 125-plus signatories of a key open letter last week to UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon protesting at pointless policies to raise carbon taxes when there is no global warming.
What sets the eight PSI experts apart from the other 120 or so is that they are in the vanguard of debunking the cornerstone of carbon dioxide fears: the greenhouse gas effect. Today Piers Corbyn launches his own blistering attack against mainstream media coverage of those Doha climate talks.
The focus of Corbyn’s venom is a particularly biased new Bloomberg article hyping the new U.S. government’s strategy to squander a further $100 billion of taxpayer monies by 2020 on pointless greenhouse gas-cutting initiatives. Corbyn pulls no punches, “CO2 [carbon dioxide] warmist delusionism is pointing the world in the wrong direction.”
Blame the Sun, Gravity and Hydrological Cycle, Not CO2
And Corbyn should know what he’s talking about. He’s widely regarded as the world’s leading independent long-range weather forecaster – no one has a better handle on what actually drives Earth’s climate. As advocated by PSI, Corbyn insists climate is driven by three key factors: the sun, latent heat (via water cycle) and gravity. All the evidence, says Corbyn, now shows carbon dioxide (CO2) has nothing to do with it. He has a point. Since 1998 global temperatures have flat-lined but atmospheric levels have risen exponentially. This proves there is no correlation between the two.
As the British weather expert insists,”there is no observed or proxy real data in the real world which demonstrates that CO2 increases contribute to warming and there is not one scientist in the world who can produce real data from recent centuries or millenia (or more) to show this.”
Backing Corbyn is Joe Postma, a young Canadian astrophysicist and rising star at Principia Scientific International (PSI) who demonstrates on his new blog what a slew of independent climate experts, including Jelbring, Nikolov and Zeller have shown: Earth’s gravity is the elephant in the room – an overlooked thermostat regulating atmospheric temperature. [1]
Also added to the mix should be latent heat (via the water cycle). Postma and his colleagues have the numbers to prove that it’s latent heat along with gravity that moderate incoming solar energy as the real climate mechanism without any need to factor in the bogus ‘greenhouse gas effect’ (GHE). With climatologists now admitting they can’t understand why there is no longer any link between levels of CO2 and temperature, they are also shown unable or unwilling to explain what has gone wrong with their GHE theory.
Sensible discussion about climate is increasingly being left to independent researchers in the blogosphere. Online is where more science papers are being published independently of the broken ‘pal review’ system of mainstream science journals. The beauty of online review is that it is far more open and lively with no holds barred across many competing web sites. One of several forums where there is dynamic and informed discussion is Tallbloke’s blog. Here you will see genuine debate over the new science provided by PSI and the ‘Slayers’ (or cynically called “the deniers”). As Postma sums it up, Earth’s gentle climate “is actually already described simply by its heat capacity, and latent heat.” A bold yet common sense declaration that will bring no shock to the sensibilities of meteorologists trained to understand barometric pressure and the role of hydrological cycle.
Here’s what one meteorologist, Ulric Lyons has to say, “water vapour, which is considered to be the dominant ‘greenhouse gas,’ reduces peak daytime surface temperature (tropics, summer at higher latitude).”
So it seems water, via latent heat, is a moderating effect in climate. Indeed, and plenty of actual empirical evidence tells us so, as demonstrated by recent experiments of Carl Brehmer. Tests in our open atmosphere prove that heat retention via latent heat and the strongest “greenhouse gas” (water vapor) actually causes lower temperatures, not higher, which tells us that what happens in our atmosphere is limited by a function of the specific heat capacity of all those gases around us.
On Downward Infrared Radiation (DWIR)
For more than 30 years crank science led by NASA’s James Hansen sought to dodge that powerful climate machine: Earth’s hydrological cycle, in favor of placing false emphasis on runaway radiation effects connected with CO2. Why? Because governments would rather scare us and more easily tax the air we breathe rather than admit natural variation by way of the sun, our oceans and clouds better accounts for climate change.
Indeed, Postma and his PSI colleagues have shown that when measured against conduction and convection, radiation is the most trivial mode of energy transport in our gaseous, wet atmosphere, despite what Hansen says. But even hard core climate alarmists will admit all the hype about CO2 and downward infrared radiation (DWIR) goes back to a clever political ruse from the 1980’s when UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher wanted an excuse to shut down Britain’s strike-prone coal mining industry. [2]
Thatcher, in her key speech to the Royal Society was the first world leader to stir up fear about the “vast increase in carbon dioxide” which she described as “a greenhouse gas” that was “creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability.” But she is now proven wrong, as there has been no additional warming this century despite the rise in CO2.
But to serve her political agenda Thatcher co-opted Big Oil in the form of Shell and BP to construct the new “science” of climatology at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) as a means to eliminate coal (and those pesky striking miners) as a viable energy source. The CRU and other universities all dived into the money pit for “research funding” and serve the agenda that put the focus on atmospheric CO2 rather than the real sky “villain” water (H2O).
Water was then and still is the only true “heat trapping” driver of climate via latent heat. The latest science shows those 1980’s claims about DWIR and carbon dioxide are busted. As Postma declares, “With Carl’s [Brehmer] data and my last paper, we proved that DWIR doesn’t actually cause additional heating on the surface, on top of what the Sun can already do. With ~300 W/m^2 extra of heating power from DWIR, that should have shown up easily. It didn’t, and this has something very important to say about how adding “cold” radiation power to “hot” radiation doesn’t actually increase the temperature of the target. Cold can’t warm up hot in other words.” Read more of Postma’s Q&A here.
Not only in the science labs but also in the courtrooms are PSI experts taking apart junk greenhouse gas science. Dr. Tim Ball’s outspoken denouncement of junk UN climate modeling so outraged the sensibilities of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) lead climate modeler, Professor Andrew Weaver that he then sued Ball for libel in January 2011. Now that case is about to come to an abrupt end after Weaver failed to show the court exactly how those IPCC models of the GHE actually work. As such, the world is on the brink of getting a legal validation that the greenhouse gas theory isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
Meanwhile, as PSI’s openly peer-reviewed papers have shown, there is no evidence of any additional heat generation occurring in Earth’s atmosphere due to CO2. So climatologists, seemingly unable to debunk PSI’s papers have fallen back on a new strategy: claiming the GHE doesn’t add any heat to the system! Instead, they now say DWIR simply delays nighttime cooling. But as with all other claims about the GHE no one has published any numbers showing by how much. Or have they?
Well, Joe Postma has the answer for us, “Again, I am the only one who has attempted to calculate that. You take the known output at TOA [top of the atmosphere], which the ZEB [the Zero-Energy-Balance] plots shows is ~240 W/m^2, and calculate how much total energy actually gets lost over night. Then, you compare that total night time energy loss to the actual amount of stored energy in the system.”
Common sense tells us that by knowing how much energy you started with, and how much you lost, you can calculate the associated drop in temperature. In this case, the drop in temperature for the whole system over night is shown to be ~1K. However, the actual measured drop at EARTH’S SURFACE as shown by Carl Brehmer’s experimental data was in fact ~10K. An increase in cooling not a delay! So much for that “nighttime cooling” gambit.
Postma continues, “Most of the drop in temperature therefore occurs at and near the surface. So why not just say that night-time DWIR actually helps cause cooling, rather than delay cooling? There is no delay measurable…but the opposite. Don’t forget that DWIR has another half – UWIR [upward infrared], and this UWIR is being lost, whereas if IR from the atmosphere didn’t exist at all, then said energy wouldn’t be lost at all.”
In short the system perpetually operates, either faster or slower, to maintain the balance such that we always see: ENERGY IN = ENERGY OUT. As fellow PSI researcher Hans Schreuder characterizes it, “Just like electricity or water in a river, if there is no gradient (of any kind of energy) then there is no movement of energy; let there be a gradient and wham energy will move to equalize the setting.”
So we see that the fact DWIR exists means that UWIR exists, and if UWIR exists then it is net cooling, not net warming, since half the internal thermal energy is being LOST, and no more energy is coming in over night. If DWIR/UWIR/IR didn’t exist at all, the atmosphere wouldn’t be able lose energy at all, and so there could be no temperature drop in the atmosphere at all. But DWIR/UWIR/IR does exist, and so energy is being lost that otherwise wouldn’t be.
As Postma sums up, “I think internal IR emission is simply passive energy exchange. It doesn’t really do anything…it is just energy being shared back and forth, but, half of the internal IR emission is UWIR – it is not all DWIR – and so the IR energy is net loss, not net gain and not delay, because if the IR didn’t exist at all, THAT would be the best way to delay cooling.” In short, once radiation enters our climate system it takes a back seat because it leaves all the real work to the hydrological cycle.
So, as Principia Scientific International has shown, if governments can’t prove global warming is due to carbon dioxide more than those other factors, then there’s no justification for hammering already hard-pressed taxpayers with more climate levies. As such we can just leave control of our climate to nature where atmospheric forces always reacts to change by seeking equilibrium, whatever we throw at it.
[1] ‘The Gravity of Some Matter,’ (January 15, 2012), tallbloke.wordpress.com (accessed online: November 30, 2012)
[2] Speech to the Royal Society (27 September 1988), Public Statement, Speech Archive, Margaret Thatcher Foundation (accessed online December 3, 2012)