Trilogy of Failure in Global Warming Science
The shortcomings in much government-funded climate research are too broad to be addressed in one article but herein we highlight three key areas of concern; (1) biased peer review in prominent journals and among national institutions, (2) misidentification of the role of carbon dioxide in climate and (3) a systemic avoidance of increasingly compelling evidence for global cooling.
The “we” referred to above is Principia Scientific International (PSI), a non-political body of over 350 concerned members, many of whom hold PhD’s from the “hard” sciences. PSI’s unpaid experts reviewed the evidence and determined there exists no measurable man-made climate warming; the widely-reported assertion it exists and may be “dangerous” is a trite, faith-based assertion emanating mostly from a dominant and self-serving clique of government-sponsored climate researchers.
By contrast, the most overlooked evidential certainty of our time is that global cooling is under way and, as such, man-made global warming theory premised on rising “greenhouse gas” emissions (CO2 levels allegedly up 40 percent in recent decades) is discredited. Despite continued efforts by the scientific establishment to suppress dissent on the issue a growing number of experts are speaking out.
Dissenters argue that obfuscation is rife and cherry-picking of data too often the norm. Such subterfuge persists because earth’s water-dominant climate is complex and barely understood by practitioners in this infant field of science. Indeed, the greenhouse gas theory obsesses about radiative forcing despite the fact that temperatures in both greenhouses and our atmosphere are dominated by convection and conduction.
Censorship of Inconvenient Science
Instead of being listened to, for too long concerned independent experts from outside the climate science fraternity have been shunned by self-serving climate journals and national science bodies engaged in secretive and subjective peer review practices.
There are numerous examples we could draw on but we first highlight the experience of one of our own members, Physicist Terri Jackson, a former lecturer at Belfast Metropolitan College and science advisor to Northern Ireland’s First Minister. Terri’s mistreatment by the Institute of Physics (IoP), where she has been a member for 30 years, typifies the cynical and systemic censorship in play. Despite being the founder of the IoP’s High Energy Physics Group Jackson was shunned after initially being invited by the London branch to submit a climate-related article for one of their newsletters. Once the powers that be saw Jackson intended to address the growing evidence for global cooling her submission was rejected. Shocked at the IoP’s reaction, Jackson determined it amounted to “censorship of the worst kind” and proof of “scientific suppression.”
In a subsequent press statement, Beth Taylor, the IoP’s director of communications and external relations, glibly reported that Jackson’s analysis was rejected because it lacked “proper validation or peer review.” But as the leaked Climategate emails proved, the subjectivism and political advocacy that passes for “peer review” among climate researchers would be condemned in other fields of science.
Jackson, now Recruitment Officer for PSI, urges us to consider other high profile cases of systemic bias. “The recent resignation of Professor Richard Tol from the IPCC is further proof of growing dissent. There has been no global rise in temperature for seventeen years. The rise that did occur 1970 to 1998 was entirely natural and due to the changing sun and ocean cycles,” says Jackson.
Notably, May 2014 evidenced the mistreatment of Professor Lennart Bengtssom, former Director of the prestigious Hamburg based Max Planck Institute of Meteorology. Professor Bengtsson’s findings challenged those of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that erroneously backs the increasingly discredited theory of man-made climate change. His story was reported in the Times newspaper of London (May 16, 2014). The unethical censorship of Bengtssom is powerful testament of a new kind of McCarthyism in science. It is no coincidence that Bengtssom’s research was rejected by Environment Research Letters – a publication owned by the IoP. The vast list of disaffected dissenters, including former IPCC scientists, grows year on year.
For years propagandists have repeatedly claimed the science was “settled.” But in recent times research has uncovered previously unknown or ill-considered factors in climate change, for instance, a possible dominant sun–ocean–climate connection. As the latest peer-reviewed science cited herein shows, our oceans with such large heat capacity, can store and transport huge amounts of heat. As such, earth’s powerful hydrological cycles cause a time lag between the impacts of (variable) solar activity and air temperature change. Time lag effects on climate also occur in other ways not considered by the politicised IPCC, increasingly recognised as a sham science body despite it winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 (note: not the science prize!). Since then further analysis of the important Vostok ice core data proves the existence of a previously overlooked time lag discrepancy between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and temperatures. Today, fuller and more complete analysis of such primary evidence makes a mockery of alarmist claims that contemporary industrial emissions of CO2 raised global temperatures between the 1970’s and 1997.
The Role of Carbon Dioxide
Despite billions spent on research in the last 30 years, much stubbornly remains uncertain in climate science. But what we can be sure of, upon scrupulous examination of all the empirical data, is that there is no evidence that variance in atmospheric CO2 drives climate change. Indeed, on a geological time-scale, many peer-reviewed studies show that rises in levels of atmospheric CO2 seem to lag rises in temperatures by about 800 years. [1]
Indeed, experts from the “hard” sciences such as Chemistry and Physics go as far as to say the very opposite of climate scientists. PSI Chairman, Dr Pierre Latour, a renowned Chemical Engineer has now published (June 2014) his own expert analysis, ‘Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Lags Temperature: the Proof.’ Objective evidence shows that above all carbon dioxide has pronounced cooling characteristics and is demonstrably a benign harmless gas essential for life.
Eminent expert, Professor Murry Salby, in recent presentations in the House of Commons and Scottish Parliament, further confirmed that all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be accounted for from natural causes with no reference to humans (see report: www.scef.org.uk). Salby was disenfranchised and exiled from academia in Australia for daring to speak such “sacrilege.”
In fact, satellites prove increases in CO2 levels are shown to be coming from high vegetation equatorial areas of the earth (not industrialized regions). Yasuhiro Sasano, Director of Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies admits, “in the high latitudes of the Northern hemisphere [industrialized regions] emissions were less than absorption levels.” Unsurprisingly, Japan sensibly abandoned its CO2 limitation targets when Japanese IBUKU climate satellite data confirmed this. [2]
Oceanographers, Geographers and Geologists are also in agreement that ocean temperatures and CO2 prevalence in the environment have no distinguishing human signal. While a giant of Geology and Glaciology, Professor Christian Schlüchter, recently spoke out about how his game-changing discovery on glaciers and climate change was suppressed by global warming sensationalists.
The concept of strong climate-forcing by atmospheric CO2 concentrations, as advocated by the IPCC, is therefore proven to be at odds with climate developments during geological, historical and recent times (Priem; van Geel & Ziegler). Energy & Environment, Vol. 24 No. 3 & 4, 2013).
Oceanography affirms that the greatest source and sink of CO2 are the shallow layers of the Southern Oceans and the Arctic Sea, respectively (Schmitt et al., 2012). The depleted fraction of atmospheric CO2 has a dominant natural biogenic component overwhelmingly related to atmosphere/water exchange fractionation (Quirk, 2009; Piper, 2012).
The Role of Solar Cycles & Global Cooling
Solar physicists understand that our sun is shown as the driver of earth’s climate and global cooling is the new norm as solar activity is measurably in decline. A review of possible connections between the Sun and the Earth’s climate is given by Gray and et al. (2010). [3]
Weak solar activity correlates with cooler temperatures and vice versa. In essence, fluctuations in sunspot activity show a strong correlation with temperatures revealing a rhythmic cyclical pattern leading to continuous climate change. This has been known since the observations from 1893 by the English astronomer Walter Maunder, who came to the conclusion that, from 1645 to 1715, sunspots had been generally absent, which coincided with the coldest part of the severe temperature dip known as the “Little Ice Age” that stretched from about 1300 to 1870.
Independent experts including astrophysicist Piers Corbyn and Habibullo Abdussamatov’s work affirms this. Corbyn has a thriving business in long range weather forecasting with a claimed 70 percent or above success rate premised on accounting for solar factors. Meanwhile, in his capacity of the head of the Russian-Ukrainian project “Astrometria” on the Russian segment of the International Space Station, Abdussamatov is conducting additional research to refine his long-held prediction of a new Little Ice Age starting from 2014. [4]
Abdussamatov’s analysis is on page 140 of a 2009 report issued by the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, documenting more than 700 scientists who disagree that global warming is an anthropogenic, or man-made, phenomenon. While the latest peer-reviewed paper shows that “Periods with many sunspots and faculae correspond with periods with higher irradiance in the visual spectrum and even stronger response in the ultraviolet, which acts on the ozone level. It is also proposed that galactic cosmic rays can act as cloud condensation nuclei, which may link variations in the cloud coverage to solar activity, since more cosmic rays penetrate the Earth’s magnetic field when the solar activity is low.” [5]
Such evidence accords with the twenty-four climate parameters monitored by the Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC) and recorded in its quarterly Global Climate Status Report (GCSR) in which eighteen of them show global cooling as the dominant trend. The remaining six are expected to convert to ‘cooling’ status within the next five years.
Despite data from NASA, the US Air Force, and the National Solar Observatory confirming the on-going decline in solar activity, these researchers have been ignored.
And the Polar Ice Keeps on Growing
Real-world scientific facts (unlike pseudo-scientific climate models) show Antarctic ice extent is undergoing a long-term expansion even though alarmists and mainstream media would have us believe the contrary based on cherry-picking natural events and not due to any human influences (see: ‘Antarctic Melting Reports Omit Key Facts,’ (Larry Bell; May 19, 2014)).
Beyond doubt, we are in a phase now where the Antarctic ice extent is setting record after record. It’s not just the Antarctic, either. Widely accepted satellite measurements of both polar ice caps prove no decline in polar ice since the start of the satellite era in 1979. Polar ice extent is greater than the long-term average and has been so continuously for the past 16 months. In the United States winter temperatures show a distinct 20-year cooling trend, defying all alarmist predictions.
If climatology is to ever attain respect from those who practice in the “hard” sciences then a more open, non-partisan and multi-disciplinary approach is required; one that conspicuously disavows post normal methods.
References
[1] Smagorinsky et al. (1982) and Idso (1982, 1989]; Fischer et al. (1999) found that “the time lag of the rise in CO2 concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order of 400 to 1000 years during all three glacial-interglacial transitions.” Indermuhle et al. (2000) performed a statistical test on the data that suggested that shifts in the air’s CO2 content lagged shifts in air temperature by approximately 900 years. Caillon et al. (2003) examined Vostok ice cores and they also concluded “the CO2 increase lagged Antarctic deglacial warming by 800 ± 200 years.” Caillon et al., “confirms that CO2 is not the forcing that initially drives the climatic system during a deglaciation.”
[2] O’Sullivan, J., ‘New Satellite Data Contradicts Carbon Dioxide Climate Theory,’(October 31, 2011), climaterealists.com
[3] L.J. Gray et al., ‘Solar influence on climate. Reviews of Geophysics,’ 48 (2010), p. RG4001 http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2009RG000282
[4] Abdussamatov, ‘Optimal prediction of the peaks of several succeeding cycles on the basis of long-term variations in the solar radius or solar constant, ‘ Kinematics and Physics of Celestial Bodies, 23 (2007), pp. 97–100
[5] Solheim, Stordahl & Humlum, ‘The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24,’ Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Volume 80, May 2012, Pages 267–284
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