A short sample of high-caliber scientists who have criticized the hoax of 'global warming', demonstrates by itself how media-engendered is the myth of consensus on 'global warming':
Here's some of the distinguished scientists you've slandered, GST:
Robert White (former head of the US Weather Bureau)
Richard Lindzen (Prof. of Meteorology at the MIT)
Willie Soon (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Sallie Baliunas (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Robert Balling Jr. (Director of the Office of Climatology, Prof. of Geography at Arizona State University)
Fred Singer (President of The Science & Environmental Policy Project)
Zbigniew Jaworowski (Chair of the Scientific council of the Warsaw Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, CLOR)
Eric S. Posmentier (Department of Physics and Mathematics at Long Island University, Brooklyn)
Michael Jorgensen (Paleoclimatologist)
Theodor Landscheidt (Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity, Nova Scotia)
Frederick Seitz (Former president of the National Academy of Sciences)
Robert E. Stevenson (Oceanographer, previously with the ONR and Secretary General of The International Association for the Physical Science of the Oceans)
Craig Idso (Center for the Study of carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Arizona)
Sherwood Idso (Center for the Study of carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Arizona)
David Legates (Center for Climactic Research, Delaware)
Chauncey Starr (Former Dean of Engineering at UCLA and founder of EPRI)
Kary Mullis (Nobel Prize, Molecular Biologist)
Add to this scientists who have reversed their originally pro-'global-warming' views, such as:
Roger Revelle (Prof. of Ocean Science at Scripps Institute of Oceanography)
Michael McElroy (Head of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard)
The above list from:
'GLOBAL WARMING': AN OFFICIAL PSEUDOSCIENCE
by Paulo N. Correa, M.Sc., Ph.D. & Alexandra N. Correa, HBA
ISBN 1-894840-35-6
biogenesislab.blogspot.com
ABSTRACT
On Nov. 1, 2005, Lawrence Livermore Laboratories announced that "if humans continue to use fossil fuels in a business-as-usual manner for the next few centuries, the polar ice caps will be depleted, ocean sea levels will rise by seven meters and median air temperatures will soar to 14.5 degrees warmer than current day..." You might think that this would be a preamble to demanding investment by industry and/or governments in alternative energy research. But you would be wrong - for it is, in fact, nothing more than scare propaganda to resign you to even more gouging by the oil companies at the gas pumps and the extortionist prices now being paid for natural gas; all in order to bring us to our knees begging for more nuclear power plants, and oil and gas exploration. LLN no longer hides its being one more power mechanism dedicated to this sort of indoctrination.
By now you should have figured this one out. Recent years have witnessed a series of fear-mongering alarmist fads in pseudo-scientific meteorology and climatology, each promoted in succession by news media and mainstream science publications. Perhaps the most expensive example of these mass-hysterias is the pseudoscientific fad of 'global warming'. The present article is an examination of the science behind the ideology of 'global warming', as well as the social and political forces driving its promotion.
Few scientists would dispute the fact that climate is changing on a planetarian scale, and there are good reasons to believe that some of the changing features are not part of a natural variation, but consequences of man-made pollution. What every good scientist will dispute, however, is whether this observed and ongoing change is, as the promoters of the 'global warming' myth dogmatically assert, an upward change in the atmosphere's mean global temperature - and whether the mechanism responsible for it is CO2 emission from fossil fuel combustion. Present-day climatology is vulnerable to these kinds of faddist dogmas - pushed forward as part of a political and media-driven agenda - because it lacks a functional, comprehensive, systematic and interconnected understanding of the nonlinear system formed by the atmosphere, the oceans, the land mass and the biosphere, and their interaction with solar radiation. The discoveries and methods of Aetherometry provide inroads towards developing such an understanding, beginning with a new understanding of the role of the Sun and solar radiation in modulating weather patterns over short and long-term scales.
I - THE FAD, THE MYTH AND THE FUDGE OF 'GLOBAL WARMING'
1. The pseudoscientific fads of Official Climatology and Environmental Sciences
There is perhaps no clearer example of the arbitrary vagaries of mainstream peer-review and its promotion of non-scientific fads, driven by political and economic interests, than the recent promotion of the pseudoscientific myth of 'global warming', systematically accompanied by the recurrent fits of public hysteria it engenders amongst scientists, politicians, environmentalists (another type of politico), mainstream science journals and mass-media.
Fads of this type - the fear-mongering alarmist type - have become the mainstay of official mass-media and the object of sensationalistic 'science-journalism'. There's been a whole series of such fads associated with pseudo-scientific meteorology and climatology, that are cyclically promoted by syndicated news media and official or mainstream science publications.
In the 70's, in the wake of the atmospheric cooling experienced between 1945-1947 and 1972, there was a passing fad of 'global' cooling, supposedly buttressed by study of the fossil record and ice samples, which had 'established' the existence of cycles of minor ice-ages (see reference to the Milankovich model below). At that time, the fear was that the earth was just turning the corner into a new ice-age. Any notion of global warming was strictly anathema. Instead, it was argued that man-made contributions would aggravate this cooling by the production of carbon and sulphur aerosols. As Richard Lindzen points out [1], some of the best-selling authors of this rubbish, like Stephen Schneider and Crispin Tickell, have now, not so surprisingly, moved on to become apologists of the 'global warming' hysteria. Lindzen may argue that, amongst scientists, the fad was shortlived; yet, it is worth mentioning that, besides an ambiguous report by the NRC of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the two reports that initiated the 'global cooling' fad - on the natural prediction of an ice age as the trend of future climate [2], and on the effects of CO2 and aerosols on cooling global climate [3] - were both published in the journal Science, the very same peer-reviewed journal that now promotes the 'reality' of 'global warming'.
Next came the fad of acid-rain, then one heard about cows and termites being a significant source of atmosphere-polluting methane (that one was dear to Reaganism in the early 80's), then about the hole in the stratospheric ozone layer over Antarctica (back in 1985, by the British Antarctic Survey, BAS), and finally 'global warming' came of age. Each fad came with smidgens of truth scattered about in a tissue of lies, unverifiable axioms and perverse falsification of facts. And, of course, each also came with an ever growing number of climate modellers, now armed with supercomputers...
Pseudoscientific fads do not have, nor do they need, any reason to come about, being set in motion solely by the political and social forces that promote them, and the vested interests they serve. Climatology and other environmental sciences are particularly vulnerable to this sort of manipulation because, as Lindzen puts it, "rigor is generally impossible" in these disciplines. But since these fads are supposed to be 'scientific', they are compelled to search for pseudo-evidence which may serve as the excuse (the 'scientific reason') for their promotion in mainstream journals and the media. Typically there is a little truth in this pseudo-evidence, but its generalization or interpretation falsifies the facts and the data, undermining both the value and the quality of the latter.
2. The social forces driving the hysteria of 'global warming'
But how did the official line of Royal Science and mass-media coverage manage to flip flop from the hysteria of anticipated 'global cooling' to the hysteria of 'global warming'?
By 1989, mass-media mouthpieces were promoting the notion, now dominant, that 'all' scientists in the U.S. and Europe were agreed on the reality of 'global warming'. The magazine Science, of course, was at the forefront of the new fashion. When Lindzen submitted, in the spring of 1989, a critique of the myth to Science, the paper was rejected without even being peer-reviewed. Eventually, it was accepted by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, but Science took it upon itself to criticize the blackballed article before it was even published - one in a long line of clear-cut instances of Science's unethical behavior, and proof positive of the existence of an unspoken policy of general circulation of leaked submissions.
The direct political reasons for the promotion of the 'global warming' fad are to be found in the convergence of diverse social forces:
• the evolution of left (social-democratic) political forces towards a new electoral marketing - militant form of environmentalism, and technocratic managerialism;
• the transformation of 'ecological' organizations into profitable non-profit, macro-capitalist funds;
• the design of national State bureaucracies to control the entirety of social life with new regulatory mechanisms;
• the emergence of a new International State technobureaucracy in search of supranational powers and jurisdictions.
To these social forces one must add the worldwide unregulated growth of cadres and the transformation of forces of antiproduction and destruction into profitable ventures. Thus -
• an excess of PhD's in physics and mathematics with little left to aim for other than the pursuit of a career within the official institutions of organized dissent, where they endlessly generate models and fads pliable to political interests, in particular those fads that are dear to the global techno-socialist management of capitalism; and
• the subsidies, grants and investment provided to 'green' groups by some of the worst polluter industries (eg oil, nuclear companies, utilities, etc) as a way to redeem their status or blanch their image, and as a sort of 'protection fee'.
Finally, there is, as we said, a softness that, so far, is intrinsic to environmental sciences, and which makes them particularly vulnerable to mystification and political manipulation.
Of all these social forces and trends, it is apparent that the main role is played by the emerging global technobureaucracy. Taken separately, the other forces were unlikely to amass sufficient momentum for a deep social penetration. They needed a substantial partner in power, and a pseudo-scientific doctrine that could be shoved down everyone's throat. That's what they found in the UN, in its latest role as a 'regulator' of 'sustainable development and global growth', and in its highly corrupt NGO structure. From the sham Rio de Janeiro Conference, in 1992, to Kyoto, these neo-left-wing militants - their ranks swollen with crypto-anarchist volunteer slave-labor - formed the frontlines of the New Global Order, the millenial paradigm, even as they claimed to be denouncing 'globalism'. Pliable to the new international capitalism of global looting, the 'global warming' movement disguised its objectives as scientific, and 'dictated' them as being in the objective interest of mankind. The myth of 'global warming' was their precious tool:
"Global warming advocacy is big business, hundreds of millions in research and other funds are available annually for those scientists and organizations who spout the party line (just check the Pew Foundation gravy trains), don't fool yourself, scientists and professors need money and research funds, and some are willing to violate the scientific method to obtain them. (...) Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, WWF, etc, who make these claims, (...) who present themselves as non-profit/non-partisan, are neither. They are just as biased and unscientific in their approach as the big oil, car and chemical companies are. They make money from fear mongering to collect funds from well meaning, concerned, but scientifically naive people." [4]
'Global warming' is likely to be the most expensive pseudo-scientific hoax ever implemented. As of August 22, 2005 - and since the Kyoto protocol came into effect on February 16, 2005 - the Kyoto Agreement has cost 80 billion dollars for, supposedly, a prevention of warming by 0.0008 deg C... To prevent a 1 deg C increase it will cost some 100 trillion dollars [5]. One can measure this wasteful capital expenditure by the 16 billion that was needed to shore up New Orleans and the Mississippi delta from a stage 5 hurricane like Katrina, or by the paltry 3 billion that the US spends annually in orthodox research on alternative energy (reduced, in essence, to solar cells and wind turbines) . 'Global warming' is a clearcut example of the central role acquired by antiproduction in global capitalism. Its promoters, with peer-reviewed mainstream publications at the forefront, have struck gold - a very lucrative business, where nothing needs to be actually produced, not even real science, in order for a 'healthy' profit to be made under the cover of an altruistic advocacy voicing demands in the name of mankind...
Nothing could outdo the power of this hoax in fuelling anti-Americanism worldwide, nor become as engrossing a plot for the 'prime time' show:
"The global warming circus was in full swing. Meetings were going on nonstop. One of the more striking of those meetings was hosted in the summer of 1989 by Robert Redford at his ranch in Sundance, Utah. Redford proclaimed that it was time to stop the research and begin acting. I suppose that that was a reasonable suggestion for an actor to make, but it was also indicative of the overall attitude towards science. Barbara Streisand personally undertook to support the research of Michael Oppenheimer at the Environmental Defense Fund, although he is primarily an advocate and not a climatologist. Meryl Streep made an appeal on public television to stop warming. A bill was even prepared to guarantee Americans a stable climate." [1]
From Jeremy Legget of Greenpeace, to George Mitchell and Albert Gore (who compared the 'true believers' in 'global warming' to Galileo! Caramba!), 'global warming' had become the latest soap, an international brand to sell books and plead for donations. Lindzen appropriately concludes:
"Rarely has such meager science provoked such an outpouring of popularization by individuals who do not understand the subject in the first place."
To the long list of circus performers, one must add that other latecomer among the plethora of modern trashcans, the populist purveyor of gross ineptitude - Wikipedia, ruled by a neo-maoist cabal of 'global warming' zealots.
3. The rationale for 'global warming': manufacture of a global consensus.
One may ask, why was the global warming myth chosen to promote the new doctrine of globalization? The answer is simple: because climate is changing on a planetarian scale, and there are good reasons to believe that this is a man-made (anthropogenic) factor, not part of a natural variation. Few scientists would dispute the fact of a climatic change. Just what it is and what causes it, is the problem.
What every good scientist will dispute is whether the implicated change is that which promoters of the global warming myth dogmatically assert: an upward change in the atmosphere's mean global temperature. Furthermore, most good scientists will also dispute whether the mechanism proposed for 'global warming' (ie CO2 emission from fossil fuel combustion) is really the mechanism responsible for the observed and ongoing climactic change, or even the main factor.
In his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field", Nobel laureate Kary Mullis (molecular biologist, biochemist and inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction) summarizes - in Chapter 11, appropriately entitled "What happened to the Scientific Method?" - the negative consequences of the pseudoscientific fads which Official Science regularly promotes, and the widespread stupidity that this engenders:
"Very little experimental verification has been done to support important societal issues in the closing years of this century. Nor does it have to be done before public policy decisions are made. It only needs to be convincing to the misinformed voter. Some of the big truths voters have accepted have little or no scientific basis. And these include the belief that AIDS is caused by human immunodeficiency virus, the belief that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming, and the belief that the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere has created a hole in the ozone layer. The illusions go even deeper into our everyday lives when they follow us to the grocery store."
Let's take a look at the science behind this pseudo-scientific ideology of 'global warming'. The zealotry displayed by the promoters of this hysteria, their belligerently militant pose of altruistic motivation, can best be exposed - for all the revulsion they evoke - by debunking the pseudoscience and the main tenets of the myth of global warming. The new party line, as defined by one such pseudoscientific zealot [6], is founded upon a bureaucratic notion of a consensus with 4 tenets (the sacred pillars of the myth):
1.That the earth is getting warmer (0.6 deg C over the last 100 years, and at a rate of 0.1 deg C per decade in the last 30 years). [Some claim 0.2 deg C per decade...]
2. That the effect is man-made.
3. That the effect is attributed to the increase in carbon dioxide over the last 100 or 200 years (depending on whom one reads) caused by burning fossil fuel (in cars, power plants, etc), and as the burning will increase because it is the main source of energy, so will the global warming.
4. That something must be done about this, which means the use of political power to bring the burning of fossil fuels to a stop.
More likely, we should add, to permit substantial increases in the cost of those fuels...
The main objections to this faddist consensus can be easily summarized: the atmosphere is far too complex a system, and too dependent on the oceans, on geothermal energy and solar radiation, to be arbitrarily reduced to processes driven by single causes, such as the emission of carbon dioxide, or even the production of 'greenhouse gases' (GHGs). Moreover, climatology is not a real science, not yet a discipline that has succeeded in understanding the core of its subject the way other sciences have, nor one that is able to effectively adhere to the principles of the scientific method and thereby become rigorous. In fact, until the present authors published their proposed enthalpy balance for the most fundamental atmospheric cycle, the allotropic cycle of water, oxygen and ozone [7], no physicist nor chemist, let alone a climatologist or modeller, had been able to resolve this simple but most immediate problem. Without such a solution, one cannot even hope to establish a science of climate and weather. Similarly, chemo-atmospheric cycles, as regards pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide, remain poorly understood to this day.
Furthermore, even though meteorologists are taught that most of the atmospheric energy budget exists only in the form of latent heat, there is no adequate physics or physical understanding of the circulation and key role of this latent form of energy in the atmosphere, nor a real understanding of the energy conversions into and from it. All arguments are reduced to radiative treatments of electromagnetic energy, plus the mechanics of the movements of cold and hot air masses. In the past 20 years, the vulnerability of the field of climatology was more poignantly put into evidence by its take-over by climate modellers, bent on improving forecast ability. 1980 and 1990 models predicted temperature rises on the order of 1.5 to 2.0 deg C by the year 2000, more than 5 times what the promoters of global warming now accept 'was found' to be the case (rates of 0.1 to 0.2 deg C per decade). Modellers cannot predict even the path of a hurricane (when Katrina was 200 miles offshore, all models predicted a path towards northern Florida, not towards New Orleans), nor even local weather on the same day - and yet, they are trusted to tell tall tales about the past and spread alarmist fears about the future. It is, therefore, hardly astonishing that climatology has become a preferred field for pseudo-scientific faddists.
So, let's address the four false tenets of the 'global warming' ideology. In summary, we can counter them and their dogma, as follows:
1. First of all, there is no real scientific evidence that demonstrates that the Earth has been warming over the past 100 years - neither for seawater, the atmosphere, nor the land mass. There is evidence that shows that there are complex interwoven cycles of intradecadal and supradecadal warming and cooling, but no data that can even be formulated as a warming rate of X deg C per decade with any legitimacy.
2. The main effect of man-made pollution is not 'global warming' but a complex alteration of atmospheric chemistry and energy conversion processes, little of which is being investigated.
3. The role of carbon dioxide in warming the atmosphere has been overestimated, partly because so little is known about that atmospheric chemistry.
4. Instead of asking for more political and policial powers for national and supranational State structures, for more 'daddies' or 'dons' to protect us, society should be fostering and encouraging real scientific research in alternative energy systems and non-mainstream basic physics.
Finally, the pretense of 'a consensus of scientists' about the 'reality' of 'global warming' is the very underpinning of the myth, a commodity manufactured by mediocre scientists most often associated with State or UN 'services', and marketed by globalized media-chains and unethical mainstream peer-reviewed magazines such as Science. A poll of the American Meteorological Society in 1999 found that 49% did not believe that there was an association between man-made CO2 emission and climate change, 33% were not sure about the connection, and only 18% were sure that there was such a connection. But in aspiring populist organizations [8], where 'majorities' can be enforced by techno-bureaucratic power plays, the consensus is declared to be 'virtually unanimous'...
Yes, the consensus, too, is part of the hoax, a complete fabrication. As to what "popular consensus" really means - that too, is nothing other than an exercise in mediocracy for consumption by zombies, as performed by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and 'eco-sensitive' Hollywood stars.
A short sample of high-caliber scientists who have criticized the hoax of 'global warming', demonstrates by itself how media-engendered is the myth of consensus on 'global warming':
Robert White (former head of the US Weather Bureau)
Richard Lindzen (Prof. of Meteorology at the MIT)
Willie Soon (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Sallie Baliunas (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Robert Balling Jr. (Director of the Office of Climatology, Prof. of Geography at Arizona State University)
Fred Singer (President of The Science & Environmental Policy Project)
Zbigniew Jaworowski (Chair of the Scientific council of the Warsaw Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, CLOR)
Eric S. Posmentier (Department of Physics and Mathematics at Long Island University, Brooklyn)
Michael Jorgensen (Paleoclimatologist)
Theodor Landscheidt (Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity, Nova Scotia)
Frederick Seitz (Former president of the National Academy of Sciences)
Robert E. Stevenson (Oceanographer, previously with the ONR and Secretary General of The International Association for the Physical Science of the Oceans)
Craig Idso (Center for the Study of carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Arizona)
Sherwood Idso (Center for the Study of carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Arizona)
David Legates (Center for Climactic Research, Delaware)
Chauncey Starr (Former Dean of Engineering at UCLA and founder of EPRI)
Kary Mullis (Nobel Prize, Molecular Biologist)
Add to this scientists who have reversed their originally pro-'global-warming' views, such as:
Roger Revelle (Prof. of Ocean Science at Scripps Institute of Oceanography)
Michael McElroy (Head of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard)
But for those who have any doubts about the dissenting views of a majority of scientists with respect to the fad of 'global warming' just consult the Petition Project of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (19,000 signatures, of which 2,500 by scientists in Earth Sciences), at www.oism.org/pproject/s33p403.htm
If there is a scientific consensus about 'global warming', it is that it is junk science, pseudo-science, humbug.
When the entire myth eventually collapses, scientists and the public will do well to wonder how so much of the public purse was abusively wasted by scientists and politicians on an issue and a field of investigation where most of the basic science is still missing, while virtually nothing was done to investigate basic physics (including atmospheric physics) and to develop alternative energy sources. To call this widespread abuse and overt mismanagement of funds 'a scandal' will hardly begin to describe the free-for-all gravy-train circus it has been.
4. A modeller's myth of oceanic warming: how the new (pseudo)science is secreted
Let us start by considering the oceans. The latest weapon in the arsenal of 'global warming' advocates is a study by Syd Levitus' group at NOAA's NODC (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's National Oceanographic Data Center), which supposedly established the 'fact' that 'the oceans are warming', irrespective of its cause. Levitus et al had previously built an extensive ocean database where yearly data from 1948 to 1998 was logged after an 'objective grid analysis' [9]. In the 2000 study, they admit that of the data they employed for values of heat content from sea surface to a depth of 300 meters, the most reliable only dates from the period following 1975, when real-time reports of data logs were initiated [10]. The determinations are made only in terms of heat content, likely so that standard errors appear smaller by attribution to supersets of data sets, rather than to actual sets of raw data. No actual salinity data is employed. In the same 2000 study, the entire set of results presented for depths from sea surface down to 3000 meters is a simulation, an estimate based on arbitrary 5-year running composites, which, in the authors' own words, was made "necessary due to the lack of deep-ocean observations" [10]. By any measure of the scientific method, this could never be mistaken for scientific results, for empirical data. It could only be considered for what it is, an hypothesis that 'massages' data, even fabricates it, in order to construe a rationale that justifies supposition of the starting hypothesis. The simple truth is that no scientist can suppose the hypothesis proven by virtue of the 'massage'! And since the hypothesis remains to be proven, it is not yet proven, and should never have been published as a 'finding'! That such could happen must be credited to the corrupt nature of our social institutions - from the 'ecology shows' to the UN-affiliated NGOs, from the oil-industry to regulatory mechanisms - and the spread of this corruption to science itself.
Could it be that only science that is incomplete, and remains axiomatic, is susceptible to official appropriation? Could it be that the greater part of Official Science is corruptible science? That only science which is susceptible to falsification, and strays so far from the scientific method that it settles for systematic inconsistency, can be official?
With no real science to back them up, Levitus et al claim that from 1955 to 1995 the 'evidence' demonstrates a net warming of 0.06 deg C down to a depth of 3,000m, and a mean increase of 0.31 deg C down to a depth of 300m depth. Taking at face value their interpretation of the treated data - that during the years 1985 to 1998 there has been a net warming trend of seawater (they actually claim in the paper's discussion that the trend began in the 1970's for surface sea water, though none of the present trends shown in their data - in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans - began in the 1970's...) - what can one conclude? One can conclude what one should by looking at their own data (Fig. 1 of their paper) - namely, that the data for all three oceans shows annual and quasi-periodic, supra-annual oscillations in cooling and warming. The latter oscillations appear to be decadal, or even hemidecadal, likely also with patterns that are longer term than decades. Little can be said about these patterns - and thus also about long-term trends predicated on the moving averages of these oscillations - since Levitus et al failed to make any correlation with periodic variations in solar radiation, such as the sunspot cycle, etc. But the patterns are there, showing that long-term variations in ocean temperature, and oscillations of its thermal content, alternate over the period of the study.
In fact, conventional climatology accepts that between 1920 and 1940 there was a bidecadal period of surface ocean water cooling, followed by a decadal period of warming, and then - from 1947 to 1967-1970 - another period of cooling. And Levitus et al's data itself, on all three ocean panels, shows that while some warming occurred between 1967 to 1977 or so, there was equally a cooling from 1977 to 1984 or so. They passed by these oscillations in silence, and instead concentrated on showing what appear to be impressive 'trends' on the simulated data for the greater depth of 3000m (their Fig. 4). Any decent reviewer should have asked for the physical rationales for constructing such conveniently smooth composites. The rationale for a statistical construct cannot be merely the invocation of a statistical technique. Nowhere do Levitus et al provide a physical and chemical reasoning for their constructs. But what is more important, they fail to test for simple physical correlations - such as correlation of temperature variations against cloud cover, salinity, or, more importantly still, solar periodicities (eg the Gleissberg, 22- and 11-year cycles of sunspot activity; the long and short solar orbital periods on the plane of the ecliptic; the variations in the solar constant, in particular, those affecting atmospheric UV photon production; the variation in speed and composition of solar winds). But aside from such tremendous shortcomings or effective cop-outs, there is a simple fact that should be staring every scientist in the face: if the data can be trusted, it presents the record of a series of oscillations, and any mean taken at any arbitrary point in time cannot be extrapolated linearly into the future (or into the past, for that matter), since it is part of an oscillation or an oscillatory train of variations. A sample of 50 years suffices to identify a small set of quasi-periodic oscillations, but the mean value of the oscillation about the mean, either way (for warming or cooling), even if it is said to be an anomaly ("the anomaly in heat content"), cannot be taken - with any scientific legitimacy - as a basis for a projection that increases the "anomaly" indefinitely at the same rate of warming (or cooling), because of some out-of-the-blue postulate of a "positive feedback mechanism"...
The real 'anomaly' is the nonsense of the reasoning that extrapolates a global trend from a periodic oscillation. Even the overall mean temperature of reference is a relative mean, dependent upon the size of the sample, which is merely the same 50 year period...
Yet, a paper with simulated data from scientific technobureaucrats of a government service so pleased their masters at the IPCC, the UN CLIVAR program and the US NRC, that it passed peer-review - during which, incidentally to our subject, none of these objections were raised - and was published in Science... Mar-vel-lous.
To further underline just what faith the raw data itself deserves, the oceanographer Robert E. Stevenson describes his early days at the mechanical job of data collection - by dipping a bucket into the sea water from a travelling ship, to take a temperature reading:
"Most of the thermometers were calibrated into 1/4 degrees Fahrenheit. They came from the US Navy. Galvanized iron buckets were preferred, mainly because they lasted longer than the wood or canvas ones. But they had the disadvantage of cooling quickly in the winds, so that the temperature readings needed to be taken quickly. I would guess that any bucket temperature measurement that was closer to the actual temperature by better than 0.5 deg C was an accident, or a good guess. (...) The archived data used by Levitus, and a plethora of oceanographers, were taken by me, and a whole cadre of students, postdocs, and seagoing technicians around the world." [11]
And, as if this weren't appalling enough, there are the further unaddressed problems of the limitations in the resolution of those thermometers and thermistors, the proper calibration of the latter, their drift and noise... Science is method, or it is nothing but any odd lump sum.
Not to be outdone, the same group took the next step in another Science report, in 2001 [12]. There they categorically asserted that the Earth has increased its heat content in the atmosphere (all the way to the stratosphere), in the oceans, and in the cryosphere, and that this effect is anthropogenic.
What is the proof? The best fit of a modelled curve to a pre-agreed curve tracking a cumulative global warming... Even a doodling grocer coming out of Cambridge or Oxford can become a scientist.
Present-age of climatology is filled with mathematical gimmicks or 'computer games', called models, which are axiomatic and self-validating by a vast number of corrective, 'normalizing', 'fitting', 'infilling' procedures which they include in order to fit a set of overprocessed 'data' to the desired result. The precarious epistemological situation of climatology only worsens when such models are built with 'treated' data, and the whole procedure justified by the poverty of real data. In a model, an algorithm takes over which weighs a variable number of variables ('forcings'). The selection of such forcings is, itself, a matter of contention. Irrespective of that, the data is further 'processed' (blanched, laundered). In the case of the 2001 Levitus at al paper, the proof for the correlation of ocean warming and global atmospheric warming is obtained in reverse, as the fit between a modelled curve that integrates all the separate ocean 'results' of the 2000 study for ocean warming down to a depth of 3,000m, and a modelled curve for the effect of one or several 'forcings' related to atmospheric parameters (greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols) predicted by the global warming climate model. The data of the 2000 paper was processed into 5-year running averages (the points plotted), using a 'smoothing' method (or 'Einstein-fudge factor') which is supposed to 'compensate' for the sparseness and the 'intrinsic noise' (sic) of the data. The best fit found by the Levitus group included 'forcings' representing the greenhouse gases, sulfate aerosols, volcanic aerosols, and solar variability (perturbations in solar irradiance, which is assumed to be constant otherwise). The authors conclude that their study "is evidence" that the warming of the terrestrial surface is of anthropogenic origin and due to the increase in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols...
One might wonder where the data is - the real measurement data, down to 3000m into the deep ocean; or the data for correlation, or lack thereof, with solar processes; or the data that justifies the assumptions intrinsic to the 'global warming' climate model, including those predicating it upon an increase in greenhouse gases. Where is it? Thousands of papers have been published, yet so very few are worth citing.
That the results of modelling, or even simulation, can be treated as if they could replace and equate to empirical data and the product of empirical methodologies, is a still more dangerous corollary of the myth of 'global warming'. It presents us, in fact, with a 'retrograde paradigm shift' brought about by the unquestioned reign of computer modelling in climatology (or that of String Theory in physics, and so on). It is the price paid for the new hegemony of 'sophisticated' manipulation of data, and the inscrutable rule of technobureaucratic cadres. With the right selection, any fact can be omitted from existence and replaced by any of the imaginaries of modelling... This formalistic turn of Official Science may well be signaling the end of science - at least the point at which Official Science is no longer able to absorb science itself, because it ceases having a handle on what is or is not science.
It is modelling which is a forcing, and not a reliable one. As reliable as the predictions of the path and intensity of hurricane Katrina before it hit Louisiana, or the effectiveness of FEMA in helping people in the aftermath. One cannot apply the term "science" to that which lacks data but asserts its hypothesis as proven by the mere fact that the hypothesis itself can be enunciated. An hypothesis, no matter how 'neat', must be proven experimentally, by actual observations and measurements, before being considered "proven", or even on its way to being "proven". Even then, it is most likely destined to be disproven later by a better and finer hypothesis. But all this, the very method of science, has now been discarded by the apologists of 'global warming' and the high priests of Official Science.
In passing, we should remark how the language of these climate modellers is the technocratic language of the neutered and the inverted: simulations that extrapolate a model become a "control run" (!); filling in missing data becomes "smoothing" (one of the 'great evils' of modern science); statistical procedures are employed as if they were equivalent to empirical investigation and methodologies, and are referred to by such euphemisms as "optimal detection methodology"; long-term variations in temperature are called 'anomalies' with respect to operational means extracted from small sets; the "heat increase predicated on global warming", becomes the "observed heat gain". And so on.
5. Where is the evidence for global atmospheric warming?
Just like seawater shows oscillations in temperature or content of sensible heat, the atmosphere, too, is subject to long-term oscillations in energy content, including sensible heat and its measure by temperature. In fact, the evidence indicates that the atmosphere undergoes regular periods of cooling and heating, both near the ground and all the way up, through the troposphere, to the tropopause and the stratosphere. The scientific evidence collected over the past 50 years suggests that there are periods of cooling and warming superimposed on cycles of various scales, and that these variations are connected, in ways not yet understood, to solar periodicities, geothermal energy, varying atmospheric electricity and latent heat, and varying cloud cover and cloud composition. As suggested by a number of investigators (viz. Richard Lindzen, Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, etc), these cycles may also involve negative feedback, likely through diverse physical processes - chemical ,evaporative, radiative and electrical.
Temperatures of the atmosphere close to the surface have had oscillations of a secular character - a fact that for some time now has been recognized by glaciologists, paleoclimatologists, archeologists, etc. Changes in the amount of heavy oxygen isotopes (which is proportional to the amount of ice) in marine fossils have been correlated to three separate cyclic changes in the movement of the Earth with respect to the Sun, to produce the so-called Milankovich model of climatic periodicity: a 90-100k-year periodicity associated with variation in the orbital eccentricity; a 40k-year cycle associated with the tilt of the Earth's axis; and a 21k-year periodicity associated with the wobble of the axis. Between 83 and 18k-years ago, a 'great freeze' seems to have taken place, and it is commonplace to infer that our epoch lies near the end of an interglacial that began some 12 to 10k-years ago. Within this interglacial, it was apparently warmer at earlier times, for example in the period of 850 to 1250 AD (so-called Little Climactic Optimum), than it is today. A recent study of the last 1,000 years by Willie Soon et al, concluded that "many records reveal that the 20th century is likely not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millenium" [13].
FIGURE 1 (top): Time-series of seasonal temperature anomalies of the troposphere based on balloons and satellites in addition to the surface.
FIGURE 2A: Time-series of seasonal temperature anomalies of the lower stratosphere from balloons and satellites.
As others (viz Theodor Landscheidt, Michael Jorgensen) have pointed out, in parallel with the long-term oscillations of ocean cooling and heating, variations in atmospheric temperature also occur on scales substantially shorter than those of the Milankovich model - as decadal, supradecadal and intradecadal oscillations. This is readily apparent even in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) presentation. A graph [FIGURE 1] of the separate ground-, balloon- and satellite-measured temperature variation of the troposphere from 1958 to 2001 [14], presents parallel curves, with intradecadal periods of cooling ('58-'66, '69-'72, '81-'85, '91-'93, '98-'01) and concommittant periods of warming ('66-'69, '72-'81, '85-'91, '93-'98). Some of these periodicities have near-perfect coincidence with variation of solar irradiance residuals: the cooling of '81-'85 coincides with decreased irradiance residuals, and the warming of '85-'91, with increased irradiance residuals at least up to '88 [15]. Larger scale supradecadal variations suggest a three decade 'cooling trend' between '45 and '72, by 0.6 to 1 deg C, and a warming trend from '85 to '98, on the order of 0.4 to 0.5 deg C. Clearly, a period of 4 or 5 decades of study is not enough to determine the real underlying periodicities of these oscillations, intradecadal and multidecadal, so as to distinguish them from any lags in atmospheric and oceanic responses, and from any real trend anomaly caused by anthropogenic pollution. In other words, a dispassionate look at the 2001 IPCC data does not yield any basis whatsoever for assuming that there is steady tropospheric warming, or that the tropospheric warming trend from '85 to '98 - interrupted between '98 and '01 - is a lasting trend, or justified as such by an hypothetical positive feedback mechanism.
Moreover, satellite and balloon curves [FIGURES 2A & 2B] for the stratosphere present a distinct and steady 4 decade cooling from 1958 to 2001, only interrupted by volcanic eruptions [16]. Even that is likely not a trend but a periodic oscillation. Indeed, a graph of the average monthly temperatures, from 1979 to 2005 (at www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/msusci.html), presents no trend per se, just a steady mean 'cool level' on the order of -0.5 deg C since 1993. Yet, this stratospheric cooling 'trend' is presented not as something that contradicts 'global warming', or even compensates for it, but as something 'believed' to be caused by ozone depletion. This, too, is somewhat ironic, since nowhere do the acolytes of 'global warming' attribute the excess heat of urban environments to increasing concentrations of ground ozone caused by man-made pollution! Yet, if ozone depletion can account for stratospheric cooling, urban warming could just be the result of excess ground level ozone!
FIGURE 2B
So where is the beef in the 'global warming' hypothesis? It resides in that composite global temperature curve employed by the IPCC, as a combination of annual land-surface air and sea surface values [FIGURE 3][17]. It is only once this composite is considered, with its weighted, 5-year-smoothed moving average, that the 'evidence' for 'global warming' 'fully' emerges. It is, in essence, the same curve that is employed by the 2001 Levitus et al study (see their Fig. 1) as the parametric reference to be fitted with the 'optimal' modelled curve for global ocean heat content, except that Levitus et al modified it so that it further included their 'infilling' estimates of ocean heat content down to 3000m, and qualified it as "observed" (sic).
From that IPCC graph, one may conclude that a 4-decade warming 'trend' (by ca 0.5 deg C) from 1905 to 1945, was followed by a cooling 'trend' (by ca 0.2 deg C) from 1945 to 1968, and this, after a 'lull' in the variation from 1968 to 1972, was followed, from 1976 to 2000, by the current 'trend' with a temperature increase on the order of 0.6 deg C - or a rate of warming of 0.2 deg C per decade.
However, first of all, all these curve trends, aside from being composite and including some form of a doubtful ocean warming curve, are referenced to the 1961-1990 average of the three curves, despite being part of a graph that spans from 1860 to 2000. Though choosing a longer term average would increase the relative amount of observed increased warming, it would more strongly suggest that positive (warming) and negative (cooling) oscillations have comparable amplitudes about a better or longer-term mean, thus decreasing the likelihood of a significant anthropogenic contribution to warming (and suggesting that, if one exists, then man-made factors must also have a comparable short-term contribution to cooling, thus adding to either of the natural variations, or intensifying them).
FIGURE 3: Combined annual land-surface air and sea surface temperature anomalies (C°) 1861 to 2000, relative to 1961 to 1990. Two standard error uncertainties are shown as bars on the annual number.
Secondly, even at face value, the composite IPCC curve clearly indicates that there are supradecadal oscillations, suggesting that the present supradecadal warming 'trend' is likely at its temporal end.
Thirdly, one should keep in mind our above criticism pertaining to modelling of 'overprocessed data' in recent oceanographic studies, and in particular how smoothing curves, weighting averages, infilling data, etc, are arbitrary procedures for which a mathematical rationale and a model can always be constructed. What should count is a physico-chemical foundation for that rationale, and that is precisely what is systematically missing from these voluntaristic models. Undoubtedly, there is a chance that partisans of 'global warming' could be right, and the composite curve could take off and go northward. But this is not a chance with a high degree of probability, nor even a chance that lies above a significant threshold of correlation. It is a very slim chance indeed, and one that needs to invoke the specter of a constant positive feedback mechanism in order to sustain its faddist projections. Yet, there is no shred of evidence for such positive feedback. While accepting a 50% increase in CO2 and a global warming since the 1970's on the order of 0.5 deg C, Lindzen bites on these exaggerations:
"On the basis of models that predict a 4 deg C warming for a doubling of CO2, we might expect to have seen a warming of about 2 deg C already. If, however, we include the delay imposed by the oceans' heat capacity, we might expect a warming of about 1 deg C - which is still twice what has been observed."
Once again, there is no substitute for going back to the roots of real and basic science: the raw data must be re-examined.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 5
When one compares the mean annual surface air temperature curve of P.D. Jones for the Northern Hemisphere [FIGURE 4][18] with the composite Northern Hemisphere air curve that includes sea surface as provided either by IPCC (and the World Meteorological Organization, WMO) or the Climate Research Unit, CRU (UK) [FIGURE 5], one notes that the fundamental difference, all else aside, is the determination of the mean: Jones took the mean from the 1951-1970 period, whereas IPCC and CRU took the mean from the 1961-1990 period. With the lower position of the reference mean, however, the maximum oscillation of the smoothing mean does not exceed 0.5 deg C (a single instance in 1885) - and peak annual variations do not go past 0.65 deg C (in 1864). If one considers, instead, the CRU curve, the moving average curve reaches 0.7 deg in 2005, flattens the observed variation (in warming and cooling) between 1930 and 1950, and slopes the curve of the mean progressively higher with time. One could, of course, go once more over all the rationales (exclusively modelling and statistical rationales, not physical and chemical) for the CRU and IPCC curves, and as to why Jones' method had to be 'superseded' - if, for no other reason, than because 'more, better and newer' data had 'arrived', from 1987 to 2000 (CRU includes data up to the present). Yet, annual means from satellite observations of the global mean air temperature in the lower troposphere, made from 1979 to 1995 and free from the thermal distortions imposed by the 'urban heat island effect', present a very different story [FIGURE 6] [19-21]: a distinct, typically 3-year long, quasiperiodic oscillation of alternating warming and cooling is observed, with amplitudes no greater than 0.3 deg C (see an instance of cooling in 1985). This cyclic variation in the data is obliterated by the data processing of General Circulation Models (GCMs) employed by IPCC and GRU, which are neither fine enough to resolve those short-term cycles, nor capable of accounting for them. Until the processes behind such short-range oscillatory patterns are understood, little can be hoped for from loaded axiomatic extrapolations.
Very recently, on August 12, 2005, Rupert Murdoch's trashy daily USA Today ran a feature article entitled "Scientists find errors in global warming". Penned by a dimwit called Dan Vergano, the 'article' reports that Science had just released 3 papers that confirmed global warming (yes, we know, the title 'errors in global warming' does not seem to be very confirmative, but that's Murdoch-style 'journalism'...). In fact, the USA Today article is a digest of another digest, an anonymous Economist item (the Economist is owned by the The Financial Times) from the day before (August 11th), entitled "Heat and Light". Neither article provides references to any of the claimed 3 papers.
FIGURE 6
The digest of all 3 papers constitutes a perfect denial of our own very argument above - that the warming 'trend' is short-lived, neither on the order of the claimed 0.20 deg C per decade, nor necessarily caused by anthropogenic factors, and that satellite and balloon data contradict the surface 'trend' claimed by 'global warming' apologists. Indeed, after much massaging of the weather balloon and satellite data for the troposphere, the partisans of global warming managed to squeeze out of them an insignificant temperature increase of 0.09 deg C per decade. This was clearly not good enough for their dogmatic assertions. So in came Carl Mears and Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems, collaborators of militant 'global warming' modeller Benjamin Santer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to perform a rescue operation [22]. They believe, they tell us, that there must be some warming of the atmosphere and that the satellites are just not giving us the right data. It is worth quoting from the Economist:
"It [ie the apparent atmospheric cooling detected by satellites] is caused, they believe, because [sic] the orbital period of a satellite changes slowly over that satellite's lifetime, as its orbit decays due to friction with the outer reaches of the atmosphere. If due allowance is not made for such changes, spurious long-term trends can appear in the data. Dr Mears and Dr Wentz plugged this observation into a model, and the model suggested that the apparent cooling the satellites had observed is indeed such a spurious trend. Correct for orbital decay and you see not cooling, but warming."
Orbital decay is hardly news, since it has been known ever since man attempted to put an artificial satellite into orbit, and corrections for it have long been entered in altitude calculations. Mears and Wentz, however, find, with a mouse click, the model adjustment required by 'global warming': with a new 'systematic' correction in place, the decadal increase in temperature now becomes 0.19 deg C, near the value claimed by global warming apologists for the increased warming of the Earth's surface - and finito the contradiction! This sure ain't science, even if it's called Science. And there's more. As members of the Santer club, Mears and Wentz are part of of Science's next feat: a paper by Santer et al demonstrating how the disagreements between 'global warming' models is due to data that has not been properly treated (read blanched or patrolled by fellow zealots) [23]. So far, this is all just more modelling crap. But that's not the end of the goodies offered by Science.
Not to be outdone, a third study reports a second (!) systematic error in balloon measurements of temperature which is said to be due to uneven heating by "tropical sunlight" of instruments from diverse manufacturers [24]. To compensate for such heating, routine correction factors are applied. Now Steven Sherwood et al report that daytime data was systematically overcorrected across all these decades of measurement. They conclude that balloon data is so unreliable that one cannot doubt the atmosphere is warming - though by how much cannot really be determined (!) if one uses balloon data. The net result of this fudging is that the decadal rate for tropospheric warming, in Sherwood et al's expert hands, rises from the insignificant 0.09 deg C to the warming-corroborating but still insignificant 0.12 deg C...
That's enough, however, for the mediocracy of USA Today to declare, on August 12, 2005, that the peer-review-certified Science "results" (modelling corrections...) demolish "the last bastion of scientific doubt" about 'global warming'! The results were blessed by Science and sanctified by the Murdoch empire. All in keeping with Rupert Murdoch's intent, stated explicitly on May 15, 2003, as aiming to bring the quality of American media analysis down to the level of a nouveau-maoist party line:
"As someone who was born in Australia and who is married to a woman from China, I feel that I and my Australian-owned news sources are the most qualified to present the true American perspective on things. (...) Between my down-under upbringing and her Red China view of things, we come up with the real American perspective, like no actual American possibly could. (...) I know the true voice of America, like no American possibly could if I didn't spell it out for them on a daily basis. (...) I would love to fully and completely own the entire American media. Just this past week the U.S. Congress was holding hearings about allowing even greater ownership of the media by a single entity. It is just a matter of time before I am allowed to weed out all of those un-American American-owned news sources and ensure that America is provided with nothing but the real American view of things, as determined by this Aussie and his lovely, wonderful wife from China."
Who's taking who for a ride? Yes, Murdoch is funny - in a macabre sort of way. Members of the international mediocracy, the true rulers of the present global system, speak for the 'down-under' as Chairman Mao Dze Dung once did: swallow the bitter pill of 'global warming', and get the remedy from science; pardon us, from Science, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Ain't that sweet? Murdoch and the advancement of science. More American than any American. The global dictatorship of the mediocrats.
In January 2005, Roy Spencer of NASA had written [25] :
"A scientific report on what this apparent discrepency [sic] between the satellite and surface data means in the context of global warming theory will be completed in 2005 as part of the US Climate Change Science Program."
Now we know how the "discrepency" was resolved - by the introduction of still more fudge factors.
The immediate question that surges to one's mind is: how can so much trust be put by scientists into data that has so many systematic and diverse errors associated with it - errors in collection, errors in processing, errors in intrinsic parameters, errors in calibration, etc? And then, how does such dubious raw data get dubiously processed in order to provide 'evidence' for what it still does not prove?? Any sane individual will be left wondering - after thousands of papers, and a veritable Niagara Falls of them in Science - where is the evidence that would prove that there is global atmospheric warming??
The hypothesis of 'global warming', now so often enshrined as 'fact', has been called junk science. It is indeed junk, and if its reasons to exist are both political and economic, the 'evidence' for its supposed veracity has been fabricated piecemeal by official scientists - read: technobureaucrats - who have gravely departed from the scientific method. Many weather stations do not have complete records for the 1961-1990 period used to determine the global mean, so methods were employed to estimate these values from neighbouring records or inferences. Over the oceans, the data could not be organized for fixed or repeating points, so inferred data was interpolated. The composite land and marine surface data takes values from each set, and in the case of the CRU analysis, it is 'weighted' in latitude/longitude grid boxes, by area and neighbouring values, with so-called 'infilling'. Also in the CRU model, 'variance adjustment' is carried out relative to an underlying 30-year timescale trend, whose establishment requires estimation of grid box temperatures into the future (beyond the end of each record, including the present)! Furthermore, in the same model, the so-called thermal anomalies do not average to zero in the period of reference - though this results in a lower mean baseline. The truth is that even collection of basic data raises many questions as to the validity of the data - simple questions like: why hasn't the data been generated differentially for urban, rural and wildlife environments? Or for cyclonic versus anti-cyclonic conditions? Or between anticyclonic days of the burst type versus nonburst type [26]? Or why hasn't it even been properly integrated as to the time of day?
One of the grimmest jokes that passed itself off for science in the pages of Science, was a statement from the 2001 Levitus et al paper. It's a riot: "Estimates of the melting of continental glaciers (Antarctica and Greenland) range from -1.8 to 1.8 mm of global sea level change per year [the provided reference for this statement is ICCP 1995]. Using a value of 1.8 mm per year, the amount of heat required to melt...etc" [27]. In other words, a reference to a biased study now suffices as replacement for any actual gathering of data! Further, when a range is given, no quality or statistical qualification needs to be attached to the polar figures of the range. Then, if the range were real, the mean change would be 0 mm per year. Lastly, as neither 0 mm, nor -1.8 mm of change would require, presuppose or justify the notion of increased melting of the polar ice caps because of 'global warming', only the value of +1.8 can be, and will be, employed. After all, no other value would permit the supposition of melting, the "required to melt".
With such modeling gimmicks, militants of 'global warming' establish the conclusion that any skepticism concerning the myth is both undeserved and suspect... They are the unwitting and not-so-unwitting tools of global mediocracy.
In closing this section, we should mention that a 2000 study at 9 selected weather stations distributed across Canada, since their inception and spanning periods of 50 to 150 years, failed to detect increased temperature at any location, urban and rural, except in Toronto, and marginally in Moncton and Indian Head [28]. No evidence either was found for a trend of increased precipitation, save for Moncton. Of course, had the study examined Vancouver in 2004-2005, they would have found increases in both temperature and precipitation, for the problem of 'global warming' is most fundamentally the problem of atmospheric pollution in cities, in urban environments, particularly growing ones. Curiously enough, the posture of the ideologues of 'global warming' is to admit half-heartedly that local climates may be cooling while insisting that the global climate is warming.
6. The case for the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide
We now come to the fulcral question: is there evidence that the concentration of carbon dioxide has increased in the past 100 or 200 years? Here begins the story of one of the most egregious instances of scientific skulduggery. All begins in 1958 with George Callendar's dubious treatment of carbon dioxide data [29]. Callendar arbitrarily discarded, amongst other things, all measurements above 350 ppmv (parts per million by volume), most measurements above 320 ppmv, and all measurements taken in city environments (not even a comparison between rural and urban environments was carried out) - to arrive at the notion that the mean carbon dioxide concentration during the 19th century was 292 ppmv. Inclusion of the data discarded by Callendar would have placed the 19th century carbon dioxide mean 15% higher, at 335 ppmv [30]. If one accepts the Callendar treatment of the data, one accepts that there has been an increase in carbon dioxide in the past 100 to 150 years (but not in the 100 years before that), ie an upward variation of at most some 21% - from 292 ppmv to a maximum of 350-355 ppmv. This is an essential tenet of 'global warming', but it is noteworthy that some critics of this myth accept this variation, or the existence of a variation that may be as high as 25% (eg Jorgensen) or 50% (eg Lindzen). Typically, this increase is explained by deforestation (preponderantly before 1905) and increased fossil fuel burning (after 1905) - by coal-burning plants, internal combustion engines, etc.
It is obvious that, if one accepts instead the value provided by Giles Slocum [30], the increase in carbon dioxide is either of threshold significance (ca 7%), or actually nonexistent. This is the position of other critics of 'global warming' - viz. Zbigniew Jaworowski - who assert that there is no evidence for the observed increase being significantly different from the variations recorded in the past, in the compiled data for the last 200 years and in the fossil record [31]. But the militants of the 'global warming ideology' do not limit themselves to defending the Callendar manipulation of the data, they further hold that for the past 10,000 years the carbon dioxide concentration remained below 270-290 ppmv. Once more, these are grandiose statements based on flimsy data, if any at all. Stomatal frequency in fossilized Holocene leaves suggests that levels of carbon dioxide reached 310 and 325 ppmv, respectively, at 8700 and 7,800 years BP, with decreases of 25 ppmv between 8,400 and 8,100 BP [32]. Still others have reported levels on the order of 333 to 348 ppmv at 9,600 to 9,800 years BP [31]. Furthermore, the inconsistency between such fossil studies and the lack of Antarctica ice-core data supporting a temperature-CO2 correlation during the Holocene is explained by a variety of physico-chemical processes, including the presence of liquid water, in the air bubbles trapped in ice crystals of polar ice cores, which effectively falsify the use of the carbon dioxide content of such air inclusions to construct a record of its past concentration [34]. Moreover, "formation of CO2 clathtrates starts in the ice sheets at about 200 meter depth, and that of O2 and N2 at 600 to 1000 meter depths. This leads to depletion of CO2 in the gas trapped in the ice sheets. That is why the records of CO2 concentration in the gas inclusions from deep polar ice show values lower than in the contemporary atmosphere, even for the epochs when the global surface temperature was higher than now" [31]. So much for using the evidence from ice-cores to show that with respect to the past, there has been a 25% increase in atmospheric CO2 content. And so much, also, for the rigid view that before 1850 or so, the CO2 concentration was stable and at 270 to 292 ppmv. This is nothing but more hogwash not sustained by actual data.
From the perspective of the present authors, the simple fact is that there is no data on which to reliably base any meaningful statement about the CO2 content of pre-1945 terrestrial epochs. The data is tentative and subject to interpretation - thus the best interpretation must be cautious and must not place too much stock on any one value, trend or statement. The existing data, even post-1945, is widely diverse in the methods employed for its collection over the period of 200 plus years, different in reliability, in quality, even in the real nature of the scientific interest or dedication of those who collected it. There is no doubt that combustion of fossil fuels is generating massive quantities of CO2, along with carbon monoxide, unburned carbon compounds, lead vapour, sulphur aerosols and oxides of nitrogen. The present authors are not in the pay of any of the Oil Sisters and have never been, nor will be. We have, in fact, no intent to deny or downplay the toxic ill effects of the oil, coal and nuclear industries - their poisoning of the air we breathe, the water we drink, their destruction of the environment, their threat to ecological habitats or their causing of countless grave ailments, not to mention wars. In fact, the reader should ask hirself why it is that oil, coal and nuclear companies now embrace the green movement, agree with the tenets of 'global warming', and are so intent on spending to reduce CO2 emissions - and in the same breath of (polluted) air, also ask hirself why it is that all these militants of the ecological anti-'global warming' movement are so averse to the non-polluting energy technologies invented by these authors; in fact, as averse to considering them as the Oil Sisters are. Is there a link here too? A good question indeed.
But our concern here is the hocus-pocus of CO2-induced 'global warming'. It could be true - and certainly CO2 pollution is real enough in our cities and urbanized territory. As real as the incessant traffic noise. But the data presented by adherents of 'global warming' is not convincing because it is the product of too much forcing - a forcing of the CO2 concentrations, a forcing of what they do and do not mean, a forcing of the effect of CO2 upon temperature. Yet, despite all these forcings - or because of them! - no real science can be squeezed out...
The parody is so intense that a recent third-rate study on the categorical 'Antarctica warming', by two technobureaucratic 'scientists' (one of whom is a civil servant with the British Antarctic Survey), "studied" (sic) simulations by 3 different 'global warming' models and actually "reported" that none of the models produced the desired warming (ie "a significant enhancement in warming"), "even with enhanced forcing" (what a pleonasm! - even with forced forcing...) [34]! That 'enhanced forcing', incidentally, did not yield warming either, even when the CO2 concentrations were greatly accelerated (some modelling!). The same pseudoscientific study then concluded that either the unquestioned Antarctica warming which will occur over the next century "is a response to forcings not included in the models or that the [Antarctica] Peninsula is sensitive to effects poorly modelled". In other words, by the models of 'global warming', there shall be no warming over Antarctica in the next century... Yet, even when the model of warming does not generate nor predict warming, the warming is still somehow there, to be believed in, to be marketed - it is just modelling that needs a facelift, just as the modeller needs job security in an age where that is now past.
FIGURE 7
Now, let's take a dispassionate look at the Mauna Loa data for the variation of the annual growth rate of lower tropospheric CO2 content from 1958 to 1995 [FIGURE 7] [35]. It presents a pattern of annual and biennial variation that suggests a short term negative feedback control, not a positive one. Also, though the moving average rises, from 1958 to 1995 the rise merely goes from a rate of 1 ppmv/yr, to 1.6 ppmv/yr, on the threshold of being both an insignificant growth rate, and an insignificant variation of the growth rate.
Now see what the fanatics of 'global warming' do with the the Mauna Loa curve. You're about to contemplate one of the greatest frauds in the history of science.
Indeed, perhaps there is no more poignant mystification or forced falsification of science than the so-called Siple, Antarctica curve - not the original curve of the data taken at Siple per se, but the curve which has become the banner of the Big Warming zealots. Jaworowski's presentation to the US Senate unwrapped this mega-fudge cake, which was stamped and approved by Official Science and its peer-reviewed publications, with the vanguardist Science at the forefront. Jaworowski first presented the data for CO2 from ice cores taken from Sipel in Antarctica [FIGURE 8][36-37]. This curve, spanning 1601 to 1901, is used generally as proof of the anthropogenic nature of the CO2 concentration. Yet, Jaworowski found that it presents a nearly linear inverse correlation with the pressure (from 5 to 15 bars), that is, with the recorded and variable depth of the cores employed to collect the data! Be that as it may, Big Warming zealots desperately needed to relate the Siple, Antarctica curve to the atmospheric readings at Mauna Loa from 1958 on - which were performed a mean 83 years later (1973-1890=83) than the time the ice last probed in the Siple curve had been deposited (1890) [FIGURE 9]. By royal decree [36-37], subsequently stamped by the IPCC, an ad hoc assumption was made with no evidence to back it up, and the problem of relating the two curves was simply and 'elegantly' solved: even though a core was formed, for example, in 1890, the air trapped in it was not as old as the ice, but younger by exactly...83 years! So the curve was moved upscale by 83 years and aligned with the Mauna Loa record to give the illusion of a staggering, steady increase from 280 ppmv in 1744 to 350 ppmv in 1973.
FIGURE 8
FIGURE 9
This procedure of mainstream climatology sanctioned by IPCC in 1990 is an outstanding example of pseudoscience employing sheer arbitrariness and outright forgery of the data record to establish a 'scientific' dogma - a falsified Siple curve, made official by a supranational institution of Official Science. The blatant moving of a curve along the X-axis of time to fit the desired result has perhaps only one other parallel falsification in the recent history of science: another institutional event of Official Science, one that moved a curve along the Y-axis of energy (heat) to raise the baseline and conceal the anomalous heat from a cold fusion cell. This took place in 1989, and the whistleblower was a vertical man, a scientist, science-journalist and engineer who would later become a very close friend of the present authors - Eugene Mallove. The subject was room-temperature fusion, aka 'cold fusion', and Mallove, in charge of the MIT news office, was at the time a 'cold fusion skeptic'. But when he studied the data from MIT's attempt to reproduce the Pons-Fleishmann experiment, he realized that the baseline line (or control curve) had been delberately shifted by an amount required to render the small excess heat null [FIGURE 10][38]. When Mallove blew the whistle, and no corrective action took place (in fact, the graph in question was simply suppressed in the final publication of the MIT report), he resigned his MIT job in protest. Here a forgery, a fudge factor, was employed to deny the existence of a phenomenon; there, in the Siple curve, a fudge factor, a forgery, was employed to 'prove' the existence of a phenomenon. In both instances, Official Science availed itself of zealots, of scientists who have become technobureaucrats, and who will do whatever it takes to prove a desired point - either that global warming exists, or that room-temperature fusion does not. In the first instance, a veritable pseudoscience is promoted into the hall of fame of Official Science; it acquired status. In the second instance, science, a nomadic or eccentric science, was demoted into the pit of disgrace and treated officially as if it were pseudoscience. Two different outcomes of the same anti-scientific lunacy, of the same ideological scientifism. Two more examples of the socially adverse effects of allowing the logic of power to rule the world of science impunely, and beat us all into submission with the sticks of Official Science and 'mainstream consensus'.
FIGURE 10
Of course, there is no doubt that CO2 is constantly released in great quantitities from automobile engines, coal-fired plants, natural gas plants, etc, along with other still more noxious pollutants. What happens to it, what conversion cycles it may engage in, what, if any, is the evidence for a negative feedback atmospheric response to its increased cconcentration, etc, are all good questions - questions where little investigative effort is being spent, questions that do need answers, and answers that the promoters of Kyoto do not really want to know.
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