Scientists dismiss claims of runaway man-made global warming

Several researchers are claiming in a study published last week that rising greenhouse emissions will raise global temperatures by 6.7 to 8.0 degrees by 2100, even if the earth's climate enters another “Little Ice Age.”

Huh?

In their paper published in the journal of Geophysical Research Letters, Georg Fuelner and Stefan Ramstorf of the Potsdam Institute claim that a long-lasting decline in solar activity – similar to the period from 1300 to 1850 known as the Little Ice Age – would cut only 0.5 degrees from the projected rise in global temperatures this century.

Give Fuelner and Ramstorf credit for not going out on a limb with their prediction. Their forecasting prowess covers only the next 90 years. (A few recently humbled meteorologists at the MET Office in Britain would kill to have such predictive powers.)

Where does such nonsense come from?

According to the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) crowd (e.g., government-paid shills like NASA’s James Hansen, “Hockey Stick” Penn State Professor Michael Mann, and disgraced former Climate Research Unit Director Phil Jones), CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are being trapped in the atmosphere where they act as a temperature-forcing agent. As CO2 levels continue to rise, the planet will eventually face runaway global warming.

However, there is a problem with their “catastrophic climate change” theory: hard, empirical evidence does not exist to support it.

CO2: forced warming

Let’s start at the beginning. CO2 molecules capture a small portion of surface energy and transfer this energy to other gas molecules in the atmosphere. Some of this energy escapes into space and the rest finds its way back to the surface, where it is eventually re-radiated, beginning the cycle again.

Note that CO2 doesn’t actually retain energy. It acts only to transfer captured energy to other molecules in the atmosphere through collisions. In short, the greenhouse effect of CO2, even at concentrations well below current levels, is energy-limited and not concentration-limited.

According to Dr. Pierre Latour, a chemical and process-control engineer, a tripling of CO2 from current levels (approximately 385 parts per million) would not produce any additional warming. In an editorial published in the February issue of Hyrdocarbon Processing magazine, he writes:

"CO2 only absorbs and emits specific spectral wavelengths (14.77 microns) that constitute a tiny fraction of solar radiation energy in earth's atmosphere. The first 50 ppm [parts per million] of CO2 absorbs about half of this tiny energy, [and] each additional 50 ppm absorbs half of the remaining tiny fraction, so at the current 380 ppm, there are almost no absorbable photons left. CO2 could triple to 1,000 ppm, with no additional discernable absorption-emission [warming]."

In other words, all the long-wave radiation that can be absorbed by CO2 is eventually absorbed. So no additional warming is possible. The process is analogous to adding blankets to a bed on a cold night. Adding one extra blanket will have a big effect. But adding more and more extra blankets will have a progressively smaller effect until there is no effect at all.

Some climate scientists claim that clouds and water vapor amplify the radiative “forcing” of man-made CO2 – creating a sort of magic “multiplier effect” that raises surface temperatures. But where’s the proof? There isn't any. Climate models lack the computational power to accurately simulate clouds and cloud variations. In fact, as recent studies have shown, clouds may act to suppress any warming triggered by greenhouse gases.

Hundreds of thousands of radiosonde measurements have failed to find a pattern of upper trophospheric heating predicted by the models. Global temperatures flat-lined in the late 1990s and have been declining slightly since 2002. The IPCC models predicted a steady upward trend, not a decline. In other words, their predictions are faulty.

Creative computer models

The belief in runaway CO2-induced warming is based solely on computer models that have been manipulated over time to produce a desired political conclusion: ergo, a world being warmed by mankind. It is a theory unsupported by solid scientific evidence.

As Dr. William Gray, professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, writes:

“All the global General Circulation Models (GCMs) which predict future global temperature change for a doubling of CO2 are badly flawed. They do not realistically handle the changes in upper tropospheric water vapor and cloudiness . . . They should never have been used to establish government climate policy.”

Gray also observes that models “failed to account for the weak global cooling over the last decade, ” so how can they be expected to make long-range predictions?

“It is also important to note that the GCM groups do not make official shorter-range global temperature forecasts of one to 10 years, which could accurately be verified. If they won’t do this, why should we believe their forecasts at 50 to 100 years?

“Any experienced meteorologist or climate scientist who would actually believes a long range climate model should really have their head examined. They are living in a dream world,” he concludes.

Dr. Willie Soon, a solar and climate scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, challenges the rubber-stamped theory that blames CO2 emissions for global warming while disregarding the sun’s influence on climate.

“The sun, of course, with its light energy output is probably the only true external driver of the earth’s climate system . . . There is no other force on earth that would supply that amount of energy for the air to move around, for the ocean currents to move around and for the trees to grow,” Soon explains.

The theory that increasing CO2 levels lead to warming is false, according to Soon. In fact, the process is exactly reversed: Increases in CO2 follow, rather than precede, warmer climate periods, he says.

“Published papers [analyzing ice core data] clearly, clearly show that it is always temperature that rises first by at least several hundred years . . . then the CO2 curve response follows. It is a very clear scientific consensus on this issue,” Soon says.

Politicized IPPC research

Nevertheless, the AGW camp, including the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), claims the “science is settled” and continues to finger human-generated CO2 as the principal cause of global warming. There seems to be more “political science” at work than actual science, Soon laments.

“Those [AGW] views are promoted by political bodies . . . and there appears to be a corrupted process, in my opinion, of the bodies, where science and scientists are . . . misusing [data] in a lot of ways. This is all becoming a war of words instead of a war of evidence and science,” Soon says.

Dr. David Legates, associate professor of climatology in the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware, accuses IPPC policymakers of rigging the findings in “working group” science documents so they match the conclusions in the IPPC Assessment Report’s “Summary for Policymakers.”

“In many cases, they [policymakers] go back to scientists and say, ‘Can you change this science document to match our summary? We want to beef this up. We want to make it look worse.’ That’s not the way science is done,” Legates says.

The impact of the sun and ocean currents on climate is simply ignored in the IPCC climate models. CO2, a plant food, is the default climate-change scapegoat blamed for everything from “acne" to “longer allergy seasons” by scientists trolling for their next research grant.

Billions of dollars are pouring into the study of man-made global warming. It is the Mother Lode that keeps the grant money flowing. If the theory were given the proper burial it deserves, research dollars would dry up, forcing scientists to hunt for other sources of funding. As a result, the theory is defended with wolf-pack determination by scientists who stand to lose the most, including their reputations.

A favorite canard of global warming alarmists-turned-conspiracy theorists is the claim that AGW skeptics and their climate blogs are funded by corporate interests, especially “big oil.” But the reverse is actually true. The truly big money is pouring into climate-change research.

The U.S. government has spent $79 billion since 1989 on climate research and technology, 3,500 times the amount contributed to skeptics, according to Joanne Nova, a science writer who runs the Web site JoNova.

“The money buys a bandwagon of support, a repetitive rain of press releases, and includes PR departments of institutions like NOAA, NASA, the Climate Change Science Program and the Climate Change Technology Program. The $79 billion figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, and is not adjusted for inflation. In other words, it could be…a lot bigger,” Nova says.

By comparison, the skeptics’ camp is largely self-funded. Greepeace, after conducting its own investigation, discovered that Exxon funneled $23 million to so-called skeptics over a 10-year period, a pittance compared to the riches heaped on taxpayer-funded scientists by governments and foundations.

CO2: a plant nutrient

CO2 is not the global menace described by climate-change scaremongers. It is an essential planetary nutrient.

“The move to label it as a pollutant is simply preposterous,” writes physical science and mathematics professor Richard F. Yada. “The notion would be laughable if it were not so tragically real.”

Rising CO2 levels will not lead to runaway global warming and may very well provide a nutritional boost to agriculture, according to Dr. S. Fred Singer, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.

"The observational evidence . . . suggests that any warming from the growth of greenhouse gases is likely to be minor, difficult to detect above the natural fluctuations of the climate, and therefore inconsequential. In addition, the impacts of warming and of higher CO2 levels are likely to be beneficial for human activities and especially for agriculture," Singer writes.

Scientists don’t understand how the sun works, they don’t understand how clouds work, they have a rudimentary understanding of how oceans work, and they’re still studying the impact of volcanic eruptions. In other words, they still have a lot to learn about the earth’s climate system. Yet AGW alarmists are absolutely certain human-induced CO2 emissions cause global warming and continue to peddle fraudulent horror stories based on a mish-mash of inaccurate, incomplete and misleading analyses that fall apart under close examination. 

Self-interest, not science, and ideology, not reason, are propelling the climate-change movement and its CO2 alarmism. Human-induced global warming is a fantasy driven by money and a profound hatred of “polluters,” those nasty industrial capitalists bent on destroying Mother Earth through their greedy and relentless efforts to raise mankind’s living standards. It is a fictional narrative that dovetails well with a belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

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Breaking news update: This BBC headline just came across the Examiner.com news desk: "Climate change makes 'birds shrink' in North America" (see: http://bit.ly/8XBum0).

You can’t make this stuff up.

Kirk Myers' columns appear several times weekly. To receive e-mail alerts when new articles are published, click on the "subscribe" button above. For a comprehensive look at global warming, please see the list of links to the right.