Why Global Warming is Probably a Crock

The American Thinker ^ | January 16, 2007 | James Lewis

[oldtimer2]

Why Global Warming is Probably a Crock

By James Lewis

As a scientist I've learned never to say "never." So human-caused global warming is always a hypothesis to hold, at least until climate science becomes mature. (Climate science is very immature right now: Physicists just don't know how to deal with hypercomplex systems like the earth weather. That's why a recent NASA scientist was wildly wrong when he called anthropogenic warming "just basic physics." Basic physics is what you do in the laboratory. If hypercomplex systems were predictable, NASA would have foolproof space shuttles --- because they are a lot simpler than the climate. So this is just pseudoscientific twaddle from NASA's vaunted Politically Correct Division. It makes me despair when even scientists conveniently forget that little word "hypothesis.")

OK. The human-caused global warming hypothesis is completely model-dependent. We can't directly observe cars and cows turning up the earth thermostat. Whatever the human contribution there may be to climate constitutes just a few signals among many hundreds or thousands.

All our models of the earth climate are incomplete. That's why they keep changing, and that's why climate scientists keep finding surprises. As Rummy used to say, there are a ton of "unknown unknowns" out there. The real world is full of x's, y's and z's, far more than we can write little models about. How do you extract the human contribution from a vast number of unknowns?

That's why constant testing is needed, and why it is so frustrating to do frontier science properly.

Science is difficult because nature always has another surprise in store for us, dammit! Einstein rejected quantum mechanics, and was wrong about that. Newton went wrong on the proof of calculus, a problem that didn't get solved until 1900. Scientists are always wrong --- they are just less wrong now than they were before (if everything is going well). Check out the current issue of Science magazine. It's full of surprises. That's what it's for.

Now there's a basic fact about complexity that helps to understand this. It's a point in probability theory (eek!) about many variables, each one less than 100 percent likely to be true.

If I know that my six-sided die isn't loaded, I'll get a specific number on average one out of six rolls. Two rolls of the die produces 1/6 x 1/6 = 1/36. For n rolls of the die, I get (1/6) multiplied by itself n times, or (1/6) to the nth power. That number becomes small very quickly. The more rolls of the die, the less likely it is that some particular sequence will come up. It's the first thing to know in any game of chance. Don't ever bet serious money if that isn't obvious.

Now imagine that all the variables about global climate are known with less than 100 percent certainty. Let's be wildly and unrealistically optimistic and say that climate scientists know each variable to 99 percent certainty! (No such thing, of course). And let's optimistically suppose there are only one-hundred x's, y's, and z's --- all the variables that can change the climate: like the amount of cloud cover over Antarctica, the changing ocean currents in the South Pacific, Mount Helena venting, sun spots, Chinese factories burning more coal every year, evaporation of ocean water (the biggest "greenhouse" gas), the wobbles of earth orbit around the sun, and yes, the multifarious fartings of billions of living creatures on the face of the earth, minus, of course, all the trillions of plants and algae that gobble up all the CO2, nitrogen-containing molecules, and sulfur-smelling exhalations spewed out by all of us animals. Got that? It all goes into our best math model.

So in the best case, the smartest climatologist in the world will know 100 variables, each one to an accuracy of 99 percent. Want to know what the probability of our spiffiest math model would be, if that perfect world existed? Have you ever multiplied (99/100) by itself 100 times? According to the Google calculator, it equals a little more than 36.6 percent.

The Bottom line: our best imaginable model has a total probability of one out of three. How many billions of dollars in Kyoto money are we going to spend on that chance?

Or should we just blow it at the dog races?

So all ye of global warming faith, rejoice in the ambiguity that real life presents to all of us. Neither planetary catastrophe nor paradise on earth are sure bets. Sorry about that. (Consider growing up, instead.)

That's why human-caused global warming is an hypothesis, not a fact. Anybody who says otherwise isn't doing science, but trying to sell you a bill of goods.

Probably.

James Lewis

[Yelling]

So you figure CO2 can cause temperature to increase in the past.

Sorry, don't fly.

???

[LM_Guy]

You are right about Water Vapor vs CO2,

But why not show a graph of Atmospheric Water Vapor & CO2 measurements for the past 100 years vs Global Atmospheric Mean Temps ?

[ancient_geezer]

Have you yet read the paper where the 95% comes from?

Actually the 95% comes from the relationship of H2O overlap with CO2 IR absortpion around the 15um band where earth's blackbody radiation is most intense, a point discussed in many papers as ones you refer to.

For example a much more recent analysis based on current HITRAN database focusing expressly on the blackbody region of CO2 667 & 2349 lines of interest can be found here, indicating the same relationship:

Greenhouse molecules, their spectra and function in the atmosphere
by Dr. Jack Barrett
Energy & Environment, volume 16 No. 6 2005

It is to be noted:

The water vapour spectrum indicates almost total absorption from 0–500 cm–1, followed from 500–1300 cm–1 by a host of weak rotational bands. From 1300 cm–1 the absorption increases to almost total again as the centre of the bending vibrational mode at 1595 cm–1 is approached and beyond 1800 cm–1 the rotational structure of the bending mode decreases in intensity until 2300 cm–1 when the transmission becomes 100%. The CO2 spectrum is dominated by the bending vibration, centred at 667 cm–1 and the antisymmetrical stretching mode at 2349 cm–1. The extra very weak bands arise from further excitations and represent very small absorptions that are, nevertheless significant in calculating the GH effect accurately. The methane spectrum shows the bending/stretching vibration at 1306 cm–1 and that of dinitrogen monoxide shows the three bands as described above.

*** SNIP ***

It is clear from Barret's HITRAN calculations that watervapor by itself with no other GHGs accounts for 68% absorption of blackbody radiation.

Adding CO2 CH4 & N2O) to the atmosphere mix only increases the blackbody IR absorption in the atmosphere by 4.7% to a total of 72.9% where H2O contribution is accounted for.

The percentage absoption of earth's blackbody radiation by the lessor GHGs relative to total absorption including H2O vapor is 100*(72.9-68.2)/72.9 = 6.4%

That works out to be 93.6% for CO2, CH4 and N2O in combination, in relation to H2O.

Close enough to demonstrate the point very well.

[ancient_geezer]

But why not show a graph of Atmospheric Water Vapor & CO2 measurements for the past 100 years vs Global Atmospheric Mean Temps ?

You are more than welcome too if you can find one.

However I am more interested in the effect of solar wind and its effect on the magnetosphere in relation to temperature over the last century or so as the solar activity cycle passes through its dance, an effect that can be traced to causing changes in low level cloud cover due to Cosmic Ray ionization as it pass through the atmosphere much like that which on can observe in Wilson cloud chambers.

Course along with that is the wonderful correlation with idiocy in NYT and main stream media's global climate change hype as things change [click of the graph for more on that]:

 

 

[lepton]

but neglects to mention that these have been succesfully tested on real-world conditions. E.g., if you plug in the initial conditions resulting from the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo (1991), the models correctly predict the amount and duration of the resulting global cooling.

Only after the fact, and including a number of fudges. They do not successfully predict anything into the future from when they were designed. This isn't solving the equation, it's fitting the curve.

[ancient_geezer]

By the way, you might want to see what the GHG calculated flux trend is doing in terms of the effective top of atmosphere blackbody flux calculated for the lessor GHGs as an index by NOAA.

http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/aggi/

 

Figure 3. Radiative forcing of all the long-lived greenhouse gases, relative to 1750, and the NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI) on the right axis, which is indexed to 1 on January 1, 1990.

[lepton]

This is the standard procedure for testing models, because you already have the data and you already have the outcome. Otherwise it would take far too long to verify a model's accuracy.

It is the test for *plausibility* only. It's proof comes in predictive value. If you really want to test the past, you take a portion of the data, use that to train, and then test it against the other portion...but you have to trust the person doing the test to have done the second part completely blind...which in this situation is questionable (if nothing else because the general sweep of the common data is known). If you want to know it was actually correct, you wait a few years and test it against information you COULD NOT have known...and the climate models fail after less than a decade.

[lepton]

We have proof that there has been global warming in spurts, most definitively since 1995. It's the cause and thus the future and any solution that are in question.

[lepton]

You just showed that the Hypothesis is probably correct !!! Not that humans cause Global Warming but, Rising CO2 levels cause Global Warming.

Look closely. The temperature rises first.

[lepton]

But, It is also an undeniable fact that we humans are dumping billions of tons of CO2 in the air and atmospheric CO2 levels have risen quite dramatically over the last 100-150 years.

Wanna see smething really funny? Look at an hourly measurement of CO2. In the summer, plants devour the levels down during the day, and push the levels way up during the night. there's rather less variability during the winter, but temperature definitely affects the day-to-day results.

Luxemburg station; April 2005: http://meteo.lcd.lu/co2_variations/daily_co2.html

Today: http://meteo.lcd.lu/today_04.png

[lepton]

But, It is also an undeniable fact that we humans are dumping billions of tons of CO2 in the air and atmospheric CO2 levels have risen quite dramatically over the last 100-150 years.

Wanna see something really funny? Look at an hourly measurement of CO2. In the summer, plants devour the levels down during the day, and push the levels way up during the night. there's rather less variability during the winter, but temperature definitely affects the day-to-day results.

Luxemburg station; April 2005: http://meteo.lcd.lu/co2_variations/daily_co2.html

Today: http://meteo.lcd.lu/today_04.png

[lepton]

Also, citing 1998, 1999, 2001 etc., studies or quotes is quite ancient news in the world of Climate Science.

Unfortunately, it also takes about 3 to 5 years to even begin to shake out the studies. Heck, Mann's 1998 and 1999 studies (hockeystick, MHB98 and MHB99) weren't openly evaluated until 2006, wherin it was found he'd A) used unproven statistical forms which overweighted certain proxies (by up to 390 times); B) not properly described what statistical methods he was using; C) used improper proxies; D) the "peer review" had never checked his math; E) falsely claimed a robustness to certain proxies; F) proxies were selected based upon their agreement to a trend. There are other things too, but one should find it interesting that the NAS Panel's review characterized his conclusions (quite aside from his work) as merely "plausible". This is EIGHT YEARS down the road, after dominating the influential U.N.'s TAR in 2001, and after dozens upon dozens of works gaining credibility based upon his "results".

The Wegman report included lines like this: "We note that there is no evidence that Dr.Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant interactions with mainstream statisticians", and "It is clear that many of the proxies are re-used in most of the papers. It is not surprising that the paper would obtain similar results and so cannot really claim to be independent verifications."

[lepton]

But why not show a graph of Atmospheric Water Vapor & CO2 measurements for the past 100 years vs Global Atmospheric Mean Temps ?

As of a few years ago, I couldn't find any of the primary models that included variation in relative humidity, or didn't assume that cloud cover was a non-variable. As late as this past summer, Gavin Schmidt was asserting that they don't even know the SIGN of the effects of clouds. The ocean has an albedo of less than 0.06. Some of the water vapor forms a cloud and that albedo suddenly rises to anywhere from 0.60 to 0.90.

[ccmay]

But doesn't their precious "Precautionary Principle" require that we wait for definitive proof before we do anything?

Hah! That's a good one. I will have to remember that.

There are few more ridiculous notions in public life than the Precautionary Principle, and few more pernicious termites eating away at the foundations of civilization than those who espouse this asinine ideology of fear and cowardice.

Mankind would never have tamed fire if these thumb-sucking pants-pissing milquetoasts had been in charge in caveman days.

-cm

[ccmay]

And that is why I am a skeptic. Especially about their motivations.

Whatever the truth, falsehood, or magnitude of global warming may be, it is also the excuse for a gigantic grab for money and political power by left-wing statists who have been repudiated over and over at the ballot box.

-ccm

[ccmay]

Her quick answer is that warming is real (she tells them to look at sat-pics of any glacier and compare them to ones taken twenty years ago - something is causing them to shrink)

Not any glacier. Some are getting bigger (in Greenland, for example.) Also, you would only have to go back about 500,000 years to see glaciers covering much of North America. Where did they go, and why? I don't think cavemens' bonfires produced enough CO2 to cause the glaciers of Yosemite to melt.

-ccm

[x]

Let me get this straight: we know for sure the planet is going to warm up dramatically within our lifetime but we can't predict with certainty how our investments would do on the stock market day to day? Now THAT is a bunch of crock!

Wait a minute. We know that some day, far in the future, the sun will burn out. And we know that with much more certainty than we can say what a given stock will sell for tomorrow.

I don't know if there is man-made global warming, but scientific questions can often be settled with far more certainty than human or social ones. That's the nature of scientific laws as opposed to social probabilities.

[DungeonMaster]

It was very good. Not to change the subject but imagine the same math applied to evolution.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

That's why human-caused global warming is an hypothesis, not a fact.

Global warming is not really an hypothesis. If it were, it could be tested.

There is one manifestation of global warming which is clearly an ideology; call it the Al Gore school of global warming. Like most ideologies it is extremely robust with respect to data. Like belief in Socialism or Freudian Psychology.

Another manifestation is as a physical theory, like classical electromagnetism or Newtonian mechanics or General Relativity. There is no "Newtonian Hypothesis", rather a set of interrelated and self consistent laws that are useful in explaining the operation of the real world. Any of their results or predictions are subject to test and refutation. For instance, Newtonian mechanics was insufficient for explaining the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. General Relativity explains it neatly. General Relativity doesn't refute Newtonian mechanics, so much as merely limit its scope and applicability. Newtonian mechanics is still useful for explaining 99.999% of all physical and engineering problems.

This is the problem with Global Warming theory. There is simply no well validated canonical from of GWT. It is amorphous and half baked. A set of inconsistent and unvalidated computer models do not constitute a physical theory.

Its "respectable" adherents do not resist its misapplication for ideological ends. It cannot be tested by experiment or observation; there is no agreed to framework for validation. (Think the four classical tests of General Relativity.)

That anyone with the least technical training takes Global Warming seriously for a second is a sad commentary on the state of our educational system.