Search This Blog

De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Avalanches of global warming alarmism

UN climate cataclysm predictions have no basis in fact and should not be taken seriously
 
Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris
 
Throughout the United Nations Climate Change Conference wrapping up in Bonn, Germany this week, the world has been inundated with the usual avalanche of manmade global warming alarmism. The UN expects us to believe that extreme weather, shrinking sea ice, and sea level rise will soon become much worse if we do not quickly phase out our use of fossil fuels that provide over 80% of the world’s energy.
 
There is essentially nothing to support these alarms, of course. We simply do not have adequate observational data required to know or understand what has happened over the past century and a half. Meaningful forecasts of future climate conditions are therefore impossible.
 
Nevertheless, this year’s session has been especially intense, since the meeting is being chaired by the island nation of Fiji, a government that has taken climate change fears to extremes.
 
COP23 (the 23rd meeting of the Conference of the Parties on climate change) conference president, Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, has called for “an absolute dedication to meet the 1.5-degree target.” This is the arbitrary and most stringent goal suggested by the Paris Agreement. In support of Bainimarama’s position, the COP23/Fiji Website repeatedly cites frightening forecasts made by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
 
One prediction stated: “The IPCC recently reported that temperatures will significantly increase in the Sahel and Southern African regions, rainfall will significantly decrease, and tropical storms will become more frequent and intense, with a projected 20 per cent increase in cyclone activity.” 
To make such dire forecasts, the IPCC relies on computerized models built on data and formulas to represent atmospheric conditions, and reflect the hypothesis that carbon dioxide is the principal factor driving planetary warming and climate change.
 
However, we still do not have a comprehensive, workable “theory of climate,” and thus do not have valid formulas to properly represent how the atmosphere functions. We also lack data to properly understand what weather was like over most of the planet even in the recent past. Without a good understanding of past weather conditions, we have no way to know the history, or the future, of average weather conditions – what we call the climate.
 
An important data set used by the computer models cited by the IPCC is the “HadCRUT4” global average temperature history for the past 167 years. This was produced by the Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, both based in the United Kingdom.
 
Until the 1960s, HadCRUT4 temperature data were collected using mercury thermometers located at weather stations situated mostly in the United States, Japan, the UK, and eastern Australia. Most of the rest of the planet had very few temperature sensing stations, and none of the Earth’s oceans (which cover 70% of the planet) had more than occasional stations separated from the next ones by thousands of kilometers of no data. Temperatures over these vast empty areas were simply “guesstimated.”
 
Making matters even worse, data collected at weather stations in this sparse grid had, at best, an accuracy of +/-0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees F), and oftentimes no better than +/-1.0 degree C. Averaging such poor data in an attempt to determine past or future global conditions cannot yield anything meaningful – and certainly nothing accurate or valid enough to use in making critical energy policy decisions.
 
Modern weather station surface temperature data are now collected using precision thermocouples. But, starting in the 1970s, less and less ground surface temperature data was used for plots such as HadCRUT4. Initially, this was done because governments believed satellite monitoring could take over from most of the ground surface data collection.
 
However, the satellites did not show the warming that climate activists and computer models had forecast. So, bureaucrats closed many of the colder rural surface temperature sensing stations, while many stations in the vast frigid area of Siberia were closed for economic and other reasons. The net result was that cold temperature data disappeared from more recent records – thereby creating artificial warming trends, the very warming that alarmists predicted, desired and needed for political purposes.
 
Today, we have virtually no data for approximately 85% of the Earth’s surface. Indeed, there are fewer weather stations in operation now than there were in 1960.
 
That means HadCRUT4 and other surface temperature computations after about 1980 are meaningless. Combining this with the sensitivity (accuracy) problems in the early data, and the fact that we have almost no long-term data above Earth’s surface, the conclusion is unavoidable:
It is not possible to know how or whether Earth’s climate has varied over the past century and a half. The data are therefore useless for input to the computer models that form the basis of the IPCC’s conclusions.
 
But the lack of adequate surface data is only the start of the problem. The computer models on which the climate scare is based are mathematical constructions that require the input of data above Earth’s surface as well. The models divide the atmosphere into cubes piled on top of each other, ideally with wind, humidity, cloud cover and temperature conditions known for different altitudes. But we currently have even less data above the surface than on it, and there is essentially no historical data at altitude.
 
Many people think the planet is adequately covered by satellite observations – data that is almost global 24/7 coverage and far more accurate than anything determined at weather stations. But the satellites are unable to collect data from the north and south poles, regions that are touted as critical to understanding global warming.
 
Moreover, space-based temperature data collection did not start until 1979, and 30 years of weather data is required to generate a single data point on a climate graph. The satellite record is far too short to allow us to come to any useful conclusions about climate change.
 
In fact, there is insufficient data of any kind – temperature, land and sea ice, glaciers, sea level, extreme weather, ocean pH, et cetera – to be able to determine how today’s climate differs from the past, much less predict the future. The IPCC’s climate forecasts have no connection with the real world.
 
Sherlock Holmes warned that “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
 
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote this famous quote for fiction, of course. But it applies perfectly to today’s global warming debate, especially where the IPCC’s scary conclusions and forecasts are involved. Of course, this will not stop Bainimarama and other conference leaders from citing IPCC “science” in support of their warnings of future climate catastrophe.
 
We should use these facts to spotlight and embarrass them every time.
___________
 
Dr. Tim Ball is an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.
                                                              

8 comments:

  1. The global warming, climate change enviro freaks are past being to brainwashed to ever be deprogrammed. This is indeed a new religion and people are in love with their new god. The politicians around the world want this because it gives them excuses to raise taxes because like usual they are always spending more than what they collect in tax revenues and always need new revenue tools because they ran out of other peoples money a long time ago. We are fighting a loosing battle between fantasy and illusion compared to facts, logic and common sense.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Robert,

    Thank you for your interest and mostly I agree. I would add one more important issue about this as a global initiative - and that's the desire to use "another" green crisis to advance the idea of a leftist world government under the auspices of the United Nations.

    I disagree that we're fighting a losing battle though. Two year ago it would have seemed that way, but now the tide is turning. It may change at some point, but right now we're winning, and the promoters of this scam are looking like fools.

    Best wishes,
    Rich

    ReplyDelete
  3. The Right Climate Stuff (TRCS)research team of retired NASA scientists and engineers from our nation's manned space program, who began their careers in the Apollo Program, have completed a 5.5 year independent, objective assessment of the Anthropogenic (human-caused)Global Warming (AGW) alarm. Our findings in reports, presentations and videos are published on our website: www.TheRightClimateStuff.com

    Our fundamental finding is that mainstream climate scientists are relying far too much on un-validated climate simulation models to predict their alarming global warming for this century. These models, endorsed by the UN IPCC and its climate alarmists, don't agree with each other and don't agree with physical data, as required by The Scientific Method for models used in scientific research and for critical decision-making involving human safety.

    Our research team and other more objective climate scientists have developed and validated much simpler models relating earth surface temperature to atmospheric Greenhouse Gas concentrations based on Conservation of Energy considerations and an energy balance of the earth's climate system. These validated models use measured values for incoming energy from the Sun, incoming radiation reflected to deep space by the earth's atmosphere and surface, and infra-red radiation to deep space from the earth's surface and thin atmospheric covering of the surface, and a small amount of surface heat flowing into our cold deep ocean waters. These validated models agree with each other and predict much less global warming from continued unrestricted use of fossil fuels than do the un-validated models used for UN IPCC reports.

    Our simple TRCS validated model and similar validated models published by other researchers, predict less than 1 deg C additional warming by 2100 from unrestricted use of fossil fuels.

    ReplyDelete
  4. How do you explain the latest Bonn Germany climate summit ? It seems that if we are winning, whatever we are winning is falling on deaf ears. They keep meeting and pushing this green agenda down our faces and sheeples around the world don't bother doing their research to educate themselves about the reality of this scam. They just accept it and like puppets propagate this false agenda around the world just like a religion that it is. The lame stream media and the political left are on side with this green scam, so not easy to convince most sheeples that it is just that, a scam of major proportion that will ruin this planet economically if it is continued as is. Time to wake-up sheeples.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Harold,

    Thanks for you interest and your efforts.

    Robert,

    We can never expect the green/left to quit. This global warming clabber, like most leftist concepts, exists because ideology makes smart people dumb. They will never abandon their scares and demands. That's a reality we have to accept, but time is the great leveler of truth and time is killing them.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hope so Rich, hope so because we definitely can't afford this anymore. Global Debt Hits A New Record High Of $217 Trillion; 327% Of GDP. The world is broke and bankrupt. The money now that go for deficit spending is money that does not exist. It is electronic generated money but the interest payments on those debts is real and is paid by our taxes. In onterrible (ontario), we pay $23 billion a year in interest payments alone. That's $12 billion for the provincial debt of $309 billion and $11 billion a year for our provincial share of the federal debt of $645 billion. These interest payments keep going up because all canadian governments are in yearly deficit mode increasing the debt overall. Nothing is getting paid on the capital of those debts.Imagine what we could do with all this money being burned away in interest payments. Green energy only increases the debts. Imagine if interest rates go up and they are and will.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Robert,

    You might find My January 30, 2013 article - Get Our of Debt Card - interesting.

    http://paradigmsanddemographics.blogspot.com/2013/01/get-out-of-debt-card.html

    ReplyDelete
  8. Very interesting article. Go to http://www.usdebtclock.org/ to get full picture of the U.S. debt and to http://www.debtclock.ca/ for the Canadian version. U.S. total debt is now at $ 66 trillion with a GDP of 19.5 trillion. In Canada our total debt is 1.5 trillion with a GDP of $ 1.8 trillion.

    ReplyDelete