By Kirk Myers, Seminole County Environmental Examiner

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 not effect at all.

Some climate scientists claim that water vapor amplifies 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. Ergo, their predictions are faulty.over a 10-year period, a pittance compared to the riches heaped on taxpayer-funded scientists by governments and foundations.

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: “ll 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? “t is also important to note that the GCM groups do not make official shorter-range global temperature forecasts of one to 0 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 “sence is settled” and it 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, here 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.

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 physical . “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.

But many climate researchers continue to peddle CO2 horror stories supported by a mish-mash of inaccurate, incomplete and misleading analyses that fall apart under close examination. The CO2 fantasy is driven by both money and a profound hatred of “polluters,” those nasty industrial capitalists on a mission to destroy Mother Earth through their relentless efforts to raise mankind’s standard of living. It is a falsehood that deserves a place alongside a belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

Breaking news update: This BBC headline just came across the Examiner.com news desk: “Climate change makes birds shrink in North America.” You can’t make this stuff up. See Kirk’s post here.

Prague’s Clementinum, an old Jesuit Convent and the current National and University Library near the Charles Bridge (Google Maps), hosts the world’s second oldest continuously working weather station after the Central England dataset (*1659) and, obviously, the oldest one in the Czech Republic. The records go back to 1770 and haven’t been interrupted or modified since 1775.

Today, Clementinum is also the warmest weather station in the Czech Republic, exceeding the annual mean temperature of 10 C, arguably because of urban effects as well as its low elevation of 192 meters. The coldest station in Czechia is on our highest peak Sněžka, elevation 1602 meters, on the Czech-Polish border. Its annual mean temperature is close to the freezing point. The Czech average is around 7 C.

Click here to zoom in with the monthly averages since 1770 which began to be recorded during the reign of Maria Theresa of Austria, queen of Bohemia. The Clementinum temperature was mostly cooling between 1800 and 1900 and mostly warming since 1900, by roughly the same amount.

If you allow me to cherry-pick a bit, the Clementinum’s annual mean temperature in 1794 was 11.50 C but 10.88 C in 2005. The 1848 revolution in Prague. As recently as in 1850, Prague only had 157,000 inhabitants, which includes the (relatively negligible) villages that joined Prague later - much fewer than the 1.2 million population today. Guess how the urban heat effects have changed since 1800. The links above present some evidence that this robust old station which, despite the urban effects, shows that there’s been no statistically significant warming in Prague since 1800 (and at most 0.5 C or so in 200 years, and I haven’t subtracted any corrections for the intensification of Prague’s urban heat island which may be as much as 0.6 C per century and which would probably revert the 200-year trend to a significant cooling!), has been deliberately censored from the GHCN data in some way, without a known scientific reason, and replaced by some gapped and strangely artificially adjusted data from the Prague International Airport (Ruzyně, a Western suburb of the Czech capital).

A lot of seemingly problematic stuff to check.

It’s plausible that the Clementinum data actually show that there’s been no statistically significant warming in all of Central Europe for 200 years.

Warming trends in Prague since 1770

This text is a counterpart of Warming Trends in Central England Since 1659 where I explain the basic issues. The Prague record, the second oldest, is somewhat shorter.

The average temperature between 1770 and 2009 (included) is 9.6 C which is 0.4 C warmer than in Central England, 1659-2009. The standard deviation of the annual mean temperatures from this overall average is 0.98 C which is 50% higher than 0.65 C in Central England where the fluctuations are probably lower because of the relative proximity to the “stabilizing” sea (while Prague has a more continental climate).

When you look e.g. at 20-year warming trends, when the man-made warming should be really fast in the current era, our generation actually drops out of the race. The graph (enlarged here) looks like this:

A 20th century interval only appears on the 8th place in the ranking:

1779-1798, 9.187 C/century
1782-1801, 8.317 C/century
1776-1795, 8.103 C/century
1778-1797, 7.629 C/century
1783-1802, 7.407 C/century
1849-1868, 7.292 C/century
1777-1796, 7.214 C/century
1984-2003, 7.125 C/century
1850-1869, 6.984 C/century
1780-1799, 6.853 C/century

And by the way, even the fastest warming at the end of the 18th century loses when compared to the fastest 20-year cooling in the 19th century:

1821-1840, -10.05 C/century
1822-1841, -9.338 C/century
1823-1842, -8.005 C/century
1824-1843, -7.259 C/century
1819-1838, -7.029 C/century
1825-1844, -6.879 C/century
1820-1839, -6.586 C/century
1831-1850, -6.582 C/century
1826-1845, -6.461 C/century
1830-1849, -6.331 C/century

At any rate, you can’t see any unexceptional behavior in the late 20th century Prague, either. Moreover, it’s likely that if you adjusted the figures for the urban heating, the warming trend would disappear completely or change to a cooling trend.

Is there a global weirding?

An inkspiller at the New York Times has proposed a new replacement for global warming and climate change, namely global weirding. Well, until November 2009, we have seen a lot of it, but of a different type than Thomas Friedman envisioned.

In order to be able to use any weather event as a proof of climate change, which would certainly simplify the life for all the AGW gods and their prophets, he conjectures that the climate variations are increasing. And no doubt, man is to blame. However, already the first step is wrong because there is no increase of the climate variations.

For example, the graph above (enlarged here) shows the “typical” (standard deviation, or “Pythagorean average”, as I call it) month-month variations calculated from the Prague 1770-2009 monthly anomalies (which I first have to calculate), smoothed over 10-year intervals or so (with a truncated Gaussian-like measure, but let me not go into irrelevant details).

You see that there is actually a vaguely decreasing trend in these variations. The minimum variations were sometime in 1905-1915 - it’s the point 1650 (months since the first 10-year period) on the graph above. But the maximum variations occurred around the point 1000 on the x-axis which corresponds to 1865-1875 and similar years (there are two similar peaks over there).

The decrease of the month-on-month temperature variations in the anomalies is pretty large: the maximum is around 2.8 units while the minimum is close to 2.0, which is a 20% decrease - despite the averaging over 100 month-on-month differences or so! The most recent decade is much closer to the minimum (like around 1910) than the maximum. So the temperatures are actually changing somewhat less dramatically these days, which actually can be justified theoretically, too (the pole-tropic differences have decreased, reducing gradients and storminess etc.).

Similar methods to calculate these things actually lead to similar graphs with similarly located maxima and minima (even when I start with the year-on-year jumps, the basic structure looks very similar).

The quantity I drew, being inspired by Mr Friedman, could be interesting to study but global weirding is just not taking place right now. Before Mr Friedman blames SUVs for his global weirding, he should have noticed that only himself, and not the Earth’s climate, has actually been a victim of such a recent global weirding. See full post here.

By Climate Realists, Piers Corbyn

The feeble defence today (BBC Radio4 here) of the failed science of Man-made climate change by Lord Martin Rees President of the Royal Society is a “dereliction of his duty to defend the integrity of science and a surrender to the politically driven agenda of the UN which is mounting a ‘Custer’s last stand’ review of IPCC procedures in a desperate bid to save its credibility”, said Piers Corbyn astrophysicist and founder of WeatherAction long range weather and climate forecasters.

Piers (speaking on his birthday March 10th) further said: “Martin Rees is a great scientist but his support today of failed science over evidence-based factual observations is a betrayal of the scientific method in favour of anti-scientific dogma. One wonders at what point should political expediency ever over-rule evidence-based science?”

“His defence of the refuted theory of man-made climate change on the grounds that ‘CO2 has been rising recently at an unprecedented rate and very simple physics’ is without foundation.

Firstly the claim that current rates of rise of CO2 are unprecedented is neither relevant nor justifiable. Recognized published peer-reviewed work shows:

(i) measured data over hundreds, or thousands, or millions of years proves CO2 changes have no net driving effect on world temperature or climate, indeed the relationship is observed to be the other way around - for example at the end of ice-ages temperature rises drive CO2 rises with a lag of centuries. This means that current changes of CO2 are also of no consequence. This is demonstrated by world cooling for the last 8 years while CO2 has been rapidly rising.

(ii) ice core data smooths out rapid fluctuations in CO2 levels which occurred in the past and other methods of measuring CO2 in more recent times show rapid changes. The claim of unprecedented rises in something of no consequence is scaremongering nonsense. “Secondly the ‘very simple physics’ he claims to draw on is just too simple and leaves out other pretty simple physics. The supposed large magnifying effect of water vapour which is a more significant contributor to infra-red absorption and emission than the trace gas CO2 has been widely challenged along with other assumptions of the CO2 centred theory. More fundamentally wherever those considerations lead a number of feedback effects totally negate any impact CO2 changes may have on surface temperatures. For example extra CO2 enhances plant growth and photosynthetic transpiration which is a powerful cooling effect and the more CO2 the more the cooling. So any extra surface warming due to extra CO2 in the atmosphere is negated by extra cooling caused by extra photosynthetic transpiration. Warming also enhances plant growth so if at one point there were insufficient plants to do the cooling and therefore warming occurred that would enhance plant growth and extend the growing season until there are sufficient plants to provide cooling to negate any warming.

“Martin Rees and the IPCC should be prepared to defend their CO2-driven climate change position but they have still failed to produce any observational evidence for their hypothesis and the BBC consistently avoids allowing any air time to Climate Realist scientists who can easily refute the CO2 hypothesis. Nevertheless I am glad Martin Ress did not repeat the banal claims of Professor Corine Le Quere of the University of East Anglia that ‘There is no other explanation for it. Perhaps he realizes that our WeatherAction verification of predicted chains of events leading from solar activity to extreme weather events is evidence that the Sun causes ‘it’.

Read this and more here.