The climate change cult
consists of contested science,
and scary climate predictions
that never come true.
Of course we need to keep
our land, air, and waters
free of real pollution.
Carbon dioxide (CO2 )
is not pollution, even though
the Environmental Protection
Agency now calls CO2 a "pollutant".
CO2 is really the staff of life.
A normal human exhales
about 1 kg. of CO2 per day.
So, by breathing, are humans
polluting the planet ?
The current CO2 level
in the air is about 410 ppm,
or 0.041% of all atmospheric
molecules.
About fifty million years ago,
geological evidence indicates
CO2 levels were much higher --
several thousand ppm ...
and life flourished.
For green plants,
CO2 is a plant food.
Most green plants evolved
with CO2 levels averaging
at least 1,000 ppm,
much higher than now.
Greenhouse operators use
CO2 enrichment systems
to raise CO2 levels to at least
1,000 ppm.
Most plants stop growing
if the CO2 levels drop
much below 150 ppm.
There's an upper CO2 limit
that humans can tolerate.
The US Navy recommends
an upper limit of about
8,000 ppm for submarine
cruises of ninety days,
and NASA recommends
an upper limit of 5,000 ppm
for missions of 1,000 days,
although higher levels
are acceptable for missions
of only a few days.
That tells us something:
Atmospheric CO2 levels
should be above 150 ppm,
to avoid harming green plants,
and below about 5,000 ppm
to avoid harming people.
CO2 in our atmosphere today,
at 410 ppm, is much closer
to the 150 ppm
lower limit for plants,
than the 5,000 ppm
upper limit for humans.
The current rate of burning
fossil fuels adds about 2 ppm
per year to the atmosphere.
Getting to just 1,000 ppm CO2,
which is a logical goal
to optimize green plant growth,
would take almost 300 years.
And that's assuming people
will still be burning fossil fuels
in 100, 200 and 300 years in
the future !
There are demands to stop
further CO2 level increases,
and reducing the current level.
Why?
What is the danger ?
Based on lab experiments,
CO2 is likely to cause
only mild, harmless warming
in the troposphere.
But there has been
mild, harmless warming
long before fossil fuels
were popular.
There's no way to determine
if the global warming after 1940
was natural global warming,
or greenhouse warming
from man made greenhouse
gases.
The unanswered question
is how much warming
in the past century was
caused by humans.
The medieval warming,
around the year 1000,
was when Vikings
settled Greenland,
and wine
was exported
from England.
There's no evidence
a CO2 increase
caused the medieval
warming period.
And ice-core records
show that changes
in temperature
happened BEFORE
changes in CO2 levels,
leading CO2 changes
by hundreds of years.
The global warmunists
use ice core studies
to estimate CO2 levels
before 1959, but they
completely ignore ice
core 'temperature leads
CO2' data !
The first IPCC report,
issued in 1990,
showed both the
"medieval"
warm period,
and the following
"little ice age"
cool period.
But the IPCC’s
2001 report used
a graph that showed
a nearly constant
temperature
from the year 1,000,
until 150 years ago,
when the temperature
began to rise abruptly,
like a hockey stick
on the floor
with the blade
facing up.
There was
no explanation
why the medieval
warm period,
and little ice age,
had disappeared.
Two Canadians,
Steve McIntyre,
a mining consultant,
and an academic
statistician,
Ross McKitrick,
proved the
"hockey stick chart"
was a fraud.
And the IPCC
never used it again.
In Fall 2009,
large number of
e-mails, and other files,
from computers of the
Climate Research Unit (CRU)
of the University
of East Anglia,
were hacked.
These files were embarrassing
to the climate scientist senders,
and recipients.
The event was named ClimateGate.
A senior scientist from CRU wrote:
“PS, I’m getting hassled
by a couple of people
to release the CRU station
temperature data. "
"Don’t any of you three
tell anybody that the UK has
a freedom of information act.”
And consider this comment:
“I can’t see either of these papers
being in the next IPCC report."
"Kevin and I will keep them out
somehow—even if we have to
define what the peer-review
literature is.”
CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
That's proved by
closed system
infrared spectroscopy
laboratory experiments.
It is then assumed
that adding CO2
to the atmosphere,
by burning coal, oil,
natural gas, wood
and other biofuels,
should modestly
increase the
temperature of
the troposphere,
which should warm
earth's surface
almost as much.
A doubling of the air's
CO2 concentration,
should directly cause
about +1 degree Celsius
of surface warming.
At the current rate
of CO2 increase
in the atmosphere,
of about +2 ppm per year,
it would take 200 years
to achieve this
+1 degree warming.
That would be mild,
harmless warming
that should affect
drier areas the most,
simply because the
greenhouse effect
of CO2 overlaps the
greenhouse effect
of water vapor, a much
more important
greenhouse gas.
The drier areas of Earth,
most likely to be warmed
by adding CO2 to the air:
(1)
Warming at higher latitudes,
(2)
Warming in the coldest
six months of the year,
and
(3)
Warming at night
(1), (2) and (3) describe
the warming in the
Northern Hemisphere
from 1975 to 2003.
That is the strongest
evidence of greenhouse
gas warming.
But the Southern Hemisphere
did not have the same
"signature" of greenhouse
warming, so the evidence
is mixed.
There are also large
benefits from having
a slightly warmer
earth, and more CO2:
A significant increase of
food and wood production.
In real science, a theory
explains observations,
and makes predictions
about what will be
observed in the future.
Observations weed out
the theories that don’t work.
This has been
the scientific method
for over three centuries !
Computer simulation models
do not replace theory
and observation.
Except in the junk science
of "modern" climate change.
Huge amounts
of money from
governments and
wealthy foundations,
are available for
climate-related research.
They get the research results
that they pay for, just like
cigarette companies used to
buy the science they wanted !
In addition,
government subsidies,
loan guarantees, and
captive customers, go to
green companies.
And carbon-tax revenues
flow back to some governments.
Leaders of scientific societies
sign on to the coming
global warming catastrophe
bandwagon, because
governments and foundations
generously fund those
who reinforce their views.
Many investments
are underpinned
by the supposed threat
of global warming.
Many careers depend on
global warming alarmism.
There's a lot of money
available to buy
the climate science
( mainly junk science )
that is desired.
Publication of contrary
research results in
mainstream journals,
are rare.
Members of the environmental
news media uncritically promote
the party line of a coming
climate change catastrophe.
That's why I started this blog
in 2014 to summarize my
climate science reading.
It seems that wild guesses
of a scary future climate
are always published, while
real scientific studies of
the past climate are usually
not.
In climate junk science,
skeptics’ characters
and motives are attacked.
Over 50 years of wrong
scary predictions of the
future climate, since the
1969's, are ignored.
The same scary predictions
are repeated year after year !
Real science is skeptical
of theories, and tries to
disprove them.
Wrong predictions are
proof the theories are wrong.
Real science
attacks the science,
not the scientist's
character.
From Charles Mackay’s
"Extraordinary Popular Delusions
and the Madness of Crowds":
“Men, it has been well said,
think in herds; it will be seen
that they go mad in herds,
while they only recover
their senses slowly,
one by one.”
There is a "climate crusade"
based on junk science,
to suppress energy use,
economic growth, and
the benefits from
faster creation of wealth
in free market capitalism.
Resist the "climate crusade" !