The legendary humorist Mark Twain once sarcastically quipped, "Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it," as if feeble humans had the power to affect the rain and wind any more than they had the ability to stop the planets from orbiting the sun. He was ironically prophetic, because now there is a rapidly growing, quasi-religious movement that actually intends to do just that. Proponents of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming are insistent on their two major truth claims: first, that the industrial pollution that mankind creates is causing the Earth to warm; and secondly, that this artificial warming will bring about climate changes that could have deleterious effects on the entire planet. These alarmists have become deeply entrenched in the political sphere. By contrast, there are a great many scientists who have been highly skeptical of the claims of climate alarmists and their bizarre suggestions on how to try to improve the environment. An examination of the evidence on both sides will show that, despite their certitude, the sophistical theories of the global warming alarmists are nothing more than hot air.
The ecologists' current fascination with global warming began in the early 1980s when climate researchers reported that they were beginning to notice progressively higher surface, oceanic, and atmospheric temperature readings. The data lead some scientists to predict that the trend would continue until the planet's mean temperature was so high that geological catastrophe would occur. NASA climate researcher James Hansen's article in Science in 1981 was one of the first proclamations of the warming and the theory behind it. It was followed by oceanographer Roger Revelle's article in the August 1982 edition of Scientific American which claimed that the warming phenomenon confirmed his earlier findings linking global average temperature deviations with carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. The exponential increase in the use of fossil fuels in the last half of the twentieth century was hastily identified as the source of the increase in carbon dioxide, and therefore the newly discovered warming trend. Climatologists started to warn that the waste products of these fuels included greenhouse gases, which are compounds that trap solar rays in the Earth's atmosphere. The fear was that the release of additional man-made climate forcing agents into the atmosphere could unbalance the natural greenhouse effect, and have severe environmental implications. Shortly after Revelle began studying the level of atmospheric CO2 in 1957, he predicted that it would gradually rise from its starting point of around 320 parts per million (by volume) to somewhere around 370 ppm by the year 2000. His predictions turned out to be remarkably precise, although the anticipated climate disasters never materialized.
In the broader scientific community, global warming became an overnight sensation. Climatologists climbed over each other to see who could scare the gas-guzzling public the most. Long ignored by society at large, the men in white lab coats now commanded the attention of everyone, from world leaders on down. It is no small wonder that so many scientists concluded that the world was ending; their egos and wallets multiplied in size with every new press release about the extinction of this species, or the inundation of that low-lying island, or the heatwave that will kill this number of citizens. It wasn't long before timorous politicians were forced to take action regarding climate change.
The Europeans were the first to use the global warming hype to their advantage, and in 1988 the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has since become the most powerful political force when it comes to global warming advocacy. Not surprisingly, however, the American public, as well as their elected leaders, did not pay much attention to the alleged threat of global warming throughout most of the 1980s. The first time Americans viewed climate change as a viable political issue was after the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day in April, 1990. New environmental movements began forming around issues such as the exploration of renewable energy sources, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and the promotion of lifestyle alternatives that would lead to a decrease in fossil-fuel consumption. Although U.S. President George H. W. Bush reluctantly attended the 1992 Rio Earth Summit organized by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)[1] and signed a treaty which was aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the president insisted that the agreement would be non-binding, thereby virtually assuring that no substantial action would be forthcoming. The first real executive attempt at mitigating global warming did not come until 1993 when President Bill Clinton called for an ill-fated proposal known as the 'BTU Tax'. This was an effort to reduce petroleum consumption by placing an excise tax on certain types of fuels, which, as an American University study showed, were never clearly defined (1). The poorly drafted bill was quashed after justifiable scrutiny from both political parties. After that embarrassing episode, Clinton wisely avoided the issue of climate change, preferring to let his tree-hugging vice president assume the lead role in environmental policy.
Albert Gore, Jr. was one of the first politicians to make global warming a central policy issue, first in the Senate, and then during his first failed presidential bid in 1988. It is ironic that during the eight years he was Vice President of the United States, when he wielded the most influence to make the nation aware of the seriousness of his pet issue, no real executive action was taken to combat global warming. The only time the Clinton Administration came close to introducing a policy that would curb greenhouse gas emissions was when Vice President Gore was dispatched to Japan in December, 1997 to attend the latest UNFCCC fiesta. Like Rio, this was another gathering of unelected, autocratic UN officials and marginally educated environmental activists with the purported aim of protecting the Earth from man-made warming (Singer 56). After a few rounds of squabbling over details, Gore put his signature on an international treaty that became known as the Kyoto Protocol, a contract between 'developed' nations whereby they would all agree to reduce their respective greenhouse gas emissions by certain levels and according to specified timetables (Article 3.1). However, as soon as Gore got back to the States, he found that the administration deemed the treaty such a political hot potato that they dropped it immediately and never even submitted it to be ratified by the Senate.[2]
In the ten years since Kyoto, there has not been much of a push for comprehensive legislation on climate mitigation, although some American politicians have expressed a desire to reach some sort of agreement with the nations that endorsed the treaty. Eventually, the U. S. will have to take a decisive stance and defend its policies, or lack thereof, from the onslaught of the European Union, the UN, and the Greens' conformist agenda. Perhaps the best way to do that is to actually investigate the evidence, rather than simply nodding at whatever wild predictions are put forth by non-scientists like Al Gore. The truth might not be what we would expect.
Since its inception, the global warming movement has had its critics, from conservative politicians and business tycoons worried about the economic implications of attempted climate mitigation, to religious leaders and humanitarians concerned about how the proposed UN mandates might adversely affect developing nations. All kinds of objections have been raised, especially from economists, but for our study only scientific criticism of anthropogenic global warming will be permitted. The global warming pushers are perfectly right about one thing: tumbling stock prices or increased unemployment won't matter a whole lot if the Earth burns up like a gasoline-soaked newspaper. This is a matter of planetary importance.
One of the favorite arguments of global warming advocacy groups, such as climatecrisis.net, is that "[t]he vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real....and that it is the result of [man's] activities and not natural (1)." This is a highly dubious statement, as there is rarely unanimity in an eclectic group of professionals in any field. Also, the statement is a half-truth at best; almost every scientist does agree with the premise that the Earth is warming, but there is an astonishing plurality as to the question of whether the warming is natural or anthropogenic. The above platitude falls on its face when we look at the Oregon Petition, organized by Dr. Arthur B. Robinson of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine and former president of the National Academy of Sciences Dr. Frederick Seitz, which railed against the climate change hysteria and compelled the U.S. government to reject the Kyoto treaty (37). The petition was signed by some 17,000 scientists and other experts, and the site claims that almost every name on the list was verified as legitimate (357). There are, of course, a great many scientists who believe in man-made warming and neither their credentials nor their motives will be impugned here, even though the radical "green" activists have disparaged the skeptical scientists on both grounds. However, since we know that the number of skeptics is not insignificant, our task now becomes to try and understand why so many of these experts disagree with the alarmists.
Let us begin with the greenhouse theory, which we have already investigated. Annex A of the Kyoto Protocol listed six chemical compounds under the heading, "Greenhouse Gases". The first three face the strongest indictments by the UNFCCC: CO2, CH4 (methane), and N2O (nitrous oxide).[3] The last three co-defendants are hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and SF6 (sulfur hexafluoride). Conspicuously absent from this line-up are sulfur dioxide (SO2) and other radiative forcing compounds, which tend to counteract the greenhouse effect and cool the Earth by reflecting solar rays back into space rather than trapping them inside the atmosphere.[4] The list also leaves out the most notorious greenhouse gas of all: H2O! As climate physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer tells us, "Water vapor makes up about 60 percent of the natural greenhouse effect, with CO2 making up an estimated 20 percent (40) ." Dr. Singer also refutes the primacy of the greenhouse theory as it relates to climate change; he states that focusing on CO2 alone is insufficient for "explaining known [climate] realities" for no less than eight reasons, not the least of which is that all three of Kyoto's prime suspects are, for the most part, created by Mother Nature, not man (10). CO2, which accounts for 76% of climate forcing, comes mostly from animals and decaying biomass, while CH4 is given off by rice paddies and cattle. Enormous quantities of N2O are emitted when volcanoes erupt.
Typically, scientists who have been heavily invested in the IPCC from its earliest days, such as British physicist Sir John Houghton, tend to overstate the role of man-made CO2 and ignore other important factors in global temperature change such as changes in solar radiation. In the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (2001), Houghton claims that the surface temperature warming in the last half of the twentieth century cannot be fully explained by changes in total solar irradiance (10). Astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas questions the conclusiveness of that statement, given that the exo-terrestrial climate indicators are extremely difficult to measure (Michaels 210).
The experts on both sides agree that the planet has been slowly warming since the mid-1970s, but the alarmist camp ignores the fact that from 1940-1975 a cooling trend took place.[5] This is another quagmire for those who contend that CO2 is the primary driver of atmospheric temperature; we are told that more greenhouse gases mean higher global temperatures, so why did they fall in an era of increasing CO2? Another anomaly on the timeline is that from 1850-1940, and, specifically, from 1920-1940, there was a huge surge in mean temperatures and CO2 could scarcely have had much to do with it; the meteoric rise in greenhouse gas emissions from industry and transportation did not occur until after World War II.
We now look even further back at the extended climate timeline, which has been compiled from a careful examination of various types of proxy .. ice cores, tree rings, seabed sediments, coral reefs, and stalagmites, just to name a few. The records tell us that since the last Ice Age ended approximately 11,000 years ago, the natural global temperature fluctuations occurred in fairly predictable stages. Global temperatures fell from 600-200 B.C., rose during the Roman Warming period from 200 B.C. to 600 A.D., fell again during the Dark Ages cold period until about 900 when the Medieval Warming began, then fell once again starting circa 1300, marking the beginning of the Little Ice Age. This lasted until around 1850, commencing our current era known as the Modern Warming.
If these figures sound different than the ones disseminated by the alarmists, it's because they are, and this brings us to what is, quite possibly, the most embarrassing episode in the short history of the global warming crusade: the tale of the "hockey stick". In 1998, a paper was published in Nature by M. Mann, R. Bradley, and M. Hughes titled "Global-scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcings Over the Past Six Centuries," usually called MBH98 (IPCC 2001 Q9). The article featured a graph that looked like a hockey stick lying on its back. The implication of the graph, with its steady pattern of climate history prior to 1850, and then a drastically increasing slope designating unnatural modern global warming, was that for the last 1000 years there was little deviation from the mean until the Industrial Revolution.[6] This is patently absurd, but IPCC 2001 used the supposedly peer-reviewed chart to further its fear-inducing agenda. It wasn't until 2003, when statistics expert Stephen McIntyre checked the math used by Mann and company to calculate the "hockey stick" that the errors were uncovered. Equally disconcerting was the discovery that, during his non-partisan audit, not only did McIntyre realize that the math which Mann used to calculate the graph was all wrong, but that no one before him had even bothered to verify the graph at all! McIntyre, along with his partner Ross McKitrick, an economist, subsequently published a report known as MM03 in the fourteenth edition of Environment and Energy, in which the fallacies of the MBH98 graph were exposed (751-71).
The reliance on fabricated charts, models, and prognostications, especially computer-generated ones called General Circulation Models (GCMs), is the Achilles' Heel of the alarmists. According to Earth scientist Eric Posmentier and physicist Willie Soon, the theory that climate forcing due to increased CO2 levels will cause precipitous global warming is not a hypothesis proven by scientific experimentation, but a prediction generated by those notorious computer models (Michaels 242). In a handful of sophisticated laboratories across the globe, data is fed into titanic supercomputers which are then trusted to project the outcomes of current climate trends. Since NASA and other agencies began using the new, impressive-looking equipment, not only have all of the highly-touted models been unacceptably inaccurate when forecasting climate scenarios, they have not even come close to predicting the known results of temperature fluctuations in the last ten or twenty years since their inception. The latest models are no more trustworthy than the primitive designs from the 1980s, and most honest climatologists are aware of their shortcomings, so why do they continue to have such indefatigable faith in the GCMs? It could be the fact that it is very easy to manipulate data in order to project a desired outcome, which is, almost without exception, a frightening apocalyptic scenario that reads like the Book of the Revelation: the Earth becomes so hot that glaciers melt, seas rise, extinctions and famines occur, both floods and droughts wreak havoc in different locations, storms become fiercer and more frequent, etc. This is distressing indeed, as it is meant to be; no charitable organization is going to raise much money by telling the public that everything's just fine, and some academics have accused eco-groups of exaggerating the potential destructive effects of climate change as a fundraising gimmick (Day 24). This may give us a clue as to what really motivates the alarmists.
The rhetoric from the global warming crowd probably will not cease anytime soon, no matter how foolish their arguments sound in lieu of the evidence. Despite Al Gore's assertion that skeptical climatologists have financial motivation to misinform the public, the converse is true. There can be no denying that professional climate alarmists, not just in the scientific community, but in the news media, entertainment, politics, and even business have carved out a niche in the fear-induction business and created a cottage industry for themselves. Wherever any cataclysmic event occurs, whether it be a hurricane, flood, mud puddle, melted ice-cream cone, or small cloud hovering over a spot where some disgruntled baby-boomer thinks the sun should be allowed to shine, some EU spokesman or Newsweek editorial writer will be on hand to gleefully confirm that it was the result of SUV-driving Americans and President Bush's energy policy. Bet on it.
This essay opened with a quote from Mark Twain, and it shall close with one. For anyone who still believes in the anti-scientific dogma of the alarmists like Gore, and stubbornly clings to the notion that his 'science' is concrete and irrefutable, I would encourage you to listen to the words of the former vice-president himself, from his Academy Award-winning global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth:
"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we
know for sure that just ain't so." --Mark Twain
NOTES
1. American University, Trade and Environment Database, "TED Case Studies: US BTU
Tax".
2. Climatecrisis.net, "The Science",
3. Day, Elizabeth, "Charities 'Spread Scare Stories on Climate Change to Boost Public
Donations'", Weekly Telegraph/UK, 24 February 2005.
4. Hansen, J., and D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, G. Russell,
"Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide",
Science 213, 957-966 (1981).
5. Third Assessment Report: Climate Change 2001, The Scientific Basis,
"Summary For Policymakers", pp98, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
Geneva, Switzerland.
6. "Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change",
7. Mann, M. E., R. S. Bradley, and M. K. Hughes,
"Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcings Over the Past Six
Centuries", Nature 392, 779-87 (1998).
8. McIntyre, S. and R. McKitrick, "Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) Data Base and
Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series", Environment and Energy 14,
751-71 (2003).
9. Michaels, P. J., Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming, Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
10. Revelle, R., and H. Suess, "Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and
Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades",
Tellus 9, 18-27 (1957)
11. Revelle, R., "Carbon Dioxide and World Climate", Scientific American 247 (2):35-
43 (1982).
12. Seitz, Frederick, "Petition Project", 1998-2007,
13. Singer, S.F., and D. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years,
Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
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[1] As is the case with most UN subcommittees, the UNEP, UNFCCC, and IPCC are thoroughly political, not technical, in membership and mission. Reports are edited by non-scientists, sometimes with embarrassing consequences. Their much-ballyhooed "findings", "assessments", etc. should not be assumed to have been peer-reviewed by legitimate experts and therefore must, by no means, be considered canonical.
[2] In the summer of 1997, prior to Gore's trip, the Senate voted unanimously on a proclamation rejecting any treaty that would specifically try to damage the American economy, which would later come to describe the Kyoto Protocol almost verbatim. On 21 July the Byrd-Hagel resolution passed, 95-0.
[3] Other nitrogen-oxygen structures, designated by the chemically meaningless term, NOx, have climate forcing capability although N2O is the only one listed in Kyoto.
[4] Technically speaking, SO2 and other sun-blocking agents are not greenhouse gases, but they do have considerable power to counteract global warming, especially after major volcanic eruptions. The measurable cooling anomalies following Krakatoa (1883) and Pinatubo (1991) epitomize this phenomenon.
[5] The alarmist camp has never reconciled the 'global cooling' and 'Ice Age' scares of the 1970s with the current global warming hype, mainly because both eras had very comparable emissions levels but diametrically opposed temperature patterns. Despite their attempts to shrug them off, we cannot take what the alarmists say seriously until they deal with their own contradictory overreactions from thirty years ago.
[6] A year after the 'hockey stick' graph was unveiled, the same team of Mann et al. updated the data to extend the timeline all the way back to 1000 A.D. It was just the same data as MBH98 with another 400 years of climate history tacked on and was known as MBH99. MM03 lists the errors in both graphs.
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