The Problem With Man-Made Global Warming

earth fire disaster

The mainstream “consensus” on anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW) says the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) remained stable for millions of years, until the Industrial Revolution when it went from 280 ppm in 1750 to 414.7 ppm in 2019.

Environmentalists blame this on man’s consumption of fossil fuels, which has increased significantly since the early 1900s.

In support of the “consensus” view, climate change researchers write:

“[T]he current CO2 concentration is unprecedented over the past 3 million years[.] … [G]lobal temperature never exceeded the preindustrial value by more than 2°C during the Quaternary” (Willeit et al., 2019).

Environmentalists predict that, as anthropogenic CO2 rises, there will be more and more natural disasters, threatening the lives of millions of people around the world.

These include more frequent and severe hurricanes, widespread flooding, extreme heatwaves, and prolonged drought.

Belief in the dangers of AGW has led to the emergence of “climate change science,” an interdisciplinary field that is very different from the natural sciences.

Regular scientists rely on objective, empirical methods to test hypotheses. Climate change scientists, on the other hand, manipulate data to fit preconceived beliefs; they are trained to ignore hypotheses challenging the AGW status quo, no matter how plausible.

In the natural sciences, governments fund different avenues of research; in climate change science, only AGW receives funding because it is “politically correct.”

Climate change scientists are expected to uncover positive correlations between anthropogenic CO2 and temperature; if they cannot find one, it will have to be manufactured out of thin air.

Not only is there no research money for those seeking alternative explanations of climate change, but any attempt at falsifying the AGW hypothesis is considered heresy.

Those who question the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)’s findings are dismissed as cranks challenging a well established scientific “consensus.”

Climate change science has more in common with Lysenkoism than actual science.

Climate change scientists are not above using ad hominem rhetoric to silence legitimate debate. Geologists and other researchers who disagree with AGW are dismissed as “climate deniers,” even though no scientifically literate person denies that climate always changes.

In 2008, NASA’s James Hansen, whose testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1988 began the AGW scare, demanded that CEOs of fossil-fuel companies be tried for “high crimes against humanity and nature.”

Prosecution for thoughtcrime is apparently warranted because of refusal to accept mainstream “consensus” on AGW.

In 2014, the pro-AGW documentary Merchants of Doubt smeared noted American physicist Fred Singer as a “liar.” Singer threatened to sue the film director for libel.

In 2009, a server at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) was hacked, and thousands of emails were leaked.

These emails revealed a world seldom seen by the public, where manipulation of data and willful suppression of evidence had replaced scientific objectivity.

Free from the glare of public scrutiny, the CRU disregarded the scientific method in pursuit of a political agenda.

The emails tell a tale of corruption at the highest levels of academia. In one email, a climate change scientist who had uncovered a decreasing trend in Northern Hemispheric temperatures was told to “hide the decline” using “Mike’s Nature trick.”

By padding the trend with “instrumental” or thermometer data, the proxy temperature record was adjusted to reflect mainstream “consensus.”

In other emails, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests were routinely evaded and incriminating emails hurriedly deleted. Scientists who disagreed with the CRU were ridiculed and bullied.

The scandal, known as “Climategate,” revealed a conspiracy among scientists to feed biased information to the IPCC. In the aftermath, the CRU’s top scientists narrowly escaped criminal prosecution because of a legal technicality.

In addition to its proponents’ questionable conduct, there are numerous problems with the evidence of AGW. Environmental activists typically rely on scientific “consensus” and the “hockey stick” graph to prove it.

Claims of overwhelming scientific “consensus” on AGW are sourced from Cook, et al. (2013), a team of volunteers affiliated with SkepticalScience.com, a pro-AGW website.

The study supposedly found that 97% of the scientific community endorses AGW. The re-analysis of the data revealed significant bias and unrepresentative sample sizes. Cook, et al. had excluded 75% of all papers discussing climate change.

Geologists have long known about climatic fluctuations across geological and evolutionary timescales, but studies from geology and other earth sciences were woefully undersampled.

Cook and his team of volunteers were taken to task for mistaking “a trend in composition for a trend in endorsement” (Tol, 2014).

Michael Mann’s iconic “hockey stick” (1998), the centerpiece of the IPCC’s case for AGW, ignited a firestorm of controversy and debate in the early 2000s, thanks to the efforts of Canadian researchers McIntyre and McKitrick.

The original graph showed Northern Hemispheric mean temperature increasing dramatically after the early 1900s; this rising trend, when depicted graphically, resembled a “hockey stick.”

McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) re-analyzed Mann’s data, concluding that it was “primarily an artifact of poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components.”

They also uncovered a late–15th-century “Medieval Warming Period,” when temperatures were higher than they are now.

Mann was criticized for using a computer algorithm that “mined for hockey stick shapes and overstated their dominance in the underlying data patterns” (McKitrick, 2014).

His proxy temperature data for the “hockey stick” were based on tree ring analysis, which does not produce accurate results because ring width is influenced by soil conditions, amount of sunlight and rainfall, humidity, and CO2 availability.

These effects must be disentangled before the data can be properly interpreted.

The IPCC believes that rising anthropogenic CO2 reduces ocean buffer capacity; if the ocean can’t absorb excess CO2, it remains trapped in the atmosphere with nowhere to go.

As climate physicist Edwin X. Berry pointed out (2019), if this were true, the concentration of atmospheric CO2 would be many times higher than it is now, given average CO2 variation across geological and evolutionary timescales.

The IPCC apparently believes that anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic CO2 have the same molecular formulas but different molecular structures, a preposterous assumption that violates the laws of chemistry and physics.

The most accurate models always supply us with an explanation that best fits the data. Berry’s simple mathematical model “shows how CO2 flows through the atmosphere and produces a balanced level where outflow equals inflow.”

After nuclear testing during the 1950s and ’60s, there was a temporary accumulation of C14 in the atmosphere, which eventually dissipated after 1970.

In order for the Bern model to be correct, this man-made CO14 would have remained trapped in the atmosphere. The data show this to be false, forcing us to conclude that Berry’s “physics model” is the most accurate explanation.

AGW is clearly not supported by the data, so what causes rising average global temperatures?

There is evidence that climate change is affected by solar magnetic flux, although the precise mechanism is still under debate.

The most common theory suggests an inverse correlation between sunspot activity and cosmic ray intensity.

During low sunspot activity, the expansion of the sun’s corona produces faster and stronger solar winds. This shields the heliosphere from interstellar cosmic rays, which are needed for ionization of aerosols in Earth’s atmosphere.

If ionization fails to produce enough charged particles, there is less formation of cloud condensation nuclei (CNNs), the “surface” area for water vapor condensation.

Without sufficient cloud cover, incoming solar radiation will raise the average global temperature because it is not being reflected back into outer space (Svensmark, 2019).

Environmentalists like to believe that there is a climate “control knob,” but we have as much control over the climate as King Canute of England had over the tides.

AGW is a malicious fraud based on spurious correlation and post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning.

The question remains to be asked: if AGW is so obviously wrong, why does the IPCC continue to promote it as if it were actually true? The answer is money and power.

This means more money and power for governments, which get to collect carbon taxes and impose cap and trade policies, and for the IPCC and other U.N. bodies, which get to dictate global environmental policy and transfer billions of dollars from the West to third-world countries.

Read more at American Thinker


PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX. 

Please DONATE TODAY To Help Our Non-Profit Mission To Defend The Scientific Method.

Trackback from your site.

Comments (6)

  • Avatar

    Jerry

    |

    I have several questions for the IPCC:

    Where is the experimental evidence that quantifies the co2 atmospheric sensitivity (impact)?

    Where is the data and codes for the hockey stick graph?

    Where is the proof that the co2 level rise first followed by the temperature not the other way around?

    Why are the rings of a single spruce proof of global impact and ice cores are considered proof of local impact?

    Why have you created a black box around the AGW?

    Why do you not name the people who peer review your papers?

    Why are you neglecting the impact of natural co2 and the other 24 systems that impact our climate?

    Why are manipulating the temperature data?

    When are you going to start practicing science?

    Reply

  • Avatar

    Pierre D. Bernier

    |

    I have a question also for the IPCC, well… A comment !
    https://climateofsophistry.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/greenhouse.jpg

    From Washington University. You can find the same diagram for Penn State, Columbia, Harvard and probably many other Universities on the web. Let’s take a look at the top left of the diagram. It says 1370 * (1-A) /4. 1370 is the Sun’s flux reaching the Earth at the top of the atmosphere, (1-A) is subtracting the reflected light by the atmosphere (what is called albedo) and /4 means divide by 4. They divide the Sun’s flux reaching the Earth’s surface by 4 ignoring the fact that the Sun shines on Earth on only one hemisphere at a time, not 2. But let’s play their game.

    You have 239,7 W/m2 from the Sun reaching the Earth. That energy is reflected back to the atmosphere and heats it up. Now the atmosphere is a blackbody at -18 °C and, as all blackbodies do, radiates in all direction equally, that is, 239,7 W/m2 up and 239,7 W/m2 down. Now the earth receives 239,7 W/m2 from the Sun and 239,7 W/m2 from the atmosphere for a total of 479,4 W/m2. According to the Stefan-Boltzman law that is a 303K temperature (30 °C). Now, as all blackbodies do, the Earth which is now at 303K will radiate that 479,4 W/m2 back up to the atmosphere in an attempt to cool off. What was good the first time around must be good the second time around. There is no law of physics that says otherwise. So now, the atmosphere is also at 303K and, as all blackbodies do, will radiate 479,4 W/m2 up and 479,4 W/m2 down. Now the Earth receives 239,7 W/m2 from the Sun and 479,4 W/m2 from the atmosphere for a total of 719,1 W/m2. That’s a surface temperature of 336K (63 °C). This continuous heating cycle must result in continuous increases in temperature causing increases in radiative emissions and it has no end. So clearly, there is a flaw somewhere. The flaw is that the atmosphere creates energy. No energy can be created from nothing. It goes against the first law of thermodinamics that states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. The solution to this problem is that the Sun shines on one hemisphere of the Earth at a time and therefore it’s flux should be divided by 2, not 4. That way we get our required 30 °C from the start, which creates the weather and climate, and we have no more need for GHGE ! Also, the earth having received 479,4 W/m2 on one hemisphere can now radiate it back to space at half that rate (239,7 W/m2) from both hemispheres at the same time as measured by the satellites. QED !

    Reply

  • Avatar

    Zoe Phin

    |

    Pierre,
    “The flaw is that the atmosphere creates energy.”
    You say that here, yet you also believe Downwelling IR exists and it’s greater than solar.

    “Also, the earth having received 479,4 W/m2 on one hemisphere can now radiate it back to space at half that rate (239,7 W/m2) from both hemispheres at the same time as measured by the satellites.”

    And object that radiates 239.7 from all sides, is an object at -18C.

    Neglect geothermal some more!

    Reply

  • Avatar

    Dan Paulson

    |

    “During low sunspot activity, the expansion of the sun’s corona produces faster and stronger solar winds. This shields the heliosphere from interstellar cosmic rays, which are needed for ionization of aerosols in Earth’s atmosphere.”

    I believe that this is a typo and should say “during high sunspot activity”

    During low sunspot activity the reduced solar winds allow deeper penetration of solar rays on Earth, leading to more cloud formation and cooling.

    Reply

    • Avatar

      tom0mason

      |

      Dan Paulson,
      Or is it that as the solar activity wanes then cosmic rays impact more on the earth’s climate and geological systems with more clouds and seismic activity.

      Reply

  • Avatar

    tom0mason

    |

    A Question for the IPCC …

    Why should anyone believe a political organization’s re-rendering of pseudoscience?

    Reply

Leave a comment

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
Share via