Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Sherlock Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
A recent article titled “Two Competing Narratives on Carbon Dioxide,” asks the question “Is carbon dioxide our friend or foe?” The official answer is “foe,” because of the predetermined assumption of those using climate for their political agenda that global warming was only bad. From 1985, when the foundation meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was held in Villach, Austria, to the present is 32 years and reflects how effective they have been in selling a totally one-sided argument. I know, because I received more angry responses when I dared to suggest global warming has benefits and is far less threatening than global cooling. What they could not allow was any research that identified or even hinted at any benefit to higher levels of atmospheric CO2. Or a warmer world.
From the start, the IPCC objective was deliberately and carefully orchestrated to demonize carbon dioxide. The larger structure saw Working Group I prove that the human portion of atmospheric carbon dioxide was causing global warming – they never even considered the null hypothesis. Working Groups II and III accepted that finding without question. The positive side of many variables was ignored. This includes the fact that while humans add carbon dioxide, they also remove an estimated 50 percent of what they add, but only the gross figure was ever used. This bias pervades all the work of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from the definition of climate change given to the IPCC to the standard environmental escape hatch of the precautionary principle identified as Principle 15 of Agenda 21.
A major vehicle to promote the validity of the IPCC was the so-called Stern Review. Commissioned by the Labour government of Gordon Brown, of which Stern was a member, it was an economic study that instead of doing a balanced cost/benefit analysis said,
“Climate change is a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen. The evidence on the seriousness of the risks from inaction or delayed action is now overwhelming. The problem of climate change involves a fundamental failure of markets: those who damage others by emitting greenhouse gases generally do not pay.
All he had to do was look at the impact of cooling produced by people like Martin Parry for the World Meteorological Organization Stern’s work was completely in line with the bias applied to alternate energies. Only benefits were considered; balanced Cost/Benefit analyses were never applied. The perspective was further distorted by massive government subsidies at so many different levels that they became almost impossible. Stern’s work was given credibility within a year of releasing the Review in 2006, just like the Nobel Prize given to the IPCC, by making him Lord Stern in 2007. A strange reward for a socialist.
Every action, study, procedure, and policy was directed to one side of the hypothesis that human CO2 was causing global warming (AGW) and it was all bad. Funding came mostly from government and was only given to research that proved the hypothesis.
Documentaries are carefully planned, scripted, and produced. Considerable thought is given to the message and the assumptions made to ensure it is effectively transmitted. The decisions determine what is included, but equally important what is omitted. The BBC publishes a very detailed list of Editorial Guidelines. In a section on “Accuracy,” they provide considerable latitude.
The requirements may even vary within a genre, so the due accuracy required of factual content may differ depending on whether it is, for example, factual entertainment, historical documentary, current affairs or news.
Accuracy is not simply a matter of getting facts right. If an issue is controversial, relevant opinions as well as facts may need to be considered. When necessary, all the relevant facts and information should also be weighed to get at the truth.
So, a producer can determine content and emphasis but must include sufficient evidence to support the veracity and credibility of the story. Presumably, this means any documentary will include fundamentals essential to understanding; one can expect coverage of certain pivotal information depending on the topic.
I was watching episode 9 of the BBC’s TV Life Series titled “Plants” narrated by David Attenborough. (The video has commercials, but you can skip most). I was waiting for the standard reference to global warming impact on plants. I thought it would come early in the discussion about the importance and uniqueness of photosynthesis defined as
“the process by which green plants and some other organisms use sunlight to synthesize foods from carbon dioxide and water. Photosynthesis in plants generally involves the green pigment chlorophyll and generates oxygen as a byproduct.”
There was no mention of photosynthesis – it was the first dog that did not barkin the night. Obviously, you can make a documentary about plants without mentioning photosynthesis as Attenborough has done but, frankly, I don’t understand how you can provide an overview of the history, evolution, role, and importance of plants in the Earth system without discussing it. The omission, especially in the context of other omissions in the program indicate it was a conscious decision. The question is why? The answer is it would speak to the benefits of increased CO2 levels.
The program spoke of the development of trees and their adaptation to life in some remarkable locations. It examined the various ways they sought light and water. It spent considerable time on the importance of nutrients, even having two segments on meat-eating plants, like the Venus Flytrap, which obtain them by catching and absorbing insects.
I thought they would bring up global warming at the end when they talked about the extent and importance of grasslands. They emphasized the importance of rice and wheat to human nutrition and advancing human societies, but still made no mention. Again, the dog did nothing in the night. Then I realized that not once in the entire documentary did they mention CO2 or even Oxygen. I watched it again to confirm that the dog wasn’t even there, let alone barking. The focus of the documentary was that
“Plants’ solutions to life’s challenges are as ingenious and manipulative as any animals.”
Surely nothing is more ingenious about plants and critical to their very existence than the presence of chlorophyll and its ability to combine sunlight and CO2 to produce nutrition. You don’t even need to include the by-product of oxygen that is essential to all animal life.
The documentary was released in 2009 when the political agenda of global warming was at a critical point. The “hockey stick” graph had been under intense scrutiny since the 2003 publication by McIntyre and McKitrick. Andrew Montford’s detailed and definitive exposé “The Hockey Stick Illusion” was due for publication in 2010. Concern about the production of policy based on deliberately corrupted science pushed somebody to leak 1000 emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), the major climate research centre at East Anglia in November of 2009. The Kyoto Protocol, the major political vehicle dependent on the corrupted science was due for final approval at the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties (COP15) in December 2009. The hiatus, the levelling of temperatures after 1998, was reaching troubling lengths for promoters of the AGW claim. Weather patterns shifted so ordinary people were becoming skeptical, and promoters decided a change of terminology was required. A 2004 leaked CRU email from the Minns/Tyndall Centre on the UEA campus said,
“In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media.”
To which Swedish Chief Climate Negotiator Bo Kjellen replied,
“I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming.”
Apart from cold weather and a levelling temperature curve, the alarmists faced the problem that CO2 continued to rise. Skeptics were aware that this contradicted their basic assumption that a CO2 increase caused a temperature increase. Everything the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had done since its inception was to demonize CO2. Now, as people other than skeptics began to ask questions, there was the danger that people could learn that CO2 was essential to life and that plants especially benefitted from an atmospheric increase. Research started to appear from agencies NASA that anyone who studied long-term climate change and was familiar with palynology or plant physiology knew that plants thrive on higher CO2 levels.
The researchers looked at what was driving the increase in plant growth between 1982 and 2009 and found that CO2 was the main culprit, and that up to half the world’s land is becoming greener as a result.
Dr. Sherwood Idso studied and published on CO2 enhancement for years as his important website attests. He appeared in two classic documentaries on the subject, the first The Greenhouse Conspiracy as early as 1990 and later The Great Global Warming Swindle. When Patrick Moore, former co-founder of Greenpeace and a biologist, became active in the climate debate his first major campaign was about the benefits of increased CO2. It was the theme of a presentation to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2015.
The BBC “Plants” documentary lists three technical advisors or staff members of The Open University, “is the UK’s largest academic institution.” Mike Dodd is identified as an ecologist, David Robinson as a zoologist and Janet Sumner as a geologist with specialization in volcanology. All three must know about CO2 and its role in plant growth, but Sumner likely knew more about its atmospheric effects because of specialized work in volcanic degassing.
The documentary ends with an addendum on the process and techniques of slow motion filming used to produce the film. This is remarkable, and the visual results are stunning and revealing, but growth at any speed is not possible without photosynthesis. Its omission in this documentary is the dog that did not bark in the night because they couldn’t allow it to bark.
Attenborough & BBC America are as bad as it gets. You can bet on an inference on CAGW or any other current Marxist talking point about every 10 seconds. National Geographic Channel and public stations are just as bad, and even the Comedy channel. But it’s present in pretty much all media. 1984 is now…..
Let’s not be distracted, these groups care nothing about controlling the climate, they want to control people, climate is just how they bait the hook.
The entire notion that human beings have the slightest capacity to control the weather at a single point on the earth’s surface for even a single moment, let alone control the climate of the entire planet over long periods of time, is beyond ludicrous…it is pure fantasy. Not even science fiction. Such an idea has no basis in fact.
We have neither the available energies, the proper acumen, or even any rudimentary technological basis for believing such.
Present day “climate scientists” have demonstrated they do not even have a willingness to objectively analyze the variables, let alone the inputs, to form a coherent base of knowledge to understand what is happening in the present, in real time, with any degree of precision or accuracy.
They cannot even discuss the limits of their own knowledge with any degree of candor.
The very epitome of ‘oxymoron’: Swedish Chief Climate Negotiator Bo Kjellen
Is anyone aware that global warming causes [cooler] temperature? When ice melts it consumes 540 calories. When water warms 1 degree it consumes 1 calorie. Therefore melting ice reduces the temperature of the surrounding water and air😳😞
Oops “cooler” temperatures.😳
Correction: “cooler” temperatures.😳
Actually, the amount of energy, the enthalpy of fusion, for water is closer to 80 calories per gram…79.72 to be more precise.
And the energy, or “heat”, is not consumed, it is stored as potential energy in the molecules.
This is not very precise either.
The whole story is rather complicated, but basically, when ice melts, it requires that 80 calories of energy per gram is imparted to the ice, allowing it to transform from ice at 32 degrees to water at 32 degrees. The ice does not “cool” the surrounding molecules, but rather, their must be 80 calories of energy to transfer to the ice to melt it to begin with.
Ice turning into water cannot cool what is around it below 32 degrees.
This being a science site, let’s keep it sciency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion
“The liquid phase has a higher internal energy than the solid phase. This means energy must be supplied to a solid in order to melt it and energy is released from a liquid when it freezes, because the molecules in the liquid experience weaker intermolecular forces and so have a higher potential energy (a kind of bond-dissociation energy for intermolecular forces).”
And yes, to answer your question…lots of people here have much more than high school physics under their belts.
I have concluded that there must exist at institutions like the BBC, CBC and CNN censors every bit as empowered as existed in the 19th Century Churches who banned books, listed acceptable memes and anointed acceptable authorities.
It is censorship plain and simple. It is censorship unanswerable to the public and in service of an influential few.
The public cannot be properly served by guard dogs that don’t bark and Ombudsmen that can’t bite. The same public cannot survive without food produced from CO2 or breathe air without oxygen.
It seems that a pack of grade-school aged dolts has now descended upon the WUWT website.
At the very least, it is eye-opening to see the level of knowledge of even young warmistas.
They do not know how little they know…zero awareness…but are sure of everything.
Troubling indeed.
Ignorance + hubris. Never a good combination.
I have read a number of reports from the IPCC and others that talk about the benefits of global warming, but they also say the disbenefits are greater, so I am not sure what Tim Ball is missing. Increased greening is talked about in those reports.
I don’t know why the “CO2 is good for plants therefore there is no possible problem, argument is ever used”. The argument is superfluously obvious. Of course CO2 is good/ essential for plants. The question is the increase to concentrations by human actions, not its existence.
The idea that a documentary did not mention photosynthesis therefore wanted to continue the demonisation of CO2, strikes me as pure fiction.
Tim Ball does not believe that the greenhouse effect is real so it is useless to talk about greenhouse gases with him.
IPCC “disbenefits” are illusionary, Geoffrey. They are based on exaggerated interpretations of unreliable IPCC climate model outputs, sometimes connected with economic models that purport to represent technical and economic realities out 50, 100 and even 300 years. If you think anyone can predict with accuracy the human condition beyond about 20 years, then I would have problems carrying on a rational discussion with you.
Since there have been no increases in extreme weather in a generally warming world, IPCC CMIP5 model “projections” of the various climate metrics worsening in the future are nothing more than biased speculation. Additionally, CMIP5 models’ hindcasts miss multi-decadal variations, being tuned to the warming end of the 20th Century. Dr. Curry’s recent report on climate models adopted my suggestion that such models are not sufficient to fundamentally change our society, economy and energy systems.
Recent studies show that many models have excessive CO2 sensitivity, and their hindcasts rely on unrealistic levels of aerosols to approximate actual measurements. That makes their “projections” run hot compared to 21st Century results. It is especially bad in that their atmospheric temperature trends run 2 to 3 times actual estimates by 3 satellite, 4 radiosonde and 3 reanalyses. I observe that the only model approximating actual results is the “hacked” Russian model that has a far lower sensitivity to CO2. Russians hack everything, you know.
It bothers me that climate science practitioners do not seem to publicly acknowledge credible data and worthy studies that would normally call for some introspection about claimed “consensus.” The Climategate emails should caution anyone listening to claims of extreme climate change by some of the top people in climate science. It also seems that personal attacks substitute for reasoned debates in climate science.
Minor warming and the physical impacts of such warming do not prove that CO2 is the main driver. AGW, maybe. CAGW, no proof.
Hi Dave Fair, thanks for those respectful comments. I am not sure how you can say the “disbenefits” are illusionary, when they are predictions. They may turn out to be wrong and therefore become illusionary. I would agree that long term predictions are problematic, even short term. I do think, however, that if increases in world temperature are significant in the next 50, 100, 300 years then the stresses on the creatures of the planet will be also be significant. Many species thrive in particular climates suited to their requirements and any migration that might occur is going to be severely hampered by the extremely fragmented natural systems that exist today.
I would agree that we can’t see much in extreme weather events as yet, maybe never.
I think that the lower end models have come closest to accuracy. (I think the Monckton analysis using the average of models as something meaningful is a bit silly, as if some one has said that the predictions are based on the average of models.) Any one of the models could become accurate or none.
The “climategate” emails were examined by a number of enquiries that found very little evidence of anything terribly nefarious, maybe all the participants were in “the scam”, but I just don’t think there is much to see there.
Proof – I would agree proof is not really there, but proof is probably impossible, only the most plausible until something else is shown to be the cause. I don’t know how many other explanations for how the climate is controlled, at least 5 that I’ve perused, but the greenhouse theory is still king, in my opinion.
Well, Geoffrey, since “disbenefits” was presented as an assumed thing, I think illusionary would be OK. That is, unless we want to get so pedantic it is impossible to carry on a normal conversation. Then, again, I guess “wild speculation” would be more accurate.
I think the operative term you used related to significant future warming is “if.” We ought to throw in another “if” related to significantly harmful effects on climatic systems in the event of possible warming. Another, big, “if” is the ability of organisms to adapt to any of the other “ifs.” It is all speculative and not worthy of expensive policy non-solutions.
Please note that the Russian climate model with the lowest sensitivity is the most accurate. In any case, IPCC climate models have been shown to be inadequate for the purposes of fundamentally changing our society, economy and energy systems. They are in no way “plausible” in the sense they would justify belief in CAGW.
Geoffrey, I read the Climategate emails. On their face, by plain reading, they destroyed any credibility the participants could ever possibly have. Collusion to falsify scientific results, criminal conspiracy to violate laws, suppression of contrary data; need I go on? I have read that criminal charges were only avoided due to the statute of limitations having run out. No whitewashing by bureaucrats and politicians can change that.
Your last comment is completely false. There is a greenhouse effect. I explained it in the textbook I publishd, although I also explained it is a very poor analogy. I also think the effect is almost all a function of water in all its phases and phase changes and the CO2 effect is close to zero.
“A Greenhouse as Analogy For The Atmosphere Is Completely Wrong” – Tim Ball. August 12, 2013. I just read English. You do seem to contradict yourself evey few sentences so it is understandable that you would contradict yourself here.