Guest essay by Ian Aitken
What does the future hold for the climate change debate? Will there ever come a day when we see the headlines across the globe, ‘It’s Official – There Is No Climate Change Crisis’? Hardly – for unless we find some way to leap ahead in the currently highly immature science of climate change and manage finally to pin down the exact direct and indirect (via feedbacks) warming effect of adding greenhouse gases to our atmosphere and the exact effects of natural changes in our climate the outcomes will remain uncertain. The eminent scientist Stephen Koonin has stated that, ‘Today’s best estimate of the sensitivity [of the atmosphere to the addition of carbon dioxide]… is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.’ Basically, unless the ‘Uncertainty Monster’ is slain (and there is absolutely no reason to believe that will happen in the foreseeable future) neither the believers nor the skeptics can ‘prove’ their case. In which case we seem to be in a ‘wait and see’ position. But for how long? Even if the current global warming Slowdown persisted for decades it would still be possible that dramatic and dangerous warming was just about to resume. Indeed in 2015 The UK’s Royal Society expressed the view that it would take 50 years of divergence between the observations and the climate models before they would be convinced that the theory of anthropogenic climate change was flawed. We cannot be absolutely sure that there will be no climate change crisis – only that it is becoming increasingly unlikely. So the politically-correct scientific shibboleths of the ‘climate change crisis’ idea may well persist for a great many decades.
Having persuaded the world to spend trillions of dollars on fighting man-made climate change is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) really going to admit that the causes of climate change are actually far more complex than they originally thought and so they may have been fundamentally mistaken about both the attribution and quantification of warming? And what about the UK’s Royal Society and the American National Academy of Sciences, those most renowned of scientific institutions; are they going to admit that they may have put political correctness and scientific funding concerns before scientific objectivity? What about all those climate scientists who have been so careful to tacitly collude with the IPCC and not rock the climate change crisis boat; are they going to admit that their judgments may have been skewed by considerations of the self-interest of retaining their jobs, careers, incomes and pensions? And the many climate research units around the world; are they going to say, ‘Well we must go where the science takes us – if the science says that there actually isn’t a problem then we’ll just have to shut up shop.’ What about all of the senior politicians in the western world who have foisted an avalanche of regulations, taxes and controls on their electorates to ‘fight climate change’; are they going stand up and admit that their scientific illiteracy led them to be completely fooled? Are all those prestigious environmental organizations, such as the WWF, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth going to admit they had only ‘signed up’ to the global warming scare because it happened to suit their agendas, attracted donations and increased their influence? Is the BBC, that globally respected bastion of impartiality and objectivity, going to admit to the people of Britain that it abused its position of trust by simply taking on face value the selective and spun science fed to them and taking an irresponsible and unjustifiably partisan editorial approach to the climate change debate? What about all those newspaper journalists who for years have been repeating NASA and IPCC Press Releases as ‘objective facts’, neither subjecting them to critical analysis nor asking any awkward questions? What about all those celebrities who have lined up to pledge their support for fighting climate change by flying less frequently in their private jets to reduce their ‘carbon footprint’? What about all those school teachers who (willingly or unwillingly) taught their pupils about the climate change crisis as though it was an undisputed fact? No, it just isn’t going to happen – far too many reputations and far too much money is at stake.
There is also the strange culture in science explained by the scientific historian Thomas Kuhn as, ‘Once it has achieved the status of a paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternative candidate is available to take its place’. Note that he is not suggesting that this is right; instead he is saying that history shows it to be case. A credible alternative theory today is the ‘cosmic ray flux theory’; but for every dollar in research funding that goes into that theory and for every mention in the media of that theory there must be ten thousand that go into the IPCC theory. It just cannot compete. And anyway it is too late – the IPCC theory grabbed the high ground decades ago and has never surrendered it. Furthermore skeptical scientists are not suggesting that there is any single, simple theory to supplant the IPCC’s anthropogenic climate change theory, the ‘Climate Change Orthodoxy’. Instead they offer a theory that climate change probably derives predominantly from natural ocean-atmosphere oscillations and/or by natural solar variations (irradiation and cosmic ray flux) and/or by natural cloud cover variations and/or the Milankovitch Effect, i.e. it is probably predominantly just natural. On the one hand you have something that is superficially simple, certain and easy for the public and journalists and politicians to understand (‘our carbon dioxide emissions are definitely the cause of dangerous climate change and reducing them will definitely solve the problem’) and on the other hand something that is complex, nuanced, uncertain and requires a considerable knowledge of science to understand (‘various complex and interlinked phenomena in nature, none of which is well understood, are probably the predominant cause of climate change that in some ways will probably be beneficial but in others may not’). It is a very easy to understand, very alarming problem with a very ‘simple’ solution (‘decarbonize globally’) vs. a very hard to understand, very unthreatening problem with no man-made solution (since we are at the mercy of nature). Which is more likely to get the media headlines, sell newspapers and grab the public imagination? And simply admitting that our knowledge of climate change science is too slight to know ‘what causes climate change’ is never likely to supplant the dominant paradigm of the Climate Change Orthodoxy. Perhaps the Climate Change Orthodoxy theory lives on for little better reason than the failure of a simple, certain, compelling alternative theory to supplant it – and if the skeptical scientists are right then no such theory is ever likely to be found. Add to the huge vested interests of the media the huge vested interests of the scientists, the scientific authorities and the army of people who profit hugely from subsidized renewables and the dominant paradigm appears secure for the indefinite future.
Instead we may find the years rolling by with rising man-made greenhouse gas emissions yet modest, nonthreatening, global warming (and perhaps some temporary global cooling). In the fullness of time the inability of the climate change models to predict climate states generally, and atmospheric temperatures specifically, will become increasingly inescapable, the funding for climate change science research will quietly peter out (at first research into physical climate science, then later research into climate change mitigation, then finally research into climate change adaptation), the climate change researchers will quietly move on to other things (perhaps researching natural climate variability – or global cooling), the journalists and politicians will quietly stop talking about the climate change crisis – and the whole issue will quietly fade from the public consciousness. Basically, the man-made climate change crisis idea will probably simply follow a trajectory, not dissimilar to that of many other ‘man-made global crises’ (such as the DDT or BSE ‘crises’), of
1) Scientists misreading the evidence, confusing correlation, cause and effect – and then, long before the science is sufficiently mature to warrant it, leaping to alarmist conclusions
2) Scientists then exaggerating the risks (and suppressing uncertainties and contradictory evidence) in order to attract government funding to investigate the potential scare properly
3) Journalists hyping the potential scare in order to drum up public alarm (and sell newspapers)
4) The public, unable to understand the science, over-reacting and clamoring for political action
5) Politicians, unable to understand the science, over-reacting and responding to public alarm by rushing in ill-considered policies to mitigate the perceived risks
6) Politicians increasing scientific funding in order to find more evidence in support of the scare in order to confirm the rightness of their policies
7) Scientists duly supplying more evidence in order to attract further government funding (this evidence being used by journalists to drum up even more public alarm)
8) A rising awareness by scientists that the problem is actually much more complex (and the causes much more ambiguous and uncertain) than they originally surmised – and, anyway, far less risky
9) A rising awareness by the public and politicians that the risks have been exaggerated and the scare is not materializing – and the policies have done, and are doing, more harm than good
10) Scientists, journalists and politicians quietly retreating from association with the scare
11) The scare fading from the public consciousness
Today we are at about point (8). The trouble is that at this point the investment in the ‘cause’ has been so vast (both in terms of money and reputation/ego) that calling a halt has become virtually impossible (although Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord would be a good start). After (11), in the 2030s or 2040s perhaps, we may start to see many PhD theses being written by psychology graduates about the great global delusion of the catastrophic climate change scare of the early 21st century and the extraordinary story of how a small group of highly politicized scientists and computer modelers brought science into public disrepute as never before by corrupting the scientific process in order to achieve their hubristic and utopian goals.
Alan – I am glad you brought out Kuhn and his “credible alternative” babble. I do not agree with him. If you can prove that the theory in question is built upon false science and lies the theory must go, regardless of whether your alternative is credible or even exists. If you can prove that witchcraft, for instance, is a lie the ptiests better dismantle their system of witchcraft trials regardless of whether an alternative exists. With climate science, several alternatives do exist. Let us start with their lies and then look at their false science. The lie I have in mind is falsified temperature records. In 2008 I was working on my book and noticed that the eighties and nineties were a hiatus period. I used these data in figure 15 in my book to demonstrate this. But incredibly, IPCC then decided to change that temperature segment, from 1979 to 1997, into a non-existent warming period. I protested but nothing happened, so I put a notice about it into the book. Now I have an official document from NASA proving that there was no warming then but that, too, is ignored and this false warming is still part of their official temperature record. Next, false science. It starts with James Hansen’s presentation tom the Senate in 1988. He said he had found a 100-year record of temperature increase and claimed that this proved (!) the existence of the greenhouse effect. He did submit a temperature record to the Congressional Record that day. I looked at it but that graph is not 100 percent warming as he says. His wordthat he had proved the existence of the greenhouse warming was then used to justify starting up the IPCC. He went on to expand his claim by warning us that using more fossil fuels will push the climate into a runaway greenhouse mode. Which will be hot enough to evaporate the oceans, he says. His solution: simply stop using fossil fuels. To convince us of this danger he said that this is exactly what happened to the planet Venus. He takes it seriously and has a fourteen-page chapter on the Venus syndrome in his book “Storms of my grandchildren.” What this proves is that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Venus does have a very thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. It is opaque to solar radiation so that only the top layer can participate in greenhouse warming. The interior is extremely hot but not thanks to the greenhouse effect but to the operation of the gas laws. Surely, he must remember from thermodynamics the ideal gas law according to which the product of pressure and volume, divided by the gas constant, determines gas temperature. We are not dealing with an ideal gas but the product of pressure and temperature still determines the temperature. With ground level pressure of 90 bar and a thick atmosphere too it is no wonder that the ground level temperature is 467 degrees Celsius. As to oceans, Venus is a lot closer to the sun than the earth is and it is likely that solar heating just evaporated the water before it could form an ocean. An additional detail Hansen leaves out is that Venus has no plate tectonics. As a result, no heat can escape at plate boundaries as on earth and numerous volcanoes form. Eventually the buildup of internal heat breaks up the crust, its pieces sink into the interior, and an entirely new crust is formed every 300 to 500 million years. The scarcity of asteroid scars on present day crust is due to the crust having been recently formed. With it, we can say that Venus never had any oceans at all. Hence, his claim of a runaway greenhouse evaporating oceans on Venus is just nonsense. To take care of the runaway greenhouse effect on earth is simpler because we have observations. First, in his chapter on the Venus syndrome, he suggests that an examination of the Cenozoic era will prove his point. Specifically, it includes the PETM (Paleotherm-Eocene Thermal Maximium) he thinks has something to do with this runaway greenhouse effect. I agree that Cenozoic holds clues to the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect but I disagree that PETM has anything at all to do with greenhouse. The best way to look at this entire picture is to look at the geologic history of the entire Phanerozoic, as compiled by Dr. E. R. Cotese. I included this history as figure 30 in my book as well as in my Arctic warming paper. So, what does it show in Cenozoic? It shows global temperature rise from present day to the point where that PETM blip can be observed. After that blip is over, global temperature settles down to 22 degrees Celsius and stays that way, with occasional interruptions, for the next 400 million years. Carbon dioxide does not follow it, so this stable temperature platform has nothing whatsoever to do with carbon dioxide greenhouse effect. This might have remained a mystery as it has been for many years except for an important paper by Willis Eschenbach [1]. He points out that on earth, ocean temperature is limited to 30 degrees Celsius or less. There is a regulatory process whose workings are not clear but whose results have been recorded by 700 thousand Argo buoys that Willis’s report is about. Control is so accurate that if temperature somewhere goes over the limit is it is immediately forced down again. The limit of 30 degrees maximum for the ocean temperature is not that far from 22 degrees for land areas for which the Cortese platform applies. It is highly likely that this stable global temperature limit reported by Cotese is in some way supported by or related to the ocean temperature limitation reported by Willis Eschenbach. And by the way, the existence of this temperature limit proves that the runaway greenhouse effect is impossible on earth. Which proves that using the runaway greenhouse as a threat to keep emissions down is false science. I have now proven that the global warming theory is built upon lies (falsified temperature) and upon false science (runaway greenhouse) and must be abandoned.
[1] Willis Eschenbach, “Argo and the Ocean Temperature Maximum” web site PWUWT (Watts Up With That), February 12, 2017
The anomalous behaviour of water near 30 C is likely to be related to the transient nanostructures that may extend over hundreds ao molecules. It seems that these disintegrate as water temperatures rise from 0 C to over 30 C.
From: Rønne, C. et.al., Investigation of the temperature dependence of dielectric relaxation in liquid water by THz reflection spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulation, J. Chem. Phys. 107 (14), 8 October 1997
“The two lines intersect near 303 K. … It is interesting to note that 303 K has proven to be a special temperature in various studies of water. … Mizoguchi et al. have … observed a
kinklike behavior at ~303 K. In pressure dependent studies of the shear viscosity, water
behaves like an abnormal liquid below 303 K and the specific heat capacity of water, Cp,
has a minimum at 303 K. … adding all these observations together we obtain indication of
a changes in microscopic structure at ~303 K.”
From: Buchner R. et.al., The relaxation of water between 0 ºC and 35 ºC, Chemical Physics Letters 306, June 1999
They found pronounced dip in the thermal relaxation (time taken to dissipate energy) and the permittivity (ability to store electrical energy) at 30 C.
dai
So what do we have here? A valiant effort by dai davis to to mount a rear guard action against the observed existence of the 30 degree maximum temperature limit for oceans. Willis Eschenbach who reported this empirical fact did not specify any mode of action and this left an opening for someone to supply an explanation. Accordingly, dai davis takes advantage of this and trots out a panel of experts and their solutions. They are C. Ronne et al, (transient micro-structures), Mizuguchi et al. (shear viscosity) and R. Buchner et al. (dip in thermal relaxation and permittivity). Esoteric proposals but not solutions to anything. Problem is that the three “solutions” disagree with one another as well as with the original observations submitted bWillis Eschenbach. He had Argo buoys measuring the ocean depths for him. The flimsy and contradictory claims of Davis. will stand no chance against 700 thousand actual measurements of ocean temperature. My advice to you, davis and company, is to get used to the 30-degree limit. It might be well for you to also remember that the ocean will not boil at 30 degrees Celsius., just in case someone like Hansen should say that adding carbon dioxide to air will make the oceans coil.
While it looks hopeful that Trump has the galactic cajones to stand up to the global statist anti-reality cabal and end this with a relative bang , this has been a paradigm without foundation .
Both sides have accepted the falsehood that some spectral phenomenon causes the bottoms of atmospheres to be hotter than the equilibrium temperature calculated for their spectrum as seen from space . That is , both sides have tacitly or explicitly accepted the assertion , in particular , by James Hansen that Venus’s surface temperature 2.25 times that of a gray ball in its orbit is due to some spectral “greenhouse” effect .and that same effect is the cause for Earth’s surface being about 1.03 times the gray body temperature in our orbit . Thus the Catastrophic Al Gore Warming cult spreads fear of “tipping points” which would turn us into a baked ball like Venus .
Yet simple undergraduate computations show the quantitative absurdity that Venus’s surface temperature can be explained as a spectral effect — which is why no computable quantitative equation , nor experimental demonstration of the effect have ever been presented in a quarter century .
This paradigm may be unique in history ( one hopes ) in never having , in never having had , any quantitative theoretical or experimental foundation .
I will make a different prediction – at some point climate scientists, green organizations, the press, and politicians will declare, in a unified voice “We solved the problem, we saved the Earth, you’re welcome”. And they will dare anyone to contradict them. Goal posts will be moved to where they can get credit.
Think I’m wrong? Look at the ozone hole or Y2K Bug “crises” for instruction on how this will go.
And regarding Trump, I suspect he realizes that the Paris agreement is a farce – nobody who signed it intends to comply anyway. Why burn the political capital tearing it up, when it doesn’t matter? Even full compliance will make no difference – read the agreement. The whole thing was a con, put together to full the idiot greenies that we are “doing” something.
Let me tell you something – Europe WANTS him to tear it up. because if he does, they can do nothing, and blame him, as opposed to do nothing and get blamed.
I was at stages 8 and 9 about 15 years ago. There was simply no good evidence of global warming, outside of historical variation, nor ever likely to be. There was no null hypothesis. The extraneous variables were poorly defined and Ill considered. The entire subject was a superstitious mess built up with computer models that could not, and would not, make accurate predictions.
I thought the hysteria would all end in just a few years, but thanks to ample infusions of taxpayer dollars to those promoting it, along with the small vagaries of the climate itself, it still remains a public issue. It will take a mini ice age to put the issue to rest. Judging from the historical data, that seems like a greater likelihood than boiling oceans.
Arno Arrak:
You’ve inverted my intention which was to point to some of the experimental evidence that shows that something quite particular is happening in water at 30 C which could cause the observed sharp change in evaporation. Elsewhere I have listed other data and discussed how this might effect evaporation rates.
I can’t imagine what ‘company’ you refer to. I work alone and build my own perspectives. As a child I wondered why, on a hot day, puddles seemed to be the same moderate temperature while the ground nearby could be hot enough to sting bare feet. And I understand what makes the tops of waves coil.
Chill,
dai