Summing Up the Junk Science

Let’s start with the facts:

Global temperatures have been changing since the Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. The last 90,000 year Ice Age ended around 12,000 year ago. We are nearing the end of the Holocene Interglacial warm period and in the middle of the warming side of a 1500 year cycle that is superimposed on the Interglacial. The Sun is the external source of our warmth, and cyclic motions of the Earth vary the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth and account for the major Ice Ages and Interglacials. The 1500 year cycle that is warming us now is caused by the interaction of solar activity and galactic cosmic rays.

Greenhouse gasses help keep the Earth surface warm by trapping radiated heat. The major greenhouse gasses are water vapor, accounting for 60% of the warming, CO2 adding a 20% effect, with ozone, methane and other gasses contributing the remaining 20%. Water in the atmosphere is the wild card since it has both a heating effect as vapor and a cooling effect as clouds, it is rapidly and significantly variable and it is not well understood or modelled. Water vapor and CO2 are released from the sea when it is warmed by the Sun. Humans generate only about 5% of the atmospheric CO2 by burning fossil fuels, the remaining 95% coming from volcanoes, photosynthesis, outgassing from the sea and other natural causes. Thus humans cause only 1% (5% X 20%) of the greenhouse effect.

NASA scientists have discovered a massive heat vent over the Pacific Ocean that naturally opens in response to sea surface temperature rises, releasing the heated water vapor and CO2. The NASA-MIT team concluded that the Earth is much better at managing temperature forcings than the computer models assume. In fact, the Pacific heat vent released as much heat during the 1980s-1990s as was predicted for the increased CO2 content. It’s no wonder that the sea surface temperatures have berely changed.

Now we turn to the Junk Science:

The United Nations IPCC-2 report (1996) was embarrassingly wrong when it concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a human effect on climate.” The so-called scientific consensus was fudged and called a “major deception on global warming.”

Undeterred, the global warming warriors produced the IPCC-3 report in 2001 that erased the well documented 1000 years of temperature variations preceeding 1900 (the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age) replacing that with a graph showing a hockey-stick-like rise in temperature starting in 1900. Michael Mann’s data contradicted hundreds of historical sources and hundreds of scientific studies, yet another example of the “overwheling scientific consensus.”

Fortunately for science, Canadians Steven McIntyre and Ross McKittrick demonstrated conclusively that Mann’s data was all wet. The Canadian Financial Times reported: “One of the great propaganda icons of the UN climate change machine and the Kyoto process is about to get swept away as a piece of junk science. The icon is the “Hockey Stick”… and it is just plain wrong.” It’s actually worse than wrong. But that did not keep the IPCC’ers from predicting a temperature increase of up to 5 C and sea level rise up to 15 feet by 2100, all due to that nasty CO2 generated by those irresponsible humans.

And the beat goes on. Last September the IPCC-4 draft report was issued projecting with confidence that the mean global temperature will increase by 3 C and sea level will rise between 14 and 43 cm (1–3 feet) by 2100, if we do nothing. No Kyoto Protocol, no Kyoto 2, 3, 4,…N, nothing at all, and all we need to worry about is 1-3 feet higher seas. And this is if you want to believe those discredited computer models.

Now that the Democrats are back in control of the congress, the US is going to be pressured into enacting silly and costly measures to combat a non-problem. In the next post I will explain why global warming is a good thing, why the world will be a better place in 2100 if we ignore it, and what we should really be concerned about –- the coming Ice Age.