Climate forcing: Missing water must be hiding in the deep ocean

April 19, 2013

Clive Best points out that NASA data shows quite clearly that water vapour in the atmosphere has been decreasing quite significantly especially since about 1998 while carbon dioxide has continued rising. All the wonderful climate models (settled science after all) take it for granted that increased water vapour in the atmosphere is a key forcing caused by increasing carbon dioxode.

I wonder where the water went?

Presumably hiding along with all the missing heat in the deep oceans!

And causing the sea level to increase no doubt.

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of water in the atmosphere and it is a travesty that we can’t.

H2O decreasing while CO2 rises !

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Clive Best

Dire predictions of global warming all  rely on positive feedback from  water vapor. The argument goes that as surface temperatures rise so  more water will evaporate from the oceans thereby amplifying temperatures because H2O itself is a strong GHG.  Climate models all assume net amplification factors of between 1.5 and 6. But in the real world has the water content of the atmosphere actually been increasing as predicted?

NASA have just released their latest NVAP-M  survey of global  water content derived from satellite data and radio-sondes over the period from 1988 to 2009. This new data is explicitly intended for climate studies . So lets take a look at the comparison between actual NVAP-M atmospheric H2O levels and those of CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa. I have extracted all the daily measurement NVAP-M data and then calculated the global average. Figure 1 shows the running 30 day average of all the daily data recorde between 1988 and 2009 inclusive. The 365 day (yearly) running average is also shown. Plotted on the right hand scale are the Mauna Loa CO2 concentration data in red over the same period.

Fig1: Total precipitative H2O (running 30 day average) compared to Mauna Loa CO2 data in red. The central black curve is a running 365 day average.

Fig1: Total precipitative H2O (running 30 day average) compared to Mauna Loa CO2 data in red. The central black curve is a running 365 day average.

There is indeed some correlation in the data from 1988 until 1998, but thereafter the two trends diverge dramatically. Total atmospheric water content actually falls despite a relentless slow rise in CO2. This fall in atmospheric H2O also coincides with the observed and now widely accepted stalling of global temperatures over the last 16 years. All climate models (that I am aware of) predict exactly the opposite, so something is clearly amiss with theory. Is it not now time for “consensus” climate scientists perhaps to have a rethink ?

more to follow…

  1. My thanks to Ken Gregory for help with the  data. The conversion from NetCDF was a bit of a nightmare !
  2. NASA NVAP-M data is available here. Thanks to NASA Water Vapor Project-Measures (NVAP-M) team.

Anthony Watts in a comment does point out that sensor degradation or failure would need to be eliminated. (But I wonder why sensor integrity would not have been checked by NASA before the data was published as data)

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Clouds, Science | 1 Comment »

“Leaders” who can’t lead

April 18, 2013

Many, many years ago when I was first appointed a “manager”, my boss told me (and I don’t know if he was quoting someone):

Those who can lead , lead;
those who can’t lead, follow;
and those who think they can lead but can’t, blame others”

File:Congress-Graph.png

President Obama has a Democratic majority in the Senate to help him and a Republican majority in the House to carry along with him.  History will judge how much he accomplished during his terms but it is pretty clear – so far – that he takes few risks and has not been very successful in carrying his opponents towards any vision that he can communicate. For a US President I think “leadership” is manifested in being able to carry the country towards his vision even with the Senate and the House under the control of his opponents. That he has his own supporters with him is hardly any evidence of his leadership abilities. But there are 53 Democrats in the Senate . Yet he couldn’t even get all his own Democrats to stick their necks out, let alone the 7 Republicans he needed to get to the 60 required to make the cut.

Yesterday every single one of his proposals on gun control (nine in all) “failed to make the cut” in the Senate. Even the fairly innocuous measure of background checks on those wishing to purchase firearms was defeated. Inevitably the blame game began with an angry Obama blaming the Senate and the NRA and proclaiming that it was a shameful day for Washington.

Personally I think the US needs additional gun controls but that is not my point here. President Obama may prove to be an adequate administrator, but a leader he is not. He may well be one who thinks he can lead but can’t and so just ends up blaming others. A “follower” who ends up travelling in the wrong direction has few grounds for complaint.

Washington Post: 

President Obama’s ambitious effort to overhaul the nation’s gun laws in response to December’s school massacre in Connecticut suffered a resounding defeat Wednesday, when every major proposal he championed fell apart on the Senate floor.

It was a stunning collapse for gun-control advocates just four months after the deaths of 20 children and six adults in Newtown led the president and many others to believe that the political climate on guns had been altered in their favor. …… 

…..  One by one, the Senate blocked or defeated proposals that would ban certain military-style assault rifles and limit the size of ammunition magazines.

But the biggest setback for the White House was the defeat of a measure to expand background checks to most gun sales. The Senate defied polls showing that nine in 10 Americans support the idea, which was designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill.

“All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” a visibly angry Obama said as he delivered his response to the nation.

The president was flanked by Newtown families, a scowling Vice President Biden and former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who was shot in 2011 in Tucson and limped from the Oval Office to join Obama in the Rose Garden. ….. 

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Posted in Management, Politics, US | 1 Comment »

Too many coincidences? 70 feared dead in Waco explosion after Boston marathon bombs

April 18, 2013

April 18th today.

Update 2! The Waco blast is more likely to have resulted from an industrial fire. Coincidences do happen.

A case of cum hoc ergo propter hoc perhaps.

Update! Upto 70 15 feared dead

=============================

The name “Waco” had not entered my consciousness for many, many years until a TV commentator brought it up after the Boston Marathon bombs on April 15th. He pointed out that it was close to the 20th anniversary of  the Waco siege ending (April 19th  1993) and the 18th anniversary of the Oklahoma bombing (April 19th, 1995) and that it was Patriots Day and Income Tax day and that some form of anti-government, domestic, fanatic, loony-right group could be implicated.

Two letters containing ricin have also been intercepted (one to a Senator and one to the President) but the previous ricin laters were sent in 2003 and 2004 by a “Fallen Angel” – but not in April. Fallen Angel was never caught.

It was all pure speculation  and I dismissed it as yet another “conspiracy theory” (though there are so many of these, that statistics says that some few of these probably must be true).

But I woke up this morning to news reports about a massive explosion at a fertiliser factory in (or near) Waco and that another explosion was expected and that 70 people were feared dead. Fertiliser plants are no strangers to explosions  and “powder” borne explosions can be particularly devastating, and yet … .

To have “Waco” enter my consciousness twice in just 3 days seems weird – and my clear perception is that this is too much of a coincidence:

News.com.au: 

  • Explosion at fertiliser plant north of Waco,Texas
  • Up to 70 people believed to have died  
  • Several people, including children, trapped in buildings

The grim death toll was given by a senior doctor at West hospital following the blast, and reported by local station KHTX, but has yet to be confirmed by other officials.

While West’s Emergency Medical Services Director Dr George Smith was cited as saying as many as 60 or 70 people died, doctors at Hillcrest Medical Centre in Waco said none of the 66 injured taken there had died.

Babies and the elderly are among those injured in the blast, with homes within a four-block radius of the fertiliser plant flattened and several more on fire.

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Getting confusing – Sweden’s Social Democrats are not the Sweden Democrats – or are they?

April 17, 2013

In Sweden the Sweden Democrats is a  (relatively) new anti-immigrant party with neo-nazi and skinhead roots which is growing in support and has managed to win seats in Parliament. Apart from being anti-immigrant and of blaming all problems in any area on immigration their Parliamentarians have mainly distinguished themselves by regularly getting involved in scandals (old-fashioned hooliganism and drug and alcohol abuse) and subsequently resigning.

Sweden’s Social Democrats on the other hand was founded in 1889, has its roots in the labour movement and was till 2003 the dominant party of Government through the 20th century. It is the party of Tage Erlander and Olof Palme and the largest party in the country and can be credited for most of the social advances made in Sweden. For a left-leaning party they have been remarkable in being very pragmatic and supportive of private manufacturing industry. It is currently in opposition but ought – in the normal course of affairs – to return to power in the 2014 elections.

Unless they can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Right now they seem to be keen on showing the world all their dirty washing and looking for ways to lose the next election.

It is still a party where party decisions are made in back rooms (no longer smoke-filled) by the few who exert the real political power. Within the party it is old fashioned power politics which matter and there is little trace of any real democracy. Lately the twists and turns over getting rid of Mona Sahlin as leader, appointing Håkan Juholt in a coup and then replacing him after a media campaign with Stefan Löfven, indicates that the internal antagonists have been well matched with the advantage shifting between the right/left and the left/left wings of the party. (All the factions are left of centre of course but the field is wide)!

But during the last week the party has shown itself as being particularly inept and the “dirt” from the battle for power has manifested itself as seeming to be racist and anti-immigrant! They appointed an immigrant to their governing board and then the internal fight began and the unfortunate Omar Mustafa was forced to resign less than a week later. But the double whammy for the Social Democrats is that in addition to their dirty washing becoming visible they now look exactly like the party they love to hate – the covertly racist and overtly anti-immigrant Swedish Democrats!

(If I were to be very cynical it could even seem that the Social Democrats are trying to win some of the anti-immigrant vote back from the Sweden Democrats).

 The Local: Embattled Social Democrat Omar Mustafa, who also chairs Sweden’s Islamic Association (Islamiska förbundet), resigned from all his duties with the party on Saturday night, bowing to calls from within the party that he leave the governing board.

“The party leadership believes that having a mandate within the party and within Muslim civil society is incompatible. The party leadership’s view isn’t only regrettable, it’s also a frightening signal to Muslims and other Social Democrats who are people of faith,” he wrote in an open letter. 

“I therefore feel that the party leadership doesn’t have confidence in me and have forced me to resign from all my duties in the party.”

Mustafa, 28, was chosen to sit on the governing board of the left-of-centre opposition party at last weekend’s party congress. Mustafa’s announcement came following a Saturday night crisis meeting among Social Democrats in Stockholm who had previously lobbied to have him included in the party’s governing board.

“Knowing what we know now and considering how events unfolded, the situation became unsustainable. I therefore urged him to resign,” Veronica Palm, chair of the Social Democrats in Stockholm, told TT.  Palm explained that she and her colleagues had nominated Mustafa to the Social Democrats’ governing board because he’d “done a good job” for the party in Stockholm.

The Local continues in its next article:

.. Demonstrator Malika Moor has supported the Social Democrats for 36 years, but said she wouldn’t vote for the party today.

“I don’t understand why it’s come to this. It might be because his name is Omar, because he’s an immigrant, or a Muslim. I really want the Social Democrats to explain this to us,” she told TT.

Meanwhile, 29 active Social Democrats signed an open letter published on Tuesday in the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper taking issue with the party’s management of the situation.

According to the authors, it’s unacceptable that someone elected at a party congress should be forced to resign due to unfounded criticism from party colleagues and media hype.

They demand the party leadership distance itself from the accusations directed toward Mustafa and express their confidence in him. The authors also want those who published the unfounded accusations to apologize.

“We state with sorrow and anger that Mustafa was forced to leave the party’s governing board,” they wrote.

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Chaos of climate models only shows that “we don’t know what we don’t know”

April 17, 2013

I spent a large part of my early career in mathematical modelling (of combustion systems and of heat flow) and have a very clear idea of what models can do and what they can’t. Models after all are used primarily to simplify complex systems which are otherwise intractable. They are – always – severely limited by the assumptions and simplifying approximations that have to be introduced. Models are a powerful tool for investigation but are only as good as their most inaccurate assumption. But they are a tool primarily for investigation — and can be dangerous when used for decision making based on their imperfect predictions. The spectacular failures of mathematical models of the global economy are a case in point. It is worth noting that in spite of the great strides made in weather forecasting  for example – much of which is empirical – the simple statement that “tomorrows weather will be like today’s”  is as correct – statistically – as the most complex model running on some super-computer somewhere.

It has therefore always amazed me that so-called “scientists” would be so certain about their approximate models of climate systems – which are perhaps as complex, chaotic and “unknown” systems as any one could study. It has been a boon for politicians looking for new ways of raising revenue. It has been exploited by the alarmists since the alarmist predictions cannot be tested. The wide spread of results from climate models is rarely mentioned.

When reality does not match model forecasts it is time to back off and rethink the models and hopefully they will be better next time. And it is time to back track from all the political decisions made on the basis of patently incomplete and inaccurate models.

The simple reality about climate is that rather than being a “settled science”

  • we don’t know the impact of solar effects on climate
  • we don’t know the impact of clouds or even if they are net “warmers” or net “coolers”
  • we don’t know how much of the earth’s radiative energy balance is dependent upon carbon dioxide
  • we don’t know how much carbon dioxide is absorbed  by the oceans and living things
  • we don’t know the impact of aerosols and particles in the atmosphere
  • we don’t know the role of the oceans in transporting heat around the globe
  • we don’t know how much heat is stored in the oceans and how it varies
  • we don’t know the impact of solar effects on cloud formation
  • we don’t know what triggers ice ages, and
  • we don’t know what we don’t know.

This from Dr. Roy Spencer and the ridiculously wide spread of the model results and the obvious deviation of reality from model results are particularly striking:

Global Warming Slowdown: The View from Space

Since the slowdown in surface warming over the last 15 years has been a popular topic recently, I thought I would show results for the lower tropospheric temperature (LT) compared to climate models calculated over the same atmospheric layers the satellites sense.

Courtesy of John Christy, and based upon data from the KNMI Climate Explorer, below is a comparison of 44 climate models versus the UAH and RSS satellite observations for global lower tropospheric temperature variations, for the period 1979-2012 from the satellites, and for 1975 – 2025 for the models:

CMIP5-global-LT-vs-UAH-and-RSS

CMIP5-global-LT-vs-UAH-and-RSS

Clearly, there is increasing divergence over the years between the satellite observations (UAH, RSS) and the models. The reasons for the disagreement are not obvious, since there are at least a few possibilities:

……… 

The dark line in the above plot is the 44-model average, and it approximately represents what the IPCC uses for its official best estimate of projected warming. Obviously, there is a substantial disconnect between the models and observations for this statistic.

I find it disingenuous for those who claim that, because not ALL of individual the models disagree with the observations, the models are somehow vindicated. What those pundits fail to mention is that the few models which support weaker warming through 2012 are usually those with lower climate sensitivity.

So, if you are going to claim that the observations support some of the models, and least be honest and admit they support the models that are NOT consistent with the IPCC best estimates of warming.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Clouds, Mathematics, Science | 1 Comment »

Could solar flare last week be linked to two major earthquakes yesterday?

April 17, 2013

Like primitive man I am overwhelmed by the power of the Sun and a firm believer that even minute solar effects can have a major effect on the Earth and its systems. (I also note that my deification of the Sun must be similar to that by our ancient ancestors and is probably not unconnected to my moving to Scandinavia). In any case I am convinced that for climate

“Solar effects are much more profound than many so-called climate scientists like to admit”,

but I am not sure how strong the link to earthquakes is.

The link between solar effects (radio flux, sunspots, magnetic reversals, proton events….) and volcano activity and earthquakes has been postulated and studied many times but if any such link does exist it is not something obvious and it is by unknown mechanisms. For some this search for such a link is not “science” and there is no link. For others it can be a lifetime’s quest. But “intuition” and “gut-feeling” keeps me believing that there must be a connection. It could well be that the build-up of stresses upto some “breaking point” within the earths crust are a result of ongoing geologic processes and do not need any external trigger like solar activity or the position of the planets to be unleashed. But even continental drift and the build-up of seismic or volcanic stresses are all – ultimately – driven by energy fluxes. And all energy fluxes on Earth can eventually be traced to the Sun (except perhaps if the energy is from any ongoing nuclear reactions in the Earth’s core).

There were two major earthquakes yesterday – USGS

  1. 6.6, 23km ESE of Aitape, Papua New Guinea, 2013-04-16 22:55:27 UTC, 13.0 km deep
  2. 7.8, 83km E of Khash, Iran, 2013-04-16 10:44:20 UTC, 82.0 km deep

And – I note in passing – on April 11th – 5 days ago there was a solar flare and a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) event. Could be just a coincidence of course – but perhaps not …

Discovery News: APR 11, 2013 03:00 PM ET

The sun has unleashed the biggest solar flare of the year, quickly followed by an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection (CME). Both phenomena have the potential to impact communications and electronics on Earth and in orbit.

Although the sun is currently experiencing “solar maximum” — the culmination of its approximate 11-year cycle — scientists have noted that this particular maximum is a lot quieter than predicted. At this time, the sun should be bubbling with violent active regions, exhibiting sunspots, popping off flares and ejecting CMEs. But so far, the sun seems to be taking it relatively easy.

This morning (at 0716 UT), active region (AR) 1719 erupted with an M-class flare. With a rating of M6.5, this event is the most energetic flare of 2013 (although it’s a lot less impressive than 2012′s X-class fireworks). What’s more, the site of the explosion unleashed a CME in our direction.

A CME is a magnetic ‘bubble’ containing high-energy solar particles. When the CME hits Earth’s global magnetic field, it may align just right to generate a geomagnetic storm. Should this happen, we’ll be able to measure the extreme magnetic distortion of the magnetosphere and bright aurorae at high latitudes may result. Aurorae are caused when solar particles are injected into the polar regions via the Earth’s magnetic field — the particles then collide with atmospheric gases, generating a beautiful light display.

This morning’s CME was clocked traveling at a breakneck speed of 600 miles per second — at that rate it should hit Earth in the early hours of Saturday morning (April 13).

Shortly after the M-class flare erupted, a weak solar energetic particle (SEP) event was detected. This “radiation storm” was the result of relativistic particles slamming into the Earth’s upper atmosphere originating from the flare site.

Image: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of an M6.5 class flare at 3:16 EDT on April 11, 2013. This image shows a combination of light in wavelengths of 131 and 171 Angstroms. Credit: NASA/SDO

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180 million Neanderthals are among us

April 16, 2013

From John Hawks Weblog

Just got back proofs of a book chapter I have coming out soon with Zach Throckmorton. My favorite paragraph:

Nearly seven billion people inhabit our planet. At least six billion carry the genes of Neandertal ancestors. Inheritance from Neandertals makes up approximately 3% of the genomes of randomly chosen people outside sub-Saharan Africa today (Green et al., 2010; Reich et al., 2010). A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows if we took all of the Neandertal genes from today’s human population, we would have enough raw material to make up 180 million Neandertals.

I love that because it makes the Neandertals into the evolutionary success story they really were. They succeeded by becoming part of us.

The idea that all the various hominids who developed bipedalism have all disappeared except Anatomically Modern Humans does not appeal. I prefer to think that many of them – and not just the Neanderthals and Denisovans – live on; in us.

File:Homo-Stammbaum, Version Stringer.jpg

Possible archaic human admixture with modern Homo sapiens (Wikipedia)

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EU begins “repatriation of climate policy”?

April 16, 2013

It is probably the best thing that has happened for German electricity consumers for some time as German power prices fell by 3% as a reaction to the vote in the European Parliament. Even the EU Parliament – which has long been known as a “politically correct” follower of global warming orthodoxy – today balked at the  prospect of “backloading” and postponing the introduction of 900 million “carbon allowances”. This had been proposed by the climate fanatics in an effort to increase the declining price of these allowances and the possible collapse of the entire carbon trading market.

It is to be hoped that it really is the “beginning of the “repatriation of EU climate policy” which has been so wrong and so stubborn and so stupid for so long. But the religious environmentalism is still pretty fanatic and they will not give up their cherished dogma and their entrenched positions and their carbon scams so easily.

The Parliament:

Controversial ‘backloading’ proposal rejected by MEPs

The European parliament has rejected proposals for ‘backloading’ to postpone the auctioning of 900 million carbon allowances for 2013-2015, in a bid to help boost the price of ‘polluters permits’.

The proposals have been much debated, with some believing that any interference in the EU’s carbon market – the biggest in the world – could undermine confidence in the emissions trading scheme (ETS).

However, others feel that the temporary backloading solution would give the ETS, which is considered to be a flagship policy in the EU’s climate change agenda, a much needed boost, increasing carbon prices and in turn stimulating investment and innovation.

On Tuesday, parliament rejected the proposals by a narrow margin, 334 MEPs voted in favour, 315 against, and 63 abstained. Carbon prices immediately fell by 44 per cent to a record low of €2.63 following the vote.

Matthias Groote, parliament’s rapporteur on the timing of auctions, said “I deeply regret today’s vote. It is the beginning of the repatriation of climate policy.”

Reuters reports: 

Traders took the lack of political support as a signal to sell, driving the market down to its lowest yet. Immediately after the vote, carbon prices dropped by around 40 percent to 2.63 euros a tonne. They were trading at 3.15 euros, down 33.4 percent, by 1423 GMT.

“The carbon market is now in a coma, until a clear intervention takes place,” an emissions trader said. 

The Commission’s backloading proposal was meant to be a quick fix that could be agreed by the end of last year.

But it exposed deep divisions, with interest groups intensively lobbying members of the European Parliament.

Hedegaard, together with analysts and some in the energy sector have warned that failure to agree on EU steps would spur fragmentation in environmental policy as member nations move to safeguard their own green targets. Britain, for instance, already has a carbon price floor.

Of course the “loony left” were appalled:

“This kind of politics plays into the hands of climate sceptics. The rejection of the backloading proposal weakens the EU emissions trading system and puts our climate goals at risk.”

S&D deputy Linda McAvan said that the UK Tory party played an instrumental part in rejecting support for the EU’s carbon market. 
She said, “In a tight vote in the full session of the parliament in Strasbourg, most Tory MEPs chose to side with climate sceptics once again and undermine their own government’s climate strategy.” 
She continued, “They put their fanatic euro-scepticism ahead of British jobs and our environment,” adding, “This vote is a catastrophe for the environment.”
Greens MEP Keith Taylor also condemned the UK’s Tory party, as well as UKIP, saying, “Some MEPs want to leave the EU carbon market to sort itself out, but this simply won’t work.
“The ETS is flawed and leaving it alone won’t get us anywhere towards improving it. By opposing necessary steps to fix these problems Tory and UKIP MEPs are effectively signalling their desire to destroy the EU’s flagship climate change policy.”
Climate action commissioner Connie Hedegaard also expressed “regret” about the decision by parliament, and said that the proposal will now go back to the environment committee for “further consideration”. 
She added, “The commission remains convinced that backloading would help restore confidence in the EU ETS in the short term until we decide on more structural measures.
“We will now reflect on the next steps to ensure that Europe has a strong EU ETS.”
Josche Muth, secretary general of the European renewable energy council, said that the decision “renders the ETS impotent as a tool for shifting investments into less polluting generation technologies”.

But at least some sanity is returning

However, it wasn’t just the 315 MEPs who voted against the proposals that disagree with the proposals. 
BusinessEurope also welcomed the decision, with the director general Markus J. Beyrer saying that, “The European parliament expressed its support for a market-based instrument and rejected political interference. 
“It is time to move past the divisive and unhelpful debate around backloading and focus on the real priorities for the EU: how to secure a cost-competitive, secure and climate-friendly energy policy for 2030.”

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3rd anniversary

April 16, 2013

WordPress reminded me this morning that I started blogging 3 years ago.

My thanks to all those who do visit and to those who take the time and effort to comment.

Botticelli's St. Augustine writing and revising in his cell

Botticelli’s St. Augustine writing and revising in his cell

As blogs go I don’t suppose that the blog statistics are anything to write home about (1650 posts, about 500K views with typically between 400 and 800 views per day and a maximum of 5000 views in a day). I find  I cannot  predict which posts will get a high viewership but I also find that I don’t really worry too much about that. Sometimes I find that an old post suddenly gets a lot of interest and I usually don’t know why. I suspect it might be when a class somewhere gets an assignment which just happens to have been the subject of an old post. But blogging has changed my behaviour. It helps me to construct my thoughts and it has certainly changed my reading habits. It does- I think – help me to maintain a “discipline”. Perhaps it helps my perception of myself as a St. Augustine blogging in his cell!!

Writing this blog has become important to me as an extension of my personal space and as I wrote a month or two ago

  1. I write primarily for myself on any and all topics that interest me and this interest varies over time and with my reading.
  2. I write when time allows and my posts reduce when I am on assignment or if I am travelling abroad.
  3. My posts here increase in frequency when I get “stuck” with my other writing projects but I find that just writing a blog post can often “relieve” the “writer’s block”. (And that I think is because a blog post is not directed at anyone in particular but my other writing is).
  4. I have no commercial interests or consequences connected with this site. …….

……..

So this blog is just a place for letting off steam, for getting my thoughts in order, for keeping my writing flowing and generally for developing my own views in areas that are relatively new to me. It is merely an extension of my space in the world – for good or ill.

When posts are of sufficient interest to attract many (or even any) readers then that is just an added bonus.

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Questioning global warming dogma is taboo in Belgium

April 15, 2013

Reproduced from The GWPF  because “questioning the impact of mankind on climate change is evidently still a taboo in the French-speaking world”. 

The authors of this paper recently presented their views on climate science at the Royal Academy of Belgium. No French or Belgian newspaper was willing to publish their assessment. Questioning the impact of mankind on climate change is evidently still a taboo in the French-speaking world.

Double Standards in Climate Change

István E. Markó a), Alain Préat b), Henri Masson c) and Samuel Furfari d)

a) Professor at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL)

b) Professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

c) Professor at Maastricht University

d) Lecturer at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

The conference on climate change held in Doha (Qatar) last December ended in failure once again. However, the news reported in the media about this 18th conference on climate change were fully in line with the well-rehearsed mantra: the Earth is warming up, human emissions of greenhouse gases are mainly to blame for this warming up, and we are approaching disaster. We have only one climate, but communication about it seems to be plagued by double standards.

For a few years now British, American, Italian or German media have given sceptical scientists the opportunity to express their opinions on the validity of the statements released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organisation responsible for the official line of thought on climate matters. Nothing like that has been seen in the French or Belgian media which persist in portraying scientific sceptics, at best as sold out to the oil lobbies, at worst as troubled individuals, greedy for public recognition and fame and as such not worthy to be proponents in a serious debate.

The authors of this contribution were recently been granted the honour of presenting their point of view as climate sceptics at the Royal Academy of Belgium. During a series of six well-attended lectures we showed, among other things, that:

  1. The climate has always changed. This was true during ancient times and it has also been true since the beginning of the modern era. These climate changes have always been, and still are, independent of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere;
  2. During Roman times and the Middle Ages temperatures were observed well in excess of those currently experienced. From the 16th till the 19th century a cold period referred to as the “Little Ice Age” predominated. All these changes took place without mankind being held responsible. We believe that the increase in temperatures that occurred during a certain part of the 20th century is the result of a recovery from this cold period. These various events can be explained by a combination of warm and cold cycles of different magnitudes and duration. Why and how this happens is not yet fully understood, but some plausible explanations can be put forward;
  3. The so-called “abnormally rapid” increase in global temperatures between 1980 and 2000 is not unusual at all. There have in fact been several such periods in the past, during which temperatures rose in a similar manner and at comparable rates, even though fossil fuels were not yet in use;
  4. Temperature measurements do not necessarily correlate with a building up or a decrease in heat since heat variations are energy changes subject to thermal inertia. Apart from heat many other parameters have an influence on temperature. Moreover the measurement of temperatures is subject to numerous large errors. When the magnitude and plurality of these measurement errors are taken into account, the reported increase in temperatures is no longer statistically significant;
  5. The famous “Hockey-stick” curve, known as the Mann’s curve and presented six times by the IPCC in its penultimate report, is the result among other things of a mistake in the statistical calculations and an incorrect choice of temperature indicators, i.e. proxies. This lack of scientific rigour has totally discredited the curve and it was withdrawn, without any explanation, from subsequent IPCC reports;
  6. Even though they look formidably complex, the theoretical models employed by the climate modellers are simplified to the extreme. In fact there are far too many (known and unknown) parameters that influence climate change. At the moment it is impossible to take them all into account. The climate system is extremely complex, containing not only chaotic components but also numerous positive and negative feedback loops operating according to various different time scales. Which is why the IPCC wrote in its reports that: “…long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible” (page 774, Third report). This is very true. To this day all the climate predictions based upon these models have turned out to be totally incorrect. Strangely, nobody seems to care;
  7. The relationship between CO2 and temperature, obtained from the Vostok ice cores, shows that a building up of CO2 occurs 800 to 1000 years after an increase in temperature is observed. Hence the increase in the concentration of CO2 is a consequence of the warming of the climate, not its cause;
  8. But the coup de grâce to the “warmists’ theory” – certainly not yet visible in the French and Belgian media – comes from the observation that for the past fifteen years or so the global temperature of the Earth has remained constant. During the same period CO2 emissions have increased by far more than in the past, reaching an unparalleled record this year. Honest climate scientists admit that this observation is an embarrassing inconvenience for their theory. However, attempts to make us believe that the Earth is continuing to warm up persist. Will we have to wait for another twenty, twenty-five or thirty years for the global warming advocates to finally admit that there is no unambiguous correlation between the global temperature of the Earth and human-generated CO2 emissions?
  9. The claim that Hurricane Sandy is due to human CO2 emissions is totally unfounded and has been vigorously contested by numerous meteorologists. This regrettable distortion of the facts has been denounced in an open letter, addressed to the General Secretary of the UN and signed by more than 130 world-renowned scientists, including one of the present authors;
  10. Finally the “abnormal” melting of the Arctic Sea ice, that made the headlines of numerous journals during this summer, was also observed during previous decades. Amazingly the record high increase in Antarctic Sea ice that occurred at exactly the same time has been completely ignored by the very same media. Moreover, no mention has been made of the current, particularly rapid, regeneration of the Arctic Sea ice.

These ten statements are facts. We would be ready to accept that they could be wrong, if evidence were presented to scientifically disprove them. In the meantime, and in view of the lack of coherence and unreliability associated with the numerous predictions made by the IPCC, it is time to set the record straight. The public and politicians must be informed about the hypothetical character of the predominant ‘consensus’ on climate change, which has been uncritically disseminated in the media for more than ten years. If it ever existed, this so-called “climate change consensus” has now been totally undermined by the facts.

Despite the opportunity that we were given by the Royal Academy to raise this issue, we were unable to find any French or Belgian newspaper willing to publish this text. Questioning the impact of mankind on climate change is evidently still a taboo over here.

This article reflects solely the opinions of the Authors.

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