G'day Count,
[Just for Mr Morgan, to save him the hassle of pasting this into Word and doing a Word count, the total words are 2,731 not including this comment and there is not one reference. There is however a challenge for you and everyone that thinks they just know that global warming is a fact that does involve research. It should be very simple. So in a way there is a reference to research, just not to any specific research. I?m sure, since you just know I?m so wrong you and several others will have no difficulty in posting a single line post with an appropriate reference to valid research which should justify all these words if for no other reason than you will have the satisfaction of proving me wrong. I look forward to it.]
To Count, I'm sorry; I have no idea what you are talking about. A graph of an individual site over 120 years generally shows quite clear trends. It might show meandering around a mean, it might show a warming trend overall, a cooling trend or smaller trends, but it certainly normally shows some sort of trend. To put the statement you made, I can only wonder whether you have actually looked at many individual sites from the NASA dataset they present online in such a convenient form. Perhaps you have and your interpretation differs from mine. After all, it was for the purpose of working out a consistent method of analysis of the trends that I came back on the site, seeking contact with Mr Lowe. Unfortunately, it seems he has also become sick of the personal attacks and has permanently left so I guess my return will not last much longer before I have to assume this has happened.
The NASA data has been analysed by others (none that I personally consider all that well ? in respect to the question of validity and validation of the data only ? there has been other very good research done on the dataset). By my reckoning, and you are welcome to check by looking at the graphs of a large enough sampling to believe you have not just fluked a particular result, there is around 70% of world sites that show a cooling trend or no trend. There are around 25% of sites that show a warming trend but these sites tend to rise quite sharply from 1980 on. The median trend is a cooling one. The average is a warming one, so the overall trend of 0.6 degrees depends on what math you used and also what database. Out of the three main global temperature datasets, the trend is either 0.5 degrees, 0.6 degrees or 0.9 degrees.
But even if there is no problem with the database, as Dr Singer has noted in several interviews etc, as have a great many others, including a number of lead authors of the IPCC report on global warming, about 80% of the total warming of your 0.6 degrees occurred from 1880 to 1940. Then for four decades, despite man made carbon dioxide output into the atmosphere increasing exponentially, the world cooled. Then, depending on the dataset, around 1975 to 1979 it started warming again.
If CO2 is the reason for global warming, how come 80% of it occurred when man made CO2 output was relatively low, there was a four decade cooling trend when the CO2 output exploded, and then another warming trend starting when the world hit the oil shortages etc and the outputs actually dropped a little bit?
As to Nuclear Power stations, they cost around three times the amount to produce a Kw of power than a black coal power station and have a great many problems in themselves. Assuming the environmentalists would allow a great many power stations, the best that the world could do would be to replace around 25% of oil or coal power stations in the next 50 years. Since CO2 man made output is going to keep going up for at least 25 years whilst China, India and Africa plays catch up, even that huge effort, with the problems of actually supplying that much uranium safely, would not significantly reduce CO2.
Since Dan likes to challenge people to what their credentials are and accuse people of not having appropriate credentials perhaps he could say just what experience, expertise, published works or research he has done in climate science. This is not a challenge to Mr Morgan's credentials or knowledge of climate science, only a facetious challenge at him to show how meaningless such comments are on a public forum where non scientists have the same rights to their opinions as do those that have established backgrounds in the area discussed. And here is a challenge for anyone that firmly believes that global warming is a world threat AND is man made, find one single piece of hard science research that establishes any link between CO2 in the atmosphere and the climate warming.
I can quote more than 1,000 research papers that basically show no link at all; or much more correctly from the Vostok and all other ice core samples showing that CO2 increases FOLLOWS warming by between 80 and 800 years. I've actually gone to the trouble of providing citations in the past and Mr Morgan decided to ignore them, so I'll reverse the argument and challenge anyone to show research that establishes a link.
And how about a bit of social history. For around five years, there was a rather large environmental movement warning of a coming ice age. But then it warmed up a little bit. So how did global warming as a piece of climate theory come about? This is something that the co-founder of Greenpeace calls the biggest swindle foisted on the world to hijack legitimate environmental movements and allow anti-industry, anti-US, anti-globalisation forces to put on a friendly public face. I would suggest that the co-founder of Greenpeace might actually know something about the workings of the environmental movement and he doesn't believe there is any link between CO2 and global warming (nor does a great many climate scientists that were lead authors on the IPCC report that found their conclusions including the very important conclusion that there was no good evidence linking CO2 to climate change were altered by UN politicos - that little episode that includes the continuously quoted "consensus" when a significant number of the lead authors - scientists that actually knew what they were talking about - did not support any conclusion that said the link between human activity and global climate change had been established, many resigned in disgust, many asked to have their names removed, only to be told that they "contributed", even if they disagreed so their names stayed. Even the 2,500 scientists that were supposed to agree is actually a figure made up by a majority of non scientists i.e. political employees - oh and if you think I'm making any of this up, do a search in the New York Times archives, it was front page news about just how distorted the IPCC report was compared to what the lead authors originally wrote).
So how did it come about that global warming became a cause celebrity? The coal mining unions went on strike in Britain again during Maggie Thatcher's rule. The unions had already brought down one government and Thatcher was not going to have it happen to her so she took on the unions. It's a bit hard to remember all this but this was set against a background of OPEC cutting off oil supplies, hijackings of planes and the very real risk that oil supplies could become very uncertain. So Thatcher wanted to promote some form of power generation that did not involve unions or oil. Her solution? Nuclear. But the trouble was that most environmental groups opposed nuclear power with a vengeance so what did Mrs Thatcher do, she offered payment to climate scientists that published research that suggested that the warming that was then only a few years old was due to burning of fossil fuels. For the very first time, climate science actually had a ready availability of grant money as long as they went along with the very political pitch that CO2 was somehow causing warming.
The trouble is from a political point of view, this was like letting a genie out of the bottle. The radical environmental movements latched on to the idea with a vengeance because it was anti-industry and somehow living in mud huts without electricity is "natural" and "desirable" (well, as long as it is not the environmentalist who obviously needs to jet around the world, stay in air-conditioned hotels so they can get their important message across but rather some starving African or Asian who will likely die because burning timber or animal dung in a hut is an appalling way to live); it was anti-US because they are the biggest producer of CO2 of nations (actually the whole world's man made CO2 production is 100th of the CO2 released from animals, and about 1,000th of that released by oceans, as well as being less each year than the normal output by volcanic activity) and certainly anti-globalisation. It was heaven sent for environmental groups that were actually started to get on the nose of the normal first world country citizen.
None of this means that the theory might not be true, only that this little bit of social history has been very conveniently forgotten. The trouble is there just isn't any science to back the whole assertion up that CO2 causes global warming. There wasn't in 1985. Indeed, when the BBC ran a series on the earth's climate and predicted doom and gloom from cooling, one scientist suggested that CO2 output by man might actually reduce the amount of cooling. This was then a supposition, without any real science to back it up but there had just been shown that temperature and increases in CO2 are linked in paleo-climate, so the suggestion was made. It was roundly condemned at the time by many scientists that now wholeheartedly support the same theory but this was the first known public pronouncement concerning CO2 and climate.
Now, I've never been comfortable with the theory that CO2 or methane causes global warming. It never has in the whole of the past earth's climate so why would it now? That one never made sense to me. It didn't make sense when I was a Climate Science student in the mid 1970s and it still doesn't. On top of that, I believe there is good evidence that suggests that the world just hasn't warmed very much since 1880 and especially since 1980 and that the Holocene Maximum, the Bronze Warm Period and the Medieval Warm periods were all warmer than it is today although the evidence is mostly anecdotal and spotty at best. The balloon and satellite data put it at line ball for the period from 1980 and my research into surface air temperature data shows some very bad problems with the data, especially relating to how it is collected and averaged, with the averaging problem likely to have significantly over represented the average temperatures, strangely enough from around 1980. So my concern is that not only is there no proof in respect to CO2 but there doesn't even appear to be any significant warming.
Mr Morgan is obviously going to say that there is a great many words without any links but this one is for all those that are absolutely certain I'm wrong, in the pay of Exxon, or just a crackpot. In order to feel comfortable with your position you should be able to easily establish that there is a link between CO2 and warming and that the evidence is convincing and clear.
Shouldn't be too difficult. But you can't use Mr Al Gore's Vostok ice core correlations because what Mr Gore never mentioned (or more correctly made the rather strange statement that the evidence was very ?complex?, without explaining just what the complexities might be) is that while there is a very close correlation, the CO2 FOLLOWS the warming or cooling, not the other way around. Its just simple logic that a CO2 rise after the warming cannot possibly be responsible for the warming that happened before the rise. There is actually a pretty simple explanation, and it actually also relates to why carbon credits are such a huge waste of money and planting trees does not reduce carbon one iota from the atmosphere unless you get the tree at peak growth and bury it deep enough for the ground cover to be completely anaerobic. Most CO2 released or absorbed is done by the oceans. Next is the release by plants, bacteria etc. The oceans are so large and so deep that it can take centuries for the oceans to change in relation to the climate above them. The lag is known as a climate memory. When it warms, the oceans start to release carbon but this takes several decades and up to 800 years to actually get into full swing. Of course if in the meantime, a cooling occurs then the oceans start absorbing the CO2, but once again with a very long lag. Since the Pacific Ocean has a current that turns over vertically over a cycle of 10,000 years, a sudden change in a part of the ocean can actually reflect something that happened up to 10,000 years ago. And this is why predicting an El Nino or a La Nina until it actually starts to happen is so totally useless.
So all you have to do is find research that shows that climate has been changed by CO2 in the atmosphere rather than the other way around. If the global warming debate is over, then this should be a no brainer. All that is needed is a nice clear record of some past climate that shows an increase in CO2 that then resulted in an increase in temperature or even a nice controlled physics experiment that suggests that atmospheric CO2. Of course, the cosmic ray strength can't precede the warming because that would be a nice independent reason for warming since going back as much as 600 million years cosmic ray strength correlates inversely pretty much exactly with the worlds temperature.
But there still should be abundant evidence around since this is the core of the global warming theory and without it, the current warming is natural and therefore we shouldn't be doing anything about CO2 output (since CO2 is not a pollutant but actually a pretty good gas to produce a bit more of normally).
And if Dan Morgan would like to show a computer model of the world's climate that has had the predictions ring true without correction progressively for say 5 years, then he is welcome to sustain the comment that included the desire to swear that at least one model has proved to be accurate, despite not being able to model clouds and the fact that they are based on CO2 levels without any science to justify the nexus.
And speaking of computer climate models, there is actually starting to be a quite decent backlash at the lack of science holding up the global warming "fact", with an extremely important point being accepted as a major problem with any model that relates climate change to CO2 increase. In order for the theory to have any validity the models hold that the greatest warming would be in the troposphere, around 10km up. And that the earth's surface would lag behind for a while. Yet, the evidence is the exact opposite. The troposphere change in temperatures is much less than the earth surface. Now that one is a very big deal and I'd like Mr Morgan to point out one single model relating to climate change and CO2 increase that predicted that the warming would be greatest at the surface, not in the troposphere and indeed, the average of the troposphere shows no warming at all overall from 1980 (and if 1940 to 1980 was included it would show a pretty big overall cooling trend but since weather balloons were not used extensively enough to go back that far, there is a danger that extrapolating from the surface temperatures may give a false result).
And Mr Morgan, you have been warned before, that directly challenging credentials in a forum such as this breaches US defamation laws. Your belittling my credentials in your last post, when I have posted a number of times specific details of background and qualifications, is outright defamation, a deliberate slur or denigration of a person's reputation. You did this to Mr Lowe too not very long ago. Do you really want the owners of this site to lose their houses and have this site shut down for good? I do know that these discussions are being monitored by a rather right wing organisation that has an axe to grind with your type of personal attack so you are risking more than just me asking the moderator to remove the comment. I'd be well within my rights to demand that you be banned from commenting further in respect to anything I posted, with Kate risking a great deal if she did not comply. So DO NOT question anyone's academic qualifications or suggest that previously posted information may not be accurate again. I really don't think you realise what sort of risk you are taking, either that or you just don?t care about all those you put at risk and I can?t think you would be that uncaring. Given the time of the posting (and there would be no problem in tracking it back to the sending computer) if you posted the comment from a University computer, you have breached the University guidelines and could be disciplined and dismissed if the University decided the comments were defamatory. You are perfectly safe from me because there is no way I would put someone's employment at risk by lodging a complaint relating to a site such as this nor would I sue for the current types of comments you make, but you cannot just assume that no one else will ever take any action.
So, Mr Morgan, just do not attack anyone on this site personally or imply their credentials are lacking etc. It isn't all that hard. By all means insult people directly for their views, imply that they are crackpots or in the employ of the Republican Party or Exxon, count words and complain that no references were made, belittle any references that are made, whatever you want. But it should not be beyond the bounds of reason to limit the attacks to these things rather than step over the line to actionable matters. Better yet, how?s about just once actually discussing the topic of global warming by addressing the issues raised.
I?ll return at least once to see the flood of posts proving the CO2 ? warming link and naturally I will then admit my error. Being wrong is not a bad thing in science and it must be at least, oh a day or so, since I?ve been wrong in relation to climate change. I?m about due for another correction of my mistaken beliefs.
Regards
Richard
