Sunday, January 2, 2011

A Question To Ask Every Global Warming Proponent

We are at a critical point in the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) war on prosperity. The EPA is about to engage in economy busting regulation of CO2 on the theory that it is a pollutant. And on that basis, Obama is destroying our energy infrastructure with his war on coal, which accounts for 50% of our nation's electricity generation, and oil, which, with declining domestic productions, now accounts for over half of our trade deficit. This has us on a road to pay disastrous prices for energy in the future, with all that means for our economy and jobs. If our nation is to return to prosperity, we must change the paradigm of the AGW debate.

For the last two decades, the meme of the warmies, repeated ad infinitum, has been that climate science is proven by peer reviewed literature and that the consensus is that the science is beyond dispute. Today, there is a mountain of evidence showing that the meme is a canard. It is time to change the terms of the debate on this issue. It is time to demand, unequivocally, that the warmies tell us exactly what would falsify the theory of AGW. And it is time to demand that the EPA Administrator answer that question under oath before Congress.

We have had fifteen years of stable or slightly falling temperatures (notwithstanding the inane babbling of uber-warmie Jim Hansen and his manipulation of NASA data - including the "raw data"). Much of the world has just experienced one of the most horrendously cold Decembers on record. This comes on the heels of warmies telling us for years (Hansen, the MET, and virtually all other warmies included) that global warming would mean temperatures rising co-extensively with humans pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, causing untold calamities and much milder winters.

Instead, the climate models used by the warmies have catastrophically failed over the past 15 years and we are experiencing record-setting bitter winters. Shamelessly, warmies now tell us that AGW is the cause of this cold weather. AGW is, they alledge, melting sea ice, thus leading to changing weather patterns and increased humidity that is the cause.

It is notable that NASA told us, in 1999, that AGW was causing changing weather patterns over the Arctic, but that the result thereof would be ever milder winters. Regardless, and more importantly, do see Roger Pielke, Sr's specific criticism of this new theory. Pielke, an IPCC scientist, critically notes that the proposed narrative suffers from significant factual errors and actually raises "substantive issues with the robustness and accuracy" of the 2007 IPCC report.

Thus do we need to be forcing the warmies to answer, at every turn, the simple question, what evidence would be necessary to falsify the theory of global warming? What are the "facts" that they identify as forming the crucial underpinnings that AGW? With that answer in hand, then the meme of AGW will cease to be mindless dogma. It will become actual science that cannot withstand scrutiny.

The evidence against AGW is mountainous. The rise in temperatures in the last century are not in any way extreme compared to what we see throughout geologic history. World temperatures are nowhere near a historic high. For but one example, Nature magazine, a pro-AGW publication, is today discussing the study of ice cores showing that temperatures 130,000 years ago were a whopping 9 degrees F. warmer than today.

Geologic history shows no correlation between CO2 and climate. To the contrary, evidence shows CO2 levels lagging temperature spikes by centuries. A very recent study looking at this issue over the past several decades found a direct correlation between humidity and temperature, but no significant correlation between CO2 and temperature.

Our geologic history has shown numerous temperature spikes at least equal to, and in most cases exceeding, the current warming that has been occurring since the end of the Little Ice Age. Just within the past 2,000 years, evidence shows the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warming periods likely exceeded temperatures occurring today (notwithstanding the infamous hockey stick). So how can the warmies possibly show that the modern warming trend is anomalous?

What about ice? The warmies would have us believe that the ice caps are melting and that it is only a matter of time until Manhattanites are taking gondalas to work. Yet on the aggregate, we are losing little if any ice cover, and there is nothing anomalous about the local ice cover that we are losing. The vast majority of the world's ice is in Antarctica - approximately 90%. And the ice there is growing, hitting record highs in 2010. The Arctic has lost ice, but this is not an inexplicable anomaly. Moreover, interestingly, we recently learned that the area of thick ice in the Arctic has actually doubled since 2008. Regardless, there have been numerous periods in recorded history where Arctic sea ice has tended low. So how do the warmies distinguish our modern situation from history?

And when the warmies claim that their work is peer reviewed, understand that the term is meaningless as a measure of reliability (that according to one of the fathers of the modern peer review process). That is all the moreso in the context of climate science, where the entire scientific process has been bastardized - AGW proponents have substituted "peer review" as ipso facto proof of reliability in place of reproducibility of their results. Indeed, an important aspect to changing the paradigm on AGW is to ask whether each and every study and data set relied on by the AGW crowd include all the raw data, meta data, methodology and computational formulas such as would allow the work to be independently verified. Anything not meeting this criteria - and it is a very large chunk of the studies upon which the canard of AGW is built, including the temperature data sets of NASA and others - is worthless as proof of AGW. Indeed, we should be demanding that our government pass legislation holding that anyone operating pursuant to publicly funded grants and who publishes studies in respect thereof without information that would allow for independent verification be thereafter banned from recieving any future public grants. I can assure you that would shake the AGW promoting academia to their core. Certainly we should demand that the EPA not place any reliance on unreproducable studies when making regulatory decisions.

It bears repeating that carbon dioxide is a trace gas, forming only 0.03% of the earth's atmosphere. It is not even the most significant of the green house gases; water vapor is. The vast majority of the 0.03% of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is produced naturally. Indeed, all of the human burning of fossil fuels only contributes 0.0042% to the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. And that is what is supposed to be driving our climate? Pay no attention to that little glowing ball in the sky.

The few true believers are nuts. The rest who are pushing this are pursuing either money, dictatorial power over our lives, or the destruction of America - or some combination of all three. Our prosperity depends on winning the argument about AGW in the public square, and that with virtually all of the mainstream media arrayed in favor of AGW. Regardless, the argument can and must be won. Step one is to change the paradigm of the argument.

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2 comments:

suek said...

Do any of them offer any explanation for the fact that we're no longer in an ice age, with "polar" ice covering most of the US?? That must have taken considerable warming - and no CO2 to be the perp...!

GW said...

A good point, Suek. I am not sure of the answer. My sensse is that inconveinient facts are studiously ignored or, as often seems the case, dispenced with on the grounds of "peer review" if there is a direct contradiction with warmist studies.