The Failure of Climate Science!

You don’t have to be a PhD to understand the fallacy of what passes for Climate Change Science. In my last two pieces, I made the observations that the warming we are witnessing is not unprecedented. The basis of climate alarmist science is that A is happening, B is happening and C is happening and C is the result of A and B happening. CO2 levels are up, industrialization results in CO2 being pumped in atmosphere and warming has occurred so therefore warming is the results of the CO2 and human activity. The problem with this observational science is that A does not necessarily lead to B and what is missing is the actual proof that A happening and B happening leads to C. The alarmist position simply doesn’t stand up to historical records where over the past 10,000 years, we have seen centuries as warm as when Carbon Dioxide was lower and more stable. What we are witnessing is a more complicated picture in which CO2 may play a role but is one of many factors causing climate change and if past climate change offers any clues, our present climate change may be due to natural variability.

What alarmists can’t answer is simply if CO2 level is the main driving force of climate change today, what caused the Medieval Warming or Roman Warming period which may have been warmer than today based on historical records. One example is Grape harvest where during both the Roman warming period or Medieval Warming period, grape harvest was north of where any harvests are being done today. That is one piece of evidence that Medieval and Roman warming period was as warm if not warmer than today.

One study concluded, “Wine grapes were grown as far north as England where growing grapes is now not feasible and about 500 km north of present vineyards in France and Germany. Grapes are presently grown in Germany up to elevations of about 560 m, but from about 1100 A.D. to 1300 A.D., vineyards extended up to 780 m, implying temperatures were warmer by about 1.0-1.4°c.”

Romans grew grapes farther north than present, and one researcher noted, “We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low.” Historical records show that indeed over the past two thousand years we have seen climates as warm if not actually warmer. As a science writer in the Daily Mail noted, “The finding may force scientists to rethink current theories of the impact of global warming.”

In previous articles, I noted that the Hiatus is being confirmed and that a consensus is starting to develop that computer models have overestimated warming but another controversy is whether government scientists may be adjusting data to show the past climate as cooler and the present climate as warmer. Kenneth Richards observed, “Over the course of the last few decades, overseers of the 3 main 19th century-to-present global temperature data sets — NOAA, NASA, and HadCRUT — have been successfully transforming the temperature record to the shape dictated by climate models. Namely, there has been a concerted effort to cool down the past — especially the 1920s to 1940s warm period — and to warm up the more recent decades, especially after about 1950.”

These reductions are increasing reliance upon urban heat centers as McKitrick observed, “The collapse in sample size has increased the relative fraction of data coming from airports to about 50 percent (up from about 30 percent in the 1970s). … The change in the sample was not uniform with respect to source type. For instance it has biased the sample towards airport locations. GHCN had already been heavily-weighted towards airports, which, for many reasons, are not suitable for climatic monitoring. A problem with airports is that they are often in urban or suburban locations that have been built up in the past few decades, and the increase in global air travel has led to increased traffic, pavement, buildings and waste heat, all of which are difficult to remove from the temperature record. … [A]t the global level, as of 2009 49% of all GHCN data came from airports (46% NH, 59% SH), up from just over 20 percent in the late 1920s.”

Thousands of non-urban Thermometers have been removed and the dependence on more urban sites will overestimate the warming. It wasn’t that long ago, that even noted Climate Alarmists just as Tom Karl agreed as he noted, ““Results indicate that in the United States the two global land-based temperature data sets have an urban bias between +0.1°C and +0.4°C over the twentieth century (1901-84). … At present, only rough estimates of the potential impacts of urbanization can be given. This includes an urban bias in the Hansen and Lebedeff (1987) [NASA] data over the United States between 0.3°C and 0.4°C over the 20th century, which is larger than the overall trend in the United States over this period. … To our knowledge, the United States is the only large area of the globe where the magnitude of this bias has been thoroughly studied…“The magnitude of this urban bias in two global, land-based data sets was found to be a substantial portion of the overall trend of global and regional temperatures.”

The British Daily Mail exposed one key study that “supposedly debunked the Hiatus” may have violated its own protocol to ensure accuracy when they reported, “In an exclusive interview, Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of 'insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy'.”

This is a serious charge that government scientists would take a shortcut to garner a specific results that support government policy, but considering the number of studies that support the Hiatus or slowdown in temperature, this study is proving to be the outlier and this study was used by the Obama Administration to support their policy dealing with climate change.

It could be pointed out that just two decades ago, National Academy of Science, released a study that questioned the accuracy of the data noting, “Deficiencies in the accuracy, quality and continuity of the records,” that “place serious limitations on the confidence that can be placed in the research results.”Tim Ball noted, “Karl chaired the study, so he knew better than any that to achieve the results they wanted, namely a steadily increasing temperature over the 120 + years of instrumental record, was made easier by the inadequacy of the data. They ignored the fact that the inadequacy of the data negated the viability of the work they planned and did. For example, the extent, density, and continuity of the data are completely inadequate as the basis for a mathematical computer model of global climate. In short, they knew they would have to create, make up, or modify data to even approximate a result. The trouble is the data was so inadequate that even with their actions the results could not approximate reality.” Many Alarmist may have known that the modeling and methodology they were using would be undependable to deal with accuracy in measuring climate and we have seen, replacing measuring stations from rural to urban centers will lead to warmer measurements.

The entire case for climate change is based on the 20th century data in which the century warmed as CO2 rose but the problem is that if it goes back a longer period, you will find centuries as warm followed by cooling centuries in which CO2 levels were lower and stable.. Often alarmist will argue what caused climate change in the past doesn’t matter now, that is like a historian saying the past has no impact on the present or future. No Historian will state that the past doesn’t matter or have impact on the present but climate alarmist do exactly that, what happens in the past doesn’t matter to what happens now.

Do scientists truly understand what is the proper level of CO2? Alarmists can’t state that the present level damages the planet when the planet is greener and aiding in farmers’ ability to feed more people today than in the past. The evidence shows the complete opposite, that the average person worldwide is wealthier and better fed as the temperature has warmed but then anyone who has studied the past will know that warmer climates have led to expansion of civilization and are less deadly! The evolution of our life begun when CO2 levels were actually far higher than today.

An international team of scientists concluded that climate belts 400 million years ago were similar than today despite the CO2 being possibly twenty times as high as today! Researchers concluded, “The world of the ancient past had been thought by scientists to differ from ours in many respects, including having carbon dioxide levels much higher - over twenty times as high - than those of the present. However, it is very hard to deduce carbon dioxide levels with any accuracy from such ancient rocks, and it was known that there was a paradox, for the late Ordovician was known to include a brief, intense glaciation - something difficult to envisage in a world with high levels of greenhouse gases. "

Our planet has had CO2 far higher than today and it could be argued that we are CO2 starved! What we don’t know about what causes Climate change exceeds what we do know and understand.

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