Global Warming: The Great Delusion

So if the weather folk can’t figure out the weather for the rest of the week, how come they think they can tell us what the climate will be across the next decade, the next 50 years, the next century? Answer: they can’t, and that summary judgment includes the 122 Co-ordinating Lead Authors and Lead Authors, 515 Contributing Authors, 21 Review Editors and 337 Expert Reviewers who participated in the Third Assessment Report of Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which seized the headlines not so long ago with clamorous fears about the role of greenhouse gases in the creation of global warming.

What global warming? In Siberia they’re grinding their way through the coldest winter in 100 years, and it’s been rough in the northeastern provinces of Canada. It’s scarcely been a hothouse on the East Coast of the U.S. either. Shivering on Ireland’s south coast at Christmas, my brother Patrick complained that it was as cold as he could remember.

Sure, it’s been cold. But it doesn’t stop most people from accepting global warming as an official, long-term planetary condition, caused in large part by emissions of greenhouse gases due to human activities. Why, even the representative of the oil industry currently ensconced in the White House believes it. George W. Bush has signaled his support for a plan to begin regulating carbon dioxide emissions. Titans of industry who bitterly derided the models of the global warming crowd five years ago have now clearly decided the fight is not worth the bad publicity.

But the fact is that estimates of the human contribution to a current warming trend are as speculative as they were a decade ago. The case is nonproven, as even a moderately close reading of the IPCC’s "Summary for Policymakers" makes clear. What follows is a reality check on the "global warming/greenhouse gas" hypothesis, with the benefit of counsel from my friend Pierre Sprey, a man knowledgeable about the often disastrous interface between environmental prediction and computer models.

First question: Is our globe actually warming up? Back in the late 1930s they certainly thought it was. Not so long ago I picked up an excellent old volume put out by the USDA called Climate, which contained a chapter acknowledging "global warming" (that same phrase) and hailing it as a benign trend that would return the Earth to the normalcy in climate it enjoyed several hundred thousand years ago.

In fact we may well be enjoying a phase of warming. The "Summary for Policymakers" makes much of the fact that across the last 1000 years "the rate and duration of warming of the 20th century has been much greater than in any of the previous nine centuries." But to take a slightly longer-term view, the present warming trend is well within the fluctuations of the last 100,000 or last million years. The Earth’s climate has changed drastically down the eons.

As Sprey puts it, "If there’s a warming trend now, so what? These changes are due to causes that they don’t know and we don’t know and are very small in terms of earlier changes. For their 1000-year period they’re basing their numbers on tree ring, coral and icecap records before 1861, which is when people began to keep extensive thermometer records. But if you look at ice cores, tree rings and coral across longer periods, there were times when it was vastly hotter and vastly colder. This is like a pimple on the ass of climate change.

"To take one example of the monumental differences in geological record: Today, oxygen is somewhere between 18 and 20 percent of the atmosphere. But there was a period of geological time when oxygen was over 30 per cent of the atmosphere, thus prompting monstrously large species. The proportion of carbon dioxide was way higher. And here they are today, arguing about differences of one part per million of CO²."

At the core of the greenhouse gas hypothesis lie computer models with a dubious lineage stretching back to the time, 40-some years ago, when the mega-computer teams flourishing around Oak Ridge and TVA figuring out models of nuclear fission found that they had done their stuff and now had excess computer capacity and the prospects of a dwindling budget. In the ceaseless quest to preserve funding, they began to look for environmental assignments. Their first big model concerned acid rain, and it turned into something of a debacle. The idea was that they could model the atmosphere, predict drift patterns and how sulfur dispersed, connecting the belching smokestack in Ohio to a poisoned lake in upstate New York.

For sure, there are acid rains all over world, but it turned out that relating such rains to an ecosystem was a lot more difficult than anyone imagined. Right from the start, the acid rain craze was premised on a mountain of bogus studies in Sweden, where they’d found that some hundreds of lakes had gone alarmingly acid. And indeed there were also plenty of lakes where fish had died. But the lakes where fish were dying were not the lakes with acid.

The prime models of air movement and of the aerodynamics of dispersal came out of the biowarfare labs at Porton Down in England during WWII, and the acid rain modelers discovered what the Porton boffins had long known: it’s very tough to construct models of air dispersal, and no one has yet done it successfully. So, having failed at acid rain, the modelers leaped toward even larger and more empirically unverifiable studies, toward scenarios of global warming, constructing even bigger models, far harder to confirm or deny. It was the perfect subject for computer modeling, and also the perfect way of changing the subject of finite, well-known environmental ills susceptible to immediate, though politically risky, action, like dirty rivers and poisoned wetlands.

Now for the central premise of the greenhouse gas model of global warming. During daylight hours our turning globe gets its huge heat input in the form of short infrared rays from the sun. In close balance, our turning globe releases this heat in the form of longer waves of infrared radiation during the night hours.

In the greenhouse model, malign gases such as carbon dioxide and methane happen to absorb the long infrared radiation more strongly. Thus these allegedly malign gases let the short infrared rays in, but when heat tries to escape each night, they hold it in the atmosphere. The more CO² we humans create, the more cows we put to pasture and in feedlots belching out methane, the more heat is trapped and the hotter the world gets.

That’s the theory. In the "Summary for Policymakers," which represents the state-of-the-art model for the greenhouse crowd, assertions and predictions are hedged, evasive or furtively shorn of inconvenient material. On the first of the document’s 20 pages a footnote proclaims a verbal scale of confidence, ranging from "virtually certain" all the way down to "exceptionally unlikely." To each category a numeric window is attached. Thus "unlikely" is assigned "10-33% chance," which in terms of the scientific use of statistics is ludicrous.

"Globally," says the report on its first page, "it is very likely [i.e., a 90-99 percent chance] that the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the instrumental record, since 1861." But the idiom of potentially catastrophic change often falters. Try page 5. "Over the 20th century (1900 to 1995) there were relatively small increases in global land areas experiencing severe drought or severe wetness." Same page: "A few areas of the globe have not warmed in recent decades, mainly over some parts of the Southern Hemisphere oceans and parts of Antarctica." Same page: "No significant trends of Antarctica sea-ice extent are apparent since 1978." Same page: "Changes globally in tropical and extra-tropical storm intensity and frequency are dominated by inter-decadal to multi-decadal variations, with no significant trends evident over the 20th century."

Hedged with such self-protective lingo, the report inches its way along to the conclusion that "warming [over the past 1000 years] was unusual and is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin." "Unlikely" has its numeral window of 10-33 percent, which means these modelers are admitting there could be a one in three chance they are wrong about what is now taken by people, including George W. Bush, to be a dead cert.

Soon the vigilant reader notes that in all the graphs and trend lines there is one extremely significant omission: the role played by water vapor. This is odd because, as Sprey emphasizes, "Water vapor is the single largest factor in the heating and cooling of the earth. There is far more water in the atmosphere than CO², and it absorbs a lot of infrared radiation. But from the computer modeler’s point of view, water vapor is very variable. Rain they can’t predict; clouds they can’t predict. So, if your computer model can’t deal with water, forget it.

"Think of the heating-cooling equation as a giant seesaw, with a billion tons at each end. You are arguing about a few pounds making the seesaw tilt. And it’s true. A few pounds do make up a difference. But which few pounds are you talking about? All measurements in all these models have far more error than a few pounds, and in fact these computer modelers compete for money against the atmospheric measurers. There’s major research to be done in the area of exchange between stratosphere and troposphere. There are vast tropical thunderstorms that are very crucial for mixing of lower atmosphere air, polluted with CO² and aerosols and mixing it into upper atmosphere."

Yet the more they model, the less they actually measure. Sprey draws my attention to an amazing table that takes up two-thirds of page 8 of the "Summary." It purports to shows the proportions of various factors such as CO², methane and halocarbons in "forcing" the climate system to greater warmth. A confident box states that the summary’s experts can asserts with a "high" level of "scientific understanding" that halocarbons, N²O [nitrous oxide], CH⁴ [methane] and CO² are forcing the climate toward greater heat at a rate of 2.5 watts per square meter. Less obviously featured in the table is a line suggesting with a "very low" level of scientific understanding that an "Aerosol indirect effect" is cooling the climate system at a rate of 2 watts for each square meter.

Aerosols are particles so fine they float in air. As we know from the seeding of clouds by aerosols, they can cause rain. The more rain we have, the less water vapor in the form of atmosphere, hence the less heat trapped by this water vapor. A footnote to the table mumbles coyly that "A second indirect effect of aerosols on clouds, namely their effect on cloud lifetime...is not shown." Now, Sprey points out that on page 4 of the "Summary" we find the statement that "It is very likely that precipitation has increased by 0.5 to 1% per decade in the 20th century over most mid- and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere continents, and it is likely that rainfall has increased by 0.2 to 0.3% per decade over the tropical...land areas...

"They are saying rain has increased. If it rains more, you are taking water vapor out of the air. Since the role of water vapor is much larger than that of CO², it’s crucial to understand what draws water vapor out of the ocean and into the atmosphere, thus making the world warmer. Oceans are by far the largest part of the earth’s surface. Ocean currents transfer heat from the tropics to the Arctic. They are also important because they release water vapor. So, changes in ocean currents alone could easily account for global warming or cooling.

"On top of that we have feedback, which is barely admitted by the Summary. There may be factors in the global heat balance that tend to be stabilizing. For example, it may well be that when CO² goes up into the atmosphere, it rains more. Aerosols feed clouds and increase precipitation, meaning less water vapor, hence less heat trapped at night. This could mean that current smokestack emissions, full of aerosols, might be cooling the earth more than the CO² is heating it up. Since the aerosol effect is as poorly understood as the water effect, who knows whether the earth is cooling or heating, due to human activity. Certainly not the computer modellers."

The nearest the "Summary" gets to this is to say their models "cannot yet simulate all aspects of climate" and "there are particular uncertainties associated with clouds and their interaction with radiation and aerosols." Having made this extremely damaging, albeit furtive, admission the "Summary" brays triumphantly that "Some recent models produce satisfactory simulations of current climate without the need for non-physical adjustments." And what, pray, is a "non-physical adjustment"? In ordinary English it’s a fudge factor, an element introduced into the model for the sole purpose of making that model work.

"In a lot of natural mechanisms," Sprey concludes, "there are stabilizing factors. This runs counter to the catastrophist notion that if you tip things a little, then everything goes to hell."

We like catatrophism. It’s part of the eschatology of guilt. But it has more to do with faith than with science, and this absurd "Summary" only serves to buttress that basic point: the global warming/greenhouse gas thesis is most emphatically nonproven.

vol 14 no 11

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