James A. Peden - Man Made Global Warming- Fact Or Hoax (Atmospheric Physicist Refutes UN Climate Change Hysteria), ...
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The Middlebury Community Network
Editorial: The Great Global Warming Hoax?
Editor's Introductory Note: Our planet has been slowly warming since last emerging from the "Little Ice
Age" of the 17th century, often associated with the
Maunder Minimum
. Before that came the "
Medieval
Warm Period
", in which temperatures were about the same as they are today. Both of these climate
phenomena are known to have occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, but several hundred years prior to the
present, the majority of the Southern Hemisphere was primarily populated by indigenous peoples, where
science and scientific observation was limited to nonexistent. Thus we can not say that these periods were
necessarily "global".
However, "Global Warming" in recent historical times has been an undisputable fact, and no one can
reasonably deny that.
But we're hearing far too often that the "science" is "settled", and that it is mankind's contribution to the
natural CO2 in the atmosphere has been the principal cause of an increasing "Greenhouse Effect", which is the
root "cause" of global warming. We're also hearing that "all the world's scientists now agree on this settled
science", and it is now time to quickly and most radically alter our culture, and prevent a looming global
catastrophe. And last, but not least, we're seeing a sort of mass hysteria sweeping our culture which is
really quite disturbing. Historians ponder how the entire nation of Germany could possibly have goosestepped
into place in such a short time, and we have similar unrest. Have we become a nation of overnight loonies?
Sorry folks, but we're not exactly buying into the Global Hysteria just yet. We know a great deal about
atmospheric physics,
(bio)
and from the onset, many of the claims were just plain fishy. The extreme haste
with which seemingly the entire world immediately accepted the idea of Anthropogenic ( manmade ) Global
Warming made us more than a little bit suspicious that no one had really taken a close look at the science. We
also knew that the catchall activity today known as "Climate Science" was in its infancy, and that atmospheric
modeling did not and still does not exist which can predict changes in the weather or climate more than about
a day or two in advance.
So the endless stream of dire predictions of what was going to happen years or decades from now if we did not
drastically reduce our CO2 production by virtually shutting down the economies of the world appeared to be
more the product of radical political and environmental activism rather than science. Thus, we embarked on a
personal quest for more information, armed with a strong academic background in postgraduate physics and a
good understanding of the advanced mathematics necessary in such a pursuit. This fundamental knowledge of
the core principles of matter and its many exceptionally complex interactions allowed us to research and
understand the foundations of many other sciences. In short, we read complex scientific articles in many
other scientific disciplines with relative ease and good understanding like most folks read comic books.
As our own knowledge of "climate science" grew, so grew our doubts over the "settled science". What we
found was the science was far from "settled".. in fact it was barely underway.
It was for a while a somewhat lonely quest, what with "all the world's scientists" apparently having no doubt.
Finally, in December 2007 we submitted an article to one of our local newspapers, the
Addison
Independent
, thinking they would be delighted in having at minimum an alternative view of the issue. Alas,
they chose not to publish it, but two weeks after our submission (by the strangest coincidence), published yet
another "proglobalwarming" feature written by an individual whom, to the best we could determine, had no
advanced training in any science at all, beyond selftaught it would appear. Still, the individual had published
a number of popular books on popular environmental issues, was wellloved by those of similar political bent,
and was held in high esteem among his peers. We had learned a valuable lesson: Popular Journalists trump
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coupled sets of 2ndorder partial differential equations every time. Serious science doesn't matter if you have
the press in your pocket.
In fairness to the Addison Independent and its editors, our article was somewhat lengthy and technical, and
presumably the average reader most likely could not follow or even be interested in an alternative viewpoint,
since everyone knew by now that the global warming issue was "settled science". And we confess that we like
the paper, subscribe to it, and know a number of folks who work there personally. They're all good folks, and
they have every right to choose what does or doesn't go in their publication. They also have a right to spin the
news any direction they choose, because that's what freedom of the press is all about. Seems everyone, both
left and right, does it and it's almost certain we will be accused of doing the same here. And we just may be,
as hard as we may try to avoid it. We humans aren't all shaped by the same cookie cutter, and that's a
blessing that has taken us as a species to the top of the food chain.
But by then we had been sharing our own independent research of the literature with others via email, and
receiving a surprising amount of agreement back in return. (We're in contact with a large number of fellow
scientists around the country, dating back to our college days in the 17th century when beer was a quarter a
bottle). One local friend, in particular, kept pressing us to publish, and even offered to set up a "debate" with
the Popular Journalist who had usurped our original article. This we politely declined, arguing that "debate"
cannot prove or disprove science...science must stand on its own.
But then something unusual happened. On Dec. 13, 2007, 100 scientists jointly signed an
Open Letter
to
Ban KiMoon, SecretaryGeneral of the United Nations, requesting they cease the manmade global warming
hysteria and settle down to helping mankind better prepare for natural disasters. The final signature was from
the President of the World Federation of Scientists.
At last, we were not alone...
We decided to publish the results of our counterexploration on the internet but in a somewhat uniquely different
fashion. Knowing that most folks aren't geeks, and may have little understanding of science or math, we're going to
attempt to teach some of the essential physics and such as we go along. Readers with little or no mathematical or
scientific training may find it challenging, but if you have a general understanding of introductory college or even
solid high school level chemistry or physics, you should have no problem in following this amazing tale. The brighter
readers, even without a science background, should be able to follow, as well. Smart folks learn faster than most.
What follows is a tale gleaned from many sources over what turned out to be an unreasonably long period of time.
We'll be first examining a "worst case" scenario, using very simple math at first, in order to arrive in a ballpark that
will tell us if we need to go further and pull out long strings of complicated equations, which we don't want to have to
resort to because we're writing for the average layman who is not a rocket scientist. This is a valid scientific method
despite its apparent simplicity, for if one can first determine that a person does not own a motorcycle, then you don't
have to spend a lot of time calculating how likely he is to crash while riding it. Reducing it to the simplest of terms
for the average person to understand was a daunting task. Below is an example of what "real" Climate Scientists
have to deal with on a daily basis. Is it any wonder that the most popular majors in college are liberal arts?
Let's take a short glance at the equation at the left,
because you're never going to see anything like it
again in this editorial. To most of you, it is gobbly
gook, but to a physicist, it is part of a mathematical
proof accompanying a particular study done on the
sun's role in Global Warming. What the authors are
explaining is they have found that the total solar
irradiance (TSI) has been measured by orbiting
satellites since 1978 and it varies on an 11year cycle
by about 0.07%. So, from solar min to solar max, the
TSI reaching the earth’s surface increases at a rate
comparable to the radiative heating due to a 1% per
year increase in greenhouse gases, and will probably
add, during the next five to six years in the advancing
phase of Solar Cycle 24, almost 0.2 °K to the globally
averaged temperature, thus doubling the amount of
transient global warming expected from greenhouse
warming alone. Whew....
Don't fret - neither Al Gore nor any of the Popular Journalists can understand it either.
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Snipped from an article entitled
Solar-Cycle Warming at the EarthÓs Surface and an
Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity.
By KaKit Tung and Charles D. Camp
Department of Applied Mathematics
University of Washington, Seattle Washington
We'll try to reference most of the material, but if we miss a credit, or use a photograph someone didn't want to share
with the world (OK, we wonder why the photo was on the web if that were the case) we'll quickly remove it with our
apologies. And let's freely admit up front that what we offer here is a dissenting opinion, and surely we have "cherry
picked" the articles of others which are also contrary to the widely held current beliefs. A bit of this is original on our
part, but most of it comes from others around the globe. We have tried to present work from what we believe to be
credible, thoroughly diligent scientists actively engaged in current research. Let's get started:
We're reminded of an earlier story, which happened back in 1912. This was the amazing discovery of a skull and
jawbone in which was quickly named the Piltdown Man and which all the world's archaeologists immediately
accepted as a hitherto unknown form of early human. It appears no one bothered to examine it closely, assuming
that other scientists had thoroughly investigated and vetted it. The hoax wasn't uncovered until 1953, when it was
learned that the skull was that of a modern man and the jaw that of an orangutan. Seems no one had ever bothered
to take a really close look at the artifact.
Well, folks, it does appear we have a new, 21st Century Piltdown Man, and this time we know his name.
He's called "Anthropogenic Global Warming"
It's hard to nail down exactly when the sky started falling, but certainly the work of
Michael Mann
provided its first
global exposure. Michael Mann, a paleoclimatologist ( one who attempts to interpret the past climate through certain
Paleolithic records, such as ice core samples, sea bed sediments, coral heads, and tree ring growth ), submitted a
paper to
Nature
magazine in 1998 which, unfortunately, was not subjected to peer review before publication. In it,
he offered what has now become known as the famous "hockey stick" chart, showing the earth's temperature having
been relatively constant for the past thousand years before suddenly skyrocketing upward at the dawn of the 20th
century. His interpretation was that man's production of CO
2
in the modern age was obviously responsible for the
sudden increase. It turned out to be one of the biggest scientific blunders of all time.
Look carefully at the chart above, which is the famous "hockey stick" chart. Note the horizontal scale is in years,
stretching from the year 1000 to the near present time. The vertical scale is in degrees Centigrade, and note
carefully that it is graded in increments of 1/10 of a degree. That means the wiggly blue section in the middle is
actually only varying up and down by about a half of a degree. The baseline, as noted, is set at the average of the
recorded temperatures from 1961 to 1990. Also note that only the red portion represents actual measured
temperatures the rest is based on the assumption that one can interpret past temperatures from examining ancient
tree rings or ice core samples from centuriesold ice locked in glaciers. This is, at best, a marriage of apples and
oranges the handle being somewhat of an educated guess, and the blade being based on actual measurements
using thermometric recording devices. Sort of like pairing the skull of a human with the jawbone of an orangutan.
And finally, note that the chart is for the northern hemisphere only. This chart, unfortunately, became the foundation
for the first report of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ), which in turn provided the
summary information and recommendations to the world's governments. The Anthropogenic Global Warming panic
was off to a rocketing start.
However, some folks noticed a couple of significant and fairly well accepted climatological history facts to be
conspicuously missing. The first was the welldocumented "Medieval Warm Period" where temperatures, at least in
Europe as mentioned in our introduction, were significantly higher. The second was the "Little Ice Age", a period in
which the temperatures dropped so low the Thames River in London froze over.
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How could this be an accurate record of the last millennium?
Let's pause and mention that the data above is not "raw" data. Dr. Mann actually used about 7080 data sets, and in
each set he applied a mathematical analysis known as a principle component analysis ( PCA ) which seeks to extract
principal, or significant component information from a widely varying set of raw data.
Along comes
Steve McIntyre
, a Canadian analyst, who spends two years of his own personal time reverse
engineering Dr. Mann's PCA program. McIntyre subjects Mann's PCA program to a "Monte Carlo" analysis which
inserts random data sets into the function and discovered that no matter what data he fed it, the result was always
the same. The arm of the "hockey stick" ( paleorecord ) always came out straight. In Dr. Mann's case, the rising
temperature of the Medieval Warm Period and the expected trough of the Little Ice Age had been completely erased.
The hockey stick was broken. Fini. Kaput. We may never know whether Mann's work was deliberately contrived to
fit some personal environmental agenda, or just a colossal mathematical blunder.
McIntyre submitted his work to Nature Magazine since they were responsible for publishing Mann's flawed research
without peer review in the first place, but they reportedly rejected it, saying it was "too long". He then shortened it
to 500 words, and resubmitted it, but again it was rejected, this time saying it was "too mathematical" or words to
that effect. Heaven forbid any publication calling itself an "International Weekly Journal of Science" from actually
publishing any science that hinged on mathematics. Let's all push a yard stick into the snow, measure the snow
depth, call ourselves "climate scientists", and get published in Nature. In the end, McIntyre turned to the internet
and its true freedom of the press, and today he is known to every serious climate scientist on the planet as the man
who broke the hockey stick.
The National Academy of Sciences has found Mann's graph to have “a validation skill not significantly different from
zero” – i.e., the graph was useless. Note the corrected version, below, in which neither today's temperatures nor the
rate of warming are particularly unusual compared to the historical record. Thus, even the "global warming" of the
20th century was not even remotely a cause for the slightest alarm. It was all "much to do about nothing".
The Medieval Warm Period, of which the proponents
of Anthropogenic Global Warming don't want you to
be aware, was a period in which agriculture
flourished, helping Europe emerge from the Dark
Ages.
The Little Ice Age produced crop failures from too
short growing seasons leading to widespread hunger
and even starvation in some more northern locales.
Since our emergence from the Little Ice Age,
agriculture has again flourished, and most of us hope
it lasts quite a while longer. This is certainly no cause
for panic, and a few of us think being comfortably
warm and having plenty to eat is actually good.
And Tom Nelson has a few more graphs the AGW
folks don't want you to see posted
HERE.
Into the Laboratory, it's time to go to work.
Next, let's take a look CO2 from an Atmospheric Physicist's view straightforward physics that we hope most of you
will be able to follow:
What we commonly call "light" is actually electromagnetic radiation, physically no different from radio waves, except
of different frequencies and wavelengths. The part we can see is called the visible spectrum. Beyond what we can
see in the higher frequencies ( and shorter wavelengths, since they are reciprocal functions ) lies the ultraviolet
spectrum. UV light is very penetrating, which is why one could get sunburned on an overcast day. Beyond even that
are Xrays, which can penetrate much deeper. On the opposite end of the visible spectrum lies infrared... which you
can't see, but you can easily feel, as anyone who has warmed his hands near a hot stove can testify. It is the
infrared portion we commonly refer to as "heat" radiation. And beyond that are the radio and television wavelengths
we all know and love.
The sun is very "bright", and its frequency spectrum is generally too short to produce much infrared coming down
through the atmosphere. Radiation from the sun penetrates the atmosphere, strikes the earth, and some of it is
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absorbed and some is reflected. The different bandwidths (colors) of reflected light depend on the material struck, so
something greencolored is reflecting the green portion of the visible spectrum and absorbing the rest. This heats up
the earth, and that's the first part of the story.
All heated bodies emit radiation in the infrared range. This is called "black body" radiation, because a perfectly black
body reflects no visible light but still emits radiation in a specified band of wavelengths. Infrared radiation is of a
much longer wavelength, and can be much easier absorbed by certain components in the atmosphere, causing them
to also "heat up". The warm air around us is being kept warm partially from black body radiation coming from the
earth itself. Another method of warming is by conduction air coming in contact with the heated soil, rocks, trees,
buildings, etc. and being directly warmed by that contact. This may be a bigger factor than we think, but we're not
going to attempt to try to determine just how much that might be. We'd have to know the total surface area of every
object down to the smallest blade of grass there is on our planet. We also need to remind ourselves that there is
actually no physical quantity known as "cold". There is only "heat" and "lack of heat".
Next, lets talk about a scientific process called Atomic Absorption Spectrometry. It is a method by which we can
measure precisely which wavelengths of radiation a particular gas is capable of absorbing.
In our highly simplified drawing above, a radiation source is beamed through a glass container containing a gas
sample. As the radiation passes through, a portion of it is absorbed at particular narrow bandwidths (often more
than one ) so the end result are some "missing" sections of the whole spectrum coming from the source, which show
up as dark lines. They're missing because they were absorbed by the sample in the chamber. They are called
absorption lines, or absorption spectra, and when analyzed by a knowledgeable person, can tell one what the gas or
gas mixture is in the sample chamber based on a catalog of known spectra. It's a wonderful tool for analyzing
unknown gas samples.
Let's look at a real result, below the absorption spectrum for pure carbon dioxide plus an amount of water vapor
equal to that in our current atmosphere as the sample and infrared radiation from a black body spectrum as the
source. This is part of the socalled "greenhouse effect"
As we can see above, carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (IR) in only three narrow bands of frequencies, which
correspond to wavelengths of 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (m), respectively. The percentage absorption of all three
lines combined can be very generously estimated at about 8% of the whole IR spectrum, which means that 92% of
the "heat" passes right through without being absorbed by CO2. In reality, the two smaller peaks don't account for
much, since they lie in an energy range that is much smaller than the where the 15 micron peak sits so 4% or 5%
might be closer to reality. If the entire atmosphere were composed of nothing but CO2, i.e., was pure CO2 and
nothing else, it would still only be able to absorb no more than 8% of the heat radiating from the earth.
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