When someone claims “the end of the Earth is near” and demands tens of trillions of dollars to correct it, people should be a lot more skeptical than they have been. First, there better be proof of the end of the world coming. And whatever proof there is better be able to stand up to public and scientific scrutiny. 

In the age of electronic hucksters and snake oil salesmen it is always prudent to question the need to hand anyone $100 dollars, let alone tens of trillions of dollars.

It turns out that the man made global warming cries from the UNIPCC, Al Gore and James Hansen are not standing up to scrutiny. Not even the global climate is cooperating, hitting a decade long cooling period as CO2 levels have been rising at historic rates. 

But worse than being in error, it now could be argued that the data used by these “End of the Earthers” was cooked to make normal variations appear to be driven by man made CO2 production. This article over at ICE CAP is a damning piece of evidence, which adds to a long list of damning evidence built up since the UNIPCC was finally scientifically challenged:

The measured global temperature record which started around 1856 shows that the Earth was in a warming cycle until around 1880. The CO2 record shows that CO2 was increasing by about 0.21ppmv/year over this period. During the cooling cycle which followed from 1880 to 1910, the CO2 concentration increased at a rate of about 0.30ppmv/year.

The next warming cycle from 1910 to 1942 saw a dramatic increase in global temperature, but the rate of increase in CO2 concentration only grew to 0.33ppmv over this time period. The well documented global cooling period from 1942 to 1975 that had the world concerned about an impending return to the equivalent of the Little Ice Age, had a contemporaneous rise in atmospheric CO2 that equated to 0.63ppmv/year; almost twice the increase in CO2 of the precious warming cycle.

During the warming that took place from 1975 to 1998, the rate of CO2 increase took another dramatic jump to 1.54ppmv/year, but this was followed by an increase to 1.91ppmv/year that we are currently experiencing during the present ongoing cooling cycle. Each successive cooling cycle has had an increase in the rate of CO2 growth over the previous warming cycle, indicating that there is no possible correlation of CO2 with global warming.

Emphasis mine, showing the accelerated increase in CO2 levels. If I have time today I will over lay this graph on the temperature profile put out by NOAA, but what is clear is the rate of CO2 increase is not tied to temperature. 

For example, in the first warming cycle 1856-1880 the CO2 levels were rising by 0.21ppmv/year. During the last cooling cycle from 1998-2009 the CO2 levels were rising at 1.91. ppmv/year – 10 times higher than in the first warming period!

How could rising CO2 levels at 1/10nth the rate of todays cause warming while ten times the CO2 rise result in cooling? It can’t. As the article notes this really is all you need to know to prove there is no correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures. The snake oil salesmen claiming the end of the Earth is near really just want the tens of trillions of dollars.

But what about the data showing historic warming, some high school math and science geniuses may ask? Well, the data was cooked to make it look like this was historic warming. The article relates to a now well established fact that the historic reconstructions used by the End of The Earthers was jury rigged:

In 1988 Hansen et al published a paper “Global Climate Changes as Forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies Three-Dimensional Model” in the Journal of Geophysical Research that introduced a “CO2 forcing parameter”. This parameter had no actual physical basis, but was merely based on the assumption that a 100ppmv increase in CO2 was directly and primarily responsible for the measured increase in global temperature of 0.6C that had been observed over the past century.

Keep that number 0.6°C in your head because it is very important. It is important because for Hansen and his snake oil partners to be right in demanding tens of trillions of dollars from humanity the 100 ppmv rise in CO2 had to result in 0.6°C increase in global temperature per decade. This is the only way for the End of The Earth to be near.

The Earth had been warming since the Little Ice Age at a rate of about 0.5C/century. The temperature value that went into determining the CO2 forcing parameter was 0.6C, with the difference from the 0.5C/century value likely due to the urban heat island effect. Even if this difference was directly due to CO2 increases, the difference between the observed temperature and the natural warming since the Little Ice Age is only 0.1C but the full 0.6C was used to fabricate the forcing parameter.

Here we come to the conundrum. The natural rate of warming was 0.5°C for centuries, so the maximum possible effect of man-made CO2 could be 0.1°C. First off it must be noted we cannot measure an average global temperature to this accuracy today, with a fleet of sensors in the water and in space (the land based ones have been demonstrated to be 80+% dodgy).

Global monitoring satellites can correlate temperatures across this vast planet to within a couple of hours (it takes about 90 minutes for a satellite to orbit once in low earth orbit, but maybe days to map the entire globe). But no one would claim tenth of a degree accuracy even in the local measurement, let alone a global average. 

So what is Hansen and his snake oil salesmen to do, that is not enough of a rise to raise alarm bells? Well, their answer came right out of  George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Ministry of Truth:

when it became obvious that the natural warming of 0.5C/century since the Little Ice Age demonstrated the obvious deficiency in this forcing parameter of the climate models, the MBH98 temperature proxy also known as the “hockey stick” was fabricated to remove the Little Ice Age and allow the full 0.6C temperature increase to be related to CO2 increases. 

This fabrication has come in various forms, but I recently posted on how through the surgical application of a certain data set of tree ring proxies (secondary indicators that can ESTIMATE global temperatures in the past) one could magically wipe out all previous warmer periods during human existence and make it appear that this time it was historic warming! See the graph below where it was discovered if we remove two key data sets from the UN/IPCC and Hansen historic reconstructions the actual historic record magically reappears!

   

It becomes clear, that the non tree rings world wide [- THICK BLUE CURVE -] matches extremely well in the 20′th century and all the way back to year 1450. Then exactly as the MWP starts [actually ends with a cooling period], the tree rings and the non tree rings simply “looses contact”.

This chart and data is from Frank Lansner who posted this very intriguing analysis at WUWT. The thick blue line is the temperature record shown in 20 plus different proxies from ice cores to fossilized marine life. But add in one or two of these suspect tree ring data sets and you get the the other curves. Isn’t it stunning how the removal of a few questionable data sets can make known historic warming periods just reappear like that? And note how much warmer these periods were than today. Coincidence? I think not.

My scientific friends who are skeptics of global warming tend to be to reserved in their challenges against snake oil salesmen. They live in a refined world of scientific debate, where being right or wrong is not always crucial and one debates, does not make charges. But then again these debates usually don’t involve tens of trillions of dollars and the quality of life of everyone on the planet.

I live in a different world. I work as an engineer (who can dabble in science) where being wrong is disaster. We don’t debate, we test until confident nothing can go wrong. And we have our fair share of charlatans and snake oil salesmen who swear they have the greatest idea since the dawn of man. Sometimes they are just innocently naive. But usually you can tell these folks because they are not as focused on making money as proving their ideas.

Anytime someone walks up and says: “The End of The Earth Is Near! Give me a few tens of trillions of dollars to fix it” people should rightfully  be skeptical. It has nothing to do with caring for this planet, it is basic common sense. The first response should be “Prove It”!

Tags: Al Gore, CO2 Levels, Global Warming, Hansen, UN IPCC