Open letter to policy makers, colleagues, students, and citizens

Disproofs of the hypothesis of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming): And proofs that AGW is a fraud.

Dr. Eric T. Karlstrom, Professor of Geography (webmaster of www.naturalclimatechange.us)

California State University, Stanislaus, November, 2010

In this paper, I document some of the many disproofs of the hypothesis of unprecedented, catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming (AGW). In the process, I demonstrate that AGW is and has always been a fraud. I also:

2) Demonstrate that there is no consensus amongst scientists in support of the AGW hypothesis.

3) Show that natural climate fluctuations have had a far greater influence than humans on the climate system and that the claimed rate of modern warming (0.6° C in the 20^th century) is well within the normal range for natural temperature fluctuations.

4) Show that atmospheric CO₂ does not drive temperatures and plays a minor role in the climate system.

5) Discuss the historical benefits of relatively warm climates vs. more damaging colder climates.

6) Demonstrate that human contributions of CO₂ to the atmosphere are minor (about 3.5%) as compared with nature’s contributions. And water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas.

7) Detail the many ways in which science fraud has been systematically and is still being used to create the common misperceptions associated with AGW.

8) Discuss problems and limitations of the GCMs (global climate models) that provide the basis of the alarmist claims of human-induced global warming.

9) Expose the fallacies of the many propaganda ploys, including melting glaciers, rising sea levels, die-off of polar bears, increase in extreme weather, etc., that are now commonly attributed to AGW.

10) Speculate on the political, economic, and social agendas served by the AGW fraud.

Over the past twenty years, governments of the world have spent $100’s of billions on “research” ($50 to 60 billion in US alone) expressly to validate the hypothesis of AGW. This is in order to justify “the largest regulatory intervention in history: the restricting of carbon emissions from all human activity” (Horner, 2010). Today, however, this hypothesis has been thoroughly disproven by the scientific evidence. Most people understand one of the most basic rules of science is that when a hypothesis is disproven by the facts, that hypothesis is invalidated and must be discarded. As Thomas Huxley noted:

The great tragedy in science- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Award-winning Meteorologist Brian Sussman stated:

Mankind's burning of fossil fuels is allegedly warming the planet. This hypothesis couldn't stand the test of an eighth grade science fair. (But) if you dare poke holes in the hypothesis you're branded a 'denier’. Well fine. I'd rather be called a 'denier' than try to push a scheme that would make Karl Marx green with envy.

Now that satellite, radiosonde balloon, and new ocean measurements all show the world has been cooling since about 1998, the dire warnings of catastrophic “global warming” have been changed to dire warnings about catastrophic “climate change” or “climate disruption.” That the normal processes of science are not being followed, indeed, have been turned upside down, is a strong indication that this hypothesis serves some very important political/economic agendas.

Why has there been this persistent bias toward humans, rather than natural processes, as the main cause of climate change? If we look at article 1 of the United Nations Environmental Program of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): we see that this bias is incorporated into their very definition of “climate change:”

“Climate change: A change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over considerable time periods.”

This operational definition, adopted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), excludes research into or consideration of natural climate variability, which, as we shall see, is of far greater importance than any human contributions.

President Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address, warned not only of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He also warned of the potential dangers that could arise if/when the state sanctions particular scientific views:

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded… We must… be alert to the… danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

This statement perhaps best explains why the hypothesis of AGW persists today is considered a fact by many, even though it is disproven by a mountain of scientific evidence.

Briefly stated, the AGW hypothesis is: Human industrial activities, primarily emissions of carbon dioxide by industry and transportation, are causing Earth’s climate to warm in an unprecedented and catastrophic manner. The United Nations IPCC computer models predict global warming of 1° F/decade and 5-6° C (10-12° F) by 2100. In State of Climate in 2009, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) claims the world is still heating up, even during the past decade when averaged temperatures have dropped.

Over and over, IPCC officials, politicians, movie stars, and especially the media tell us that “the science is settled” and we must act now to avert catastrophe. The alarmist rhetoric from prominent politicians, scientists and environmental groups has reached a fever pitch:

Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear… We cannot afford more of the same timid politics when the future of our planet is at stake.

President Barak Obama

Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, catastrophe of our own making… I think we ought to have an immediate freeze on CO₂ emissions.

Former Vice President Al Gore, from “An Inconvenient Truth” and Congressional testimony

We are getting close to catastrophic tipping points, despite the fact that most people barely notice the warming yet.

Dr. James Hansen, NASA scientist

Climate Change is the greatest threat that human civilization has ever faced.

Angela Merkel, German Chancellor

The planet is on course for a catastrophe. The existence of Life itself is at stake.

IPCC Principal Research Scientist

Man-made global warming has a potential to kill everybody. Michael Bloomberg

This is an emergency... It’ll make world war look like heaven.

Presidential candidate John Edwards

Our planet is just five years away from climate change catastrophe- but can still be saved, according to a new report.

The World Wildlife Fund for Nature, 2007

(Prince Charles has calculated that we have just 100 months to avert catastrophe, whereas James Hansen says 4 years).

Even as politicians and media scare us with this kind of alarmist rhetoric, prominent individuals such as film director James Cameron and Google CEO Eric Schmidt try to silence debate by asserting that it is “criminal” to question global warming:

If business as usual continues…. We will have extincted (sic) 70% of the species on the planet by the end of the century. There are people who in my view criminally doubt some of the science. People need to evolve mentally and philosophically to something that has never existed before. We need to become the techno-indigenous people of an entire Earth, not of a nation, not of a state, but of a planet.

However, I would argue that the real “consensus” amongst scientists today is that the AGW hypothesis is disproven by the evidence and therefore, needs to be discarded. Although this point of view is not well covered in the media, here’s what some real experts have stated:

The Global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried the APS (American Physical Society) before it like a rogue wave. Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life.

Dr. Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara

To reduce modern climate change to one variable (CO₂) or, more correctly, a small portion of one variable (i.e., human-produced CO₂) is not science, especially as it requires abandoning all we know about planet Earth, the Sun and the cosmos.

Earth Science Professor Ian Plimer, author of Heaven and Earth; Global Warming: the Missing Science

The global warming alarm is dressed up as science, but it is not science. It is propaganda.

Professor Paul Reiter, world expert on tropical diseases at Pasteur Institute, Paris, member of United Nations IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

The public has been repeatedly misled that there is a scientific consensus on global warming. Totally false. Unfortunately, man-made climate change, or anthropogenic global warming as it’s more commonly known, has become a political issue rather than a scientific one. Those who want you to accept that humans have caused climate change have a not-so-hidden agenda of imposing carbon taxes here in the United States that will cripple our economy and make us even more unable to compete with other nations.

Senior Chemist Glenn Speck, Oklahoma City Isotek Environmental Lab

In my dealings with meteorologists nationwide, about 95% share my skepticism about global warming.

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Ohio meteorologists Dan Webster

“The ‘global warming scare’ is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. It has no place in the Society's activities.

NASA Astronaut/Geologist and Moonwalker Jack Schmitt who flew on the Apollo 17 mission. formerly U.S. Geological Survey

I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.

Hurricane expert, Dr. Christopher Landsea, as he withdrew from the IPCC in 2005

I predict that the IPCC experience will end up being the worst case of scientific malpractice in history…. žIf the new President and Congress are not careful, the resulting “sub-prime science meltdown” we are headed for will have caused carbon dioxide regulations which will make the current financial crisis seem puny by comparison.

NASA Meteorologist and Climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer

How can a barely discernable, one-degree F. increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?

The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policymakers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. Indeed, the success of scientific alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion (per year) today. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks, or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

Controlling carbon is kind of a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon you control life… One of the things the scientific community is pretty agreed on is those things (carbon taxes, etc.) will have virtually no impact on climate no matter what the models say. So the question is do you spend trillions of dollars to have no impact?

Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21^st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.

MIT meteorology Professor Richard Lindzen

Governmental officials are currently casting trillions down huge rat hole to solve a problem which doesn’t exist. It’s misapplied atmospheric science for profit. It is an expanding profit-making industry, growing in proportion to the horror warnings by government officials and former vice-presidents.

Meteorologist Tom McElmurry, member of the American Meteorological Society

The new religion of global warming… is a great story, and a phenomenal best seller. It contains a grain of truth and a mountain of nonsense. And that nonsense could be very damaging indeed. We appear to have entered a new age of unreason, which threatens to be as economically harmful as it is profoundly disquieting. It is from this, above all, that we really need to save the planet.

Nigel Lawson, p. 106, “An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming,” 2008

How have we come to universally accept this new religion based on dubious prophecy that condemns so many poor souls to a living hell and will greatly limit the salvation offered by free economies? That's where the missionaries come in. These missionaries, aka ‘teachers’ and ‘professors,’ have gone out into the fields of the education system to disseminate the depressing gospel that the Earth is forever in big trouble. Thus, with sustained indoctrination from grade school through graduate school, proselytes have been harvested.

Meteorologist Anthony J. Sadar

I'm not sure which is more arrogant - to say we caused [global warming] or that we can fix it.

Meteorologist Mark Nolan

I maintain that statements, like this, by top international scientists available on the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works website (http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minotrity.SentateReport) indicate a more accurate range of opinion by top scientists and others who now understand that the policies being proposed to “fix” the climate (including Kyoto Protocol-type legislation and geo-engineering) would not “fix” the climate at all. Rather, they would be mechanisms for increased governmental control of society and life itself that would likely be far more damaging than any possible “climate change:”

Man cannot control the weather. But he can kill millions of people in his vain attempt to control it, by limiting or eliminating the fuel that we use.

Dr. Edward F. Blick, Professor of Meterology and Engineering at University of Oklahoma

Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.

Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan

This issue has now been with us long enough (several decades) that many thoughtful individuals now perceive the “bigger picture:”

As a biologist, I am aware of a number of cases in which science has been led in directions not based on hard evidence. Examples include Malthus and the Malthusian Theory, Lysenkoism in the old Soviet Union, and eugenics in the U.S. and elsewhere. Kyoto is a failure and a new approach is badly needed.

Biochemist and molecular biologist Dr. Lynwood Yarbrough, National Institutes of Health

Man-made global warming is a hoax that threatens our future and the future of our children. Environmentalism is the new communism.

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic and new leader of the European Union

The new green left (environmentalist) propaganda reminds me of the old red left (communist) propaganda. The dirty word is now carbon rather than capitalism. The game is simply to intrude and control everything. How much will the carbon tax be for each of us to breathe?

Vincent U. Muirhead, emeritus professor, aerospace engineering, University of Kansas

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed- and hence clamorous to be led to safety- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L Menken

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. . . Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus [which] is the business of politics. . . . What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

Michael Crichton, author of State of Fear

Science seems to have become the Great Dictator, and no dissent can be allowed. We refer to this as the New Scientism. We call it new to distinguish it from the old sort - the sort that, ironically enough, was organized by U.S. imperialism in the Cold War. As with the original Cold War scientism, the New Scientism perverts objective science towards questionable political ends. Ironically, greens now rehabilitate the Cold War scientism of RAND, which they affect to hate so much, so as to legitimize not the Cold War, but today's war on personal behaviour - the war to colonize people's minds, make them internalize green mores, and make them spend all their time buying (and repairing) windmills, sorting their rubbish, and turning off their consumer electronics equipment. Instead of rationing access to fallout shelters, David Miliband wants a nationwide scheme to ration carbon.

Some have used the IPCC summary to assert that the debate on climate change is over. In part, this stems from the proclamations of the IPCC itself and its supporters. For example, Achim Steiner said that 2 February, the day the summary was published, would be ‘remembered as the day the question mark was removed'. Anyone interested in genuine scientific inquiry, not to mention political debate, should always be concerned when question marks are removed.

The heart of the problem with today's supposed consensus on climate science is not so much a false claim to knowledge of how climate works, as an assertion that such knowledge can tell us how to live our lives. In this sense, the real consensus on climate change today is more political than scientific. It is a consensus that privileges emotional fears of loss and which is based on apocalyptic thinking and doubt about humanity's achievements and capabilities.

James Woudhuysen, a professor of Forecasting and Innovation at De Montfort University in Britain

Disproofs of the hypothesis of AGW:

1. Climate is always changing and temperatures always fluctuate; daily, seasonally, and on longer time scales as well.

The commonly accepted 0.6° C (1° F) average warming on Earth during the 20^th century is quite small compared to daily and seasonal fluctuations, fluctuations in average ocean temperatures over the past 3000 years, etc., as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Comparison between the current U.S. temperature change per century, the 3,000-year temperature range (of Figure 4), seasonal and diurnal temperature range in Oregon, and seasonal and diurnal range throughout the Earth. From Robinson et al. (2007).

2. The “modern warming” (~1850 to present) is not unprecedented at all. It is quite small relative to past, natural climate changes. Based on past climate records, it is well within the range of natural climate variability.

There has been a natural warming trend of ~0.5 C/century since 1750 AD, as the world recovered from the Little Ice Age (~1350 to 1850 AD). Dr. Reid Bryson, Professor of Physical Geography at University of Wisconsin, who is commonly called the “father of scientific climatology” and “the world’s most cited climatologist,” stated:

You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide… All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800’s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.

Reconstructions of average Earth temperatures over the past 2000 and 3000 years (Figures 2 and 3, respectively) indicate that today’s temperatures are well within the range of natural fluctuations.

Figure 2. Craig Loehle used 18 proxy records to produce this graph of average Earth temperatures over the past 2000 years. The graph clearly shows the world was warmer 1000 years ago during the Medieval Warm Period and cooler 300 years ago during the Little Ice Age. We started warming long before coal-powered electricity was invented.

Figure 3. The last 1000 years of Arctic temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations (from NASA data). Graph shows that average Arctic temperature about 1000 years ago (Medieval Warm Period) was about 1° C higher than present. There is no correlation with CO₂ levels.

Figure 3. Surface temperatures in the Sargasso Sea, a 2 million square mile region of the Atlantic Ocean, with time resolution of 50 to 100 years and ending in 1975, as determined by isotope ratios of marine organism remains in sediment at the bottom of the sea. The horizontal line is the average temperature for this 3,000-year period. The Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Optimum were naturally occurring, extended intervals of climate departures from the mean. (From Robinson et al., 2007)

Superimposed on the “modern warming” trend of the past ~150 year, there have been shorter-term ~30-year fluctuations. Recently, these include: cooling from 1882 to 1910, warming from 1910 to 1944, cooling from 1944 to 1975, and warming from 1975 to 2001.

Figure 4, below (from Dr. Syun Kasofu (2009, International Conference on Climate Change)) shows observed temperature fluctuations between 1880 and 2000. It also contrasts 1) United Nations IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) projections to 2100, and 2) future temperature trends based on a linear projection of observed past temperatures.

Figure 4. This figure, from Dr. Syun Kasofu (2009, International Conference on Climate Change) shows observed temperature fluctuations between 1880 and 2000 and 1) IPCC projections to 2100, and 2) future temperature trends based on linear projection of past observed temperatures. We are where the green arrow points.

Professor Don Easterbrook has traced this ~27-year cycle back to 1470 AD (Figure 5) and attributes these cycles to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the cyclic changes in temperature of the northern Pacific Ocean which are ultimately probably driven by changes in solar output. (Many of the world’s climate experts agree that, at least for decadal-century-long climate fluctuations, changes in solar output and ocean temperatures are probably the most important climate drivers.)

Figure 5. Alternating climatic warming and cooling has occurred about every 27 years since 1470 AD, well before atmospheric CO₂ began to increase.

Over the past 10,000 years, warmer climate prevailed during the Holocene Climatic Optimum (~9,000 to 5,000 years ago), the Minoan Warming (~1500 to 1200 BC), the Roman Warming (~250 BC to AD 450) and the Medieval Warm Period (~900 to 1300 AD) (Figure 6). Average temperatures during the Holocene Climatic Optimum are estimated to have been ~1.5 to 3 degrees C higher than today with sea levels ~2 m higher than present. Average temperatures during the Minoan, Roman, and Medieval Warm Periods are estimated to have been ~1 to 3° and even as much as 6° C higher than present (Plimer, 2009).

Figure 6. Mean global temperature variations of past ~10,000 years (Holocene Epoch), showing warm events.

Other natural warming and cooling events, many of which were of much greater magnitude than the modern warming, are shown in Figure 7 (from Plimer, 2009).

Figure 7. Some of the important, named natural climate events of the past 110,000 years (from Plimer, 2009).

Problems in measuring temperatures and reconstructing global trends.

In all fairness, several problems with temperature measurement and reconstruction should be noted and acknowledged. First, because temperatures are always changing and because temperature records are always approximations, many scientists point out that it is impossible to obtain a single average temperature for the Earth.

Physicist Dr. Bjarne Andresen, of The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, has stated:

While it is possible to treat temperature statistics locally, it is meaningless to talk about a global temperature for Earth. The globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless.

Depending on the averaging method used, the same set of measured data can simultaneously show an upward trend and a downward trend in average temperature. Thus, claims of disaster may be a consequence of which averaging method has been used.

Dr. Ian Plimer (Heaven and Earth: Global Warming the Missing Science) observes:

All this may appear to be nitpicking. However, this is the way scientific data is evaluated. If there are claims that the global temperature has risen by 0.7 C over the last century, then we need to know if the measurements of the temperature are accurate, can be validated and can be repeated. Measurement errors are ± 0.5° C, errors due to siting of a Stevenson Screen may be ± 0.3° C, errors due to wood or plastic may be ± 0.1° C, and errors due to the urban heat island effect may be ± 0.4° C. The total errors are ± 1.3° C. Therefore, over the last century, global temperatures have therefore risen by 0.7 ± 1.3° C. This is a meaningless figure. The only valid scientific conclusion is that temperature may have increased, been static, or decreased over the 20^th century.

Second, as is demonstrated below, many modern temperature records have apparently been deliberately skewed upward to show a warming trend. In “Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt?” Dr. David Evans notes “the western climate establishment has allowed egregious mistakes, major errors, and obvious biases- each factor on its own might be hard to pin down, but the pattern is undeniable.” For example, “official thermometers are overwhelmingly in warm localities such as near air conditioners, exhaust vents, buildings, concrete, tarmac, or asphalt.” Evans shows many examples of thermometers sited near cities where temperatures are skewed upward by the Urban Heat Island effect, such as the official thermometer at Marysville, California, below (Figure 8).

Figure 8. The official thermometer at Marysville, California clearly records effects of extra warming from car engines in the parking lot, air conditioner exhaust, asphalt, concrete, a wall, wind breaks and reflections from a steel cell phone tower.

Furthermore, according to Evans, climate officials also “ignore the hundreds of thousands of weather balloon results that show the IPCC climate models overestimate future warming by at least 30%,” and that they “hide the Argo (ocean temperature) data, which shows the world’s oceans are cooling” (below). In addition, “their adjustments blatantly transform the original raw data from thermometers into rising trends. And they selectively ignore thousands of other thermometers where there is less warming.” Indeed, whereas there were nearly 6,000 thermometers in the official global network in the 1980s, this number has now been reduced to nearly six-fold, to a mere 1,079. The removal of nearly 5,000 thermometers has increased the proportion of thermometers at airports, which are warmer than surrounding rural areas, and nearer the equator and at lower altitudes, where temperatures are higher.

Dr. Edward Blick, Professor of Meteorology and Engineering, University of Oklahoma, discussed a part of this problem:

At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union (1990), they could not afford their weather stations in Siberia, so they were closed. Hence, with the loss of the cooler temperature data from Siberia and rural stations in other countries, coupled with the heat island effects of the large city stations, and errors in thermometers of the 1800’s, any increase in the average earth temperature in the past may be an illusion.

Given the inherent unreliability of ground thermometers where readings are commonly contaminated by the urban heat island effect, then, satellite temperature measurements, available since 1979, and radiosonde balloons, in operation since 1958, give much more comprehensive, accurate coverage of our planet.

Third, whether the temperature is rising or falling depends on the time scale you are observing (Figure 9)! Dr. Robert Carter, Professor of Earth Science, University of Adelaide and James Cook University, states:

“Is global average temperature rising or falling? It depends entirely on the chosen end-points of the data being considered… For example, using the Greenland ice-core oxygen isotope data as a proxy for temperature, Greenland has gotten warmer over the past 16,000 years. It has also gotten warmer over the past 100 years. Over intermediate periods, however, cooling has occurred since 10,000 and 2,000 years ago, and temperature stasis characterizes both the last 700 years and (globally, from meteorological records) the last eight years (from 1998-2006). Considering these facts, is the temperature in Greenland warming or cooling? (Realistically) the last eight years of zero warming and the last 100 years of warming preceding are too short to carry statistical significance regarding long-term climate change…. No meaningful comparative judgments about climate change can be made on the basis of the trivially short, 150-year-long thermometer surface temperature record, much less on the 28-year-long satellite tropospheric record.”

Figure 9. Figure shows: A) warming trend over the past 16,000 years, B) cooling since 10,000 BP, C) cooling since 2,000 BP, D) slight warming since start of the Little Ice Age, and E) warming in the last 100 years.

3. The atmosphere has been cooling since 1998! Reality does not match the computer model predictions. Although United Nations’ IPCC computer models predicted average Earth temperature would rise at the rate of 1° F per decade until 2100, satellite and instrumental records show that the average temperature of the lower troposphere has fallen since 1998 at the rate of -0.87° F/decade (1998-2009). This has occurred even as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased by five percent over the same time period (Figures 10 and 11). This “inconvenient truth” for global warming alarmists is why they no longer speak of the dangers of “global warming,” but instead now speak of the dangers of “climate change” and “climate disruption.” In trying to spin reality to conform to their models, some have even attributed modern cooling to man-induced global warming. This has given rise to the goofy new acronym: HIGWIGC, or Human-induced Global Warming Induced Global Cooling (Hayden, 2008).

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Figure 10. Globally averaged satellite-based temperature of lower troposphere, 1979-2009, from University of Alabama-Huntsville Climate Center.

Figure 11. Average temperatures in the lower troposphere, as measured by satellite, show a cooling trend between 1998 and 2009 of 0.87°F/decade.

All the computer models failed to predict this early 21^st century cooling. Thus, all the computer models are shown to be wrong and the hypothesis of human-caused global warming is disproven. Figure 12 (below) shows the difference between observed temperature changes, IPCC computer projections and linear projections of observed temperature trends.

Figure 12. Five computer predictions of climate models in 2000. These underpin the United Nations IPCC predictions and all show there is no relationship between the predicted future temperature and actual measured temperature over even a short period of time and that there is no relationship between the actual temperature and the atmospheric CO₂ content. Computer predictions cannot even predict a decade in advance, let alone 50 or 100 years in advance.

Aeronautical engineer Eduardo Ferreyra, president and founder of the Argentinean Foundation for Scientific Ecology, stated:

Wasn't warming supposed to be ‘global'? As our records shows, Argentina has been cooling since 10 years ago, and the central part of the country since 1987. As Hadley Center's recently published data shows, the Southern Hemisphere temperatures have been decreasing for the last seven years. 2007 has seen media temperatures steadily 2º to 4ºC lower than normal average, and our present summer shows a December with a decreasing trend. Cold Antarctic Polar Fronts have increased in intensity and frequency. Late frosts as the November 14th, 2007 caused a 50-80% loss in wheat, corn, and barley crops in the humid Pampas. Similar abnormal cold weather was observed in the rest of South America, South Africa, New Zealand and big areas in Australia. So, where is global warming? Or these are just natural variations (when it is cooling) but when there is a slight increase in temperature then it is human-induced "global warming"?

4. The oceans are cooling. The Argo network of some 3,000 ocean-going robot probes indicates the world’s oceans cooled nearly 2° C between 2003 and 2008 (Figures 13 and 14; Evans, 2010). Ocean temperatures were not systematically measured until mid-2003, with the establishment of the Argo network. These probes can descend to 1000-meter depths, record temperatures, then come up and radio back the results. Oceans cover 71% of the Earth and hold ~22 times more heat than the atmosphere. Hence, ocean temperatures have a major effect on atmospheric temperatures.

Figure 13. Ocean heat content from mid-2003 to early 2008, as measured by the Argo network, for 0-700 meters. There is seasonal fluctuation because the oceans are mainly in the southern hemisphere, but the trend can be judged from the highs and lows.

Figure 14. The Argo network, operational since 2003, has over 3,000 floats measuring temperature in all the oceans.

5. The “Hot Spot” predicted for the upper troposphere is missing from observed temperature records. Computer models used by the IPCC (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) all affirm that the “signature” or “fingerprint” of greenhouse warming due to increases of anthropogenic CO₂ would be a warming in the upper troposphere (8 to 12 km) in the lower latitudes, as shown in Figure 15, right diagram. Actual temperature measurements from radiosonde balloons, however, do not show the predicted “hotspot” (Figure 15, left diagram). According to Dr. David Evans, this “missing hotspot “ is the knockout blow to the hypothesis of AGW, proving 1) the IPCC climate theory is wrong, and 2) the recent warming was not caused by carbon emissions.

Figure 15. All computer models predicted that the “fingerprint” of greenhouse warming would be a “hot spot” in the upper troposphere (8-12 km) in equatorial latitudes, as shown in right diagram. Actual measurements of temperature from radiosonde balloons (1979-1999, left diagram) do not show the predicted “hot spot.” Nonetheless, these predictions are still used by the IPCC.

David Evans states:

“The missing hotspot (major update, March 2009) is the crucial evidence that disproves the theory that rising carbon dioxide levels are the main cause of global warming. Two thirds of the warming predicted by the IPCC climate models is due to water vapor feedback; in those models, the temperature rise due to rising carbon dioxide levels is amplified threefold by "feedbacks", the response of the Earth to being warmed a little by extra carbon dioxide. Any extra water vapor from feedback would expand the lower troposphere, pushing it into the colder upper troposphere, mainly at about 10 km up over the tropics -- creating a "hotspot" in a diagram of the atmospheric warming pattern. But radiosonde observations from 1979 to 1999, during the last warming, prove beyond reasonable doubt that there is no hotspot. So the carbon dioxide theory of global warming is wrong. In fact there is no extra water vapor, so the warming due to rising carbon dioxide is not amplified by water vapor feedback, and the IPCC predictions of rising temperatures are overstated by at least a factor of 2.5.”

6. To underscore that the magnitude of so-called “modern warming” (now cooling) is not unprecedented, proxy records indicate there were much more radical temperature changes from ~17,000 to ~10,000 years ago. We can extend the climatic record further into the past using oxygen-isotope ratios in ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project, GISP2 (Figure 16). This proxy record indicates that temperatures fluctuated radically between 17,000 and 10,000 years ago, with numerous episodes of much more rapid and far more intense warming (numbers 1, 3, 5, and 7, etc.) than has occurred in the 20^th century.

Figure 16. The magnitude and timing of past climatic changes as recorded in the isotope data from Greenland and Antarctic ice Cores. These data clearly show that abrupt climate changes many times greater than those of the past century have occurred many times in the past. Numbers correspond to the temperature curves on the above figure.

Explanation of temperature trends labeled by numbers 1-10 in Figure 16 (above, from Easterbrook):

1. About 15,000 yrs ago, a sudden, intense, climatic warming (~12° C; ~21° F) caused dramatic melting of large Ice Age ice sheets that covered Canada and the northern U.S., all of Scandinavia, and much of northern Europe and Russia. Sea level that had been 120 m (~400 ft) lower than present rose quickly and submerged large areas than had been dry land during the Ice Age. This warming occurred abruptly in only a few years (Steffensen et al., 2008).

2. A few centuries later, temperatures again plummeted (~11°; ~20° F) and glaciers advanced.

3. About 14,000 years ago, global temperatures rose rapidly (~4.5°C; ~8° F) once again and glaciers receded.

4. About 13,400 years ago, global temperatures plunged again (~8°C; ~14° F) and glaciers advanced.

5. About 13,200 years ago, global temperatures increased rapidly (~5°C; ~9° F) and glaciers receded.

6. 12,700 yrs ago global temperatures plunged sharply (~8°C; ~14° F) and a 1000-year period of glacial re-advance, the Younger Dryas, began.

7. 11,500 yrs ago, global temperatures rose sharply (~12° C; ~21° F), marking the end of the Younger Dryas cold period and the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age.

7. During the past 100,000 years, there were over 20 major DO cycles in which sea surface temperatures varied by up to 20° C. Sea surface temperature reconstructions of the past 100,000 years (GISP2) also show many warming/cooling events (including 20 Dansgaard/Oeschger warming events) that were far more extreme than any temperature fluctuations of the past 10,000 years (Figure 17). These figures also show the last 10,000 years (Holocene Epoch) was characterized by relatively stable, high temperatures.

Figure 17. Sea surface temperature proxy over the last 100,000 years using oxygen isotopes for Greenland ice sheet (GISP2 ice core). Sea surface temperatures varied rapidly by up to 20° C in more than 20 Dansgaard/Oeschger warming events. Ice sheets shed armadas of icebergs (Heinrich Events H1 to H6) during glaciation and there was great temperature instability during the last glaciation. During the current interglacial, sea surface temperature was higher and there was far less temperature variation than during previous 90,000 years. Present and current interglacial are to the left.

8. In fact, we’re still in an Ice Age now! Earth history tells us that “hot house” conditions” prevailed for (80%) of the Earth’s 4.6 billion year history whereas “cold house” conditions prevailed for the remaining ~20% of the time. During these colder intervals, glaciers covered much of the Earth’s surface and overall climatic conditions were commonly considerably colder than present. For the past nearly 3 million years (the Quaternary Period), Earth has been in an ice age. This ice age has been characterized by alternating glacial and interglacial conditions, with glacial conditions (“cold house”) prevailing for ~90% of the time and interglacials, including the present interglacial, or last 10,000 years, during the remaining ~10%. During full glacial conditions, average global temperatures are as much as 6 to 8° C colder than present, and up to 20° C colder in mid-continental areas in upper latitudes. Quaternary scientists assert that the total range of average temperatures during the Quaternary Period was ~10-12° C and as much as 20° C. My own research indicates that average temperatures in the Waterton-Glacier Parks area of Montana and Alberta varied by at least 16 to 18° C (29 to 32° F) over the past two million years (Karlstrom, 1990 1991).

Taking a slightly longer view into the past, proxy paleoclimatic reconstructions indicate that global temperatures have progressively cooled through the last 6 million years. Oxygen-isotope analyses from deep-sea cores indicate that global temperatures before the onset of the present ice age (2.67 million years ago) were several degrees C warmer than present (Figure 18). Prior to the onset of the modern ice age (the Quaternary Period or last 2.67 Ma,) average sea levels were about 20 m higher while atmospheric CO₂ concentration was about 30% higher (Plimer, 2009). Figure 18, below, also indicates the magnitude of temperature fluctuations was greatest during the last 1 million years.

Figure 18. The last 6 million years of climate from oxygen-isotope ratios in deep-sea cores showing cooling over the last 3 million years. Since the start of the present ice age, ~2.67 million years ago, there have been large fluctuations in temperature (as shown in oxygen-isotope ratios). The present climate is cooler than during the earlier Pliocene and Miocene Epochs, when climate was closer to its “normal” temperature, despite the presence of Antarctic ice sheets. Note the apparent importance of the 41,000-year obliquity cycle in the earlier part of the present ice age and the 100,000-year eccentricity cycle in the last one million years. These cycles are attributed to periodic variations in the earth’s orbit around the sun, and are associated with the Milankovitch, or astronomic, theory of climate change.

9. Distribution of plant and animal fossils, past sea levels, and oxygen-isotope records all show that past interglacials in the Quaternary Period (i.e., present ice age) were considerably warmer than the present interglacial (Holocene, or last 10,000 years). Proxy evidence, including distribution of plant and animal fossils, evidence of higher sea levels, etc., indicate that numerous previous interglacials of our present ice age (Quaternary Period) were warmer than the present interglacial by several degrees C. For example, the last interglacial, from 130,000 to 116,000 years BP (Before Present) had average temperatures 2 to 6° C warmer than today and sea levels some 4 to 6 m higher than today’s (Plimer, 2009). Earlier interglacials were even warmer. Tables 11 and 14 (below) indicate the estimated amount of temperature increase above today’s average temperature that occurred during the last interglacial, based on past floristic boundaries in Europe and North America, respectively (from Frenzel, 1973).

Temperature reconstructions from the C Dome ice core in Antarctica also show that the last interglacial was significantly warmer than the present interglacial (Figure 19).

Figure 19. High-resolution temperature reconstructions from the C Dome Ice Core based on deuterium excess and oxygen isotopes.

Figure 20 (below), derived from oxygen-isotope analyses of ice cores, also indicates that numerous previous interglacials were warmer than the present interglacial (Holocene).

Figure 20. Cycles of glacials (grey) and interglacials (black) over the last 400,000 years indicate that the current interglacial is not as warm as previous interglacials, that the current interglacial should be followed by glaciation, and that there is nothing extraordinary about the modern climate.

10. Even longer-term paleoclimatic records make it clear that “warmer” is “normal” on planet Earth. Again, examination of Earth history reveals that “hot house” conditions (in which climate was considerably warmer than the present) prevailed for about 80% of Earth’s history (Plimer, 2009, Hoffman and Simmons, 2008.) For the past 65 million years (Cenozoic Era), the climate has been cooling toward the present ice age. Figures 21 and 22 show changes in estimated average temperatures during the Cenozoic Era, based on past distribution of fossils and oxygen-isotope studies. Today’s average temperature is much lower than during most of the past 65 million years.

Figure 21. Climate reconstruction over the last 65 million years from measurement of oxygen isotopes in fossilized floating animal shells. The present is to the left.

Figure 22 (below), based on past distribution of fossils plant and animal species, indicates that tropical and subtropical conditions prevailed in Western North America between about 50 and 35 million years ago.

Figure 22. Climatic estimates for western Europe (Dorf, 1964), western North America (Dorf, 1964; Wolfe and Hopkins, 1967) and Japan (Tanai and Huzioka, 1967). Temperatures at boundaries between climatic zones are those assumed by Savin (1977), from whom the figure is modified.

Figure 23 (below), based on distribution of plant fossils, also indicates that 55 and 40 million years ago, tropical and subtropical climates extended into the upper middle latitudes. These climate zones are now confined to the lower latitudes.

Figure 23. Boundaries of major biomes (vegetation zones) 55, 40 and 20 million years ago as compared with present distribution of major biomes, based on distribution of plant fossils.

`11. Temperature was ~8 to 10° C warmer than present for most of the past 600 million years. Figure 24, below, provides estimates of Earth’s average temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide content for the past 600 million years (GEOCARB III reconstructions). This figure indicates that average Earth temperature (blue line) was some 8 to 10° C higher than present for most of the last 600 million years.

Figure 24. Plot of temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide over time, showing that the Ordivician Permo-Carboniferous, and Jurassic ice ages occurred when atmospheric CO₂ was higher than present. After Scotese (2000) and Bernier (2001); present is to the right.

12. Warming is beneficial for living things. But cooling can be catastrophic. (And, by the way, it’s cooling now). Earth and human history teaches us that during periods of relative warmth, life and biodiversity flourish, agricultural productivity increases, life-spans increase, and human economies boom. Thus, warming is not a bad thing at all. Furthermore, earth history teaches us that no catastrophic “tipping points” were reached, even when temperatures were 10° C higher and/or atmospheric CO₂ levels were 20+ times higher than present. By contrast, “cold house” conditions are generally associated with reduced agricultural productivity, shorter life-spans, social disruption, catastrophic droughts, and extinction of species. Thus, cooling can be quite bad.

Dr. Denis G. Rancourt, Professor of Physics and an Environmental Science researcher at the University of Ottawa, stated:

In a warm world, life prospers. There is no known case of a sustained warming alone having negatively impacted an entire population. As a general rule, all life on Earth does better when it's hotter: Compare ecological diversity and biotic density (or biomass) at the poles and at the equator…

Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middle class.

13. Atmospheric CO₂ levels do not drive temperature! Figure 24 (above) shows no correlation between atmospheric CO₂ (gray line) and average temperature (blue line). In the past, concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide were up to 20+ times greater than the present during both “hot house” and “cold house” conditions. Note that CO₂ levels in the past fluctuated wildly and have decreased toward the present. But for most of the past 600 million years, CO₂ averaged at least 1000-2000 ppm, (parts per million) as compared with today’s 380 ppm. During the Ordivician glaciation (~450 to 420 million years ago (Ma)), average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were over 10 times higher than today. Thus, ecologist Dr. John R. Etherington, University of Wales, stated: “CO₂ has close to zero correlation with temperature.”

The Vostok and Dome C ice core data indicates that over the past 650,000 years, increases in atmospheric CO₂ typically lag ~800 years behind increases in temperature. Thus, it appears that over these shorter time spans, temperature fluctuations drive CO₂ changes rather than the other way around. This is primarily due to the fact that when oceans cool, they absorb (and remove) more atmospheric CO₂, whereas when ocean temperatures increase, CO₂ is released into the atmosphere.

As biochemistry researcher Dr. Thomas Lavin noted:

If you simply freeze Al Gore’s movie when he introduces CO₂ and temperature relationship through geologic time (using the Vostock ice core data), and look at the graph, the temperature goes up before the CO₂ in every one of the six or seven elevations (interglacials) recorded geologically. And this gap is on the order of a few hundred years.

14. Again, looking at the past 600 million years of Earth history, we see that past concentrations of CO₂ were as much as 25 times higher than today and there were no catastrophic “tipping points.” Atmospheric CO₂ levels today are near an all-time low. Concentrations of atmospheric CO₂ during the Cambrian Period, for example, were some 25 times higher than today’s (Figure 25).

Figure 25. Carbon dioxide concentrations for the last 600 million years, expressed in parts per million (left) and as multiples of current concentration (right). (GEOCARB III, COPSE, and Rothman models shown.) Present is to the left.

Thus, even a doubling of modern atmospheric CO₂ levels would be insignificant relative to past concentrations of CO₂ and would cause very little warming. Furthermore, a doubling of pre-industrial levels of CO₂ from an estimated 280 to 560 ppm- a common assumption of climate modelers- and one that Al Gore demonstrates in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth (below)- would be insignificant relative to past atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, which were up to 25 times higher than today’s levels of 380 ppm (Figure 26). Thus, Al Gore’s Vaudevillian theatrics are, at best, misleading, and at worst, designed to deceive.

Figure 26. Al Gore standing on an elevated platform to dramatize projected high CO₂ concentrations in 50 years (left). To the right are Jurassic CO₂ levels as compared to modern levels. Modern levels of CO₂, are represented in the dark box at the bottom (Hayden, 2008).

15. A doubling, tripling or even quadrupling of current levels of atmospheric CO₂ would have a negligible effect on temperatures anyway because there is a logarithmic decrease in absorption of terrestrial heat with increased concentrations of atmospheric CO₂ (Figure 27).

Figure 27. The first 20 ppm of CO₂ acting as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has the greatest effect on temperature. After about 200 ppm, CO₂ has done its job as a greenhouse gas and has absorbed almost all the infrared energy it can absorb. Once the atmosphere is at the present CO₂ concentration of 380 ppm, a doubling or quadrupling of atmospheric CO₂ content will have very little effect on temperature. This is why there have not been catastrophic “tipping points” in the past, even when atmospheric CO₂ was 25 times higher than present.

This explains why MIT Meteorology professor, Dr. Richard Lindzen, concludes that any reductions of anthropogenic carbon emissions that might be imposed by carbon taxes and other political solutions would have essentially no effect on Earth’s temperature:

One of the things the scientific community is pretty agreed on is those things (carbon taxes, etc.) will have virtually no impact on climate no matter what the models say. So the question is do you spend trillions of dollars to have no impact?

Another problem with the computer model projections is that humans are probably not even capable of doubling the atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. As explained by geologist/geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, professor and head of the Geological Museum, University of Oslo, Norway (formerly an expert reviewer with the UN IPCC):

In the real world, as measurable by science, CO₂ in the atmosphere and in the ocean reach a stable balance when the oceans contain 50 times as much CO₂ as the atmosphere. The IPCC postulates an atmospheric doubling of CO₂, meaning that the oceans would need to receive 50 times more CO₂ to obtain chemical equilibrium. This total of 51 times the present amount of carbon in atmospheric CO₂ exceeds the known reserves of fossil carbon-- it represents more carbon than exists in all the coal, gas, and oil that we can exploit anywhere in the world.

16. Furthermore, atmospheric CO₂ is a much less potent greenhouse gas than water vapor. Water vapor makes up some 95% of all greenhouse gases and accounts for at least 75% of the so-called “greenhouse effect.” Dr. Martin Hertzber, retired Navy meteorologist, explains:

Water covers 71% of Earth’s surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there’s 100 times more CO₂ in the ocean, dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses, the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards. It is the warming of the Earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse. In vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that for the last 750,000 years, CO₂ changes have always lagged behind global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.

17. Pre-industrial levels of CO₂ were ~335 ppm, not 280 ppm as the IPCC and most climate scientists assume. In a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski stated:

The basis of most of the IPCC conclusions on anthropogenic causes and on projections of climatic change is the assumption of low level of CO₂ in the pre-industrial atmosphere. This assumption, based on glaciological studies, is false….

The notion of low pre-industrial CO₂ atmospheric level, based on such poor knowledge, became a widely accepted Holy Grail of climate warming models. The modelers ignored the evidence from direct measurements of CO₂ in atmospheric air indicating that in 19^th century its average concentration was 335 ppmv.

Modern greenhouse hypothesis is based on the work of G.S. Callendar and C.D. Keeling, following S. Arrhenius, as latterly popularized by the IPCC. Review of available literature raise the question if these authors have systematically discarded a large number of valid technical papers and older atmospheric CO₂ determinations because they did not fit their hypothesis? Obviously they use only a few carefully selected values from the older literature, invariably choosing results that are consistent with the hypothesis of an induced rise of CO₂ in air caused by the burning of fossil fuels…

In a paper in Energy and Environment (2008), Dr. E.G. Beckstated:

Since 1812, the CO₂ concentration in northern hemisphere air has fluctuated exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857, and 1942, the latter showing more than 400 ppm… Mauna Loa does not represent the typical atmospheric CO₂ on different global locations but is typical only for this volcano at a maritime location in about 4000 m altitude at that latitude.

18. Carbon dioxide is a miracle gas and plant fertilizer, not a pollutant!

Atmospheric carbon dioxide is critical in the process of photosynthesis and thus for all life on earth! It is the very basis of life as well as a plant fertilizer. It is not a pollutant. Thus, an increase in atmospheric CO₂ increases the biological productivity of planet Earth- not a bad thing at all! Agricultural specialists estimate that the slight (human-caused) increases in atmospheric CO₂ of the past half century have increased the Earth’s plant productivity by 8 to 12%. Figure 28, below, shows that increasing atmospheric CO₂ from 295 to 383 ppm increases production of some agricultural and pine species from 11 to 72% and that a doubling of CO₂ would cause production of these species to increase by 38 to 248%.

Figure 28. Calculated growth rate enhancement of wheat, young orange trees, and very young pine trees; a) already taking place as a result of atmospheric enrichment by CO₂ at from 1885 to 2007, and b) expected as result of atmospheric enrichment of CO₂ to 600 ppm (Robinson, et al., 2007).

Some research shows that U.S. forests have increased by 40 to 50% in the last 50 years (Figure 29). This increase may be due, at least in part, to increases in atmospheric CO₂ from the burning of fossil fuels (Robinson, et al., 2007).

Figure 29: Inventories of standing hardwood and softwood timber in the, United States compiled in Forest Resources of the United States 2002, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service. The linear trend cited in 1998 with an in crease of 30% has continued. The increase is now 40%. The amount of U.S. timber is rising almost 1% per year.

Thus, Dr. David Bellamy, Botany Professor and Great Britain’s best-known environmentalist, stated:

(CO₂) is in fact, the most important airborne fertilizer in the world, and without it there would be no green plants at all. Even a doubling of CO₂ in the atmosphere would produce a rise in plant productivity. Call me a biased old plant lover, but that doesn’t sound like much of a killer gas to me. Hooray for global warming is what I say, and so do a lot of my fellow scientists.

It would be terrible if billions or trillions of dollars were wasted on a problem that doesn’t exist- money that could be used in umpteen better ways: fighting world hunger, providing clean water, developing alternative energy sources, improving our environment, creating jobs.”

19. Humans only contribute ~3.5 % of all CO₂ to the atmosphere and much less than 1% to the total greenhouse effect. As noted previously, water vapor makes up over 95% of greenhouse gases (Figure 30). (And there have been no proposals to tax or limit water vapor production.)

Figure 30. Atmospheric greenhouse gases showing the proportion of greenhouse gases derived from natural and human activities. About 98% of the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere is due to water vapor and very little of the effect of CO₂ is due to human activity (from Plimer, 2009).

20. Projections and “scenarios” from Computer Models (General Circulation Models or GCMs), not reality, are the basis of the climate alarmism. Andrew Weaver, lead author of the UN IPCC, stated the AGW alarmists position as follows:

The scientific community has a very solid understanding of what is causing global warming. It is overwhelmingly because of the combustion of fossil fuels. Thus, the solution to the problem is as simple as it is daunting: The elimination of fossil fuel use in our economies… All those fossil fuel emissions need to be eliminated. And we must do so quickly if we are to have any chance of stabilizing the climate and maintaining human civilization as we know it.

However, it is well known that these radical proposals are based on the computer model projections and that these computer models are fraught with erroneous assumptions, fudge factors, and inadequacies. And many informed scientists now are deeply skeptical about the models.

Professor Chris Folland of the UK Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, admitted:

The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.

ž

And Dr. Kevin Trenberth, another IPCC official, admitted further that:

žNone of the models used by the IPCC are initialized to the observed state, and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate. In particular, the state of the oceans, sea ice, and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models. There is neither an El Nino sequence nor any Pacific Decadal Oscillation that replicates the recent past; yet these are critical modes of variability that affect Pacific rim countries and beyond…. I postulate that regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialized.

Dr. Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, stated:

The (climate models) do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.ž

I have studied their climate models and know what they can do. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry, and biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. They are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behavior in a world with different chemistry, for example, in a world with increased CO₂ in the atmosphere.

žHere, I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens that believe the numbers predicted by their models. The problems are being grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important- poverty, infectious diseases, public education, and public health.

In “A Personal Call for Modesty, Integrity, and Balance” (Climate Science, 2007), Professor of Meteorology, H. Tennekes, stated:

Sophisticated climate models have been running for twenty years now. It has become evident that these models cannot be made to agree on anything except a possible relation between greenhouse gases and a slight increase in globally averaged temperatures… We should stop our support for the preoccupation with greenhouse gases our politicians indulge in. Global energy policy is their business, not ours. We should not allow politicians to use fake doomsday projections as a cover-up for their real intentions.

1) What the IPCC Reports Themselves Say on the Limitations of Computer Climate Models:

“In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” (IPCC Third Assessment Report, TAR, 2001, p. 774)

“Scenarios are not predictions of the future and should not be used as such.” (IPCC First Assessment Report, Climate Change 1992)

“The possibility that any single emissions path will occur as described in this scenario is highly uncertain .…”

“No judgment is offered in this report as to the preference for any of the scenarios and they are not assigned probabilities of recurrence, neither must they be interpreted as policy recommendations” (IPPC,Third Assessment Report, Climate Change, 2001).

“Models continue to have significant limitations, such as in their representation of clouds, which lead to uncertainties in the magnitude and timing, as well as regional details, of predicted climate change.” (IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, chapter 8, p. 600)

Everyone who has ever worked with computers knows that computer programs and models can be no more accurate than the assumptions they incorporate. The axiom in the computer world applies here: “GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out.”

Pierre Gallois states it more eloquently: “If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no one dares criticize it.”

NASA climatologist, Dr. Roy Spence identifies some of erroneous assumptions incorporated in the computer models in his book, Climate Confusion (2008):

ža) The models falsely assume that the Earth’s climate would be stable without human carbon dioxide emissions. Embedded in this assumption are two erroneous assumptions: 1) that natural climate changes do not occur, and 2) that CO₂ is the principle driver of climate change. Both of these assumptions are wildly mistaken. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of independent paleoclimatic records show evidence of natural climatic cycles. Plimer (2009) identifies the periodicities of some of the most commonly recognized natural climate cycles in Figure 31:

Figure 31. Commonly recognized natural climatic cycles, including galactic, Milankovitch (or astronomical/orbital), solar, and tidal cycles that drive the Earth’s climate. Climates always change and are driven by a diversity of natural cyclical and random processes. What we do not see with past climate changes is climate changes driven by changes in CO₂.

b) Equally important, by assuming that CO₂ is a primary “climate drivers,” climate modelers accept as proven that which has not be proven but instead, has been disproven. As shown above, an examination of the Earth’s climate history reveals that there is no clear relationship between atmospheric CO₂ and temperature.

c) Models assume climate change will be linear, thereby ignoring the entire climatic history of Earth, as shown above.

d) The models arbitrarily assume there will be a doubling of CO2, despite the fact that there is an incomplete understanding of the carbon cycle and carbon sources and sinks, and, as indicated above, that CO₂ would not double even if humans were to burn all the planet’s fossil fuels. Modelers also fail to account for the fact that a doubling of CO₂ would produce diminishing heating effects, as noted above.

2) Fudge Factors

e) The climate models incorporate many “fudge factors” in order to “initialize” the models, i.e., make them conform with observed reality. Even the IPCC admits the models are not initialized accurately. This is due to the highly complex nature of the climate system itself, which is the product of the interaction of virtually countless non-linear systems.

3) Inadequacies in computer models

žf) The computer climate models incorrectly assume that all the feedbacks from clouds will be positive, i.e., make the temperature warmer. However,

GCMs cannot model clouds adequately because clouds are so complex. The cloud-water vapor component of climate is critical to an understanding of climate feedbacks. Without an adequate understanding of clouds and water vapor, the models cannot produce valid results. For example, the models don’t accurately account for the negative feedback involved in increased cloud cover, moisture, etc. that occurs under a warmer climate. In fact, clouds and water vapor act as a thermostat to regulate and moderate temperatures. Also, cloud forcing is 15 to 20 times greater than the 2.5 watts per square meter presently attributed to enhanced greenhouse warming.

g) Due to the chaotic nature of weather itself, weathermen (and GCMs) can’t predict the weather more than 5 or 10 days in advance. Thus, it is also impossible to make predictions for the next 100 years.

žh) 20^th century surface temperatures are skewed upward by the urban heat island effect and other land use changes. Thus, late 20^th century climate records may be over-estimating temperatures by 40%.

i) The models don’t adequately account for the dampening effects (negative feedbacks) of oceans and sea-ice.

žj) They have poor spatial resolution.

žžk) žThey don’t realistically model atmospheric dust, diurnal variations in solar radiation, ocean heat capacity, and ocean circulation.

žk) They don’t accurately model the climatic effects of volcanoes, orbital parameters, fluctuations in solar output, or the Pacific “heat vent.”

Australian Soil Scientist Vis Forbes, chairman of “The Carbon Sense Coalition,” poetically concludes:

The output of a complex computer simulation of the atmosphere is not evidence. It is a leaky fluttering flag of forecasts, hung on a slim flagpole of theory, resting on a leaky raft of assumptions, which is drifting without a rudder of evidence, in cross currents of ideology, emotion, and bias, on the wide, deep and restless ocean of the unknown.

Various United Nations IPCC climate projections have such a wide range of temperature estimates for the next century as to be nearly meaningless (+2 to +11° F). But due to their common (fallacious) assumptions, all project warming, rather than the cooling that has actually occurred.

Figure 32. Projected warming trends based on computer models for the midrange scenario for carbon dioxide emissions, 2000-2010.

21. Scoring computer model projections against reality: Computers get an F-, scoring less than 3% of a possible 100%. Solar Physicist and Climatologist Douglas V. Hoyt, coauthor of The Role of the Sun in Climate Change, and former scientist at both National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), has developed a scorecard to evaluate how accurate climate models have been. Hoyt wrote:

Starting in 1997, we created a scorecard to see how climate model predictions were matching observations. The picture is not pretty with most of the predictions being wrong in magnitude and often in sign. 

A March 1, 2007 blog post in the National Review explained the scoring results.

[Hoyt] gives each prediction a ‘yes-no-undetermined score. So if the major models' prediction is confirmed, the score at the beginning would be 1-0-0. So how do the models score when compared with the evidence? The final score is 1-27-4. That's one confirmed prediction, 27 disconfirmed, and 4 undetermined.

23. Fraud has been employed deliberately and systematically throughout the AGW campaign. This fraud has included the deliberate monopolizing, manipulating, misrepresenting, and concealment of scientific data, control of publication of scientific articles through installation of key individuals in key editorial positions of major scientific publications, and control of which research projects receive funding.

A) The United Nation’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established as a political body with political goals from the beginning. As noted above, if we look at article 1 of the United Nations Environmental Program of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): we see that the bias toward AGW is incorporated into their very definition of “climate change:”

“Climate change: A change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over considerable time periods.”

This is why MIT meteorology professor, Dr. Richard LIndzen explained: “The consensus was reached before the research had begun.” Professor Dr. Don Aitkin of the University of Canberra similarly observed:

Why is there such insistence that AGW has occurred and needs drastic solutions? This is a puzzle, but my short answer is that the IPCC has been built on the AGW proposition and of course keeps plugging it, whatever the data say.

Likewise, Engineer Alan Cheetham, stated:

The IPCC was set up as a political process. The political purpose of the IPCC can be summed up as the former Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart put it in referring to the IPCC: ‘No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits…. climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.’ [Calgary Herald, December 14, 1998].

Numerous scientists have commented on how the IPCC has largely abandoned has largely abandoned the scientific process in favor of advancing their fundamentally political mission. Chemist Dr. Grant Miles, member of UK Atomic Energy Authority Chemical Separation Plant Committee noted:

There is no credible evidence of the current exceptional global warming trumpeted by the IPCC and there can be no such thing as an average world temperature. The IPCC is no longer behaving as an investigative scientific organization or pretending to be one. It is now showing its true colors in its use of fantasy and propaganda to advance its environmental socialist agenda. Environmentalism has become a quasi- religion. It is now becoming clear to scientists that in identifying the complete falsity of the IPCC’s pronouncements they are seeing the work of an organization that used pseudo-science to promote an ideology. Their leaders betrayed the trust of the world community. They have no interest in the genuine investigation of the complex factors involved in long-term climate change. The IPCC should be abolished and climate research left to existing reputable research organizations.

Physical chemist Dr. Peter Stilbs, Chair of the Climate Seminar Department of Physical Chemistry at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, explains how the IPCC process works:

These [IPCC] Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by government representatives. The great majority of IPCC contributors and reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts.

Geologist Dr. A. Neil Hutton, former District Geologist for Northwest Territories and the Arctic Islands further noted:

In an extraordinary move last spring the IPCC released the 21-page SPM (Summary for Policy Makers) for the Fourth Assessment Report (2007) more than three months ahead of the 1,600-page scientific report. This was to ensure that the scientific report was consistent with the SPM. In other words the science was not to conflict with the politics! The general public and the media, apparently, are quite unaware of these contradictions and are much taken up with the emotional aspects of the reports of melting arctic ice, glaciers, and the snows of Kilimanjaro, as well as many other weather catastrophes appearing in the press. In the long term, the failure to challenge the so-called consensus will be detrimental to scientists and our future ability to legitimately influence public policy. Most of the statements from the SPM are unproven assumptions and a review of the literature on the basis of a truly multidisciplinary approach involving physics, geology, history, and archaeology leads to much different conclusions.

Thus, not surprisingly, the real scientific consensus today has shifted away from the IPCC’s alarmist conclusions. Japanese Geologist Dr. Shigenori Maruyama, professor in Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Tokyo Institute of Technology, was asked by reporters if there was widespread skepticism among his colleagues about the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report that concluded that most of the observed global temperature increase since the mid-20th century ‘is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations..” He responded that when the question was raised at the Japan Geoscience Union symposium the previous year, 90% of the participants did not believe the IPCC report.

B) The fraud was exposed by hacked emails in “Climategate!”. On November 20, 2009, three thousands emails between scientists at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) and their colleagues at places such as Penn State were leaked. These emails revealed a consistent, deliberate effort to skew data as well as destroy and hide contradictory data. Booker (2009) noted that the scientists involved “came up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.” CRU director Dr. Phil Jones wrote another scientist that he had employed the same statistical “trick” used by Penn State’s Dr. Michael Mann (lead author of the now infamous “hockey stick” graph) to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures

In Air Con: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth about Global Warming, author Ian Wishar, stated:

Manipulation of raw data is at the heart of recent claims of corrupt scientific practice in climate science, with CRU’s Phil Jones recently claiming old temperature records by his organization were “destroyed” or “lost,” meaning researchers can now only access manipulated data.

The individuals involved in the scandal were “the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least because of the role they played at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)” (Booker, 2009). The emails revealed that this small group of scientists conspired to sabotage the work of skeptical scientists and prevent their data from being released. In one email communication, Penn State’s Michael Mann (of the infamous “hockey stick graph”), said about some scientific papers he did not like: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

That this system of science fraud was systematic and sustained over an extended period is indicated by Dr. David Deming’s (University of Oklahoma) testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Dec. 6, 2006:

In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me. I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, ‘We have got to get rid of the Medieval Warm period.

The emails also revealed that Jones, himself, had collected a staggering $22.6 million in research grants since 1990.

C. “NASA-gate.” U.S. temperatures were also deliberately skewed upward to show a warming trend. As noted above, Australian researcher, Dr. David Evans (2010) noted that “the western climate establishment has allowed egregious mistakes, major errors, and obvious biases- each factor on its won might be hard to pin down, but the pattern is undeniable.” Similar cases of fraud have now been uncovered in official governmental scientific establishments in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

There is the fundamental problem of accurately recording temperatures. Evans (2010) noted that “official thermometers are overwhelmingly in warm localities such as near air conditioners, exhaust vents, buildings, concrete, tarmac, or asphalt. ” Meteorologist Anthony Watts, also documented that of the official ground thermometers used by NASA, “90% of them don’t meet (the government’s) old, simple rule called the ‘100-foot rule” for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influences.” In addition, the number of weather stations used in the U.S. to calculate average global temperatures has declined from about 6,000 in the 1970’s to 1079 currently whereas the number of reporting stations in Canada has dropped from 600 to 35. In both cases, the remaining stations tend to be in warmer, urbanized areas that distort the climate record through the influence of the urban heat island effect. Data for unmonitored areas are simply extrapolated from other stations, which are often far away. It is important to note that climate scientists, such as Dr. Roy Spencer, author Michael Crichton (State of Fear) and the website www.surfacestations.org have noted that temperature records in rural locales in the U.S. actually show a cooling trend in the 20^th century.

One particularly egregious case of falsification of data occurred in 2007, when Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) announced that October, 2008, was the warmest on record. This was despite the fact that NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) had registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month and it ranked only the 70^th warmest October in 114 years. It was later discovered by readers of the two leading warming-skeptic blogs (Watts Up With That and Climate Audit) that the Russian temperatures had been up to 10° C higher than normal. On further investigation, they found that the reason for the freak figures was that NASA had used September temperatures (a statistically warmer month) in place of October data, using the same temperature values for both months and thereby skewing the overall temperatures upward.

Likewise, after Dr. James Hansen announced that 1998 was the hottest year of the past century, Stephen McIntyre of www.climateAudit.org exposed a NASA temperature data error in 2007. After the error was removed it was clear that 1934, not the previously hyped 1998, was the hottest year in U.S. history since records began. The (corrected) temperature data reveals that four of the top ten hottest years in the U.S. were in the 1930's while only three of the hottest years occurred in the last decade. [Note: 80% of man-made CO₂ emissions occurred after 1940). Climate Audit stated:

NASA has yet to own up fully to its historic error in misinterpreting US surface temperatures to conform to the Global Warming hypothesis, as discovered by Stephen McIntyre at ClimteAudit.org.

Suspecting that NASA had consistently inflated recent U.S. temperatures, Christopher Horner of the Competitiveness Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed three Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to NASA and GISS. Although NASA consistently refused these requests, as public agencies they eventually had to release the requested internal email discussions regarding whether and how to correct the temperature errors caught by McIntyre. Horner notes that the emails clearly show the intent of NASA scientists to “prop up the argument for the biggest regulatory intervention in history: the restricting of carbon emissions from all human activity.” As of 2010, Horner has filed additional FOIA requests for documents which NASA has thus far refused to share.

Senators Inhofe (Oklahoma), Barraso (Wyoming) and Vitter (Louisiana), who are now investigating “NASA-gate,” note that “NASA’s methodology had been to dramatically change the true temperature record of the United States” by reducing the number of weather stations they use and by “cherry-picking” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places” (www.surfacestations.org). Dr. Edward Long a former NASA physicist, concluded: “GISS, over a 10-year period has modified their data by progressively lowering temperature values for far-back dates and raising those in the more recent past.” In a similar case, it was found that NASA used “faulty sensors” in a report that recently underestimated the area of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles (about the size of California).

Amazingly, despite the systematic falsification of data and despite the admission by NASA scientists (in FOIA’d emails) that NASA’s data is less accurate than the CRU’s (Climate Research Unit) data, NASA’s climate research programs are expected to receive increased funding of $2.4 billion, or 62% through 2015. The Washington Post reports: “The budget increase reflects both a campaign promise by President Obama to focus far more on the threat of climate change and what NASA officials called a “philosophical shift’ on the issue.”

The FOIA’d NASA emails reveal other systemic problems as well. They reveal, for instance, that the databases maintained by NASA’s GISS, the University of East Anglia’s CRU, and NOAA’s National Climate Data Center (NCDC) “are not independent, as they must use much of the same input observations” (according to GISS). Indeed, these agencies use each other’s analyses as assumptions, and use each other’s data as the basis of their own calculations. Thus, the collapse of the CRU’s credibility (in “Climate-gate” revelations of 2009) necessarily damages the credibility of the entire AGW industry.

Booker (2010) states:

When Phil Jones (the now disgraced and suspended director of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia) claimed that he had lost most of the raw data that he and others have used to pronounce the impending doom of our little planet from anthropogenic global warming (AGW), the official word from the warmists was that it made no difference because the completely separate databases of NASA and NOAA showed the same results.  The fact that CRU’s raw data had been randomly and arbitrarily twisted to fit their goals of getting massive grants to continue their “research” supposedly didn’t alter the fact that the science was settled. In light of those pronouncements, it turns out that NASA has only been using their own data for U.S. climate modeling — they have been using the CRU data for world climate modeling because they consider their own data to be inferior.  It further turns out that NASA has routinely been adjusting its modeling based on the models of the CRU and NOAA— there’s nothing remotely independent about NASA’s climate models. The AGW scam unravels more every day.

An interesting side-note is that Sullivan (2010) revealed that NASA may also have suppressed equations dating back to the Apollo Moon landings that invalidated the greenhouse gas (GHG) theory. At least since 1997, NASA scientists have known that the fudged equations used to calculate the greenhouse effect are so bad that they can actually show a greenhouse effect on the moon, which has no atmosphere or greenhouse gases at all! NASA scientists had access to far better equations during the Apollo Moon landings but ignored these in favor of the much poorer equations that exaggerate the greenhouse effect. Specifically, Apollo mission scientists devised a three-dimensional model for accurately determining Earth’s energy budget that is far more practicable than the rudimentary flat blackbody Stephan-Boltzmann equations. But since the three-dimensional model numbers contradict any greenhouse warming effect, they have been ignored by global warming advocates.

The Competitiveness Enterprise Institute NASA is now sueing NASA because NASA has defied all of CEI’s FOIA requests to examine their “full surface energy balance equation.”

A NASA publication quotes a lead “scientist” as stating, falsely, that: “CO₂ acts as a thermostat in regulating the temperature of Earth.” Similarly, a NASA web page headline reads: “Carbon Dioxide Controls Earth’s Temperature.” However, a graph in their own website archives indicates that whereas atmospheric CO₂ rose significantly in the latter half of the 20^th century, average Earth temperatures did not (Figure 34).

Figure 34. Although NASA scientists claim CO₂ acts as Earth’s thermostat, the correlation coefficient (R²) between CO₂ and temperature in this graph is less than 2, showing no correlation whatsoever.

NASA’s data manipulation is not confined to America’s borders. A guest post by Willis Eschenbach showed that NASA’s GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) took a cooling trend at the one GHCN station in Nepal (which covers the Himalayas!) and turned it into a strong warming trend of 9° C/century. In addition, GISS also adjusted over a century’s worth of temperature records in eastern Australia, thereby creating“Australiagate!” Just as was done by the CRU at the University of East Anglia, raw climate data was ‘homogenized’ and then the original temperature records were destroyed. The disparity between the raw data, which yields the blue cooling trend line, and the “cooked” data, which yields the red line showing a warming trend, is shown in Figure 35.

Figure 35. A century of temperature records from Queensland, Australia, showing raw data (blue trend line) and adjusted data that yields the red trend line. “Homogenization” of data was carried out by GISS at Columbia University and creates the false impression that temperatures rose 2° C during the past century.

Willis Eschenbach found similar manipulations of the temperature record at Darwin, Australia that produced even more dramatic effects. “Homogenization” of the data converted a 0.7° C cooling trend to a 1.2° C/century warming trend (Figure 36, www.climategate.com).

Figure 36.