The GOLDEN RULE

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Reference JoNova’s post “The Skeptic’s Case”, a paper by Dr David Evans:

IMHO, a very well constructed article covering the essential science in a easily understandable format and explaining the failures of the AGW ‘warmists’ to correctly assess the actual global temperature (GT) trends and to prove correlation between man-made pollution and GT.

Who Are You Going To Believe – The Government Climate Scientists Or The Data?

Guest Post Dr David M.W. Evans

We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message — here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.

What the Government Climate Scientists Say

Figure 1: The climate models. If the CO₂ level doubles (as it is on course to do by about 2070 to 2100), the climate models estimate the temperature increase due to that extra CO₂ will be about 1.1°C × 3 = 3.3°C. [1]

The direct effect of CO₂ is well-established physics, based on laboratory results, and known for over a century.[2]

Feedbacks are due to the ways the Earth reacts to the direct warming effect of the CO₂. The threefold amplification by feedbacks is based on the assumption, or guess, made around 1980, that more warming due to CO₂ will cause more evaporation from the oceans and that this extra water vapor will in turn lead to even more heat trapping because water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. And extra heat will cause even more evaporation, and so on. This amplification is built into all the climate models.[3] The amount of amplification is estimated by assuming that nearly all the industrial-age warming is due to our CO₂.

The government climate scientists and the media often tell us about the direct effect of the CO₂, but rarely admit that two thirds of their projected temperature increases are due to amplification by feedbacks. They admit there are discrepancies, and go to great lengths to resolve them (see for example, Thorne, Dessler, Sherwood).

What the Skeptics Say

Figure 2: The skeptic’s view. If the CO₂ level doubles, skeptics estimates that the temperature increase due to that extra CO₂ will be about 1.1°C × 0.5 ≈ 0.6°C.[4]

The serious skeptical scientists have always agreed with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO₂. The argument is entirely about the feedbacks.

The feedbacks dampen or reduce the direct effect of the extra CO₂, cutting it roughly in half.[5] The main feedbacks involve evaporation, water vapor, and clouds. In particular, water vapor condenses into clouds, so extra water vapor due to the direct warming effect of extra CO₂ will cause extra clouds, which reflect sunlight back out to space and cool the earth, thereby reducing the overall warming.

There are literally thousands of feedbacks, each of which either reinforces or opposes the direct warming effect of the extra CO₂. Almost every long-lived system is governed by net feedback that dampens its response to a perturbation. If a system instead reacts to a perturbation by amplifying it, the system is likely to reach a tipping point and become unstable (like the electronic squeal that erupts when a microphone gets too close to its speakers).  The earth’s climate is long-lived and stable— it has never gone into runaway greenhouse, unlike Venus — which strongly suggests that the feedbacks dampen temperature perturbations such as that from extra CO₂.

What the Data Says

The climate models have been essentially the same for 30 years now, maintaining roughly the same sensitivity to extra CO₂ even while they got more detailed with more computer power.

• How well have the climate models predicted the temperature?
• Does the data better support the climate models or the skeptic’s view?

Air Temperatures

One of the earliest and most important predictions was presented to the US Congress in 1988 by Dr James Hansen, the “father of global warming”:

Figure 3: Hansen’s predictions [6]  to the US Congress in 1988, compared to the subsequent temperatures as measured by NASA satellites [7]>.

Please refer to the article here.

A marvellous mass of commentary follows the article, an education itself. I don’t believe that we, the ‘non-believers’ in the AGW religion, have much cause to lose sleep over our possibly being wrong.

Thanks Jo!

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