Memories of the 28th Century

I recently met someone who pointed out that the backers of the idea that there is some great climate change that was caused by human activity going on are minions of a vast international conspiracy. I don’t go in for conspiracies, but the climate change people exhibit many of the characteristics of a religion, and those characteristics might be indicators on something like a conspiracy.

I see that movement as religious in nature, because it has articles of faith that cannot be proven by science, and which are contrary to actual scientific knowledge. When something that purports to be scientific demands religious acceptance of tenets, I start to wonder whether it is scientific. The global warming / climate change people started to demand such acceptance quite some time ago. More specifically, the way that they claim CO2 behaves is contrary to standard scientific knowledge.

For one example, a greenhouse gas is one that has a dipole moment, so that it will absorb and emit infrared radiation. For example, CO2 has a very slight dipole moment, but the climate change people claim that it is a major greenhouse gas. When it was pointed out that it is not a greenhouse gas, someone made up a story about how CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time, when it actually cycles rather quickly through the atmosphere and is absorbed by plants. This activity leads to a large seasonal and year to year variation in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. I just spent some time looking for data on the amount of CO2 that humans put into the atmosphere, but that datum seems not to exist, so people simply claim what they want. It appears that no one has determined that quantity, and that matter would be an estimate, at best; but there is some information about CO2 levels having started to rise in the mid to late 1800’s, as the Earth was starting to recover from the Little Ice Age. Considering how much carbon was locked in frozen vegetation during the Little Ice Age it is not surprising that more of that would be released as decay accelerated with the rise in temperature. That process is certainly still happening with muskeg and arctic peat decaying faster as they warm enough for bacteria to live and eat more.

Another religious tenet of the climate change group is that there was no Medieval Warm Period, or that it was limited to the North Atlantic region. There were no weather records being kept then, so there is no direct evidence, but there is a great deal of indirect evidence that suggest that there were climate changed toward the beginning and end of the Medieval Warm Period, but especially toward the end, when there were many tribes that moved, because the rains failed or the crops failed, I am thinking particularly of the Mongols in Central Asia and the Ancient Ones in what is now Arizona. Ascribing crop failures to climate change is uncertain, but if the situation became so bad that they had to pick up and find a better place, then the situation was extreme.

Another religious tenet is that changing human activity will reverse climate change, and this is different from claiming that human activity has caused climate change. This also includes the idea that the previously known and accepted causes of climate change are not relevant. These causes include the sunspot cycle, the Milankovitch cycles, and other cyclic changes in solar output. I posted about the solar cycles a few weeks ago, so I won’t repeat that material.

Like organized religions the climate change people try to punish sinners and to convert people to their faith. At the same time they belittle people who oppose their beliefs and try to punish them for their sins. An excellent example of this is what has happened about the survey of meteorologists regarding climate change. In November of last year Forbes Magazine published an article (link below) that point out that 52% of respondents to a survey sent to all members of the American Meteorological Society answered that they thought that climate change was mostly caused by humans. The results are a little questionable on other grounds, because the American Meteorological Society (AMS) sent surveys to 7,197 members for whom they had email addresses, but there were response from only 1,854 (response rate of 26.3%), which is not unusually low, but it brings into question what the others might think. One could also say that when asked 13% of members of the AMS indicated that they believe that climate change is being caused by human activity. There has been criticism of a man who wrote that 52% of AMS members who responded think that climate change is caused by humans.

The climate change people have backed off on a few claims, because of criticism of research methods; there was the matter of phony numbers that was discover in the UK. And there was the problem with the “hockey stick” graph. Some of the data included in that was dropped, but it indicated greater problems. The worst of that graph was from one tree in Siberia. It was decided that it was easier to drop it entirely, but the concept of using tree ring data to indicate temperature is greatly flawed. The width of tree rings is closely related to rainfall, not to temperature. Measuring temperatures indirectly is tricky. If barley would ripen somewhere at one time but won’t ripen there now, then we can be confident that that area had a longer growing season in that other era, but we can’t tell how much warmer the area was. And that is the situation with Greenland, where the Norse colonists did grow barley, but barley hasn’t ripened there since the thirteenth century.

Indirect measurements of anything can be tricky. Paleo-climatologists have tried to determine ancient atmospheric levels of CO2, but the best they can do is use samples of air trapped in ice. That is an interesting method, but ice changes over time. Some of the CO2 can be absorbed into the ice, so we can’t tell how closely the sample resembles the atmospheric at some time in the past.


In summary, it appears that the people who believe that human activity has caused climate change are denying what science shows us. They have been trying to shove a pack of lies down the world’s collective throat, and some people think this is part of a plot to create an international government. I doubt that there is a conspiracy involved; although there probably are some people who would love to use climate change as a way to control the world, but that brings up some funny images, like Al Gore at the controls of a huge machine that controls what the weather will be tomorrow. That’s funny, but it can’t be taken seriously. But there are people who seriously think that human activity could reverse climate change, and I think they are right; they could do great damage.

But we should remember that there is no consensus among professionals in the climate field as to whether climate change has been caused by human activity, and some of the data that has been used to show that there has been major climate change is of doubtful quality. And many of the conclusions that have been fed to the general public are not supported with any data; they are simply assertions of opinion. The next time someone tries to foist climate change caused by human activity on you demand to see the data, raw data. Don’t be afraid. You probably know more than 90% of the climate change people; they just think they know more.





Selected sources:

The Latest Meteorologist Survey Destroys The Global Warming Climate 'Consensus'
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestay...ate-consensus/

Survey results
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...69620078,d.cWc


The magnitude of the variation in atmospheric CO2
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

Historic CO2 levels
https://www.google.com/search?q=carb...e%3B1024%3B768