I was challenged to give my reasons for opposing the claims of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming on another website. I summarized them with the following list, with some additions within points since:
Reasons why CO2 emitted by man is not causing global warming:
1) The rise of atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 1850 to the level of 2008 made almost no difference in the infra-red radiation absorbed since almost all of the infra-red radiation was already being absorbed that CO2 can absorb in 1850. The temperature increase due to the CO2 increase since 1850 is about 0.12C.
2) The residence time of man's CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is about 5 years, not the 50 to 200 years claimed in one part of the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, but in agreement with another part of the same report.
3) The portion of the CO2 in the atmosphere due to man is estimated to be about 1.2% to maybe a couple of % based on other reasonable assumptions. The seas and plants are the dominant factors determining the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Warming seas add to the atmospheric CO2, while plants use large amounts of it to grow. Warming causes CO2 to increase and is partially offset by more plant growth which uses more CO2. Warming will also cause land minerals to react with more CO2.
4) The hot spot from about 8 to 12 km altitude near the equator that should be found if CO2 is acting as strongly as a greenhouse gas and enhancing the greenhouse gas effect of water vapor as is claimed by the UN IPCC AR4 report has been searched for and it is not present. This is definitive proof that the UN IPCC computer models are wrong about the role of CO2.
5) The temperatures on other planets and moons in our solar system are also rising, which is consistent with measurements of the solar cycle.
6) Much of the claimed rise in land surface temperatures is due to the urban heat island effect, which has increased the reported temperatures in recent decades due to the closing down of more accurate rural weather stations around the world. Few station sites follow the rules for good siting. Urban stations should be entirely excluded when recording temperatures for global warming or cooling effects or assessing the effects of greenhouse gases such as CO2.
7) Much raw temperature data has recently been pried loose from national temperature archives, often thanks to dogged requests under Freedom of Information Acts. The rural stations in the U.S., Russia, Northern Europe, northern Australia, and New Zealand whose data has been examined carefully show little to no late 20th Century temperature increase. The data used in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 was heavily manipulated, in ways that make no scientific sense, to enhance a rapid rise of temperatures in the late 20th Century.
8) There is much evidence that the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warming, the Minoan Warming, and the Halocene Warmings b and a and other warmings were warmer than the present time.
9) The rate of the temperature increase at the start of the Medieval Warm Period was similar to that we had in the late 20th Century using even the inflated and manipulated temperature data. There was also a warming period around 1700 in which the temperature rose 2.2C in just 36 years, compared to the 0.7C temperature increase of the 20th Century.
10) The sea surface temperature data and the satellite temperature data for the late 20th Century show much smaller temperature increases than does the manipulated land surface data used by the alarmists. The oceans cover 70% of the Earth and the satellites read temperatures over the entire Earth.
11) The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 follow temperature increases rather than preceding them, consistent with dissolved CO2 being emitted upon the warming of the oceans or dissolved when the oceans cool. Due to high pressure, the deep ocean waters hold huge amounts of CO2, but it takes a long time to warm those waters in response to solar irradiance changes, so the rise in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere will lag general warming events by long times.
12) Despite a continued rapid rate of CO2 concentration increase in the atmosphere since 1998, the temperatures have not risen, which was noted as an embarrassment in the dumped CRU e-mails. The much touted computer models are baffled by this.
Of course one could add more on our recently improved understanding of the reasons why natural forces are the dominant players in the real climate outside of urban areas, but I had to keep the text within reasonable bounds, so I minimized that discussion.
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2 comments:
Excellent summation!
I would add the Svensmark theory about cosmic ray/cloud relationships to the list. I hope you will blog more about this topic.
Thanks!
Yes, the Svensmark theory is very interesting as an addition to the variations in direct sun irradiance with the solar cycle. The changes of the solar wind with the solar cycle and the accompanying changes in the Sun's electromagnetic field change the flux of cosmic rays incident upon the Earth. When the Sun is relatively inactive, there is an increase in the cosmic ray flux, which leads to the nucleation of more clouds at low altitudes. This causes an increase in the Earth's reflectivity, cooling the Earth. It takes only about a 1.5% change in reflectivity to cause a 0.5C change of temperature according to Dr. Martin Herzberg in his article Earth's Radiative Equilibrium in the Solar Irradiance, Energy & Environment, Vol. 20, No.1, 2009.
Recently, Qing-Bin Lu, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, was studying the depletion of the Earth's ozone layer, which he and colleagues had earlier discovered to be a result of CFCs and of cosmic ray radiation. He found that this interaction had a strong effect upon the Arctic and Antarctic climate, while CO2 concentrations do not. I discussed this in my post of 25 December 2009. The link is:
http://objectivistindividualist.blogspot.com/2009/12/another-cosmic-ray-effect-on-climate.html
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