Global Warming: Fake News from the Start -- Article by Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris

Senator Tim Wirth, scientist James Hansen and others manufactured the climate “crisis”

President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change because it is a bad deal for America.

He could have made the decision simply because the science is false. However, most of the American and global public have been brainwashed into believing the science is correct (and supported by the faux 97% consensus), so they would not have believed that explanation. 

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and indeed the leaders of many western democracies, support the Agreement and are completely unaware of the gross deficiencies in the science. If they understood those deficiencies, they wouldn’t be forcing a carbon dioxide (CO₂) tax on their citizens. 

Trudeau and other leaders show how little they know, and how little they assume the public knows, by calling it a “carbon tax” on “carbon emissions.” But CO₂ is a gas, the trace atmospheric gas that makes life on Earth possible. Carbon is a solid, and carbon-based fuels are solid (coal), liquid (oil) or gaseous (natural gas).

By constantly railing about “carbon emissions,” Trudeau, Obama and others encourage people to think of carbon dioxide as something “dirty,” like soot, which really is carbon. Calling CO₂ by its proper name would help the public remember that it is actually an invisible, odorless gas essential to plant photosynthesis. 

Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is arguably the most misinformed of the lot, saying in a recent interview that “polluters should pay.” She too either does not know that CO₂ is not a pollutant, or she is deliberately misleading people.

Like many of her political peers, McKenna dismisses credentialed PhD scientists who disagree with her approach, labelling them “deniers.” She does not seem to understand that questioning scientific hypotheses, even scientific theories, is what all scientists should do, if true science is to advance.

That is why the Royal Society’s official motto is “Nullius in verba,” Latin for “Take nobody's word for it.” Ironically, the Society rarely practices this approach when it comes to climate change.

Mistakes such as those made by McKenna are not surprising, considering that from the outset the entire claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was built on falsehoods and spread with fake news. 

The plot to deceive the world about human-caused global warming gathered momentum right after the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) created the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988.

After spending five days at the U.N. with Maurice Strong, the first executive director of UNEP, Hamilton Spectator investigative reporter Elaine Dewar concluded that the overarching objective of the IPCC was political, not scientific. “Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the global governance agenda,” she wrote.

The political agenda required “credibility” to accomplish the deception. It also required some fake news for momentum. Ideally, this would involve testimony from a scientist before a legislative committee. 

U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO) was fully committed to the political agenda and the deception. As he explained in a 1993 comment, “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing.…” 

In 1988 Wirth was in a position to jump-start the climate alarm. He worked with colleagues on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to organize and orchestrate a June 23, 1988 hearing where the lead witness would be Dr. James Hansen, then the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Wirth explained in a 2007 interview with PBS Frontline:

“We knew there was this scientist at NASA, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So, we called him up and asked him if he would testify.”

Hansen did not disappoint. The New York Times reported on June 23, 1988: “Today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation, but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.”

Specifically, Hansen told the committee, “Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming…. It is already happening now.”

Hansen also testified: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now…. We have already reached the point where the greenhouse effect is important.”

Wirth, who presided at the hearing, was pre-disposed to believe Hansen and told the committee. “As I read it, the scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth's atmosphere gets warmer,” Wirth said. “Now the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend, and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.” 

More than any other event, that single hearing before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee publicly initiated the climate scare, the biggest deception in history. It created an unholy alliance between a bureaucrat and a politician, which was bolstered by the U.N. and the popular press – leading to the hoax being accepted in governments, industry boardrooms, schools and churches all across the world.

Dr. John S. Theon, Hansen’s former supervisor at NASA, wrote to the Senate Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “Hansen was never muzzled, even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.”

Hansen never abandoned his single-minded, unsubstantiated claim that CO₂ from human activities caused dangerous global warming. He defied Hatch Act limits on bureaucratic political actions, and in 2011 even got arrested at a White House protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. It was at least his third such arrest to that point. 

Like Trudeau and other leaders duped by the climate scare, Senator Wirth either had not read or did not understand the science. In fact, an increasing number of climate scientists (including Dr. Ball) now conclude that there is no empirical evidence of human-caused global warming. There are only computer model speculations that humans are causing it, and every forecast made using these models since 1990 has been wrong – with actual temperatures getting further from predictions with every passing year.

President Trump must now end America’s participation in the fake science and fake news of manmade global warming. To do this, he must withdraw the U.S. from further involvement with all U.N. global warming programs, especially the IPCC, as well as the agency that now directs it – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. He should also launch a “Red Team” exercise that lets non-alarmist scientists examine climate cataclysm claims and the purported evidence for them.

Only then will the U.S. have a chance to fully develop its hydrocarbon resources to achieve the president’s goal of global energy dominance and long-term prosperity for America and the world. 

Dr. Tim Ball is an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.

The Oceans are Absorbing Large Quantities of Carbon Dioxide

Alan Siddons recently pointed out that NASA’s James Hansen has been complaining that 44% of anthropogenic CO2 goes missing EACH YEAR, but CDIAC’s data clearly show that the situation has become far worse than that from the alarmist viewpoint.  Alan Siddons found when looking at the CDIAC 2016 Global Carbon Project spreadsheet, under the Historical Budget tab, that he could graph both the annual increase in gigatons of carbon for the atmospheric CO2 concentration growth and for the change in carbon in the Ocean. The values to be discussed here do not resolve man's contribution from natures contribution.   They are total changes in carbon dioxide in each case. The resultant profile was not what he expected.  The additional carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean in red is compared with the additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in Alan Siddons plot below.

Since a shallow minimum in about 1840, the amount of the increase in the ocean concentration of CO2 has increased almost every year.  Generally the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased except for two brief periods of reductions around 1820 and 1856.  There was a strong decrease in the amount of the increase centered on about 1946.  Because the surface water layer of the oceans is attempting to come into equilibrium in dissolved CO2 content with the atmosphere, but there is substantial exchange between the warm surface layer and the colder ocean depths, the general increase in CO2 in the atmosphere since the end of the Little Ice Age will result in more dissolved CO2 in the ocean for a given surface temperature for a long period of time.

In 2004, the additional CO2 dissolved in the oceans and other waters of the Earth was a bit more than 60% of the additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the 44% that was already so high in James Hansen's mind as to be a troubling indicator of the disappearance of CO2 that he expected to remain in the atmosphere.   For him, this disappearance was a problem with respect to the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis with its claims that man's emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel use and the making of cement would leave that CO2 in the atmosphere for a hundred years or thereabouts.  Basically, these high atmosphere residence times are threatened by the high solubility of CO2 in water and the overturn of the surface layer of water with colder water from below.  At 25°C, CO2 is about 26 times more soluble in water than is molecular oxygen.

We are told by the settled science that increased atmospheric CO2 causes warming.  Yet, everyone knows that a warming ocean should release CO2, thereby adding to the CO2 in the atmosphere.  If that picture is right, do we not expect the ocean to act like a source of further CO2, rather than a sink, because CO2 in the atmosphere is supposed to warm the oceans?

Perhaps not.  Let us examine this exchange or equilibrium condition for CO2 between the ocean and the atmosphere. The mole fraction of a gas, X, dissolved in water is given by 

X = (v/RT) e^H/RT P,

where v is the free volume occupied by a mole of water, T is the temperature in Kelvin, H is the heat of vaporization of the gas from water, P is the partial pressure of the gas over the water surface or in the atmosphere, and R is the gas constant, as in the Ideal Gas Law equation PV = nRT, where n is the number of moles of the gas and V is the volume of the gas.  The mole fraction is the number of dissolved gas moles in the water divided by the sum of the number of water moles and the number of gas moles.  For the low pressure cases we will be examining, the denominator is essentially the number of water moles since the number of gas moles will be much, much smaller.

Because the mole fraction of the dissolved gas decreases as the temperature increases in this formula at constant P proportional to (P/T) e^H/RT , it is commonly assumed that changes in the temperature are the dominant control knob with respect to the solubility of CO2 in the oceans.  But, note that a change of the surface temperature of 0.7°C from 14.65°C to 15.35°C 

means that the ratio of the temperatures on the Kelvin scale is only 288.50K/287.80K = 1.00243.

For the sake of this thought experiment, let us assume, albeit wrongly, that the increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1850 has caused a 0.7°C or 0.7 K temperature increase as the atmospheric concentration of CO2 went from 280 ppm to 400 ppm. Then a 0.7 K temperature increase to present temperatures would be due to about a 120 ppm increase in CO2 concentration using a linear relationship as the alarmists are wont to do.  It would actually take more of a CO2 increase than that due to the logarithmic saturation of the CO2 absorption of surface thermal radiation  with concentration, but let us use their numbers anyway. The present to 1850 ratio of CO2 atmospheric concentrations is 400 ppm /280 ppm =1.43 or a 43% increase in the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 96th Edition, has a table for the solubility of carbon dioxide in water.  With a 5 kPa partial pressure of CO2 it says the mole fraction of CO2 is

10°C, X = 0.000048 = 48 x 10^-6

15°C, X = 0.000041 = 41 x 10^-6

20°C, X = 0.000035 = 35 x 10^-6

Let us examine the rate of change of the mole fraction with temperature, while holding the pressure constant.  From 10 to 15°C, the rate of change is a decrease of 7 x 10^-6 / 5 K and from 15 to 20°C, the rate of change is - 6 x 10^-6 / 5 K.  Thus at about 15 C, the rate of change is about - 6.5 x 10^-6/ 5 K = - 1.3 x 10^-6 / K.  All of this is for the partial pressure of 5 kPa.

There are 101.325 kPa in one standard atmosphere.  A partial pressure of CO2 of 400 ppm is then (0.000400 atm.) (101.325 kPa/atm.) = 0.0405 kPa. Since the mole fraction X is proportional to the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere, the mole fraction X at 0.0405 kPa is much lower than this lowest partial pressure in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics table of solubility.  We have

X = [0.0405 kPa)/ (5 kPa) ](0.000041) = 0.332 x 10^-6 

at 15°C.  The rate of decrease of X near 15°C with a temperature increase at the partial pressure of 400 ppm at a temperature of 15°C is then  

dX /dT = [0.0405 kPa)/ (5 kPa) ] ( - 1.3 x 10^-6 / K) = - 0.0105 x 10^-6 / K.

If we increase the temperature by 0.7°C as it has been claimed is the case since 1850 for the Earth's surface temperature, then near 15°C the decrease in X due to the temperature increase is about ( 0.7 K ) ( - 0.0105 x 10^-6 / K) = - 0.0074 x 10^-6.  Consequently, the mole fraction X after the temperature increase is about 

X = 0.332 x 10^-6  - 0.007 x 10^-6  = 0.325 x 10^-6 

due to the temperature increase of 0.7 K.  The mole fraction was therefore reduced to 97.9% of its prior value by the 0.7 K temperature increase.

But, when increasing the temperature, the partial pressure of CO2 was increased from 280 ppm to 400 ppm, an increase in the partial pressure by a factor of 1.43.  Since the mole fraction is proportional to the partial pressure of CO2, this means the mole fraction was increased by 43%, which is vastly larger than the 2% decrease due to a 0.7 C temperature increase.

Consequently, for the conditions on Earth, the oceans are a strong sink for CO2 as the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere increases.  What is more, increases in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere lead to smaller and smaller increases of the absorption of the Earth's surface thermal radiation, but the solubility of CO2 in the oceans and other waters of the Earth's surface remains proportional to the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere. Thus, for a given increase in the absorption of the Earth's surface radiation or contribution to a temperature increase by that saturating mechanism, more and more CO2 will be absorbed by the oceans for any increase the absorption of surface thermal radiation.

The data that Alan Siddons plotted above shows this effect, much to the consternation of James Hansen.  The more CO2 you put in the atmosphere, the more gets sucked out of the atmosphere by the oceans and water generally, including even water bound up in minerals or soil.  The solubility of CO2 is proportional to its partial pressure, which has increased greatly, while temperature changes measured against the absolute Kelvin temperature scale are very small.  The more CO2 you put in the atmosphere, the less effect it has in absorbing further thermal radiation from the Earth's surface.  The atmospheric CO2 concentration changes are dominant compared to the temperature changes in solubility, which helps to stabilize the atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the resulting temperature.

But it is even worse than this for the alarmist cause, because Alan Siddons made another extremely critical discovery when examining the government's data on CO2 emission increases by man and comparing those annual increases with the government data on the annual increases in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.  He discovered that man's carbon dioxide emission increases each year were a small fraction of those due to natural causes.  Man's emissions are only 4 to 5% of the total annual additions of CO2 to the atmosphere averaged over the period back to 1960.

Now, one's first thought about where the huge natural CO2 emissions are coming from would be that it might be the oceans, but as we saw above, the oceans are a large sink for added CO2.  They are not the source. Things are getting mighty interesting!  Scientists clearly need to spend more time learning about nature and a little less trying to damn mankind.  Unfortunately, they are clearly being paid by most governments and the UN to make a case, no matter how, that mankind is evil and determined to destroy the planet.

Of course, some of the alarmists will say, see the oceans are acidifying and isn't that just awful.  But, ocean plant life, mollusks, and coral reefs consider CO2 as much food and construction material as do land plants. They actually thrive on what is still an alkaline ocean with plenty more CO2 for shell building, reef building, and plant food.  On this subject, see: 

Washington Post and Published Research Falsely Report Largest U.S. Reef Dissolving Due to Increased CO2

Governmental Exaggeration of the Increase in Global Temperature

The federal government has systemically increased the global surface temperature record to suit its purpose of claiming that catastrophic man-made global warming has occurred.  Among examples I have pointed out in the past are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for instance.  Steven Goddard at Real Science has just posted an interesting comparison of the surface temperature record used by James Hansen in 1981 with that claimed by GISS now.  He took the two sets of data and normalized them to various dates to show how they differed over other periods of time.  The plot I like the most is the normalization to 1895 which I show below with the black line the data Hansen used in 1981 and the red line the newer, adjusted data of GISS:

Note that the data taken from 1880 to 1940 has curious changes, but no large and continuing differences from the data used earlier.  This would seem to be a concession that the 1880 to 1940 data had only small errors in it.  Then strangely the data from 1940 to 1980 must have originally been very bad and required a large upward adjustment of the temperature record by GISS.  Now one possible reason for an increasing and large adjustment might be a rapidly growing human population that would cause temperatures at recording stations to be falsely elevated when they were too near high population areas.  But the urban heat island correction to such a problem requires that an increasing temperature correction be subtracted from the record, not added to it.

So what is the reason for this positive addition to the surface temperature record?  Well, there is reason to believe it is simply to eliminate the cooling that broadly occurred between 1940 and 1980 when the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was increasing.  This was not good for the claim that man's use of fossil fuels was causing a catastrophic rise in surface temperatures, just as the present failure of the temperature to rise in the last 17 years is also an embarrassment to that hypothesis. 

Steven Goddard produces an e-mail from Tom Wigley to Phil Jones that points to a non-scientific reason for the adjustment reminiscent of a high school student fudging results in a laboratory report to get the expected answer from a botched experiment.

So why is this important?  For one thing, Tom Wigley was a member of the UCAR team.  This outfit describes itself on its website today as:

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research is a consortium of more than 100 member colleges and universities focused on research and training in the atmospheric and related Earth system sciences. Our members set directions and priorities for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which UCAR manages with sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Through our community programs, UCAR provides innovative services in support of the community's education and research goals.

Phil Jones was the head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK, before his shenanigans revealed by ClimateGate cost him his job.  Phil Jones was a principal coordinator of the science that was incorporated into the first four IPCC reports backing the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming.  So, Tom Wigley of the UCAR climate research coordinating group for all government-funded climate research in the US was scheming with the head of the very important Climatic Research Unit in the UK to fraudulently produce more evidence for their pet theory, as they were being encouraged to do by their governments.  UCAR was and is essentially a propaganda unit charged with also keeping government-funded researchers in-line by setting "directions and priorities" in collusion with the National Science Foundation.

There is almost nothing in the government-managed record of temperatures that one can believe in any more.  The record is highly fudged and the fudgers have no idea themselves what string of changes they made to the data, whether as to how often, how much, or why.  But, those changes appear to systematically be motivated by attempts to prove the hypothesis that man's use of fossil fuels was somehow causing a catastrophic global warming.

Global Surface Temperature Data Lost

NASA has a surface temperature data set maintained by James Hanson's GISS, but it tends to be loaded with readings which are thought by many critics to be too high and it has been caught in some serious mistakes. The most commonly cited surface temperature data set is maintained by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia, Great Britain. For years scientists have requested the raw data to check to see if such adjustments made to it for urban heat island effects and grid averages are valid. The CRU has refused to make the data available, despite its being public data collected with government monies. Now, in response to a determined Freedom of Information Act request, Prof. Phil Jones, an activist-scientist, who controls the data says that the raw data no longer exists.

So, most of the developed countries of the world are restricting the use of economical fossil fuels and paying huge subsidies for alternative, non-competitive energy sources, based on a cock-a-Mamie theory of catastrophic man-made global warming which is based mostly on the surface temperature data sets of CRU and NASA, neither of which can be relied upon. These data sets have long indicated more global warming in the late 20th Century than did satellite measurements or many buoys measuring the ocean water temperatures. Temperature data sets of the entire atmosphere and the oceans that cover 70% of the Earth's surface have been largely ignored in favor of the land surface measurements which are most likely to be affected by artifacts such as the urban heat island effects. This makes no scientific sense, but it does fulfill the agenda of socialist political goals.

Another reason to worry about the quality of the surface temperature data sets is that over the last 20 - 30 years, 5000 of the world's 6,000 weather stations have been abandoned or ignored. Despite the huge increases in climate research monies, these have not been replaced or upgraded with modern technology. Many of the abandoned stations are in more remote areas where it is important to have high quality surface temperature measurements. Of course, those remote area measurements are subject to less data manipulation, so if one has an agenda that causes one to want exaggerated global warming, it is easier to get that from surface temperature measurements made near cities or towns with heat island effects.

Chief Global Warming Scaremonger

Dr. James Hansen started the global warming hysteria with his testimony before a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Al Gore in 1988. He now runs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is one of four agencies responsible for monitoring global temperatures. In fact, GISS temperature numbers are the most frequently reported since they are consistently higher temperatures than those of the other three groups reporting global temperatures to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His friend, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, is chairman of the IPCC. Dr. Pachauri is a former railway engineer with no prior background in climate science.

Dr. Hansen was forced by US meteorologist Anthony Watts and by the Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre (who debunked the infamous "hockey stick" temperature graph) in 2007 to admit that his US surface temperatures claiming that the 1990s were the hottest decade of the 1900s were wrong. The 1930s were hotter. This is the man who has called for criminal prosecution of those who speak out against the idea that we are facing a man-made global warming catastrophe. He supported Greenpeace activists who damaged a coal-fired power station in England, while claiming that the power plant did more damage than the Greenpeace terrorists did.

So, what is Dr. Hansen up to most recently? Well, earlier this month his GISS released temperature maps showing that much of Russia was 10 degrees hotter than usual in the month of October. Meanwhile, China's official news agency had reported that Tibet had suffered the worst snowstorm ever in October and reports of unusually low temperatures and early snowstorms for the Alps, New Zealand, China, and the American Great Plains were filed in October. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claimed there were 63 local snowfall records in October, along with 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month. They said October was the 70th warmest October in 114 years. Note that that makes it cooler than the average for 114 years, most of whose cooler Octobers should have been before the popular claim that the Earth is getting ever warmer.

So how did GISS have such high temperatures for much of Russia? It turns out that it was because they used September numbers both for September and for October! September is usually a warmer month than is October. Their initial response to being found wanting on this once again by Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts was to claim that they had found a hot-spot in the Arctic. Odd, given that satellite images showed the Arctic ice to have recovered from the summer melt at a rate 30% faster than it had in 2007, which was a year of globally lowered temperatures!

Meanwhile, IPCC Chairman Dr. Pachauri, gave a talk in Australia at a university saying that global temperatures are rising very much faster than ever. Behind him was a temperature graph showing that temperatures have not risen in years, despite rising atmospheric CO2, and that they have dropped since 2007.

These are the fearless leaders who would clamp Cap and Trade limits on the use of fossil fuels on us and wreck our economies. They would yoke us to expensive, dangerous, and inconvenient electric cars, leave us shivering in our homes and offices, and leave us without electricity to light the dark, operate our laboratory equipment, and even to recharge those damned electric vehicles. What is the real agenda that causes them to distort the climate record and work so hard to bring misery to the people of this planet Earth? I think it is a love of socialism and a hatred for individualism.