The Evidence Settled State of the "Settled" Science of Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming

In many posts on this blog, I have torn apart the supposed physics of climate that supposedly backs the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  The alarmists backing that hypothesis say it is settled science and those of us who do not agree are both unknowing and dangerous to mankind's very survival.  Since my arguments against their physical explanations require the reader to know a significant measure of physics, the alarmists hope to win the hearts of most of the people with the stridency and supposed authority of their claims.

Fortunately, one does not actually have to understand much physics to see that the alarmist claim that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is causing a warming similar to that which their complex models are predicting is clearly and obviously wrong.  John Christy, in support of the state of Alabama's appeal to the Obama and rabid environmentalist-dominated EPA to prevent the closing of coal-fired power plants in that state, provided this plot:

Now anyone can see that the actual temperature data measured by satellite and that measured by balloons at the middle altitudes of the troposphere, our lower atmosphere, are in pretty close agreement.  The actual temperature increase according to these measurements since 1980 is much lower than that predicted by any of the computer model results based on the alarmist view of the physics of the atmosphere and the climate.  This is definitive proof that the alarmists do not know what they are doing.  They clearly do not understand the physics.

In fact, these scientists clearly do not even agree on the "settled" science very well themselves, given the great divergence in their own predictions.  Their models predict a rate of increase that varies from twice that observed to about 8 times that observed.  By any measure of reason, this is indication that even the alarmist community cannot claim the science is agreed upon among themselves.  They are highly biased toward exaggerated warming predictions, but each model has its own individual misconception of the actual physics of the climate.

Such a failed prediction history should cause any rational person to reject the claims of the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists.  In fact, anyone rational would find their continued persistence in advancing this hypothesis to be hilarious.  That is, were it not for the US government spending $20 billion a year in support of this and the EPA shutting down coal-fired power plants and denying construction of pipelines on the basis of this nonsense.

In order to perpetuate this massive fraud on the American People and indeed upon people worldwide, our government is also massively fabricating the temperature record at the weather stations it operates.  Tony Heller at Real Science has shown that these surface temperature measurements show no temperature increase since 1990 if only the actually measured data is examined.  A massive 7.3 F/century temperature increase is provided in the fabricated data, however.  All of the claimed increase in temperatures in the US since 1990 is faked.

When you get the physics wrong and yet you insist on continuing to promote a political agenda to strangle economies, to rob the private sector of its wealth and productivity, and to destroy businesses and whole industries, you just have to tell some really big and strident lies.  As I have pointed out innumerable times on many, many issues, socialists and Progressive Elitists are very willing to lie.  Nay, they are compelled to lie.  The Big Lie is all they have.  They never allow reality to get in the way of a "good" lie.

A Perspective on the "Greenhouse Effect" that Includes an Important Cooling Effect

Tony Heller at Real Science says that:

“The sun warms the Earth’s surface, which causes the Earth’s surface to emit longwave radiation.

Greenhouse gases like H2O and CO2 absorb certain wavelengths of longwave radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface. This adds energy to those molecules, which gets transferred to nearby molecules as heat. Without the greenhouse gas molecules, that energy would have been directly transmitted back into space without warming the atmosphere.”

Tony is right in this quote.  But the scale of such effects needs to be put into perspective relative to another effect of the infra-red active gases.  The solar insolation at the top of the atmosphere was 1365.8 W/m² in 2010.  So on a cloudless day and with no infra-red active (so-called greenhouse) gases or gases that absorb ultra-violet light, there is a time when this 1365.8 W/m² would be incident upon the Earth’s surface.  Let us examine the top of the atmosphere solar radiation spectrum and compare it with the solar radiation spectrum at the surface.

The atmospheric absorption in the UV and the visible range here is about 0.175 times the top of the atmosphere solar insolation, while that due to the absorption in the infra-red range is about 0.146 times the top of the atmosphere solar radiation.  If we assume an 8.8% reflection of solar radiation incident upon the surface, as was the case in the Kiehl-Trenberth Earth Energy Budget of 1997, then the solar radiation incident and not reflected from the surface is 845.77 W/m².  The corresponding surface temperature assuming an emissivity of 0.95 would be 354.0K or 177.5ºF.  Of course, water evaporation and transport and air conduction and convection are powerful cooling effects so that conditions are rare when surfaces actually reach this temperature.

Now let us add back in the solar radiation absorbed by the infra-red active gases and make the same calculation.  The incident and not reflected solar power density would be 1027.63 W/m².  The corresponding surface temperature would be 371.65K or 209.3ºF.  Without infra-red absorbing gases in the atmosphere, the mid-day temperature would rise by 17.65K or 31.8ºF, before the water evaporation and air conduction cooling effects lowered the surface temperature!

This cooling effect of infra-red active gases which only operates during the daylight hours has to be subtracted from such slowing of cooling effects due to the infra-red radiation emitted by the surface by those same infra-red active gases.  Now, I have only calculated a maximum mid-day effect and the cooling effect is smaller at other times and vanishes at night.  Meanwhile, the slowdown in the long wave surface emissions is an all-day effect.  Taken together, the two effects provide us with an important moderation of the temperature through the daily cycle.  The day to night temperature variations are reduced, very much to our advantage.

I believe the net warming (the slowdown in cooling effect) due to infra-red gases is smaller than the cooling effect in the daylight hours.  In other words, the net effect is a cooling effect.  This many will dispute with me, but there is a dawning awareness by many scientists that the net warming effect of infra-red gases is nowhere near the 33K warming commonly claimed by the proponents of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  For those who believe that effect is much smaller, then it becomes very important to calculate the daytime cooling effect I have discussed here in comparison to the moderation of surface radiative cooling.  It is a travesty that these offsetting effects are not given proper attention in discussions of the effects of infra-red gases.

Of course water has a host of other heating and cooling effects at the surface and in the troposphere which also need to be carefully considered to determine its net role in our climate.  Also, while the absorption of surface-emitted longwave radiation warms the atmosphere, that warm atmosphere is more effective in transporting that warmth upward than back to the surface.

Hiding the Decline - Not Since 1997, Since 1921

I have concentrated on revealing the mistakes in the physics that is used to explain the so-called greenhouse effect of infra-red active gases in recent times, because Tony Heller at the blog Real Science has done an excellent job revealing the massive data manipulations in the temperature data.  His plot of the raw thermometer data since 1921 and the highly manipulated and published data since then is shown here:

The raw temperature data over this time shows a decline in the average temperature, while the manipulated data shows a large increase, especially since 1977.  Most of the discussion of a "Pause in the Temperature Increase" is simply addressing the highly manipulated data of the last 17 years, during which time the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased, but the temperature has not.

The thermometer readings come from the USHCN stations across the USA shown on the map below:

The temperature data manipulators claim that much of the earlier 20th Century data has to be shifted downward because the stations reported the same high temperature two days in a row.  Now this assumes that the station managers were incredibly dumb and failed to notice that there was an unbelievable incidence of daily high temperatures that were the same due to the time of day at which they reset the temperature recorders to report the high temperature of that daily time period.  Assuming such overwhelming stupidity of Americans lies at the core to the Progressive Elitist ideology and justifies strong and intrusive rule by politicians and bureaucrats of elevated intelligence and who have been well-indoctrinated in our Progressive education system.

Tony Heller has also revealed that increasing portions of the temperature data record have no actual thermometer temperature reading behind them at all.  More and more often, it is said that the stations do not report the data and so a program runs an algorithm to generate a replacement temperature.  The reason for the failure to report the temperature data is unknown, as is the nature of the algorithm that replaces the missing data with some calculated number.  Tony Heller has provided the following horrifying plot of the rapidly increasing percentage of missing temperature data replaced by the algorithm of our most untrustworthy bureaucrats.

Tony Heller also says that almost all of the temperature increase claimed since 1990 is the result of the temperature data added to the record to replace the missing raw data.  Frankly, I would not be surprised if there was not a concerted effort on the part of the catastrophic man-made warming alarmists to throw out station data that does not fit their agenda of rising temperatures.  In addition, it would not be surprising to find out that the algorithm to replace the missing data is biased to generate hotter temperatures.  In fact, the fact that almost all of the temperature increase since 1990 is due to the algorithm-produced data is proof that the algorithm does have such a bias.

The physics of the catastrophic man-made warming alarmists is dishonest.  The temperature data they publish is dishonest.  Honest temperature data would provide the experimental proof that the theory of catastrophic greenhouse warming was wrong.  The physics knowledge needed to understand why their explanations for the physical basis of catastrophic man-made global warming are wrong is beyond most scientists, let alone the general public.  That fact keeps the alarmist somewhat protected on the theory side of this equation.  But, without the massive fraudulent manipulation of the temperature data on the experimental side of the equation, the massive fraud would be immediately exposed to a much larger fraction of the People.

Obama and much of his Democrat Socialist Party base are still very determined to use this fraud to provide a basis for a massive invasion against individual rights, especially economic rights.  It allows them a reason for further expansion of the control of the People and a rich mother lode for extortion and pilfering of businesses.  Similar special interests are found in countries around the world and the latest Synthesizing Report of the latest IPCC report of the UN shows how committed they are to continuing the fraud.  That fraud is unraveling rapidly now.

One of the many things the new Republican majority in the Senate should make possible is a renewed effort to push along and promote the unraveling of the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud.  I hope the newly re-elected Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma will continue to promote reason and science with respect to man-made global warming, energy, and environmental policies as he has and that he will have many more active allies in the Senate and the House of Representatives.  It is critical to keep the US from signing international treaties on these issues and to maintain our sovereignty and our constitutional management of our internal affairs.  We must not be sucked into UN claims that we must aim toward zero carbon dioxide emissions or the planet is doomed!