The Bottom Line About "Climate Science" and "Global Warming"

The war of words over "climate change" and "global warming" continues to be a fragmented one, with a wide diversity of opinions and little focus overall. Most writers on the subject are set in their views now, as the consensus authorities--alarmist propagandists all--have been all along, in the interest of their own favored positions and of the political power these radical activists see now being wielded by an insane Left under President Obama. Another example of set opinion is Dr. Roy Spencer, who puts out a satellite-based global temperature record and is a harsh skeptic of the alarmist "consensus", but he is a "lukewarm" believer in the "consensus" science and therefore just as miseducated as the alarmists. He has, just this past weekend, decided to close all comments on his web page, simply to deny any further attention to those who, like me, deny the very existence of a measurable CO2 "greenhouse effect".

It is a complex situation for any layperson to try to learn the truth from. That is why my approach to the climate debate has been to present only simple, definitive evidence, all of which I have found to be against the consensus climate science. I can present my view in one clear and simple illustration.

The following image is my version of one presented to the public, on USAToday, in October 2010). It embodies, for me, the central truth about "global warming" and the "climate science" behind it, that everyone (particularly any "expert" who defends it, and any politician--like President Obama or his Attorney General--or dogmatic ideologue who demands obedience to it) needs to know and accept:

The original image purported to show that the "global temperature" (more correctly, the global mean surface temperature, or GMST) has increased with the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, since 1880.

Note, in the graph, that the temperature is shown as apparently closely tracking (to the eyes of the unwary, non-scientific layperson) the rise in CO2, from about 1975 on (to the end of the graph, about 2008). I say the temperature "apparently" tracks the CO2, because the scales of the two superimposed graphs have been selected to show just that (again, to "make it clear" to the non-scientist reader). The trouble is that the temperature data is very noisy, making that "jittery" appearance in the temperature graph, and it doesn't really follow the smooth CO2 curve all that well, particularly from 2000 on.

Now, honest scientists can legitimately argue over just how well or how bad the temperature tracks the CO2 from 1975 on, based solely upon this illustration as presented to the public by leading climate scientists. What cannot be honestly argued about, however, is that the temperatures BEFORE 1975 do NOT track the rising CO2; they vary, both positively and negatively, independently of the ever-rising CO2. That is the first simple, and devastating, point to be remembered by everyone, even those who are uninterested, or uneducated, in the debate.

This was so apparent to me, when I first came upon this image, that I posted the following comment:

"The graph shown here arbitrarily puts the CO2 curve on top of the temperature record so that the two curves rise together after 1979--but only after 1979, note. As an independent scientist, I do not hesitate to call this what it is: fraudulent science. This is very ugly, raw political propaganda in the name of science. All scientists should be repulsed, and ashamed, by the breadth and depth of the incompetence in their midst, and the foisting of that incompetence upon the public."

Since the public debate was not about the science, but was and is in fact a political war, my small voice for real science was ignored, as it has been by most ever since.

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In November 2010, just a month after seeing that fraudulent graph, I performed my Venus/Earth temperature-vs-pressure comparison that, in my view, definitively proved to any competent scientist that there WAS NO "global warming greenhouse effect" due to CO2. That Venus/Earth comparison precisely confirmed the Standard Atmosphere model of Earth's troposphere, which has been well-known for over a century. The Standard Atmosphere defines an utterly stable mean surface temperature, and is based upon both many years of temperature measurements throughout the atmospheres as well as on a very simple understanding of the physics behind the vertical temperature gradient in the troposphere. Simply put, that temperature gradient (a simple decrease in temperature of 6.5°C for each kilometer of height above sea level) is widely known as the "lapse rate", and while all of the "experts" have been taught that it is "the adiabatic lapse rate", in fact it is fundamentally and properly called "the hydrostatic lapse rate", physically due only to the very simple hydrostatic condition, that the atmospheric pressure at any height in the troposphere is just the weight of the atmosphere above that height.

Again, my Venus/Earth comparison precisely confirms the Standard Atmosphere (as of 1991, when the Venus data was taken by the Magellan spacecraft), over the full range of tropospheric pressures. And here is the second utterly simple and fundamental point for everyone to understand: The mean surface temperature, in the Standard Atmosphere, is 288K (15°C, or 59°F), and it has been so FOR A CENTURY OR MORE. Look again at the above illustration, where I have added that fact into the graph. Simply, according to the precisely confirmed Standard Atmosphere and its simple physics of the hydrostatic atmosphere, the surface temperature of the Earth is 288K, and not only has it been so throughout the modern temperature record, despite what the official global temperature calculations claim, but it is HIGHER than the supposed mean surface temperature today, despite a century of "global warming", according to the climate scientists themselves (the above is THEIR graph; I am only contrasting their claims with the precisely verified, and utterly stable, Standard Atmosphere).

The leading climate scientists ignore this utter failure of their science. "Lukewarm" scientists like Roy Spencer vehemently reject it also, refuse to even have it heard on their web sites. And radical activists have used this epidemic of incompetent stupidity (actually dogmatic adherence to failed theory) on the part of the scientists to push for ruinous legislation, to make "war on coal" for example, now a full-fledged war on any and all fossil fuel use, despite the utter dependency of our civilization upon that energy. The free peoples of the world are being warred upon, literally, using clearly false science.