“Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the committee, entered into the record an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that claimed sea levels are not rising because of climate change, a view that rejects thousands of scientific studies. The piece was written by Fred Singer, who is affiliated with the Heartland Institute in Chicago, Illinois, which promotes the rejection of mainstream climate science.” —Science Magazine
The above quote highlights two of the most popular sophistry tactics of the Progressive Left and Mainstream Media.
As the quote mentions, Dr. Fred Singer is affiliated with the Heartland Institute…so what? Almost every other climate researcher is on the payroll of a Liberal University, the Federal Government or an Environmental Group.
Sanctimonious and arrogant Progressives groups seem to believe they are the only ones that can perform climate research. The ability of the research to withstand scrutiny determines the quality of the research, not who funded it.
These Progressive attacks on funding are simply a brand of scientific censorship or scientific McCarthyism.
The second sophistry tactic is to brand scientists whose research rejects the conventional wisdom as not being sound science.
Newsflash, that is how science is advanced, scientific discoveries must by definition reject the null.
When scientific studies showed that the Earth was flat, no matter how many experiments were run supporting the belief that the Earth was flat, they didn’t change the fact that they were all wrong.
The number of experiments doesn’t determine the quality of the science, the ability to accurately represent what is being studied does.
Climate alarmists simply start with CO2 causes climate change and then find countless data sets that correlate with the CO2 trend. That isn’t real science, that is nonsense.
Everyone knows correlation does not prove causation. In fact, they write books about it.
There are countless experiments that can be run demonstrating that temperature and climate change correlate with CO2, but there are also countless other experiments that can demonstrate something else is the cause.
There are infinite experiments that must be run to prove CO2 is the cause, but only one is needed to disprove it. That is why real science rejects the null, it doesn’t prove the null.
Sea level is a great example of this principle. Climate alarmists will simply claim CO2 is causing the sea level to rise.
That is convenient, but they can’t explain how CO2 and LWIR between 13 and 18µ can warm water and melt ice. There are infinite other factors that could be causing the sea level to rise.
Shifting fault lines, rock slides and erosion, volcanic activity, visible radiation causing thermal expansion, moon orbit, development draining swamps, etc etc etc.
To prove CO2 is the cause one would need to rule out all other causes…which is simply impossible as the Einstein quote above highlights.
Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise because now you have less space in those oceans because the bottom is moving up. –Representative Mo Brooks (R–AL)
While climate alarmists approach climate change in the impossible unscientific manner to “prove” CO2 is the cause, skeptics approach it scientifically and search for the one experiment that CO2 can’t explain. That is how real science is performed.
That one experiment is Antarctica, a natural control for isolating the impact of CO2 on atmospheric temperature.
Antarctica has very dry cold air, void of H2O, and whose only main GHG is CO2 which has increased the same as the rest of the globe.
What do you find when you isolate the impact of CO2 on temperature? CO2 has basically zero impact on temperatures.
Climate alarmists simply can not explain how CO2 has increased 30%+ in Antarctica and there has been 0.00°C change in temperature.
They also can’t explain how no warming in the Arctic is causing the ice to melt more than in the past. Hint: Warm water, not the atmosphere is melting the ice.
CO2 and LWIR between 13 and 18µ don’t warm water, visible light does. Visible light also causes thermal expansion of the water and sea level increase. CO2 is transparent to visible light.
Click image to enlarge
The “settled science” behind AGW neither support the claims of warming nor do the possible experiments.
- The only defined mechanism by which CO2 can affect climate change is through thermalization, i.e. warming of the LWIR spectrum between 13 and 18µ.
- CO2 represents only 1 out of every 2,500 air molecules, so the thermalization is greatly diffused in the atmosphere.
- The thermalization of LWIR between 13 and 18µ has a blackbody temperature of -50 thru -110°C.
- The W/m^2 absorption of LWIR between 13 and 18µ has a logarithmic decay, meaning each additional molecule absorbs less and less energy.
- The oceans control the climate, and LWIR between 13 and 18µ doesn’t penetrate or warm water, visible radiation does.
- CO2 has been as high as 7,000 ppm and never caused catastrophic warming, the earth fell into an ice age when CO2 was 4,000 ppm.
- Analogies between Earth and Venus are completely misleading and scientifically dishonest.
- CO2 follows temperature in the geologic record, it doesn’t lead it. There is no mechanism by which CO2 should cyclically increase to end an ice age and decrease to start an ice age.
- MODTRAN demonstrates that CO2 has zero impact on atmospheric temperature in the lower atmosphere where H2O is abundant. The CO2 signature only appears once H2O is no longer present in the atmosphere.
- If data sets are identified to control for H2O and the Urban Heat Island Effect, they show no warming with an increase in CO2.
- CO2 is evenly distributed around the globe, there is no way for CO2, a constant, to cause regional, hemispheric, or pockets of warming. CO2 would cause a parallel or near parallel shift in the global temperature. There is no way for CO2 to cause warming in one area and cooling in another.
- The Earth cools through conduction, convection, and radiation. Radiation moves energy much faster than the other two methods. CO2 may actually work to cool, not warm the atmosphere. Evidence actually shows that.
Read more at CO2 Is Life
