“Trust science, not the scientists.” That is the essence of science. That should be widely shared.
Unfortunately, climate change advocates have completed the twisting of science (although this was well underway).
Science was created to eliminate opinions and the role of prestigious experts.
We are watching the rapid collapse of COVID-19 experts, like a house on a Malibu cliff after heavy rains. Will the unsustainable hoax of climate change be far behind?
The establishment system exalts experts if they advance statist goals. But the public rejects royalty.
First, science has decayed into “Imagineering.” Thought experiments are not science. (Imagining things can lead to proposed hypotheses. But a hypothesis must still be tested by hard-core experimentation.)
Many argue desperately for speculation as being science when science was designed to avoid speculation.
What matters most is what we do not know. The surprise factor between what we expected and what actually happens in real-world experiments is where discovery lives. We don’t know what influences are happening that we did not know about. That is why Imagineering is not science.
Second, so we have to run actual empirical experiments. To determine whether carbon dioxide (CO2) causes the Earth to be warmer would require experiments “with all other things being equal.”
To qualify as science, we would need to contrast Earth A with no human industrial activity against Earth B with human industrial activity. All other things would have to remain the same, identically. Then we would have to repeat that experiment. So we would need Earth C, D, E, F, G, etc.
This cannot be done. The correct response is for grown-ups to say “We don’t know.” But there is too much to gain in publicity and fame. So we corrupt science to reach conclusions that cannot be scientifically confirmed.
There has never been an empirical experiment to test whether CO2 causes a planet to be warmer. Have we tested Venus or Mars by removing some of the CO2 from those planets? No. Then we don’t know what role CO2 plays. You can strongly believe it. But that’s faith, not science.
Third, because it is impossible to test Earth A versus Earth B, climate change proponents are trying to use another “proxy” by comparing current time periods against the past.
This is an attempt to fake up an experiment, substituting for Earth A versus Earth B. Today is Earth A. The past is Earth B.
But we cannot “hold all other factors constant” across different time periods on Earth. There are too many influences known and unknown changing over time.
We know that the Earth’s orbit changes shape under the influence of other planets in long-period oscillations called Milankovitch Cycles. So “Today’s Earth” vs. “Yesterday’s Earth” cannot replace an empirical experiment because we cannot control for other influences.
Fourth, the behavior of CO2 in a container in a laboratory cannot be projected to the open atmosphere. Climate change activists say that scientists prove in the laboratory that CO2 “traps” heat.
But the question is how does the planetary atmosphere of a gigantic planet behave? We don’t care what CO2 does in a box in a lab. We care how the massively complex global climate responds.
Fifth, the reason why is because the atmosphere is in constant motion. All climate change theory is intrinsically grounded on the assumption that air cannot move. CO2, they argue, is like a “blanket.” But it is not. Air is not nailed to the Earth’s surface.
Therefore, we cannot take observations from an enclosed container and conclude anything about the open atmosphere, which is freely and constantly in motion.
The assertions of climate change are impossible to test. The Earth is too big. The atmosphere is too complex. There are too many forces at work, known and unknown.
Science presumes that what cannot be confirmed is treated as false (for now). We cannot pretend we know things we don’t know.
Sixth, what do we know? We know that hot air rises. We know that the atmosphere circulates vertically through “convection.”
We know that convection is central to weather. We know that heat at the Earth’s surface is transported up to high altitudes by convection. We know that the very purpose of weather and convection is to transport heat from the surface to the edge of space. We know that the heat is radiated into outer space.
Seventh, CO2 does not trap heat. A CO2 molecule absorbs energy at frequencies determined by its electrons.
In one of the weirdest mysteries in physics, the absorption of electromagnetic radiation is converted into kinetic energy. Increased vibration is experienced as heat (and pressure).
Then the CO2 molecule re-emits the energy. A photon of infrared frequency energy is absorbed and re-emitted. Then it is absorbed by another molecule. Then re-radiated. Absorbed, emitted, absorbed, emitted – maybe thousands of times per second. This is the opposite of trapping.
But they say CO2 is “opaque” to infrared energy. When CO2 re-emits heat energy it gets absorbed by another CO2 molecule. Again, that’s irrelevant, because the atmosphere moves vertically, transporting the heat up to space.
It’s also wrong because everything absorbs heat. Put a penny out in the sunshine. It will get hot, without being CO2.
Eighth, CO2 probably cools the Earth. By absorbing heat and carrying it to the edge of space, CO2 would facilitate the release of heat out into space.
The air is thinner above, and thicker below. And the Earth is curved. So at high altitudes, the probability of an IR photon escaping out into space is significantly greater than being re-absorbed by another air molecule.
The air is very thin at 5 to 10 miles up at the top of convection, and thinning even more rapidly above that. There is a built-in bias causing heat emitted by CO2 molecules to leave the planet, not to stay.
Ninth, a number of plants can freely expand, especially algae and seaweed in over 70% of the Earth’s surface that is lakes and oceans.
If the Earth were warmer, rainfall would increase, droughts would decrease, and plants would proliferate with warmth, moisture, and more CO2. We should expect proliferating plants to consume any CO2 surplus.
Tenth, we do not have scientifically valid temperature measurements earlier than World War II. The machine to measure CO2 in the open atmosphere (meant to measure a patient’s breath) existed but did not work well before 1930.
The earliest spotty records of temperature in only a few locations date back only to around 1850. An early advocate for global warming lamented that CO2 measurements were unreliable.
Because of the complex nature of the Earth, including many influences we probably don’t know about, we cannot use short periods of time to draw conclusions.
If we knew the Earth warmed over the last 200 years that would not tell us why in the climate of a 4.5 billion-year-old planet.
It’s like saying I got my brakes changed, and then my house was struck by lightning. Therefore, brake changes cause lightning. Repeated experiments would be required on the hypothesis. Just A happened, then B happened is not science. Over such short periods of time, the noise of other phenomena drowns out any signal.
The key to successful science is to isolate just one single cause and carefully measure its effect. Climate change opinions do not meet these standards.
Read more at American Thinker
Science loses its credibility the moment scientists decide to leave the scientific path and – for which reason ever – manipulate (their) data to fulfill an agenda, political or for personal beliefs.
Germany is a good example: Following the political “Fridays for Future” culture of leftist youths, “Scientists for Future” was created to to back them and give them “evidence” of the “righteous cause”.
It has even gone so far, that the German Court’s verdict on “future social justice” – based solely on the findings of those “scientists” – demands of politics to rapidly change, and accelerate the taxing of CO2. The court had no interest whatsoever to validate the verdict by true and unbiased scientific research.
Yes, to all of that. But notice also that looking back into the past is itself a poor substitute, a proxy, for an actual classic experiment.
A model that more closely explains the past is of course better and we can learn a lot by the difference among models.
But comparing the present to the past is still a weak attempt to compare the Earth’s massive planetary climate with and without CO2 released by humans
Climate science is the science of data that aren’t and models that don’t.
Climate catastrophists claim that there is no other explanation for modern warming but CO2. However, there is no explanation for the onset and subsequent end of the Roman Warm Period, or the Medieval Warm Period, of the Little Ice Age. They were certainly not the result of atmospheric CO2 changes.
Climate science needs to get serious. It needs to stop referring to those with alternative scientific results as “deniers”. It needs to measure near-surface ad sea surface temperatures with instruments which do not require “adjustment”. It needs to validate and verify a model of the climate which actually models the climate of the past without “tuning”. It needs to give up on generating “scary scenarios” based on RCP8.5 and its successor.
“It needs to validate and verify a model of the climate which actually models the climate of the past without ‘tuning’”. The Russian model, INMCM5, matches real world data more closely than any other. It is the only model that works when projected onto data of the past. Yet, it only predicts warming of 1.4 degrees by 2100. This is useless for justifying the draconian measures that the liberals want to take in the name of climate change. So, as with everything else that doesn’t serve their agenda, the model is ignored.
The Russian model is also consistent with the results of recent research regarding TCS and ECS, unlike the CMIP6 models.
“No other explanation” is indeed a weak basis for concluding anything,
especially when we realize that 200 years or even 11,000 years is a blink of the eye in the Earth’s history.
So “no other explanation” when we really haven’t look at very much of the planet’s history or planet-wide climate is wildly premature.
One thing that is certain about climate change science is it is loaded with fraud. The extra cold winter of 2017 had the data adjusted to look like an ordinary year. The temperatures before 1950 were adjusted down and those after that year up. Weather stations at higher altitudes and in rural area have been eliminated so that the average temperature will be warmer. Those controlling the data obviously believe that the unaltered data doesn’t support the climate change cause.
We might not be able to run true scientific experiments of the impact of carbon dioxide on temperature, but we do have empirical data. One is that 40% of the warming blamed on man occurred between 1910 and 1941 when the carbon dioxide levels were relatively low and raising very slowly. Another is early in this century we had a 15 to 18 year pause in warming despite high emission of carbon dioxide. It is certainly true that other parameters were changing during these periods of time. The important point is this casts enough doubt on the climate change theory that trillions of dollars are not justified to be thrown at the issue let alone measures that would force all but the elite into poverty.
This is the role of science. It is a bit strange, but makes sense once we understand it.
Within true science, it is always easier to reject a hypothesis than to confirm it.
So finding ways that observations do not fit proposed hypotheses is both important and entirely valid.
But the flip side of confirming a hypothesis as true scientifically is always going to be much harder.
This is part of how science is search for truth in which we can always re-examine hypotheses as we get more information.
It may seem unfair to be so strict and harsh in rejecting hypotheses… until we remember that we are always gathering more information and better understanding and the process continues.
Noting t hat back in the 1970’s it was Global Cooling and New Ice Age liberal rags like Times and Newsweek were giving it front page coverage and a 1978 Episode of IN SEARCH OF had a episode all about the Coming Ice Age
Climate catastrophists love the peer review part of the modern scientific process. It has become an echo-chamber of catastrophism.
It is instructive that the results of climate models can be peer reviewed, while a basic tenement of mathematics, such as one plus one equalling two, never shall be.