6 impossible things before breakfast

Posted by Pointman on June 13, 2015 · 22 Comments 

Shakespeare said that when sorrows come, they come not in single espials but in battalions, and so often that’s true. In the midst of a bout of flu from hell, the Jesus bolt on my computer broke. So I’ve had a very merry week doing technical variations of the Heimlich manoeuvre on the PC Computatanic between bouts of shivering, cursing and coughing up some vile green stuff you really don’t want to know too much detail about. On the plus side, everything was backed off and for a change no data was lost.

At the moment I’m staying on cybernetic life support using a tablet computer, but using a touch keypad to write anything more than a brief email is beyond my patience and capabilities – if anyone knows how to connect an antique but beautiful IBM keyboard to a Samsung tablet, in the name of all mercy let me know. With some reluctance, I’ll be breaking open a few piggy banks and heading down to Ye Olde Compooterr Shoppe for a new base unit. When will that damn cheque from big oil finally arrive?

As usually happens on these occasional rough patches, friends can really help you get through them, and in this particular case it’s Graeme doing the helping. I never know what he’s working on, I just get emailed a piece out of the blue. It’s an arrangement I like because one of the drivers of writing a good article is that you like to read a good article yourself, and opening one of his emails is me getting to read a surprise piece by a blogger I like. It always comes with the cover note saying use it if or when things are slow or you need it. This weekend fits that bill. Cheers mate.

It’s a lovely eclectic refutation of the specious assertions made by the high priests of Gaia pretending to be scientists. Enjoy.

Pointman

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NOTE: In deference to the host’s refined susceptibilities, I will occasionally use a euphemism [agricultural metaphor]. Imagine that you are a safe distance south of a north facing bull. He lifts his tail, so shortly you see a pile of [agricultural metaphor].

In 1823 the first Professor of Geology at Oxford University the Right Rev. William Buckland excavated Paviland cave in Wales, looking for evidence of Noah’s flood. As an ordained minister in the Church of England he firmly believed in the unquestioned authority of the time Bishop Ussher, and his conclusion that human life started on the Earth in October 4004 B.C.

So when Buckland unearthed a skeleton and some ivory ornaments made from a mammoth tusk, it seemed obvious to him that the grave had been made on top of those ivory pieces at a later date.  After all it was believed that humans were not living when prehistoric animals like mammoths were roaming the Earth, because of Bishop Ussher. Indeed editors of british journals refused to publish contrary evidence for another 37 years. The fact that both the ivory pieces and the bones were stained a deep reddish colour couldn’t therefore be due to staining from the earth as they must have been buried at different times, hence the bones had to have been stained as a funereal practice. As gentlemen in Georgian England didn’t use rouge the bones had to be that of a women, possibly a witch. Dating the burial to the earliest Roman times followed as it seemed compatible with an early settlement nearby. Hence the Red Witch of Paviland.

Nowadays the male skeleton – anatomy wasn’t Buckland’s forte – has been radiometrically dated to 18,000 years ago, and the staining was of course from minerals in the soil. From an initial assumption of faith a chain of choices had led to a quite wrong conclusion.

In modern times Buckland could have become a well-known Climate Scientist. To explain that thought, I set out below 6 of the better known beliefs current among the gullible.

CO2 is causing global warming:

The Earth orbits the Sun, which radiates energy to the Earth. The IPCC claims that the Sun’s energy output doesn’t vary enough to explain global warming. 30 years of measurements are apparently enough for them to explain the sun’s part in the last 500 million years.

The Earth is in radiative equilibrium says NASA and other unquestioned authorities in Climatology. Solar energy in = energy radiated into space, but the temperature of the Earth is rising because the level of carbon dioxide is rising. How? If there is equilibrium then there can be no change as there is no extra heat to warm the Earth. We are told that it is created by “greenhouse gases” radiating back to the ground in a sort of perpetual motion. Then they wave their hands about and talk of insulation. Why? Insulation only slows heat loss, it doesn’t generate any heat. And every bit of that back radiation has to end up in space to maintain the equilibrium, so it can’t stay behind warming the ground or the oceans. The heat to cause warming is really the missing heat.

What they are saying is if you put a kettle on the stove but don’t light the gas it won’t warm up; there is no extra heat to warm the water. But according to Climate Science if you had filled the kettle with soda water, the dissolved CO2 would bubble out into the air space and the kettle would warm up. [agricultural metaphor].

To carry this further consider those farmers who inject CO2 into their greenhouses at levels about 4 times that current in the atmosphere. Do they use less heating? NO, but the plants grow much better. “Greenhouse gases” don’t work even in a greenhouse.

So for global warming to occur there has to be surplus energy coming in. Either the radiation measurements are wrong or there is some other way for energy from the Sun to reach the Earth. If either is found to be the case it will show that Climate Science is [agricultural metaphor]. So there is no reason to conclude that CO2 is causing global warming, yet that ASSUMPTION pervades the whole of Climate ‘Science”.

At this point someone who knows very little about science, a mathematically challenged Chief Scientific Advisor or a President of some Society will utter the claim that the extra heat is from burning fossil fuels. [agricultural metaphor] – do the calculations first! Still, it is nice to think that they wouldn’t hesitate to change “the settled science” while still claiming it is “settled”.

The ICE CORES are PROOF:

We are bombarded with claims that temperatures are rising, this or that recent year was the hottest EVER. From the assumption that CO2 causes warming, the argument is that a higher level of CO2 means the temperature MUST be higher, and with a further assumption that CO2 is higher than ever before that it is warmer than EVER. EVER turns out to be a variable time span of 40, 100, 160, 1000, ten thousand, half a million or the last five million years, getting longer as the ignorance of the speaker increases.

We have ice cores going back 800,000 years which ‘prove’ CO2 causes warming, Climate ‘scientists’ and other spokesmen say. For those of you who saw “An Inconvenient Truth” remember Al Gore on his cherry picker? He used an out of date, low resolution chart which obscured the timing of the changes, but Al Gore is no scientist so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn’t mean to mislead people. Ice cores show climate changes well because the effect is first felt in the polar regions, and there have been numerous natural ice ages interspersed with warm interglacials, like the current Holocene. Al Gore and climate ‘scientists’ claims that the temperature fluctuations follow a rise in the CO2 level, and at the lower resolution they do seem to go up and down together.

Ignore the critics who claim that a higher resolution chart shows the reverse with CO2 following a temperature rise, and just look at the changes in climate. The cycle frequency changes but apart from the present one there have been 4 interglacials in the last half million years. They have all reached a temperature above the current one with CO2 levels not above 300 ppm. In the Eemian (approx. 125,000 years ago) the Earth was definitely 2 to 3C warmer than now as confirmed by the fossils of lions, giraffes, elephants and hippos found in the Thames Valley. Yet the CO2 level from the ice cores was 285 ppm.

So the ice cores show that the temperature has been much higher than present in the distant past, and not dependent on the level of CO2.  So what of the Holocene (the last 10,000 years)? Archaeologists know that the climate has changed a number of times during the Holocene. The warmer years since 1850 are opening up Alpine passes in Europe, showing that they have been in use in the past. Not possible according to climate ‘science’ because the CO2 level in the past was lower than now, so those passes MUST have been impassible. [agricultural metaphor] !

That the Sahara was green and well watered about 7,000 years ago during the Holocene Optimum is shown by the Tassili frescoes. Humans were living in what is now a quite inhospitable desert, but drawing giraffes, hippos and various bovines in their surroundings. The CO2 was at the same level that 125,000 years ago led to a sub-tropical Thames Valley, but according to climate ‘science’ that doesn’t mean a wet green Sahara was possible. Similarly the known warmer times of the Roman and the Medieval periods have been retrospectively been declared impossible according to climate ‘science’. Why? Because CO2 is higher than EVER so the current temperature MUST be higher than EVER, so any contrary evidence must be ignored.

Do you get the feeling that an initial assumption of faith has led to a series of quite wrong conclusions?

Temperature adjustments:

That the official figures published show a rise in temperature is hardly surprising. Taken from carefully selected sites ( “cherry picking” is only used of sceptical figures) and adjusted and homogenized (with added vitamins?) into showing just that. Much indignation has been directed at this processing, but misses the main point that they are quite useless.

The old saw that if you only have a hammer then everything looks like a nail has some bearing. Trying to reconstruct past trends the climatologists used the daily temperature recordings, showing just the maximum and minimum figures, and averaged them. These figures were never intended to show the average temperature of that day.

To explain – Suppose you have a temperature gauge on a snow-covered airfield. It is overcast windless day and the maximum reading has been -10? all day, even overnight. Suddenly one of the airplane exhausts sends a puff of hot air towards the gauge for 5 minutes. The maximum reading climbs to 10?. The daily average will now be 0?. Suppose the warm air blast lasts for 10 minutes, the ‘maximum’ now becomes 30? and the daily average is now said to be 10?. The local member of Greenpeace starts screaming hysterically and running round in ever decreasing circles, and the World’s media in a serious voice tell us that “it is worse that we thought”.

Now suppose all the airplanes are busy ferrying delegates, officials, reporters and hangers-on to the latest Climate Conference. Any change in the readings is ‘natural’. Instead of a flat -10? for 24 hours there is half an hour before the time for reading the minimum when a wind blow the clouds away. The temperature drops, so now the daily average becomes -15?.  So the record from that site could be -15?, -10?, 0? or 10?, yet the temperature there was -10? for 97% of the day. In other words the records are quite useless as a measure of the climate.

And how many of the “official” stations are actually fit for the purpose. A survey by WUWT found that 80% of stations in the USA were not of acceptable standard. Whole areas have no stations so ‘estimates’ are added.

Every year for the last 18 years a figure for the temperature of the Earth has been trotted out showing a very slight increase. The gullible are reassured that most of these years are the hottest EVER, thanks to minuscule rises below the level of accuracy.  But, say the climatologists, all we have to do is take dodgy figures (“accurate” to the nearest decimal point) and homogenize them with equally dodgy figures from selected other stations and then average all the averaged and homogenized figures and we can announce a World temperature accurate to 2 or 3 decimal points. Anybody who believes that [agricultural metaphor] should bundle all their money and send it to the IPCC immediately – it will save time. Persons trying to send other people’s money to the IPCC should be bundled out of office.

Parts of the World have warmed since 1850; the melting of glaciers alone proves that. In climate ‘science’ it is impossible since the whole World has to warm, the heat to do so is missing. So parts of the Earth may be warming and others cooling to maintain the average, or extra heat is appearing in a manner unknown to climate ‘science’.

Even in the official figures the rate of temperature change in the warm cycles is the same regardless of the rate of CO2 rise in the atmosphere, therefore any warming caused by CO2 is not affected by the rate of increase in CO2. So if it is not the level of CO2 nor the rate of change affecting the temperature, claiming that CO2 is the cause is hardly the sort of reasoning that you would expect from a good scientist, let alone the President of The Royal Society.

And it is merely an interesting observation that the “warming” in the 1980’s and 90’s occurred as the old style thermometers were progressively replaced by electronic ones much more sensitive to short-term fluctuations. I wonder how seriously they were calibrated against the originals.

Ocean acidification:

One of the latest bogeymen being touted by those who failed chemistry at school is the impending disaster of the seas becoming acid. Some group somewhere claimed to have found a small drop in the pH of sea water over several years. Ignoring the fact that sea water varies about 10 times as much naturally, they leapt to the assumption “it is all due to CO2”. Quickly they used the computer to extrapolate back to the 18th century and a scary press release. There is no way to check the figures they quote because there were no pH measurements for the first 150 years of their graph, and precious few for the rest. ‘Science’ like that is not even third rate.

But it got the gullible like Barak Obama and Ed Milliband believing that more CO2 means more dissolved in the ocean, generating acid which will wipe out marine life. [agricultural metaphor].

Firstly, about 98% of the CO2 dissolved in sea water remains as a gas subject more or less to Henry’s Law and not lowering the pH. More CO2 in the air, more dissolves; but a higher temperature causes the gas to be less soluble in water. So what these people are saying is that more CO2 will NOT cause any warming, otherwise there would not be any  problem. The “Science is UNsettled?”

Secondly the necessary conversion of CO2 to carbonic acid is dependent on the pH. The lower the pH the less is converted, a feedback mechanism never mentioned in case you start to have doubts. There are other reasons centering on carbonic acid being a weak acid, hence sea water is buffered and pH changes (due to CO2) are minimal. Yes, sea water will become slightly acid if pure CO2 is forced in under pressure, but if the atmosphere reaches 1 million ppm (pure CO2) there won’t be any sea creatures to be affected.

People who’ve seen the White Cliffs of Dover should realize that they were laid down by sea creatures over millions of years in the Cretaceous Era when the CO2 level in the atmosphere was 4 times (or more) that today, and think a little about the claims of climate ‘scientists’.

Geo-Engineering:

On the lunatic fringes there are those who want to “save the World” by destroying it.

Assuming that CO2 will cause warming they want to counteract this by adopting vast schemes for cooling with unknown side effects.

Solve a non-existent problem by causing another? [agricultural metaphor].

The “settled science” cannot describe the climate; the models they use have failed again and again to predict what will happen. “Oh, we’ve adjusted them” they say, “we are now 97% right … in hindsight”. It is just the future they’re clueless about.

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to listen to.

Too many people:

In the last century the population of the Earth has increased so much that some people living secure, comfortable lives in advanced economies are getting agitated. We have to reduce the population they say; they’re very coy about the means, and even who will get the chop.

Perhaps I can make a suggestion about who is surplus to requirements. We want to be democratic don’t we? So I suggest a committee of 3 to decide who gets eliminated.

Composed of One peasant from the slums of China, forced off his farm when it was expropriated for industrial development. Now living in a polluted environment and employed at one of factories making goods for export to the EU.

One peasant from South America recently dispossessed of his land (and livelihood) by a Foreign Company wanting his land to grow biofuel for shipment to Europe.

An African who recently lost 2 children because no vaccine was available after 2 cloudy days meant no power to run the refrigerator at the Clinic. In accordance with IPCC and EU dictates the Clinic had to use a small solar panel not a diesel generator.

They could choose a small target for a trial; some small overcrowded island off the NW coast of Europe perhaps? Then the slaughter could be expanded through the overcrowded  Low Countries and into Germany. It will be easier in the latter country, with infrastructure already available. Surely many Greens will volunteer for elimination, especially at the spiritual home of the german Greens – Auschwitz.

So ladies and gentlemen of Europe, be it understood that you will be leaving out own dear planet for our dear planet’s good. What’s that you’re saying? This isn’t who we want to kill. What makes you think that you will have the choice?

Are you left thinking that climate ‘science’ is an initial unchallenged act of faith followed by a chain of assumptions leading to quite wrong conclusions? Just like Professor the Rev. Buckland. And to round off the analogy the greens want us to go back to living in a cave.

What are you going to believe? Archaeology, Paleontology, Geology, Chemistry, Physics, History and Thermodynamics or Climate ‘science’.

I say Climate ‘science’ is all [agricultural metaphor].

©Graeme No.3

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