A CLOSER LOOK AT CLIMATE CHANGE (PART 6)

IS CO2 CAUSING CLIMATE CHANGE? OR IS CLIMATE CHANGE CAUSING CO2?

Revised 8/6/2011

Back in the 1950s when Roger Revelle was pondering the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and the oceans (CLCC - 1), he concluded that the oceans weren't an unlimited sink that would go on dissolving CO2 forever and keep atmospheric concentrations from getting out of hand. The so-called "Revelle Factor" is a measure of the resistance of the ocean's surface to dissolve CO2 because CO2, the gas, has to dissociate into bicarbonate ions (HCO₃^-).  and carbonate ions (CO₃⁼ ) at the water's surface in order to enter into solution. Thus, there's a chemical equilibrium established between the HCO₃^- and the CO₃⁼  ions at the

sea surface and the molecular CO2 in the air. The equilibrium of the current system is such that for every ten additional ppmv of CO2 in the air, only one ppmv of CO2 dissociates at the ocean's surface and goes into solution.   Now, the argument that proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warning (AGW) are trying to make is that CO2 is entering the atmosphere because of "human activity", which is true, but human activity may not be the whole story. Here's the argument some scientists are making: - Global warming is causing more CO2 in the atmosphere.  
As any high school chemistry class teaches, many chemical reactions are reversible. Anything that disrupts the equilibrium of a chemical system will drive the reaction either forward or in reverse until equilibrium is regained. So we have a system in which the dissolved carbonate and (predominately) bicarbonate ions in the sea are in equilibrium with the CO2 molecules in the air. If the oceans are heating up, which we're told they are, the equilibrium will be shifted towards dissolved CO2 (in its ionic forms) reconstituting into airborne CO2 molecules at the ocean's surface and entering the atmosphere. It's a two-step process that looks like this:

Warmer <--------------------------
(carbon dioxide molecule) CO₂   +   H₂O  ⇌  H₃O⁺ + HCO₃^-  (bicarbonate ion)
                     

 (bicarbonate ion)   HCO₃^-  +  H₂O ⇌ H₃O⁺ + CO₃⁼  (carbonate ion)
------------------------------> Cooler

So, in a nutshell, the CO2 in the atmosphere is in equilibrium with bicarbonate and carbonate in the ocean. A warm ocean tends to drive the whole reaction to the left to produce carbon dioxide from its water solution (a process known as outgassing). Cold water will cause the equilibrium to shift to the right, causing more carbon dioxide to enter into solution in the ocean.
It's easy to visualize this when you consider that 98% of the total CO2 on the planet's surface is dissolved in the oceans as carbon dioxide, bicarbonate, and carbonate. Only 2% is in the air, so it doesn't take a really big equilibrium swing to push some of that dissolved 98% CO2 abundance out into the air.


So how could the oceans be heating up by themselves - without any help from the man-made greenhouse effect? It would have to be the sun, according to many astrophysicists, one of which is Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, whom I referenced in my previous post. Let's have another look at the Hubert Lamb chart (the bottom one):

Let's compare that with a record of observed sunspots encompassing the same time period:

This chart tracks sunspot activity over the course of the last millennium. It's kind of a funny chart - it's read from right to left, with the recent past expressed on the left side of the chart. In other words, it's a backwards chart.
Now if you could flip this chart around and compare it to the climatic data from Hubert Lamb, you'd see a striking resemblance. Here's another sunspot chart that can be read the normal way - from left to right:
                              
This is a zoomed-in version - it only shows the last 400 years beginning with the Maunder Minimum - which coincides with the Little Ice Age. From about 1665 to about 1700 there were only about 1/800th as many sunspots as usual. Relatively speaking, the sun was taking a long nap.                 

According to astrophysicists, more sunspot activity means a more active, hotter sun. The connection between sunspots and the climate was cited by astronomer John A. Eddy in a paper he published in 1976. Historical records of sunspot observations were meticulously consolidated in the late nineteenth century by Gustav Spörer and Edward Maunder that included post-Galileo telescopic observations and pre-Galileo naked-eye observations of the sun when it was low in the sky. Eddy supplemented the Spörer - Maunder data with proxy data obtained from carbon-14  (¹⁴C)   levels found in tree rings. There's an inverse relationship between solar activity and the presence of  ¹⁴C that is, when ¹⁴C levels in tree rings were low, solar activity was high, and vise versa. Tree rings, by the way, are also a means in determining temperatures in the past, they can establish a direct link between temperatures and solar activity.  

Many stars show a variation of luminosity over time - they pulsate because of back-and-forth equilibrium shifts in their cores. The sun isn't a particularly large star - it's known as a "yellow dwarf", although it radiates strongest in the yellow/green frequency range (flash a glance up at the sun or at a reflection of the sun in a windshield and you'll see a pale green disc). Being a smaller star, the sun is more stable than the bigger ones, and its luminosity pulsations are much smaller in magnitude than massive stars. Moreover, the time scales of these variations are measured in decades and centuries rather than every few days as with the bigger stars. The Lamb chart, in fact, appears to show a roughly millennial cycle, with temperatures once again on the upswing after being cooler for more or less five hundred years since the end of the Medieval Warm Period, which itself began over a thousand years ago. These are general trends - on shorter timescales there appear to be hiccups of cooler or warmer trends within the longer millennial trends. In fact, since about 2000 we appear to be experiencing a leveling off or even cooler burp which coincides nicely with diminished sunspot activity since about 2000 (Revision: The decade 2001-2010 has turned out to be one of the warmest periods in decades. Some experts are predicting the current decade 2011-2020 will be cooler. They cite the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) and the AMDO (Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation) compounding each other to influence global temperatures, that is, they reinforce each other at times and cancel each other at other times, that is, they establish a resonance which repeats roughly every thirty years. Thus, the period of 1980-2010 was warmer than the long-term average[similar to the warm period of 1915-1945, which peaked in intensity during the Dust Bowl years]. Moreover, the La Nina - El Nino phenomena plays a major role as well. The second or third strongest La Nina of the past 100 years is blamed for the extreme temperatures and drought conditions in much of the Continental US this summer. At the same time, the Pacific Coast has experienced much cooler than average temperatures.) 
On a mucher longer scale, proxy evidence holds that there have been warmer periods interspersed with cooler periods over several thousand years. There was a substantial warm-up during Roman times, and another one during the Minoan Civilization between the 15th and 20th centuries B.C., each warm period being followed by a cool one.

Many paleoclimatologists believe that, historically, CO2 concentrations follow the earth’s temperature up and down over time instead of the other way around. In other words, when the sun is more active and heats up the Earth, more CO2 enters the atmosphere, and when the sun takes a nap the Earth cools and CO2 dissolves back into the oceans and seas.


The paleologic record, however, is inconclusive on any hypothetical link between global temperature and CO2 concentrations - there are a lot of complex variables that determine climate over vast timescales, so the warming-leads-to-CO2 theorists will have to rely on sunspot records and historical anecdotal evidence going back centuries, or at the most, millennia, to argue their case. Nevertheless, here are some paleologic charts to illustrate how difficult it is to make a convincing argument one way or another. Note: these charts are laid out temporally from right to left - they're backwards.

ABOVE - a temperature chart covering the last 550 million years

ABOVE - a temperature chart of the last 600 million years – pretty much the same as the one above it. Note that today's temperature is the lowest global temperature in more than 600 million years. 

ABOVE: A chart of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere during the last 600 million years

ABOVE - a composite chart of CO2 and temperatures over the last 600 million years. The temperature is the blue line, the CO2 is the orange one. Sometimes the temperature follows the CO2 down, sometimes it follows CO2 up, yet other times the temperature takes the lead and CO2 follows. And in several instances the temperature is skyrocketing when the CO2 is in virtual freefall. Of particular note: The earth was hottest at the beginning of the Mesozoic Era (about 251 Mya), a sizzling 22° C, at a time when the CO2 was at its lowest concentration of the distant past.

Finally, here's the chart I put up in Part 4 (CLCC - 4) - the one where the temperature readings are exaggerated. This is a very crude chart - with data points every fifty million years. The data points represent the average values of each parameter for each of the 12 periods from the Pre-Cambrian to the present epoch.
There is a vague resemblance to the more precise graphs above, especially the CO2.       Stay tuned.

A CLOSER LOOK AT CLIMATE CHANGE (PART 5)

QUACK SCIENCE

Updated 07/22/2011: Link to informative Deming article added.


I once worked with a guy in a laboratory environment who had an hypothesis he was sure would turn out to be valid. He tested his hypothesis from a number of different angles - he attacked it this way and that. Sometimes his data worked, sometimes it didn't. He wanted very badly for his hypothesis to check out - he had personal prestige riding on his idea, so he did what any quack scientist would do. He cheated.
He culled the data that didn't support his hypothesis and kept the data that did. His rationale for culling the data that didn't support his hypothesis was that it was "bad" data - it was some kind of artifact or anomaly that just wasn't supposed to be. So he threw it out.

Needless to say, the procedure he was trying to develop didn't work out - in fact, it blew up in his face. And the reason it blew up in his face was that he deviated from the Scientific Method. The Scientific Method goes something like this:

1. Make an observation
2. Develop an hypothesis
3. Test your hypothesis by conducting experiments
4. Assemble and analyze your data and draw a conclusion
5. Publish your results

That's how it should be done, but it's not always done that way. Here's how the apocalyptic global warming scientists appear to practice the Scientific Method, according to those who've perused the leaked University of East Anglia (UEA) email communications between scientists associated with the university:

1. Make an observation: You notice that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing.

2. Develop an hypothesis: The earth is warming, or will experience warming, and it's getting warmer because of the accumulation of CO2, a greenhouse gas. Humans are causing the earth to warm by ever increaing emmisions of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in an irresponsible manner. If we don't arrest the accumulation of greenhouse gasses (particularly CO2) we'll reach a tipping point and experience a runaway greenhouse scenario similar to what happened on Venus eons ago.

3. Test the hypothesis with experimentation: Carefully monitor the temperatures as measured by reliable thermometers at certified facilities, and in a parallel endeavor, continue to carefully monitor CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Get collaborators to develop computer modeling programs to forecast future scenarios of global devastation due to unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions. Make sure the results of the testing of your hypothesis can be repeated by independent research - conducted by your friends and accomplices, of course. And most of all, be sure to carefully cull your data, or even invent data, if you must, that will support your hypothesis.

4. Analyze your data and draw a conclusion: According to your data, the global temperature will keep rising, the anthropogenic CO2 levels keep rising, and your computer models are saying we're going to be living in a perpetual steam bath within fifty years. You conclude we're on our way to becoming another Venus.

5. Publish your results: Gather up a politically connected cabal of peers to facilitate the peer-review process and publish your results in any number of prestigious publications.

You've published a landmark paper that will save the planet! You're a hero!

Oops! Damn! Somebody outside of your circle couldn't obtain repeatable results when testing your hypothesis independently, while somebody else couldn't get your data to add up. And then someone dug around and found out you fudged your numbers. And they even want to look at the code your models are based on. What a drag!

Let's enter into evidence the "Hockey Stick" graph.

This famous graph of global temperature patterns during the last millennium was featured prominently in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It purports to show how temperatures have literally skyrocketed since about 1910. When you look at the labels of the chart, you see a thousand year's worth of temperature data all bunched up in a four inch graph, with a dramatic warming spike depicted in the final 3/8 inch (~1 cm). One can also see that the temperature data range is about 1° C (which exagerates the visual scale of the temperature spike, with most of the graph showing temperatures muddling along below the line expressing the mean temperature of a recent three decade interval (1961 - 1990). The upshot is this: The structure of the chart amplifies the global temperature data in the mind of a lay citizen who tends to see it as a picture rather than a graph of data points plotted with a narrow range of parameters.

When you look at this chart, you don't see anything that looks like the the so-called Medieval Warming Period (MWP) that began about 950 A.D. and lasted to about 1400 A.D. In the Northern Hemisphere, at the very least - and probably worldwide - temperatures were much warmer than they are now, and as far as anyone knows, mankind wasn't the cause of that particular warm-up.  
Likewise, the "Little Ice Age" (LIA), from about 1550 A.D. to 1700 A.D. doesn't seem to show up either.
These periods were reflected on older charts based on data derived from tree rings, ice cores, and anecdotal historical accounts of the people who lived through these periods. Here's an older chart (below) that was compiled prior to the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) craze of the last two decades. It was published by Hubert Lamb, who was more or less the founder of modern climatology and was an expert on historical climate. Lamb, incidentally was also the founder of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in 1971 (more on the CRU later in this post). He served as Director of the facility until 1978, when he was more or less ousted by a staff scientist, Tom Wigley, who was instrumental in founding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Wigley is a passionate apocalyptic and has endeavored tirelessly (and successfully) to politicize the global warming issue. He has brought his protege, Dr. Phil Jones, on board at the CRU to assist in the management of the agenda. Jones is currently the Director of Research at the CRU.  

                      
   
Lamb's chart (Bottom) is juxtaposed to the IPCC Hockey Stick graph (top) that was compiled by Michael E. Mann, et. al. on behalf of the IPCC. It is instructive that the bottom chart was included in the IPCC's 1990 Assessment Report, while the top chart was published in the 2001 Assessment Report. Same organization, same historical records, yet totally different charts.
The data for these charts and others like them comes primarily from analysis of tree rings and ice cores, but there are also historical records consisting of paintings by European artists and archaeological study of settlements in the Far North and elsewhere. For example, during the MWP Vikings sailed through ice-free seas in the North Atlantic to establish thriving colonies on Greenland and in Nova Scotia where people raised livestock and grew crops. These colonies were more or less killed off in the 1400s by the onset of the Little Ice Age - much like a hard freeze kills agricultural output. This period was characterized by periods of ice cover on the Thames, Rhine,  Elbe, and other European rivers. Paintings of the period depicted people ice skating on European rivers, Dutch canals, the Hudson River, New York Harbor, and Chesapeake Bay. European paintings from the MWP era depict little or no snow, whereas paintings from the LIA period prominently depict snow covered landscapes and ice-covered rivers. This is compelling evidence that conveniently supplements the derived evidence from tree rings, etc. - evidence that these climate anomalies did in fact happen. But they don't show up on Professor Mann's graph. In fact, the IPCC is no longer using the graph in its literature because the chart has been so thoroughly discredited. Nevertheless, official publishings from the IPCC maintain that these climate anomalies were regional, not global, and should be discounted as part of the global record. Archaeological evidence obtained from tree rings, sediment cores, and other sources (called proxy evidence), however, support the occurrence of a significant cool period in Central America, South America, South Africa, and in the Pacific during the LIA time frame. 

So why exactly does the Hockey Stick graph not show these climate anomalies?
Professor David Deming published a paper on historic temperature trends in the journal Science in 1995 that was non-committal on the issue of climate change, but he somehow got mistaken for an AGW ideologue by another climate scientist associated with the IPCC - Dr. Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona. Dr. Overpeck sent an email to Dr. Deming that said, essentially: "We must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period". Dr. Deming went public with Dr. Overpeck's strategy of re-writing history to accommodate the IPCC's position that we are currently experiencing the warmest period in millennia (and took a lot of heat for doing so). Three years later came the seminal paper authored by Mann, et. al. which included the Hockey Stick chart. Sure enough, the MWP was nowhere to be found. The LIA, in fact, shows up as being warmer than the period from the early 1800s to about 1900, which was after the LIA had supposedly ended. Go figure. To paraphrase Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman: "How can that be?"
Demming published an article entitled Global Warming is a Fraud in which he describes climate scientist Stephen Schneider's proclivity of exaggerating his scientific findings. In a 1989 article in Discover Magazine, Schneider says "we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have." Schneider concluded "each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." Schneider's position is not unusual. In 2007, Mike Hulme, the founding director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Britain, told the Guardian newspaper that "scientists and politicians must trade truth for influence."


Here's a link to the entire article by Deming:

http://lewrockwell.com/orig9/deming3.html



Stephen McIntyre is a Canadian statistician who at first was curious about how the AGW was handled - he wondered if there was some kind of manipulation going on. After careful analysis of numerous papers, he concluded that everything wasn't on the up and up, so he started a website called Climate Audit where he puts claims and data by AGW proponents under withering scrutiny. 
McIntyre has asked James E. Hansen if he could audit the code for his models, which forecasts dramatic upheavals in the Earth's climate within the coming century. Hansen has refused to divulge the code and the algorithms the code uses to churn out the dramatic numbers it churns out. So McIntyre took matters into his own hands - he managed to reverse engineer the code from the NASA website. What McIntyre found was that Hansen's algorithms exaggerated recent temperatures and diminished temperatures from decades past, at least in the United States. He found that the hottest year on record for the U.S. was really 1934 (during the heart of the Dust Bowl phenomenon). That knocks 1998 down to second place. 1921 came in third. Furthermore, according to the revised data, five of the top ten warmest years on record occurred before 1940, with four of the top ten occurring within the past ten years. Moreover, prior to 1934 (inclusive) eight of the previous ten years would have been the all time hottest. Funny, nobody during the 1930s was saying it was a global warming crisis, nor that the warming was man's fault.
What is particularly instructive of this discovery is that NASA (Hansen's employer) has confirmed that McIntyre's finding was accurate, but has been very low-key in publically coming clean about it. They don't want anybody in the wider populace to know.
McIntyre is looking at global data, and expects to revise those data as well, since the same code used to analyze U.S. temperatures was used to to analyze global data. 
Efforts by watchdog groups to audit climate models used by other AGW researchers have been rebuffed. McIntyre and fellow Canadian Ross McKitrick began their pursuit of examining climate models used by the CRU that predict catastrophic outcomes for the earth's climate. Predictably, modeling codes and algorithms are being kept under lock and key at the CRU facility. Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for the CRU had been rebuffed by Phil Jones time and again, but Michael Mann, author of the "Hockey Stick" graph did allow Climate Audit to review his data. What McIntyre and McKitrick discovered was that Mann had used statical tricks to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and amplify the more recent warming trends of the 20th century. But there was a problem. When McIntyre and McKitrick tried to publish their findings in Nature they were rebuffed. Apparently the peer review editors at Nature - obviously under the sway of the interconnected CRU and IPCC, decided their paper was "too technical" and unlikely to be understood by other scientists who peruse and publish in Nature. This, of course, is hogwash - climate scientists routinely publish in Nature, which is a top-tier scientific journal where top-tier scientists from other disciplines routinely publish as well. What Nature's editors did do was allow Mann himself to publish a revision to the "Hockey Stick" data, in which Mann and McIntyre/McKitrick met halfway. It was, at best, a partial fix. The graph has since been discredited and removed from the IPCC's literature.

To further cast a shadow on the secret inner workings of the AGW scientific community, and the CRU in particular (where research is conducted with all the security of the Manhattan Project), Climategate happened! The leaked emails paint a rather sinister picture of the mindsets of the researchers at the CRU. There are emails expressing contempt and hatred towards climate skeptics on a personal level - one email even expressed joy at the recent death of John Daly, an AGW skeptic. Others discussed collaborating to have a journal editor removed who had the temerity to publish papers that countered the prevailing AGW dogma. There were many emails between scientists discussing the falsification and manipulation of historical records to, among other things, make temperatures from the past cooler than they really were in order to make it appear that we're hotter now by comparison. Other emails discussed hiding the decline of global temperatures in the 1960s and 1970s (remember the global cooling worries of the 1970s?). The writing of modeling software deliberately designed to show dire consequences for the planet with the continuing discharge of greenhouse gasses was discussed. And much more.

So the question is: Why would scientists and academics deliberately pursue such unethical ends to advance their careers? Why would they perpetuate outright fraud on such a massive scale to push their ideas? And the answer is: Money! 

Consider-

In 2005 the George C. Marshall Policy Outlook Institute, a watchdog group based in Washington DC, published a report of Federal and private funding on various research projects. According to the report, the overwhelming majority of the private funding for climate research was directed to pro-AGW scientists. Federal funding - even during the Bush years, when it's reasonable to assume funding for science was down - almost all of the funds for climate research were directed to scientists and institutions conducting pro-AGW research. 

There are no surprises here. Virtually all of the Federal money and most of the total funding from private foundations (representing special interests) has gone to AGW proponents, while little or none has been awarded to scientists who disagree with the AGW hypothesis. Scientists who disagree with the anthropogenic model are largely funded by conservative foundations and energy companies. Does that negate the validity of their research? There is no known evidence that data was falsified, but AGW proponents can make an equally persuasive argument that AGW skeptics have an agenda of their own.

Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon is a scientist and author who is currently at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He believes the sun has been getting hotter over time and is causing the warming trend on Earth. According to Dr. Soon, global warming is not our fault, it's the sun's fault.  Interestingly, Dr. Soon has had his research funding completely withdrawn by the U.S. Government because of his views. That's the price he paid for going against the grain and practicing real science. It doesn't pay to be an AGW opponent but it sure does pay to be an AGW proponent! A lot of people are getting rich by pushing the pro AGW science.
A case in point: Professor Phil Jones, Director of the CRU at East Anglia, has received over £2,750,000 in grant money since 1990. That works out to £137,500 a year - or more than $220,000, if you will. That's just grant money - it doesn't include his salary or speaking fees. And that's just one researcher. There are thousands more worldwide just like him. What a racket!

So that's the rub. It boils down to cheating to get more money. My former co-worker wanted a promotion because of his research. He got one, oddly enough, even though his project blew up in his face. It worked out for him after all, just like it's probably going to work out for the scientists practicing quack science around the world, even though Climategate blew up in their faces by exposing their fraud. What a racket!