GW Evidence

This is a list of empirical scientific evidence pro and anti doomsday global warming …  well, that was the intention, but then I found there wasn’t much pro, so in order to include more from the warmists I’ve lowered the bar so that I can add in stuff from the warmists which really can’t be called empirical science.

General evidence of CO2 warming

1. Even though 69% suspect the temperature record has been tampered with, it is still safe to say there was an apparent temperature increase large enough to turn a predominate cooling scare into a warming scare. So, whilst we can’t ignore instrumentational errors and outright fraud, underneath was an apparent trend large enough to persuade those who then believed in global cooling.
2. CO2 levels have risen. There’s debate about how much of this rise is due to mankind, but the fact it has risen is not in dispute.
3. There is a scientific basis for the CO2 blanket. This is only large enough for a fraction of the predicted warming, but the fundamental, but small direct increase due to CO2 is based on reasonably sound science (although the scale may have to change in light of the German research)
4. There are indicators that the temperature may have changed. E.g. a small change in Arctic ice (3%?) and Himalaya glaciers. But these indicators are all dubious. E.g. in the case of Arctic ice there is a comparable but anecdotal changes in the early 20th century but the change appears to be real even if it isn’t unique.
5. I’m going to add in sea level rise – even though the evidence points to a deacceleration of sea level rather than the necessary acceleration, the fact is that the absolute rise is evidence of warming and is often quoted (and I’m struggling to find anything else to put in)
6. Although a model I’m adding Myhre who used a number of radiative transfer models which have evidential basis as warmists claim they are capable of reproducing earth’s emission spectra “almost exactly”.
7. The hockey stick … and other “unprecedented” warming lies. (see warmists aren’t exactly scientific)

Link: http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

Evidence supporting the massive positive feedbacks necessary for doomsday warming.

1. The main evidence here is the lack of any other explanation for the large swings in temperature going into and out of the ice ages. In effect this amounts to a hand waving argument: the earth’s temperature must have changed significantly, this is much greater than the change in solar radiation, therefore there must exist (unspecified/unknown) positive feedback. The big problem is that as the obvious candidate is ice cover, this works for warming coming out of an ice-age … ice reflects sunlight, melting ice reduces sunlight reflected from surface increasing cooling, but it doesn’t work now as the ice has melted from most regions, there is no longer a large amount of ice that will melt with a small change in climate.
2. There is a paper which looked at a tiny bit of the globe using two different satellites 27 years apart for a minuscule 3 month period, manipulated the data and then found a difference in radiation being emitted. This is evidence (and it took some finding to locate this), but I’m less than impressed (read more) also see (this)
3. Otherwise the “evidence” here isn’t evidence but is an argument. First a list of possible drivers is created (avoiding potential causes like solar and known causes like natural variation). Having set up these climate stooges, there is then a step apportioning how much of the apparent warming to allocate to each driver. From this they derive the totally unscientific result that CO2 must cause much more than the real science can support. In essence this is the same argument politicians use if e.g. 25% of the population vote and 15% vote for one party and 10% for another … from which they conclude that 60% of the public support the government, whereas the valid conclusion is that 85% of the electorate decided not to vote for the government.

Other stuff that they say is evidence.

1. Models predict … not science just equations and a computer. Global warming could be responsible …. not science just speculation. Lesser spotted goat toad numbers dropping:  global warming thought to be responsible  …. not science. Assigning a cause which is not testable. To make it science, you need to check e.g. if changes in numbers correlate with climate variability … and even then it could only support the assertion that: “it got warmer”, which is not really in dispute whereas the real question is how much was due to CO2 on which topic the numbers of lesser spotted goat toads** have nothing to offer.

And that about sums it up: I can’t think of a single bit of research that actually links the apparent warming to CO2.

And now for the scientific evidence against:-

General evidence against warming

1. Global temperatures are not rising. There is no significant warming in the last ten years. This is entirely at odds with the IPCC report in 2001 which only spoke about warming.
2. Urban heat, change of instrumentation and general poor quality of instrumentation that makes any change suspect.
3. Coldest June/July in Ireland (and cold here). Coldest winter in a similar period last winter, and cold the winter before and a lack of BBQ summer – individually they can be dismissed, but collectively it’s getting difficult to square this with “the hottest decade ever”.
4. “Analysis Of The Impacts Of Station Exposure On The U.S. Historical Climatology Network Temperatures and Temperature Trends” By Fall Et Al 2011

Evidence against manmade origin of CO2 (new category)

1. Professor Murry Salby, Chair of Climate Science at Macquarie University is reported to be about to publish a paper. Over the last two years he has been looking at C12 and C13 ratios and CO2 levels around the world, and has come to the conclusion that man-made emissions have only a small effect on global CO2 levels. (MORE)

Evidence contrary to massive feedbacks in climate models.

1. Ice cores show CO2 lagged the changes in temperature and therefore was not a cause.
2. Spencer and Braswell, their analysis of  NASA data: “NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing.” (Yahoo)
3. Lindzen and Choi implies that the models are exaggerating climate sensitivity: “warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1°C … This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5°C to 5°C and even more for a doubling of CO2″(paper)
4. Richard P. Allan: This new paper by Richard P. Allan of the University of Reading discovers via a combination of satellite observations and models that the cooling effect of clouds far outweighs the long-wave or “greenhouse” warming effect. While Dessler and Trenberth (among others) claim clouds have an overall positive feedback warming effect upon climate due to the long-wave back-radiation, this new paper shows that clouds have a large net cooling effect by blocking incoming solar radiation and increasing radiative cooling outside the tropics.
5. While all greenhouse models show an increasing warming trend with altitude, peaking around 10 km at roughly two times the surface value, the temperature data from balloons give the opposite result: no increasing warming, but rather a slight cooling with altitude in the tropical zone. (more)
6. CERN physicists conducted a cosmic ray climate experiment that appears to make credible the link between solar activity (sunspots) and global temperature.
7. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found evidence that coal burning plants may actually be cooling the planet. This claim that recent pollution was the cause of colder temperatures, is very much at odds with the claim that the reduction in pollution after the introduction of clean air acts in the 1970s on a global scale had nothing to do with the coincidental apparent rise in temperatures. It may be possible to argue that different types of pollution act in different ways, but as most of it is coal burning I’m entirely sceptical of the selective interpretations of the effects which just happen to match the required groupthink.
8. I’m going to add the paper by Hermann Harde that suggests the radiative forcing using latest HITRAN data is half that of the older HITRAN data used in the climate models. But whilst the author was strong on the spectral data, they clearly weren’t a climate modeller. Worrying the English version hasn’t materialised (it was only available in German).
9. CO2 the cooling gas. The simple fact is that CO2 is a cooling gas. It tends to cool the atmosphere where the CO2 is warmer than the surrounding environment … which high in the atmosphere is the cold of space.
10. Something like 50% of surface heat bypasses the bulk of  possible CO2 blanketing by being taken straight to the edge of the stratosphere by convection (it’s in the climate data!) …. which means that the cooling effect of CO2 is not just an “interesting” aside but it does have a significant effect on the rate of cooling of the atmosphere.
11. Natural climate variability is around 0.1C/decade with a profile near to 1/f noise. At this level, something like 10-20% of randomly produced signals from 1/f noise would appear with the same basic trends as the current temperature record. Given that half the trends would be the other way (cooling), it is very difficult to say anything other than: “the global temperature is not incompatible with natural climate variability”. It is not necessary to explain the temperature signal with weird unproven positive feedbacks.
12. Most Met Office global temperature forecasts were high (until embarrassment stopped them doing them). In essence this is the flip side of one because they kept forecasting warming for an entire decade when it didn’t warm and only about one year did they even the sign right as most years it was well the lowest expected temperature. The point is this shows that climate forecasts don’t work. I.e. the models don’t work. I think I worked out the odds of that happening by chance as 1 in 512 if the models were wright. But as you might expect, all the predictions have mysteriously disappeared so I can’t recheck that statistic.

Evidence showing significant drivers that are not CO2

Vegetation: George Ban-Weiss of the Carnegie institute seems to have found a link between vegetation cover and temperature. In other words, more vegetation (more forests) results in a cooler environment not only locally but globally. I.e. less vegetation warms the environment. According to environmentalists … we’ve been cutting down forests. We’ve certainly been putting more land to farmland which doesn’t have vegetation when ploughed. We now have a plausable explanation for the dramatic change in “urban heating” even when population density in the US changed by a few 10s of people per km. (Carnegie) (WUWT)

Evidence against doomsday effects

1. Global cyclone activity historically lowA research study shows that overall global tropical cyclone activity has decreased to historically low levels during the past 5 years. The researcher demonstrates that much of the variability in tropical cyclone energy during the past 40 years is clearly associated with natural large-scale climate oscillations such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Geophysical Research Letters, doi:10.1029/2011GL047711, 2011
2.  No evidence of an intensifying weather trend. A project looking at climate extremes reported that: “In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years, … So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871.” In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. Source: Wallstreet journal

Evidence that warmists aren’t exactly scientific (not inclusive)

1. Trenberth: “Given that global warming is “unequivocal”, to quote the 2007 IPCC report, the null hypothesis should now be reversed, thereby placing the burden of proof on showing that there is no human influence” [on the climate].
2. The hockey stick: find a proxy for prerecord temperatures, create a translation from the proxy value to temperature that totally understates prerecord temperates, add to an inflated temperature record and pretend that the graph shows anything other than the bias of the creator.
3. unRealclimate.com – real scientists are impartial. They do not run propagandists sites that refuse to print any articles or comments contrary to their religion.
4. Buddy review. The climategate emails revealed a corrupt system whereby peer review was used to prevent contrary work getting published.
5. Manipulation of conference delegates. The climategate emails revealed that “sceptic” scientists were prevented from attending conferences. This is akin to overt racism or religious bigotry. The quality of work wasn’t the issue, just the delegates view on manmade global warming.
6. Preventing publication by sceptics. Again the climategate emails showed that sceptics were actively prevented from being published.
7. Wikipedia. Real scientists do not spend their time editing trash like the wikipedia  content on the climate and certainly do not spend their time attempting to remove all evidence against their religion. E.g. try looking for  anything mentioning that the climate is not currently warming. That is a straight forward fact, it’s not deniable, it is open to interpretation, but the fact it is not currently warming is a fact which is very pertinent to an understanding of the current position on global warming and the failure to mention this simply undermines all credibility of Wikipedia on this subject.
8. The gulf stream “turning off” hoax. There is a small Arctic current which could turn off, but the suggestion the main current in the Atlantic which most people know as the “Gulf stream” could turn off is laughable because it is in fact a current driven by trade winds and as likely to turn off as … I was going to say Niagara falls but isn’t that turned off at night for hydro? (I thought it was funny!)
9. A biologist who claimed that polar bears were drowning because of melting ice has been suspended and is being investigated for scientific misconduct. The details are hazy so here is a link with the other side (i.e. ignoring that misconduct in one area often indicates similar ethics in all areas).
10. Climategate – hiding the decline.
11. Refusals to publish data even though compelled by FOI law.
12. The bogus inquiries which cherry picked the papers to examine to ensure they found no evidence that the authors cherry picked the data.
13. The numerous attempts to silence sceptics. For a list see this website
14. Times Atlas Greenland ice fubar: Death by Wikipedia?

N.B. I’m not even going to mention all the “global warming could … ” be leading to the loss of this or that species or the even less scientific: “models predict” … which is just another way of saying: “my opinion is that ….”

(I reserve the right to make changes if or when I get good suggestions to add.)

**lesser spotted goat toads … a name I made up to represent all the odd species where a change in population levels get linked to global temperatures.

Contributions welcome

… paradoxically I’d particularly welcome suggestions from “warmists” … I was going to say “because its so difficult to find evidence supporting … ” but that will be taken the wrong way. Seriously, I just don’t know where to find scientific evidence or solid scientific argument supporting the warmist case … so if anyone could point me to something concrete (either way) … !