The Logarithmic Effect of Carbon Dioxide Posted on March 10th, 2010
by David Archivald, Watts Up With That?
The greenhouse gasses keep the Earth 30° C warmer than it would otherwise be without them in the atmosphere, so instead of the average surface temperature being -15° C, it is 15° C. Carbon dioxide contributes 10% of the effect so that is 3° C. The pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 ppm. So roughly, if the heating effect was a linear relationship, each 100 ppm contributes 1° C. With the atmospheric concentration rising by 2 ppm annually, it would go up by 100 ppm every 50 years and we would all fry as per the IPCC predictions.
But the relationship isn’t linear, it is logarithmic. In 2006, Willis Eschenbach posted this graph on Climate Audit showing the logarithmic heating effect of carbon dioxide relative to atmospheric concentration:
And this graphic of his shows carbon dioxide’s contribution to the whole greenhouse effect:
I recast Willis’ first graph as a bar chart to make the concept easier to understand to the layman:
Lo and behold, the first 20 ppm accounts for over half of the heating effect to the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm, by which time carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas. One thing to bear in mind is that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 got down to 180 ppm during the glacial periods of the ice age the Earth is currently in (the Holocene is an interglacial in the ice age that started three million years ago).
Plant growth shuts down at 150 ppm, so the Earth was within 30 ppm of disaster. Terrestrial life came close to being wiped out by a lack of CO2 in the atmosphere. If plants were doing climate science instead of us humans, they would have a different opinion about what is a dangerous carbon dioxide level.
Some of the IPCC climate models predict that temperature will rise up to 6° C as a consequence of the doubling of the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm. So let’s add that to the graph above and see what it looks like:
The IPCC models water vapour-driven positive feedback as starting from the pre-industrial level. Somehow the carbon dioxide below the pre-industrial level does not cause this water vapour-driven positive feedback. If their water vapour feedback is a linear relationship with carbon dioxide, then we should have seen over 2° C of warming by now.
Climate alarmists feeling more heat Posted on February 22nd, 2010
by Lorne Gunter, Edmonton Journal
The empire has begun to strike back.
It was only a matter of time before the climate alarmists got their feet back under them. There is too much at stake politically, too many careers and reputations on the line, too much grant money for researchers and donations for 
environmental groups, too much green-tax revenue for governments, too much prestige in academic circles at risk for those who have asserted for more than a decade that man is causing damaging climate change to slink away in defeat.
So it is of little surprise that in the past couple of weeks many alarmists have begun asserting that despite all the revelations of the past three months about how key climate scientists and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have corrupted the scientific process in an obsessive drive to prove that climate change is real, nothing has undermined the “fact” that the Earth is warming dangerously.
Since late November, the True Believers have watched in stunned silence as the foundation of the climate-change theory has suffered one body blow after another.
First it was the revelation that scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in England — perhaps the most influential of the three sources the United Nations relies on for most of its climate data — were fudging their data to show more warming in recent decades than had actually occurred.
At the same time, these scientists were doing their best to upend the peer-review process at major scientific journals so scientists who disagreed with them would be unable to get published. And they were withholding their raw data and computer codes from other scientists and government investigators so no one else could validate or debunk their research by attempting to replicate it.
The alarmists have recently begun to rally around Phil Jones, the discredited head of the CRU. Nearly two week ago, Jones gave an interview to the BBC in which he admitted there had been no “statistically significant” global warming in the past 15 years.
Some news sources and global-warming skeptics overplayed Jones’s exact words. Last Sunday’s Daily Mail in Britain, for instance, claimed Jones had performed a “U-turn” in his claims for warming.
Jones, in fact, continues to insist the Earth is warming. But what he now admits is that it is not warming that rapidly (just 0.12 C per decade) and not “at the 95-per-cent significance level,” the level needed to assert statistical certainty.
He also now allows that there may have been other periods in the past 1,000 years that were as warm as or warmer than today.
While this is not a complete about-face, it is hardly business-as-usual, as the alarmist would have us believe. Even if Jones is still insisting that global warming is happening, there is now a measure of doubt in his claims that never existed before. What makes Jones’s words significant is not that they reveal some 180-degree change in his thinking, but that for the first time he admits significant uncertainty in the so-called settled science of climate change.
If leading climate scientists had spent the past 15 years saying the warming they were seeing wasn’t all that significant or that there remained many uncertainties about predictions of future climate or that some pre-industrial periods had been warmer, would there have been a Kyoto accord or a Copenhagen Earth summit? Would Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth have made $100 million? Would environmentalists have been asked to write government policy? Would there be any support at all for green taxes and carbon capture and other measures aimed at curbing carbon dioxide emissions?
Likely not.
Even though alarmists are correct that Jones has not recanted his earlier belief in the warming theory, he has undergone a significant change.
Or take the assertion, recently very common among alarmists, that NASA’s climate scientists are still finding global warming occurring, so it must still be happening.
Frankly, NASA’s climate scientists have hardly more credibility than the CRUs or IPCCs.
NASA is another of the three repositories of climate data relied upon by the UN, but three years ago a significant error was found in its records. In the 1990s, NASA had begun keeping temperature records differently, but it had failed to adjust all its pre-1990s records (about 120 years’ worth) to match the new method. When it reconciled its old records to its new method, recent warm years ceased to be as remarkable. For instance, 1934 replaced 1998 as the warmest year. And 1921 became the third-warmest.
In 2008, NASA substituted September’s global temperatures for October’s (they claimed accidentally), thereby distorting upward the worldwide averages for the fall of that year — an otherwise rather cool year.
And most recently, NASA has been shown to be cherry-picking the Earth stations it uses to calculate global average. It has been eliminating stations in colder locations (polar, rural, mountainous) and over-relying on warmer ones (mid-latitudes, urban).
Alarmists may want to believe this changes nothing, but that simply makes them the new deniers.
Hat Tip: ClimateChangeFraud
The Four ‘Gates’ of the IPCC Posted on January 27th, 2010
First there was Climate Gate, showing that the peer review process has descended into a criminal farce of scientific malpractice where adjusting and hiding data was de-rigueur. Hello Fraud. ClimateGate also spread to the US, where 75% of worldwide data is systematically ignored or “adjusted” until it tells the right story.
Then there was PachauriGate, showing that the man in charge of the IPCC was chairman of boards of companies that profit handsomely as the scare-factor is ramped up.
Along comes GlacierGate: about the IPCC “accidentally” using a WWF report instead of peer reviewed science papers. After calling a 60 page Indian Govt report on glaciers “voodoo science” they were forced to apologize for that “one paragraph that was wrong”. Then Donna LeFramboise in just one day of hunting, found 16 other references in the IPCC 4th report to the “scientific journal” called “WWF”. Proving that really, the big safety-mechanism of the IPCC reputation was not in its exhaustive reviews but was in the way it made its documents so big, so dull and so unreadable, that hardly anyone actually … reads them. Call it the thousand-page-cloak-of-invisibility.
Camouflage for poor science, poor standards, bad logic, and too many vested interests to name.
Now there is AmazonGate. The IPCC fabricates disastrous claims about the Amazon forest, and references a document written by activists that doesn’t even support the claim.
Will 40% of the Amazonian forests react drastically to even a slight change in rainfall? Is there a tipping point for the Amazon? The reference turns out to be an Australian forest specialist, who works for not just the WWF, but also for the World Conservation Union, and who according to his CV mostly works in Australia and Asia, and not the Amazon. His co-author is a journalist who’s worked on Greenpeace campaigns and for the WWF. Then, to top it off, the assertions that the IPCC attributes to them can’t even be found in the report that they wrote.
All Gates lead to humiliation and embarrassment for the followers of the great cult of the carbonistas.
And we haven’t yet got even close to the scandal of the faulty assumptions that led to the faulty models and alarmist predictions in the first place, or the even bigger scandal of how the observational evidence that proves the assumptions false is and was ignored by the IPCC.
LCCC Professor Debunks BBC Global Warming Experiment Posted on January 23rd, 2010
by Aaron Turpen, Cheyenne Green Living Examiner
Back in November, the NOAA published a simple science experiment on their website for teachers to use. The experiment was made to simply demonstrate how CO2 can retain heat. The experiment was deeply flawed and was later removed from their website, but not before the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) got ahold of it.
In a live event on television in the UK, the BBC recreated the experiment on December 17th, in the midst of the “Climategate” scandal that was also centered in England (specifically the University of East Anglia). The experiment was done before a live audience, who sat idly by and asked no questions.
But someone else, halfway across the world, was watching. His name? Professor of Physics Kevin Kilty of the Laramie County Community College (LCCC).
Kilty had re-created the experiment with students in the lab at LCCC, originally, using the NOAA guidelines. Not to prove global warming, but to show how bad scientific method leads to poor results. A short writeup titled “A Silly Experiment About CO2” was written by Professor Kilty on the experiment, showing pictures of the process in action along with commentary as to where the flaws are and why they are important.
Quoted on Andrew Watts website (WattsUpWithThat), Professor Kilty says, regarding the BBC experiment:
You can see that the two bottles start at temperatures of 32+ C. Perhaps the house is this warm, we don’t keep ours this warm, but more likely they have run the experiment and know pretty well in advance how it will turn out. I tried to see from the size of the spot on the bottle if one or other is obviously closer to the lamp–I can’t– but what really matters is the thermocouple, of course. The NOAA description in “its a gas, man” looks like the epitome of careful research in comparison.
This is just kid science. The BBC did their best. Not as good as the ten-year old of a couple of weeks ago, though. It is funny that the journalist sells this as “proof” of global warming early in the sequence.
Kilty’s version of the experiment is much more scientifically rigorous and, impressively, disproves not only the BBC’s conclusion but also the conclusion that NOAA hoped to derive from their schoolhouse plans.
As he says at the end of his writeup of the experiment:
“This is an important lesson about the value of skepticism in climate change research, observations, and publicity. If X, Y, and Z cause B just as readily as does A, then what allows one to claim A causes B?”
Bravo, professor. Well said.
The Climate is Changing Posted on January 13th, 2010
When I say the climate is changing, I do not mean, as many people do, that man-made global warming is destroying Planet Earth. I mean that the politics of climate change is changing rapidly all over the globe. Al Gore’s moment has come and gone.
In the United States, Democrats, nervously facing midterm elections, are calling on President Obama to jettison the cap-and-trade bills before the Senate. In Canada, the emissions-trading scheme—another term for cap-and-trade—is stalled in legislative limbo. In Britain, Tories are coming out against David Cameron’s green stance.
In the European Union, cap-and-trade has been the victim of fraudulent traders and the carbon price has more than halved to $18.50 per ton. In France, the Constitutional Council has blocked President Nicolas Sarkozy’s tax on carbon emissions that was set to take effect in the New Year.
In Copenhagen, meanwhile, the United Nations’ climate-change summit went up in smoke. And in Mexico City later this year hopes for any verifiable, enforceable and legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gases—and to bring in developing nations such as China and India that were, insanely, omitted from the Kyoto protocol in 1997—are a chimera.
Add to this that Washington was buried by record-breaking snowfalls last month, that hurricane activity is at a 30-year low in the U.S., that London is bracing itself for its coldest winter in decades, and that there has still been no recorded global warming this century, and it is no wonder public skepticism is rising across the world.
Nowhere is the changing climate more evident than in Australia. Last month, the Senate voted down the Labor Government’s legislation to implement an emissions-trading scheme. Polls show most Aussies oppose the complicated cap-and-trade system if China and India continue to chug along the smoky path to prosperity. The center-right Liberal-led opposition, moreover, is now led by Tony Abbott, a culture warrior who has described man-made global warming in language unfit to print in a family newspaper and cap-and-trade as “a great big tax to create a great big slush fund to provide politicized handouts, run by a giant bureaucracy.”
Until Mr. Abbott’s election as opposition leader last month, the climate debate in Australia had been conducted in a heretic-hunting, anti-intellectual atmosphere. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd claimed that climate change is the “greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time.” In clear breach of the great liberal anti-communist Sidney Hook’s rule of controversy—”Before impugning an opponent’s motives, answer his arguments”—Mr. Rudd linked “world government conspiracy theorists” and “climate-change deniers” to “vested interests.” Much of the media, business and scientific establishment deemed it blasphemy that anyone dare question his Labor Party’s grand ambitions.
Australians had heard a lot of science, much of it poorly explained. But the “dismal science” had been conspicuously absent from the climate debate. There was very little serious analysis of the economic consequences of climate change: What choices did we have to mitigate its effects, and how much would these choices cost us? Labor ministers had emitted a lot of hot air about global warming and the urgency with which resource-rich Australia (which accounts for only 1.4% of global emissions) must act.
All of this has now utterly changed: Australia’s debate has entered a new phase, one that goes beyond the religious fervor and feel-good gestures that had held sway all too often. Suddenly, political strategists are thinking the unthinkable: far from presaging an electoral debacle that was inevitable under Mr. Abbott’s green predecessor Malcolm Turnbull, the issue could be a godsend for conservatives Down Under.
Already, Mr. Abbott—an Anglophile, Rhodes scholar, patron saint of Australian conservatives and protégé of former Prime Minister John Howard—is gaining ground in the polls. In their first test at the ballot box since they killed the government’s climate legislation last month, his Liberal Party recorded impressive victories in by-elections in Sydney and Melbourne—confounding the conventional wisdom that opposition to cap-and-trade will damage a center-right party in metropolitan seats.
In this environment, Mr. Abbott deserves praise for persuading Australia’s conservatives to fight Labor on climate change—even when the liberal wing of his own party would happily bow to Mr. Rudd. Not only will he raise the temperature over the inevitable higher costs in energy, transport and groceries under the next tax—and thus appeal to Labor’s working-class and coal mining and other energy-intensive constituencies—Mr. Abbott will also radiate the technological optimism that has characterized the human species since time immemorial. His case is not an appeal to do nothing, but to avoid doing something stupid. And unilateral Australian action in a post-Copenhagen world would be stupid: Economic Pain For No Environmental Gain. Not a bad slogan during an election scare campaign.
To be sure, Mr. Rudd remains politically popular on the back of a strong local economy that has weathered the global financial storm. But as the changing climate shows, Mr. Abbott is tapping into a more skeptical mood about climate change. If he wins the federal election later this year, Australia’s opposition leader will be a role model to conservative skeptics around the world.
