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As I write, the Associated Press reports that: “Talks on a global
pact to fight global warming appeared to make progress late Friday, with some
negotiators telling The Associated Press a deal was close.” The global pact is being hammered out by the COP
(the Conference of the Parties) in Paris. The stated goal is to limit human
CO2 emissions in order to stop global warming. But perhaps they should take a
break. You know, pause. After all,
the Earth has. Global warming stopped 18 years ago—they call it
‘the pause.’ The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
and the media have been building our fears of global catastrophe with claims
of an ever warmer Earth. But guess what? The
very minute this campaign really got started in 1998—with IPCC climate
simulations predicting dramatically accelerated global warming—the Earth stopped warming. And there
is zero controversy about the pause itself. Everybody agrees it is happening. You never heard about it? I think I can explain why. The IPCC, a United Nations organization that brings
together the world’s most powerful governments, claims to have recruited the
world’s best climate scientists, and to have the moral support of a 97%
‘consensus’ of all scientists (the
other 3%, one hears, are getting oil industry bribes). So IPCC climate
simulations—the media remind us almost every day—must be almost certainly
(totally) correct. What could go wrong? The IPCC’s climate simulations assume that tiny
increments of CO2 in the atmosphere lead to whopping rises in temperature. So
these simulations simply had to
predict a sharp acceleration in warming after 1998, because humans were
expected to produce record amounts of CO2. We did produce that—in fact, 1/3
of all man-made ‘greenhouse gases,’ as they call them, were generated in this
period. But the warming stopped... in
1998. That’s a bit of an embarrassment for both the IPCC and the
mainstream media. Perhaps that’s why you didn’t hear about this. And
perhaps that’s why you are still hearing that the Earth is getting (even...)
warmer. And yet even the most alarmist scientific
publications (e.g. Nature) now
confess that a “mysterious” phenomenon is taking place: we are in a
‘global-warming pause’ (or ‘hiatus’)—and we have been for the last 18+ years.
Some argue, of course, that warming will resume (any
time now…). And perhaps it will. But whether or not that happens, one thing
is already clear: the IPCC—and their
media cheerleaders—have been dead wrong for 18+ years. And that suggests
that CO2 does not seem to have quite so dramatic an effect on climate. So here’s the question: Should we agree to overhaul
the world’s energy consumption patterns—and impoverish millions—on the basis
of simulations that have been dead wrong for almost two decades? Perhaps we
should pause. I paused a few years ago when friends of mine got
together to start ‘Environment University’ (Universidad del Medio Ambiente),
out by a beautiful lake not far from Mexico City. The idea was to help
‘change agents’ develop the tools to improve our socio-environmental systems
in order to heal them and make them more resilient. I loved the idea, and
eventually helped them set up the school. At the time, like my friends, I thought the most
important environmental challenge facing the world was global warming. But
then I happened to watch the film documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. The film
interviewed several top climate researchers who vehemently disagreed with the
IPCC’s claims. Stunned, I decided that, for the sake of the new school,
perhaps I should investigate the matter, for here was a controversy where I
had thought there was none. Last year I summarized years of research in my
series The Antarctic Ice Cores and Global Warming,
but most HIR readers have not seen it because it was not sent to the list.
Now, as the COP draws to a close, with the world’s eyes on Paris, it seems
like a good time to hit ‘send.’ Below I summarize my findings, with links to
the various parts of the series that deal with particular issues. The anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis
states that global warming is significantly caused by human activity, namely,
human production of so-called ‘greenhouse gases,’ of which the most important
would be CO2. This hypothesis has been defended on the basis of the following
three pillars: 1)
the
Antarctic ice-core evidence 2) the
‘hockey stick’ temperature reconstruction 3) the
IPCC’s climate models (computer simulations) Each pillar is hollow and crumbles at the merest
push. I briefly explain. With the Antarctic ice-cores, the first pillar, climate
scientists have established a geological record of Earth’s temperatures and
CO2 concentrations going back 650,000 years. An amazing feat. What this
record shows is that at the end of each glaciation, without exception, the
temperatures rise first and only then,
hundreds of years later (800, on average), rise the atmospheric CO2
concentrations. It’s called the ‘CO2 lag.’ The CO2 lag is not consistent with
the hypothesis that CO2 concentrations importantly affect Earth’s
temperatures; it is consistent with the hypothesis that higher temperatures
cause rises in CO2 concentrations (which makes sense, because CO2 is more
soluble in cold than in warm water). But Al Gore and the IPCC reported this evidence backwards: they claimed the ice-core
data showed CO2 concentrations rising first, followed by rises in atmospheric
temperature. It is interesting to speculate whether this was a
mistake (hard to believe; it’s a simple graph) or conscious fraud, but either
way they got it wrong. Out goes the
first pillar. The second pillar is IPCC scientist Michael Mann’s
famous graph, featured prominently in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. The graph showed the temperatures flat for
the last 1000 years and then shooting up sharply in the 20th c. The curve has the shape of a ‘hockey stick.’
This was useful to the IPCC’s claims because the dramatic rise in
temperatures apparent in the graph coincides with a dramatic rise in the
human production of CO2 as ‘fossil fuels’ became our main source of energy.
So the argument became: “Look, we never had such warm temperatures before,
and we had never produced so much CO2; so the two must be related.” The
problem is that we have been this
warm before. In order to produce the ‘hockey stick’ Michael Mann got rid of
the Medieval Warm Period, which paleoclimatologists had established with a
plethora of studies and multiple lines of converging evidence, according to
which the Earth was even warmer than today right around the year 1000, when
the Vikings settled what they called ‘Greenland.’ But these Earth
temperatures were achieved without any burning of ‘fossil fuels.’ The Climategate scandal raised very serious
questions about possible breaches of scientific ethics by Michael Mann and
other important IPCC scientists in the construction of the ‘hockey stick.’
That controversy still rages. What nobody now disputes (except for Michael
Mann) is that the ‘hockey stick’ is wrong. Out goes the
second pillar. The third pillar consists of IPCC climate
simulations. Many global warming stalwarts insist that this is the decisive
evidence, and they take refuge in it whenever anybody highlights the
embarrassments that have knocked down the other two pillars. The problem is
that computer simulations are never evidence.
A computer simulation is a sophisticated way of representing a hypothesis—but
it is still a hypothesis. Thus, if the CO2 appears as a cause of rises in
temperatures in the computer simulations, this is because the simulations assume that CO2 causes rises in
temperature. In order to test that assumption we need to compare the
simulation’s predictions to future temperatures. The IPCC simulations have
failed miserably: they have predicted nothing. For example, they did not predict that for the last 18+
years the world would cease to warm despite record amounts of human-generated
CO2. In addition, the ice-core evidence is a direct refutation of
the assumption of a significant CO2 impact on world temperatures. Out goes the
third pillar. What remains? Nothing. The claims about the 97% of scientists that agree with the
IPCC were always false. As you might expect, because there is so
far not one iota of evidence supporting the anthropogenic global warming
hypothesis. The climate variability is natural. In the absence of evidence, the IPCC and its
cheerleaders in the media and elsewhere have resorted to telling us each week
that it is getting very warm. This is not even true: it hasn’t warmed in 18+
years. But even if it were, warming by itself is not an argument for changes in energy policy if our energy
consumption is not responsible for the warming. Neither can claims of bigger
and more frequent hurricanes, or bigger floods, or longer droughts, even if
true, make such an argument. After all, climate has always changed, all by
itself, so the mere fact that it changes, even if it scares us, cannot
justify a costly human energy overhaul. (Why make a bad situation worse?) HIR’s series on global warming addresses all of
these issues, and also investigates: 1) the
integrity of scientific institutions that deal with climate science (here, and here); and 2) the relationship between the media and the IPCC scientists 3) the effect of the research money doled out by the IPCC
governments in order to explain why the public has been
misinformed on such a massive scale.
We hope this series, and the evidence it presents,
will become a useful tool for stirring debate and critical thinking. If you find these questions interesting, and you
would like to start at the beginning, then click here (or scroll below for an overview).
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