Global-Warming Crusade

by George Giles
by George Giles
Recently by George Giles: Rotten Log

The Global-Warming Crusade has been prosecuted vociferously for more than 20 years. Far too many scientists have jumped on this politically hot topic and its corollary public-grant-funding potential. An intragovernmental body has been created for this. This entity called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been created to lend legitimacy to this fraud. Taxpayers from all over the globe have been, and will continue to be bilked to put up this large and slick monument to questionable science. The site has made copious amounts of material available for free. By all means download it, don't buy any of these ponderous tomes; save some trees.

I have been a critic of this effort for almost 20 years. Global Warming is a massive threat to humanity, so the story goes, such that only massive and dramatic government intervention can save us from its "effects." This intervention would come as socialist policies designed to cripple the economies of capitalist countries whose carbon dioxide emissions (it is alleged) are turning the planet in a pressure cooker.

My criticism takes two fronts of argument: firstly what mankind can do with all our technological wizardry is next to nothing compared to the immense forces of the natural world and secondly because I actually have some expertise in these types of mathematical models. I was critical of Al Gore's award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth before it was even released. I have offered a criticism that is both elementary to understand, and very simple that easily shows basic flaws in the data. 

Ironically the world's foremost expert on Atmospheric Physics, MIT Professor Dr. Richard Lindzen has not participated in this charade (IPCC). He is a vigorous and vocal critic of this IPCC hype. Many others have realized that this farce was nothing more than a crude attempt to implement socialism and control of the economy via environmental regulation based on mendacious, uncritical, and fundamentally wrong interpretations of this "science."

I eschewed these models based upon years spent performing mathematical modeling on a variety of topics, one of them being, atmospheric physics. Lots of people are now recognizing that Global Warming does not exist. The temperature peaked in 1998 and things have been getting colder in the intervening years.

 A bold theory has emerged from Dr. Henrik Svensmark that is actually experimentally verifiable. Dr. Svensmark's thesis is that cloud formation is a much more important climate driver for temperature change than carbon dioxide–type "greenhouse gases" whose concentrations change in the parts per million. It is bold because it is simple and easily verified.

Almost every human being has experience with temperature changes on a cloudy day. Cloudy days are inevitably cooler than sunny days. The answer is obvious: less of the sun's heat radiation gets to the surface. Clouds also serve to reflect significant amounts of the sun's radiation back into space.

What controls cloud formation? Global-warming advocates will say it is evaporation from the surface and the oceans. Any school boy can demonstrate the flaw in this argument. Pour water on your skin on a warm day and the evaporation cools the skin as it removes the heat of vaporization from the surface of the body. Humans depend on this (sweating) heat removal mechanism to survive. Thus warm temperatures will serve as a buffer for average temperature change if evaporation is considered as a forcing function. 

Dr. Svensmark's excellent book The Chilling Stars exposits that ionized and high-energy particle absorption in the atmosphere is the pre-dominant mechanism for cloud formation. He has an impressive amount of detailed scientific evidence to prove this fact. It is based on literally hundreds, if not thousands, of independent experiments. 

If you only buy one book on the global-warming/climate-change debate this is the one to procure. The science he lays out is compelling and is valid over time frames of hundreds of millions of years. Most of the global-warming debate centers on ice core experiments that look back in time for only a few hundred thousand years. This model has many flaws because the results are very sensitive to the mechanism of specimen collection and the particular gas analysis tools chosen. 

High-Energy Physics is one of the most accurate scientific theories to date. A primary tool in this endeavor is the cloud chamber. The cloud chamber is a controlled volume of water vapor such that high-energy particles enter the chamber and leave trails characteristic of the type of particle and the energy of the particle. Cloud chambers have been used for more than a century and their physics is long-established and well-understood. Most detectors in high-energy physics derive much of their design from cloud change–type measurements. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator have detectors based upon these types of scattering principles. 

The trail of high-energy particles in the cloud chamber show, unequivocally that high-energy particles streaming (what physicist's call flux) into the atmosphere form clouds in greater and lesser amounts corresponding to hotter and colder epochs of the planet's history. 

What is the source of this particle flux? Threefold mainly, some stream from the sun (spaceweather.com), some from inside our galaxy the Milky Way, and the rest come from outside of the Milky Way from the myriad and incredibly violent events like black hole formation, accretion disk acceleration, magnetic flux tube formation and destruction, magnetar and quasar jets, etc. We live in a very docile and calm neighborhood in an immense volume of conditions very hostile to life as we understand it.

There is nothing that can be done about any of these three sources (except perhaps to call out the Oh-Oh-Squad); they stream down from all directions around the earth as they will. Most of these were created billions of years ago and are just now reaching the Earth. The conclusion then is that if Dr. Svensmark's theory is correct than global-warming/cooling is just another of Nature's characteristics that man can do little to control, so a debate and policy changes based upon this are feckless. The most rational thing we can do about climate change is to stop wasting taxpayer's money on dubious scientific programs that produce questionable data that lead to a foregone conclusion: socialism.

In closing let's review some unpleasant, but accepted historical facts. Some 600 million years ago the Earth was completely covered in ice that was a mile thick on average, No life existed here. The sun then, was about 10% younger than it is now so it was still on the same stellar evolutionary rung as currently. Only 100 million years later the snowball planet melted and life became abundant. This tells us that the planet can freeze, and the freeze can kill everything. Just 50 years ago the scientific consensus was that global cooling was the expected trend for the future not warming. An ice age on the scale of the one just 20,000 years ago caused glaciers to form as far south as Tennessee. Canada was completely smothered as were much of Russia and the northern half of Europe.

This most recent ice age would have dramatic effects on the human population; billions would die as food production plummeted. The planet can support less than 10% of the current population with subsistence farming as the technology of the day. Not to mention the fact that the most productive farmland on the planet would now be glaciated exacerbating this trend.

On the other hand what does a slight amount of global warming portend? The North Pole might completely melt. A significant part of the Antarctic ice shelf might also melt. This would raise average sea levels slightly. Oceans cover 2/3 of the planet's surface; the average depth of the ocean is about a mile. A rise in sea level of say 10 feet (much larger than expected) would change the shoreline for a lot of real estate that was put too close to the water anyway. It would not make much difference to mankind's ability to survive. Cropland would not be massively destroyed. Florida real estate would take a beating, but then it was never a good idea to overpopulate what is essentially a large sand bar.

If you go to a farm that is more than 100 years old you will almost never find that the farmhouse is in the valley or on the shoreline. Farmers were much too smart to make that mistake. They built on hilltops! Why? They learned the hard way about shifting shorelines, water and what it can do to your life and livelihood.

In closing let's just stop wasting breath on global warming, the science is of such poor a quality that it should be ignored. It is at its heart a mendacious attempt designed to strip prosperity from millions that have it and billions more that want it.

"Global-warming Political Science" is the product of an affluent society that allows a spoiled rich brat like Al Gore to get a Nobel Prize for telling un-truths. The American people fired him! He is currently unemployed and for a good reason; he has no job skills of any value, as would many of the "scientists" prosecuting the global-warming crusade if the market were free to choose.

We cannot predict weather accurately for more than a week, why should we allow the same predictions to be accepted for all of the future? The answer is we should not.

October 26, 2009

George Giles [send him mail] is the founder of the Gonzo School of Economics, the radical branch of Austrian Economic Theory. He was the youngest Republican ever elected in 1972 at age 17. You could be elected at age 17 if the office was not assumed until after age 18. It only took 3 months of local GOP meetings to become a virulent Libertarian ever after.

Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

The Best of George Giles