The Current State of Climate Science

Let's just go over a few of the things we know with certainty, some of the claims that have been pressed (defended only by the notion that there exists a scientific "consensus" that they are true) in the last 40 years, and some open theories that have not fully been addressed in our attempt to understand where climate science is today. Stephanie S's review of "Fallen Angels" opens the door to some questions as to our current state of understanding that should probably be addressed for those interested in picking up this story - another interest anti-AGW book to read is "Fear" by Michael Crichton, BTW, just FWIW.

Carbon Dioxide Facts:

Carbon Dioxide is a trace gas that makes up roughly 0.038% of the atmosphere today. It has one important property that has caused it to vault into the limelight in the last few decades. Its atomic structure (an electric dipole with positive charge bias on one side and negative charge bias on the other) gives it the ability to absorb certain wavelengths of light energy and covert that energy into rotation and vibration (in other words...it heats up when it is struck by light rays with the proper energy). This property happens to express itself most strongly in the intfrared spectrum, whereas visible light passes through it unaffected. This means solar energy hitting the Earth (maximized in the visible spectrum), is allowed to strike the ground, get converted in infrared light (heating the ground and the air immediately above the ground), and then the infrared light may be absorbed by CO2 (along with water vapor, methane, and a few other trace gasses). That secondary absorption heats the atmosphere and that heat is emitted both out into space and back down to the ground, producing a warmer ground than would otherwise be possible without greenhouse gases. Lacking in such important trace gases, our planet would be intolerably cold and covered in ice (with an average surface temperature of about 0 degrees F).

CO2 makes up 380 parts per million (volume) of the average sample of atmospheric gases. By contract, the far more prevalent water vapor, which plays several vital roles in driving the Earth's weather and climate, exists in concentrations as high as 1-2% (by volume) in tropical regions but still larger than 380 ppmv in polar desert regions. In fact, of all the greenhouse gases that may potentially impact planetary temperature, CO2 represents about 4% of the relevant volume.

CO2 concentrations have indeed steadily increased since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Our best measurements from the Hawaii Observatory (chosen so as to avoid immediately proximal contamination of the air samples taken by industry), show that CO2 concentrations have risen by around 40% since 1850. If you heavily smooth the trend line in global average temperatures over the same period, there appears to be a weak correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature, which very loosely fits the greenhouse gas theory.

However, if you take the globally average temperature estimates derived from paleoclimate proxies like del O18 (the rate of change of the concentration of a certain isotope of oxygen in marine sediments and the air bubbles within ice core samples), you find that planetary temperature changes appear to occur BEFORE CO2 changes to match, not after. For example, as the Earth warmed near the end of the Cretacius (incidentally, at this time, the Earth's eocsystem flourished with far more variety of life than presently exists today, the Earth itself was covered in lush, productive rain forests and even in the polar regions, deciduous temperature forests dominated the landscape...there was no frozen water anywhere on Earth other than on mountain peaks in winter), CO2 rose slowly as well, but there was a definite lag time and CO2 concentrations actually peaked significantly after the planet began to cool following the K/T extinction boundary which was likely caused either by a geological disaster or by a comet impact.

The ocean is the world's largest reservoir of CO2. There is far...far more CO2 embedded in the ocean than there is in the atmosphere or in the fossil fuels climate alarmists are so worried about us burning and thus lofting trapped CO2 into the air...we're talking thousands and thousands of times as much of the stuff locked away in the water. As the ocean warms, it becomes less dense and the solubility of the water to CO2 and other trapped gasses increases (the same way that the atmosphere can't hold as much water vapor when it's cooler and more dense), implying that as the planet warms, the ocean should take up CO2 and thus cancel the greenhouse affect caused by said CO2 over time. This would have the affect of making the ocean more acidic, which could be hazardous to marine life, but it should be noted that the oceans teamed with life in times when atmospheric CO2 was as high as 3% of the total volume of air (that's 2 orders of magnitude more CO2!). In fact, recent studies have found that increased acidification of the ocean may actually be helping some species of mollusks and crustaceans contrary to the theory that shell-bearing critters and corals would be unable to grown shells properly.

The fact of the matter is, all current scientific inquiry has lead to mixed results on how increased atmospheric CO2 will impact the terrestrial biosphere - there certainly is no consensus that global-warming and higher CO2 levels would be bad for plant life (and history suggests otherwise). Nor is there any evidence that our current ecosystems are likely to suffer from a failure to adapt to climate shifts. Also note that during human history and long before we began burning fossil fuels other than sporadic forest clearing efforts, CO2 levels have been estimated as significantly higher than today's concentrations.

There is also no consensus as to whether the greenhouse effect itself is likely to be exacerbated by a positive feedback or countered by a negative feedback process (feedbacks are secondary affects from a physical climate forcing like increased solar radiation or a doubling of CO2 which, themselves, cause changes in the climate system...for example, if you heat the ocean, sea ice should melt and decrease the planetary albedo (ice is very reflective, ocean is an almost perfect absorber), thus further warming the ocean - that would be an example of a positive feedback). Recent satellite telemetry suggests that as the Earth gets warmer, it radiates more energy into space, whereas all current climate models do the reverse (the heat becomes trapped and less gets emitted into space).

Why You Shouldn't Trust the Temperature Record

We see the same two or three graphs of global average surface temperature parroted by the media, by the international panel on climate change, and by climate scientists at every opportunity. They all show a fluctuating but steadily warming global temperature, they all begin around 1850, they all present average as the temperature from the last 30 years or so (usually 1960 to 1990), and they're all so full of invalid methods, assumptions, and hiding of the uncertainty that no one should trust them implicitly.

The data we have all spawns from essentially one international source database called the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN)...national meteorology offices donate their most reliable station data to the main database where post-processing occurs to try to make sense of the noise. Each climate research unit (the US National Climate Data Center, the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, and the Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia University in Britain are the main three) has their own proprietary (and generally not well documented) method for doing this, but the most common approach involves four main steps:

1) Take the data for a given station and bin it into monthly piles to get an average temperature for each month (this helps eliminate the problem of missing observations as they tend to get averaged out...in theory). Find how that monthly observation compares to the average temperature for that month for all of the years in the climate record.

2) Throw out any stations that don't have a long enough temperature record to be considered reliable statistically or that have too many missing months.

3) Take each monthly observations and compare them to the closest X number of stations in the GHCN data set and "smear" the anomalies (so that individual stations can't deviate by large amounts from the surrounding cluster of stations...this is done with some interpolation and some stepwise "corrections" to the data when its time series does not appear to conform to the overall shape of the surrounding stations' time series. The justification for this is that frequently the local conditions around a thermometer change in ways that bias the recorded temperatures or the instrument itself is moved to a new location and you want to try to homogenize the data to prevent stuff like that from creeping in and confusing your answers.

4) Take the homogenized data and interpolate it to a grid that represents the entire globe from about 1000-1500 individual stations.

Statistically, this is a very dubious process. Firstly, homogenization only works if the stations closest to the one you're correcting have similar climates (you need a dense network of thermometers and that is done away with in step 2 when we throw out about 75% of the potential reporting sites we have because they don't last long enough or there are a lot of missing reports). Even then, there is an implicit assumption that the affects of human activity aren't globally relevant. One documented influence of humanity on the surface temperatures is the urban heat island. Low albedo pavement and metal replaces green spaces, anthropogenic heat from cars, people and industry fills the air, and the urban canopy reduces surface wind speeds, thus prevents the air from efficiently mixing. All of those things lead to significant warming in and around areas with high population density. The urban heat island affect is well documented and understood by meteorologists, but climatologists dismiss its' importance in the global temperature data sets. The reason I bring it up here is that the urban heat island is a real physical explanation for a difference in the temperature trend between an urban site and an upwind rural site. Meaning smearing the trends makes no physical sense.

But apart from the problems I have with this way of calculating global surface temperature averages, there is the problem of uncertainty. Scientists are expected at all times to respect and fully account for the uncertainty in their measurements. However, with full knowledge that the uncertainty for a single temperature measurement is 0.5 C (roughly) if it's a mercury bulb or 0.2 C if it's a digital thermocouple, and knowing that you introduce MORE uncertainty the more you smash temperature records together (not less as the IPCC and the various government agencies claim)...and more uncertainty still once you start manhandling the data with post-processing schemes...and even more uncertainty once you realize how variable the conditions around these thermometers and how prevailing wind can change the expected biases of a thermometer if it is close to an urban area where a downwind position would warm the reading (for example)...how the heck can GISS, as one example, claim the error in the global average temperature estimates is +/- 0.05 C?! I would submit that the uncertainty is aty least as large as the current observed warming since 1850 (0.8 C)...and that's probably conservative.

Only One Explanation for the Warming?

We've dealt with what is known about the greenhouse affect and the possible natural dangers or benefits of increased human generated CO2. We've dealt with the data itself and the complex manipulations that go into producing the tidy looking and overconfident graphs you see published everywhere. Now, let's tackle the third and final crucial pillar of the anthropogenic global warming argument. When climate modelers attempted to explain global warming, so goes the story, they couldn't find any other way to replicate the warming trend of the last 30 years in particular without attributing an aggressive climate forcing term to the doubling of CO2 (in other words...they told their models - in the computer code that makes them work - that as CO2 concentration increases, a warming of X degrees must occur). This, they claim, is proof that AGW is the only logical explanation for the recent warmth. But let's list some of the other theories that have yet to be conclusively rejected by rigorous science.

- Changes in low cloud cover not accurately depicted in global climate models that occur in natural cycles related to the temperature of the north and south Pacific and north Atlantic ocean basins may fully or partially explain all of the temperature changes we've observed. In the Pacific, a natural variability in sea-surface temperatures occurring on 20-40 year time scales known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation may be driving changes in the amounts of low level strato-cumulus cloud formations and these clouds may be altering the planetary albedo and the radiation budget of the lower atmosphere enough to explain much of the variability in global average temperatures. In the Atlantic, a similar signal called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation occurs, but it is not exactly in phase with the PDO...from 1992 to 2006, the PDO and the AMO were both in the warm phase...a combination that has not occurred for so many consecutive years in the brief window of recorded history. The PDO is strongly cold now and the AMO is expected to turn cold in another decade or so, FWIW.

- Solar/climate variability is probably not limited to changes in the total amount of energy reaching the Earth. Climate modelers point to the relative small changes in total solar irradiance as evidence that the sun cannot be causing climatic shifts on the time scales we've experienced in the last century. However, there are now many anecdotal pieces of evidence that the 11 year sunspot cycle (more sunspots indicate a hotter sun with more changes in its' magnetic field lines, and this also changes the solar wind that reaches Earth) correlates very strongly with seemingly unrelated Earth bound decadal climate variability. For example, concentrations of trace metals in marine sediments in the Cariago Basin show a perfect 11 (+/- 2) year correlation with sunspot activity...and this seems to be explained by a similarly perfect cycle in the average summer position of the Atlantic Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (a band of thunderstorms that occurs where the tropical trade winds collide). A careful inspection of the El Nino Southern Oscillation reveals that high intensity Nino events (Either El Nino or La Nina) seem to occur during solar peaks and valleys and not in between. Also note that, looking beyond the 11 year sunspot cycle and into the longer term variability in the intensity of solar maxima (the peaks in each 11 year cycle), we note a much stronger correlation between global average temperature rates of change and the accumulated solar activity (if there's a large stretch of very active solar maxima, the planet warms, if you have two weak cycles in a row, the planet cools) than there is between global average temperature and CO2 concentration. And then there's the Tropical Accumulated Cyclonic Energy (ACE) index...calculated since the dawn of the satellite era in 1978. ACE correlates very strongly with solar variability. Hurricanes get worse when the sun is active.

- Given that the primary climate driver has historically been ocean currents (for example, the reason this planet used to be continuously very warm and then suddenly started having an unstable climate oscillating between ice ages and warm interglacials is likely to be the opening of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the North Passage in the Atlantic Basin (the area around Labrador and Greenland), it is natural to wonder if oceanic circulations about which we know very little that occur on very long timescales might be driving this climate shift and not us.

Those are just the first three big theories. The main point being that we know practically nothing about natural climate variability because we've only got real measurements for 150 years of history and reliable ones for about 50 years. Our proxy records are all over the place...in fact one of the major complaints in the ongoing ClimateGate scandal relates to a trick climatologists were forced to use to make one of their tree ring proxy time series fit with their assumptions. Michael Mann - one of the largest players in the global politics of climate change - actually FLIPS his proxy time series of they show a negative correlation with other proxies. In other words, if it doesn't fit, he just flips it so it will. The sane position is to admit you know far less than you'd like to about the climate and commit to studying it more...not to pretend your climate models have considered every possible variable when I can name three just off the top of my head that they do NOT include that probably should be. Arrogance and science don't mix.

So what do we have here...

1) They claim the science of greenhouse gases is physically settled based on lab experiments. It isn't settled and the opposition to the idea that 0.03% of the total atmosphere could possibly have the large impacts they claim is steadily rising.

2) They claim the temperature record can be calculated with high confidence. It cannot...any good scientist would be aware of the uncertainty in the measurement, the problems with their homogenization techniques they use, and the devastatingly unscientific ways in which temperature have been measured in the past...not to mentioned the larges portions of the world that do not have thermometers on them and the increasingly important role of the urban heat island affect in throwing off surface temperature measurements.

3) They claim their models have accounted for all of the significant sources of natural variability and the only way they can get those models to produce the warming of the late 20th century is to include CO2 as a warm climate forcing. Those very models have busted badly on all of their predictions. It's not warmer now than it was 10 years ago...it's now beginning to cool slightly (excluding the affects of this most recent El Nino event). The reason their models are busting on their decadal climate forecasts is exactly the reason they argue - NATURAL VARIABILITY. They say "the trend is still up except for this little downward wobble...it's just natural variability"...I can point to three natural variability drivers that help to explain the recent cooling physically. The sun is currently in one of the longest inactive periods in the last half century...a down turn in solar activity that was supposed to end in late 2007 is still ongoing and shows no signs of ending. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation has turned negative, leading to an increase in cloud cover in the North and South Pacific, and thus a higher planetary albedo (satellites have indeed measured a brightening of the Earth in the last two years). There has also been an increase in volcanic activity in the Arctic, which has a net cooling affect on the planet at the surface due to the release of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which causes a net warming way up there and this forces a cooling beneath. Isn't it more logical to note that if natural variability can cause a trend your models can't predict...then your models need to incorporate a better understanding of said natural variability? You're all too ready to attribute all of the warming of the 20th century to one variable. How would you know if you were wrong? Your forecasts would bust. And they have. Badly. In the words of Kevin Trenberth - "The fact is, we can't account for the lack of warming in the last decade, and it is a travesty that we cannot." Indeed, Dr. Trenberth. Perhaps you should tell the people that, rather than claiming with false confidence that you know everything there is to know about global warming.

And one last point before I adjourn. There is the claim that AGW must be true because there exists a consensus of scientists who believe it. Consensus is a political word. It never enters the print in the Journal of Applied Phsyics or the Journal of Astrophysics or the Journal of the American Medical Association. Hard science has been replaced in the world of climatology by the need for political words. Consensus is not science...the very nature of science is an ADVERSARIAL system where everyone to prove everyone else wrong. It's worked this way for two thousand years. At one time, the "consensus" of the best minds in science thought that the world was flat, not an oblate spheroid...that the sun revolved around the Earth, not vice versa, that the stars were points of light pinned to a great black sphere surrounding the Earth, not great balls of burning hydrogen gas light years away, that the Earth was hollow (!), that the Earth was a few hundred million years old not 5 billion years old, that the circumference of the Earth was about 14,000 miles, not 22,000...that North America didn't even exist, that there were rivers on Mars, that beneath the clouds of Venus hid dense tropical forests, not a 700 C inferno of sulfuric air and pressures that would crush a soda can to the thickness of a human hair...the reason we know more today than we did 1000 years ago is that we set out to prove the other guy wrong...we questioned consensus and strove to understand, not to be told.

I implore any who reads this...don't let them tell you there's a consensus, and that questioning proves you aren't a serious thinker. There is NO SUCH THING...as a settle science...not if the world is to continue to benefit from doing science at all.