Climate alarmism is probably the greatest hoax/scam in world history. The main evidence for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), the principal alleged adverse effect of human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), is climate models built by CAGW supporters in a field where models with real predictive power do not exist and cannot be built with any demonstrable accuracy beyond a week or two because climate and weather are coupled non-linear chaotic systems. Without the models, the whole hoax/scam collapses. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated (see Section 14.2.2.2 of the 2001 IPCC Report):
- In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.
Climate Modelers Knew or Should Have Known the Inherent Limitations of Climate Models
The hoax/scam appears to rest on the authors’ assumption that most people will not realize these inherent limitations of global climate models. Since the model authors all work in the field, they either knew this or should have known these limitations (unless they delude themselves, of course). The authors of the models have a self-interest in supporting CAGW since government grants almost always go only to supporters. This self-interest is what makes the hoax into a scam. If true climate believers understood that longer term projections cannot be made on the basis of these models, they would hopefully dismiss the whole hoax/scam for what it is.
Climate Alarmism Is Basically an Attempt to Scare People with Hypothetical Climate Outcomes Based on Models
Climate alarmism is nothing more than an attempt to scare people with unrealistic hypothetical climate outcomes based on computer models with no predictive power. The far left is trying to use this alleged threat to justify Federal Government intervention in the fuel and energy markets. Others, such as mainstream media, use it to sell their products.
The current proposition offered by climate alarmists is that if people who live in the more wealthy countries cut back their use of fossil fuels and therefore their human-caused CO2 emissions that the world can avoid the alleged catastrophic increases in temperatures based on the climate models. Even the proponents’ climate models do not show that the alleged effects could be avoided even if all the developed countries should somehow made substantial cuts in CO2 emissions. So the problems include the following:
- Reductions by the developed nations will not have any measurable effect on either atmospheric CO2 or temperatures.
- The less developed nations (where fossil fuel use is expanding much more rapidly) have not agreed to make such reductions.
- Any nation that adopts such reductions will make its exports more expensive by raising the price of fossil fuels used to make the exports.
- There is little or no evidence that decreasing CO2 emissions will do anything except raise prices for fossil fuels. Global temperatures appear to be the primary determinant of global CO2 levels, not vice versa.
CAGW Is a Failed Hypothesis since It Does Not Satisfy the Scientific Method
The CAGW hypothesis is a failed hypothesis since it does not satisfy the requirements of the scientific method, nothing more. Models showing that catastrophic temperature increases will or are even likely to occur as carbon dioxide levels may increase have no predictive value. Minor increases would be good anyway, not bad.
Various supporters of the hoax/scam have a variety of reasons for supporting it. Some left wing Democrats, for example, like it because if cap and trade should be used to implement the CO2 control program at the US level, the Federal Government would have increased income to use for increased public spending that they favor.
In California the largest single use to date of cap and trade revenue has been to start building a high-speed train line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The cost is being paid largely by lower income families, who have to pay more for fuel, an economic necessity for them but not for the generally higher income “environmentalists” who support cap and trade and may be one of the few groups that will ride the trains if and when they should ever actually run.
You are correct that prediction is impossible when using a model which has arbitrary amounts of positive feedback to the GH temperature increase.
However it is perfectly predictable with the correct atmospheric water vapor feedback amount which for 2x CO2 alone is zero. Thus the CO2 GH of -4.7 w/m2 computed by Harvard using HITRAN yields ~ 1.2 C max. GH.
This increase in temperature does not lead to increased vaporization of water since it is not a source of additional energy. There is no energy added to the system to be fed back to the surface even if there were some average physical mechanism to do it.
The latest scam of using electronic feedback amplifier equations to compute “positive temperature feedback’ is a non-starter. There is no amplification mechanism nor independent source of energy to power it in the atmosphere. This equation does not apply and has no analog in the physical atmosphere.
Thus there is no additional water vapor due to GH temperature increase and no change in cloud volume and no mechanism to modulate the power received from the sun which in the case of 2x CO2 is a constant. The power from the surface is a constant as is the power radiated from the atmosphere to space. Since the CO2 looses 4.7 watts emission in a century, the earth accumulates this over the century raising temperature by 0.012 C/yr while the random chaos of the hydrological system with its raising temperature will radiate an additional power of 0.047 watts/year with its atmospheric water vapor temperature rise.
Naturally this is not a smooth predictable year to year change but must average out in time and space over sufficient time else the thermodynamic law of energy balance in a closed system would be violated.
By the way, water is the only molecule in the upper atmosphere of significant quantity to radiate the balance of IR beyond the minor CO2 radiation plus the IR window radiation and as such is the primary earth cooling agent (including cloud reflection ) and thus is a negative feedback to any actual changes in solar input energy. There is simply nothing other than the earth’s random chaotic hydrodynamic system to do it. We may not be able to do an accurate accounting of energy flow in the random chaos but the earth must figure it out over the long term average which is ‘climate’.
I’m sure temperature changes, weather changes…speaking of, why don’t we ever hear of the apparent but controversial weather manipulation from such things as geoengineering (supposedly to combat global warming but dismissed as conspiracy theory) or HAARP which has often been the subject
of the same theorists that think it’s possible to alter the weather.. well maybe they are? I don’t know,
the point is why scare the crap out of everyone and then openly do things that could make you look like a liar and a hoaxer?
Just like some people will automatically be called racist for voting for Trump… I didn’t , not that it matters but some no many people are labeled as stupid or ignorant if they don’t blindly accept whatever “science” says. Personally, I will continue to believe the earth is round but again do all those people who all of sudden start questioning the shape of our planet have no intelligence?
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[…] Climate Alarmism: Probably the Greatest Hoax in History […]
Good article.
I would argue that socialism is the greatest hoax / scam in world history … but the latest sales pitch for big government socialism is the need to save the world from “carbon pollution” — and now the slow economic growth inherent in socialism can be spun as good news — slow growth equals less “carbon pollution.”
It’s baloney of course — the current climate is the best climate our planet has had in at least 500 years for human health and prosperity, and green plant growth rates.
Keep up the good work
The science is fraud, the debate is FAKE….”Spencer Sorcery on Magic Gas” at FauxScienceSlayer
It;s the Sun folks. Man made global warming was made up after 12 men published the Report From Iron Mountain. Global warming was to replace the Cold War. Man made climate change will be used as the excuse that it was necessary to exterminate 95% of the human population. New World Order.
All that matters is whether the “science” is in accord with the laws of physics. But if you don’t UNDERSTAND the physics I have explained, then why dabble in comments on climate blogs when you don’t have the necessary knowledge to know what’s right or wrong? Climatologists have not applied correct thermodynamics and their greenhouse garbage for the gullible incorrectly claims different fluxes of radiation from the Sun and the atmosphere can just be added together and the sum bunged into Stefan-Boltzmann calculations to “explain” Earth’s surface temperature. It gets even worse “explaining” Venus with only 20W/m^2 of solar radiation and the rest supposedly from the less hot atmosphere somehow in total delivering the required 16,500W/m^2. Some of you ought to be ashamed of yourselves lapping up the fictitious fiddled physics of climatology. How could their assumed isothermal troposphere possibly be the state of maximum entropy when there are obviously unbalanced energy potentials due to the greater gravitational potential energy at the top. Every functioning vortex tube proves them wrong. There’s a AU $10,000 reward offered for the first (in over three years) to prove me wrong, subject to the requirements at https://itsnotco2.wordpress.com where there is “first in the world” correct physics that DOES correctly explain planetary core and surface temperatures using the laws of physics.
Whenever someone asks if I believe in global warming, I answer that I believe in the Scientific Method. Therefore, I do not believe that future Man Made Catasthropic Gobal Warming is certain. CAGW is based on models that fail the Scientific Method test. I am glad to see others cite the Scientific Method. We skeptics must reclaim the mantle of science. It belongs to the skeptical.
I saw this recent look at the high-speed rail –
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-28/california-hits-the-brakes-on-high-speed-rail-fiasco
The older I get the more I keep a big packet of salt at my side.
Outside of models and in terms of empirical evidence they did present a strong correlation between cumulative emissions and cumulative warming. The problem with it is that correlations between cumulative values are spurious under the conditions that exist in the data. Please see
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2725743
If indeed this episode of science is a deliberate deception then the most likely culprit is the UN which tasted great success with ozone depletion and then tried to replicate that program with carbon dioxide but it has not worked out so well.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2794991