From an article in the Financial Post. http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/04/07/climate-models-go-cold/
The article is by Dr David Evans. David is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees, including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering.
Here are a few extracts.
The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic.
The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.
Finally, to those who still believe the planet is in danger from our carbon dioxide emissions: Sorry, but you’ve been had.
There’s much more in the article. It’s only a click away. http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/04/07/climate-models-go-cold/
Or – if you’d rather see the video … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di5FyndJbz0
All we ever see parroted in the mainstream media is that CO2 is a dangerous “heat trapping” gas but tying down the documented physical mechanism (a falsifiable hypothesis) and observations that support the notion is a different matter.
Heat dissipates to space in several ways, one of which is collisions between GHG (greenhouse gas) molecules and re-emission among same, Ignoring the fact that water vapour completely overwhelms CO2, more CO2 molecules in the atmosphere provide greater potential for heat dissipation i.e. cooling not warming. Needless to say, the AGW prescribed tropospheric heat accumulation due to rising CO2 levels is not being observed. No danger then.
The other bland statement routinely parroted is that GHG’s “heat the earth”. Given that backwelling LWIR (long wave infrared radiation) cannot heat oceans, lakes or rivers, we are left with the 30% of the earth’s surface that might be heated but when? Day-time? Night-time? And what is the average of a cubic metre sand, snow, rock, concrete, foliage etc in terms of heat capacity, emissivity, reflectivity etc? Using Darwin as an example, the LW (long wave) flux is in the order of 400 W/m2 but a doubling of CO2 only produces an extra 1.7 W/m2 and only a fraction of that is anthropogenic. Again no danger.
Solar insolation (incoming solar radiation) does the heating. What GHGs do is slow the loss of heat through the atmosphere especially at night – which is an essential benefit. So where’s the danger?
Thanks Richard,
I saw a video of a presentation by Dr David Evans about the missing tropical tropospheric hotspot. (Heartland’s ICCC, New York, May 2009). The .mp3 audio and .ppt slides are downloadable from Heartland. It took me a few times of viewing and listening to grasp the implications. The hotspot is touted by IPCC as THE ‘signature’ of global warming. A signature is likened to your signature or fingerprint, indicating a supposed ‘one to one’ relationship test for global warming. Whichever way you look at it (either the models are wrong, implying warming could occur without the ‘signature’, or the models are right, but as there’s no measured signature the model predictions are wrong); you can’t trust the IPCC models.
I also read a paper by Richard Lindzen about his ERBE (earth radiation budget experiment) where he showed outgoing radiation as measured by satellite over many years correlated postiviely with surface temperature (increased outgoing radiation – increasing surface temperature). This seemed a reasonably intuitive response to me. ie: make something hotter and it emits more heat. This simple measured fact proves that the resultant climate feedback damps the initiating temperature perterbation. This is the opposite from what the IPCC climate models assume. They presume various levels positive feedback creating ‘unreal’ levels of calculated temperature rise.
It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 would by itself cause about 1C rise. Lindzen’s experiment shows the outcome would be about 0.5C to 0.7C due a natural damping factor of around 0.5 to 0.7. Whereas the climate models multiply up the 1C, by guessing positive feedbacks, resulting in their alarming temperatures.