SOME LIKED IT HOT….

This is a very much updated article of mine from the Institute of Director’s magazine, Direct Report, in 2004. It in turn was drawn largely from a chapter in my book A Great Deal of Nonsense entitled Some Like It Hot. It seems that the chickens observed back then are coming home to roost in a big way.

Global warming = Big Money
Global warming is now one of the largest recipients of government research money in the world. It has gained an apparently unstoppable momentum, keeping an army of people in comfortable employment and financing research, journals, conferences and international travel. It also fills acres of newsprint and blog space, like this. So what is the truth?

The first thing to understand about global warming is that, all else being equal, increased carbon dioxide emissions from mankind’s activities will make the biosphere hotter. The carbon dioxide in the air has increased from 275 parts per million by volume at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century to 365 parts per million now, an increase of about one part in ten thousand. Carbon dioxide levels have never been as high as this in the 400,000 years of information now available (mainly from Arctic and Antarctic ice core samples). This is a ‘greenhouse gas’, that is it absorbs outgoing infrared radiation reflected back from the sun's heating of the earth's surface, and bounces it back again.

Yet it appears that only the surface temperature may have risen, and then only in certain areas. Stevenson Screens, those familiar white louvered boxes at meteorological stations, measure this temperature and these showed that a global warming of about 0.4°C occurred in the last twenty years of the 20th century. What was puzzling, however, was that neutral figures were obtained for North America, Western Europe and Australia. However, in tropical areas and Siberia the surface and satellite results diverged, with the surface records showing warming. Yet satellite and balloon checks did not bear out this warming. It is suspected that this phenomenon is because many Stevenson Screens in the third world have been surrounded by their rapidly growing cities, which give a known and marked heating phenomenon, the Urban Heat Island Effect. The conclusion is that the troposphere - the bottom layer of the atmosphere - does not seem to have warmed hardly at all.

Is the Planet Really Warming?
If you would like to get the basic data as derived from satellite observations go to -
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt

The scientists responsible for collating this data (Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy of The University of Alabama) have this to say about the attempts to limit carbon dioxide emissions:

“While the approximately 0.14 C per decade of global warming seen in the satellite data is minor compared to the scale of some past climate shifts, it reminds us that the natural processes of climate change have not stopped….A fundamental point that needs to be understood is that if any of these proposals (including the Kyoto protocol) are implemented, they will have an effect on the climate so small that it cannot be detected. None of these proposals will change what the climate is doing enough to notice.”

Please Don’t Mention Water Vapour - Official
The tiny warming figure reinforces an enormous, glaring weakness in the whole argument for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Since water vapour has a greenhouse effect about double that of carbon dioxide and as air has an average moisture content of over ten times that of carbon dioxide, shouldn't we be doing something about that as well?

Evidently not. To quote 'A Beginners Guide to the UN Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol’: 'Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas, but human activities do not affect it directly'. No? Then how about this (bear with me; I have rounded off the figures to keep them simple) -

· The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the carbon burnt in fossil fuels amount to about 6 trillion tons a year
· This translates to about 20 trillion tons of carbon dioxide a year
· But this combustion also causes the production of over 5 trillion tons of water vapour (fossil fuels are all hydrocarbons; combustion of the hydrogen present in them produces water vapour)
· In addition, about 50% of this carbon is used for power generation, of which the majority of plants - say 80% - use evaporative cooling (that is cooling towers) to condense and recycle the steam generated.
· With this system something like 3.6 tons of water are evaporated per ton of fuel burnt
· This therefore generates another ten trillion tons a year of water vapour, which together with the 5 trillion from combustion totals 15 trillion tons of moisture into the atmosphere.

Now, remembering that this 15 trillion tons of water vapour we are producing has twice the greenhouse effect of the 20 trillion tons of carbon dioxide we also generate, why are we saying that water vapour does not affect global warming?

A standard answer is that water vapour does not stay in the atmosphere for more than a week. That may be true in temperate climates, but for much of the globe the winter is dry, and apart from dew (which evaporates off again once the sun comes up of course) that water in the air must stay there for months.

More, it turns out that if we don't take water vapour into account (both the very large natural amount and our own small contribution), our activities have generated about 5.5% of the present greenhouse gases. But if we do then they represent under 0.3%. Mankind's contribution is negligible. As nothing. Irrelevant. Unimportant. Not a factor.

Never Argue with an Institution
In the meantime the Kyoto Protocol had become institutionalised, with predictable results. The institution concerned with giving scientific advice is a United Nations body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It draws on a consensus of 2,000 scientists, and twenty years ago this army of boffins concluded:

'There is inadequate data to determine whether consistent global changes in climate variability or weather changes have occurred – to date it has not been possible to establish a clear connection between these regional changes and human activities.'

Not good enough; this was massaged by the IPCC into:

'The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.'

When the Secretary General of the IPCC was confronted with this deception, he said ‘it was the price the IPCC paid for having influence’. A very institutional response; its own survival comes first.

Global Warming = Global Scandal
It turns out that the original curve showing a link between carbon dioxide and temperature was wrong. And whereas before this discovery was exposed in dull academic journals dealing with metrological statistics, the e-mail hacking scandal known as ‘Climategate’ has revealed that the perpetrators knew exactly what they were doing. Expect much more scandal as tens of thousands of people whose jobs are now at stake attempt to explain it all away.

It’s the Sun, Stupid
There is, however, one very strong relationship between the earth’s temperature and an outside factor. A link between sunspots and the weather has long been noted - amazingly, in 1801, Sir William Herschel, the Astronomer Royal of the time, found a correlation suggesting that the price of wheat was directly controlled by the number of sunspots.

There is striking agreement between cold and warm periods and low and high solar activity over the last 10,000 years. Solar activity was very high during the medieval period, when the Vikings settled in Greenland, forming a colony that lasted until the Little Ice Age, when the sun quietened down and the consequent freeze drove them out. During the 20th century, sunspot activity increased again.

(To keep this simple I have removed the references from the quotations and sources here. If you want to see the sources take a look at the full text of A Great Deal of Nonsense which you can find elsewhere in this blog.)