Title: Global Warming and Science
1Global Warming and Science
- So far the balanced story of basic science is not
getting through to the public - There is at least one alternate hypothesis
- and a new theory
- Fran Manns, Artesian Geological Research, Toronto
2(No Transcript)
3What is Global Warming?
- Throughout time the Earths climate has varied
- Since the base of the Pleistocene (1.8 M ya)
there have been at least 30 glacial -
interglacial cycles of 40,000 years to 100,000
years duration with interglacial periods warmer
than now between them - Sea level has risen 125 metres in the past 20,000
years. That 6 mm a year (arithmetic average). - ICPP recently cited 2-3 mm a year one might
say its slowing down. - All the worlds coastal tribes have flood myths
because they lived on the continental shelves. - Between glacial ages the climate varies due to
external and internal influences some result in
cooling. Others allow the Earth to warm - There are short-term cycles e.g. El Niño,
among others for example - the 10 to 12 year
long solar energy cycles, and cycles that relate
to oscillation of Atlantic and Pacific ocean
masses, and the Milankovich orbital cycle.
4Athabasca Glacier has been receding since the ice
age
5Pennekamp Park Key LargoReefs keep pace with
sea level rise
6Solar System
7What If?
- If The atmosphere did not absorb incoming heat,
we would roast all day and freeze-dry at night
and end up like a sun-dried tomato - Mercury - 427 to 172 ºC
- Mars - temperate zone soil
- 27 to 80 ºC
- Moon - 107 to 153 ºC
8What is the Greenhouse Effect?
- Certain gasses in the atmosphere absorb heat
energy and reduce the amount that escapes into
space - This trapping of heat from our only source of
warmth the Sun by the atmosphere is known as
the Greenhouse Effect - This gives us a global average temperature of
15C rather than -18C if we had no Greenhouse
Effect
9Important Facts
- Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas
- 60 - 98 of the greenhouse effect is due to
water vapour in the atmosphere (jury still out) - CO2 and other minor gasses account for the
remainder
10Contribution to the Greenhouse Effect (including
water vapour) http//www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/gr
eenhouse_data.html
11Is Global Warming Happening?
- Lets examine some very wiggly curves
- Death Valley California - temperature trend
12Berkeley California
13Blaine Washington
14New York NY
15Albany NY
16Harrisburg Pa Civil War gap
17State University Mississippi
18Chicago Illinois
19Houlton Maine - Did someone shoot the weatherman?
20Buffalo NY
21Niagara Falls NY - 1911
22Key West Florida
23Global Warming
- Typically the majority of weather stations yield
corrupt time series data - Those weather stations are located where people
are living. Thus, it is far from a random sample
of the surface of the world, rather a measure of
increasing human density - Death Valley, Key West, Blaine, and Houlton are
far (remote) from urban centres and are likely
more reliable Who knows about Berkeley? Albany
vs. New York City? - Since 1979, temperatures have been measured from
satellites. Not surprisingly, these measurements
give a much smaller warming.
24Realistically
- The planet is not warming in the dramatic manner
the alarmists claim - There are many other sites that demonstrate
cooling - I accept the warming but not the drama
- I do not accept the popular cause CO2
- Why are the graphs so wiggly?
- Because climate is not weather
25Kamél, 2003
- In the past couple of years, new and better
analysis of the Antarctic ice data, giving a
better time resolution, have shown that first
temperature rises, and then carbon dioxide levels
increase. It is the temperature increase which
causes the increase in CO2 and not the other way
around. - The extra CO2 could at most add a little extra
warming to what is going on, but not even that is
certain.
26CO2 increase in the atmosphere is a trailing
phenomenon
- Throughout the greatest temperature transitions
experienced by the planet over the past 420,000
years, atmospheric CO2 concentration has been
proven to have been a follower, and not a leader,
of climate change, rising from one to five
thousand years after major increases in air
temperature, and falling in similar manner
throughout the course of the past four
glacial/interglacial cycles (Mudelsee, M., 2001).
27Observations
- Warming precedes CO2 increase - likely due to
warming of the oceans - CO2 has inverse solubility in liquid (warm your
Guinness to see this effect) - CO2 has a geometrically wasting greenhouse gas
effect more CO2 less effectiveness
28CO2 has inverse solubility in liquid
- Solubility of solids increases directly with
temperature of the solvent - sugar dissolves more rapidly in hot water than
cold - Carbon dioxide dissolves quickly in cold water
and evolves rapidly out of warm water - Dont shake your Guinness!
29And
- You might say, and alarmists say every day,
that the new anthropogenic CO2 from the
industrial revolution is tipping the climate over
into uncontrollable heating
30CO2 Feedback effect
- Has a geometrically wasting property (Kamél,
2003) - Analogous to Venetian blinds and light
- Adding a second and third set of Venetian blinds
to the same window becomes decreasingly effective
in blocking incoming light - More CO2 less additional greenhouse effect
- Increase in CO2 has less effect because
- Carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has
exactly one important spectral line in the
infrared part of the spectrum. This line is
clearly saturated. - If you increase the number of CO2 molecules in
the atmosphere, not much will happen
31Downward forcing - all greenhouse gasses - vs.
increasing CO2 content - Willis Eschenbach
32Absorption wavelength CO2 vs. H2O
33Look up! - recognise the variation is in the
fourth significant digit
34Annual Sunspot Averages 1700 to 2003
35Sunspot peak frequency vs. temperature
anomalyBlack Temperature anomalyRed Sun
spot peak frequency
36Friis-Christensen and Lassen (1991) Science
Magazine
- 95 correlation between sunspot peak frequency
and the temperature anomaly - Sunspot curve, moreover, does lead the
temperature curve - But, correlation is not causation
- What is the cause?
37Danish National Space Centre
- An essential role for remote stars in everyday
weather on Earth has been revealed by an
experiment at the Danish National Space Center in
Copenhagen. It is already well-established that
when cosmic rays, which are high-speed atomic
particles originating in exploded stars far away
in the Milky Way, penetrate the Earths
atmosphere, they produce substantial amounts of
ions and release free electrons. - Now, results from the Danish experiment show that
the released electrons play a significant role in
promoting the formation of building blocks for
cloud condensation nuclei, on which water vapor
condenses to make clouds. Hence, a causal
mechanism by which cosmic rays can facilitate the
production of clouds in Earths atmosphere has
been experimentally identified for the first
time. - http//www.spacecenter.dk/publications/press-relea
ses/getting-closer-to-the-cosmic-connection-to-cli
mate
38Danish Space Centre Theory
- Active sun ? enhanced magnetic and thermal flux
solar wind ? geomagnetic shield response ? less
low-level clouds ? less albedo (less heat
reflected)Â ? warmer climate - Less active sun ? reduced magnetic and thermal
flux reduced solar wind ? geomagnetic shield
drops ? galactic cosmic ray flux ? more low-level
clouds ? More snow ? more albedo (more heat
reflected) ? colder climate - That's how the bulk of climate change works
- Coupled with sunspot peak frequency there are
cycles of global warming and cooling like waves
in the ocean
39Potentially large sources of cosmic radiation
when stars supernova
40CO2 vs. Friis-Christensen and Lassen (Science,
1991) www.friendsofscience.org
41CO2 and Temperature Anomaly
- Temperature rise preceded CO2 from 1890 to 1950
- CO2 does not correlate with temperature anomaly
from 1940 to 1970 - Temperature rise does correlate with solar
activity - CO2 rise cannot be a cause of warming
42Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas
- The most variable component of the atmosphere is
water in its various phases such as vapour, cloud
droplets, and ice crystals. Water vapour is the
strongest greenhouse gas. For these reasons and
because the transition between the various phases
absorb and release so much energy, water vapour
is central to the climate and its variability and
change. - Climate Change 2001 The Scientific Basis
Section 1.1.2 The Climate System
43We are at the end of the 23rd Cycle since
sunspots were first recorded
44Cycle 23
- The cycle was short - 10 years (out of 11)
- Bimodal peak is interesting (cycle 22 was bimodal
too) - We are experiencing the sunspot minimum this fall
and winter - Anecdotally, this is consistent with both a
warmer than usual climate and also the result of
the Danish cloud chamber experiment - High precipitation in humid regions of the planet
like the Great Lakes Region and NA west coast - Desertification in regions of low humidity
- El Nino
45Why? Realistically?
- Is CO2 the target?
- CO2 hypothesis has precedence (1897)?
- Media propagation? Bottom Line
- Repetition of stale science
- Bandwagon science? - DDT and Malaria!
- Consensus science? - Copernicus and Galileo!
- Publish or perish? - Mann and the Hockey Stick
- Research grants? Tied to outcome
- All of the above?
46Original Sin
- Gracious no! Humans can only claim
responsibility, if that's the word, for about
3.4 of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere
annually, the rest of it is all natural (IPCC,
Woods Hole) - Anthropogenic 0.11 of the global CO2 cycle
- www.CO2Science.org
47My hypothesis is very weak
- Eruption of Krakatau, 1883
48 Skepticism or Objectivity
49Moving to higher ground above An Inconvenient
Truth
- "A scientific hypothesis that survives
experimental testing becomes a scientific theory"
50Key References
- Friss-Christensen, E. and K. Lassen, 1991 Length
of the Solar Cycle - an indicator of solar
activity closely associated with climate,
Science, New Series, Vol. 254, No. 5032, Nov. 1,
1991, pp.698-700. - Svensmark, Henrik, Jens Olaf P. Pedersen, Nigel
D. Marsh, Martin B. Enghoff, and Ulrik I.
Uggerhoj, 2006 Experimental evidence for the
role of ions in particle nucleation under
atmospheric conditions, Proceedings of the Royal
Society (A), Proc. R Soc. A, doi10.1098/rspa.2006
1773. Published online.
51References
- Temperature
- Lars Kamél, 2003 Temperature measurements Is
climate research pseudo science? -
- Swedish original text from June, English
translation from Nov, 2003, a few updates made
since. - http//www.astro.uu.se/l/noworry.htm
- United States Historical Climatology Network
dataset - http//www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushc
n/ushcn.html -
52References
- CO2 as plant food
- Eamus, D. 1996 Responses of field grown trees to
CO2 enrichment. Commonwealth Forestry Review 75
39-47. - Eklundh, L. and Olsson, L. 2003 Vegetation index
trends for the African Sahel 1982-1999.
Geophysical Research Letters 30
10.1029/2002GL016772. - Saxe, H., Ellsworth, D.S. and Heath, J. 1998
Tree and forest functioning in an enriched CO2
atmosphere. New Phytologist 139 395-436.
53References
CO2 Saturation Elachi, Charles, 1987
Introduction to the Physics and Techniques of
Remote Sensing (John Wiley Sons) Kamél,
Lars, 2003 Why we don't have to worry about CO2,
Department of Astronomy and Space Physics,
Uppsala, Sweden http//www.astro.uu.se/l/noworr
y.htm CO2 Trailing effect Mudelsee, M., 2001
The phase relations among atmospheric CO2
content, temperature and global ice volume over
the past 420 ka. Quaternary Science Reviews 20
583-589.
54Other Reading
- deFreitas, C.R., 2002 Are observed changes in
the concentration of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere really dangerous?, Bulletin of
Canadian Petroleum Geology, Vol. 50, No. 2 (June
2002), pp. 297-327, School of Geology and
Environmental Science, Auckland, New Zealand. - McIntyre, Steven and McKitrick, Ross, 2005
Hockey Sticks, principal components, and spurious
significance, Geophysical Research Letters, 32,
L03710, doi10.1029/2004GL021750 - Wegman, Edward J., David W. Scott and Yasmin H.
Said, 2006 Ad hoc committee report on the
Hockey stick global climate reconstruction, To
The Chairman of the Committee on Energy and
Commerce and the Chairman of the Subcommittee on
Oversight and Investigations, US House of
Representatives. - The IPCC Report Climate Change 2001 Third
Assessment Report consists of four sub-reports
1) Climate Change 2001 The Scientific Basis, 2)
Climate Change 2001 Impacts , Adaptation and
Vulnerabilities, 3) Climate Change
2001Mitigation, and 4) Climate Change 2001
Synthesis Report.
55Francis T. Manns, Ph.D., P.Geo.
(Ontario) artesian1_at_sympatico.ca 323 Blantyre
Avenue Toronto Ontario M1N 2S6 Canada 416-698-6291
56Acknowledgements
- Jim Tilsley
- Les Manns
- Richard Bedell