An old friend of mine, Tom, has been telling me for some time that the carbon dioxide theories of global warming don't hold water. Looks like he may be right.
Meanwhile, see all those links to the right of this article by organizations cashing in on the carbon dioxide theories? Click on them all, and waste their money. As you read on, you will understand .....
It seems that climate science is no longer about Science ... it is about Belief and cronyism.
A 'belief' is an axiom a scientist currently holds to be most likely true, until new information refines or invalidates the axiom. A 'Belief' is something a person holds to be true even in the face of overwhelming proof that it is outright wrong, and that the person is prepared to ignore or fraudulently alter data to support their Belief.
On with the story.
An email server at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England was hacked, and some 61 megabytes of emails were copied, then posted on a Russian server. These emails were communications between 'scientists' who Believe in Global warming, affirmative believers in the concept that the broader picture that humanity generally is causing global warming, and specifically, the mechanism is rising carbon dioxide levels.
Problem is, the studies don't support the theories they are coming out with very well at all. The past ten years, the earth has actually been cooling, which cannot be explained the Global Warming theories.
In their zealous pursuit of their Beliefs, these 'scientists' have been communicating about their inconclusive results with other scientists who have also been getting nothing, to see if there is a way they can put two 'nothings' together and come up with 'something'. They actually suggest 'papering over' the inconclusive data to come up with something that might support their Beliefs.
It is a story of unethical collusion to launder information, and angry, often violent rantings against the opposition thinkers. Read the news story here. http://www.examiner.com/x-25061-Climate-Change-Examiner~y2009m11d21-ClimateGate-emails-provide-unwanted-scrutiny-of-climate-scientists
Immediately, the Greenhouse Gas Believers were in an uproar, claiming the emails were stolen, then claiming that they were probably fakes.
Problem is, Steve Macintyre, one of the emailers whose emails have been posted, has verified that every email they posted of his was authentic and unchanged. http://www.examiner.com/x-25061-Climate-Change-Examiner~y2009m11d20-ClimateGate--Climate-centers-server-hacked-revealing-documents-and-emails
For you poor benighted Americans living in the US Police State ( Behave, rhg) where only the Federal Government Carnivore program is allowed to 'collect' everybody's emails, here is an Australian take on the story, and links to the actual files themselves. http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/hadley_hacked
Now why is everybody so surprised? Scientific fraud in America has an illustrious history. (I think they inherited it from the British. I can go back to dear old Isaac Newton for the roots on this one! But I digress ....)
American scientific research is about funding. 'Scientists' get on a bandwagon that has some momentum pick up a lot of funding. There is a long history of scientific fraud that repeats this story again and again.
How does it happen? Easy answer: follow the money.
The climatologists who demonize carbon dioxide have given Governments around the world a new, trillion dollar tax potential, taxation on companies' carbon production. Power plants, steel manufacturing, and any industrial process that produces carbon would have to charge more for their products and give the money to Government , effectively raising the tax burden on the entire world by several hundred dollars a year per person.
Time to look at some history.
In just about every area of science, there are axioms that turn out to be dead wrong. The plough that turns this soil over is continuing research, new repeatable experiments or data, that can be replicated by scientists anywhere to show that the accepted axioms are incorrect.
Science is far more driven by Belief than most scientists will accept, They are an emotional, vain bunch, very needy of recognition, and when somebody challenges their Beliefs, particularly if it is in an area where they are a World Authority, they get very snotty indeed.
To look at this kind of fractious evolution of ideas from conceptual birth to acceptance by the scientific community, let's look at continental drift and Plate Tectonics, its trendy new name, now that it is a science.
"Abraham Ortelius (1597), Francis Bacon (1625), Benjamin Franklin, Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (1858), and others had noted earlier that the shapes of continents on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean (most notably, Africa and South America) seem to fit together. W. J. Kious described Ortelius' thoughts in this way:
Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus ... suggested that the Americas were "torn away from Europe and Africa ... by earthquakes and floods" and went on to say: "The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents]." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drift
The modern scientific movement began with Alfred Wegener http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener , who wrote paper in 1915 proposing that the continents were slowly drifting around the world. Despite Wegener's eminence in meteorology (his lectures, "The thermodynamics of the atmosphere" had become a standard textbook), the scientific world reacted spitefully and emotionally to his publication.
Now this is actually a standard response for the scientific world when confronted with a new theory that will dim the spotlights on the pre-eminent stars of the time. How could they have missed something so glaringly important in their field of global scientific eminence?
In Wegener's case, his 1915 paper included a large amount of circumstantial evidence. The response of the mainstream American scientific world was not a studious investigation of the facts, but a long-term condemnation of the ideas by professional scientific organizations on a Belief basis. In 1925, the America Association of Petroleum Geologists roundly condemned the theory without any investigation whatsoever! In 1943, the American paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson, used his enormous influence against Wegener's proposales in a vitriolic attack that stopped further investigation in America dead in its tracks.
It was not until the 1950's that research began to throw up convincing data for Wegener's theories, and it should come as no surprise that this research came from outside the US.
This is an illustration of the history of US science that is repeated again and again.
In the US, most traditional science is based on very emotional Beliefs, which are never questioned until there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This overwhelming evidence often comes from outside the US, or from research that has nothing to do with the field where it is overturning the old thinking. And the slow-down to new thinking very often comes from within the United States.
Far from being the intrepid and independent explorers they profess to be, 20th century American science has a history of being riddled with cronyism and intellectual dishonesty. Almost any area of science you may choose, you will find intellectual dishonesty and reprehensible behavior, driven by Belief, self-interest, and vanity.
Now, this same behavior has been exposed amongst climate-change scientists, as a result of an email server being hacked.
Why is this so important?
America throws money based on Belief. Look at televangelists, who receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in gifts, simply because they put on a good dog-and-pony show on television, asking for money!
These snake-oil salesman have paved the way for science posing as a movement for the social good. If they can appeal to Believers who will throw money, then that money will be spent trying to prove what their Believers who are throwing money want to hear, even if it means bending the truth.
This fits right in with the scientific principles of almost 50% of Americans, who actually believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old. Hey, these people can also find 'scientists' in America who will tell them this, and, by the way, these 'scientists' will also take their money.
And this idea of an ancient earth, where the continents drifted apart over hundreds of millions of years, is unfortunately more proof that the earth is more than ten thousand years old. So the money to support a denialist movement comes from the Creationists, who want to stymie any theories that might provide compelling evidence otherwise.
It comes down to 'follow the money'.
So where is the future path?
The United States was blessed in the 20th century. The Second World War thoroughly destroyed Europe's manufacturing capacity, leaving American manufacturing capacity undamaged, and vastly strengthened by the huge increase in wartime industrial production. This set the stage for unprecedented growth, bot internally, and in exports. Along the way, the US dollar became the world's reserve currency, with the added bonus of allowing the US, as the world's banker, to print $600 billion a year in 2007 dollars to provide to other countries for their growing international trade.
Inefficiencies that were introduced into the US scientific process did not matter, in this environment. The US had almost unlimited resources to spend on its endeavors, and Government spending on basic research created entire new industries. For example, the computer chip was a byproduct of the space race. And many of the people who created these technical miracles were imported from other countries, the best of the best from around the world.
Now, we have reached the pinnacle of this trajectory. China, India, and other countries that many Americans still regard as Third World, are chafing at US heels. They have modernized, created a new industrial and educational base, and streamlined their systems to get knowledge into the marketplace in a very efficient manner. Their best and brightest are now rewarded for staying home, and building their own national industrial base.
Their further advantage is they are not hobbled by Fundamentalist Belief. I am sure that scientific fraud is global, based on human vanity, greed, and need for recognition. But I think Belief slows the movement forward of science perceptibly. Dragging this albatross around becomes the American liability in a more competitive world.
However, acceptance of scientific fraud is an inbuilt part of the American scientific scene. It has even reared its head in areas as important as AIDS research, where people who have raised valid questions, which, if answered, might have really moved the field forward, have been hysterically shouted down by Establishment figures, whose reputations hinge on continuing acceptance of the current theories, even if they are wrong.
So let me finish by revisiting the global warming scenario.
Global warming theories are based on a pyramid of theory that does not square with the facts. The theory is that rising carbon dioxide levels will cause the earth to warm up, and as a result the North and South Pole will melt. The problems are, the habitat of many species will be destroyed, which will lead to their extinction, and there will be enormous flooding of coastal areas which are densely populated.
Problem is, this does not square with reality. There is no doubt that the earth is actually cooling, and has been cooling for at least a decade while carbon dioxide level have been rising. But the peculiarity here is that ice has been melting around the world, in Greenland and the Arctic, and even the Antarctic. If the world is cooling, the ice sheets should not be melting, they should be growing larger!
The real problem is going to be rising sea levels as a result of melting ice.
Now what if the melting ice has nothing to do with carbon dioxide?
OK, how about an alternative theory.
Just suppose that maybe this ice melting is caused by microscopic particulate, industrial dust, the result of huge industrialization in China and India? Tiny particles of dust that get into the jet stream, and get carried around the world, and eventually deposit as a microscopically thin layer on everything around the world.
If this dust lands in New York City, it wouldn't even be noticed. But if it lands on ice, instead of that ice reflecting the light, it will absorb it, and the energy from the absorbed light would melt the ice. The increase in blue ocean, which absorbs a lot more light than ice, would accelerate the process.
Now I am not saying that this is the mechanism. I am just proposing it as a more credible alternative to the fictions that have grown up around carbon dioxide.
(Just in case you think I have created a fictitious scenario, have a look here. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080407132120.htm
These guys are doing really excellent work, but there are far too few of them for the problem in hand, and they have been shouted down by the carbon dioxide lobby already, who consider their research irrelevant.
But what if the CO2 lobby is wrong? What if we are focusing on carbon dioxide when it has absolutely nothing to do with melting ice? We are not fixing the problem. Worse, we are not looking for the real cause, so the disaster of rising sea levels becomes a certainty.
Let me tell you a story.
There is this guy standing on a street corner in San Francisco, waving a stick. A man, observing this behavior, steps up and asks what he is doing. "I'm scaring away the elephants", the stick-waver replied. The man sputters, "There aren't any elephants in San Francisco". The stick waver stops, and looks the man in the eye. "Effective, isn't it?", he says.
Now if this man had a cup and was collecting donations for scaring away the elephants, we have the Belief-driven climate control school who shout down any other scientific research.
There is one piece of information about the connection between carbon dioxide and global warming you may find useful. The global warming theorists who claim there is a past geological connection between high carbon dioxide levels and warm planetary temperatures have omitted one very important fact.
The geological data shows that high carbon dioxide levels have never caused an increase in global temperature, in the geological record.
The carbon dioxide levels rose some 800 years after the global warming took place.
So what if we fix carbon dioxide levels and the poles still melt?
As always, I welcome your comments.
