Conditioned response was the forte of Pavlov and his dogs. Contrary to belief, the dogs didn’t slobber when they heard a bell. It was a metronome or an electrical shock they got. Today America is force-fed the notion that “climate change” which used to be called “global warming” is a given. Further more, it is a given to be entirely created by man, a.k.a. anthropogenic increase. It is assumed to be settled science. So what is science? A better question perhaps is “What isn’t science?”
Carl Popper, science philosopher said if it isn’t falsifiable then it isn’t science. What did he mean? He meant that if you cannot test a hypothesis, no matter how elegant the model is, it cannot be called science. It is merely a hypothesis, a guess. And all the climate models and variations thereof, are computer models. Garbage in, garbage out as they say. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created to measure the change in climate, and thus pre-assumed that global warming was a given.
Those models may number in the thousands if you include their variations. They often create a series of scenarios based upon the idea that X amount of CO2 creates a rise in surface temperatures and that, in turn, can be predicted (again by the computer) and we can determine an RCP value. What is RCP? It stands for Representative Concentration Pathway and is measured as the amount of wattage striking the earth per square meter. Currently, debate exists about what the current RCP value is, some say 2.4 watts/meter2. Others say higher, and the IPCC predicts (but cannot prove it) the RCP will be 4.5 by 2050. The goal of the Paris accord was 1.9 RCP which is some theoretical steady state…but the agreed protocols of the Paris agreement fail miserably at achieving the reduction in CO2 that again, theoretically, necessary to get to RCP 1.9.
On the other hand, we are told that RCP 8.5 (if you believe the IPCC) is an unlikely scenario meaning even more coal fired plants will be built, built without any pollution controls and would produce 4.9º C of warming by the year 2100. That scenario is so far fetched even many global warming advocates do not believe it is possible. The IPCC says that RCP 4.5 (4.5 watts per meter2) is the most likely scenario given the path we are on. Again, that is well above the present estimates of what exists today.
There are too many details to go into but sufficient to say, we have to assume an awful lot, and the models also assume an awful lot. First, three-quarters of the earth is ocean and ice sheets of the north and south poles. There are no dense networks of temperature stations in a large part of the earth. After the collapse of the old Soviet U.S.S.R. many Soviet stations were shut down, especially those in the more remote areas of Siberia. That created an instantaneous spike of temperatures of a global assessment of temperature station averages. So ocean temperatures are recorded by passing ships randomly across the oceans.
Then there is the issue of temperature “adjustments.” NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency which is the national weather service. But NASA also has a team of climate experts. That agency was created in 2002 and opposed by many astronauts because they felt this was not the function of NASA. But that has since become the agency that openly promotes the idea of climate change. Once again by Pavlovian conditioning, this agency simply asserts that climate change is a given and anyone questioning them are “deniers,” literally equating climate skeptics as holocaust deniers.
But back to the adjustments. If one compares the NOAA temperature graph created in the early 1990s with one produced more recently, you see that the 1930s, the dust bowl years, etc. are oddly depressed and barely above the mean trend line whereas the 1980s and 1990s are well above the early graph readings. Strange is it not?
Science has always been about skepticism. It is an integral part of the scientific method. In 1912 a meteorologist by the name of Alfred Wegener noticed that the shapes of the continents fit like a jigsaw and that certain species were found on different continents that would have been attached millions of years ago. He was roundly ridiculed. Geologists smugly said, Wegener was not a real geologist thus has no basis for the claim. Others ridiculed the idea. But 60 years later when the ocean ridges were clearly spreading and matched the curves of the continents, “continental drift” was a given.
For over 100 years any archaeologist who might claim that the Americas were first occupied by humans before about 11,000 B.C. were ostracized by the powers that be in the archaeological field. Your funding would dry up and no university would hire you. And as a consequence, no archaeologist dared to seek any evidence that suggested a date earlier than this “Clovis First” idea dictated. And it was wrong. It is clear today that the Americas had settlement perhaps at least back to the last Ice Age.
By denying skeptics and funding only research that promotes as a given that “climate change” is settled science, we are overlooking a lot of information that suggests two things. One, that the climate is not impacted by CO2 as much as believed and, second, the bigger climate driver might, in fact, be the sun itself.
The orbit of earth around the sun varies as the elliptical shape of the orbit varies from nearly circular to rather elongated. As math teaches, this means the earth speeds and slows with its distance from the sun. Likewise, the output of the sun varies within a range and every 11 years the magnetic field of the sun flips.
Also, ocean currents vary. And we know that we have been through times of warmer decades and cooler ones. After the Ice Age, oceans and lakes covered parts of the Sahara. There was a warm period in Egyptian times. The collapse of the Bronze Age, when people destroyed much of the Hittite kingdom and attacked Egypt and Greece, may have been the result of people forced from further north and cold periods in the north hemisphere. And during Roman times, temperatures were moderate until the 6th century. Roman roads were recently uncovered in Norway where the ice and snow had receded. It means in Roman times that snow was not there and weather may have been much milder. And the Medieval Warming Event (MWE) is well documented as well as the Little Ice Age (LIA.) Clearly the CO2 output of Roman Chariots did not create a climate crisis. In fact, warm periods provide abundant food and fewer pandemic and plague outbreaks. A warmer climate may benefit mankind. But according to climate doom and gloom, all changes in climate are bad. Worse, the climate alarmists also deny that the sun has anything to do with this warming.
Then came the 21st Century. It seems that there have been very little change in temperatures since 1998 and the alarmists have scrambled to make sense of this hiatus in their mantra that more CO2 means more warming. We’ve had a substantial increase in carbon dioxide but no warming. Not in the surface record, not in the satellite data.
So let’s get to the punch line. I am sure the guest editors, Dr. Harwood Schaffer and Daryll Ray in a piece in Farm Talk Magazine (Parsons, KS) are much smarter men than I…but obviously they suffer the same sort of Pavlovian response that had literally been bred into the current generation of academia sans the sort of skeptical questioning that is necessary to meet Karl Popper’s definition of “science.” It must be testable and refutable. Otherwise is merely an appeal to authority that cannot be questioned. But some researchers are now saying there is no evidence of increased tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, nor does any crop reports suggest famine or drought to be anything but the norm over the long term. Drought is a normal part of any weather system, even back to the time of Joseph and the Egyptians.
So, in a recently published article, Italian researchers studied American weather and climate since we have more data than most other countries and hurricanes and tornadoes are more common here. Its conclusions sound nothing like the mantra fed to us that requires every weather event to be attributed to man-made “climate change.” In fact, the authors of the paper found no significant correlation between the number nor magnitude of either hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or much of anything else and any perceived climate change.
In part the abstract reads,
- “The most robust global changes in climate extremes are found in yearly values of heat waves (number of days, maximum duration and accumulated heat), while global trends in heatwave intensity are not significant. Daily precipitation intensity and extreme precipitation frequency are stationary in the main part of the weather stations. Trend analysis of the time series of tropical cyclones show a substantial temporal invariance and the same is true for tornadoes in the USA. At the same time, the impact of warming on surface wind speed remains unclear. The analysis is then extended to some global response indicators of extreme meteorological events, namely natural disasters, floods, droughts, ecosystem productivity and yields of the four main crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat). None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events. In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”
We are being led down the primrose path where science is by computer model and authority of government funded scientists doing the bidding of their own version of Dr. Pavlov. We will waste trillions upon jousting an imaginary windmill called “climate change.” It is a sorry state of affairs for scientists to fall into this trap. If you want to read the whole report, I suggest you google the title and it is downloadable.
Signed – Terrel Shields
Just an old farm boy who knows when I am being lied to.