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Since the beginning of Scragged as an online publication, one of our regular themes has been the utter falsity of the ongoing "global warming" scare. Indeed, as old as its publication date is, one of our classic series on this topic actually predates Scragged entirely - it first saw the light as a private discussion.
But this, and most of our previous articles on the subject, have assumed that our readers know what science is. The events of this year have revealed this belief to be touchingly naive and generally false.
Hence this series, which has laid a thorough foundation of explaining the operation of true science and the scientific method. In the previous article in this series, we touched on the bad "science" behind our societal reaction to the covid virus. Now it's time to apply the same principles to the scams and faulty reasoning behind the ever-determined push to stop using fossil fuels in order to "Save the Planet."
Although the warmists keep calling anyone who disagrees with them "deniers" and keep bellowing that "the science is settled," you ought to know by now that global warming fails nearly every test of being a true science. For example, back in the 1970s, the same advocates or, at least their academic fathers, were predicting a new ice age - the exact opposite of what they're predicting today.
That didn't lead to many government grants, so they switched to "global warming." When that didn't happen either, they switched to "climate change," the only remaining alternative, so that they could demand more money no matter what happened. That's politically astute, but highly non-scientific!
A valid scientific theory predicts what will happen before it happens, and people collect data see if the predictions match reality. On this basis, climate change has a terrible record.
For example, the Germans were promised that they could Save the Planet at reasonable cost by switching to renewables. Instead, it's been reported that electricity has become a "luxury good" because renewable energy is so much more expensive than fossil-powered juice. Google has become woke and shoved such negative proofs down the memory hole, but duckduckgo.com gives several sites of failed ecological and climate disaster predictions, some going back to 1895 and 1902. As Brietbart puts it after listing a mere 41 failed predictions,
Why would any sane person listen to someone with a 0-41 record? ...
And if that's not crazy enough, the latest ploy is to trot out a 16-year-old girl to spread prediction number 42, because it is so much more credible that way. [emphasis in the original]
When data fails to confirm a theory, the theory is just plain wrong! There is so much money to be made in having renewable energy sources collect subsidies, however, that numerous scan artists who seek to keep the programs going have managed to scare nonscientific people into letting them rip us off.
Historians are in agreement that North America was settled by natives who walked from Siberia to Alaska around 12,000 years ago. At the time, sea levels were a lot lower so there was a land bridge from Siberia to the US.
Similarly, underwater archaeologists have found the remains of a stone age village from about 8,000 years ago at the bottom of the English Channel, showing that England has not always been an island. Where did all the water go? It was frozen into vast ice sheets that covered much of the planet.
As Livescience put it,
As the climate began to warm up near the end of the Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, people were moving into Northern Europe and settling down in the many river valleys left behind by melting glaciers, Momber explained. [emphasis added]
The historical record shows that glaciers melted and the sea rose when the climate began to warm up long before we started using fossil fuels.
The Vikings ranched cattle in Greenland during the Medieval warming period which is generally agreed to have been from around 950 until 1250. They were starved out of Greenland when the weather turned cold during the Little Ice Age which seems to have been between 1300 until around 1850, although historians differ on the precise dates.
The condensed version is that the past climate was cold enough to form massive ice sheets all across North America and Europe. These ice sheets held enough water that the sea level was low enough for people to walk from Siberia to Alaska, from France to England and from India to Ceylon a.k.a. Sri Lanka. As the earth started warming 10,000 years ago, the ice melted, raising the sea levels to where they are today.
Climate has always changed - that's what climates do. When we've pointed this out to warmists, they reply, "But with all our CO2, it's changing faster than in the past!"
They don't know that - the data simply aren't there, and to the extent that it is, it disagrees with them. The Climategate revelations showed that warmists were gaming the peer review system to block articles which showed that their ideas were bogus. The university where the research was carried out investigated and, of course, found nothing wrong and ruled that the emails had been taken out of context. How convenient!
More recently, scientists tried to show that the planet was warming rapidly by arguing that it had been colder in the past than we'd realized.
Scientists must adjust the raw data to take into account all the differences in how, when and where measurements were taken.
These adjustments have long been a heated point of debate. Many climate skeptics like to argue that scientists "exaggerate" warming by lowering past temperatures and raising present ones.
The Conversation discusses the controversy from a different angle:
But this process can lead to large adjustments to the raw data, and in at least some instances the adjusted data can suggest long-term warming even when the raw data indicate cooling. [emphasis added]
In other words, in some cases, raw data suggest that the earth is cooling, and it's only after "adjustments" that the data can be made to suggest warming. If data don't match the warming theory, the theory is wrong!
"Adjusting" data in controversial ways to "prove" the theory is at best anti-science and could be fraudulent. As the old saying goes, "Figures don't lie, but liars figure." This is particularly true when lying can be worth so many billions of dollars in energy subsidies to the politically-connected.
On top of these "known unknowns" where we can't agree how to "adjust" past data, we keep discovering new factors that upset warmists just as better data upset astronomers. AOC was ridiculed for talking about "cow farts," but it's true that cows emit methane which helps the atmosphere hold heat. For decades, scientists thought that methane was produced only by living creatures, but we're reported that methane is also produced by chemical processes deep in the earth. Nobody knows how much methane is added to the atmosphere in that way, but it's "a lot."
On top of that, ecologists have been trying to get the climate community to notice that trees put a great deal of water vapor into the atmosphere. Water vapor traps more heat than CO2, and clouds are one of the major uncertainties in climate models.
"Forests Emerge as a Major Overlooked Climate Factor" points out that:
... a single tree can evaporate hundreds of liters of water per day - enough to fill several bathtubs. The world's major forests, which contain hundreds of billions of trees, can move water on almost inconceivably large scales. Antonio Nobre, a climate scientist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, has estimated, for example, that the Amazon rainforest discharges around 20 trillion liters of water per day - roughly 17 percent more than even the mighty Amazon River.
The Amazon river puts water into the sea; Amazon trees put water vapor, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Are we absolutely sure that planting trees fights climate change?
Forbes knows that the facts about water vapor and CO2 don't favor the warmist narrative. They wrote:
The fact that water vapor is the dominant absorber in the Earth's greenhouse effect can lead to a flawed narrative that anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) is not important nor a significant driver of climate warming. [emphasis added]
Forbes argues that even though water vapor is the "dominant absorber," we shouldn't argue that human-generated CO2 isn't important. Even though water vapor is the "dominant absorber," warmists claim that cutting CO2 will reduce global warming!
Saying water vapor is a more important greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is like saying the amplifier in a sound system is more important than the volume dial for producing the sound. It's true, in a literal sense, but very misleading. CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases are the volume dial on the climate, and the water vapor amplifies the warming that they produce. [emphasis added]
They say that it's true, but misleading, to say that water vapor is more important than CO2!
The Economist has also gone all-in against CO2. Their weekly newsletter of Dec 3, 2020 told us:
The International Energy Agency reckons that global coal use will never again surpass its pre-covid peak. Yet coal still accounts for 27% of the raw energy used to power everything from cars to electric grids. More important, unlike natural gas and oil, it is concentrated carbon, and thus it accounts for a staggering 39% of annual emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. [emphasis added]
Note what they don't tell us:
Warmists can't tax water vapor or keep the sun from creating water vapor by evaporating oceans or keep trees from pumping vast quantities of water into the atmosphere. They can't do anything about the fluctuations in the sun's output which are blamed for the little ice age. They have to focus on something they can tax and regulate! Hence CO2 from fossil fuels takes the blame...
Forbes' article suggests that the water vapor trees put into the atmosphere traps more heat than the CO2 the trees absorb would have trapped. Will AOC want to burn down all the forests while we slaughter all the farting cows? Climate "scientists" are reluctant to discuss the question because their models can barely handle the variables they already know about and any focus on water vapor might distract the masses from worrying about CO2.
On top of all this, there's no way that 3rd world nations will tolerate not being permitted to increase energy use. Both India and China will experience regime change if the peasants aren't given air conditioning.
We've pointed out that the increase in electricity use just for air conditioning by 2050 will be more electricity than all the electricity used today in the US and Germany combined. To put it in perspective, the increase in A/C in India alone will be 55 times total use of electricity in New York City.
The New York Post tells us:
... if New Zealand meets its promise of zero emissions in 2050 and stays at zero for five decades, then the greenhouse-gas reduction, according to the standard estimate from the United Nations' climate panel, will deliver a temperature cut by 2100 of 0.004 degrees.
New Zealand is considering spending at least $5 trillion [that's $1 million per person] to deliver a physically unmeasurable impact by the end of the century. [emphasis added]
Is New Zealand really going to spend more money on climate change than on "social security and welfare, health, education, police, courts, defense, environment, and every other part of government combined?" Please tell me again why we should stop using plastic straws.....
As you can see, the slightest objective glance at the evidence shows just how utterly unscientific the entire global cooling, global warming, climate change movement has become. If we still believed in science, the theory would have been laughed off the stage long ago.
Unfortunately, true science is no longer common in the world we live in and we're all paying the price. As we wrap up this series, we'll assign blame where it belongs.