In this time of a new administration, it is clear that the media and most of the recently elected members of Congress are unanimous in attacking global warming, even as the globe cools substantially and many are suffering from the ravages of cold and snow and ice. Nevertheless, those who accept the myth that human activities are responsible for global climate change, particularly global warming threaten the very existence of modern society with demands to drastically reduce the generation of electrical power and substitute theology for science.
The real argument arises from the claim that emissions of carbon dioxide from human activities are warming the climate, and will inevitably lead to ecocatastrophe.
If this claim is true, then climate change over the last one hundred years must have taken place at rates and ranges never before seen in history. It didn’t! Ignoring all the ice core data that show that global temperature has been decreasing for the last 8000 years, anthropogenic climate change advocate James Hanson, in a letter to the President Obama, argues that the temperature of today is as high as it has been since the end of the last glaciation. All the historic temperature data show that the argument is specious. It is not only unsubstantiated, it is untrue.
To establish that emissions of carbon dioxide from human activities are the cause of global warming, there must be a direct and close correlation between increasing temperature over the last 100 years and increasing carbon dioxide concentration levels in the atmosphere.
Except for the period from 1976 to 1998, over the last 100 years there is no correlation. While positive correlation is not proof of cause, negative correlation disproves cause.
To establish that emissions of carbon dioxide from human activities are the cause of global warming, there must be a plausible theory substantiated by laboratory testing, that increased concentration of carbon dioxide has a significant effect on temperature.
The thermodynamics of carbon dioxide specify that the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature is logarithmic, decreasing exponentially with carbon dioxide concentration. 95 to 99% of the possible total effect of carbon dioxide had already been accomplished when its level in the atmosphere reached about 280 ppm. Therefore, doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have essentially no effect on future temperature, especially in a wet atmosphere, the normal state of the earth’s envelope.
It is critically important to identify the real cause of climate change before irrational public policies are adopted and Draconian economic sanctions are placed on Western Civilization. The causes of short term changes in climate are many. Long term climate drivers are not so easy to identify. There is, however, a record of climate change in the historic and geologic past that identifies solar and orbital variations as the essential drivers of long-term climate change.
Actual measured solar intensity variations are not large, and the disciples of anthropogenic global warming (AGW ) have argued that it is too small to account for the temperature changes that have taken place, although the changes in carbon dioxide levels are too small also.
To make their case, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argues that the exponential decrease in the effects of increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere must be offset by “amplifiers” to arrive at the temperature projections their computer models spew. The fallacy of that argument is that the amplifiers work no matter what the driver may be, since the amplifiers are derived from the temperature changes themselves, not driver mechanisms.
What we do know is that there is a close correlation between solar and orbital variability and climate change. We can relate recorded temperature change to documented solar cycles. For instance, we can identify that the 1934 temperature spike (the warmest temperature in the United States in the last 100 years) marks the beginning of a Gleissberg cycle (the 60-80 year-long solar cycle), and the warming leading to the 1998 spike the other end of the cycle. In between the warm spikes there was a 30-year cooling from about 1940 to 1970. From those data one can predict, as I did, that the current temperature should trend downward in response to lower solar activity, which it has.
The very fact that we can predict changes in temperature and match those predictions with history as well as current events makes this correlation a much more rigorous and therefore credible hypothesis for causation than just simple correlation of past events. Similarly, we can predict, and do, that the millennial cycle is close to a major change, having previously been high about 1000 A.D., and due now for a decline. This matches predictions that the next solar cycle will be the weakest since the Little Ice Age around 1750, and may presage a long term decline in global temperature.
The computer models upon which the AGW adherents have based their argument have not been able to predict, nor have they been able to replicate documented climate change which has already occurred. They predict continuing warming, but it has been cooling for ten years. Why should we accept their predictions of climate change yet to come?
There is no substantial credible scientific evidence that carbon dioxide is the driver of modern climate or accounts for climate change on Earth since the last ice age. Those who still argue that it is will not acknowledge the failure of their hypothesis because there is too much money and social engineering based upon their theory to abandon it. But claiming humans are causing significant global climate change is no longer science. It is theology.
Dr. Lee C. Gerhard is a geologist who has studied meteorology since 1958 and climate change since 1964. He is retired as Getty Professor of Geological Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines and also as State Geologist and Director of the Kansas Geological Survey. He has published more than 200 scientific and policy papers, including 20 evaluating causes of climate change. He was elected to the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, US Section in 2007, and is an Honorary Member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, its Division of Environmental Geosciences, and the Kansas Geological Society. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. He lectures widely about environment and natural resources policy and about climate change.