Enrico!

A report published in the January 29, 2010 issue of Science Magazine shows that stratospheric levels of water vapor decreased by about 10% from the year 2000, slowing the increase in global temperatures by about 25%.

The 25% figure comes from the same horribly flawed bullshit models that are the basis for all the other bullshit claims of the climate “scientists,” but the key takeaway is, the alleged scientists are very embarrassed that they can’t explain why global average temperatures have stayed flat or declined in the face of steadily increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and they are absolutely desperate to find an explanation which allows them to maintain the focus on rolling back humanity’s lifestyle.

Don’t be confused:  the global warming enthusiast’s motivation is a) lots of money and b) a Unabomber-esque political agenda which would be most gratified by a mass migration to unpowered yurts, global adoption of a vegetarian lifestyle, and men wearing skirts.

So, my question is, will the EPA declare that water vapor is a pollutant?  This would make as much if not more sense than its declaration that CO2 is a pollutant.  Water vapor is the most potent, the most significant, greenhouse gas, both in its impact per unit, and in its concentration levels in the atmosphere.

The bozos in charge of the IPCC process don’t know what the fuck they are doing.  The Himalayan glaciers hoax is just the tip of the iceberg.  Any cool rational true scientist will admit that climate “science” is not truly deserving of the name.  Saying that it is in its infancy is very generous.

The climate is an insanely complex system, and we don’t even begin to know all the things we don’t understand about it.  Here’s one of the most basic head scratchers, which ought to illustrate why all the modeling is currently doomed to failure:  we can’t figure out where all the CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere is going.  The numbers don’t add up.  Something like half the amount the doofusses claim is being emitted winds up in the atmosphere.  Some of it winds up being absorbed by the oceans, and of course quite a bit is metabolized by plants.

But, the numbers don’t work.  If the charlatans can’t get that right, how can their models possibly work, even if everything else in their models is correct, which, obviously, we know is not the case?

And these idiots want us to bet the lives of billions of people on their wild-ass guesses.

It snowed in Houston yesterday.

Look, I know that one snowy day in Houston, of all places, proves nothing about the millennial global climate prognosis, but I was also not the one who claimed that mankind’s CO2 emissions caused Hurricane Katrina, nor am I the one who claimed that, pretty damn soon, a 30 foot wave would appear off lower Manhattan.

Where were the people who would (rightly) object to my linking snow in Houston to long-term global cooling when Al Gore was on his global hysteria tour? I guess they were on the hypocrite’s bus.

Many of the people who are hyping the hysteria over anthropogenic global waming just have no intellectual integrity, and so, frankly, I would be more inclined to bundle up than not if they predict a warm spell.

There’s a good article in the October 10th edition of Science Magazine, about teleconnection between northern hemisphere insolation and temperatures in tropical southeastern Africa during the past 60,000 years. The gist of the article is that the authors examined the orthodox view that CO2 concentrations would play a significant role in the teleconnection. However, INCONVENIENTLY, their analysis shows that temperatures began to rise in tropic southeastern Africa (this is the area of the African great lakes, like Lake Tanganyika) about 3000 years before rises in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

The authors don’t draw any big conclusions about this in relation to the global warming hysteria (only the Alpha whitecoats are allowed to do that, to challenge the orthodoxy is to risk being ceremoniously stripped of one’s whitecoat), but they do state that the mechanism for the teleconnection is unknown.

This article is also good for showing the artistry and resourcefulness needed to even begin to do even the roughest analysis of temperatures, CO2 levels, hydrology, and insolation at the distance of 60,000 years. Heck, even doing this analysis at the distance of 100 years is quite a challenge.

It is very obvious that popular culture completely misunderstands the level of precision inherent in these kinds of proxy-driven reconstructions. Researchers are forced to come up with a tailored approach to doing this analysis in a given locale, using whatever kinds of historical records may be readily available. The methods are not much repeatable in a different locale, and correlating the reconstructions done in one locale with those done in another locale is a fraught process which introduces its own rather high margin of error, multiplying the original errors in the separate reconstructions.

The statistical methods used to analyze the rate of error are total bullshit. This must be the case, as there is no control case, no base data with known correlations. The statistical methods boil down to a giant case of amazingly complex circular reasoning.

I don’t mean to imply that i know a better way to do the analysis these researchers are attempting. I admire their creativity and the intricate chains of connections and surmised biological processes that underlay the “data.” It isn’t really data.

Here’s an article from an Australian newspaper, which lays out the uncontroversial fact that, since 1998, global average temperatures have decreased.

As I have argued previously, it is pretty obvious from the scientific data that the sun’s activity, within its normal range of variation, is a far more significant factor in the temperature of the earth than atmospheric concentrations of CO2. I really cannot imagine any rational person contradicting this statement.

Global warming enthusiasts argue that the earth’s recent cooling cycle is a product of other countervailing natural forces, and that, were it not for the massive quantities of CO2 mankind is dumping into the atmosphere, the earth right now would be cooler than it is, presumably by about one degree fahrenheit, or so.

It seems to me that this response reinforces the argument I make, that other forces, some known, others possibly unknown or poorly understood, are bigger factors in the earth’s temperature than CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

The mechanism by which CO2 contributes to warming is limited to a certain spectrum of reflected infrared radiation. We have long since passed the point of CO2 concentrations where there is no more reflected infrared radiation in the specific spectrum to be additionally trapped. This is a partial explanation for that fact, although CO2 levels have continued to climb rather dramatically since 1998, temperatures have not continued to climb. I suspect that this is a MINOR part of the explanation, however, given the fact that CO2 has to compete with a giant (what an inadequate term!) burning sphere of hydrogen for its influence over our climate.

Despite the fact that CO2 doesn’t pose the specific threat of sending us into a catastrophic warming cycle, there are quite sufficient other reasons for putting a stop to the massive emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. For one, and this would really be quite sufficient by itself, the oceans absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. As they absorb more and more CO2, the oceans become more acidic. This is not a good thing for our current complement of ocean life, and there is a very real potential for this to be highly disruptive to the global foodchain.

For two, and this one is also quite sufficient all by itself, we in the United States are hocking our wealth and our future, and compromising our security, by buying hydrocarbons from our enemies. The dollar would probably not be plummetting as it is were it not for our addiction to foreign oil. We’ve got to cut this out.

Craig Venter gave a talk recently at the TED conference on his work on digitally engineering life. He’s working on engineering an organism which converts CO2 into an ethanol-like fuel.

Venter is a genius. He’s the man behind Celera and Human Genome Sciences. Back in the 90s, there was a huge government-backed program to map the human genome. The official government position was that this a difficult, expensive project, and that it would probably take a decade or so to complete, all the while consuming the efforts of thousands of scientists. Venter believed that the project could be done much more rapidly and less expensively, using whole genome shotgun sequencing, a riskier approach involving blasting the human DNA into tiny bits and attacking the analysis on a massively parallel basis. The government program said his approach was bullshit, and there was a falling out. Venter went off on his own, raised capital, and completed the analysis in about 2 years and at a fraction of the cost of the government program.

The science Venter describes is astounding, powerful beyond my imagination. Making fuel will certainly turn out to be the least interesting application.

But making fuel for humanity is a very significant scale challenge. The scale of production needed to produce meaningful quantities of fuel is hard to conceive. The world produces (and essentially consumes) about 80 million barrels of oil per day. On an annual basis, this is enough oil to cover the state of Massachussetts 1.5 feet deep in crude oil.

The corn ethanol program is insane, nearly criminal. Making ethanol uses more energy than is contained in the ethanol. The only reason there is ethanol being made from corn is that the government subsidizes it to a scandalous level.

Not all ethanol is bad in this way. Brazil derives more than half of its fuel for transport from ethanol, but the ethanol is produced from other feedstocks, in a process which is energy profitable. But it is virtually impossible for even the most efficient, most feedstock-versatile ethanol fermentation process to ever make a significant dent in the world’s demand for liquid fuels. We just cannot afford to dedicate the arable land we have to making fuel at the scale the world needs.

I think Venter’s science may still be 10 years away from a place where it can be used to make fuels at commercial scale. But there are other companies exploring similar, though not as amibitious, genetic engineering approaches which have the potential to hugely increase the efficiency of the conversion of feedstocks into fuels. LS9 and Amyris are two of the most promising, well-funded companies, both based in Silicon Valley.

This is an area well worth watching. We are on the verge of a revolution in genetic engineering that will surpass the industrial revolution in its impact on humanity.

This study from a scientist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory concludes that the senstivity of global temperatures to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is 1.1 +/- 0.5 degree K. The sensitivity of the planetary system to increases in CO2 levels is less than half the figure used by the UN’s IPCC. Idiots like Algore, and even the IPCC reports, present the notion that planetary temperatures respond to increased CO2 in a linear relationship. In reality, the relationship is logarithmic–the incremental temperature increase due to CO2 diminishes as CO2 concentrations rise. The reason for this is the mechanism by which CO2 contributes to increased temperature. The shape and size of the CO2 molecule prevents the radiation into space of a certain range of wavelengths of infrared energy reflected from the earth’s surface. As a greater and greater pecentage of this range of wavelengths of energy is blocked, incremental amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere have less and less effect.

But you don’t have to believe or understand anything about the mechanism to look at charts of CO2 concentrations overlaid with charts of global mean surface temperatures (GMST). When you look at the charts, the logarithmic relationship is evident. If the IPCC’s hypothesis were correct, GMST should increase in a linear relationship to CO2 concentrations. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Even so, given that the relationship is logarithmic, there is still a legitimate concern about the point at which the temperature forcing levels out. The top end of the range assessed by this paper, 1.6 degrees K, may seem small, but there is little doubt that we will all notice this in dramatic (although well short of catastrophic) changes in the planetary ecology. The bigger concern is the possibility that we will experience warming due to changes in solar activity. It would not be a bad thing for the planet to consider what we will do about this, if it develops.

Some readers of this paper conclude that the author is saying that some large portion of the total possible forcing from increased in CO2 levels has already occurred, i.e., during the industrial era, increased CO2 has already probably caused an increase of about .5 degrees C, +/- .3 C. I am uncertain as to whether this is an accurate reading.

It continues to amaze me that so many alleged scientists are apparently so willing to ignore the facts.

I am not a scientist. But my reverence for the white-coated priests of logic, evidence, reason, caution and dispassionate objectivity has been shaken to the core by the alleged prevailing scientific consensus that human-emitted carbon dioxide is causing or is going to cause a catastrophic increase in global average temperatures.

This conclusion is simply not at all supported by the facts.

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