Playing With Our Heads

I’m sure some of you have noticed by now that AGW proponents are playing with our heads.

I decided to run a little experiment to show this; it actually started three years ago, when I first heard the claim “People around the world have noticed that something is very wrong with the weather…” going on to say that ordinary people see “spring arriving weeks earlier”, “winters shorter and warmer” and so on.

So I began to note down rough basics; first day of 75°F+ weather, last frost, first frost, storm frequency, and so forth. Apparently, according to AGW people, spring is now up to three weeks earlier than “just a few years ago” (a vague term). Let me share with you my relatively unscientific findings, based on local observations of the climate here in Missouri.

The first “warm stretch” of spring (3 consecutive days of 75°F or more) occurred within 5 days of each other in both 2006 and 2007.  In 2008, it occurred 10 days late.

The first “cold snap” of fall/winter fell within 3 days in 2005-6, 2006-7 and 2007/8.

The last frost occurred within 3 days of each other in all years. This past winter was the 3rd snowiest on record. We hit record lows on no less than 3 occasions.

In March-April of 2006 and 2007 there were 10-12 stormy days (by “stormy”, I mean “severe storms”, i.e. hail, heavy rain, thunder and lightning, etc) In 2008 there were (so far) 3.

The dogwoods (the first things to bloom here) came out in late march in both 2006 and 2007.  this year, they arrived in mid-April.  The trees came into leaf in 2006 and 2007 by early april.  they’re just starting to today (April 25th, 2008 )

OK, I know; small samples, highly unscientific and so forth, but remember the claim: Everyone has noticed winter becoming shorter and warmer, and summers are hotter and drier.  Spring is getting earlier and earlier… etc etc. Since this is a statment about persnal experience, I decided to test it.  And my “experiential” findings? No “later winters, earlier spirings”.  If anything, things are pretty static. And spring was technically really late this year.

So what’s going on?

Surely in your life you’ve come across people who say things like “we never really had a summer last year, did we?”, when you can plainly remember lying on the sofa, fans and A/C on high with a cold cloth on your head, sweating in misery as the mercury hit 100 for the third straight day (not a terribly unusual occurrence here in the midwest).  It’s basically that everyone constructs their own reality based on faulty recollection, and our minds fill in the gaps with invention that is utterly identical to real experience.  We lie to ourselves.  Every day.

The AGW crowd has gotten hold of this phenomenon and is using it against us now, playing with our own memories and implanting the idea that we have all experienced global warming in our everyday lives.  The figures to back this up, however, are missing.  In the reports where they cite our “personal experienec”, they never quote any real observations about how much warmer year X was over year Y, or how much later spring was (except vague terms like “weeks” or “days”.  How many weeks and days? No response.)

I’m not suggesting that you need to perform this little experiment, although it might be interesting if you did. Nor am I saying that the AGW people are explicitly, deliberately doing this, although I am sure some are.  Instead, I think it’s that a lot of well-intentioned AGW people have convinced themselves that the seasons are going haywire, and misremember the experiences of previous years to justify it, almost entirely unconsciously.

The only real result of my experiment, as far as I can tell, is that the world might be warming, or might not.  It just isn’t doing much of anything here; so it’s hardly a Global phenomenon, is it?

 

Not with a bang…

It’s been over a month since my last post, and what a month it’s been! Tornadoes! Earthquakes! Yard work! Yes, I have seen all this and more. So very much more…

Anyway…

Well, that little Expelled! movie is getting a little bit of attention, it seems. I saw ads for it on CNN (surprising), Fox News (very, depressingly, absolutely unsurprising), and Discovery Channel (horrifying). Of course, Ben Stein began to tarnish in my eyes when he became a regular Fox contributor, redeemed himself with very funny performances in Fairly Oddparents, then dropped off the radar of my respect with this movie. Not, I’m sure, that he will wake up sobbing at the prospect at having lost my respect. His bank balance will take care of any lingering qualms he might have in that regard. I understand Fox News Channel pays a fair bit to its contributors, too… why else would Dick Morris be there? (Except that Fox hates the Clintons more than he does?)

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised about the ad appearing on Discovery Channel, though… after all, they continue to shove AGW down our throats on a regular basis, joined now by NGC and History Channel. They have large numbers of worthy talking heads all real scientists, saying “There is no debate”, which, considering several hundred scientists are doing just that, is pretty ludicrous now.

They still harp on about the polar bears being endangered, and how terrible it is that the US Government wants to take them off the protected list as part of their horrific scheme to claim that AGW is a myth, despite the fact that the figures show that the Polar Bear population has increased 90% since 1980. Yes. 90 percent!

We’re told Greenland is melting, although the interior isn’t, that Antarctica is melting, the Arctic is melting, and we’re all gonna die. But the Arctic sea ice in the 2007-8 season contained about 1.8 million square kilometers more ice than last year, and the 2007 Antarctic season substantially more than that.

In NGC’s “Last Days on Earth” special, Global Warming was the “NUMBER 1 THREAT TO ALL LIFE ON EARTH!!!!”, ahead of asteroid impact. This despite the fact that even the most dire projections raise the temperature far less than the Triassic Global Desert event, which only managed to wipe out 60% of life, and Asteroid impacts are a lot more common than we imagined only 10 years ago, and Toutatis is going to pass within a few hundred miles of the surface of the Earth on Friday, 13th April 2029. Toutatis is not an extinction-level event, but it’s pretty nasty all the same.

In the meantime, the world is stubbornly refusing to get hotter, cooling by almost a degree over the last ten years, and even the IPCC says this year, globally, will be “cooler than average”. Whatever “average” is.

So, the World is apparently going to hell in a handbasket, and we’re all going to die of heatstroke and dehydration. Or cold and flooding. Or something nasty, anyway.

The only problem is, someone forgot to tell the World.

Where’s the Hole?

In all the Global Warming talk of recent years, I’m sure you’ve all noticed something missing in the “humans are evil” chatter; the hole in the ozone layer.  Where is it?

Well, the good news is, it’s shrinking; has been for years, actually, but no-one thought to splash it across the front pages, or lead their evening news with this ringing endorsement of Man’s ability to accept wrongdoing and change for the better. How could the media have made such an egregious error? Well, actually, there are a couple of reasons.

1. The shrinking hole doesn’t quite fit in with the current GW catastrophe scenarios. If it was reported, the Powers That Be might find people realizing that their doom scenarios, splashed so prominently around a decade ago regarding the Hole and now rendered meaningless, bore an uncanny resemblance to the ones currently being touted regarding Global Warming.
2. Some people might question exactly what is going on here, and rightly so.

See, CFCs are still around. Science informed us in dire terms that CFCs lasted for thirty years or more in the upper atmosphere, triggering millions of cascading free-radical interactions that will slowly kill the ozone layer. Even if we stopped producing CFCs back in 1995, they warned, the hole would grow for decades, until the chemicals were finally neutralized. And it’s not just the CFCs that are still there from our overuse dating back to the 50s… China, India, Africa and a host of other developing nations still use CFCs… in some cases, with even greater abandon than the West did, so they’re still being added to the atmosphere.

And yet the hole is closing…

Nobody seemed to notice a few points. Firstly, we didn’t even know that the hole (really a thinning, not a hole) was even present until we looked for it; there were no baselines for ozone concentrations over Antarctica before the 80s, when the hole was “found”.

Secondly, nobody had a mechanism for how the CFCs would actually get into the ozone layer in the first place; the tropopause, a boundary layer in the middle atmosphere, helps prevent atmospheric mixing from ground to top-level. This is why ozone does not drop to ground level, and why our ground level atmosphere has not slowly evaporated into space (well, not the only reason, but one of the top ones…) Neither could they explain how, once miraculously in the upper atmosphere, they were able to travel from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere across the coriolis winds that circle the equator, and prevent a lot of atmospheric mixing between the hemispheres from occurring.

And finally, all the experiments that demonstrated CFC-driven ozone depletion failed to mention that the free-radical reaction was closed; O3 certainly broke down with CFCs, which themselves were dissociated free radicals at that point, but the resultant molecules were themselves very unstable at the best of times. Under the high radiation, high-UV environment of the ozone layer, that collapse would be even faster, resulting in more oxygen free radicals to mop up outstanding O2 molecules to create yet more O3… And that this was just a variant of the reaction that occurred to create ozone in the first place. Nothing was “permanently bound”, since all the molecules formed and involved in the reaction were unstable.. And the ozone layer operates by the dissociation from O3 to O2 and back again to block UV light.

The hole is closing now.. and its closing coincides with an increase in Antarctic sea-ice formation.  The same story is true in the northern hemisphere.

So what do we learn from this? Firstly, it is an example of leaping to a conclusion when there was little science to support it, massaging what science there was to fit the story, and generally going public before the research was complete.

Secondly, it is an example of the politicization of science; in itself, the studies suggesting a thinning of the ozone layer over the Antarctic would have been interesting, but simply a point for further study.  The same is true of early studies indicating a warming trend globally. However, these results were seized on by an environmental lobby desperate for a “win”; decades of environmental campaigning had resulted in little overall change in man’s attitude to the environment, and the lobby was getting desperate for some “proof” of large-scale damage being created by man.  Here was an opportunity to get a message – any message – out into the public eye.

Thirdly, today you would be hard pressed to find any scientist who stands proudly proclaiming “I found the ozone hole, and I fixed it”. In fact, the community had gone very quiet as yet more evidence comes in suggesting that the ozone layer fluctuates regionally every bit as much as the climate. And, it should be noted, that when the AGW argument is finally laid to rest, the same silence will ring through the scientific community then.

Don’t think it’ll happen? Do you remember the hysteria about the ozone hole? The daily reports, the full-color splashes in the newspapers?  The loving executed graphics on TV? And yet here were are, just a few years later and we’ve all forgotten about it.  Global Warming will fade away too, because the scientists, politicians and interest groups who have fanned the flames know that the general public will forget as thoroughly as they did about the ozone hole.

A little ice in that, sir?

Wow. It never ceases to amaze me how hysterical the human race is. Recently, as you may have noticed, we’re been informed that we’re a terrible cancer on the face of the Earth, and now we’re about to destroy everything, including polar bears, with our nasty emissions.

Not exactly a break with tradition, though; Malthus called us all diseased, over-breeding pigs back in the 1700s, about the time that Defoe was writing scathing satires on the rich eating children. In the 1800s, Bentham, Cadbury and the other nouveau riche of Britain’s industrial age were trying to assist the downtrodden (a laudable effort, if not purely motivated by the humanitarian urge they are often ascribed to), and of course in the 1900s, we had a wide variety of “people are sick” events to choose from, starting with the Great War and more or less getting worse from there on in.

As usual, such assertions are couched in terms that we find a little more palatable; in this case, it’s the brutal industrial overlords of Big Oil, Big Industry and various other entities (including – gasp- Communist China!) who are forcing all of us little, honest, lovely, smiling, happy and otherwise deeply responsible people to pollute and despoil our world. Basically, it’s the same story – as individuals, we’re not really responsible for it, so we can feel good about ourselves. The real enemy are those mustache-twirling technocrats in the opera-hats over there who have planned all along to turn the world into a huge trash-heap for reasons that no-one can adequately explain.

And, of course, now they have evidence on their side. No, really.

Well, I must tell you right off; I’m a geologist, not a climatologist.  On the one hand, that might seem to disqualify me from commenting, but on the other hand, it does provide me with something that a lot of climatologists seem to lack. Context.

In science, context is everything. For example, when the first atom bomb tests were conducted on Bikini Atoll, many respected scientists averred learnedly that the very air would be set alight, destroying all life on Earth. I’m not sure if you noticed or not, but that didn’t happen. Now, of course, we know that as hot as an A-bomb explosion gets, it’s nowhere near as hot as, say, a ten-mile chunk of rock hitting the planet at 50,000 mph tends to get, and the firestorm that happened then certainly didn’t sterilize the whole planet. OK, it was 65 million years ago, but well, we’re here, so something survived.

See? Context.

So, what does context tell us about global warming? Well, let’s first set aside the discussion about whether it’s happening or not for another day. (Believe me, that’s a juicy one!) Let us, for sake of argument, assume that the IPCC worst-case projection is accurate, and we’ll rise by 7 degrees or so in the next century. Do we see death and destruction? Well, not quite.

See, at the end of the last major glacial period (a lot of people say “the end of the last Ice Age”, but folks, it ain’t ended yet) global temperatures rose. A lot. And, a fair body of evidence now suggests, very very fast. Some areas appear to have experiences rises of 15F in less than four decades.  We were around for that one, and we didn’t even bottleneck; as a population, we exploded, responding to the new environment with a vigor and gusto that the climate-change-doomsayers seem to forget that we possess. No, I’m not saying that it will be easy, but it won’t be calamitous.

There were extinctions; many mega-faunas went out, mammoths were restricted to extreme northern Siberia and northern Canada until our ancestors and a change in vegetation seems to have finally done for them. Polar bears, once widespread, began to find their ranges limited as the ice caps retreated to the highest latitudes.. hey, that sounds familiar! But the rate of extinction does not seem to be much lower then than it is today, despite the opinions of the environmentalists who tell us everything on the planet is dying. As a geologist, I can tell you that, uh, that’s what they do. Evolution is a long term process, and things die constantly.

Of course, before the last glaciation event, global temperatures fluctuated too. They rose, initially, for about 20-30 years, and in that time, put on anywhere from 5 to 10 F – pretty impressive rises – before the bottom dropped out and the world froze. Again, mass extinctions weren’t on the cards then, either, just the same slow die-off.

The Earth has been much hotter than it is today, and much much colder. Triassic temperatures averaged in the 80F range globally, Precambrian “snowball Earth” temps down below 20F.  The fact is there is no baseline “normal” from which to measure our temperatures; even 1000 years ago, the Vikings found a paradise in the far north, and grew crops there. They called it Greenland. It’s still there today, but scientists and alarmists now point to its horrifying rate of glacial retreat. They don’t point to the retreating glaciers revealing Viking settlements with grain stores and farms, because it doesn’t fit the story.

Something else that doesn’t fit the story is Antarctica, which is getting colder and icier by the year, so much so that over a dozen species of Antarctic lichen have gone extinct, or are threatened with extinction.

Where’s their TV ad?