Something a bit different… an editorial
Thoughts on Global Warming – Science or Hoax
Much ado is being made of something called “global warming” and that
man is somehow responsible for it. One can read many articles
testifying that man is destroying the planet to his own peril. Yet as
we will see further down, the very proponents for “man-made global
warming” have ignored the most obvious things about their data which
have a devastating effect on their own argument. This post intends to
get down to the reality of the matter and simply to point out both the
possible truth and obvious error in this controversial topic. Is there
a possibility of global warming? If not, we’ll dismiss it altogether.
If so, then let’s find out the real reason for it and get on with life
and do something appropriate if we can.
We are going to do something very simple. We are going to think but we
aren’t going to get detailed about this because the massive amounts of
“data” available on this is only relevant if a certain outcome is true
i.e. if man is responsible for “global warming”. If we show that the
evidence indicates otherwise such data is moot. Even in such a case,
other incidental facts found in the process of studying “global
warming” may become important… and they will. So we will use the
principle of “behind every lie there are true statements designed to
make the lie believable and convincing.” So we do not have to be
experts at climatology or anything else. We merely need to think
logically and ask some important questions and toss out what doesn’t
make sense.
Now a disclaimer is appropriate here… as I relate time spans and other
data, I am relating what these sources and current scientific dogma are
saying, not necessarily what I believe about it. Anyway, as you will
see, some EPA and NASA websites will be cited in case the reader is
interested where the data comes from.
So let’s look at the problem from a distance… and try to define what
possible causes there could be and see if any of them make more sense
than the others.
For the earth’s climate to change temperature one way or another, there is more than one possibility for its cause:
1. Source induced changes (i.e. the sun and changes in the intensity of sunlight)
2. Recipient induced changes (i.e. the earth and its atmospheric
changes due to a variety of natural and
man-made sources) (the
proponents’ opinion exclusively)
3. Sun/Earth relationship induced changes (i.e. distance based changes)
4. Non-solar/non-earth induced changes
5. Any combination of the above
Let’s take a quick look at each one of these cases to see which might
be more likely to cause global warming, if it were to occur…
1. Sun induced changes – we have a working model of this happening
right now, the Earth and Sun. The sun outputs a certain amount of
energy and the earth receives a corresponding amount. If the sun’s
output increases a little or decreases a little then the earth receives
a corresponding amount from those changes. We are told that there has
been a 0.5 deg F rise in average global temperatures over the last few
decades. If we compare this to say a 77 deg F day, this change
represents 0.65% change. Working backwards, the sun’s output would have
to change 0.65%. If we consider that our reference is the sun’s
photosphere (the surface) with its estimated temperature of 10,832 deg
F, this 0.65% change would represent the sun’s surface increasing by …
an unimpressive 70.4 deg F. If one were to boil water on that 77 deg F
day, they would have to raise the water temperature much higher than
this to get it to boil. Now there are hotter places on the sun. The
layer above the surface is the chromosphere and its temperature is
right around 50,000 deg F and the layer just below the surface is the
convection zone and reaches a whopping 3.6 million degrees. So it would
only take a temperature rise of 70.4 deg F to create global warming?
Yes. This assumes that the physics that brings energy to our planet
hasn’t changed. A 70.4 deg F upward change in temperature at the sun’s
surface creates a 0.5 degree change on Earth. The amount for the
chromosphere and convection zone will be correspondingly higher and
proportionate as well. If one is worried about a less linear response
in this model remember the temperature movement is very small and
should appear reasonably linear i.e. a proportional relationship. It’s
a good thing our sun is remarkably stable or we’d be getting a lot more
variation than we do.
How about some evidence of sun induced changes that are shown elsewhere
beside the sun or earth? Let’s take a look at Mars… from an article
from the following site…
http://mpfwww.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/gallery/PIA04295.html
the following quote was obtained:
Four images are shown here, plus an animation at left presenting the
four frames in sequence. The location is near 86.3 degrees south
latitude, 49.4 degrees west longitude, and the images show the same
portion of the south polar residual cap as it appeared in 1999, 2001,
2003, and 2005. Comparing the images or viewing the animation makes it
evident that the landscape of the south polar cap has been changing
rapidly over the past four martian years.
Each year that Mars Global Surveyor has been in orbit, the landforms of
the south polar residual cap have gotten smaller, and the carbon
dioxide removed from the cap has not been re-deposited. The implication
is that Mars presently has a warm (and possibly warming) climate, with
new carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere every year. The other
implication is that, at some time in the not-too-distant past, the
planet had a colder climate, so that the layers of carbon dioxide could
be deposited in the first place. If one takes the rate of scarp retreat
and projects it backwards to fill in all of the pits and troughs with
the carbon dioxide that has been removed from them, one finds that the
colder climate might only have occurred a few centuries to a few tens
of thousands of years ago. This kind of time scale is not unlike that
of the climate changes that have been recorded on Earth, including the
Ice Ages and the smaller fluctuations that have occurred since the last
Ice Age (e.g., the "Little Ice Age" of the mid-14th through mid-19th
centuries).
Perhaps our neighboring planet, Mars, is telling us the truth. There is
“global warming” there and its not because man has put greenhouse
gasses into its environment. The sun itself is getting warmer
2. Earth induced changes –
There are a variety of reasons claimed for “global warming” some of
which are volcanic eruptions (aerosol emissions and CO2 (carbon
dioxide) emissions). The EPA website
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/pastcc.html
says there is no
doubt as to the cooling effect of the particles that block sunlight
(citing the “year without summer” dropping worldwide temperatures in
1816 by 5 deg F that followed the eruption of the Tambora Volcano in
Indonesia the year before), yet they fail to explain why visible air
pollution doesn’t do the same thing. In addition, the effect of CO2
emissions from volcanoes is dismissed simply because it is believed
that humans produce something like 150 times the amount volcanoes do.
Now one has to ask, do they really measure all these volcanoes
constantly or is this citation an off-the-cuff estimate?
There is an interesting chart (Figure 1) which shows an interestingly
neat pattern of a global warming episodes every 100,000 years. We’ll
need to remember this number for later. While these folks claim that
the world’s normal level for atmospheric CO2 is something like 280 ppm
and today we’ve got 382 ppm. BTW, they get this from Antarctic ice core
samples. Yet they don’t consider that gasses tend to want to exit from
materials over time, a very common process called “outgassing”, and
such “outgassing” is accelerated in times of rising temperatures
depending on the amount of temperature increase. This would mean that
over 100,000 years the ice lost 100ppm of CO2 concentration which is
not unreasonable. Ultimately, this would mean that 382 ppm or higher
may be entirely normal for a “scheduled global warming episode”. Yet it
is the assumption that there is no “outgassing” process taking place
that should be very troubling to those who are inclined to think about
these matters. And ultimately the CO2 that was captured in the ice to
begin with had to already be in the atmosphere so it could be absorbed
and frozen to be released later.
Beyond this, we should note that our scientists really don’t have a
good idea what the “ideal levels of atmospheric CO2” should be. They
have neither tested nor measured the real atmospheric levels of 100,000
years ago so this must derived indirectly from other artifacts which
they assume agree with their idea of how things work. I don’t want to
make such work totally unusable but indeed we must admit the fact that
they weren’t there to measure the real thing and that isn’t the same as
making a guess, even an educated one about what was supposed to be
real. To say it simply, science wants the world to buy into the same
mental process that has brought us “evolutionary theory” which is still
revising its “truth” about the matter.
Given these issues, the proponents of the science of “man-made global
warming” have a lot yet to prove. At this point, however, with so
little proof, we have to consider this position to be “faith in the
man-made global warming religion” and not fact.
3. Sun/Earth Relationship Induced Changes –
Now it shouldn’t be strange to humans that the earth’s position (and
any point on its surface) is not constant with relation to the sun. We
know this because this is what causes our seasonal temperature
variation, changes in weather over the year, day and night, etc.
It is also no surprise to science that the earth does not return to the
exact same spot one year later when it has made one full revolution
around the sun nor does it return to the same position each time it
rotates on its axis every day. It has been accurately described that
the earth “wobbles” much like a spinning toy top as it slows down. Now
the Earth itself does this ever so slightly over a very long period of
time. There are three major ways this happens:
1) earth’s orbital eccentricity – the entire cycle is around 100,000
years (the earth’s orbit changes from an nearly perfect circle to an
oval shape over time)
2) earth’s rotational tilt – the entire cycle is around 41,000 years
(the earth’s tilt varies between 22 and 24 degrees over time)
3) precession. – the entire cycle varies around 19,000 to 23,000 years
(our north pole star “Polaris” wasn’t always our pole star because of
this)
This following link from NASA explains a lot of this…
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Paleoclimatology_Evidence/
Now just as our seasons vary and the range of temperature extremes we
experience far exceed the reported miniscule 0.5 degree F change over
the last several decades, with high temperatures coming in around 100
deg F to well below freezing (32 deg F and much lower), representing at
least a 68 degree F temperature swing for most of the places here in
the U.S. Given this, it is fully believable that these three effects
could have a major effect that could cause cycles of “global warming”
and “global cooling”.
Yet it is here where we need to stop and note what we just read.
Remember what was found earlier in this post? The earth’s orbital
eccentricity cycle is 100,000 years. Didn’t we note that the last
glacial meltdown was 100,000 years ago? It is not hard to see how
these two numbers might interrelate and makes a much better story than
blaming biological processes or man’s industrial activity on the
matter. Indeed, this is important and tells us clearly that if this is
the cause, there is no amount of man’s effort that will correct this.
We’ll have to ride it through the “naturally occurring global warming
process” and adjust. Now while I jest in saying that there have not
been any SUVs found in the fossil records or any industrial production
plants found in the rock strata and because CO2 and methane are
“greenhouse gasses”..., if we were to accept our “greenie”
friends’ stories about this, we all should blame the last episode of
global warming on dinosaur respiration and flatulence. However, I
digress. So if a warming period has been a historical pattern,
shouldn’t we be expecting one about right now, man-made CO2 or not? Why
tell the world a lie to cover up the fact?
4. Non-solar / non-earth induced changes – to this point, no
extra-solar sources of energy are known to affect earth’s climate
significantly. This possibility is left open since that area of science
has not been fully developed.
Now there is one final nail to put in the coffin of “man-made global
warming”, it is the testimony of the NASA quote found above on Mars’
southern polar cap. If one reads carefully, we find that “global
warming” produces the CO2, not CO2 being the cause of “global
warming”. This would say that as the natural events of the Earth’s
eccentric orbit around the sun, its tilt that caused more sunlight to
hit the polar caps longer, etc. reached the appropriate point and with
some slight contribution from the sun as well, we would see that the
glacier meltdown would release the entrapped CO2 into the atmosphere
just as everyone is measuring. We also know that increasing the
temperature on Earth creates not only respiratory increase in animals
but causes other biological & chemical processes to accelerate as
well.
So, the conclusion is that “global warming” (and cooling) episodes have
occurred in the past and we have been able to establish a regular
pattern of these events. None of these events required man’s
participation in any form. We also noted, based on these sources, the
Earth is due for another major one right about now without man’s help
with “greenhouse gasses.” We have also been able to discover vastly
more plausible reasons for some sort of global warming based on natural
phenomena rather than greenhouse gas production by man.
Now a “global warming” story doesn’t have to be bleak… We have history
of the Norse settling in Greenland just prior to the year 1000, the top
of a warming peak that occurred and melted off the glaciers is shown in
Figure 2 of the EPA page listed above and history also records that the
Norse population of Greenland disappears right about the time of the
beginning of the “little ice age” in the late 1400’s. The period lasted
a bit longer than 500 years and made a land that was covered with
glaciers usable for a while.
http://www.greenland-guide.gl/leif2000/history.htm
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/pastcc.html
What is abundantly clear is that proponents of “man-made global
warming” are gambling. There is a mad rush to make money, attain power, etc. on something
that occurs naturally by becoming “carbon credit czars” and such
things. Politicians want to make it part of their campaigns to do
something about global warming and it’s the perfect scam because they
won’t have to lift a finger because there’s nothing for them to do.
This seems to be all too much like a “geo-political operation” given
larger political bodies are participating as well. Perhaps the most
dangerous thing about man-made global warming is the people who intend it to
deceive and use it to acquire wealth and power from it.
So the answer is before us. There is some potential truth to “global
warming” yet it is also a hoax depending on what you are looking at.
Mr.Vee
It is appropriate to note that God starts with the very
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