Climate Change Is Real, of Course

William M. Briggs, on “Of Course Human Caused Climate Change is Real”:

Given our knowledge of physics, it is not just true, but trivially and obviously true that humans cause the climate to change.

But then so do ants cause climate change, and their arch rivals the aardvarks.  As do yellow perch and their meals the nightcrawlers.  Any species that moves or engages in respiration, or in eructation after a good meal, changes the climate.

It would be impossible for them not to.  Why?  Because any move through the atmosphere changes its state, just as any exchange of gases changes the state, and any change of state of the atmosphere is a change of climate.  And that is that. Humans, ants, and every other damn creature cause the climate to change.

The only question is how much?  A worm wiggling across the surface of a sidewalk after a rainstorm is not moving fast, and thus not causing large changes of state of the atmosphere.  But it’s not as simple as that: the birds who dive bomb the worms cause larger changes, changes that would not have taken place had the worms not been there.

And when the worm begins to rot after you squish it, its dissolving body changes the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and changes it in a different way than if it were processed through the gut of a robin.

Don’t scoff!  We read that the biomass of worms outweighs that of humans.  Worms are unimaginably important critters, aerating—get it?—soil, feeding fish, and crawling trillions of miles.  How can we say authoritatively the exact effect worms have on climate?  We cannot, not exactly; but perhaps we can approximate it.  [...]

Humans and worms do cause the weather to change, even cause it to change measurably; thus they also cause the average of the weather—the climate—to change measurably.  For instance, your author lives on a small island upon which is dumped a great, tangled mass of concrete, through which scurry motorized vehicles, rats, cockroaches, and even people.  These static and movable objects cause great changes in the weather, and thus in its average.

Humans, on the island and off, also pump various gases and other effluvia into the atmosphere.  These gases also cause changes in the weather, thus climate.  So much is indisputable.

What is disputable is how much.  We can ask—it is an intelligible question—what the weather (thus climate) would be like on the small island given the concrete, vermin, and people were removed.  We might cobble together a mixed physical-statistical model which gives an answer.  But the answer won’t necessarily be the right answer.  And we’ll never be able to tell if it’s right or wrong because we’ll never be able to shift all that stuff off the isle to check.  [...]

Tangled Webs

At The Resilient Earth, in “Climate Science’s Tangled Web”, Doug L. Hoffman reports that bogus reports of global warming from alleged scientists continue:

Recent days have seen a number of announcements about our changing climate.  As it turns out, Arctic ice is rebounding, sea levels are dropping and things just are not going according to the IPCC's plan for catastrophic global warming.  Faced with reversal after reversal, it might seem logical for mainstream climate scientists to admit that they are wrong, that global warming is not taking place at a breakneck pace, but this has not happened.  Instead, climate change apologists are weaving a tangled web of excuses—hot is cold, wet is dry, up is down.  No matter what happens to the world we live in, the root cause according to the doomsayers is always the same:  it’s always global warming’s fault.

Sea level rise due to global warming has been a topic of intense debate for years.  While the minuscule rise of the world's oceans has been fairly steady for most of the last 20 years, every once in a while sea levels do something unexpected.  In the past two decades global sea levels increased at a rate of roughly 0.12 inches a year, compared to 0.07 inches from 1961 to 2003, according to satellite data.  A recent study of sea levels, as measured by tide gauges, suggested the rate of ocean rise has declined in the past decade around Australia and New Zealand.

See also  Bill Muehlenberg, at Quadrant Online, on “The growing desperation of the climate alarmists”:

You can always tell when real science has long ago given way to hysteria and agenda setting when the arguments being dragged out become more and more bizarre.  Less and less science is offered, and instead we get all sorts of blatant moonbattery.
We have had several prime examples of this lately.  Consider a major player in all this, Al Gore.  He has gotten so desperate to push his whacko agenda that he is now saying that climate change skeptics are basically in the same camp as racists.
Just as we had to fight the ugly racists in the past, Gore says we need to do the same with those ugly climate change skeptics today.  And we are supposed to embrace the alarmists as the epitome of rationality and science?  Sorry Al, but I don’t have enough faith to be a true believer like you are.
Then we have the case of an Australian true believer who has actually said we can link climate change to mental illness!  Yes you heard me right.  An ABC report puts it this way: “A report has been released that draws a direct link between inaction on climate change and long-term social and mental health problems.  [...]
I suppose it is only a matter of time now before scientists will be telling us that climate change is responsible for migraines, impotence, and the common cold.  Indeed, they will soon inform us that the London riots were due to climate change.

 A recent song:

Climate Change Is Responsible for All the Things That Have Ever Gone Wrong

Polar bears numbers may be on the rise,
we know what to blame whenever one dies.
See rivers inundate each sun-baked plain
for global warming brings more and less rain;
farms will be barren or covered with mud
as all crops suffer from a drought or flood;
more dearth, devastation, much more death—
we poison the world with every breath.

    Climate change is responsible for
    all the things that have ever gone wrong.

We may see fewer storms or maybe more
then thirsty nations will be stirred to war.
Give me liberty or give me the rope
for man has nothing when he has no hope

    Climate change is responsible for
    all the things that have ever gone wrong.

You’ll hear the eloquent wind in the trees:
“our weather will spread more nasty disease.”
Across the mountains see a want of snow;
and early this morning I stubbed my toe.

    Climate change is responsible for
    all the things that have ever gone wrong:–
    woeful standards in atrocious schools,
    everyone in a ship of fools,
    the London riots, the Gillard coup,
    and man’s first disobedience too,
    the fire at Pharos, all modern wars,
    the rise and fall of the dinosaurs,
    the wall street crashes, and poor TV—
    all the bad things that ever can be.
    Climate change is responsible for
    all the things that have ever gone wrong.

Faking Man-Made Global Warming

I have finally completed the production of a few mixes of a song—“What Shall We Do with the Missing Data?”—which I wrote in November, 2009, shortly after the release of the “climate-gate” e-mails.  One mix is available here:

What Shall We Do with the Missing Data?
 
How shall we deal with egregious errors?
How can we spread more alarmist terrors?
What could we fake to create a scare as
good as global warming?
     Faking man-made global warming.

Soon your power must be dearer;
Armageddon is much nearer;
evidence, we say, is clearer
for that global warming.

Now it seems the weather’s cooling;
numbers drop of those we’re fooling;
people whom we should be ruling
must fear global warming.

Dr. Jones is now quite shaken,
feeling that he’s cooked his bacon;
maybe he was just mistaken
over global warming.

What shall we do with the missing data?
How shall we hide all the graphs’ stigmata?
How shall we keep all our fees pro rata
while we fake world warming?
     Faking man-made global warming.

Oh, dear, no, the seas aren’t rising;
powercos though are downsizing;
stop those sceptics analysing
man-made global warming!

We must keep the mob from waking;
hide how much that we were taking;
Mann and Jones et Al. were faking
man-made global warming.

Quench the opposition fires;
all who disagree are liars;
we’ll defame those bad deniers
of our global warming.

What shall we do with the evil-doers?
What shall we do with the peer-reviewers?
What shall we do with corrupting CRUers
faking global warming?
     Faking man-made global warming.

UPDATE (24 March, 2012):  with the sad demise of mp3.com.au, various mixes of this song (previously provided above) are no longer available; I shall upload the song to other sites.  One mix is  available at SoundCloud.

No Acceleration of Global Sea-Level, II

Stuart Rintoul, in The Australian, reveals that despite our Government’s hysterical claims that the world’s sea-levels will rise alarmingly, a government expert explains that the rises are decelerating.   In “Sea-level rises are slowing, tidal gauge records show”, Rintoult writes:

One of Australia’s foremost experts on the relationship between climate change and sea levels has written a peer-reviewed paper concluding that rises in sea levels are “decelerating”.

The analysis, by NSW principal coastal specialist Phil Watson, calls into question one of the key criteria for large-scale inundation around the Australian coast by 2100 – the assumption of an accelerating rise in sea levels because of climate-change.

Based on century-long tide gauge records at Fremantle, Western Australia (from 1897 to present), Auckland Harbour in New Zealand (1903 to present), Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour (1914 to present) and Pilot Station at Newcastle (1925 to present), the analysis finds there was a “consistent trend of weak deceleration” from 1940 to 2000.

Mr Watson’s findings, published in the Journal of Coastal Research [...] supports a similar analysis of long-term tide gauges in the US earlier this year.  Both raise questions about the CSIRO's sea-level predictions.

Climate-change researcher Howard Brady, at Macquarie University, said yesterday the recent research meant sea levels rises accepted by the CSIRO were “already dead in the water as having no sound basis in probability”.

“In all cases, it is clear that sea-level rise, although occurring, has been decelerating for at least the last half of the 20th century, and so the present trend would only produce sea level rise of around 15cm for the 21st century.”

Dr Brady said the divergence between the sea-level trends from models and sea-level trends from the tide gauge records was now so great “it is clear there is a serious problem with the models”.

“In a nutshell, this factual information means the high sea-level rises used as precautionary guidelines by the CSIRO in recent years are in essence ridiculous,” he said.  During the 20th century, there was a measurable global average rise in mean sea level of about 17cm (plus or minus 5cm).  [...]

The federal government has published a series of inundation maps [...] showing that large areas of Australia’s capital cities, southeast Queensland and the NSW central coast will be under water by 2100.

Without acceleration in sea-level rises, the 20th-century trend of 1.7mm a year would produce a rise of about 0.15m by 2100.

Mr Watson’s analysis of the four longest continuous Australian and New Zealand records is consistent with the findings of US researchers Robert Dean and James Houston, who analysed monthly averaged records for 57 tide gauges, covering periods of 60 to 156 years.

The US research concluded there was “no evidence to support positive acceleration over the 20th century as suggested by the IPCC, global climate change models and some researchers”.

See P.J. Watson, “Is There Evidence Yet of Acceleration in Mean Sea Level Rise around Mainland Australia?” in the Journal of Coastal Research. 

See also our “No Acceleration of Global Sea-Level, I” and, at WUWT, “The battle over sea level”.

Greenhouse-Gas Theory Dissipates

In Nasif S. Nahle’s “Repeatability of Professor Robert W. Wood’s 1909 experiment on the Theory of the Greenhouse”, at Biology Cabinet Online, he demonstrates:

that the warming effect in a real greenhouse is not due to longwave infrared radiation trapped inside the building, but to the blockage of convective heat transfer with the surroundings, as proven by Professor Wood in his 1909 experiment.

See, at Climate Realists,  John O’Sullivan’s “Greenhouse gas theory of global warming is refuted in momentous Mexican lab experiment”:

Results mean epic fail for doom-saying cult and climate taxes.

Professor Nahle of Monterrey, Mexico, backed by a team of international scientists, has faithfully recreated a famous experiment from 1909 to confirm that the greenhouse effect cannot cause global warming.
Astonishingly, the 1909 greenhouse gas experiment first performed by Professor Robert W. Wood at John Hopkins University hadn’t been replicated for a century.  This despite over $100 billion spent by the man-made global warming industry trying to prove its case that carbon dioxide is a dangerous atmospheric pollutant.
The analogy had been that greenhouse gases (e.g. CO₂) act like the glass in a greenhouse trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere and if they build up (due to human industrial emissions) the planet would dangerously overheat.
At the Biology Cabinet laboratories Professor Nahle was able to confirm the astounding findings: Wood was right all along.  After peer-review the results confirm that the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’ is solely due to the blockage of convective heat transfer within the environment in which it is contained, i.e., as in this case, a lab flask.

UPDATE I (6 August):  See also John O’Sullivan’s “New NASA Satellite Data Study Undermines Greenhouse Gas Effect”, and UPDATE II (26 December) see his Greenhouse Gas Theory Trashed as Dissenters Build Compelling Case.

The Impact of Wind-Turbines

See also “Throwing Money to the Winds”.  (Thanks to John O’Sullivan for the link.)

Gore Redefines Reality

One of the world’s biggest liars, Albert “Götterdämmerung” Gore Jr., spying from his sumptious führerbunker his dreams of scamming the world ended by a sad deficiency of world-wide warming, as well as fewer tornadoes, fewer droughts, and fewer dupes of his apocalyptic doom-saying, has determined on a savage, reality-denying, youth-recruiting, ruinous, final effort to hoodwink the world into believing in his discredited CAGW conjecture of a trace-gas-induced Ragnarök.  (Any day now, perhaps, we might watch as he pins an Iron Cross to the tunic of a teenager who has removed all the incandescent light-bulbs from his parents’ house.)  Gore eructates:

The climate crisis is a reality, and we are seeing its impacts in extreme weather all around the world.  Using the same deceitful playbook as big tobacco used years before to mislead the public about the dangers of smoking, oil and coal companies and their allies are now deceiving the public about climate change.  They have nearly unlimited resources to sow doubt, but we have one critical advantage:  Reality is on our side.

We are not seeing particularly remarkable extreme weather, that’s a lie.  We here at Impact of Climate Change, for example, are not being funded by anyone, we have very limited resources, and we are not deceiving anyone.  Reality is not on Al. Gore’s side.

The number of wildfires in the US have declined over the past
fifty years of global warming. – From the Hockey Shtick.

http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/New_Data/

See Noel Sheppard’s “Gore Announces New Campaign and Worldwide Event to Re-energize Global Warming Hysteria” and his “Gore Admits Financial ‘Stake’ in Advancing Global Warming Hysteria” at NewsBusters.
Thanks to Crack Emcee at the Macho Response.

A Consensus on Consensus

The Australian Government continues to lie about the dangers of climate change and continues to argue that the pseudo-scientific conjecture of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming has scientific support and continues to promote the foolish notion that a consensus among scientists constitutes proof.  According to “What the science tells us”, from the Government’s Office for the Propagation of the Faith:

The vast majority of scientists worldwide agree that the many different lines of evidence all point to the same conclusion: human activity has unintentionally turned up the global thermostat.  The release of large quantities of carbon pollution is making our planet warmer.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a natural component of the air we breathe and circulates in large quantities through natural processes.  Over the past century, the levels of this gas in the atmosphere have jumped sharply as a result of our activities, such as burning fossil fuels (like coal) and clearing forests.  Pollution from these activities has resulted in there being more CO₂ in the atmosphere now than at any time in the past 800,000 years.

Climate change has been confirmed consistently by leading scientific organisations from around the world, including  [...]  Climate Commission – The Critical Decade[.]

 Tee hee.