RIP Aaron Swartz Hero of Internet Open Access who “Committed Suicide”

On the morning of January 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz the young genius who gave the Internet the RSS feed system and opposed controversial Internet copyright reform was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment by his girlfriend.

The NY Medical Examiner concluded this was another sad suicide. At the time of his death, Reddit co-founder Swartz was defending against 13 felony charges, $1 million in fines and more than 35 years in prison. Swartz, a leading campaigner for the open Internet access movement was a growing threat to the Establishment’s grip on mass media. At just 14, this child prodigy co-authored RSS, a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. RSS helped instantly make the world wide web a far more dynamic experience. Later Swartz started Reddit, the massively popular bulletin board system. But he first fell foul of the authorities when, as a promoter of Open Access,  he fought SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). This was a U.S. bill intended to protect copyrighted intellectual property but was also seen by critics as a Trojan horse to shut down websites not approved by the Establishment.

Federal prosecutors charged Swartz for alleged crimes relating to downloading around four million academic journal articles from JSTOR (short for Journal Storage) a digital library founded in 1995. Prosecuting Attorney Stephen Heymann claimed Swartz intended to make the papers freely available on P2P file-sharing sites. Kelly Caine, a professor at Clemson University who studies people’s attitudes toward technology and privacy said Swartz “was doing this not to hurt anybody, not for personal gain, but because he believed that information should be free and open, and he felt it would help a lot of people.”

In a moving statement the Swartz family commented that Aaron’s “commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life.” In his short life he  “was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.”

Chris Soghoian, a technologist and policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “Existing laws don’t recognise the distinction between two types of computer crimes: malicious crimes committed for profit, such as the large-scale theft of bank data or corporate secrets; and cases where hackers break into systems to prove their skilfulness or spread information that they think should be available to the public. The government used the same laws intended to go after digital bank robbers to go after this 26-year-old genius.”

A White House petition has been launched to remove Assistant Prosecutor Heymann for “overzealous prosecution of an allegedly minor and non-violent electronic crime.”  According to the Boston Herald (January 15, 2013) the petition has now achieved more than the 25,000 signatories threshold needed to generate an official response from the White House under the Obama administration’s stated terms.

2012: Another Increase in Media Boredom with Global Warming

Latest research shows that news coverage of the global warming scare  fell again in 2012. Despite all the hype over ‘Superstorm Sandy’ the year 2012 continued the trend of falling mainstream news and public interest about climate. But while most news outlets cut back on global warming stories the core promoters of the man-made warming cult  are unmoved in their coverage.

The latest numbers come from the media database maintained by the nonprofit journalism site The Daily Climate as reported by Climate Central blog. They prove that the New York Times led the way in 2012 posting the most stories on this non issue. The inescapable truth is that public interest in global warming has long fallen off a cliff. In no small part because, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)  global temperatures have flatlined since 1997.  Nonetheless, the NYT still registered the biggest increase in climate coverage among the five largest U.S. daily papers, according to media data trackers from the University of Colorado.

According to The Daily Climate a total of 7,194 reporters and commentators filed 18,546 stories, compared to  7,166 reporters who filed 18,995 stories in 2011. Climate Central says, “The numbers remain far from 2009’s peak, when roughly 11,000 reporters and commentators published 32,400 items on climate change, based on the news site’s archive.”

Meanwhile in Britain UK television viewers were treated to a gloomy New Year prediction from media alarmists-in-chief, the BBC.   The BBC’s Roger Harrabin announced the nation’s first “climate disaster” story of the year  delivered by the discredited Met Office. Hopefully, they will have better luck than their last pitiful prediction. The gaffe-prone Met Office issued a long range forecast  in a  press release  last March warning that 2012 was going to bring a “very serious summer drought.”  In the same article they boasted they had “world-leading weather forecasting expertise.” But right on cue the clouds opened up and the weather played it’s usual trick with a slew of deluges to prove just how incompetent the Met Office really is.  Today the record books shows 2012 was the second wettest in Britain for 100 years. No wonder these clowns are the butt of so many jokes.

So this week, in the wake of all that prolonged rain, out come the nation’s weather bunglers  once again this time saying 2012’s rain was predicted by global warming models and more is on the way! Oh boy, nothing changes. Harrabin and the Met Office have a track record of being economical with the truth. Perhaps the root of the problem could be their choice of  Robert Napier as boss. This is the same Robert Napier who is Chairman of the Carbon Disclosure Project – as hard core green as it gets.

With both the Met Office and the BBC unashamedly with their grubby fingers in the climate change money pie it’s no wonder viewers have switched off.  As the latest media data proves, more savvy media outlets are reacting accordingly and dumping climate alarmism.  But no prizes for predicting that the Met Office, the BBC and the New York Times will go on spewing the same old nonsense regardless – especially as the UN’s  Intergovernmental  Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is set to publish a major new report  later this year.

Enforcers of Greenhouse Gas Faith versus the Seekers of Truth

Climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer is at it again. He has stood up for his religious belief in the greenhouse gas theory in yet another article  dodging the growing mountain of evidence disproving it. In  Roy’s new post, “Misunderstood Basic Concepts and the Greenhouse Effect”  we again see a high priest of the cult defending the creed that insists that radiation always transfers thermal energy. Taking him to task is agnostic, Douglas Cotton in his “Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” [1]

Spencer believes radiation is  climate’s almighty king. Cotton says it isn’t and counters by insisting ‘back radiation’ has never been shown to add more heat movement from a cooler atmosphere to the warmer surface of our planet. Indeed, ‘back radiation heating’ was a non-science term invented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agrees Dr. Judith Curry.  But Spencer is holding true to his beliefs while Cotton and his 200+ colleagues at Principia Scientific International (PSI) choose the facts.

Critic Cotton declares Roy wrong and berates  his crass assumption that all radiation transfer must add heat. Cotton and his colleagues also dismiss  Spencer’s unproven assumptions that radiation is the key to transport energy throughout earth’s gaseous, wet atmosphere (those damned heretics claim it’s convection and conduction). Cotton blasphemes by pointing to empirical evidence that proves that gravity, not radiation, “creates a thermal gradient which determines planetary surface temperatures. In comments added to Spencer’s blog Cotton says that unlike in greenhouse ‘heaven’  our worldly facts show that any radiation imbalance “is the result of natural climate cycles, not the cause.“

But this sullies Spencer’s Scriptures  – not to be confused with Lindzen’s liturgy. (For those who don’t know, Roy says the greenhouse effect works from the ground up, while Dick disagrees and says the opposite!).  It’s like Catholics debating Jews, or Shia versus Sunni. How many angels can really dance on the head of that greenhouse gas pin? Spencer repeats the same tired old mantra, “the full depth of the atmosphere would achieve the same temperature as the surface through thermal conduction.” To which Cotton is most dismissive pointing to the evidence of 800 real-world experiments. Bishop Roy has no experiments to back his claims. His Holiness still claims that hand-held infrared meters (IRT’s) can measure his GHE. He does so even after an email exchange with a noted expert in thermodynamics proved him wrong.

But Roy not only dismisses the ‘evil’ of such facts he doesn’t appear to heed the message from one of the world’s leading manufacturers of these devices. Mikron Instrument Company Inc., has confirmed that IRT’s are deliberately set to AVOID registering any feedback from so-called greenhouse gases. Thus climate scientists were measuring everything but the energy emitted by carbon dioxide and water vapor. Perhaps Roy should have a word with Mikron.

What we have from Dr Spencer is a lot of sanctimony in devotion to his GHE religion. His is the creed of no equations, no experiments, or observations.  Indeed, trying to get sight of any of those IPCC greenhouse gas models is proving as fruitless as trying to locate the Ark of the Covenant – or as mysterious as the true goings on at the Freemasons Grand Lodge. As Lionell Griffith observes, the Greenhouse Effect is all a matter of faith for climate ‘scientists.’

Griffith observes:

“If that were not so, the so called Greenhouse Effect would have been unambiguously defined long ago in such a way it could be tested. Then, it actually would have been tested rather than just being simulated. This has NOT been done and the so called effect has morphed from ambiguity to ambiguity countless times from the get go. It continues to morph in exact parallel to the belief in spirits, gods, goblins, devils, and the like has morphed and for the same purpose. Its purpose is to stop thought, investigation, questions, and the requirement for objective evidence and actual demonstration. Their whim is to rule simply because it is THEIR whim. Everything else is simply a fog intended to hide what they are really after – likely even from themselves.

What to do about it? At the very least, don’t get entrapped in their tangled web of words. Their words are without referents in reality. They connect only to a foggy undefined constantly morphing set of intentions within what passes for their minds. Simply continue with the effort of discovering the truth, offering a demonstration of it being the truth, and making things that work because you have discovered and know the truth. THIS is the only thing that has ever worked.

Trying to convince them of the rightness of your path by open and honest debate is a hopeless effort. They are not interested in rightness. They are only interested in their whim and your sacrificed to that whim. Your being engaged in that debate is part of that sacrifice.”

[1] Cotton, D., ‘Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics,’ (March, 2012), principia-scientific.org (accessed online: January 2, 2013)

National Academies and the (non) Greenhouse Gas Effect: Part 4

The first three parts of this series* showed the academic fraud that for 33 years promoted the greenhouse gas effect. The articles caused outrage among believers in the cult as evidenced by the comments section of my blog. But with some of the cultists having come out to openly debate we can better gauge the intellectual bankruptcy of their arguments.

Carbon Dioxide Not the Devil He Claims

Not only are there so many assumptions made about what is the greenhouse gas effect (GHE) but what strikes me most about these discussions is how believers in the ‘theory’  avoid addressing why, if this is all ‘settled science,’ there is no standard definition. Moreover, the closer we look at it the less it is clear just how this ‘theory’ even operates. Pointedly, despite around $100 billion spent on climate research, this cornerstone of the man-made global warming science hasn’t even been validated by any objective test in earth’s atmosphere.

What has triggered the furor is my analysis of the seminal 13,000-word report from 1979 by the National Academy of Sciences. The study is often referred to as the Charney Report and was commissioned by the U.S. Government to supposedly explain how carbon dioxide (CO2) will impact future climate. From our modern perspective – 33 years on – it seems incredible that such an in-depth report should fail to mention the greenhouse gas effect (GHE). This is especially incongruous being that climatologists will glibly tell you the theory has unimpeachable provenance stretching back 150 years to the formative era of radiative physics and Arrhenius and Tyndall.

But it isn’t just the absence of any mention of the GHE that is odd. There is also the  failure to identify the mechanism by which CO2 is supposed to generate additional warming at the earth’s surface. Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  claims ‘back radiation’ heating as the mechanism by which CO2  adds additional heat to our planet. But that term, just like the GHE,  is absent from the Charney Report. Thus an objective reading of the report adds, not diminishes, my skepticism especially knowing that the ‘best evidence’ for the phenomenon is nothing more than a ‘toy’ model generated by a NASA computer, as adeptly shown by Professor Claes Johnson. Likewise, none of the GHE chicanery is getting past astrophysicist, Joseph E Postma who provides his own assessment on climateofsophistry.com. Postma observes:

“The one thing which has become very clear, is that the GHE doesn’t actually have a consistent explanation or description.  We have seen it as the backradiation ‘active heating’ mechanism, where radiation from a cold source adds serially with the radiation from the Sun in order to amplify the temperature generation; we have seen it as the “delayed cooling” mechanism, where GHE advocates wish to be in compliance with the Laws of Thermodynamics, and so backradiation does not cause “active heating”, but merely serves to reduce the rate at which energy is lost, particularly during the nighttime.  In my last paper, we proved that neither of these things actually occur because, by definition, these things should be quantifiable and observable in their effect on the temperature, and they were not.”

What the NAS report did stress was that uncertainties abounded wherever the scientists looked. The authors admitted they lacked sufficient real world data and so had to rely on guesstimates from computer models. From such speculation emerged the view that  an otherwise benign trace gas (CO2) may warm the climate. But the  caveat in ‘Charney’ was that CO2 might actually cause cooling, something the IPCC and GHE advocates would rather you didn’t know.

Aficionados mostly from Skepticalscience.com were having none of it. My blog filled with irate accusatory comments from them. In response I pointed out that nowhere in this major report were the best brains in the business able to put a name to what they described. If it was the greenhouse gas theory then surely an in-depth 13,000-word report on atmospheric carbon dioxide would at least make some passing reference to it. Secondly, and perhaps more damaging to the credibility of the ‘theory’  is that the NAS overlooked to mention ‘back radiation’ heating as the mechanism that could trigger the heat adding phenomenon, either. But upon further investigation we may have found out why it was no oversight. The concept of  ‘back radiation’ heating seems to have been invented years later, according to Dr. Judith Curry, in the reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is this dubious concept that the ‘Slayers’ have insisted falls foul of the laws the thermodynamics.  Dismissing ‘back radiation’ heating in no uncertain terms is popular skeptic climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball who noted,

“… [radiation] merely resonating in place does not imply reflecting energy back at the source….it is so difficult to argue with the absurd Alice looking glass science.” While Georgia Tech. climatologist,  Dr. Judith Curry conceded, ““Back radiation is a phrase, one that I don’t use myself, and it is not a word that is used in technical radiative transfer studies. Lets lose the back radiation terminology, we all agree on that.”

Thus my thesis is a simple one:  when the best brains from thirty years ago commissioned to explain what CO2 does in the climate overlook to identify the  GHE or it’s mechanism, ‘back radiation heating,’ then there is something seriously awry with the provenance of this ‘settled science.’

What further stokes my cynicism is how much uncertainty the Charney Report expressed about how our climate actually works. It seems utterly plausible to infer that uncertainty about the GHE is the reason why the panel of scientists that included James Hansen and Richard Lindzen omitted to include it.  Even now when you learn that Hansen’s version of the GHE is very different to Lindzen’s then you can understand the reticence of us cynics.

You don’t have to be a scientist to feel uneasy when these ‘experts’ can’t even agree on the name!  Depending on which afficianado you talk to,  some will tell you the name ‘greenhouse effect’ is  misleading because ‘no one means the atmosphere acts just like a greenhouse.’ But, yes, many of the top authorities do. There are no less than  53 bogus authority statements online declaring that Earth’s atmosphere DOES act ‘like a greenhouse.’ You might imagine a similarly hostile religious debate between Shia and Sunni Muslims,  or Protestants and Catholics. But instead of fighting over interpretations of a biblical script these cultists argue over the computer models.

The ‘blasphemy’ in my series of articles was daring to prove that their ‘settled science’ emperor has no clothes. Only yesterday (December 27, 2012) James Hansen sent a protest letter to the editor published in the Wall Street Journal. A skeptical article the previous week by Matt Ridley in WSJ (December 19) titled “Cooling Down the Fears of Climate Change” upset him. Hansen called it “another misleading attempt to present a distorted view of the consensus that exists among the vast majority of the community of science experts”. He countered with his own speculations for GHE ‘back radiation’ warming (with a 68% probability). Hansen claims “this agrees with IPCC estimates.”

However, 33 years ago when contributing to the NAS report Hansen, Lindzen and others did not attribute any warming, as per IPCC ‘science’ to such ‘back radiation’ heating. But worse yet, if you examine how back then Hansen, Lindzen and others describe the mechanism for this ‘theory’ you can understand why there is so much confusion.

From all this ‘confusion’ it is no wonder why any thinking scientist could believe that any gas could ‘store’  energy even though the absorption/emission cycle of carbon dioxide is one billionth of a second – less than the blink of an eye. At Principia Scientific International (PSI) hundreds of experts are aghast that such a small bit of radiation briefly bouncing around the atmosphere before it escapes to outer space should be accorded anything other than a very negligible impact within the overall system.

For PSI researchers  the real emphasis should be on the very powerful energy storage potential of water and the relentless dynamo of the hydrological cycle. Speak to anyone who glibly spouts to you that the greenhouse gas effect is real and the chances are they have no clue that there is no less than 130 years’ worth of solar energy stored in latent heat in the liquid of our oceans. They are likely also oblivious to the fact there is around 7 days’ worth of solar energy stored in water vapor latent heat of our atmosphere.

We have seen in this series of articles that the science academies and their well-funded researchers are at odds with independent scientists (i.e. those not on the global warming gravy train). Here are just a few comments from top scientists weary of this whole scam. Tens of thousands share their sentiments. All too often GHE believers have wrongly assumed that the properties of latent heat and other elements of the Ideal Gas laws are the GHE. They then casually toss in the bogus belief that ‘colder makes warm even warmer.’ To fudge that they then seek to add any and all admitted uncertainties and claim them as also part of the ‘signal’ for the GHE. This is in large part how they concoct the illusion of the ‘settled science’ they often refer to. GHE advocates just don’t want to let go of this unscientific and illogical conflation.

As Professor Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan says, CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or the other – every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so.”

*This article is one of a series on this subject. The full set are found as follows: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part 6

Another Alarmist Author Admits Spreading Greenhouse Gas Bunkum

Prominent global warming blog, skepticalscience.com is in crisis due to internal dispute over the “long settled science” of man-made global warming. Writer goes “off message” to discredit website’s own alarmist claims after prompted by  new articles  exposing greenhouse gas lies.*

Aussie doomsayer, Glenn Tamblyn is a regular author on the popular alarmist blog alongside frontman  John Cook. But Tamblyn has now exposed the lie that the greenhouse gas theory has the finest pedigree, thus discrediting such bold statements as this on their website:

“Disputing that the greenhouse effect is real is to attempt to discredit centuries of science, laws of physics and direct observation.”

But yesterday (December 23, 2012) under the weight of evidence from this series of new articles, Tamblyn has performed an astonishing U-turn causing huge embarrassment to Cook. The once avid cult member  submitted a comment to my blog  owning up to the truth that the greenhouse gas theory is less than 30 years old – only figuring on the mainstream science radar within the last generation.  These capitulations by hardcore greens may be getting contagious. Readers may recall the esteemed James Lovelock, a fellow climate cult writer, also jumping the sinking ship back in May.

Lovelock appeared on MSNBC to admit he, too,  has overstated the science. Lovelock told viewers, “…we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.  That led to some alarmist books…mine included…because it looked clear cut…but it hasn’t happened.”

Likewise, Tamblyn has long been invested in the scam. At last, he now accepts that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) correctly represented the mainstream position for the first half of the 20^th Century when it showed that the scientific consensus did not believe that the greenhouse gas effect (GHE) and carbon dioxide (CO2) drove climate.

The widespread delusion among the ranks of the  true GHE believer is finally cracking. We see it as it truly is – not a mass conspiracy, just the product of creeping scientism. This is where post-normal cherry-picking can infect believers’ minds with confirmation bias and misinformation wrought by noble cause corruption.  But back in 1951 the AMS  conspicuously held a non-political stance on all matters climate. While in the modern era, with so much money sloshing about for scientists to ‘prove’ a link between humans and climate,  it’s little wonder that otherwise honorable folk succumbed to the bait.

A more honest AMS from 50 years ago openly admitted there have always been huge natural swings in levels of atmospheric carbon stating, “The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere must have varied greatly during geological time, being depleted by the formation of limestones (carbonates) and coal measures, and replenished by volcanic action.” [1]

Geologists had long known volcanoes pump out far more CO2 than humans. The AMS admission about volcanoes is very welcome vindication for leading Aussie geologist, Professor Ian Plimer,  long pilloried by the alarmist UK Guardian and elsewhere for honestly pointing to a wealth of  such confirmatory science down the ages.

Likewise, Tamblyn is learning NASA’s James ‘dusty’ Hansen had for years attributed the GHE to dust particles, not CO2. Hansen’s big flip-flop into blaming CO2 for the GHE occurred in the 1980’s, not before. Other contemporaries of Hansen merely played ‘follow my (funding) leader.’

Tamblyn has signaled a breakthrough in his own understanding (albeit grudgingly) by admitting the evidence the AMS presented was true yet represented “an outdated position based on science that was just about to be overturned.”

As such the shamefaced eco-warrior affirmed what many GHE skeptics at Principia Scientific International (PSI) had shown by reference to the older and more established science literature. They found  mainstream belief in the GHE switched on fast 30 years ago as per the signal sent out by British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher in her key GHE  Speech to the Royal Society (27 September 1988). Even rank alarmists like DeSmoglblog admit Thatcher bought into the GHE to smash the striking coal mining unions and to boost UK nuclear investment. Until then the ‘theory’ had long been consigned to the trash can of science after Professor R.W. Woods’ experiment debunked it in 1909 (re-affirmed by Prof. Nasif Nahle in 2011). [2]

As shown in a series of new articles, the trick of post 1980’s climate science was to re-write the science history so that it became accepted that the natural moderating effects on temperatures actually due to the latent heat properties of water became obfuscated into the nomenclature as a ‘greenhouse gas.’  PSI’s peer-reviewed publications are pioneering this march back to traditional science. Tamblyn has simply been exposed to the simple truth  that latent heat, the actual moderator of our atmosphere’s temperatures, stops Earth getting too hot or too cold. Just contrast and compare earth’s temperatures with those of our water-less moon which has a daytime surface high of 130 degrees C (266 degrees F) and night time low of minus 110 degrees C (-166F). But as we so often, the alarmists (and even so-called ‘skeptics’) will try to dupe us into accepting that earth’s “mild” climate is due to the mythical GHE while ignoring the critical role played by latent heat. Such is the GHE fraud repeated across many websites, not just Tamblyn’s,

Embarrasingly, Tamblyn’s welcome confession contradicts what his own website, skepticalscience.com states on this back story myth. So far John Cook, site owner has made no public comment on Tamblyn’s admission. But expect many more alarmists to follow suit.  Already hardcore German environmentalist and socialist, Fritz Vaherenholt, has fessed up in his new book, “The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Disaster Won’t Happen.” He lays the blame for modern junk climate science squarely at the door of the UN.

Spotting untold errors in reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the principled eco-champion charged them with gross incompetence and dishonesty for  fear-mongering exaggeration about human CO2 emissions. When reporting the scientific errors to  IPCC officials Vaherenholt was shocked that his complaints were  simply brushed aside.  Stunned by the dishonesty he asked himself:  “Is this the way they approached climate assessment reports?” He came to wonder: “…if the other IPCC reports on climate change were similarly sloppy.”

Well, folks PSI’s 200 science researchers  proves they were.

————————

*This article accompanies a series on this subject. The full set are found as follows: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four

[1]  Brooks, C.E.P. (1951). “Geological and Historical Aspects of Climatic Change.” In Compendium of Meteorology, edited by Thomas F. Malone, pp. 1004-18 (at 1016). Boston: American Meteorological Association.

[2] Nahle, N.,’Repeatability of Professor Robert W. Wood’s 1909 Experiment on the Theory of the Greenhouse,’ (2011), principia-scientific.org

US National Academies and the (non) Greenhouse Gas Effect: Part Three

This article is the third in a series that traces the back story of the (non) greenhouse gas theory.* Their purpose is to expose the truth that this so-called ‘settled science’ never appeared on any national science academy’s radar until the 1980’s.

Here we show how James Hansen flip-flopped from claiming the greenhouse gas effect (GHE) was due to aerosols to claiming it was due to carbon dioxide. We show how a ‘pre-GHE era’ calculation was re-packaged to provide the key numbers for this cynical and fraudulent revision of science.

Previously, we saw that not only did the greenhouse gas ‘theory’ not concern the best scientific minds of the 20^th Century, we showed why: the ‘theory’ was widely accepted as being refuted before 1951. This is confirmed by the prestigious American Meteorological Society (AMS). [1]

Today’s populist promoters of the greenhouse gas effect (GHE) have sought to denounce these articles by citing papers they claim vindicate their beliefs. However, our previous essay made short work of that delusion. It demonstrated that leading climate researchers prior to the 1980’s either were dismissive of it, or made no mention at all, of any GHE; the vast consensus accepted that once solar energy entered earth’s atmosphere it was the water cycle and convection that ran the show on global temperatures. This pre-1980’s consensus agreed that carbon dioxide (CO2) could not alter the climate because it was discovered that all the long-wave radiation that could be absorbed by CO2 is already absorbed by water vapor (id.). Therefore the effects of latent heat (water) by the process of the hydrological cycle (evaporation, condensation, precipitation, conduction and convection) were proven to dominate instead.

But a growing body of evidence collated by thousands of citizen scientist auditors is pointing to the likelihood that since the 1980’s government climatologists – incentivised by a billion dollar funding stream – employed sophistry and spin to resurrect the long discredited GHE. We know that even alarmists admit that the politics of the day (re: Margaret Thatcher’s  1988 keynote speech to the Royal Society) rather than science was a key motivator. [2] Leading this post-normal era of junk climate science was NASA’s James Hansen. Hansen’s team at NASA cleverly re-branded the hydrological cycle as “the greenhouse effect” despite the fact no national science academies in the pre-1980’s era regarded water vapor as a ‘greenhouse gas.’

This was a major U-turn for Hansen, who in 1967 published a key paper defining the GHE as being caused by dust particles (aerosols). Nowhere in that paper did Hansen attribute any GHE to water vapor. [3]

What’s in a Name?

In short, this is the ‘nomenclature argument’ presented in Part One and should have put an end to the climate change idiocy right at the start. Our thesis there was simple: settled science should have settled nomenclature. But as the National Academy of Science showed in a key 1979 report the term ‘greenhouse gas theory’ didn’t exist. (id.) Therefore, reason and logic dictates there is no such thing as a greenhouse gas if there is no such thing as a greenhouse gas theory!

But as Canadian climate researcher, Norm Kalmanovitch who has studied this aspect in detail shows, there is clear fraud here. Kalmanovitch reports, “The greenhouse effect as defined even by Hansen back in 1981 is simply the difference between two numbers; one a theoretical calculation that always comes to 255 K and the other the Earth’s actual temperature typically taken as 288 K with the difference of 33 K being the greenhouse effect. (This same calculation on Mars comes to 5.5 K)

Kalmanovitch advises. “ This yields Te ̴ 255 K. The mean surface temperature is  T ̴ 288 K. The excess (Ts – Te) and is a pre-Hansen era value but is morphed into being Hansen’s ‘greenhouse effect’ of gases and clouds.” Kalmanovitch and independent scientists at Principia Scientific International (PSI) proved that the term  “greenhouse gas” was applied many years after the above calculation was written (and when consensus science rejected any such notion of a GHE).

 But the passage of time has been the undoing of this 1980’s scam. We have seen that CO2 emissions have stubbornly refused to correlate with atmospheric temperatures. Since 1997 global CO₂ emissions have increased by 39.8% but there has been no change in the Earth’s temperature proving Hansen was wrong to fudge the numbers to make a connection between CO2 and global temperatures. According to Hansen’s own mangled numbers T_s has remained constant since 1997 and T_e is calculated as a constant value. As Kalmanovitch describes:

“The excess, Ts – Te, which according to Hansen “is the greenhouse effect” is also constant since 1997; so in Hansen’s own vernacular there has been no change to the “greenhouse effect” from the 39.8% increase in CO₂ emissions since 1997!” As Dr. Pierre Latour (noted for his work on the Apollo Space program) has shown, there is also a fatal calculating error elsewhere in Hansen’s GHE numbers. [4]

National Geographic Says ‘Carbon Equals Cooling’

It isn’t just in English-speaking nations this fraud was sold. PSI is constantly receiving reports from around the world enabling us to better trace the back story of how this scam got going. A jigsaw puzzle is being put together showing the gradual usurpation of accepted climate science by the new Greenhouse Gas Brigade. It was a steady drip fed of dross over decades permeating into the major national academies. From Italy, independent climate researcher, Alberto Miatello, recalls,”the oldest article I could find is a 1976 piece by Samuel W. Matthews, from the National Geographic (November 1976). But it is curious to note that at that time the main fear in the scientific community was NOT of the possibility of global warming, but for a new Ice Age.”

As the evidence shows, this was because scientists before 1980 had understood that adding more CO2 into the atmosphere provided a cooling effect, not warming as shown by the peer-reviewed literature examined in our previous article. [5]

In the Nat Geo piece above (“The Ice from the Future”), Matthews presents the consensus view of climate experts of the day saying “some” scientists believe CO2 can cause warming, but that “other scientists believe these molecules [CO2] pushed outwards by man could generate an opposite effect, namely cool our Earth by mirroring outward the light from Sun.” The Nat Geo piece not only echoes a similar one in Newsweek article from around the same time but is much longer and more detailed. [photo link: courtesy of wmconnolley.org.uk]

 Miatello concludes that the Matthews article “was showing clearly that the main concern of the scientific community at that time (middle of ’70) was NOT the possibility of heating, but of cooling.”

 From his own studies of how the science has been presented in the literature in Italy Miatello affirms, “Between 1975 – late ’80 any such GHE was being  linked to air pollution rather than to global warming. As we recall, back then we still had gasoline with high sulfur content, lots of ‘fossil fuel’ burning and much higher levels a lot of lung diseases due to smog than in today’s cities.” This is the Great Truth being re-discovered to defeat the ‘Big Lie’ of man-made global warming.

As David Whitehouse put it so succinctly (The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 20 December 2012):

“It is the bloggers who are science’s new auditors. Many do not like it and have a cultural difficulty in accepting that the times are a changing. But as the new generations take over, science will become more participatory and more appreciated. All scientific conclusions are open to revision, especially those of climate science.”

As such, anyone who recalls the 1970’s will know the main concern of scientists was to reduce high levels of air pollution created by burning hydrocarbons. The science was thus aerosol-focused as per those peer-reviewed papers of Hansen in the pre-1980’s era. Airborne dust particulates (not the trace gas, CO2) was what was being cited as damaging to the health of people and the planet. The great fear then was not a heating world but for the ozone ‘hole,’ CFC’s, and the acid rain scare as Hansen had well acknowledged. (id.) But because western society had cleaned up its act so well by reducing particulate pollution  a new scare story was contrived to subjugate the masses, and Hansen’s team was well-funded, willing and able to launch their counter-consensus assault on long-accepted science.

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*This article is one of a series on this subject. The full set are found as follows: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five,Part 6

[1]Brooks, C.E.P. (1951). “Geological and Historical Aspects of Climatic Change.” In Compendium of Meteorology, edited by Thomas F. Malone, pp. 1004-18 (at 1016). Boston: American Meteorological Association. It shows the American Meteorological Society had refuted the concept of a GHE in 1951 in its Compendium of Meteorology. They stated that the idea that CO2 could alter the climate “was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation [that would be] absorbed by CO2 is [already] absorbed by water vapor.”

[2] Lars Myren, Anne Debeil, ‘Climate & Energy Presentation,’ (April 3, 2009), www.desmogblog, (accessed online: December 3, 2012)

[3] Hansen, J.E., and S. Matsushima “The atmosphere and surface temperature of Venus: A dust insulation model” Astrophys. J. 150: 1139–1157 (1967) Bibcode 1967ApJ…150.1139H. Doi:10.1086/149410.

Manabe. S & Wetherald, R.T., ‘Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity,’ Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, May 1967 .

[4] Latour, P.R.,’That Bogus Greenhouse Gas Whatchamacallit Effect,‘ (January, 2012) www.slayingtheskydragon.com.

[5] O’Sullivan, J., ‘US Academies and the Greenhouse Gas Effect: Part Two, (johnosullivan.wordpress.com)

 

U.S. National Academies and the (non) Greenhouse Gas Effect (Part Two)

Glenn Tamblyn  (climateandrisk.com) and John Cook (skepticalscience.com) were among a myriad commenters apoplectic with rage about my article yesterday. * Their outrage was because I showed that no American science academy, at least till 1979, gave the idea of the greenhouse gas theory the time of day. In fact it was never even mentioned in a key report to Congress that year. So much for ‘settled science’ I said.

But Tamblyn was having none of it. He thought he had gotten one over on me by citing a paper from 1967 by climate experts, Manabe and Wetherald. [1] Now that I’ve had time to read and digest that paper two things struck me: (a) How many times the authors mentioned the GHE. Answer: ZERO and (b) They found carbon dioxide cools the atmosphere and water vapor dominates the climate system.

Peppered throughout the paper on virtually every page were such water-related terms as ‘hydrological cycle’, ‘convective equilibrium’, ‘humidity,’ ‘clouds’, ‘water vapor.’ So much so, it was obvious that the authors understood the overriding significance of latent heat in the atmospheric system. Playing second fiddle in all this is radiation and carbon dioxide (CO2), which Glenn, like all other GHE believers, wants to tell you is a far more important climatic factor. Well, judging by this offering –  his “best evidence” from 50 years ago –  Glenn’s rather proved my point.

The big bombshell drops on Tamblyn’s argument from page 250 onwards where the authors admitted:

“If one discusses the effect of carbon dioxide upon the climate of the earth’s surface based upon these results, one could conclude that the greater the amount of carbon dioxide, the colder would be the temperature of the earth’s surface.” [emphasis added]

Manabe and Wetherald also declare:

“In order to obtain the complete picture, it is also necessary to consider the effect of convection.” (p 251). They then go on to state, “The larger the mixing ratio of carbon dioxide, the colder is the equilibrium temperature of the stratosphere.”(p 251).[emphasis added]

Then:

“Generally speaking, the larger the cloud amount, the colder is the equilibrium temperature of the earth’s surface” (p 252). [emphasis added]

So, in short,  they say CO2 and clouds make the earth’s atmosphere colder, while convection is a cooling process, and almost wherever you care to look  not even one mention of any greenhouse gas effect – whether  natural or enhanced by humans. PSI’s independent researchers will be pleased! As Dr. Tim Ball has adroitly shown many times, the GHE ‘Big Lie’  over global warming due to human emissions of CO2 only began to appear in mainstream science journals from the time of Margaret Thatcher’s speech to the Royal Academy, London in 1988. [2]

And as Tim’s colleagues at Principia Scientific have demonstrated, the only ‘heat trapping’ gas proven to exist in Earth’s atmosphere is water vapor – thanks to the miraculous properties of latent heat. No other gas traps heat. It is by the (non-greenhouse gas) phase changes of water vapor that Earth is able to enjoy such a moderate climate. It is the very reason why the American Meteorological Society (AMS) in 1951 finally dismissed carbon dioxide and the GHE as a possible factor.

The AMS assessed the greenhouse gas hypothesis based on the best science of the day. They found  the consensus opinion was that there is no evidence of any greenhouse gas effect  in our climate and it “was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation [that would be] absorbed by CO2 is [already] absorbed by water vapor.” [3]

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*This article is one of a series on this subject. The full set are found as follows: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four,Part Five,Part 6

[1] Manabe. S & Wetherald, R.T., ‘Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity,’ Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, May 1967 .

[2] Thatcher, M., Speech to the Royal Society (27 September 1988), Public Statement, Speech Archive, Margaret Thatcher Foundation (accessed online: December 3, 2012)

[3] Brooks, C.E.P. (1951). “Geological and Historical Aspects of Climatic Change.” In Compendium of Meteorology, edited by Thomas F. Malone, pp. 1004-18 (at 1016). Boston: American Meteorological Association.

Breaking: U.S. National Academies Find Greenhouse Effect Doesn’t Exist

This story is huge. America’s prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and related government bodies found no greenhouse effect in Earth’s atmosphere. Evidence shows the U.S. government held the smoking gun all along –  a fresh examination of an overlooked science report proves America’s brightest and best had shown the White House that the greenhouse gas effect was not real and of no scientific significance since 1979 or earlier.*

Unwittingly, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council have all dealt climate alarm it’s biggest ever blow. Their killer evidence had been hidden in plain sight for 33 years until uncovered by a team of maverick climate researchers.

All those global warming skeptic Christmas wishes have come at once wrapped in the NAS document, ‘Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment,‘ a joint publication from 1979 commissioned on behalf of the U.S. government. This amazing story ties in perfectly with all the big climate news chatter this past week about the revelations from the leaked draft report (AR5) of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The leaked IPCC draft admits it has had to ratchet down yet again the climate sensitivity it expects to find from carbon dioxide (CO2). No wonder the IPCC is today having to retreat over CO2 sensitivity –  the trace gas can’t be any factor in our climate if there is no greenhouse gas effect to begin with!

Readers can browse for themselves online the 13,000-word 33-year-old U.S. government report that details the role of carbon dioxide and how it might impact climate. You will see that while CO2 is mentioned no less than 112 times, as you’d expect, nowhere in those 13,000 words will you find ANY mention of the greenhouse gas effect/theory. Scientists at PSI who have carefully studied the document assert this to be the most compelling physical evidence ever found proving the GHE as nothing more than a modern  (post-1979) political construct – a veritable sky dragon now well and truly slain. After studying the report PSI expert Hans Schreuder adroitly characterizes the tone of it’s authors: “the main theme that jumps out at me is “we don’t know enough.””

The NAS study was commissioned by the U.S. government to address the best science of the day on the role of carbon dioxide in atmospheric physics and is the perfect seasonal accompaniment to the leaked IPCC admission that climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is once again lower than all the experts predicted  – now we know why!

Because of it’s total omission from this key report, any rational human being will be forced to infer that America’s brightest and best in climate science knew as far back as 1979 there was no greenhouse gas effect for CO2 to impact. The report was the distillation of the best climate science from that era. It examined all aspects of how CO2 might alter the temperature of the atmosphere. Popular Canadian skeptic climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball and climate researcher, Derek Alker, both of Principia Scientific International (PSI) recognized the significance of the NAS publication straight away. Acting on their suggestion this author obtained a download copy from the NAS website and ran it through a full word search to confirm the  numbers. Readers can check for themselves. There is ZERO mention of any greenhouse gas effect as a factor on our climate.

Now let’s be clear on this. No governmental scientific body entrusted to present the best available evidence on the impacts of CO2 on Earth’s atmosphere would omit to make any mention of the so-called ‘greenhouse gas’ effect unless they did not consider it a factor – however small. But omit it they did.

So, if climatologists are to be accorded the prestige of being the best arbiters of what mechanisms are most likely driving our climate why is there such a huge discrepancy between what science knew 30 years ago and what we are being told today?

One crucial factor here is credibility. What we can be sure of is that the cream of U.S. climate science in the 1970’s had no political axe to grind. Back then the political hullabaloo about man-made global warming took another decade to gather momentum. As such this pristine and untainted evidence provides skeptics the world over with an unequivocal smoking gun to challenge the man-made global warming scam.

We can now say with great confidence that no serious mainstream climate scientist (up to the current generation of rent seekers) gave the GHE the time of day. This new revelation vindicates what experts like Tim Ball have been saying all along: the GHE was already debunked by Professor  H. W.Woods in 1909.

I asked senior members of the 200-strong Principia Scientific International who had worked in meteorology or climate science to recall when they first saw the ‘science’ of the GHE emerge onto the radar in universities, schools and national science academies.

PSI co-founder, Dr. Martin Hertzberg recalls:

“I was trained and served as a forecasting and research meteorologist for the U.S. Navy from 1953-1956. The term “greenhouse gas” never appeared in any of the texts or articles I studied during that period, nor did I or any of my fellow meteorologists ever use the concept in either short term or long term weather prediction.”

While Dr. Tim Ball confirms:

“As I recall the original greenhouse effect concept was created as a teaching analogy that was adopted and adapted into the hypothesis. Carl Sagan and Hansen were messing around with the aerosol issue because of the alarmist threat of nuclear winter. This proposed that with a global nuclear war so much dust would be put into the atmosphere sunlight would be blocked driving the world into a snowball earth. The idea was later shown to be theoretically incorrect and disappeared but not without leaving residue such as Hansen’s focus on aerosols and soot. This created his pathological hatred of coal that is the broad theme running through his career. He came to world attention because Gore and Senator Wirth heard about him and brought him to testify before Gore’s Committee in 1988.”

PSI is appealing for more anecdotal evidence from other professionals and scientists the world over who studied in, or were connected to, climate and meteorology studies before the 1980’s.  PSI’s aim is to forensically compile a trace line back to where national science bodies and universities went over to the ‘dark side’ to sound the alarm over bogus greenhouse gas ‘science.’

Sane minds will now put all the telling pieces of evidence together and understand why the most modern of science instruments shows little if any climate sensitivity to CO2; while climatologists knew in 1979 the greenhouse gas effect wasn’t even a consideration. If there was to be found killer evidence to expose this scam this surely must be it.

*This article is one of a series on this subject. The full set are found as follows: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five,Part 6

—— UPDATE ——-

John Cook (Skepticalscience.com) and other GHE fanatics have rushed here to post a swath of comments to berate me that I’ve been misleading in my article (above). It is they who are being misleading. Settled science requires settled nomenclature.

The very fact no mainstream science body dared tout the greenhouse gas theory by name in 1979 is because: (a) they lacked the confidence in the science to call it as such (b) they well understood that the greenhouse gas ‘theory’ had already been refuted by RW Woods (1909) and affirmed as such by the American Meteorological Society (1951) in its Compendium of Meteorology (Brooks, C.E.P.  “Geological and Historical Aspects of Climatic Change.” pp. 1004-18 (at 1016)).

The AMS was adamant that the very idea that CO2 could alter the climate “was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation [that would be] absorbed by CO2 is [already] absorbed by water vapor.”

The cold, hard facts are in black and white and the revisionists of science history have failed to bury the truth despite billions of dollars in resources and virtual ownership of the media.

New Paper Forces Greenhouse Gas Believers to Abandon ‘Theory’

A Canadian astrophysicist who last month published a hard-hitting paper exposing critical errors in the greenhouse gas theory is claiming victory.

Joseph E. Postma, a global warming skeptic, laid out his paper’s challenge on October 22, 2012 to all takers inviting them to prove him wrong. Postma’s detailed scientific case exposes a host of errors in the science of the greenhouse gas effect (GHE). Despite the public fanfare and brazenly throwing down the gauntlet to his critics, in the two months that have elapsed no one has yet stepped up to publish a rebuttal of his paper, ‘A Discussion on the Absence of a Measurable Greenhouse Effect.’ [1]

So is this failure of hardline greenhouse gas believers to come out and defend their ‘theory’ an indication of a mass capitulation? Joe thinks it is. He and his 200+ colleagues at maverick science body, Principia Scientific International (PSI) are boldly declaring that unless or until believers in the greenhouse gas effect (GHE) have the gumption to come out and openly debate the evidence his papers present then it is only reasonable to infer he’s right. By openly publishing his paper and inviting criticism rather than submit to any of the mainstream journals, Postma and his PSI publishers have chosen to go the old-fashioned, tried-and-tested route: gauging new science by open public examination. This is a refreshing common sense approach when compared with the discredited practice of the big science journals whereby scientists were required to submit their papers to a secret ‘peer review’ by anonymous panels.

This ‘behind closed doors’ system was shown to facilitate corruptive and coercive practice during the Climategate scandal. In 2009 hundreds of leaked emails proved that a clique of government climatologists and their handlers were colluding to bully and threaten editors if they dared publish papers refuting the man-made global warming narrative.

Postma’s freely-available paper has stunned believers of the accepted GHE ‘theory’ into mass silence because it has not one, but two key strengths. It not only cleverly applies textbook mathematics to detail differential equations of atmospheric heat flow but it does so using a wealth of cold, hard observations from nature collated by fellow climate researcher, Carl Brehmer.

Over at his blog, Joe says, “With that data and with the heat-flow equation, I was able to do two things: 1) predict the day-time surface high if NO greenhouse effect were present; 2) predict the night-time cooling if NO delay in cooling was present.  Both of these points were relevant to assess because they represent the two main versions of the greenhouse effect.”

Of great importance here is that Postma’s paper demonstrated that there was no GHE heating up the surface from back-radiation to a higher temperature. In effect, this  proved the standard version of the GHE is wrong. His calculations, based on observations from nature, proved there was no delay in cooling at the Earth’s surface. But it did show  cooling was enhanced there, again proving the mainstream science version wrong.

Postma claims this is “a very interesting point, because it is consistently the fall-back position that GHE adherents use when they are proven wrong.” In effect, there are two mainstream versions of the GHE theory.  “Version 1″  is based on the “back radiation heating” fallacy. This was demonstrated to be a bogus because the laws of thermodynamics expressly state “colder cannot add heat to warmer.” Experts in thermodynamics have since affirmed that climate scientists had, indeed, gotten that wrong.

When “Version 1” of the GHE was shown to be busted climatologists then fell back to “Version 2” insisting that so-called greenhouse gases must cause “some” delay in cooling of our atmosphere.However, at Postma and his PSI colleagues repeatedly point out, “they [government climatologists] never, and have never, actually stated any numerical values for how much cooling they expect with and without the delayed-cooling GHE overnight.”

And this, dear readers, is where we stand today. Climate science has been backed into a corner and shown to be unable (or unwilling) to adduce any verifiable numbers to back their claims that a greenhouse gas effect even exists. That the whole developed world is being compelled to reduce ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions when the scientists haven’t a shred of evidence to back their ‘theory’ that such gases alter our climate, demonstrates the lunacy of the modern world.

[1] Postma, J.E., ‘‘ A Discussion on the Absence of a Measurable Greenhouse Effect.’ (October 22, 2012), principia-scientific.org (accessed online: December 20. 2012).

It’s the Sun, after all

Guest post by Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser

A leaked draft of the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) forthcoming 5^th assessment report has some explosive new revelations:

There is substantial influence on our climate by the radiation received from the Sun.

There is a breaking of the ranks. The previously touted consensus about the forces driving our climate appears to be falling apart.

 

Climatology in denial?

The News

Specifically, the draft report says “The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link.”

In layman’s terms: The radiation received by the earth has a larger effect on the climate than previously thought.

 Agenda21

Past claims by the IPCC as to the cause of any climate change were almost exclusively laid on the shoulders of mankind’s use of fossil fuels, with its resulting increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the Earth’s atmosphere. This claim has been taken as sufficient justification to promulgate a new world order, as prescribed in detail by the UN’s overarching program namedAgenda21. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in an interview with Yale Environment 360, explains:

“…what we are doing here is we are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to [consensus] science. So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different”, [emphasis added].

Consequences

The consequences of the new findings must not be underestimated. They pull the rug out from under the entire CO2-climate hypothesis and, therefore, the claimed scientific consensus which, until now, has underpinned Agenda21. Consider it as an early Christmas gift!

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Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser is author of CONVENIENT MYTHS, the green revolution – perceptions, politics, and facts convenientmyths.com

Dr. Kaiser can be reached at: mail@convenientmyths.com