Physicist, Christopher Keating, is offering a $30,000 reward to anyone who can disprove man made climate change. He has put this out as a challenge to man made climate change deniers. Personally, I do not believe that he will be able to admit that he is wrong and so never expect that anyone will receive the $30,000. What observations, data etc. would he consider to be evidence against AGW? Can he say? Will he say? A scientific theory must be falsifiable. Can we agree on that? If he does not know what will falsify the hypothesis then we are not dealing with a man of science but a man of faith.
Besides, it is the proposer of a theory that must provide evidence for the theory and to show his work for all to see. Mr Keating seems to think that man is altering the climate? What is his evidence?
Does he mean that CO2 absorbs radiation and thus arrests its exit to the universe? Well, OK, it does. Skeptics do not deny CO2 absorption bands. So Mr Keating’s $30,000 is safe if that is all he means. But that which absorbs also emits so the radiation energy eventually leaves. The presence of our winters seems to be enough to counteract the heat of summer. Remember the summer of 2012 in the US? Heat waves. Drought. Hand wringing over climate change. Where is all that heat now? The winter of 2012-2013 was a cold one. Cherry blossoms arrived later in spring 2013 than spring 2012. Does CO2 only trap heat in the summer? Have our winters been getting warmer? Five of the top six years for snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere have occurred since 2003. Arctic sea ice extent made a big recovery in 2013. CO2 seems to be falling down on the job. Even the ‘X’ billion Hiroshima bombs of energy impacting the atmosphere since 1998 have not been enough to fend off the recent visit from the Polar Vortex.
Do I think that humans have an effect on the climate? Of course. Our cities warm the air around them to a greater extent than would otherwise be the case. That warm air blows over the countryside and can affect other communities(less snow cover?). Humans also alter land use in other ways through clearing the land which affects albedo and thus the local climate. Removing vegetation can also affect the humidity in the area. So, do humans have an effect on climate. Yes. If that is all he is referring to then his challenge is a trivial truism that most ‘deniers’ would support and his $30,000 is quite safe.
But people pejoratively branded as ‘deniers’ have a more specific objection in mind. The Global Climate Models are designed to indict CO2, carbon dioxide, emitted by humans as the primary driver of climate change in the late 20th century when both temperatures and the emissions of CO2 rose in tandem. Man made climate change skeptics dispute the dangerous nature of such an alliance and it is the indictment of the human emissions of CO2 as the main driver of dangerous climate change that is being challenged.
So, will the reward be offered if the challenge is reworded to propose that the human emissions of CO2 are responsible for contemporary climate change.
This restatement gets to the crux of the issue, CO2, and provides the important focus.
The scientific method formulates an hypothesis, human emissions of CO2 dangerously drive climate change, which is then tested by an appeal to reality. If Mother Nature supports the hypothesis then it is confirmed. If Mother Nature does not support the hypothesis then science says modify or abandon the theory because as it stands it is wrong.
In the case of the human emissions of CO2 as main driver of climate change several things are supposed to happen according to those who are its champions among which are the following:
- The atmosphere warms as CO2 concentration increases in the atmosphere
- Extreme weather becomes more severe and/or more frequent as more energy is ‘trapped’ in the system
- The polar regions warm and both the the sea ice and the ice sheets melt contributing to an acceleration of sea level rise
- The magnitude of the changes are unprecedented - outside the bounds of natural variability.
Does Professor Keating accept these effects as valid expectations of the theory?
Now we can go out into the real world and monitor what Mother Nature is doing to see if she agrees with these pronouncements. If she does then good for the theory. If we can find no support in reality for these major tenets of the CO2 centered theory of climate change then it can take up its rightful place alongside other failed ideas like the flat earth, the earth centered solar system and phlogiston.
We can take each of these anticipated results and break it down into additional parts in order to test its validity. To test number one we can list all the results we should expect to see if CO2 does indeed cause the temperature to rise either directly through its increase in concentration or secondarily through the anticipated rise in water vapor implied by the increased evaporation in a warmer atmosphere.
Here are a few ‘markers’ we can examine to see if CO2 is busy doing its implied heat trapping job. We know that CO2 has increased in the last 60 years by an amount 4.5 times as great as the rise in the previous six decades. Should we expect a greater rise in temperature in the last 60 years than occurred in the previous 60 years?
- The Global Mean Temperature(GMT) as measured by the 5 world temperature datasets will keep rising as CO2 concentration in the air continues to rise.
- Past higher levels of CO2 than we have now will coincide with warmer times and not colder times throughout geological history. The Ordovician ice age puts the run on that idea.
- Increasing levels of CO2 will always result in higher temps.
- As CO2 increases there will be no other climatic factor that increases in tandem with the temperature record that could also provide an explanation for the warming
The list is not meant to be exhaustive. Would it surprise anyone to learn that none of those 16 ‘markers’ is confirmed in reality? And Mr Keating is well aware of this or should be.
Some might object that using data from the US which contains only 2% of the land surface of the planet is not representative of the whole Earth. Does CO2 only do its heat trapping work in certain areas? Would unprecedented changes not show up in the atmosphere of the #2 emitter of CO2?
So what about extreme weather like floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes? Are they increasing in severity or frequency as CO2 increases in the atmosphere?
Mr Keating is well aware that none of those extremes has been found to be associated with an increase in CO2. Even the IPCC agrees with that. There is either no trend or the trend is down over the last 60 years. Examples of low CO2 extreme weather events are plentiful in the newspaper archives - thanks Google, NYT, Trove et al. Bad weather seems to arrive regardless of the CO2 content of the atmosphere. Should we not be asking, a la Tina Turner, what’s CO2 got to do with it, got to do with it? After all, the difference between high CO2 tornadoes and low CO2 tornadoes is that they destroy people and property in their path. So easy to tell the difference.
That leaves the polar regions as the last bastion of ‘warmth’ with which to save the theory. The Antarctic is not cooperating as sea ice is expanding and setting new records almost daily. Research vessels became trapped in the sea ice during the Antarctic summer last January. We now know the WAIS is warming due to geothermal sources called under ice volcanoes. We know that most of the Antarctic continent has been cooling for the last 30 years and that the East Antarctic ice sheet is gaining mass and the glaciers there are growing. Thus the vast Antarctic ice sheets are in no danger of imminent collapse despite the alarmist press the WAIS received recently. Meanwhile the Greenland ice sheet is similarly in a stable state and has been cooling for the last 70 years. That which melts in the summer is replaced in the winter. Monitoring the Summit Camp webcam is always fun. See if you can find evidence of all the melting going on. While some glaciers on Greenland are receding others are growing suggesting local climate change otherwise they would all be receding in a warming world. Arctic sea ice is lower than it was in 1979 but its demise has regularly been eluding the best guesses of our Arctic ‘experts’. Skeptics have fun reserving a spot for current guesses in the Hall of Fame of Failed Forecasts. Al Gore is up again this year(2014). There is an annual guessing game for the minimum sea ice extent in the Arctic. Someone is usually pretty close to the final value but can they repeat? Again, the newspaper archives provide regular stories of the melting Arctic and the danger to coastal towns going back to the late 1800s. We still await the deluge. Last summer with CO2 at record levels not seen in 400,000 years the NWP foiled several attempts to navigate it because of too much ice. The Canadian Coast Guard even had to shut it down to prevent people getting trapped and needing rescue. Incidentally, here’s a study assignment, how did the climate change from ice age to warm interglacial and back again if CO2 was low and steady over the last 400,000 years? According to the Danish Meteorological Institute temperatures in the high Arctic(>80N) have been colder than normal for 12 years with last year(2013) being the coldest on record. Three of the coldest Arctic summers have occurred in the last 5 years. In 2013 the Arctic sea ice was the largest in a decade. A Sierra Club scientist saw some cracks in the ice early in the melt season and from that deduced an ice free Arctic Ocean in summer 2013. Yes, our experts really have a handle on the Arctic. The polar regions are not building tropical resorts.
If the ice sheets are not melting then we should expect no change in the rate of sea level rise(SLR) and that is what we observe.
Can any of the changes in climate that we observe as we cycle out of the LIA be said to be unprecedented? Our records would not suggest that such a description is an accurate rendition of reality. We have seen it all before. There is nothing unusual going on with the planet’s weather that has not appeared somewhere at sometime in the past. Ask a newspaper archive or a paleoclimatologist.
The climate model scenarios that are being used to frighten the bejeebers out of us have been shown to be diverging from reality in an ever increasing gap. CO2 has been given a starring role in the climate drama that is not justified by our observations. It should be assigned a more minor part or not be included in the cast at all. Perhaps a new star, like the one that rises in the East should be cast in the lead role.
If none of this constitutes proof that we owe CO2 an apology then I do not know what evidence Mr Keating would accept as definitive proof that the human emissions of CO2 have little or nothing to do with climate change. Perhaps he can escape his quandary by insisting that the beneficial effects of increased CO2 on our flora constitute climate change. And if he can’t say what we would have to show to falsify the CO2 hypothesis then he does not have a testable theory and he is promoting not science but a religion. The idea that CO2 increases explain everything actually explains nothing. It is at best wishful thinking and, at worst, isn’t it fraudulent?
If Italian scientists can be locked up for not issuing sufficient warning of an earthquake can we not lock up scientists for peddling snake oil?
"It is no secret that a lot of climate-change research is subject to opinion, that climate models sometimes disagree even on the signs of the future changes (e.g. drier vs. wetter future climate). The problem is, only sensational exaggeration makes the kind of story that will get politicians’ — and readers’ — attention. So, yes, climate scientists might exaggerate, but in today’s world, this is the only way to assure any political action and thus more federal financing to reduce the scientific uncertainty." ~Monika Kopacz, atmospheric scientist
Mother Nature is a man made global warming denier. Now where is my $30,000 Mr Keating?
It’s a beautiful day in the neighbourhood. The truth has come out as we knew it would.
=====================================================================
Can you say what type of evidence will be acceptable to you as disproof of AGW?
A scientific theory must be falsifiable. Can we agree on that?
Human emissions of CO2 have increased most rapidly over the last 60 years. Can we agree on that?
So let’s take tornadoes.
Does your theory of man made climate change imply that they will become more severe and more frequent as human emissions of CO2 grow in the atmosphere? That is, we should see an increasing trend in the most severe tornadoes(EF3-EF5) with increasing CO2.
Would you then consider a downward or flat trend in these tornadoes to be evidence against the theory? If yes, we can look at the numbers. If not, why not?
Just trying to get a handle on what you would accept as evidence against man made climate change? Is there any that could be presented to you? If so what would be some examples?
If not, then are we not dealing in groupthink, a cult, a religion or an agenda? Science must be falsifiable. If there is nothing that you will accept as evidence against the theory then this is a waste of time and your money is quite safe. If we are not talking tornadoes or temperatures then what are we talking about? CO2 IR absorption bands?
