It’s always funny when Cato Institute hacks try to act like they know something about climate science. Like in this article from the New York Post, Al Gore Makes Latest Global-Warming Whooper by Alan Reynolds:
Gore says, “The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States.”
It’s an interesting theory, but where are the facts?
According to “State of the Climate” from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Global precipitation in 2009 was near the 1961-1990 average.” And there was certainly no pattern of increasing rain and snow on America’s East Coast during the post-1976 years, when NOAA says the globe began to heat up.
So what was it, exactly, that Gore’s nameless scientists “have long pointed out”? A 2008 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Climate Change and Water,” says climate models “project precipitation increases in high latitudes and part of the tropics.” In other areas, the IPCC reports only “substantial uncertainty in precipitation forecasts.”
In other words, the IPCC said that its models predicted some increases in rain or snow — not observed them. And only in high latitudes or the tropics, which hardly describes New York or Washington, DC.
If you take that last sentence and separate it from the rest of the article, Reynolds is right. Al Gore flubbed by saying the increased rain and snow was due to a predicted increase in evaporation when in fact that has only been predicted, not observed. The predictions aren’t based on nothing, though. Higher precipitation in warmer years is an established scientific fact, although detecting and analyzing global precipitation has been especially difficult: “None of the trend estimates for 1951–2005 are significant, with many discrepancies between data sets, demonstrating the difficulty of monitoring a quantity such as precipitation, which has large variability in both space and time.”
What Gore and Reyonds both get wrong is that the prediction is for the second half of the 21st century, not for 2010 or any specific year because, like the global temperature, the randomness of yearly variation is greater than any overall trend. That’s the difference between weather and climate. Weather deals with seasonal trends. Climate deals with 10 to 30-year trends. Like Gore said in his movie, you can’t point to Katrina and say global warming caused that particular hurricane, but you can say that global warming will increase the strength of future hurricanes like it. Not that it matters, but this was the fifth hottest winter ever recorded, not one of the coldest as the deniers like to believe. What really matters is that this is the hottest decade ever recorded.
The IPCC Third Assessment report says:
Based on global model simulations and for a wide range of scenarios, global average water vapour concentration and precipitation are projected to increase during the 21st century. By the second half of the 21st century, it is likely7 that precipitation will have increased over northern mid- to high latitudes and Antarctica in winter. At low latitudes there are both regional increases and decreases over land areas. Larger year to year variations in precipitation are very likely7 over most areas where an increase in mean precipitation is projected.
Reynolds continues on:
In fact, recent research actually contra dicts Gore’s claims about “significantly more water moisture in the atmosphere.”
In late January, Scientific American reported: “A mysterious drop in water vapor in the lower stratosphere might be slowing climate change,” and noted that “an apparent increase in water vapor in this region in the 1980s and 1990s exacerbated global warming.”
The new study came from a group of scientists, mainly from the NOAA lab in Boulder. The scientists found: “Stratospheric water-vapor concentrations decreased by about 10 percent after the year 2000 . . . This acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000 to 2009 by about 25 percent.”
Specifically, the study found that water vapor rising from the tropics has been re duced, because it has gotten cooler there (another inconvenient truth). A Wall Street Journal headline summed it up: “Slowdown in Warming Linked to Water Vapor.”
Moisture in the lower stratosphere (about 8 miles above the earth’s surface) has been going down, not up.
Later, he says:
What the new research suggests is that changes in water vapor may well trump the ef fect of carbon dioxide (only a fraction of which is man-made) and methane (which has mysteriously slowed since about 1990).
Gee, it’s funny that when you click that link of Scientific American, you aren’t taken to the article in question but to a bunch of other New York Post articles that feature the name of the magazine in them. That’s helpful.
Well, no problem, I just pulled it up myself and was surprised that the article said nothing about the fact that their study had disproven earlier claims about increased precipitation due to Global Warming.
Well, maybe they are just trying to cover it up for them. Or maybe it’s the fact that the stratosphere contains only 1% of the earth’s water vapors. It’s the troposphere below the stratosphere that contains the other 99%.
So is that the best Alan Reynolds could have done? Well, I can’t say if Reynolds cherry-picked that article or if it just happens to be one of the few articles that he happened upon, but if he had, you know, bothered to actually search for the topic in Scientific American, he would have found this article:
And this article….
Oh, gee. So Scientific American actually believes in the conspiracy? I guess Reynolds and the guys from Cato can’t trust them any more. Or at least not until some other science article can be misconstrued to say something that it doesn’t.
As you can see this 2006 analysis, hot temperatures do mean more rain and snow:
Results for the November–December period showed that most of the United States had experienced 61%– 80% of the storms in warmer-than-normal years. Assessment of the January–February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%–80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years. In the March–April season 61%–80% of all snowstorms in the central and southern United States had occurred in warmer-than-normal years…. Thus, these comparative results reveal that a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more snowstorms than in 1901–2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.
Okay, now let’s look at The Hidden Flaw in Greenhouse Theory, an article from the conservative internet publication, The American Thinker, and written by a former radioactive Chemist from the Inhofe 400 list, Alan Siddons:
Recently, I chanced upon an Atmospheric Science Educator Guide [PDF] published by NASA. Aimed at students in grades 5 through 8, it helps teachers explain how so-called “greenhouse gases” warm our planet Earth.
So he’s going to try to disprove the Greenhouse Theory by taking issue with the junior high school edition of NASA’s Educator Guide?
* Question: What is the relationship between light and heat?
* Answer: Things that are hot sometimes give off light. Things under a light source sometimes heat up.Utterly false. Heated masses always emit light (infrared). Always. That’s a direct consequence of molecules in motion. And while it’s true that some substances may be transparent to infrared light, it doesn’t follow that they can’t be heated or, if heated, might not emit infrared. Yet NASA’s misleading formulation implies precisely that.
Is it really that “utterly”? When one uses the single word light, one typically assumes the person is talking about visible light. I mean, yeah, the book could have been more descriptive, but then again, it is a kid’s book. I can’t help but notice how Siddons is trying to hide the word “Infrared” in parentheses so that it doesn’t distract from the way he blasts away at this I guess somewhat official NASA publication with words like utterly and always.
So how does NASA go wrong? By consistently confusing light and heat, as you see in the illustration below, where infrared light is depicted as heat. Elsewhere, NASA expresses heat transfer in terms that pertain to radiant transfer alone:
Mixing up heat and infrared light is a common mistake, but the picture he refers to does not show heat coming from the sun but as being reflected back to the earth by greenhouse gases.
But a mixup like this raises a deeper question: Why does NASA go wrong? Because it has a flimsy yet lucrative theory to foist on the taxpaying public, that’s why. As the space agency explains in the Main Lesson Concept, the core idea of greenhouse theory is that downward radiation from greenhouse gases raises the earth’s surface temperature higher than solar heating can.
Siddons shouldn’t be so modest. To phrase it like that implies that global warming is being fostered on the unknowing public by NASA alone and not the National Academy of Science, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the American Meteorological Society, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, Canada, plus the Acadamies of every other major industrialized country.
To make this idea seem plausible, therefore, it’s crucial to fix people’s attention on the 1% of the atmosphere that can be heated by radiant transfer instead of the 99% and more that is heated by direct contact with the earth’s surface and then by convection. NASA is stacking the deck, you see. If they made it clear that every species of atmospheric gas gets heated mainly by conductive transfer, and that all heated bodies radiate light, then even a child could connect the dots: “Oh. So the whole atmosphere radiates heat to the earth and makes it warmer. All of the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas.”
Crash, boom, there goes the theory. And there goes the abundant funding that this fear-promoting “science” attracts so well. For what CO2 and water vapor emit is miniscule compared to the buzzing multitude of heated nitrogen, oxygen, and even argon, all of it radiating infrared, too. Keep in mind that thermal radiation from this forgotten 99% has never been proposed or imagined to increase the earth’s temperature, although by the theory’s very tenets, it should.
Utterly false. All molecules do not radiate heat equally. Carbon dioxide may be a trace gas but it absorbs strongly in the infrared and near-infrared. The greatest contributor to the greenhouse effect is not carbon dioxide but water vapor, as every model makes abundantly clear. The other three main greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone, but clouds also have an effect.
The greenhouse effect is not some new hypothesis invented in the last couple of years. It was first discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1824 and was first reliably experimented on in 1858 by John Tyndall, one year before Charles Darwin published his theory of natural selection in On the Origin of the Species. Tyndall also contributed to the study of diamagnetism, invented a better fireman’s respirator, helped confirm that ozone is an oxygen cluster, and helped provide further evidence against critics of germ theory by developing the process of sterilization called “Tyndallization.”
The greenhouse effect was first reported quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896 using the Stefan-Boltzmann law he formed the Arrhenius’ greenhouse law, which says: if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression. He was the first person to predict that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other combustion processes would cause global warming.
Arrhenius estimated that halving of carbon dioxide would decrease temperatures by 4 – 5 °C and a doubling would cause a temperature rise of 5 – 6 °C. In his 1906 publication, Arrhenius adjusted the value downwards to 1.6 °C (including water vapor feedback: 2.1 °C). As of 2007, estimates from the IPCC say this value is likely to be between 2 and 4.5 °C.
Arrhenius believed that global warming would have a positive effect on the world, but he also expected carbon dioxide levels to rise at a rate given by emissions in his time. Since then, industrial carbon dioxide levels have risen at a much faster rate: Arrhenius expected a doubling of carbon dioxide to take about 3000 years, but it is now estimated in most scenarios to take about a century.
Proof of the Greenhouse Effect can be seen on Venus, where a dense atmosphere consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen. This carbon-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar System, creating surface temperatures over 460 °C (860 °F), hotter than Mercury’s maximum surface temperature of 420 °C, even though Venus is nearly twice Mercury’s distance from the Sun and thus receives only 25% of Mercury’s sunlight.
So once again, a simple bit of fact checking adds further evidence to the Dunning-Kruger study showing that incompetent people tend to have inflated self-assessments.
“Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.” -Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” -Bertrand Russell, 19th century philosopher
