Climate Change hypothesis: Evidence does not Support the Claim

In the world today there is tremendous amount of activity around the subject matter called anthropogenic global warming (AGW). It is claimed, that the human created increase of CO2 in the atmosphere has caused, and will increasingly cause increases in temperatures. UN sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was awarded a Nobel prize in making AGW known within the political circles and in the worldwide community. Significant amount of economical resources are invested and, increasingly so, will be invested in the future to try to reduce the CO2 emissions with an aim to control the temperature change of the future.

Up until November 2009 I took the claims of man-made global warming as granted. All the media was reporting about it convincingly with one major claim: thousands of top notch scientists support AGW, so it must be true. Up until the end of last year I believed all the media reporting.

The credibility of mainstream media suffered greatly in November 2009, when the email archives of leading climate scientists were made public. The emails of Phil Jones, the guru of climate science science, disclosed a disturbing underworld in which truth was not the objective of science. The emails, on the contrary, portrayed a world in which the end justifies the means. It looked like, that Dr. Jones, Mann and their associated had manipulated climate data in order to make their case: to show, that increased CO₂ in athmosphere in deed increases the temperature of planet earth in a dramatic way.

I was confused and so were many other. Thus, I wanted to find it out by myself, what lies behind the AGW claim. I wanted to see the proof, that the CO2 emissions of mankind in deed produce significant increases in global temperatures.

In my humble search of information and proof of AGW I got quite surprised. There was no proof at sight. Not even a smoking gun. I also found out, that there are a lot of very reputable scientists, who do not agree with the AGW hypothesis at all. Some say, that they do not know – that the science is not settled yet. Yet the politicians, meteorological institutions, UN sponsored IPCC organization, Al Gore and many others were unanimously and ferociouosly stating, that that there is a concensus among scientists about the AGW and that drastic economical actions are justified to keep our planet habitable. Threats of sea level rises, cities becoming hellholes during summers, people dying by the millions. Significant threats to mankind have been manifested by the advocates of the political elite and AGW advocates. I saw a large gap in the information coming from the likes of MIT Scientist Richard Litzen, athmopsheric scientist John Christy as compared to the world political leaders. I smelled, that something shady was going on and wanted to find out the facts behind all this.

Even more alarming to me was, that there appears to be no physical theory, which would actually explain the mechanism of the AGW hypothesis, when it comes to the warming effect of man-made CO2 emissions. Yet, the basic physics is something, that a graduate physics student can easily grasp. There is nothing very complicated there – nothing at a level of complexity, that phycical sciences are up today. String theory, theory of relativity, modern cosmology. These are disciplines of science, in which lifetime is not enough to capture them fully. Greenhouse effect physics is about applying the basic laws of thermodynamics and radiation physics. Almost elementary in the basic principles – yet, no serious effort is available to properly digest it.

 

Traditional definition of Greenhouse effect (GE) goes followingly:

Earth absorbs sublight 168 W/m². Using Stefan-Boltzmann law for black body radiation, we get that the temperature of Earth should be -18 °C, given there would be no atmosphere. Since the actual temperature on the surface of Earth is 33 °C more, it is concluded that the difference is caused by the Greenhouse effect.

The mechanism of GE, which is assumed to explain this 33 °C difference, is claimed to be the following:

• Sun radiates at higher ultraviolet frequencies, which largely penetrate atmosphere. The photons of the solar radiation frequencies cannot activate the molecules in the atmosphere, thus 70% of the radiation is absorbed by Earth.
  
• Earth then radiates the absorbed heat according to Stefan-Boltzmann law for blackbody. As the temperature is lower, than on the surface of the Sun, Earth radiates mainly on infrared spectrum.
  
• Atmosphere contains molecules, whose vibrational energy states are at the bands of infrared radiation. Thus, the radiative heat is blocked by athmospheric CO₂, H₂O, NO₂ molecules. Thus, photons of Earth's infrared radiation are converted to kinetic energy of the diatomic molecules of atmosphere, thus increasing the temperature the earlier mentioned 33 degrees.
  

 

Figure 1, Greenhouse Principle

 

This basic theory of GE was invented by Joseph Fourier in 1824. The physics was more conclusively analyzed by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. He concluded a logarithmic relation between the temperature increase and CO₂ concentration. Doubling CO₂ would mean a constant temperature increase 5-6 °C. In his later years he reduced this estimation to a level of 1.6 °C.

Arrhenius work was long forgotten. Only until in the later part of 1900 century did his results get more attention. This was two reasons: firstly infrared spectroscopy was developed so, that the CO₂ and H₂O absorption spectra could be analyzed in more detail. Secondly: the world had become aware of the increasing CO₂ emissions due to the use of fossil fuels. The Mauna Loa observatory started measuring athospheric CO₂ concentrations in 1958. And, a trend became clear. The picture below became the icon of the changing world.

 

Figure 2, Mauna Loa CO2 measurements

 

Another landmark in the global warming discussion was the IPCC publication on 2001, where a "hockey stick" emerged. It showed and alarming rate of increase of temperature in the world – claimed to be due to man-made CO₂ emissions.

Figure 3, Hockey Stick (IPCC 2001)
 

 

By the early 2000's politicians world-wide subscribed to the idea of AGW hypothesis. No respectable politician questioned any aspect of the AGW. It was not necessary. Not at least after Al Gore had published his movie Inconvenient Truth. The science was settled and our generation was up to a task to save the world. The CO₂ concentration curve had to be made bend downwards no matter the cost.

 

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by United Nations and World Meteorological Organization more, than 20 years ago. IPCC is a well respected organization. It says it uses the expertise of 2500 top scientists of the world to provide reports and advice to politicians on climate change.

IPCC defines the scientific bases of the AGW by referring to Callendar (1938) and Plass (1956).

Callendar developed Arrhenius work further by defining, and solving, a set of equations that calculated CO₂ impact on the temperature of atmosphere. However, his model was too primitive as it only included the radiative heat transfer and completely ignored the convective component. This was quickly recognized at a time and his work did not get much attention.

Plass developed the models one step further, by including the convective heat transfer component.

IPCC is supposed to represent the consensus of 2500 top scientists of the world. Yet, the core of their AGW claim is based on the work done by two scientists 70 and 50 years ago. And, the scientific community seems to agree, that these models do not accurately describe the mechanisms as to how CO₂ will heat the atmosphere.Yet, there is no work going on in the world to model the basic physics by means of which CO₂ heats the atmosphere. All this looks very weak to me. It would be about time for somebody to establish a more solid basis on the physics of AGW. World deserves better science to support the important decisions ahead.

 

To me the AGW hypothesis is still on it's early days, and far from "science settled". I can certainly subscribe to the general idea of greenhouse theory. Atmosphere acts like a radiation valve. Simply said: ultaviolet radiation penetrates the atmosphere and gets absorbed by Earth, which in turn radiates in infrared frequencies back. Infrared radiation gets blocked by the greenhouse gases. The more there is CO₂, the more the air heats.

While the greenhouse effect is a simple and neat theory, the devil is in the details – as always.

 

Central question in AGW hypothesis is the absorption capacity of CO₂.Typical AGW proponent claims, that most of the outgoing infrared radiation gets absorbed by athmospheric CO₂. This is not the case. The absorption spectrum of CO₂ is extremely narrow. In order to prove or disprove the AGW hypothesis, it would be necessary to have more detailed understanding of CO₂ absorption spectrum. Due to the physical limits in the sensitivity of infrared detectors available today, it is not even possible to estimate the rates at which certain infrared radiation actually gets absorbed by CO₂ molecules. However, even the information today seems to suggest, that the spectra is very narrow as can be seen from the Hitran pictures below:

 

Figure 4, CO2 Absorption Spectra

 

 

Looking at the above absorption characteristics of CO₂ one could estimate that only a very small proportion of the Earth's infrared radiation actually gets blocked by CO₂. My guesstimate is 0.01%. Even if it were 100 times more (1%) CO₂ greenhouse effect would be negligible, nullifying the AGW hypothesis.

Other notable uncertainties in the AGW hypothesis are the following.

• Effect of clouds: the current climate models cannot take into account the effect of clouds. IPCC admits this openly. Most climate scientists agree at the same time, that climate modeling has little value without understanding the feedback effect of clouds. According to Lidzen, clouds can have provide a negative feedback loop. The more atmosphere heats, the more there is water vapour, and clouds. Thus, heating could be reduced by this mechanism.
  
• IPCC assumes a positive feedback in it's climate models. This is necessary to justify AGW claim, as CO₂ alone can only attribute to an increase of 1 C . IPCC uses some fairly vague arguments based on which they conclude the feedback to be positive thereby increasing the temperature by 4 C. IPCC states this without any scientific basis.
  
• IPCC assumes extremely simplistic models of heat transfer at the Earth-atmosphere interface. Without justification it is said, that the major heat transfer component is radiation. As evidenced by Gerlin, there is a complex interplay of radiative, conductive and convective heats transfers taking place. It is questionable, whether IPCC's simplistic model actually models the real behaviour of athmosphere at all.
  
• Climate scientists of today are putting major emphasis and effort into developing large-scale system models. Their target is to create an accurate representation of world's climate: different atmospheric layers, sea, different geographies, ice, clouds, storms into a one model, which is expected to model the behaviour of climate 100 years from today. This is, of course, impossible. Athmosphere and the entire globe is such a complicated dynamical system, that a long-range forecasting of it is not feasible. Poincare proved already hundred years ago, that complex dynamical systems possess chaotic behaviour. Even a rounding error on the initial values of the model can mean, that the trajectories go to opposite directions creating two completely different solutions.
  
• Temperature measurements on earth surface are unreliable. Large part of the of the measurement spots are in urban areas. This is particularly problematic, since many measurement stations are in areas around which the populations have grown rapidly during the last 100 years. Dense populations, buildings and other infrastructure generate heat, which is then shown by the thermometers as increased temperature. Additionally, in many parts of the world the measurement stations in remote areas have been dismantled. This leads to cherry picking of data in which the urban measurement stations get represented more, than their share would be statistically.
  
• Earth temperature measurements do not properly measure the heat content of earth. There is, for example, very little measurement of sea water temperatures. Not having the sea water heat content properly included in the models make the simulation models useless.
  
• The effect of the variation of solar irradiation has not been considered at all in the current climate models. This means, that the models have little value as the the solar irradiation changes have big impact on the climate.
  
• The statistical analysis of real weather station data, using modern time series methods indicates that there is no statistically significant temperature rise so far.
  

 

Thus, there is a lot of evidence showing that the AGW hypothesis is not scientifically justified. Neither is there a scientific consensus about it, contrary to what the politicians are indicating.

 

With this I am not saying, that AGW would not be true. As MIT Climate Professor says: evidence does not support the claim. Nothing more, nothing less.