[ExI] Is Global Warming Junk Science?

[John K Clark]

It's passionately believed by many very intelligent people and studies
confirming it are reported in respected Science journals, and the
popular press is numinous, so Global Warming couldn't be junk science.
Or could it?

I decided to look a little more closely at some of this and was appalled at
how obscenely shoddy much of it is. For example, everyone agrees that cities
produce a localized "heat island" effects due to all that black asphalt and
the larger the city the larger the effect. So if you're going to compare the
temperature of New York City as it is now with 8 million people with what it
was in the early 19'th century when it had 100 thousand people you're going
to need a fudge factor, I'm sorry I should have said "correction factor", to
compensate for this localized heating.

This correcting factor is the product of two numbers, the population
increase of the city times a constant. You may wonder how that constant was
derived, well I'll tell you, it's a guess, a guess dreamed up by the
experimenters, it's as simple as that. And surprise suprise  it proves
exactly what  the experimenter want to prove, global warming is real.

The scientific community wouldn't put with this sort of crap in any other
area, but even it is not immune from political correctness. Imagine if a
drug company submitted data on the safety and effectiveness of their
new drug to the FDA  and said "don't worry about the high rate of death;
it's greatly reduced with a fudge factor of our own design". They'd be
laughed out of town.

There is another reason to suspect that this "correction factor" is not
sufficient to correct for this heat island effect. Even after the correction
New Your City still shows a very pronounced 5 degree F increase from 1822 to
2000, but Albany New York, a city that has grown much much more slowly and
is only 140 miles away has actually COOLED by .5 degrees F during that same
time. Don't you find that odd?

For a global phenomena it's also odd that Alice Springs Australia has
noticed no change of temperature from 1879 to now, or Christchurch New
Zealand from 1864, or Rome Italy from 1811, or Kamenskue Siberia from 1949,
or Death Valley California from 1930, or Paris France from 1757. The average
temperature of West Point New York was 51 degrees F in 1826 and it's 51
degrees F now. Stuttgart Germany registered a temperature DECREASE from
1792.

To be fair I should say that I cherry picked those numbers and that many
paces do indeed claim that the temperature has increased; but this is
supposed to be GLOBAL so the numbers I cite can't just be shrugged away with
a wave of the hand. To be even fairer I should include Tokyo. Like New York
City it records a HUGE temperature increase in the last century. Hmm, what
do Tokyo and New York City have in common?

I think it would be rather hard to dispute that the best maintained weather
records over a large area come from the USA and yet they show the smallest
increase in temperature. According to records in the USA from 1880 to today
the temperature has increased by only a .6 degree Fahrenheit; it also shows
that the hottest year of the 20's century was 1934. Does anybody think these
numbers are consistent with the popular panic over global Warming?

It is true and well reported that the glacier on Kilimanjaro is retreating,
but it has been doing so since the early 19'th century. It is less well
reported that glaciers in Iceland and Norway are advancing. The status of
most of the other glaciers in the world is unknown as we only have good data
on 79 of the worlds 160,000 glaciers.

Well what about sea levels, you can't fake that. If temperatures are
increasing then ice will melt and that water has to go someplace. The best
evidence is that sea levels have increased about an inch and a half over the
last 30 years; not very surprising as the sea has been rising about 6 inches
a century for the last 6 thousand years, and MUCH faster than that in the
previous 14000 years, the sea has risen 410 feet in the last 20 thousand
years, a blink of an eye geologically. Face it folks, we're in a
interglacial period and in all 4 of the previous interglacial periods during
the last 420,000 years temperatures were warmer than they are now.

And it's not just the data, theory sucks too. The IPCC predicted in 2007
that the sea will rise between 15 and 59 cm by 2100; so they admit their
models are uncertain by 400% but I think they still grossly overestimate the
accuracy of them. Clouds are absolutely critical to climate because they
reflect solar radiation back out into space and solar energy is what drives
the entire show.

The thing is that the IPCC models don't know what to do with clouds, no idea
at all, zero, not a clue. Will global warming make more clouds or fewer
clouds? Nobody and I do mean NOBODY knows, not even approximately.
Higher temperatures might (see below) put more water in the atmosphere,
but higher temperatures also means the air can support more water before
it is forced to form clouds. I have no idea who wins that tug of war, I
don't have even a ghost of a clue, and neither does anybody else.

And then there is the question of global dimming, nobody knows the cause but
the evidence is clear that at any given air temperature it takes longer for
water to evaporate now than it did 50 years ago. The IPCC Bozos tackled this
further complication by simply ignoring it, just as they did for clouds.

And so on the basis of this junk science we're supposed to spend hundreds of
trillions of dollars and tell hundreds of millions of Chinese that they
should repent from being prosperous due to that evil drug called coal and
the only moral thing for them to do now is to now slip back into abject
poverty.

I've got to tell you, that doesn't sound like a very good idea to me.

Oh and by the way, you could make a stronger case that Mars has warmed since
1977 than that the Earth has.

 John K Clark