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Sept. 26, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:34
431 Fearing Global Warming
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph from Free Domain Radio.
We're going to have a brief chat now about a terrifying topic called global warming, which we had quite a back-and-forth about on the call-in conference chat show, which is Sundays at 4 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time. You can find it on Skype, S-K-Y-P-E dot com.
You can join in any time.
Just look for Free Domain Radio.
And a gentleman called in with quite a high degree of fear with regards to global warming.
And oh, by the by, I lost a video this morning due to technical difficulties or rather user error on my part, so if you wanted to have a look at the...
What was it? 330, I think it was.
You can have a look at that on the website, freedomainradio.com.
Just click on Listen In, and then on the click here for shows, 272 plus.
And, sorry, 429.
And it's a very interesting one. I think you'll enjoy it.
It's about masculinity and femininity and good stuff that I've learned about relationships.
So, Let's have a look at an article here.
It's fairly long, so I'm just going to do a fairly brief chat about it.
It's called Is the Sky Really Falling?
A Review of Recent Global Warming Scare Stories by Patrick J. Michaels.
A bit of a bio. This is not, let's just say, this is not just some loony on the internet whose credibility you can't verify.
Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and professor of natural resources at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and an author of the 2003 Climate Science Paper of the Year, Selected by the Association of American Geographers.
His research has been published in major scientific journals, including Climate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Nature, and Science.
He received his PhD in Ecological Climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1979.
His most recent book is Meltdown!
The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.
So, like it or not, this guy does have some letters behind his name, and so we have, I think, it's worthwhile to some degree to ask what he thinks of things, right?
And he says, In the last two years, a remarkable amount of disturbing news has been published concerning global warming, largely concentrating on melting of polar ice, tropical storms and hurricanes, and mass extinctions.
The sheer volume of these stories appears to be moving the American political process towards some type of policy restricting emissions of carbon dioxide.
So, he sort of says, goes on to say, Needless to say, the unreported information is usually counter to the bad news.
Reports of rapid disintegration of Greenland's ice ignore the fact that the region was warmer than it is now for several decades in the early 20th century, before humans could have had much influence on climate.
Similar stories concerning Antarctica neglect the fact that the net temperature trend in recent decades is negative, or that warming the surrounding ocean can serve only to enhance snowfall, resulting in a gain in ice, in other words, a transfer of ice from the ocean to the ice flows.
Global warming affects hurricanes in both positive and negative fashions, and there is no relationship between the severity of storms and ocean surface temperature.
Once a commonly exceeded threshold temperature is reached, reports of massive species extinction also turn out to be impressively flawed.
You actually have to love that phrase, impressively flawed.
And so he says, for much of the last two decades, the public has been barraged with global warming horror stories.
Greenland is melting faster than I ever thought.
Antarctica is disappearing along with the Pacific island of Tuvalu.
Frogs and toads are croaking in record numbers.
Hurricanes are getting worse.
Hurricanes will get worse.
So, in this, he examines three climate-related issues that have received extensive coverage, and he has a look at the peer-reviewed literature and the reporting on that literature.
Each of these is generally considered centrally important to global warming policy.
So, to begin with, polar ice, melting of large areas of land ice, will substantially raise sea level.
Melting large areas of sea ice does not affect sea level, but can have other important ecological impacts.
Is Greenland gaining or losing ice?
What about Antarctica? Since the fall of 2004, a number of papers have appeared in the scientific literature relating increasing hurricane severity to global warming.
What are the strong points and what are the limitations of these studies?
Are there other recent findings in the refereed literature that indicate otherwise?
Extinctions? Some very disturbing research has recently been published linking global warming to massive extinctions of tropical amphibians and to large-scale migrations of entire classes of organisms, blah, blah, blah.
So, let's start with the polar ice.
He says, Antarctica's ice sheets and glaciers are the largest mass of ice on the planet, comprising some...
Okay.
2.571 times 10 to the 6 cubic kilometers, or 89.5% of total global ice, excluding martinis.
Global warming theory predicts, in general, that warming is enhanced in a cold, dry region.
That's because the response of temperatures to a given greenhouse gas, such as carbon dioxide, is logarithmic.
The response is similar if there are two greenhouse gases that absorb much of the same wavelengths of heat radiation emanating from the earth.
Both water vapor and carbon dioxide have this property.
Suppose we had an atmosphere that initially contained a relatively constant concentration of carbon dioxide, at least since the recession of ice some 11,000 years ago, from much of the North American landmass.
And suppose we could find places where there were only tiny amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere.
These would be very cold land areas.
The vapor pressure of water, a measure of how much is given off by a wet surface to the air, is about 1,000 times less at minus 40 degrees than it is at plus 40 degrees, which is the Earth's nominal surface temperature range depending on location.
The atmosphere over cold land areas is exceedingly dry.
Water doesn't evaporate when it's cold, as you would imagine.
Beginning about 1850, the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere began to rise from a background of about 280 parts per million ppm to roughly 380 ppm today.
Direct measurements taken at Mauna Laua by Keeling et al.
date back to 1957.
In fact, dry cold land areas such as Siberia or northwestern North America in winter indeed show more warming than do other places.
As dispositive proof of that hypothesis, Michaels et al.
demonstrated that the more cold, dry air there is in these regions, as measured by barometric pressure, which is the weight of the air above a point, the greater, The warming rate.
As a control, regions that are moist show no such relationship.
Antarctica is an exception.
Over 15 years ago, Sampson published a paper in the Journal of Climate that showed no net warming of Antarctica since the International Geophysical Year of 1957.
which began the first systematic study of Antarctic temperature.
Before then, records from transient expeditions are extremely sporadic.
However, Sansom's study relied on only a handful of stations and did not form an aerially weighted average, which is necessary because so many Antarctic weather stations are on the coast and very few inland.
Doran et al. demonstrated a net cooling over Antarctica, yet on Earth Day 2005, an AP Newswire headline said, Study shows Antarctic glaciers shrinking.
How does one square the seemingly contradictory result?
Table 1 gives... Okay, I won't worry about the tables here, but basically, his story as a whole is that...
The warming of the peninsula that is recorded or that was described in these newspaper articles is from a particular area, a narrow strip of land that points towards South America, which is 2% of the continent.
And it is quite anomalous compared to what is happening over the rest of the land area.
So they took 2% of the Antarctic.
They found some warming.
And they said the entire Antarctic is warming, and of course, in the rest of it, it's not.
It's actually cooling, right?
So this is the kind of stuff that you need to dig into before you start making decisions, as the gentleman was, say, on Sunday, about whether or not to have children, based on the horrifying entry of global warming.
So, a 2002 science magazine called Science carried an article by Quayle et al.
called Extreme Responses to Climate Change in Antarctic Lakes.
Now, they restricted their study to an area even smaller than the Antarctic Peninsula.
Nine lakes located on tiny Signe Island at the tip of the peninsula, which make up about one ten millionth of Antarctica.
The finding of note was that the water in the lakes...
Warmed at a rate about two or three times faster than the air temperatures, and three to four times faster than global average temperature.
While the lakes are frozen for most of the year, liquid water remains below the ice.
It is scientifically inappropriate to conflate global temperatures with what's happening on an isolated island, especially when the climate of that very small place is changing in a different direction than that of the associated continent.
So this is getting warmer, but the Antarctica as a whole is getting colder.
Although there was obviously no global significance, the Associated Press said this finding, quote, could have very important implications for global climate change.
In reality, Signe Island is a pretty special case.
It is on the edge of a lot of ice, and small changes in wind patterns will dramatically change the local temperature.
What really was being observed was a local ecological response to variations in local climate.
In fact, it was a response to a variation that was atypical for the region as a whole.
There is actually a reasonable explanation for Antarctic cooling resulting from a general global warming.
Antarctica is surrounded by water of the Southern Ocean, which has warmed an average of roughly 0.3 degrees in the last four decades.
Although that might not seem like much, he says, and it isn't much, it results in an increased amount of water vapor in the air surrounding Antarctica.
When this air is forced to ascend the continent by any number of meteorological mechanisms, the increased moisture will give rise to increased low-level cloudiness and snow.
The increase in Antarctic snow was documented by Davis et al., who wrote that the accumulation of snow was sufficient to make Antarctica as a whole net sink for sea-level rise, just as is projected by all recent climate models.
So he goes on, here, the low-level clouds responsible for snowfall are known to have a net cooling effect on surface temperatures.
Consequently, it is most likely that the growth in Antarctic ice documented by Davies et al.
is a result of oceanic warming, which is why this growth is anticipated in the models cited above.
Now he goes on to talk about a variety of other areas, ice mass, variations, and so on.
And he's not denying global warming, as of course neither do I, but of course the terrifying results that are there just don't seem to be there, right?
So here, for example, I don't know if we'll get this up.
This is temperatures.
Let's just see here if we can get it focused.
This is temperatures for Greenland for the past hundred years.
Left-hand side is 1900, right-hand side is 2000, and of course you can see here that there's not any particular change overall.
And here, a recent science paper by Eric Rino and Kenagaratnam received a tremendous amount of publicity when it was claimed that there had been a widespread and accelerating loss of Greenland's peripheral glaciers during the past ten years and an increasing runoff from the main ice-sheet.
The rate was given at two hundred and twenty-four plus or minus forty-one cubic kilometers per year for two thousand and five.
For comparative purposes, the Greenland ice mass given above in standard numerical notations is just over 2.8 million cubic kilometers, yielding a loss of 8 one-thousandths of a percent per year.
This translates into a sea level rise of two hundredths of an inch per year.
Amazingly, there was no reference in this paper to Johansson et al.'s 2005 publication in the same journal, which showed that the Greenland ice cap is accumulating at a rate of 5.4 ± 2 cm per year.
This is the increase in elevation of the ice cap measured by the very same satellites that Rignore and this other fellow used.
Well, what's the difference? Well, one of this group, the group that said that it was losing...
Combined observations of ice loss from the coastal glaciers with models of changes over the inland ice cap, whereas Johansson et al.
observed changes in the ice cap directly.
They found that the rise in ice cap elevation converts to about 75 cubic kilometers per year.
Had the guys who had the whole scare about the ice flows vanishing, had they used real data as opposed to a computer simulation, they would have found that any loss of Greenland ice had occurred only in the last five years, as it was gaining ice before then, even accounting for the loss from glaciers.
And the total loss would be about 93 cubic kilometers, which is slightly over 40% of the already tiny loss, the 8,000 that this gentleman had originally claimed.
So, temperatures from 1920 through the 1940s in Greenland were generally higher than they are today.
Fairly important.
So, let's keep chugging along here.
Composite Greenland temperatures.
Here we're going from 1961 to, I do believe, 2001.
Let's hold that up. Have a look.
This is composite temperatures.
I'm sure you can see that.
Let's try and get this centered here.
I'm doing this all backwards, of course.
Okay, well, that's fairly good.
So, as you can see, they're sort of declining over time, quite contrary to the expectations.
Again, this is not to say that global warming may not be happening.
This guy seems to think that there's a possibility, but this is quite important.
Now, let's have a look here.
A very interesting study by Overland and Wood examined the logs of 44 Arctic exploration vessels from 1818 to 1910 and found that,"...climate indicators such as navigability, the distribution and thickness of annual sea ice, monthly surface air temperatures, and the onset of melt and freeze were within the present range of variability." Commenting on the early exploration logs, they noted that,"...
Overwinter locations of Arctic discovery expeditions from 1818 to 1859 are surprisingly consistent with present sea ice climatology.
And you have a A thinning of ice, which has been widely cited, and this gentleman named Rothrock put a study together, said that the thinning of ice from 25 to 43%, as reported in Rothrock's widely cited study, was shown to be an artifact of the sampling of submarine tracks by Holloway and Sioux, who, quote, showed thinning by lesser amounts ranging from 12% to 15%.
In addition to the sampling bias, Holloway and Sue also noted that prevailing winds in the 1950s through the 1970s differed from those in the 1990s, and that recent winds have moved ice out of the central Arctic.
Okay, so let's keep chugging along here.
I'll put the link to this.
I'm obviously not going to completely pillage the guy's whole article.
And this is just the first one that I came across.
I mean, there may be other ones, and maybe this has been kind of changed.
But let's have a look at...
We'll go over some of the details here.
We'll have a look at the hurricanes.
Since the 2004 hurricane season, when Florida was struck by four storms, there have been a tremendous number of stories associating an increase in the frequency of severe hurricanes with global warming.
They are based largely on a handful of studies in the scientific literature.
So, for instance, New York Times science writer Andrew Revkin summarized it this way.
Global warming is likely to produce a significant increase in the intensity and rainfall of hurricanes in the coming decades, according to the most comprehensive computer analysis.
And that's computer analysis done so far.
As a computer programmer myself, as I have been for a couple of decades now, garbage in, garbage out is a fairly strong situation.
So, the author's own words in the Journal of Climate paper were, quote, CO2-induced tropical cyclone intensity changes are unlikely to be detectable in historical observations and will probably not be detectable for decades to come, right?
So, there's a conservative science thing, and then it becomes likely to produce significant increases in intensity and rainfall of hurricanes, right?
So, of course, this is not really the case at all.
And, of course, they end up with computer models, I mean, especially when it comes to multi-decade weather projections.
You might as well just blindfold yourself and stick a pin in a map to try and find, you know, your hometown.
It's not good to be at all the case.
That's going to be valid. Let's have a look at some of the other stuff.
Many authors have commented that the rate of carbon dioxide increase commonly applied to climate models is far too high, so they'll often do 1% per year.
Carbon dioxide levels in the model atmosphere will increase at a rate of 1% per year, which produces atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Dioxide concentration 80 years from now that are more than double the levels of today.
In reality carbon dioxide levels have grown much more slowly and continue to do so.
The average yearly increase in atmospheric concentration in the decade through 2004 was 0.49%.
In the decade before that 0.42% and 0.43% three decades ago.
Despite three decades of predictions of a dramatic increase in the rate of increase, it's supposed to be asymptotic or exponential, it simply has not occurred.
So they're using twice, more than twice, slightly more than twice, the actual rate of increase in carbon dioxide in their future modeling than has ever occurred in the past.
So, according to Kovey et al.
on this issue, the rate of radiative forcing increase Implied by 1% per year increasing CO2 is nearly a factor of 2 greater than actual anthropogenic forcing in recent decades.
Even if non-CO2 greenhouse gases are added in as part of an equivalent CO2 forcing and anthropogenic aerosols are ignored.
Thus, the 1% per year increase cannot be considered as realistic for purposes of comparing model predicted and observed climate changes during the past century.
It is also not a good estimate of future anthropogenic climate forcing, except perhaps as an extreme case in which the world accelerates its consumption of fossil fuels while reducing its production of anthropogenic aerosols.
So... Hurricane intensity.
Well, there's a bunch of stuff here.
You can look at it as you want.
No connection has been scientifically observed between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes.
So, let's keep chugging along here.
It is now, another, Lancey generally wrote, it is now understood to be physically reasonable that the intensity of hurricanes in the 1970s through the early 1990s was underestimated rather than those in the 1940s and 1960s.
Being overestimated.
All studies of hurricane activity that claim a link between human causation and the currently severe hurricane regime must somehow account for the equally active period through the mid-20th century.
They don't. So, as far as extinctions go, So he writes, perplexing indeed is the fact that the stability of the tropical atmosphere is decreasing, which is conducive to stronger storms, while all models of human-generated warming show that stability increases.
So as far as extinctions go, I won't sort of continue, but...
We really do want to have a look in general.
He obviously has a quick hack at this question of extinction that has been going on, or the conversations about extinction that have been going on.
And in a particular butterfly that was supposed to be on danger of extinction, it was actually found that if global warming is true and accounted for it, then it actually had a wider spread in terms of where it could live and where it did live than occurred before.
So, discussion in conclusion, he would like to say this.
It is apparent that many recent stories on melting of high-latitude ice, hurricanes, and extinctions are riddled with self-inconsistencies, are inconsistent with other findings, and are reported as much by scientists themselves as by reporters in extreme or misleading fashions that do not accurately portray the actual research.
This begs for an explanation.
Perhaps it is simply the way science has always been, but that the dramatic policy implications of global warming compel some people, including this author, to examine the refereed literature with more scrutiny than would normally be applied.
The alternative is that recently the peer-reviewed process has begun to allow the publication of papers that should have been dramatically modified before being accepted.
If the latter is true, then another explanation is required.
One hypothesis Would be that public-choice dynamics is now entering into science.
But this would seem to require unethical behavior on the part of a wide scientific community.
Under this model, the review process becomes less stringent if a paper promotes the economic well-being of the reviewer, and more stringent if it does not.
Shocking. One could never imagine.
Well-being here means professional advancement and reward.
It is a fact that in the United States the taxpayer outlay for so-called global change science is now in excess of four billion dollars annually.
Let's just ponder that.
Just sit with that for just a moment.
Doesn't mean that it's not true. Doesn't mean it's not occurring.
But it does mean that there is a possibility for bias.
The taxpayer outlay for so-called global change science is now at access of $4 billion annually.
Universities reward their faculty on the amount and quality of the research that they produce, which in climate science requires considerable taxpayer funding.
If the funding stream is threatened by findings downplaying the significance of climate change, the public choice model would predict rather vociferous review.
If it is enhanced, this model would predict a glowing positive review.
Whether public choice dynamics is indeed responsible for the current rather sloppy state of global warming science is a testable hypothesis but beyond the scope of this paper.
It can be tested by noting that adding new information to a forecast has an equal probability of changing the forecast in either a positive or a negative direction.
It would be interesting to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the recent scientific literature on climate change to see whether results are significantly biasing our view of the future into one that is almost always worse than we thought, and rarely not as bad as we thought.
Whether or not this bias exists, the recent tidal wave of global warming papers on polar ice, hurricanes, and extinctions has included an incredible number of omissions and inconsistencies.
It is to be hoped that this paper will help set the record straight on these aspects of climate change.
So this is just a short, it's like 25 pages, well written, the guy's a good reader, and it's voluminous literature that you might want to have a look at if you're interested in this kind of stuff.
But the important thing to remember is not to say that because there's a financial interest at stake, the science must be biased or something like that.
I would never go that far, because of course I'm no climatologist I can't really tell.
I certainly do know that science has triumphed a whole load of dubious stuff in the past from eugenics to race theories and so on.
And science has also been quite happy with frontal lobotomies to treat mental illness.
Currently science is doing quite a bit in terms of prescribing medicine to people who have depression and to children who are bored in school.
And there's an enormous amount of corrupt science that's around in the world, right?
I mean, just look throughout history and you can see That it's the case.
This doesn't mean, of course, that climate change isn't occurring, that we're not responsible, blah, blah, blah.
But the only thing that I would say is these disastrous scenarios that are put forward in movies like The Day After and in sort of popular literature.
If you are interested in climate change, my strong, strong, strong suggestion is to go to the source literature rather than the popular media.
The popular media is not interested in science any more than it's interested in philosophy or politics.
It's interested in entertainment or in eyeball grabbing, and the best way it can do that, of course, is to frighten the pants off you because of our own personal histories.
This is what we generally react the best to.
So please, please, don't make any major life decisions based on the existence and imminent disaster included in something like climate change.
Even if global warming is occurring, nobody has any clue, it would seem to me, what this is actually going to mean in the long run, sea levels rising, blah, blah, blah, and computer models going at 100 years with faulty assumptions about like 1% increase per year in carbon dioxide emissions just really aren't very reliable.
But when you look at $4 billion, You know, that's $4,000 million.
That's a significant amount of money, which is all going to dry up and vanish, right?
It's a little bit different from being a tobacco farmer, say, and being interested in big tobacco.
If big tobacco goes down, then as a tobacco farmer, you can just start growing other crops.
If you are a salesperson in the tobacco regime or in the tobacco company, you just go get a job in another company.
If you're an executive, that's transferable.
If you're a secretary, that's transferable.
But you have to understand that for scientists, if you are deep into climatology for global warming, and that's been your specialty for the past 20 years or 10 years, if that funding dries up, you have nothing to do.
You have nowhere to go.
You've become heavily over-specialized in a highly competitive field with new, younger, and cheaper entrants coming in all the time.
So I think even more so than something like a tobacco company The public choice process that's going on in climatology is going to lead people to exaggerate.
And there's a whole sort of process by which the original data ends up in the newspaper headlines.
But I wouldn't trust any of it.
I mean, we don't trust those of us who are libertarians who studied the media for any amount of time.
We, of course, don't trust the media when it comes to reporting politics because it's all just such biased nonsense.
And I certainly wouldn't go any further in trusting the media to report something like global warming.
And I certainly wouldn't trust the integrity of every scientist who's currently hanging off that immense state booby, sucking at the mother's milk of the taxpayers' money.
So I hope that this helps.
Obviously, you've got to go and research it yourself, but don't be frightened.
Don't be scared. Climate change is probably going to turn out to be as manufactured as the war on terror, and global cooling, and us running out of resources, and all the scare stories that are always put in to make you run to the state.
And bleat like a lost little lamb.
So don't be frightened. Let's keep an eye on it.
Let's keep looking at the original research.
Let's keep trying to understand the basis of it.
But for heaven's sake, don't be scared.
Don't be scared of any of this kind of stuff.
The planet has gone through much worse and will go through much worse again in the future and we will find a way, even if it is occurring, to ameliorate the response.
So don't be scared.
That's sort of the idea behind global warming and don't succumb.
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