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Nov. 29, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:54
1518 True News: The Case Against Climate Change

Melting Watergate - Some facts and figures that oppose the prevailing hysteria about global warming/climate change.

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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
This is True News.
Current events clarified. Melting Watergate.
Skeptical facts about global warming.
I really wanted to bring you some of the facts that are not brought front and center in the current media, and to some degree scientific hysteria, about global warming.
My first request or piece of advice is please don't be just another sports fan.
You know, my team, right or wrong, I have a position.
Regardless of the evidence, I'm going to stick to it.
Anybody who opposes me is an enemy of me and a virtue and goodness and so on.
Don't be that person.
Be more mature, wiser, intellectually curious and look at...
I mean, there's nothing more boring than somebody who's only ever looked at evidence which supports his or her own conclusions.
Look at the contrary evidence and that will breed, I think, a very important and virtuous humility.
People respond to incentives.
That's a basic fact. And when you pour billions of dollars a year at scientists to study global warming and to come up with catastrophe scenarios, that will be produced.
It corrupts not because the scientists are bad people.
It's just an inevitable result of the corruption of statism.
Governments like increased power, and in order to do that, they create fictional enemies.
Read 1984 if you have any doubts about how this is achieved.
Real science is about skepticism and empiricism and rigorous and reproducible experiments, and global warming conforms to none of these.
Let's look at some of the myths.
Weather extremes such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and heat waves have become more common.
No. No, not at all.
Scientists have studied this quite extensively and come to the opposite conclusion.
Extreme events are becoming less common.
Atlantic hurricanes were much more numerous from 1950 to 1975 than from 1975 to the present.
Hailstorms in the US are 35% less common than they were 50 years ago.
Extreme rainfall at the end of the 20th century is comparable to what it was at the beginning of the 20th century.
Roger Pelkey in the journal Climate Change said, quote, it is essentially impossible to attribute any particular weather event to global warming.
Evidence for man-made global warming?
Well, scientists generally agree that there's been a 0.6 degree 20th century warming.
Large increases, of course, have been observed in sunspots and solar irradiance.
As I mentioned in my first video, astronomers reported that the Sun has also warmed Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto.
They can do this by measuring the ice on these planets.
So, the Earth is not the only place being warmed.
CO2, what happens is when you warm the Earth, the oceans get warmer.
And it takes a while for this to happen because the oceans are so massive.
As the oceans get warmer, the CO2 bubbles out of the oceans, just like bubbles come out of your can of Coke.
And that's sort of important.
So what happens is the Earth gets warmer, and then you get an increase in CO2. The lag seems to be about 800 years because the oceans are so large.
So we're looking at stuff that happened almost a millennia ago, and we'll get into more of this in a few minutes.
So here's the total solar irradiance, 1611 to 2001.
And this is a narrow graph, but as you can see, there's been a clear increase.
And it to some degree corresponds when they say, well, in the early 1800s, which you can sort of see in the middle of the graph, you began to get temperature increases.
It corresponds to solar radiation increases.
Climate catastrophes due to global warming?
Well, let's look at some of the facts.
The hurricanes and other tropical cyclones, it's been the lowest activity recently for the last 30 years.
Sea level has been rising about a foot a century since satellites began recording in 1993, but there's been no rise in the last three years.
It has, in fact, been steadily rising for the past 20,000 years without any particular spike recently.
Now, Pacific atolls, which are supposed to be submerged underwater, are not at risk.
Coral grows upwards at 10 times the rate of sea level rise.
So they're not going to go underwater, even if the sea level does rise.
Ah, the polar bear is falling off the ice flows.
Well, the population has increased five times, or five-fold, since the 1940s.
The Antarctic sea ice has been growing for 30 years.
In Greenland, the average ice sheet thickness grew by 2 inches per year from 1993 to 2003.
And remember, the Vikings landed, and I guess way back when, the Greenland was actually green, which is why it was called that, and the Romans grew grapes in England.
So temperature varies quite widely throughout history.
The Sahara Desert has been greening so quickly, sorry for the typo, that 115,000 square miles have been opened to habitation, which is, I think, pretty good.
Rising CO2 and crop yields.
So CO2 has been rising to a small degree.
The atmospheric CO2 concentration rose from 315 to 360 parts per million, and global combined crop yields rose from 1250 to 2850 pounds per acre.
That's staggering. That's one of the reasons why people in India and other places in the second and third worlds are not dying as much.
A 1% increase in CO2 results in an 8% increase.
In fact, people who run greenhouse are told to keep the concentration of carbon dioxide at a thousand parts per million, and here we are about a third of that.
So the fact that this increase in carbon dioxide is hugely increasing the world's crop production is really, really great for people who are poor, not often thought of as great by environmental hysterics in the first world, who don't seem to give a rat's ass about the poor and their need for food.
Here's an example of a graph.
Global combined crop yields, kilograms per hectare, traced up against atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
As you can see, it is almost a straight correlation.
More carbon dioxide, more food.
Who's cheering that? Well, have you even heard about this?
Well, of course not. Ah, the data modeling that global warming relies on.
General circulation models vary by a factor of three in their forecast.
They're off by 300%.
Try putting that into your business plan and see what happens.
They require arbitrary adjustments, and we'll see some of those later, and they cannot properly simulate clouds.
Clouds are hugely important to global warming and are hugely important to global temperatures, and they can't simulate clouds, of course, and so how can we take them to be accurate?
Their forecasts of substantial warming depend on a positive feedback from atmospheric water vapor.
Water vapor clouds is 90% of global temperatures and global warming, and so they require that increased levels of carbon dioxide cause a huge increase in the effects of atmospheric water vapor, and we'll see shortly that this is actually not the case at all.
Now, these models, they can't, A, they can't predict huge events like monsoons, like when they're going to happen, how strong they're going to be.
They can't even get close.
Secondly, none of the models has been able to actually predict, quote, predict what has happened in the past.
If you can't even predict what's happened in the past when you have all the data, how on earth can you predict what's going to happen in the future?
It's all just such state-funded nonsense.
Sea levels. Well, the sea levels have been rising at a rate of 1.8 millimeters per year for the past 8,000 years.
The IPCC notes, this is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, notes that no significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected, which you would expect if the ice caps were melting.
Data quality. Now, I've worked in IT for many, many years, so I can really, really understand some of this stuff.
Ross McKittrick and Bob Bolling have addressed the contamination issues of global databases.
So stations drop out, so the stations that are recording temperatures either don't record data or are moved or simply stop being used.
Urbanization, so if a town goes up nearby, they don't normalize for that, they don't adjust for that.
Land use changes. Is it gone from the forest to an open field or to fertilized and planted land?
None of that. These have all been improperly adjusted for, resulting in a warming overestimation of up to 50%.
Similar results have been found in numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years.
Warming. The major greenhouse signature is supposedly warming in high atmospheric levels in the low to mid latitudes.
Ah, sadly, in actual fact, observations from weather balloons show no warming, or even a slight cooling there, invalidating these models as forecast tools.
And it is always the case that in the free market, if you predict something that doesn't work out, then you lose your job.
But in a status market, failure, it's FUMU, right?
F up, move up, and you get more funding if you don't supply accurate results or results that are verifiable, because then you say, well, more study is needed in order to scare people into giving up the rights of the government.
So recently there was a first international conference on climate change.
Full disclosure, these were 5% funded by private industry groups associated with energy.
Over 500 people attended.
A cross-section of specialties, climatologists to meteorologists to geologists, physicists, chemists, astrophysicists, biologists, economists, engineers, blah, blah, blah.
Many were current and former members of the IPCC who participated in the reports but did not support the conclusions.
Some have quit the IPCC in disgust.
You may want to Google this.
There's a lot of climate scientists and other scientists whose names have been attached to conclusions from the IPCC which they have not supported and they've lobbied to have their names taken off with varying degrees of success.
This conference produced the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change.
They said that current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous mess allocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity's real and serious problems.
Imagine $3 billion a year the US spends on climate change research.
Imagine if just one year of that money had been redirected to shoring up the levees and dikes around New Orleans.
Different world. They said there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.
And here's an interesting piece of data, or series of data.
So there's a whole bunch of ice core samples that were taken from Vostok over many, many years.
And at the very bottom here, sorry for those who are listening to the audio, you might want to check out the video.
At the very bottom, we have this original data set, which is CO2 against temperature.
And it seems to be quite close, which seems to be causal or at least correlational.
But what these guys did is they said, well, wait a second here.
We can't assume that the age of the ice is the same as the age of the air, because air circulates.
Air doesn't form in the middle of ice pockets, right?
It floats around, and then it gets trapped in ice.
So they measured the age of the air, and they measured the age of the ice.
And they then applied this fix to the data.
And as you can see from the top line, all of the correlation is almost completely removed.
And this is the kind of stuff where you see the bottom graph, you go, ooh.
You see this top graph, you go, ah.
And again, you can see lots of examples of this.
I just picked one pretty much at random.
So, a fellow, a doctor, did an annotated bibliography of recent peer-reviewed papers, and all of these are over on the right-hand side on YouTube, or at the end of this, I will put a link to the sources here.
So, he writes, As the debate on climate change and global...
Sorry, greenhouse gas emission targets continues unabated.
A large number of studies questioning the global warming science have appeared in peer-reviewed international scientific journals.
The studies have seriously questioned many aspects of the global warming science, and at present there is an emerging view among many scientists that the present climate change may be more due to natural variability rather than due to human-added CO2. The conclusions he comes to from a review of 69 peer-reviewed papers To continue.
The Arctic Basin temperature changes of the last 125 years appear to be intimately linked to the total solar irradiance, while showing a weak correlation with the atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
The Earth's climate experienced rapid climate change during the entire Holocene period, and in particular during the last 5,000 years or so.
This warming appears to be strongly linked to solar variability and not to greenhouse gases.
As I mentioned in the first video, I guess two videos ago on this subject, the recent leaked documents.
Here are some quotes. So, one of the climate scientists whose emails were linked wrote, I can't see either of these reports being in the next IPCC paper.
These are reports that are critical of global warming, hysterical orthodoxy.
Kevin and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is.
And a journal, a scientific journal, that published some findings that were counter to state-funded global warming hysteria.
Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to or cite papers in this journal.
And one of the leaders of this particular group, one of the most prominent scientists in the hysteria movement, I will be emailing the journal to tell them that I'm having nothing more to do with it until they've rid themselves of this troublesome editor.
And this guy controls a huge amount of scientific funding.
And this editor was then removed, the guy who accidentally or perhaps on purpose allowed reports critical to global warming hysteria to get through.
And the taxpayer has, quote, paid for the data and has the right to examine that data under the Freedom of Information Act in the United Kingdom.
And some climate scientists have refused to comply with the Freedom of Information request by illegally deleting relevant documents.
So this one guy wrote, certain people have been after the CRU station data for years.
If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK. I think I'll delete the file rather than send it to anyone.
And subsequently, the requested data had been, quote, inadvertently deleted, which is complete nonsense.
Everybody has backups of everything, particularly in science.
So it's all nonsense. So they don't just delete the data to not allow anyone else to try and reproduce what their conclusions, they hide it.
Scientists have attempted to, in the words of one email, hide the decline, or obscure the fact that, quote, global warming stopped about a decade ago.
One guy wrote, the scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998.
Okay, it has, but it's only seven years of data, and it isn't statistically significant.
It's sad. These scientists are not bad guys.
It's just the inevitable corruption of violence and state power.
So one poor bastard attempted to reproduce the results or attempted to recreate the results of studies he'd, I think, been involved in earlier.
So he got all the data and began to start working through it to reproduce stuff.
So here are some of the quotes from his emails.
Just went back to check on synthetic production.
Apparently, I have no memory of this at all.
We're not doing observed rain days.
It's all synthetic from 1990 onwards.
So I'm gonna need conditionals in the update program to handle that and separate gridding before 1989.
What the fuck happens to station counts?
So what he's saying here is that they didn't even include rain days, which is kind of important when you're talking about temperature recordings, right?
Are there clouds or not? And so the data is all synthetic.
It's all made up. It's all projected.
It's all nonsense. It's not empirical from 1990 onwards.
And so how does he deal with that?
Does he say, well, we'll have to withdraw our conclusions because the data is crap?
He says, no, I'm going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that.
In other words, code something in to model rain days or whatever they come up with.
So let's go away from the empiricism.
Let's just tweak the data to make it look right.
And station counts, of course, are all over the map because some are recording, some are not.
Some have data, some have not, and so on.
And he continues with the memorable scientific phrase, Oh, fuck this.
It's Sunday evening. I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought I was done, I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases.
There is no uniform data integrity.
It's just a catalog of issues that continues to grow as they are found.
Now, of course, in the free market, this would have all been shut down long ago, but in state subsidies, it really doesn't matter.
You just make up whatever you want. Dr.
Happer from Princeton gave a testimony to a Senate committee February 25th, 2009.
Full disclosure, he is a physicist.
He is not a meteorologist, but as he points out, nobody who was giving any testimony that day was a climatologist.
So, he writes, we have been in a period of global warming over the past 200 years, but there have been several periods, like the last 10 years, where the warming has ceased, and there have been even periods of substantial cooling after 1940 to 1970.
At least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds.
This is very, very significant.
A direct effect of doubling of CO2 concentration will be a small increase of the Earth's temperature to the order of one degree, which is...
I really care.
He also writes, I believe that the increases in CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind.
I think he's talking about food for the starving.
The current warming period, he says, began about 1800 at the end of the Little Ice Age, long before there was an appreciable increase in carbon dioxide.
Over the past 10 years, there's been no global warming and in fact a slight cooling.
This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models.
Can't get it right, can't get it right.
The famous hockey stick graph, which to some degree launched all of this, temperature, temperature, up, up, up.
He refers to that. We now know that the hockey stick has nothing to do with reality, but was the result of incorrect handling of proxy temperature records and incorrect statistical analysis.
In fact, they took the program that produced the hockey stick graph, ran any set of random numbers through it, and it produced a hockey stick.
It was all complete nonsense. Now, he's done a lot of research into the history of temperatures and carbon dioxide.
He says first the temperature goes up, and then the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere goes up, a delay of about 800 years.
So as we talked about earlier, temperature goes up probably as a result of solar activity or other things.
Then eventually the oceans heat up enough that they start releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and that's when you get the CO2 levels rising.
The water feedback. So we touched on this earlier.
This is important. Since most of the greenhouse effect for the Earth is due to water vapor and clouds, added CO2 must substantially increase water's contribution to lead to the frightening scenarios that are bandied about.
So since 90% of the greenhouse effect is water vapor and clouds, increasing CO2 must have some sort of Asymptotic effect on water vapor.
But that's not true.
So all the models assume that the water feedback is positive, that the more CO2 you add to the atmosphere, the more greenhouse effect you get from water vapor.
But that's true. That's not true.
Satellite observations suggest that the feedback is zero or negative.
In other words, adding CO2 to the atmosphere does not cause the water vapor to trap more heat, to create more of a greenhouse effect.
In fact, it seems to be kind of negative.
So again, the models just don't work at all.
Ah, the stifling of dissent inevitable where the gun is in the room.
So I'll read this to you.
He writes, this professor writes, there may be an illusion of consensus.
The climate catastrophe movement has enlisted the mass media, the leadership of scientific societies, the trustees of charitable foundations, and many other influential people to their cause.
Many distinguished scientific journals now have editors who further the agenda of climate change alarmism.
Research papers with scientific findings contrary to So, don't listen to me if you don't want to.
Listen to a guy who actually is in the field and knows what he's talking about.
So, we could go on and on, but I think you sort of get the idea.
This is sort of why I have said, and I've done videos on this years and years ago, so this is not a new stance for me.
I think it's important to ask why.
Well, obviously, there's huge amounts of money and prestige and advancement and so on, and that causes people to slither, right?
To do bad things and to get a kind of groupthink going on.
But I think it's important to look at the timing.
This is just my theory. It doesn't mean it's true, right?
So, the climate change history of global warming, it really started in the early 1990s.
Well, what happened just before that?
Well, The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union collapsed, it was the end of the Cold War.
And the Cold War was a huge, alarmist, terrifying scare that governments used to control their populations.
In the absence of the Cold War, you would expect governments to shrink down hugely, just like when crime drops, you'd expect the police in a free market scenario to drop down considerably as well.
But after the Cold War, what were we going to frighten our citizens with in order to control them?
And I would suggest that climate change was one of those things.
Remember, frightened animals don't think, don't plan.
They just run around in herds and look for a leader.
And I think that's really important.
Ask yourself this. What would the world look like for you without any imminent catastrophes or disasters?
What would it look like for you?
Would you need protection?
Would you need a leader? Would you need to submit yourself to a higher power if you weren't going to hell, if climate change wasn't about to happen, if the oil wasn't about to run out, if society was not about to collapse?
What would the world look for you in a secure, happy, and sustainable place?
Well, I think it would look like a world without a state, without a church.
Thank you so much for watching.
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The references are at fdrurl.com forward slash tnclimate.
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