Dr David Evans: Four fatal pieces of evidence

Dr David Evans lays out four crucial pieces of evidence, and calls for a debate with Prof Andrew Pitman. But the evidence is so unarguably strong for skeptics, we know that the name-calling-team-who-want-our-money will do anything to avoid a public debate. If the evidence is “overwhelming” why are they so unwilling to explain it?  — Jo

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Submission to the Inquiry into Carbon Tax Pricing Mechanisms

Dr David Evans

20 September 2011

Dr David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, and part-time to the Department of Climate Change from 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. Evans is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University.

Global warming has become a scam. Let me explain how it works.

It has superficial plausibility. Yes, global warming is occurring. Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and levels are rising. And yes, every molecule of carbon dioxide we emit causes some global warming.

Many non-scientists think that proves the case, but it doesn’t. In particular, it doesn’t rule out the possibility that carbon dioxide is merely a minor or insignificant player, and that something else is the main cause of global warming.

Here’s a clue: the world has been in a warming trend since 1680, the depth of the Little Ice Age. It has warmed steadily since then, at half a degree per century. Within the trend there is a pattern of 25 – 30 years of warming followed by 25 – 30 years of mild cooling. We just finished a warming period that started in 1975, so chances are we’ll have mild cooling for the next couple of decades. But there were no SUV’s in 1680. Human emissions of CO2 were miniscule before 1850, nearly all come after WWII, and a quarter  since 1998. Yet the warming  trend was as strong in the 1700s and 1800s as it was in the 1900s.

The theory of man-made global warming doesn’t stand up to even casual scrutiny. It requires believers to ignore or deny overwhelming evidence that it is bunk. The believers have to be schooled by massive propaganda not to notice certain things, and to ignore and revile anyone who points out those things.

There is in fact no empirical evidence that global warming is mainly man-made. If there was, we would have heard all about it. Tens of billions of dollars has been spent looking for it.

Climate scientists readily concede that there is no direct evidence that global warming is caused by our carbon dioxide. Instead, they say that our knowledge of how the climate works is embodied in their climate models, and the climate models say that global warming is man-made.

Models are logically equivalent to someone punching in numbers and doing sums on a calculator – models are calculations, not evidence. The problem is that the models contain many guesses and assumptions about how things work, and some of them are wrong.

Here are four bits of evidence that the climate models are fundamentally flawed

1 First,  they have a track record of greatly exaggerating temperature increases. The global warming scare was started by James Hansen in his presentation to the US Congress in 1988, and comparing his predictions then to what actually occurred, the actual temperature rises are about a third of what he predicted. Remember, they have been saying the “science is settled” since the early 80’s, and the models now are essentially the same as they were then.

Furthermore, Hansen’s models predicted the temperature rise if human carbon dioxide emissions were cut back drastically starting in 1988, such that by year 2000 the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was not rising at all. But in reality, the temperature did not even rise that much. Which proves that the climate models don’t have a clue about the effect of carbon dioxide on world temperature.

2Second, the climate models predict the oceans should be warming. We’ve only been measuring ocean temperature properly since 2003, using the ARGO system. In ARGO, a buoy duck dives down to 2000m, slowly ascends and reads the temperatures on the way, then radios the result back by satellite to HQ. Three thousand ARGO buoys patrol the oceans constantly. They say that the ocean temperature since 2003 has been basically flat. Again, reality is very different to the climate models.

 

3Third, the climate models predict a particular pattern of atmospheric warming during periods of global warming. In particular, the most prominent change they predict is a warming in the tropics about 10 km up, the so-called “hotspot”. But we have been measuring atmospheric temperatures by weather balloons since the 1960s, and millions of weather balloons say there was no such hotspot during the last warming from 1975 to 2001. The hotspot is integral to their theory, because it would be evidence of the extra evaporation and thickening of the water vapor blanket that produces two thirds of the warming in the climate models – the carbon dioxide itself produces only one third of the projected warming, but is amplified in the models by water vapor. But in reality there is no hotspot, so there is no amplification, which is why the climate models have exaggerated temperature increases.

Source of data: US Climate Change Science Program, 2006, part E of Figure 5.7, on page 116. Comes from millions of radiosondes (weather balloons) from the 1960s on. There is no other data for this period, and we cannot collect more data on atmospheric warming during global warming until global warming resumes. This is the only data there is.

Source of model pattern: Any climate model, for example, IPCC Assessment Report 4, 2007, Chapter 9, page 675.

Explanation: The hotspot in the models is due to a thickening of the water vapor blanket during global warming, as more water evaporates and the blanket of warm moist air displaces cold dry air above. This thickening causes 2/3 of the warming in the models. But in reality there is no hotspot, so the models exaggerate temperature increases by at least a factor of 3.

(By the way this became known by the mid-1990s, so the theory of man-made global warming should have been abandoned then, but there was too much money, bureaucracy, ideology, bank trading profits, and renewables action for the gravy train to be shut down.)

4Fourth, satellites have measured the outgoing radiation from the earth and found that the earth gives off more heat when the surface is warmer, and less heat in months when the earth’s surface is cooler. Who could have guessed? But the climate models say the opposite, that the Earth gives off less heat when the surface is warmer, because they trap heat too aggressively (positive feedback). Again, the climate models are violently at odds with reality.

Those are four independent pieces of evidence that the climate models are fundamentally flawed. Anyone one of them, by itself, disproves the theory of man-made global warming. There are also other, more complex, pieces of evidence. Remember, there is no direct evidence that man causes global warming, so if the climate models are wrong then so is the theory.

Now let me explain how they prevent the scam from being revealed

The trick is that they never put any alarmist climate scientist in a position where they have to answer to a  knowledgeable critic.

To defend their theory in public, the alarmist climate scientists typically send out people like Tim Flannery or Tony Jones who know next to nothing about how climate models work. Then, when confronted with evidence, these believers immediately just say “but the climate scientists say”. They argue from authority. It has the same structure as the celebrated argument between  Galileo and the Pope – evidence on one side, and massive political and religious authority on the other. Note that the Pope had “scientists” on his side too, in fact the overwhelming majority, and they were “the consensus”. It’s easy to manufacture a consensus with that much money and power.

Alarmist climate scientists do make public appearances, but never in a situation where they come under sustained questioning or criticism from anyone who understands models. They have avoided any real debate in public for decades – these alarmists have never been held accountable, they’ve never had to answer to people who knew the problems with their theory. They have never faced an audit, an inquiry, a Royal Commission, or even a hostile interview – yet they get paid megabucks and presume to tell the rest of us how to live our lives.

The alarmist government climate scientists say they only respond to what is in the peer-reviewed journals. But that cover was memorably blown in the ClimateGate scandal of 2009, which revealed in their own words that they rig the journals to prevent publication of anything critical. That’s why they go on and on about peer-review – it’s their mechanism for keeping out criticism.

The climate scientists and their believer acolytes, by the way, are more than happy to argue with unknowledgeable critics – critics who know something is wrong, but don’t quite have the background or understanding of the models to know where the weaknesses are in the alarmist case. The climate scientists delight in being more knowledgeable and all “scientific” against uninformed criticism, because it makes them feel like real scientists instead of charlatans, and is great PR for their cause.

There is something very religious and medieval about all of this. Galileo’s case led to the Enlightenment, in which evidence came to triumph over political authority. In enlightened society, people do not have to believe something just because some political or religious authority say it is so – the evidence determines what is considered true.

But on climate, our society is reversing the Enlightenment, slipping back towards the middle ages. Sure we have smart phones, but our means of determining truth has reverted to political authorities and their pet scientists declaring what is true, denying the evidence, and reviling the unbelievers.

It gets worse. Not only we reversing the values of the Enlightenment, we are de-industrializing. These scam artists, led by those technological buffoons the Greens, want us to close down our cheap and reliable sources of power and go back to using unreliable and intermittent windmills. Like in the middle ages, we would be at the mercy of the breeze, using muscle power where possible. These people pride themselves on being “progressive”, which, like everything else on this topic, is a fully sick parody of the truth.

This corruption has to end. We have repeatedly called for a Royal Commission into the science before taking action, but were of course ignored.

So now I am calling for a debate

Professor Andy Pitman is the leading climate scientist in Australia. Andy has about 20 PhD students working for him, has had millions of dollars of researching funding, and holds lots of prestigious positions in the climate establishment. He recently refused to debate William Kininmonth and me, in the usual dismissive way “I won’t debate people who don’t believe in gravity”. Kininmonth was head of Australia’s National Climate Centre for 12 years, and spent 38 years at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

So Andy, come and debate us. Your side says the evidence for man-made global warming is overwhelming, so it should be easy for you. What’s the problem? The Australian taxpayer looks after you extremely well, so the least you should have to do is explain yourself once in a while.

The government and the ALP might find such a debate very interesting . As I said in The Australian newspaper in 2008:

“What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Labor Government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it.”