Global warming and the media elite
Back to the Enviro-Nazi Tactics of the Idiot Left Page
Saturday, July 7, 2001
By Gordon Prather© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
The media elite can be divided into two categories. One category, perhaps the largest, comprises those who – although not eco-wackos themselves – accept uncritically, and publish widely, every pronouncement given them by the eco-wackos. The other category, of course, comprises those who actually are eco-wackos. So what's a poor soccer mom – who wants to know the truth about global warming – to do? What channel can she turn to?
Well, she can always hope that a few newsies in the non-wacko category will have epiphanies, begin to actually read the stuff they are given, think about what they have read and begin to be more critical about what they pass on. Andrew Revkin, who covers global warming for the New York Times, may have had such an epiphany – and it may be worth examining in some detail his column this week entitled, "Climate Research: The Devil is in the Details."
A New York Times editor may have put that title on Revkin's column, but there are two points worth noting about it. First, although the column purports to be about climate research, it is actually mostly about computer modeling, which hardly qualifies as "research." Second, although the expression "the devil is in the details" is of unknown origin, it seems to have become popularized by Ross Perot in his first run for the presidency. Perot was referring to various proposals by candidate Bill Clinton, and what Ross apparently meant was that when you closely examined Clinton's angelic proposals – as Perot had done – they turned out to be satanic. In the present context, the implication is that an unbiased examination of the predictions of the Global Climate Change [GCC] computer modelers – that have been passed off by the eco-wackos as "evidence" that global warming is real and that mankind is largely responsible – will lead you to question whether the eco-wackos can possibly be on the side of the angels, as they claim.
Revkin, epiphany or no, apparently continues to believe that "the signal achievement" of the GCC modelers has been the "accumulation of evidence" that rising levels of greenhouse gases in the air have discernibly warmed the planet. However, the only sense in which the predictions of a GCC modeler could be considered to be "evidence" would be if – and only if – his predictions were conclusively demonstrated to be accurate. None of the GCC model predictions have ever been demonstrated to be accurate.
On the contrary, all the GCC models predict that, for an increase in the temperature of the earth's surface, there would be a concomitant increase in the temperature of the lower atmosphere. Actual satellite measurements over the past 20 years show no such temperature increase. Not only does that prediction of warming of the lower atmosphere by all the GCC models have no evidentiary value, neither does any other un-checkable GCC model prediction.
Since that prediction by the GCC modelers was one of the very few that could actually be checked -- and so serious was the conflict between what the GCC modelers predicted the temperatures of the lower atmosphere ought to be and the temperatures that were actually experimentally measured by satellite and balloon-borne instrumentation – a panel was assembled in 1999 by the National Academy of Sciences to try to resolve it.
They couldn't.
According to the global-warming aficionados, the Earth's surface temperature has risen about 0.4 to 0.8 degrees Celsius – or 0.7 to 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit – in the last century, primarily, they claim, because of man-made increases in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. But, according to all the GCC models, if increased concentrations of greenhouse gases had resulted in such surface temperature increases, then there should have been a concomitant increase in the temperature of the atmospheric layer extending from the surface up to about 30,000 feet.
Now, the earth's average surface temperature may – or may not – have increased over the past century. And even if it has, it may – or may not – have been because of increases in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. And even if that was the cause, mankind may – or may not – have been principally to blame.
But here's the only thing we know for sure: The temperature of the lower atmosphere has not increased. All the GCC models are wrong. Even when they know what they have to predict – namely no temperature increase for the past 20 years – their GCC models can't be made to predict that.
Now, the actual measurements over the past 20 years of no increase in the temperature of the lower atmosphere do not prove that the surface temperature has not been increasing. Maybe it has. Nor do the actual measurements of no temperature increase in the temperature of the lower atmosphere disprove the notion that increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide are causing the surface temperature to increase – if it has. Nor do the actual measurements of no increase in the temperature of the lower atmosphere disprove the notion that mankind is somehow responsible for the increase in surface temperature – if they occur.
But what it does show is that all the GCC models are wrong. Furthermore, whatever is wrong with them can't be fixed – they can't be made to predict zero temperature increase in the lower atmosphere – without throwing out the fundamental mechanism of greenhouse-gas enhancement of surface temperature.
Now, the GCC models could presumably be fixed by telling them that there had been no increase in the surface temperature over the past 20 years – and maybe there hasn't been – despite a 30 percent increase in carbon dioxide levels. Presumably, then the GCC models could be forced to predict no temperature increase for the lower atmosphere. That would mean finding some physical mechanism – such as cloud formation – that would quench, before it got started, any greenhouse-gas effect due to increased carbon dioxide levels, and incorporating that mechanism into the GCC models.
But hark ye! These GCC models which are so clearly wrong – which cannot even predict the known past, much less the unknown future – are the models on which the International Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) based the Kyoto Protocols. These are the models that predict that the entire state of Florida will be under six feet of water if you soccer moms don't cut back your SUV driving to 1992 levels by 2012. The predictions of these GCC models – which the National Academy of Sciences has essentially discredited – are what the European Union weenies were waving in the face of our president a few weeks ago, demanding that he immediately make this country subject to the edicts of Algore.
Revkin has apparently also just learned something you have known all along if you've been reading these columns: The predictions made by computer models of "non-linear" systems can be very sensitive to input conditions. What's a non-linear system? One that includes such weird things as feedback loops and changes-of-state. The greenhouse-gas phenomena is a real-world positive-feedback loop. Water evaporation, cloud formation, rain and snow are all real-world changes-of-state. Any computer model that attempts to incorporate such non-linear processes can be extremely sensitive to input conditions.
Remember the "Butterfly Effect"? Climatologist Lorenz originally coined that term to refer to the sensitivity of weather-prediction models to input conditions. He experimentally discovered that if he made two runs using the same initial conditions, but specified his input conditions in one to three decimal places, rather than two, or four rather than three, he always got different – and sometimes got wildly different – weather predictions. And the longer he let the computer run, the farther apart his two predictions got.
The "Butterfly Effect" never meant that a butterfly in the real world could cause a tornado in Oklahoma by flapping its wings weeks earlier in Mexico. What it meant was that a small difference in an input pressure between two otherwise identical computer runs, could result in one computer run predicting – after a long time – a tornado while the other one predicts a hurricane. Of course, neither computer prediction – even if they are not much different – may bear much relationship to what actually transpires in the real world, especially after a few days.
While we're on the subject of accuracy of input conditions, recall that this spring the British "Hydro" office announced that after studying 50 years of experimental data – wherein the measured temperature of the ocean surface was compared with the measured temperature of the air immediately above the ocean surface – they could find no functional relationship between the two. That is, given a knowledge of the ocean temperature, there was no way to know what the temperature of the air above might be.
This was a stunning revelation. More than 70 percent of the earth's surface is covered by water. The GCC modelers had assumed that the temperature of the air just above the ocean surface was the same as – or highly correlated with – that of the ocean surface, which is relatively constant over a fairly large surface area. These GCC modelers are folks that need to know their initial conditions – such as input temperatures – to arbitrary accuracy, and now they have learned that they haven't had a clue as to what 70 percent of their input temperatures should have been.
Revkin reports that GCC modelers had already known for more than 10 years that a small change in the way cloud and rain droplets are assumed to form could have a large impact on what the models will then predict. Dr. Anthony Slingo at the British Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research says that a decrease or an increase in the assumed size of water droplets of just 10 or 20 percent in the models could either halve or double the amount of climate change that would be predicted. Now that's a non-linear GCC model, folks.
Let's return to Lorenz and his sometimes wildly-different computer predictions made by the same computer code using slightly different input conditions. There was nothing different about the science that went into Lorenz's computer program from run to run. We can assume that his science was as settled as the "science of global warming" is now claimed to be. But what the "Butterfly Effect" guarantees is that, even if the science is settled – which it apparently is not in the case of Slingo's water-droplet formation – if the input conditions cannot be specified to arbitrary accuracy (and they never can be) the predictions may depart significantly over time from what transpires in the real world. Mother Nature doesn't have an accuracy problem, but the GCC modelers undeniably do.
Revkin reports that GCC modelers have also begun to realize that it is not enough to run their GCC models on the same supercomputers that nuclear weapons designers use. They are going to have to conduct their research the same way nuke research has been traditionally been carried out. There has to be a constant interplay between (1) basic research into the physical and chemical processes that are to be mathematically incorporated in the model, (2) faithful mathematical representation of the physical and chemical processes and translation of the mathematical representation into something the computer understands and finally (3) checking the predictions of the GCC model against the real world.
Revkin quotes Dr. Syukuro Manabe – who in 1969 helped create the first GCC model coupling the atmosphere and oceans at the Commerce Department's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, but is now helping Japan create a $500 million supercomputing climate "research" center in Yokohama, Japan – as saying:
The best we can do is to see how global climate and the environment are changing, keep comparing that with predictions, adjust the models and gradually increase our confidence. Only that will distinguish our predictions from those of fortunetellers.
Come to think of it, isn't that basically what President Bush and Prime Minister Koizumi have decided to do about the Kyoto Protocols?
Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.