MORE ABOUT DISHONEST GREENIE SCIENCE

A critical movie review in the Boston Globe of the laughable "Day after tomorrow" scare movie evoked a defensive reaction from various Greenies. I posted yesterday Iain Murray's demolition of one of the Greenie responses. Below is a demolition (by a reader of this blog who is a retired climatologist with more than 30 years experience) of Greenie John Holdren's response to the same movie review:


John Holdren should be ashamed of his ad hominem attack on James Taylor. His letter simply debased the debate.

In recent years, alarmism about anthropogenic climate change has grown from a mild concern among a few to near panic among many. This unnecessary alarmism is based upon faulty science as we will briefly explain in this letter.

The IPCC makes the bogus claim that a doubling of carbon dioxide will lead to a warming of between 1.5 and 4.5 C. These numbers correspond to a climate sensitivity between 0.43 and 1.29 C/W/m2. Without any feedbacks, the climate sensitivity is 0.22 C/W/m2 corresponding to a warming of 0.7 C for a doubling of carbon dioxide.

In contrast, about a dozen empirical measurements of climate sensitivity have been made and the values range from 0.07 to 0.26 C/W/m2.

Why are the theoretical sensitivities roughly 5 times greater than the measured climate sensitivities? The simple answer is that the climate models assume (without any evidence) that the climate feedbacks are positive. Fortunately, the climate data allows scientists to test whether the feedbacks are positive or negative, and two recent independent studies by Karner (2002) and by Douglass et al. (2004) have established that the feedbacks, in toto, are negative. Consequently, there are major problems with how the climate models treat feedbacks. For example, Minschwaner and Dessler (2004) recently showed that the water vapor feedback is overestimated by about a factor of ten. This error in the models arises from simplified guesses about how this feedback operates. The climate models ignore portions of the physics in their computational codes. So far, no climate model has been developed that gives answers in accord with observations.

There are good theoretical reasons to believe that the sum total of all climate feedbacks must be negative for the predicted forcing by greenhouse gases. Simply put, if the feedbacks were positive, they would imply a thermodynamic system exists that absorbs radiation more efficiently than a blackbody which is already the most efficient absorber that can possibly exist. It is extremely unlikely that such a thermodynamic system could exist for any length of time, let alone thousands of years. Put another way, the climate modelers are arguing that the Earth as a heat engine has an efficiency greater than 100%, which essentially makes it a perpetual motion machine.

In summary, the climate models have serious deficiencies, omit physics, and disagree with numerous observations. The evidence is overwhelming that the climate is insensitive to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations and the alarm over future climate changes represents poor judgment.

References:

Douglass, David H., Eric G. Blackman, and Robert S. Knox, 2004. Temperature response of Earth to the Annual Solar Irradiance Cycle. Physics Letters A Vol. 323, No 3-4, pp. 315-322.

Karner, O., 2002: On non-stationarity and anti-persistency in global temperature series. J. Geophys. Res. 107, D20, 1-11.

Minschwaner, K., and A. E. Dessler, 2004. Water vapor feedback in the tropical upper troposphere: Model results and observations. Journal of Climate, 17, 1272-1282.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else.

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