Statistical Proof of sun-caused global warming in South Australia Part I

Statistician Jonathan Lowe has some really pesky findings for the Greenies -- reproduced below. See his site for links

Abstract: Statistical analysis of the rate of temperature change between times of proximity has shown that the rate of increase of temperature as a measure of time has significantly increased up until 3pm and then decreased until 9am in South Australia over the last 50 years. If Co2 levels were the major cause of global warming, then no rate of change in temperature between near times should exist, eg they should all increase at the same rate. Our analysis proves that this is not the case, and that temperature is increasing at a greater rate when the sun is at it's peak in the middle of the day. Hence our conclusion is that the major force behind global warming is not Co2 levels, but the sun.

When looking at the graphs at 3am,6am and the minimum for south east southern Australia, something puzzled me. Whenever 3am or 6am had a negative anomaly (eg a lower than expected temperature for that year), the minimum temperature for that year was average. Whenever 3am or 6am had an average temperature for the year, the minimum temperature was significantly higher than normal.

This pattern was even more extreme in more recent years. It was because of this that I decided to look into the rate of change of temperature anomalies between neighboring times. We actually said a few things about this in the last post on the area:

We even found that temperature anomalies at 3pm were significantly higher than at Noon (p<0.01) and that temperature anomalies at 9pm were significantly lower than at 6pm (p<0.01). This indicates, that the temperature around south east southern Australia is heating up during the day, but more importantly is heating up at a greater rate when the sun is at it's hottest. Does this not clearly indicate an increase in solar heating?

But actually looking at graphs of this made the pattern that more obvious than simple significant figures. But first lets hypothesise what would happen to the rate of change, if we believe that the sun has been the major cause of most recent warming.

We have said shown in a very early post on this blog, that in the last 5 years of more recent warming, almost all of this has occurred during the day when the sun it up. The pattern is clearly identifiable in the graph below. The rate of change of temperature anomalies have increased rapidly up to 3pm and then decreased. Even at midnight, the temperature is still a little hotter than normal, largely to due the extra hot sun heating up the atmosphere. By 3am and 6am, the atmosphere it would seem is not influenced by the sun.



Similarly from 1947 to 1976 when we saw a slight decrease in overall global (and Australian) temperature, most of the decrease occurred during the heat of the day around 3pm. This indicates again, then when the overall temperature is cold, it is because it is a lot colder during the heat of the day and not equally hot overall.

If Co2 were the major cause of global, and Australian warming, then we would expect an equal increase in temperature at all times of the day and night. Maximum and minimum temperatures agree with this, however, the analysis shown here strongly disagree. In fact it disagrees so much, that it is clearly obvious that Co2 could not be the major cause. What else heats the world up with increasing rates up to around 3pm and then decreasing? The sun of course.

So our hypothesis on rate of temperature anomaly change between neighbouring times in south eastern south Australia, given that the sun is the major cause would be very similar. We should find little difference in the overnight temperatures of 3am and 6am, but should find significant increases in the rate of change of temperature anomaly's leading up to 3pm and then significant decreases in the rate of change of temperature anomaly's. This of course is looked at over time (in this case years). The rate of change should actually grow stronger as the years go on (as we have seen stronger increases in maximum and minimum temperatures).

So does the data suggest this? Let's find out.

Whilst temperature data at midnight is limited, we do find that the rate of change of temperatures at 3am is on average 0.1 degrees Celsius less than that at midnight. In other words, the temperature at 3am is cooling down a rate of 0.1 degrees quicker than it is at midnight. Perhaps this is because the influence of the sun is now very limited? If Co2 was the major cause of warming, we should not see any pattern at all in this graph of limited years.

As a surprise, the rate of change of temperature anomalies at 6am have decreased significantly from 3am. In fact this rate of decrease has been at 0.5 degrees per 100 years. Why is 6am getting a lot colder with relation to 3am?

When looking at changes between 9am and 6am, we find no major change with the exception of the latest 10 years all being warmer. So the last 10 years, we have seen temperatures at 9am increase significantly more than at 6am. This isn't surprising as this is when the sun increases, although I have to admit I would have thought the increase would have been more substantial (if the sun was the major cause of global warming).

But now the pattern, as predicted, is starting to hit in. Temperatures at Noon were significantly increasing as compared to 9am at a rate of 0.4 degrees per 100 years and the significant increase in temperatures at 3pm as compared to Noon was even greater (1.2 degrees per 100 years).

No major changes were found in the relationship between 6pm and 3pm, although it must be noted that a large negative trend was found in the last 6-7 years (eg. 6pm has been cooling quicker than at 3pm). And when the sun is starting to lose it's influence of the temperature (between 9pm and 6pm) in south east southern Australia, we see that the rate of change more recently has been negative at a rate of 0.5 degrees per 100 years. This pattern, though a small sample size, is still obvious when looking at changes in temperature anomalies over time between Midnight and 9pm.

So believe it or not, we have proven exactly what our hypothesis predicted. That the rate of change in neighboring times would increase more significantly over time when the sun is getting hotter (around 3pm) and then decrease with time later in the day. I strongly recommend you view the linked graphs above to see it for yourself.

This is a clear indication, that the major driving force behind temperature change is the sun. Should Co2 levels been the main force, then would have seen no patterns at all in these graphs, but the patterns are clearly obvious and only point to one possible conclusion.

Of course you are asking, this is only a small sample of Australian weather stations yet alone the world, and yes we will get to them. I can't let all the eggs out the basket at once!

But this analysis still doesn't look at why minimum temperatures have increased despite early morning temperatures having not done so. We have hypothesized in the past how the sun is influencing minimum temperatures as well, but can we prove that statistically? You're just going to have to wait till the next article for Part II on Statistical Proof of sun caused global warming in South Australia.




EMOTIONALIZING CLIMATE CHANGE

Is the IPCC Doing Harm to Science? -- asks major German newsmagazine "Der Spiegel"

No United Nations organization currently dominates the headlines as much -- or is as controversial -- as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Critics call the panel politically one-sided and its reports alarmist. Its defenders say the opposite is true. The IPCC will publish its third report on Friday.

It was about 10 a.m. when Rajendra Pachauri climbed up on a chair in the lobby of a European Union conference building in Brussels and turned to the cameras and microphones to give an improvised press conference. It was a situation to which the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's largest scientific commission, was unaccustomed. Normally Pachauri stands in front of podiums instead of on chairs to inform the public about the progress of his panel's work and the current state of the earth.

Pachauri held up his hands and asked the assembled journalists to be patient. It would be a while yet, he said, before the group preparing the IPCC's global climate report would be able to present its results. Discussions were still underway. In short, Pachauri couldn't tell the journalists what the current prognosis is for the future of the globe.

A laborious process

The discussions Pachauri mentioned were taking place in the large conference room on the third floor of the building. There, behind closed doors, politicians from more than 130 countries were arguing with the authors of the report of the precise wording of a thin, 23-page document. The document, known as the SPM, or Summary for Policymakers, contains the essence of the actual climate report, which is a scientific compendium divided into three volumes, each containing at least 1,000 pages. Negotiations were underway in Brussels over the summary of the second volume and, as always, it was a laborious process. The two groups debating the issue had little in common except a mutual interest in reaching a consensus.

On the one side were the authors of the report, all scientists, who have done little else in the last three years than work on this report. For many of them, it was already asking too much to compress the contents of more than 1,000 pages into a 23-page summary. On the other side were the politicians, members of delegations from almost every country on earth. Sitting in alphabetical order in the chamber, their main concern was to adjust the report to suit their individual economic, environmental and foreign policies.

The delegations from the industrialized nations dominated the debate, especially that of the United States, which, as is so often the case, had sent the largest delegation. The Saudi Arabian delegation, not much smaller, was aligned with the Americans, as were the Australians and the Chinese.

Their opponents -- the report's authors, supported by the delegations from the core European Union countries, as well as Great Britain -- would register collective outrage each time the US delegation demanded that an unambiguous phrase like "will happen" be changed to a less clear "will likely happen." The US delegation submitted this request alone more than a hundred times. These objections were possible because the IPCC's rules make it possible to negotiate the summary line by line and word for word -- a necessary provision when so much could be riding on a single word. No other document has such a far-reaching impact on global environmental and industrial policy.

The IPCC is a scientific panel created by the UN Environmental Organization (UNEO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Once every five or six years it issues a report summarizing the current status of research on climate change. It operates on a minimal annual budget of only _5 million ($6.8 million). To be able to fulfill its mandate, the IPCC is dependent on assistance from UN members. They finance the conferences and provide the scientists who, as authors, are responsible for the contents of individual chapters.

The IPCC's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, consist of only a few glass-enclosed offices lining a hallway. The organization's real work -- reviewing, analyzing and summarizing studies -- takes place in research centers, institutes and universities around the world. The IPCC is a highly decentralized and very typical UN organization. Its leadership positions are handed out in the hallways and chambers of the political bazaar otherwise known as the United Nations. The IPCC's control board currently includes an Indian -- Pachauri -- a Russian, a Kenyan and a Sri Lankan researcher. The involvement of governments in the reports was part of the process from the very beginning. The organizations that established the IPCC -- the UNEO and the WMO -- wanted to prevent governments from using the reports as little more than notepaper. And the politicians were intent on preventing the scientists from gaining sole responsibility for the content of the reports.

Coalition of the unwilling

Shortly after the negotiations began in Brussels, the room became divided into a coalition of the unwilling, under US leadership, and a coalition of the willing, consisting of the authors with support from Old Europe. The overwhelming majority of participants were silent throughout most of the debate.

The US delegates used a classic tactic to achieve as many of their demands as possible, a tactic that has proven effective in many venues, from UN diplomacy to living situations to marital disputes. The Americans simply talked long enough, were hardnosed enough in refusing to compromise and kept submitting new demands until their opponents were worn down and exhausted, and finally gave in.

The same thing happened in Paris in early February, when the summary of the first volume was being debated and the central question revolved around the extent to which human activity is responsible for climate change. And the same thing is also likely to happen this week in Bangkok, where the parties will argue over the contents of the third summary and the question of what man can in fact do to avert climate change.

Like a Major Terrorist Attack

At noon on Good Friday, after a 22-hour marathon negotiation, Rajendra Pachauri went before the press, this time at a podium, and introduced colleagues who reported on what had been agreed in the chamber. At issue were the consequences of climate change, which are specified in the second volume. The panel informed the world that 20 to 30 percent of all known species will become extinct if the rise in temperatures, measured from 1850 to the end of the 21st century, exceeds 2øC (3.6øF). The world also learned that there could be water shortages and more frequent flooding, and that food production would decline if global warming exceeds 3øC (5.4øF).

Pachauri, exhausted and his suit wrinkled by then, listened to what the scientists had to say. He knew what would happen after the press conference. The speakers' sentences would make waves, big waves, and in the space of a few hours they would reach virtually every corner of the earth. And he was right. A headline in the next day's issue of German tabloid Bild read: "Climate Report Shocks Germany." The British Independent reported: "Mankind will be divided." US newsmagazine Time complained: "Our feverish planet badly needs a cure." The world was in a panic, almost as if there had been a major terrorist attack.

Pachauri had good reason to be pleased, and not just over the media reactions. The scientists, supported by their European allies, had warded off most of the attacks from the coalition of the unwilling. Concessions were made, but they were more symbolic than anything else. Because the IPCC's rules require that politicians produce scientific arguments to implement changes, the scientists have, in a sense, a home court advantage.

As pleased as he is about these rules, Pachauri is concerned about the critics who are not bound by the rules -- the outsiders. He calls them skeptics, and when he pronounces the word, he shrugs his shoulders as if he wanted to shoo away a fly. And then he says: "There will always be skeptics."

Down to earth and diplomatic

Pachauri is now sitting in a hotel room in Brussels, a surprisingly plain room for someone so high up in the UN hierarchy. Also, the fact that he has scheduled this interview here and not in a conference room rented specifically for this purpose suggested that he is a person who has not allowed his status to go to his head. Pachauri is an economist. When colleagues describe him they mention his beard, the way he combs his hair straight across his head and his diplomatic skills.

In his native India, Pachauri heads an institute that employs a staff of more than 700 and is devoted to sustainability. He has worked for the World Bank, is a consultant to the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) and teaches in the United States. He could be characterized as a member of his continent's humanitarian jet set. Pachauri became head of the IPCC in 2002, when he was elected after being nominated by the US. The Bush administration had really wanted more of an obstructionist but was unable to find someone who would have been acceptable to other members of the organization. Instead, it nominated Pachauri, who had the reputation of being thoughtful and deliberate.

It was a miscalculation, though. Some time ago, Pachauri likened a critic of the IPCC to Hitler because the man had publicly reflected on whether it would make more sense to compensate and relocate the residents of Pacific island nations threatened by rising sea levels instead of attempting to keep sea levels somewhat constant. Skeptics have hounded Pachauri since he took office, but he is anxious to play down their importance. In fact, he prefers not to discuss these people at all. But the deep-seated global debate that the IPCC has triggered with its reports, its analyses and its predictions also directs a great deal of attention to precisely these skeptics.

Questioning from skeptics

Is climate change truly manmade? Are the scientists' arguments convincing? Aren't there some scientists who hold completely different views? And this IPCC, isn't it really just a collection of political activists and eco-fundamentalists who are playing up their research results to transform all of mankind into users of public transportation and converts to car-pooling?

These are the questions the skeptics are asking, and they are debated in serious media outlets, including the influential German newspapers Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt and the television program heute journal. In other countries, like the United States, people like bestselling author Michael Crichton debate with Pachauri's colleagues on radio talk shows, experts debate the scientific foundations of the IPCC's reports on the TV talk show "Larry King Live," and in Great Britain the Channel 4 television network aired a documentary titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle."

The discussions revolve, among other things, around issues like climate sensitivity, Dansgaard-Oeschger events, the question of whether a global temperature increase of just under 0.8øC (1.4øF) in the last 100 years is a lot or a little, and whether the rise in CO2 levels is a consequence of increasing temperatures or vice-versa.

Who can answer these questions? Certainly not laymen. And neither can most politicians because they too are scientific laymen, and they too haven't the faintest idea what a Dansgaard-Oeschger event is. It's a difficult situation. A layman can only attempt to consider arguments he actually understands. And he can also attempt to discover whether the others, the critics, in fact have the better arguments.

The Leading Critic of Climate Change Theories

The skeptics' figurehead is an American named Richard Lindzen. Lindzen is repeatedly referred to as the only one who, in the struggle for dominance in the climate debate, can compete in the same weight class as his opponents. These days Lindzen is much in demand and often on the road. He sits on the terrace of a hotel in Venice, facing the Grand Canal and the dome of St. Mark's Cathedral to the left. He fumbles in his pocket, pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights a Marlboro. He has come here directly from the United States. His delayed flight landed two hours ago, and he plans to fly back tomorrow. During his short stay, Lindzen plans to explain to Italian investors what this greenhouse effect means for them and their money. He has been asked to limit his comments to 20 minutes.

Lindzen is a 67-year-old physicist and a professor at the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His area of expertise is that of the physical processes that take place in the atmosphere and regulate the weather and climate. Lindzen is a theoretician, and he looks the part. His body seems a bit hunched over, as if its main purpose were to support the weight of his head.

An 'Alarmist' and 'Hysterical' Debate

In his speeches, articles and studies, Lindzen concedes that climate change is a reality, but he also insists that it is unclear whether the warming measured to date can be considered dramatic. He criticizes the models that are used to estimate climate change, calling them too imprecise and therefore unusable. Lindzen also says that the results achieved by his opponents in the scientific debate are based on arbitrary assumptions. He calls the SPM, the summaries of the IPCC reports prepared for the politicians, "alarmist" and the tone of the debate "hysterical." In his opinion, mankind would be better off addressing the world's true problems: wars, epidemics and hunger.

Perhaps Lindzen's overall criticism is correct. Perhaps his field is as dysfunctional as he claims, and perhaps his fellow scientists are more interested in manipulating than informing. After all, the world, and man, isn't driven purely by good intentions. But if this is the case, why is he the only one among serious critics who is expressing his outrage so vehemently? Lindzen's response: "It could have something to do with the fear of opposing the mainstream."

But Lindzen hasn't exactly suffered as a result of his critical stance. He is still a professor at MIT. He continues to conduct research and publish. He may be controversial, but he is also very well known. Indeed, he even seems to derive benefits from his position. Italian businessmen fly him in for presentations. The media court him and ask for his opinions. Lindzen was the skeptic who appeared on US talk show host Larry King's show, a crowning achievement in the United States for someone who wants publicity.

Lindzen's second argument is that the scientific research and discovery process is distorted. Instead of being devoted to truth, its main emphasis is opportunity, says Lindzen, which distorts the results.

A transparent global process

Lindzen's arguments sound convincing, but they are still nothing but claims, popular theories as opposed to a transparent global process, a global plebiscite among climate researchers.

The work on each report begins by reviewing all scientific studies in all relevant disciplines, summarizing them, organizing their results and then writing a first draft. This work is done by IPCC staff members, and their draft is accessible to scientists worldwide, who are invited to comment on it and submit suggestions for improvement. Each of these suggestions is considered and either incorporated or not. The lead authors of the individual chapters must maintain an accounting of their decisions, in the form of endless Excel tables that document the path and fate of each comment. When necessary, the authors are also required to justify their decisions to those submitting the comments and suggestions.

Once this process is complete the first draft is written. It is sent to all governments, which also have the option of submitting comments. Once again, the suggested changes are either incorporated or not. And once again, the scientists are at an advantage and the fate of each suggestion is meticulously documented. Finally the last draft is produced, which serves as the basis for the SPM, the production of which is similar to the production of the actual report and ends with the negotiation between scientists and politicians.

Lindzen's next argument goes like this: The scientists are exaggerating the dangers of climate change, because this is the only way to get the research funding they receive, primarily from their respective governments.

In the history of global climate research, the research budget in Lindzen's native United States has been inflated twice -- once during the presidency of the first President Bush and once during that of his son, George W. Bush. In both cases the injection of funding was preceded by a sentence uttered by the president: We know too little. If climate researchers wish to secure or expand their budgets, they shouldn't be saying: We are 90 percent certain that the lion's share of climate change is manmade. Instead, they should say: We know too little. But there is one climate researcher who says precisely these words: Lindzen.

Lindzen can argue that the models need to be more precise, and other, less competent critics can demand that details need to be better understood. This can happen, and will probably happen, but it is virtually impossible that these changes and these conclusions will throw doubt on the core conclusion of the current global climate report: Climate change is real, and it is overwhelmingly manmade.

When it comes to his one remaining argument, however, Lindzen is dead-on. The tone of the debate, he says, is hysterical. There is hardly a newspaper article and hardly a TV or radio program that doesn't conjure up images of "climate catastrophe," prophesy floods of gigantic proportions, droughts and hunger. Indeed, the media have developed something akin to a complete apocalyptic program.

Al Gore, Scaremonger?

It's the fault of the media, of course, but not exclusively. It's also the fault of a new hero, an environmental activist who likes to introduce himself by saying: "Hello, I was once the next President of the United States of America." Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," is a PowerPoint presentation, a modern-day slide show about the causes and consequences of climate change. It also paints apocalyptic scenarios, and its dramatic climax shows large parts of Florida, as well as San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai, the Netherlands, Bangladesh and New York, complete with the World Trade Center memorial, being swallowed by the sea. Gore spends a great deal of time on this sequence, in which each region appears on the screen and the regions ultimately disappear, one after another, into the dark sea.

The world climate report assumes that sea levels will rise by about 38.5 centimeters (15 inches). This is the mean of all scenarios, which predict increases of between 18 and 59 centimeters (7 and 23 inches). The report also states that sea levels could even rise by several meters if Greenland and western Antarctica were to become ice-free. According to the IPCC's estimates, this process, if it happens, would take several centuries, perhaps even millennia. Gore neglects to mention this time frame. Instead, all he says is this: "If the ice on Greenland melts or slides into the sea, or if half of Greenland and half of western Antarctica become ice-free, the sea level will rise by seven meters." Gore makes it sound like something that could happen tomorrow.

Emotionalizing the debate

This doesn't mean that Gore should necessarily be taken to task for his statements. He is a politician. But it is odd to hear IPCC Chairman Pachauri, when asked what he thinks about Gore's film, responding: "I liked it. It does emotionalize the debate, but it seems that it has to do that." And when Pachauri comments on the publication of the first SPM by saying, "I hope that this will shock the governments so much that they take action," this doesn't exactly allay doubts as to his objectivity. When Renate Christ, the secretary of the IPCC, is asked about her opinion of reporting on climate change, she refers to articles that mention "climate catastrophe" and calls them "rather refreshing."

Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of the physics of oceans at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, one of the world's bona fide experts on the subject and the lead author of the current report, praised Gore's film unconditionally, even for its inclusion of the sequence depicting New York sinking into the ocean. And Rahmstorf's boss, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who serves as the institute's director and as an advisor to the German government, sounded a lot like Al Gore recently when he said in an interview: "We could see a one-meter rise in sea levels by 2100. The expected, climate-related shift in the ocean current could cause the water to rise by an additional meter in the Helgoland Bight." It sounds as if it could happen tomorrow. But it can't, and Schnellnhuber's colleague Rahmstorf, who has an inclination toward extreme scenarios, estimates that there is only a 10-percent probability that it will even happen at all.

Is activism trumping science?

No matter where one encounters officials from the IPCC -- at the organization's headquarters in Geneva, in Brussels during the negotiations over the SPM or in Potsdam, where the German authors, together with the Federal Ministry of the Environment, are staging a workshop on the world climate report -- everyone seems to be talking more like environmental activists than scientists these days.

In Potsdam, Michael Mller, a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and a state secretary in the Federal Environment Ministry, pleaded for a sea change in energy policy on a global scale, and the tone of his arguments was not unlike that adopted by Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, in Brussels. When asked about this, climate researchers respond: "And? Where is there a problem? What's wrong with warning the world about a catastrophe?"

The problem is that the IPCC is not a political group whose goal is to exert pressure, but a scientific institution and panel of experts. Its members ought to present their results and analyses dispassionately, the way pathologists or psychiatrists do when serving as expert witnesses in court, no matter how horrible the victim's injuries and how deviant the perpetrator's psyche are.

Peter Weingart, a sociologist of science from Bielefeld, a city in northwest Germany, believes that the climate experts' lack of distance has something to do with their training. Scientists usually learn only to reflect on the results of their work, not on their role within the social decision-making process. As a result, they join forces with politicians who share their views. And in this way they do harm to science.

But Rahmstorf, the professor from Potsdam, dubbed a climate protection zealot by some, is unswayed by these arguments. He sees climate change as an existential issue, "a baptism by fire for the developing global society." Rahmstorf is the father of a baby, which he drives through Potsdam in a bicycle trailer. He doesn't own a car. He wants to do his utmost to leave behind for his child a world that is as similar to today's world as possible, at least as far as the climate goes. He feels responsible, as someone who sees the big picture. And in half a century, when many things will be clearer, when things may even be worse, he doesn't want to have to answer the question: Why didn't you do anything?

The same question haunts IPCC chairman Pachauri. This week he will be in Bangkok, where the subjects of debate will be possible solutions, distribution of the burdens and the structure of the future. Pachauri will sit on the podium, follow the debate and do what he believes he has to do -- be on the side of a good cause and not on the side of science.

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Is Global Warming a Sin?

by Leftist Alexander Cockburn. Cockburn has discovered the Great Depression paradox (of the 1930s) -- when human economic activity dropped catastrophically but the earth still underwent a major warming episode

In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint" is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others less virtuous than themselves.

The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind's sinful contribution--and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed.

Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slow arc. The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. It starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e., 1.1 billion metric tons), and peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, plummets into the Great Depression and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 percent drop. Then, in 1933, the line climbs slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.

And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That's the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it's at 380. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 percent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn't even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere's CO2. It is thus impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil fuels.

I met Martin Hertzberg, PhD, the man who drew that graph and those conclusions, on a Nation cruise back in 2001. He remarked that while he shared many of The Nation's editorial positions, he approved of my reservations on the question of human contributions to global warming, as outlined in columns I wrote around that time. Hertzberg was a meteorologist for three years in the Navy, an occupation that gave him a lifelong mistrust of climate modeling. Trained in chemistry and physics, a combustion research scientist for most of his career, he's retired now in Copper Mountain, Colorado, but still consults from time to time.

Not so long ago, Hertzberg sent me some of his recent papers on the global warming hypothesis, a thesis now accepted by many progressives as infallible as Papal dogma on matters of faith. Among them was the graph described above, so devastating to the hypothesis.

As Hertzberg readily acknowledges, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased about 21 percent in the past century. The world has also been getting just a little warmer. The not-very-reliable data on the world's average temperature (which omit data from most of the world's oceans and remote regions, while overrepresenting urban areas) show about a 0.5 degree Celsius increase between 1880 and 1980, and still rising. But is CO2, at 380 ppm in the atmosphere, playing a significant role in retaining the 94 percent of solar radiation that the atmosphere absorbs, as against water vapor, also a powerful heat absorber, whose content in a humid tropical atmosphere can be as high as 20,000 ppm? As Hertzberg says, water in the form of oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor "is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the Earth and the sun.... Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane." And water is exactly that component of the Earth's heat balance that the global warming computer models fail to account for.

It's a notorious inconvenience for the Greenhousers that data also show CO2 concentrations from the Eocene period, 20 million years before Henry Ford trundled out his first Model T, 300 to 400 percent higher than current concentrations. The Greenhousers deal with other difficulties, like the medieval warming period's higher-than-today temperatures, by straightforward chicanery, misrepresenting tree ring data (themselves an unreliable guide) and claiming the warming was a local European affair.

We're warmer now because today's world is in the thaw following the recent ice age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we receive, all due to predictable changes in the Earth's elliptical orbit round the sun and in the Earth's tilt. As Hertzberg explains, the clinical heat effect of all of these variables was worked out in great detail between 1915 and 1940 by Milutin Milankovitch, a giant of twentieth-century astrophysics. In past post-glacial cycles, as now, the Earth's orbit and tilt give us more and longer summer days between the equinoxes.

Water covers 71 percent of Earth's surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there's 100 times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. "The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards," Hertzberg concludes. "It is the warming of the Earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse." In vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that for the last 750,000 years, CO2 changes have always lagged behind global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.

It looks like Poseidon should go hunting for carbon credits. The human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces and volumes, not to mention the role of the giant reactor beneath our feet: the Earth's increasingly hot molten core.

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POLITICAL THAW: EU AND USA AGREE TO DIFFER

President George W. Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said they agreed that climate change must be addressed while playing down differences over how to achieve that goal. The U.S. and the European Union recognize "we have a problem with greenhouse gases," Bush said during a news conference today with Merkel, president of the EU, and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in Washington. "We are aware of the fact that we do have a problem here, that we need to solve this problem," Merkel said through a translator. ``There are different approaches, obviously, as to how to solve that, but we have been able, actually, to find a lot of common ground."

While all three leaders talked of progress toward dealing with global warming, neither side indicated movement on closing their main differences. The EU regulates greenhouse-gas emissions, and the U.S. is sticking to an approach that relies on developing cleaner sources of power other than fossil fuels. "This issue has become, along with the Iraq war, a great symbolic divide between Europe and America," said Paul Bledsoe, a spokesman for the Washington-based National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan advisory group that includes academics, oil executives, labor leaders and environmentalists. "Europeans view America as willing to sacrifice the very health of the planet for marginal economic gain."

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Barroso also said he was "very happy" that the meeting confirmed that "climate and energy security are important on the agenda." Bush suggested that a single solution won't work for all countries. "Each country needs to recognize that we must reduce our greenhouse gases and deal, obviously, with their own internal politics to come up with an effective strategy" to reduce emissions, he said. Merkel said the issue would be raised at the meeting of eight industrialized nations in Germany in June. Developing nations including China, India, Brazil and South Africa, would be included in talks, she said. "If we were not doing that, we would not be able to combat that problem that is truly a global one," Merkel said. The EU is "not happy" with the inability of the two sides to get together and dismisses the Bush administration's argument that tough penalties on polluters may curb economic growth

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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 generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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