In my previous post, I went into the philosophy of AGW (catastrophic) and how it emphasizes the destruction of our society for some far-out fantasy. This is the basis of healthy scepticism on CAGW and I think its key to note 2 things in particular:
1) Until you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that man is “destroying the planet” you can not radically transform society. That is just illogical. So therefore the big mistake in simply believing because we can not prove it wrong. This turn evidential procedures on its head when normally new theories in science have to displace old theories and old ideas. To put it into perspective, to say that the climate changed naturally before man and then suddenly it stopped changing is so silly as to be comical.
2) Any transformation must be quantified and otherwise explained as to why we are making these changes and what it is we are going to accomplish. We can not afford to remake society in such a drastic method as the greens want us to. The UK for instance on their quest are going to spend just short of 1 TRILLION pounds and for this they are not going to save the world. This huge expense is not justified by science, but by a belief that man is inherently evil.
First off, I am going to credit Lord Monckton for the motivation on my part here. He broke it apart and I am going to use his argument technique in breaking it apart as two separate arguments (and posts therefore). Those two separate arguments are both sound by themselves and they are both reasons why we should not transform society. The problem is in other words: not explained fully.
Image is courtesy of: http://www.revolutionmediausa.com/News/2010/09/30/project-lord-monckton/
These two points form the foundation of the argument that was started in the previous essay. The essay showed how in the past mass hysteria has indeed caused destruction and massive death. This is the problem with beliefs. If you do not justify what you are doing (per point 2) then what you are doing could potentially be just as harmful as doing nothing. Part 1 is a danger in the fact that this is how incoherent ideas of how to “make society better” that really do not make sense by themselves get passed onto the individual as making sense and being otherwise sensible.
For the purposes of the rest of this article: I am going to focus on point 1. Point 2 is for another day. But as per part 1: we should realize that no real sceptic will claim that AGW is impossible or that namely its impossible for AGW to be occurring to some extent. The main motivation for sceptics is showing how an un-natural belief AGW truly is. We acknowledge almost universally that it would be impossible to prove the concept incorrect and that it would be a fool-hardy task to do so. Indeed, we are told that we are the ones that must prove it wrong from the people who tell us that the science is settled in the same breath. They never even proved the theory correct by disproving the null hypothesis. What a turn-around. Here is a lovely illustration of this from Harry Potter:
Image is from: Fakeposters.com. Harry Potter is referenced further down under ‘sources’ and ‘notes’.
Here we see the argument of AGW in a nut-shell. We are asked to prove that AGW is not happening as if to prove the unprovable as Hermione mentions it is even possible in any way. We are asked to prove that humanity is in no ways contributing to the .8C of warming we have seen over the last 100 years. This is similar to picking up every stone in the Harry Potter universe and exploring every single one of those stones to find out if they can indeed resurrect lost loved ones. A hopeless endeavor indeed, and the true strength of a weak argument is that it must tell others to prove the argument wrong.
Here is where this occurs in the science directly:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/15/unequivocal-equivocation/
Here is a paragraph of this here:
The pea is already under the other walnut shell. He is implying that the IPCC says that scientists have “unequivocally” shown that humans are the cause of weather ills, and if I don’t take that as an article of faith, it’s my job to prove that we are not the cause of floods in Brisbane.
Willis Eschenbach
As you can see, not much different then in the Harry Potter example. We are given an impossible task due to changing the ways evidence is measured. Hermione (the smart one) is smart enough to ask that evidence be presented first to prove the existence of a very controversial subject. But instead of getting evidence, gets it thrown back into her face “prove that it does not exist.”
This is exactly the same thing that happens in AGW as shown above by Willis. He has shown with this quote that the entire scientific background is flawed. This has implications for the science which is more under the “belief” category then the science category. No one argues that the world has not been warming up for the last 100 years. But most sceptics correctly contend that when you come out of a Little Ice Age, you are probably doing so naturally unless proven otherwise. In science, this is known as the null hypothesis, and in science you are forced to prove the null hypothesis wrong before your theory is admitted as the gospel truth.
This reason alone is enough to throw out any evidence for AGW and whether it occurs or not. The correct assumption is to assume all warming is natural and that climate change which has never been shown to not happen in the past before humans is not necessarily all of our faults after this point. It should be noted with interest that true believers in AGW state that “80-120% of all warming witnessed is due to man.” This is a belief structure as otherwise how could you come up with those figures? There is no doubt that man has an impact on the planet. The question which has never been answered except in vague terms like that is “how much?”
This combined with science malfeasance as shown by the release of emails from the CRU and with other “inconvenient facts” such as the lack of a troposphere hot spot or warming oceans should make people think twice about this theory. None of the theory predictions stacks up when you look at the evidence. If the world was warming “due to CO2” we would see one of these two things: A troposphere hot spot or warming oceans and more than likely both.
Further reading:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/climategate/
http://joannenova.com.au/2008/10/the-missing-hotspot/
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/01/22/nasa-data-shows-oceans-cooling-since-2003/
The fact that neither of those exist tells us everything we need to know in regard to Carbon Dioxide being the “driver” of climate. That in fact is the entire fallacy, there is no proof that AGW exists except through correlation (slightly) and there is no way to prove it wrong. But to show that there are issues with correlation as well, here is a very detailed and succinct excerpt that Reality Returns put together. (H/T if you will.)
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Remember, that between the years 1940 and 1975 the world cooled, and this was at the same time that world CO2 levels went up. This is therefore an important distinction as well.
The IPCC quotes temperature change over the 20th century (100 years) as 0.74 (+ or – 0.18) deg C
This is between 0.56 and 0.92 over 100 years …with me so far??
Now when we divide by 10 to give a ‘per decade
figure’ we find 0.056 to 0.092 deg C per decade
From Professor Jones :
Period / Length / Trend / Significance / CO2 ppmv
1860-1880 21 0.163 Yes (rise in atmospheric CO2
= 4.5 ppmv)
1910-1940 31 0.150 Yes (rise in atmospheric CO2 = 10.7 ppmv)
1975-1998 24 0.166 Yes (rise in atmospheric CO2 = 35.4 ppmv)
1975-2009 35 0.161 Yes (rise in atmospheric CO2
= 58.9 ppmv)
Trend = Degrees C per decade
From Professor Jones again :
“There has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.”
From the same interview:
C – Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been
statistically significant global cooling?
PJ – No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is
negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically
significant.”
The table clearly shows the 1975 to 2009 warming trend at 0.161 deg C per decade
(with a CO2 increase of 58.9 ppmv)
as being virtually the same as the
pre-industrialised 1860 to 1880 trend at 0.163 deg C per decade (with a CO2
increase of only 4.5 ppmv)
This in itself shows that temperature is not
sensitive to CO2 increase in any significant way.
Further reading on correlations between CO2 and temperatures.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/07/carbon-dioxide-and-temperatures-ice.html
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So this factual information not only shows that CO2 (and thus man) has not had a dominant impact on climate over the last 100 years, but the fact remains that there is not even evidence to support the contention that CO2 has had a “measurable effect” on the climate. The only two things we have are a general warming trend and rising CO2 to back the contention that all warming is “man’s fault.” Indeed, some warming probably is, but how much and why hasn’t this been studied in more detail?
I leave you all with ( of course a scientific study) predicting that the natural warming trend will continue and that more than likely we will see temperatures rise by .5 degrees C in the next 100 years. That is half a degree and is not scary or dangerous at all.
http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/images/stories/pdf/akasofu-lia-2010.pdf
That being said, there really is very little scientific evidence at all for the concept of AGW once you start digging into the actual scientific papers. Once you have read papers at the magnitude I have, you realize that most of them are worthless since they are based on the premise that warming is happening, it’s the fault of man, and that if this is not true, the paper of course is purely a hypothetical situation, which is of course hardly a place for science. The very few papers that actually address the central question fail to even somewhat prove the case that Cagw or AGW or even climate change no matter what you want to call it is occurring due to man. Sure, the climate is changing, but more than likely man has a very minor impact on it.
To explain this better, the belief in global warming is a belief system that has caught many others into believing as well as the mass hysteria I discussed in part 1 takes hold. Without evidence, we call any position a belief. This is what was illustrated with the famous “Xenophillius” from Harry Potter and how a belief can become an obsession and how this same obsession can get you carried away. In this case, people are carried away with the idea that man is destroying the planet. In the end, there is no difference in belief in religion and belief that man is responsible for warming over the last 100 years. Both are unprovable and fail the scientific litmus test of : invalidating the null hypothesis. So therefore, in all honesty, the science is rather settled in that we have warmed over the last 100 years by less than one degree and that further warming will be either neutral or beneficial and that increases in CO2 will also be beneficial as shown by NASA studies showing the biosphere blooming:
-Note linked to WUWT but the studies are based on NASA data and there is indeed a couple NASA studies in there.
So with no evidence scientifically speaking, the next logical question is what should we do about “imaginative catastrophe”. Just like in the example of the Xosha, the solution is to destroy our society and kill vast amounts of our population for a dream that has no basis in reality. Just what will “killing all the cattle” or adopting the green agenda do? Well I will explore that in my next post.
Notes: It should be noted that the author of Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling is in no ways supporting this post in any way. The usage of the book is simply under “Fair Use”. I would also like to thanks Anthony Watts, “Reality Returns” and Willis for all having the know how to show facts and figures well. Their contribution to this post which was difficult due to the intense amount of sources was very difficult.
Sources:
J.K. Rowling, 2007, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, UK: Bloomsbury
http://www.revolutionmediausa.com
BenfromMO 