The Age Of Global Warming: A History

Review by Martin Hutchinson from Good Reads

Errors have been key to global warming’s trajectory. Rupert Darwall’s book “The Age of Global Warming” shows how politicians locked us into global warming belief before scientists had credible evidence for it. Then a self-perpetuating U.N. bureaucracy and conflicted scientists manufactured evidence to order. The result has been toxic both for the modestly warming globe and for its economy.

The first study explaining how carbon dioxide emissions might produce global warming was published by the British meteorologist Guy Callendar in 1938, following a temperature upswing in the first third of the century. The unfortunate Callendar spent the rest of his life losing confidence in his theory as global temperatures declined, his last years coinciding with the sharp British winters of 1961-63.

Warming temperatures in the 1970s and 1980s gave new credibility to the Callendar Effect, but the breakthrough for atmospheric environmentalism was the three treaties on chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) agreed between 1987 and 1990. All production was eliminated by 2000 at a moderate cost on the global economy.

The political success of this effort helped launch global warming as a political issue. The United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, after the topic been discussed earlier in the year at a G7 meeting, presented to the U.S. Senate by James Hansen, a leading scientist, and promoted by Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister. The 1992 Rio Declaration included a commitment by governments to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, although no legally binding targets were set.

Once governments were committed and a U.N. bureaucracy was bent on self-perpetuation, production of the necessary evidence by the scientific community was all but inevitable. Although Darwall does not draw the analogy, financially aware readers will think of banks’ Value at Risk models, which were designed to minimize apparent risk to top management and regulators. Global warming computer models were likewise custom-built for their purpose. Most notorious was Michael Mann’s 1998 Hockey Stick graph, purporting to show that the 20th century’s rise in global temperature was far in excess of fluctuations of the preceding millennium.

Darwall goes painstakingly through the conceptual errors of this paper, notably the use of an algorithm that would produce a hockey-stick shape from almost anything. He tells of its rapturous acceptance by the Third IPCC Report in 2001 and its gradual debunking, against fierce opposition from the scientific establishment, in subsequent years. Even the IPCC was compelled to largely disown it in its 2007 Fourth Report.

Darwall shows how the traditional scientific method was abandoned by scientists who were rewarded for the promotion of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. He criticizes the confident promotion as undoubted fact a thesis which cannot be falsified for a century. He also makes good points about the failings of a peer-review system in which the peers’ livelihood depends on the scientific points being asserted.

His description of the politics of climate change is compelling, from the 1998 Kyoto conference to the abject failure at Copenhagen in 2009. The lesson is that after Copenhagen, both a global agreement on hard targets for emissions’ reduction and a watertight permit trading system to achieve such a reduction were chimeras.

Darwall rejects the more extreme claims of the global warming scientists, but appears agnostic as to whether human activity is actually warming the atmosphere. That is probably enough doubt to cause climate change believers to reject the book out of hand. To a less biased reader, it appears well-written, fair and even-toned.

After reading “The Age of Global Warming”, this reviewer would favor a modest carbon tax, adopted country by country, to encourage research and investment in lower-carbon technologies. The more urgent lesson, however, is the need to dismantle the birds’ nest of trading schemes, subsidies, crony capitalist contracts and regulations which have slowed global economic growth without doing much to slow whatever global warming actually exists.

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Global Warming Fears New Data

New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism

By James Taylor | Forbes – Wed, Jul 27, 2011
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New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.

The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth's atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth's atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict.

When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a "huge discrepancy" between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.