From Jennifer Marohasy
By jennifer
After the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC)* conference finished in London, I caught a British Airlines flight to Seattle, to visit with my daughter. She has just recently moved there, to begin a PhD at the University of Washington.
The view from BA53 was of snow covered tundra as we flew from Greenland, then over Baffin Island towards Hudson Strait near Repulse Bay. The outside air temperature was showing as minus 23 degrees Celsius (minus 74 Fahrenheit) at 11,576 metres (37,979 feet) altitude. I could see deep, evenly-spaced channels cut along the eastern edge of the island, presumably cut by water from the snow as it melts each spring. I assume the snow is melted by the Sun. I can’t image it is melted by the atmosphere even though the atmosphere is, I am repeatedly told, on average some one-degree warmer now, because of all the carbon dioxide.
In Seattle, my daughter took me to the most wonderful second-hand bookshop, Magus Books. I purchased several books, as I inevitably do when I visit a bookshop, including Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. That was after I checked the book’s index and saw it had a good number of pages on ‘climate change’: pages 136 – 154.
I was hoping to find some ‘reason’ and ‘science’ concerning ‘climate change’. I was hoping to better understand the mainstream view given all the obfuscation I had just experienced at the ARC conference in London. All these talks on ‘Energy and the Environment’ beginning with an acknowledgement that carbon dioxide causes warming without any explanation of how and why.
Even Richard Lindzen suggested at ARC that I should be more accepting of the mainstream historical temperature reconstructions, more accepting of the idea there has been a 1-degree temperature increase and not so concerned about what he mentioned as some slight discrepancies associated with the transition to electronic probes for measuring air temperatures.
I know I have a tendency to go down ‘rabbit holes’ and get into a level of detail many find too tedious. Here, I thought as I read the cover of Pinker’s book, here was a book written by a most reasonable person and with a section on climate change. It might help me take a few steps back, as Lindzen was suggesting, and see how more mainstream intellectuals describe the physics.
After all, I reasoned, for anyone to be convinced that human-caused global warming is real and caused by carbon dioxide, the Earth must have physical properties that permit it.
According to Wikipedia, Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. And this book was ostensibly promoting ‘reason’ and had a section on climate change. And I know many of my colleagues are fans of Steven Pinker, as they are fans of Jordon Peterson another Canadian psychologist.
Scanning inside the book, I read: anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is ‘the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history’.
Great I thought, Pinker is going to lay out the arguments, the case for and against.
But he didn’t and he doesn’t. Much in the same way John Anderson went on about the importance of debate and discussion and Western civilisation being special because of science at the ARC conference while at every opportunity avoiding any meaningful discussion on the same.
Rather, as I discovered only after I purchased the book by Steven Pinker, he writes that,
By now, all the major challenges – such as that global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because they were measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising but only because the sun is getting hotter have been refuted …
Well. I thought, he might have acknowledged that for much of the twentieth century temperatures were actually falling. I also tried to have some discussion with Bjorn Lomborg about this. But he just defers to Judith Curry.
‘All series show significant cooling of maximum temperatures from 1921 to 1950, which is at variance with Australian and global homogenized temperature series.”
Further more, global temperatures could be rising due to something other than ‘the sun getting hotter’, but he’s clearly avoiding the core issue, or at least the one that has been concerning me more recently, exactly how carbon dioxide causes the warming. What is the physical mechanism causing carbon dioxide to warm the Earth and the oceans … or is it just that carbon dioxide is warming the atmosphere?
A page earlier Pinker explains the theory thus: we have excess carbon dioxide from the burning of wood, coal, oil, and gas that ‘wafts into the atmosphere’, where it ‘traps heat radiating from the Earth’s surface.’
But he has not explained to me how this causes the temperature of the Earth to rise, though he claims it does. He writes,
If the emission of greenhouse gases continues, the Earth’s average temperature will rise to at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level by the 21st century …
This was more or less as much detail as Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shellenberger and Steven Koonin could manage at ARC.
We know that carbon dioxide levels were much higher in the distant past, and temperatures also, but what exactly is the physical mechanism that causes the warming of the Earth and the oceans?
If Pinker, Shellenberger and Lomborg, can’t explain this, which they don’t, well they are just repeating what the King says. Everyone knows King Charles III is a great proponent of global warming, he insists we believe as much.
Pinker claims to have written a book about reason, but he doesn’t even acknowledge any one of the very valid challenges to this theory of human-caused global warming.
It was like this at the ARC conference in London, there was this assumption that everyone knows carbon dioxide causes warming of the Earth and the oceans and that as atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide rise we risk even more warming, but no-one was prepared to engage in any detail or explain the physical mechanisms. Certainly no-one wanted to explain to me how the spike that was occurring in global temperatures while I was in London, how it had been caused by carbon dioxide.
It got me thinking, how do I explain succinctly in plain English, why I have come to conclude, that on average, carbon dioxide is not warming planet Earth – not at all!
It got me thinking, I really haven’t explained why I don’t subscribe to even the Will Happer view of global warming: that carbon dioxide is causing some warming, just not much more than 1 degrees Celsius. I have pressed Happer for more mathematics and calculations and more explanation as to how he gets to his 1 degree of warming. But he has not been forthcoming on any of this. There is of course the very popular IPA YouTube from his Australian tour. But it doesn’t have enough detail for me.
If we are going to work from average values, which is how Happer, Lindzen and the IPCC present information, then I just can’t understand how considering overall energy budgets and averages, how carbon dioxide is going to warm the Earth.
To put it very crudely, and appealing to only known physical properties of the Earth: the average temperature of the lower atmosphere is just not warm enough.
The lower atmosphere is certainly not warm enough to warm the oceans that are on average17 degrees Celsius.
And certainly the ocean is a lot warmer where I go scuba diving which is mostly in the Tropics. In the Tropics, ocean temperatures mostly range between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius. Which got me thinking: how can the atmosphere warm the ocean in the Tropics and Subtropics when ocean temperatures are so much warmer than the temperature of even the lower atmosphere and all year around.
To be continued.
This is part 4 of a series that I began with my visit to London late October, you can read part 3 by clicking here.
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* According to Wikipedia, ARC was founded by four people including Paul Marshall. It also says:
“He is the co-founder and chairman of Marshall Wace LLP, one of Europe’s largest hedge fund groups.[8] Marshall Wace[9] was founded in 1997 by Marshall and Ian Wace.[10] At the time, Marshall Wace was one of the first hedge funds in London.[6] The company started with $50 million, half of which was from George Soros.[6]”
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