Why was “Climate Change” part of the SOTU Speech?

 

Vincent J. Curtis 


13 February 2013
 

 

President Barack Obama included measures to address “climate change” in his State of the Union address last night.  The wonder of this inclusion is how such a canard as “climate change” persists in serious public discourse.

 

Almost exactly sixteen years ago, I wrote an article criticizing the-then recently signed Kyoto Protocol, and that piece was eventually published in the Hamilton Spectator under the headline “Environmentalists may regret their purely political victory.”  There was no doubt in my mind – then or now – that “global warming” as it was then called – was not based in good science; and the drive to accept “global warming” was transparently political.  The economic consequences of accepting “global warming” was the crippling the economies of the Western world.

 

I forecasted accurately in that article that the Kyoto Protocol would fail precisely because crippling of Western economies was not something that politicians of Western countries would actually do.  The consequences for environmentalists I foresaw would be a tilt toward more nuclear power generation, which was anathema to environmentalists then and now.

 

Important today is a comment made almost off-handedly in the article, but which in due course has proven to be the real scientific alternative to the theory that ‘evil mankind is destroying the planet’.  I said that changes in the energy output of the sun provided a better explanation for the phenomenon of “global warming” if it really existed than anthropogenic carbon dioxide.  (i.e. the burning of fossil fuels by mankind creating carbon dioxide, which would trap heat on earth.)

 

This solar explanation was available to anyone who understood basic thermodynamics.  The sun warms the earth.  If the sun went cold, so would the earth.  Consequently, if the sun got warmer, so should the earth. 

 

Now, the sun getting warmer is a little more complex than it sounds, which is why I used the expression “energy output.”  Energy in the form of light can range from cosmic rays to radio waves, with X-rays, visible light, and infra-red light in between.  Though all of these are forms of energy, the effects of the absorption by a body like the earth of each of these different kinds of light are different.  Thus there are qualitative differences between the different kinds of light, even when the quantity of energy from the light is the same.  (Physicists will recognize here the basis of the Photoelectric effect, tanning beds and microwave ovens!) The most efficient transmitter of heat is infra-red radiation.  Consequently, a change in the spectrum of light emitted from the sun can change the sensation of heat here on earth, even if the quantity of energy emitted by the sun remains the same.

 

We don’t know that much about the processes that occur within the sun.  We do know that the earth has undergone several periods of glaciation and warming.  We know that there was a medieval warming period, when Vikings settled in a verdant “Greenland” and also a Little Ice Age that ran approximately 300 years and ended in the middle of the 19^th century.  None of these changes in climate are explicable through anthropogenic carbon dioxide; but all are explicable due to changes in the energy output of the sun, either in quantity or quality.

 

We simply do not have enough data on the sun’s output to be able to dismiss, as climate changers do, variations in the energy output of the sun as a bona fide competitive theory.

 

Another problem I had with the theory of climate change then, and now, was the use of tree ring data to estimate average temperature.  I happen to have an old fashioned mercury thermometer.  It measures temperature from -10°C to +120°C.  The glass has black scribes on it running perpendicular to the length of the thermometer, in 2 degree increments.  At a good angle under bright light, I can estimate to within 0.5°C the temperature of the liquid in which the thermometer is immersed.  Having seen tree rings, I do not know how you can estimate a temperature to within 0.5°C with a tree ring, let alone to with 0.1°C, which is what the climate scientists say they can.  The width of the ring is related to the rate of growth of the tree, which is supposedly related to the average annual temperature the tree experienced.  But tree rings are not uniform in width; nor are their edges as sharp as the scribes on my thermometer; we do not have a mathematical relationship between ring thickness and “average temperature” (whatever that means); and tree growth seems to depend upon water, sunlight, and soil fertility as well as temperature, and suddenly there are too many variables here to account for, and control.  It doesn’t end there: to get an estimate of average global temperature, one would have to sample trees from all over the globe, including Antarctica, the high Arctic, and perhaps also the 70 % of the earth’s surface covered by ocean because the earth is not “at equilibrium” (as thermodynamicists would say.)

 

In other words, there are a lot of reasons for a scientist to take the climate models offered by tree ring data as little more than an interesting theory.  On the balance of probabilities, the scale of likelihood is tilted strongly against taking the quantitative predictions of “global warming” caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide seriously.

 

But what about the principle of precaution - that you can never be too careful in these things?  If I am wrong, and the “global warming” theory is true, then the world will go to hell in a hand-basket, right?  We have to take precaution against that potentially fatal error.

 

The trouble with invoking the pre-cautionary principle is that most people use it the wrong way.  When you are presented with hooey, you need to be cautious about using hooey to base your judgement on.  If scientific polling is right within 95 %, nineteen times out of twenty, then the one poll that seems totally out in left field in comparison to the rest is the one you discard, not the one you embrace.  That’s the scientific way; the other way, the way used by those who invoke the precautionary principle, is counter-intuitive and unscientific.

 

Armchair scientific considerations led me to disbelieve straightway the theory of “global warming caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide.”  Over the last sixteen years, the famous “hockey stick” graph, which supposedly demonstrated global warming, was shown by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick to be a product of mathematical chicanery.  Irreplaceable raw data was destroyed by the principle scientists behind global warming theory; and in “climategate”, the private emails among the global warming advocates, released by a Russian hacker, present the appearance of a conspiracy to suppress inadequacies and to discredit opinions and persons opposed to global warming theory.   Finally, 1998 proved to be the hottest year (as such things are measured) in the last two decades; global temperatures have been lower ever since, inconsistent with the theory.

 

I can understand that certain opinions are fashionable, but why should serious people even be asked to entertain discredited theories?  This is where the underlying political consequences of “global warming” come into play.  The purpose of the “global warming” theory was not science, but to undermine the basis of western prosperity: energy production.  Fossil fuels are practically the sole means of transport fuels, and a large proportion of electric energy production comes from the burning of either coal or natural gas.  There is a strong co-relation between growth in energy consumption by a society and growth in economic output and wealth by and in that society.  If growth in energy consumption is artificially crippled, then so is economic growth.

 

There is a wide streak in modern western philosophy of pessimism and self-loathing.  A powerful segment of American public opinion, that includes many prominent politicians, is given to the loathing of America’s immoderate success as a country and society, and this opinion has been become marked and prevalent since the Vietnam War.  In short, it seemed to me that the urgency behind “global warming” and its consequences was a manifestation of the wide-spread political desire to bring America low.

 

The desire to bring America low, by heaping opprobrium upon her and trying to cripple her economic success, is political, having nothing to do with science.  As a scientist and some-time thinking man, I find intolerable the perverting of truth and science for the attainment of a political end, whether laudable or not.  I have my opinions about the desire to bring America low, but “global warming” or that slight-of-hand trick “climate change” are kept from complete disgrace for reasons having nothing to do with scientific merit.

 

An entirely separate question is why people would want to bring America low?  That question is not political and certainly not scientific.  It is psychological.  In President Obama’s speech, “climate change” was the justification for crony capitalism in the green energy sector, and for economic distortions to advance the allegedly good cause.

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