The following post is intended to show, to those with some technical background, that the major issues that surround the belief that anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) is the proximate cause of the recent thirty year increase in global temperatures are not settled; as claimed.  To accomplish this we will go through ten issues associated with what passes for the Anthropogenic Climate Change Theory, although they do not call it a theory, and their projections which they do not call forecasts. In essence what they are telling us is that their (IPCC) climate models might show what might happen, if we have considered all the variables correctly; in order words they aren’t sure.

These ten issues are not full discussions only short statements showing where there are problems areas; and they are not presented in any particular order or ranking.  Although there is a lot of technical jargon used here (the actual science is complicated) it has been simplified as much as possible which has also meant some liberties were taken with the use of some words. To the best of my knowledge none of these simplifications make any material change to the implications presented here.

One, Carbon in the form of Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) has been declared to be a pollutant and thereby must be controlled under the guidelines of the 1963 Clean Air Act by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Further this was ruled to be a valid interpretation of the law by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 and therefore Carbon Dioxide is now a “legal” pollutant and “must” therefore be regulated; meaning reduced to the lowest possible value.  However, this logic flies in the face of reality as Carbon Dioxide is a “requirement” of the process that plants use to grow, known as photosynthesis.  The lower the level of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere the harder it is for the plants to grow; and, in fact, the optimum level of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere would probably be three to four times what it is now; and that level would also be more consistent with the earth’s geological records. Because of this misconception that Carbon Dioxide is a “pollutant” there is even talk of setting up some form of Geo-Engineering to remove the Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere. This is literally insane for if they were able to get the Carbon Dioxide down to below 100 ppm they would kill off all the plants and trees on the planet. Just to get back to 300 ppm we would need to stop using all Carbon based fuel and process 290.1 Tt of air to get to 1,560.2 Gt of CO₂ to pull out 406.9 Gt of Carbon.

Two, Geologically there is a poor link between Carbon Dioxide and global temperatures with periods of high Carbon Dioxide and low temperatures and periods of low Carbon Dioxide and high temperatures. It also appears that global temperature increases generally precede Carbon Dioxide level increases thereby seeming to show a reverse cause and effect from what we are being told.  In addition it also appears that whatever the link between Carbon Dioxide and temperature, it is relevant only at very low levels i.e. less than 300 ppm since Carbon Dioxide has been as high as 7,000 ppm, which is a range of values from low to high of 0ver 2,000%. Generally Carbon Dioxide has been more in the range of 1000 ppm and has only been at the current very low levels of under 400 ppm twice before once at 300 million years ago and once about 450 million years ago.  Even with that wide range of Carbon Dioxide values the global temperature has been relatively stable geologically ranging between a high of ~22 degrees Celsius and a low of ~12 degrees Celsius which is only a difference of 3.5% in heat value.  This shows that the thermal processes on the planet do not have any positive feedback associated with them as the current Climate Model’s seem to be implying or the temperature swings would be much greater. Lastly, we are currently at 14.6 degrees Celsius which is 3 degrees Celsius below the historic global mean temperature since we have probably still not completely recovered from the last ice age 11,500 years ago.

Three, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations (UN) in 1988 to “show” what the higher global temperatures caused by the observed increasing levels of Carbon Dioxide would do to the planet physically and economically. It was “assumed” that global temperatures would go up in a direct relationship to the higher levels of Carbon Dioxide caused by the burning of fossil fuels (which are primarily Carbon) for the creation of energy.  The charter of the IPCC was not to find the “cause” of global warming but to show how Carbon Dioxide “was” changing the climate. Showing what will happen with higher global temperatures is not the same as “proving” that Carbon Dioxide will cause global temperatures to increase to levels that will cause major problems. The true relationship of Carbon Dioxide and global temperatures has never been established.

Four, Determining the global temperature is a daunting task and the science and engineering behind it has not been established in a transparent mode. The core issue is how to put all the individual temperature records together into one master value.  This process is accomplished with software today that determines an anomaly (a difference) from some base.  NASA-GISS (Godard Institute for Space Studies) publishes this number monthly in their LOTI table (LOTI is the Land Ocean Temperature Index which is a composite of all the NASA temperature reading they have collected each month adjusted into one number) as a hundredth of a degree Celsius plus or minus from the base temperature which is currently set as 14.0 degrees Celsius.  NASA-GISS publishes global anomalies back to January 1880; unfortunately because of the process that they use this means that every month all the numbers in the index change.  So with no fixed base how do we even know what the temperature change is, i.e. in October 2009 the LOTI which is a derived number determined by software which purports to be the global mean temperature) value for January 1880 was 28 and on July 2013 the LOTI value for January 1880 was -34. Converting to degrees Celsius and comparing to the current temperature, that is a change of only .32 degrees Celsius using the 2009 figure but it’s a change of .94 degrees Celsius using the 2013 figure, so which is it?  This process has not been subject to independent peer review and it must be if the process and the numbers are to be believed.  Also it makes no sense to keep changing all the numbers back to 1880 every month and some of the changes are not small as just shown. There is agreement that temperatures have gone up but that’s about the extent of the process.

Five, In order to determine future global climate changes based on temperature changes Global Climate Models (GCM’s) of various kinds have been established by the IPCC. These are extremely complex constructs that to work must have equations to determine all the thermal flows of energy on the planet from the deepest ocean to the top of the earth’s atmosphere. There are two issues with this, one being we do not know all the processes and variables involved nor even what values to assign to many of them and two we do not have computers powerful enough to process the data at a resolution sufficient to determine global energy policy. The resolution is a major factor, since for these kinds of models to work the entire planet must be covered in a grid or mesh in all three dimensions, e.g. a box; the current state of the art means that these boxes are much larger than major cities and many of the key thermal flows are at much smaller sizes that cannot then be properly modeled. Then when the current GCM’s are run they never give the same result twice and so an average of a number of runs is used for each. In addition they change the population and economic circumstances such that it not even certain if they are projecting climate or economics for example in the current report, AR4, seven different economic scenarios are shown.  That range of outputs is way too broad to give any certainty to the output especially with the current downward global temperature trend which is not even possible, with the way the GCM models are currently programmed.

Six, A key number that is not known with sufficient certainty is the Radiative Forcing value of Carbon Dioxide which determines the Climate Sensitivity or the amount the global temperature will increase with a doubling of the level of Carbon Dioxide.  The IPCC uses 3.0 degrees Celsius in its models but they also admit in their Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) issued in 2007 that the range of values is from .4 to 4.5 degrees Celsius.   This wide range gives results ranging from no climate effect to global catastrophe and the use of 3.0 degrees Celsius puts the models into the range of catastrophe.  The apparent need for the value of 3.0 degrees Celsius is that is what was needed to make the models show a global temperature that matched that which was observed between about 1960 and 2000. The mistake in this was assuming that there were “no other significant factors” in play and that Carbon Dioxide was the primary cause if not the ultimate cause of the increase. It seems when properly used the Carbon Dioxide sensitivity value is closer to .64 degrees Celsius than the 3.0 degrees Celsius the IPCC uses.

Seven, The IPCC has mostly ignored orbital and solar variations and that is what has forced them to use the high climate sensitivity values for Carbon Dioxide.  The orbital changes as first defined by Milutin Milankovic and now known as the Milankovitch Cycles have three components: Precession, Axial tilt and Eccentricity all of which are well documented.  Over the past several thousand years they appear to give a global warming and cooling cycle of some 1,052 years with a swing in temperature of about 1.46 degrees Celsius.  The solar variation from internal variation in the fusion process in the suns interior are the primary reason we have the short cycle of almost 67 years with a swing of about .32 degrees Celsius.  In both cases these numbers do relate to the primary cause of the observed temperature increases but they are mitigated by all the thermal sinks on Earth and so they do not exactly correlate year for year.  These two patterns are the bases for an alternative climate model called a PCM here.

Eight, Reliable thermometers were not invented until 1724 by Daniel Fahrenheit so there was no  way to know what the global temperature really was although other cruder devices were in use prior to then; however by around 1850 there were enough weather stations recording temperatures to begin trying to determine what the average global temperature was.  It must also be understood that before 1850 everything regarding temperature is proxy data which means that it is derived from things like the ratio of the isotopes of Oxygen 18 to Oxygen 16 in wood, stalagmites, ice and sediments; the size of tree rings and coral growth.  That is not to say that there is no relationship to temperature but since other things also contribute to the items being measured its difficult if not impossible to know the true cause and therefore the global temperature. More importantly there is no “one” global temperature, whatever the number is said to be it is strictly an artificial number derived by some process e.g. software today.   The reason this is an artificial number is that the earth is a spinning global with one side facing the sun (being heated) and the other deep space (cooling down); this creates three climate bands on each side of the equator. First is the equatorial band from the equator to 30 degree north or south which receives the bulk of the available heat from the sun. Next are the bands north and south from 30 to 60 degree, where the continental United States is, that receives about 1/3 less. Lastly we have the Polar Regions from 60 to 90 degrees north and south which receives almost no heat from the sun. Considering the planet as a whole, front and back; only 5.6% is directly under the sun at any one time with another 16.7% getting a reasonable amount of solar heat, all the rest is, in effect, cooling down. The complex planetary air flows that create our climate are a direct result of the heating patterns from these bands and the spinning globe. The energy from the sun is also significantly reduced by clouds levels, and the temperature on the surface depends whether it‘s land or water and what the elevation is.  This is a very complex process that is not yet completely understood at the local level, yet we are shown a stated value, the anomaly, which are actually degrees Celsius shown to the second decimal place.  This indicates a relatively high degree of precision but since the values change every month we have low accuracy.

Nine, there is no “greenhouse” effect and there are no “greenhouse” gases!  The processes going on in the earth’s athomosephere “are not” the same processes as that occurring in a greenhouse used to grow food.  The heat in the greenhouse is trapped in there by the physical barrier of the glass or plastic panels.   There are no physical barriers in the atmosphere and so the process is very different.  Sunlight reaches the earth and as it enters the atmosphere 30% of it is reflected back into space, mostly by the white clouds.  The remaining radiation warms the air the land and the water but by doing so the energy must also “eventually” leave the planet to maintain a thermal balance and does so as radiation in the infrared (IR) bands. Some of that outgoing Infrared is absorbed by the Carbon Dioxide and then reradiated and either shifted to water vapor or sent out into space. There is a lot more water than Carbon Dioxide and, in fact, water is the primary “greenhouse” gas if we have to use that term.  The water in the atmosphere acts as a thermal buffer and that raises the global temperature from a negative 18.5 degrees Celsius to 14.5 degrees Celsius which is a positive swing of 33 degrees Celsius, and of that 33 degrees Celsius about 15% is from the affect of Carbon Dioxide at present levels.  Now here is the important fact, using the more realistic Carbon Dioxide sensitivity values there is only about .5 to 1 degrees more of a temperature increase that can be realized by the level of Carbon Dioxide in the athomosephere no matter how high it goes.  The programming in the IPCC climate models apparently use some form of logarithmic function related to Carbon Dioxide which forces the model into a positive feedback mode which is just not supported by geological records. This is why the lower value makes more sense since the planet has never been as hot as the IPCC Carbon Dioxide higher sensitivity values would take it in the near future. This value is at the heart of the argument and so knowing what it really is, is probably the single most important element in the debate.

Ten, A model of any kind is only as good as its ability to accurately predict future events and the better the model the further into the future the model can accurately predict that which it is programmed to do. According to Wikipedia “Modeling and simulation (M&S) is getting information about how something will behave without actually testing it in real life.” … “M&S is a discipline on its own. Its many application domains often lead to the assumption that M&S is pure application. This is not the case and needs to be recognized by engineering management experts who want to use M&S. To ensure that the results of simulation are applicable to the real world, the engineering manager must understand the assumptions, conceptualizations, and implementation constraints of this emerging field.” Global climate models are simulations of what will happen under the assumptions and restraints built into the models. And since this debate is on Climate that changes very slowly it will take decades to see what the real movements are and whether the IPCC models are any good.  The issue at hand is Carbon Dioxide levels which began to move up in concert with global temperatures starting around 1965.  That pattern was constant up until only a few years ago and that gave the illusion that Carbon Dioxide was the proximate cause of the Change; but three decades is less than a blink of an eye with Climate.  With global temperatures now actually dropping not increasing there is building doubt about the ability of the IPCC climate models to accurately show what is happening in the real world even a few years into the future. What we are currently seeing in the falling global temperature levels, while the OPCC GCM’s say they must go up, is the very definition of a bad model/simulation. This is a fundamental flaw not just a projection being a little bit off track!