Error Theory

Every climate scientist in the world has known beyond any doubt, for at least several years now, that late 20th century warming was driven almost entirely by the very high levels of solar activity between 1940 and 2000 (details below). They also know the corollary: that when solar activity drops into a down phase, the earth will get cold, possibly even precipitating the next ice age (due any century now).

Not only is this the real and impending threat, but solar activity has been low for several years now, and sharp global cooling is already being detected. At the same time, the current lull between 11 year solar cycles is unusually quiet and long, reminiscent of earlier downturns in solar activity that led to dramatic global cooling.

It seems certain at this point that we are in for at least a substantial dip in global temperature. In addition to the weak sun and the already falling temperatures, this winter's record snow cover is reflecting an unusual amount of solar radiation back into space, and we are also in the middle of a major La Niña event (where cold pacific waters rise to the surface).

Warming hysteria is religion, not science

If global cooling is known to be the real and impending danger, why is it that even with the onset of cooling, most climatologists are raising hysterical alarms about global warming? Because they are not actually concerned about global temperature at all. They are environmental religionists who believe that human economic growth is gobbling up the natural world.

Blaming late 20th century warming on fossil fuel burning was just an opportunity for these religionists to try to impose restrictions on economic activity, and in that way “save the planet” from human encroachment. Global warming alarmism never did have anything to do with climatology.

If only the sun had stayed aboil for one more solar cycle, the religionists would have succeeded. When the inevitable cooling did come, it would still pull the curtain off of their global warming hoax, but by then it would be too late. Economic restrictions would already be fixed in place, under UN bodies that the religionists control.

Alas, it was not to be. The fake bride was almost to the altar, but mother nature put her foot down on the bridal veil, leaving the hairy ogre standing in front of the congregation in his stuffed bra and BVDs. Fake minister Al Gore must be furious, but to no effect. Their game is up.

Even a temporary dip in global temperatures will be enough to expose the scare about human and CO2 based global warming as a fraud. There hasn’t been any dip in CO2, so a dip in temperature will explode the alarmist claim that global temperature is CO2 driven.

Sleeping like a baby

SOHO sunspot scan, 2-18-2008. Scientists have been waiting almost a year for solar cycle 24 to begin. A blip in August 2006 and a blip in January 2008 raised hopes, but all remains quiet. [A peep on 2/25/08. Wake up dragon.]

If we are lucky, solar cycle 24 will still fire up soon and solar activity will regain its 20th century intensity, giving us a reprieve from the next ice age, hopefully for hundreds of years yet. One NASA prediction scheme suggests cycle 24 ought to be strong, despite its slow start. Solar dynamo theory, in contrast, predicts a weak cycle 24 (p. 14).

Either way, long term solar cycles are predicted to bottom out in 2030 and 2200, and it is certainly possible that serious cold is coming up fast. (Solar "conveyor belt" theory predicts that the drop off will come in cycle 25.) What is certain is that whatever happens, global temperature will be a function of solar activity, compared to which even very large changes CO2 have a negligible effect.

The geological record proves that 20th century warming was driven by solar activity

Past levels of solar-magnetic activity can be measured in the geologic record by the isotope residues of Galactic Cosmic Radiation (GCR). High levels of solar wind block GCR from reaching earth, so the GCR isotope signatures serve as a proxy for solar activity.

Temperature also leaves a geologic signal in the form of temperature related isotopes. These geologic records have been examined going back thousands of years, and on every time scale, the level of GCR “explains” statistically about 90% of contemporaneous temperature variation. (The geological evidence is amassed for laymen in Fred Singer’s 2007 book Unstoppable Global Warming, every 1500 years, but none of this is new to professional climatologists.)

Between 1940 and 2000, solar activity was at the highest levels seen in the geologic record. Given the known effect of solar wind on global temperature, that means that late 20th century warming was driven largely if not entirely by high levels of solar activity, and every climate scientist in the world knows it.


What? You mean THIS makes a difference? Who’da thunk it?

The leading theory says that it is the GCR rather than the solar wind that directly affects global temperature. High energy Galactic Cosmic Radiation ionizes the atmosphere, inducing the formation of clouds that reflect sunlight back into space. Under this theory, the warming effect of the solar wind is indirect. By sweeping away some of the GCR, the solar wind in-effect blows the clouds away, giving the earth a sunburn. (See Henrik Svensmark’s 2007 book The Chilling Stars.)

But whatever the mechanism, the geologic record leaves no doubt that 20th century warming was due almost entirely to high levels of solar activity. Five years ago the geologic evidence that the solar wind drives global temperature was just beginning to mount. Now it is overwhelming, but the religionists are doing their best to suppress it. So close to their goal of using warming hysteria to impose draconian economic restraints, they are not about to admit that human activity has negligible effects on climate.

There is NO evidence for CO2 driven warming

While the geologic record provides clear proof of the effects of solar activity and GCR on global temperature, there is absolutely no evidence anywhere in the geologic record for CO2 ever having any significant effect on temperature. Maybe if you go way back to before there was plant life to gobble up the CO2, allowing CO2 to reach a hundred times what it is today, but not since. Carbon dioxide is plant food, so the advent of plant life made CO2 levels self-moderating. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the lusher the biosphere grows. Our burning of fossil fuels has created one of the lushest biospheres that planet earth has ever seen.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas, so additional CO2 will trap some heat, but apparently not enough to have any significant effect on global temperature, probably because it traps the same wavelengths of infrared as the much more abundant water vapor. In his Nobel Prize winning movie, A Convenient Lie, Al Gore points to the correlation over the last 650,000 years between CO2 and temperature, but neglects to mention that increases in CO2 lag behind the increases in temperature by about 800 years. CO2 is not driving temperature, but is driven by it. As periods of high solar wind warm the oceans, the oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere.

One ineluctable prediction of the greenhouse gas theory of 20th century warming is that the greatest warming would occur in the lower troposphere (the bottom eight miles of atmosphere). This is where greenhouse gasses do their heat-trapping work. The warmed up lower troposphere would in turn warm the surface.

In this sequence, the lower atmosphere, being the source of warmth for the surface, would be warmer than the surface warm up more than the surface (PP. 6). But the observed pattern is just the opposite. The surface has warmed, but the lower atmosphere has not, just as we would expect if the solar wind had blown the clouds away, giving the earth’s surface an extra dose of sunlight.

Too bad that CO2 does not have more of a warming effect. On the cusp of the next ice age, it would be nice if all of our fossil fuel burning could afford us a bit warmer jacket of insulating atmosphere, but apparently there is little we can do to warm ourselves up in this way. It is going to get cold, and while quite a bit more warming would have been perfectly benign, cold is brutal. Cold is actually something to worry about.

The original climate science fraud: Stephen Schneider

In the 1970’s when the earth seemed to be cooling, Dr. Stephen Schneider, now at Stanford, blamed cooling on human burning of fossil fuels. Particulates were blocking the sun, he suggested, calling for dramatic pullbacks in human population and economic activity. (Schneider’s 1976 book The Genesis Strategy is an apocalyptic neo-Malthusian fantasy.)

When the temperature signal changed from cooling to warming in the early 80’s, Schneider again blamed the human burning of fossil fuels, and again called for drastic restraints on economic activity. As cooling becomes apparent this year, expect him to again blame cooling on fossil fuel burning, and again call for drastic restraints on economic activity.

In 1997 Senate testimony, Schneider objected to any presumption that the warming of the earth after the Little Ice Age (1600-1850) was natural:

…we know that humans started changing the land surface and started changing the atmosphere, which we began to do significantly in the 18th Century, so we cannot actually rule that potential influence out yet.

Dr. Schneider’s fellow global warming alarmist, Dr. Eric Barron of Penn State, jumped in to clarify their position:

The objection occurs when [it is said that] the world is bouncing back from an unusually cold period. It's just as possible, because of the way natural variability works, that it was in the midst of bouncing to an even colder century and therefore we have an even bigger problem than we're thinking.

Schneider and Barron correctly identified the only possible circumstance in which fear of global warming could conceivably be rational. They know that for the last million years the earth has alternated between ice ages of about 100,000 years and interglacials of 10-12 thousand years. Our current interglacial started about 11,500 years ago so it is reasonable to think that at any time, natural temperature effects could carry us into the next ice age.

If Schneider’s speculation is right--that if not for human interference the next ice age would already have started--then human warming influences really are dominating natural influences, and if they remain unchecked, they really could create runaway warming. But this speculation is absurd. We know what the main natural driver of global temperature has been doing since the little ice age. Solar activity has been through the roof!

Telling the Senate that natural forces might have been in the cooling direction since the Little Ice Age was professional malfeasance, but this was the only way it could possibly make sense, on the geological eve of the next ice age, to worry about humans causing the observed global warming, so this is what Schneider pretended.

Schneider stated his attitude towards scientific honesty in a 1989 interview with Discover Magazine:

So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. … Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

This calculated dishonesty does not apply only to the magnitude of alarmist claims, but also to their direction. The alarm that Schneider is looking to raise is not over any particular climate change. Neither cooling nor warming actually matters to him. The alarm he wants to raise is over human activity.

Original climate science fraud #2: James Hansen

Other leading climate religionists indulge in similar demagoguery. A later but more central figure is NASA climatologist James Hansen, who took the global warming scare public by testifying to congress in 1988 that:

global warming is now sufficiently large that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.

Hansen just assumed that whatever warming was taking place was due to human release of CO2. That was bad enough in 1988, before the effects of solar weather on global temperature had been much studied, but Hansen was still pulling the same scam in 2005, when competing theories of natural warming were well established.

When ocean temperature data amassed in 2005 showed a warming trend, Hansen declared the data to be a “smoking gun” that proved human production of CO2 was heating the earth. In fact, the data did absolutely nothing to distinguish between natural and anthropogenic warming. Hansen deliberately misrepresented the implications of the data in order to advocate for his actual objective:

[Hansen] calculated the energy retention could be eliminated only by halting all human-caused emissions of methane or by somehow removing half of all the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere.

Of course this prescription would require drastic curtailment of human economic activity, which in Hansen’s mind is what justifies all the disinformation. Hansen couldn’t care less about the minuscule temperature effects of CO2. His goal is to stop economic advance from gobbling up the earth.

As Ronald Baily put it in his 1993 book Eco-Scam:

Freeze or fry, the problem is always industrial capitalism, and the solution is always international socialism. (p. 80)

The Goracle

How did the field of climatology come to be dominated by environmental religionists, glad to promote what has at this point become a full fledged hoax? There have always been plenty of environmental religionists in academia, but Al Gore is the one who gave them billions of dollars to play with, while excluding all “contrarians” from his largesse. As vice president over the eight years when global warming hysteria first made climate science a funding priority, Al Gore allocated every dime. This was his portfolio as President Clinton's climate science czar. With over ten billion dollars to spend (a huge amount for academia), Al Gore created the current climate science industry almost from scratch, transforming what had been a small backwater discipline into a juggernaut of his own framing.

The funding amounts have since multiplied several times, all of it channeled through the religious ideologues that Al Gore originally empowered, men like NASA scientists James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt, two of the most self-conscious frauds in the history of science, all for what they truly believe to be the best of all possible reasons: saving the environment from human economic activity.

Of course they are wrong about that too. These men are not economists, and their neo-Malthusian presumptions are childishly ignorant. The absolute best thing for the health of our natural environment is economic growth. As we advance economically, we learn to do more with less, and the quickest way to get that advance is to have more babies, because it is people who create advance.

In addition to being neo-Malthusians, “green” ideologues are also against economic liberty. They see capitalism as placing private gain ahead of public interest. But what is really gobbling up the environment, where it is being gobbled up, is lack of capitalism. Despoilation occurs in those places where property rights are not existent or not enforced, creating what has long been known as “the tragedy of the commons.” No one has an economic incentive to preserve commonly held resources like the oceans because, without ownership, no one can capture the value of the preserved resource. Their only incentive is to grab what they can today, leaving none for tomorrow.

You can’t find an economist in the America who supports the socialist stupidity of the environmental religionists, but because they pretend they are doing climate science instead of economics they are able to get away with it.

How the alarmists pull off their fraud: the omitted variable

When a regression model is “fit to the data,” the explanatory power of any omitted variables will get attributed to any correlated variables that are included in the model. This “omitted variable” problem has long been used by dishonest ideologues to practice statistical fraud. A prominent example is income studies purporting to show that women earn less than equally qualified men.

Such “advocacy statistics” are generated by leaving out important explanatory variables that are correlated to sex, such as hours of work. Since women on average work substantially fewer hours than men, the effect of fewer work hours on income gets misattributed to sex.

Properly done studies show that, when variables like hours of work are accounted for, women actually make more than similarly qualified men, just as one would expect in a society where there is tremendous legal pressure to grant preferential treatment to women. Yet the fraud has been effective. Feminists have succeeded in using their phony “advocacy statistics” as a club to push for yet more legal advantages, and their media allies keep up the fraud by only reporting the statistically biased studies.

This is exactly what is happening with claims of human caused global warming. The alarmists simply leave the dominant natural effect out of their models. The UN’s IPCC model, constructed by NASA climatologists James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, and their cronies, includes direct solar effects (changes in luminosity) but explicitly excludes indirect solar effects (the solar wind) on the grounds that the impacts of this solar weather are too speculative to warrant inclusion.

The exact mechanism may be speculative, but the existence of some such mechanism is not speculative at all. Far more speculative is the theory that climate is driven by CO2, for which there is absolutely no evidence. Variations in GCR “explain” statistically 90% of all global temperature variation, and it is omitted as speculative. CO2 “explains” 0% of temperature variation statistically, yet it is included.

Hansen and Schmidt know full well the statistical consequences of this bias. Solar activity and CO2 have both reached historic highs in recent decades. When indirect solar effects are omitted, the warming due to these effects gets misattributed to the concurrent increase in CO2, which Hansen and Schmidt then project forward to create their false alarm. Pure statistical fraud.

They pretend to be using super-sophisticated climate models to determine which explanation is supported by the evidence--man made warming or natural warming--when in fact they are rigging their models in the most obvious way to fraudulently attribute natural warming effects to CO2. (My commentary on the 4th IPCC report, tracing the omitted solar variable through their analysis, here.)

Fraudulent counter-evidence

For the last several years, the CO2 warming climatologists have been offering the most absurd evidence against the endlessly documented GCR-temperature link. They look at brief periods where the cosmic ray count is rising (due to diminished solar wind) and claim that if the GCR-temperature link were real, this should cause temperature to fall. As British climate religionist Mike Lockwood put it last year:

Since about 1985,… the cosmic ray count had been increasing, which should have led to a temperature fall if the theory is correct - instead, the Earth has been warming. … This should settle the debate.

Rasmus Benestad, a crony of NASA frauds Hansen and Schmidt, made similar claims in 2004 and 2007. If warming since the 1960’s was due to the absence of cloud inducing GCR, said Benestad, then GCR should have shown a downward trend during the period when temperature was rising, but it didn’t.

Morons. Nobody can be that stupid. It is the levels of solar activity and GCR that matter, not whether they are going up or down. Solar activity jumped up to “grand maximum” levels in the 1940’s and stayed there (averaged across the 11 year solar cycles) until 2000. Solar activity doesn’t have to keep going up for warming to occur. Turn the gas burner under you pot of stew to high and the stew will heat. You don’t have to keep turning the heat up further and further to get heating!

This is how intentionally oblivious our climate religionists are. Anything to avoid acknowledging the obvious, even pretending they don’t know the difference between level and trend. They are self-lobotimized logical idiots, speaking as the voice of science.


But it hasn't continued to get even more furious. THAT can’t cause warming!

What we would actually expect to see from fluctuations between very-high and medium-high solar activity is not fluctuations between warming and cooling, but fluctuations in how rapidly warming occurs. To examine these fluctuations, Henrik Svensmark constructed a temperature record with the warming trend taken out. The remaining temperature “anomaly” (showing whether warming was faster or slower than average) correlates well with solar activity and GCR:


Svensmark graphic (via the reference frame ), shows impressive correlation between GCR and the temperature “anomaly,” which abstracts from the temperature trend (.014K/decade), the North Atlantic Oscillation, El Nino, and volcanic aerosol effects.

This fine degree of correlation between GCR and the rate of temperature change is nuance. No nuance is necessary to comprehend the basic correlation between solar-activity and temperature, consistent over many thousands of years, as confirmed by hundreds of studies of the geological record (with no doubt about which is causing which).

Morally blind

Academia and the press--our primary information industries--are dominated by people who think that it is moral to avoid and suppress the truth in order to advance what they presume to be right or in their interest. Somehow it does not dawn on these moral imbeciles that because they avoid the truth, their presumptions about what is right can only be wrong.

Supposed scientists in academia are doing the exact same thing with the Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial, covering up the Mecca orientation of the giant Crescent of Embrace by telling the public and the Families of Flight 93 that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca!

Will global cooling wake the rest of society up to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of our left-wing elites? What greater shock could there be than to discover that this supposed “scientific consensus” on human-caused global warming was all a self-conscious lie?

The duped had better wake up, because the liars never will. No matter how much harm the Gores and the Hansens and the Schneiders do, they will never feel any compunction, because they never see themselves as acting for any but the best purposes: their presumptions about which side they should be on. Such is the banality of evil: willingly blind and morally self-satisfied about it.

California Democrats want to introduce climate change into the state's high school science curriculum. Hurry up and say “yes,” Republicans, because as soon as the cooling earth is common knowledge, Democrats will be spinning madly to cover up this left-wing debacle. Include climate science by law, and by the time it goes into effect, the unavoidable subject matter will be the global warming hoax. Awesome.


Related posts:

August 26, 2004
Global warming alarmists still running gov. bureaucracy

January 28, 2005
Greenhouse alarmists fight the new sunspot understanding

February 11, 2005
Is Realclimate part of the "reality based" community?

April 21, 2005
Earth Day 2030: "A new eye blinked open upon the world"

April 30, 2005
NASA global-warmist James Hansen is a LIAR

February 14, 2007
My commentary on the draft IPCC report, submitted last spring