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From: Neo Mulder
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Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 13:27
Subject: [ctrl] I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train
I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train
David Evans
Mises.org
Tuesday May 28, 2007
[A version of tihs article was previously blogged on Mises.org here, and
inspired a spirited debate. The author reworked the piece for the Mises.org
front page. The blog item remains the same.]
I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian
government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When
I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global
warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened that
case. I am now skeptical.
In the late 1990s, this was the evidence suggesting that carbon emissions
caused global warming:
1.. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, proved in a laboratory a century ago.
2.. Global warming has been occurring for a century and concentrations of
atmospheric carbon have been rising for a century. Correlation is not
causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit.
3.. Ice core data, starting with the first cores from Vostok in 1985, allowed
us to measure temperature and atmospheric carbon going back hundreds of
thousands of years, through several dramatic global warming and cooling events.
To the temporal resolution then available (data points more than a thousand
years apart), atmospheric carbon and temperature moved in lockstep: they rose
and fell together. Talk about a smoking gun!
4.. There were no other credible causes of global warming.
This evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain
when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were
causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political
realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees
met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon
emissions.
"Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a
fit."
The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By
the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused
global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science
jobs created too.
I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not
have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And
so were lots of people around me; there were international conferences full of
such people. We had political support, the ear of government, big budgets. We
felt fairly important and useful (I did anyway). It was great. We were working
to save the planet!
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But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence above
fell away. Using the same point numbers as above:
2.. Better data shows that from 1940 to 1975 the earth cooled while
atmospheric carbon increased. That 35 year non-correlation might eventually be
explained by global dimming, only discovered in about 2003.
3.. The temporal resolution of the ice core data improved. By 2004 we knew
that in past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about
800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon. Causality does not run in the
direction I had assumed in 1999 â?" it runs the opposite way!
It took several hundred years of warming for the oceans to give off more of
their carbon. This proves that there is a cause of global warming other than
atmospheric carbon. And while it is possible that rising atmospheric carbon in
these past warmings then went on to cause more warming ("amplification" of the
initial warming), the ice core data neither proves nor disproves this
hypothesis.
4.. There is now a credible alternative suspect. In October 2006 Henrik
Svensmark showed experimentally that cosmic rays cause cloud formation. Clouds
have a net cooling effect, but for the last three decades there have been fewer
clouds than normal because the sun's magnetic field, which shields us from
cosmic rays, has been stronger than usual. So the earth heated up. It's too
early to judge what fraction of global warming is caused by cosmic rays.
There is now no observational evidence that global warming is caused by carbon
emissions. You would think that in over 20 years of intense investigation we
would have found something. For example, greenhouse warming due to carbon
emissions should warm the upper atmosphere faster than the lower atmosphere â?"
but until 2006 the data showed the opposite, and thus that the greenhouse
effect was not occurring! In 2006 better data allowed that the effect might be
occurring, except in the tropics.
The only current "evidence" for blaming carbon emissions are scientific models
(and the fact that there are few contradictory observations).
Historically, science has not progressed by calculations and models, but by
repeatable observations. Some theories held by science authorities have turned
out to be spectacularly wrong: heavier-than-air flight is impossible, the sun
orbits the earth, etc. For excellent reasons, we have much more confidence in
observations by several independent parties than in models produced by a small
set of related parties!
Let's return to the interaction between science and politics. By 2000 the
political system had responded to the strong scientific case that carbon
emissions caused global warming by creating thousands of bureaucratic and
science jobs aimed at more research and at curbing carbon emissions.
"Science has not progressed by calculations and models, but by repeatable
observations."
But after 2000 the case against carbon emissions gradually got weaker. Future
evidence might strengthen or further weaken it. At what stage of the weakening
should the science community alert the political system that carbon emissions
might not be the main cause of global warming?
None of the new evidence actually says that carbon emissions are definitely not
the cause of global warming, there are lots of good science jobs potentially at
stake, and if the scientific message wavers then it might be difficult to later
recapture the attention of the political system. What has happened is that most
research efforts since 1990 have assumed that carbon emissions were the cause,
and the alternatives get much less research or political attention.
More- http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/may2007/290507Warming.htm
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