The Science Behind Global Warming

This is a post I wrote on AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) on the Jnonva site.

Right now the major justification of AGW as a scientific theory has been the reliance on a computer model that has never correctly predicted temperature changes.

A scientific theory of global warming has to conform to what we already know about chemistry and physics. AGW doesn’t.

One part in ten thousand of the atmosphere is just not enough to affect the overall atmosphere in the significant way that AGW says it must. CO2 would have to be magic fairy dust to have the effect they want it to have.

The correlation of CO2 levels with annual global temperature is weak. Even if it were much stronger, correlation is not causation.

Basically what we are being asked to do is to bet the world’s future on a simulation with the technical sophistication of Donkey Kong. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. Already political and economic decisions are being made on the basis of this superstitious fad, that reduce the economic prospects for the world’s poor.

Historians of the future will perhaps consider this period one of mass hysteria, where people driven to distraction by the apparently intractable collision of Islamic terrorism with liberal dogma, reacted by creating a fantasy threat that seems measureable and controllable.

AGW is real only in the sense that those who promote this piffle into government policies are causing real harm to the world’s poor, increasing the likelihood of more hunger, more disease, more isolation, and less education for those who suffer from these wants the most. The “benefits” of CO2 reduction schemes are hypothetical and entirely unproven, but the harm from them is foreseeable and as certain as tomorrow’s sunrise.

We might as well collect pine cones as trade carbon credits, for all the difference it will make to the world’s climate. And it would be better to starve a few squirrels than the poor children of the world, which is what CO2 restrictions will tend to do.

Man made global warming doesn’t need to be disproven, because it has never been proven. It has only been asserted.

“Deniers” indeed. It is the “Asserters” who need to prove their case.

The bullies behind the AGW movement need to be called on their tactics and their crummy science.

Or at least they need to have enough respect for the rest of us, or enough shame, to stop pretending that AGW is science. So far all I have seen is a faith-based political movement, a Children’s Crusade with a bevy of simpering sycophants in politics and the press.

The only degrees that count in global warming theory are Fahrenheit and Celsius. Show me a mechanism for man-made global warming that conforms to scientific principles, and calculations that explain at least the present set of observations, and I will modify my opinion of this theory. Right now, AGW seems to be a lot of hot air stirred up by 60 scientists, most of them lab partners, who hijacked the IPCC process and are now hijacking the political process.

AGW is the Technorati Tulip Frenzy. What a sad, sad footnote this will be in the history of science.

What scientists should be giving us is cheaper energy, cleaner water, better education, improved crops, and everything that will help lead to longer, healthier, more satisfying lives. Instead what we get is billions of dollars spent on a digitally-derived Armageddon fantasy and the prospect of laws that will tie our hands in taming the problems of the future.

It’s time to bring the AGW bandwagon to a screeching halt.
Brad Jensen