Setting the climate record straight (Steve Weismantel)

Link: http://www.roanoke.com/opinion/commentary/weismantel-setting-the-climaterecord-straight/article_15551b2e-0ea7-5c81-a5c5-390c50778406.html

Weismantel: Setting the climate record straight Steve Weismantel is a retired engineer, with a specialty in thermodynamics, heat transfer, and 2phase fluid dynamics, all of which are important fundamentals of climate dynamics.

By Steve Weismantel The science of climate is relatively new with many unknowns. What we know for certain is that the climate has always been changing. Climate mechanisms are highly complex, intertwined and take many years for changes to manifest. Because of this, it is very difficult to test and validate climate theories. As a result, scientists have resorted to computer models to test their theories … but more on this later.

Many scary scenarios have described the purported consequences of so-called man-made global warming (aka climate change) which is supposedly caused by the burning of fossil fuels and their CO2 emissions. The government has relentlessly used its many resources to push the CO2causal theory, including nongovernmental entities who are vested in any climate crisis. Still, polling of the general public continues to put climate at the bottom of today’s problems. In an attempt to move opinion, the alarmists’ prognostications have become more frequent and shrill.

The historic record, however, contradicts the CO2 theory and “sky will be falling” predictions. A few examples: Compared to today, the earth was actually much warmer during Roman and Medieval times (when atmospheric CO2 was at historic lows). After all, Greenland got its name when the Vikings initially settled there around 980 AD and much of the land was … green.

The Vikings left Greenland around 1350 AD when global temperatures got frigid during a prolonged period called “The Little Ice Age,” which ended in the mid-1800s. The earth has been warming ever since, which has naturally caused sea levels to slowly rise at the same rate as today. During this entire time CO2 remained unchanged when global temperatures went up, then down and then up again. Even during post-World War II economic development, when CO2 began its recent rise, its concentration remained fairly low at 0.04 percent, still a very small part of the atmosphere.

More frequent and severe storms than today were recorded in the 1930s-1950s when CO2 levels were still low. And, while the Arctic ice cap had been shrinking, it hasn’t disappeared (as Al Gore had predicted it would by 2015). Now the rate of Arctic ice loss has slowed. In fact, the combined ice in the Arctic and Antarctic has actually been increasing for over 35 years.

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But, the greatest fallacy in the warnings of impending climate doom is that the predictions are based on computer programs that have greatly exaggerated the future rise in temperature. Truth is, accurate measurements from satellites and weather balloons show earth’s warming has actually paused for about 18 years, even as CO2 continues to increase.

According to the government’s climate models, today’s global temperature average should have been much higher than it actually is. Going forward, the government’s high projections diverge further and further from the actual trend of lower temperatures.

In fact, the latest research is now showing the variation in the earth’s cloud cover to be the greatest driver of global warming (or cooling), and that CO2 has very little effect, if any. These significant conclusions are mostly ignored by the media and the alarmists, probably because it doesn’t fit with today’s “green” environmentalism narrative.

The fact that the climate modeling is wrong has wide ramification. Since the models’ single purpose was to validate the CO2-causal theory, then the theory itself must be wrong. Further, since the temperature assumption drives all scenarios, from ice melt to sea rise to droughts, the scenarios themselves must also be exaggerated because they were based on the faulty overestimation of temperature.

This is actually very good news because, with the current real temperature trend, we will not experience the diseases and other calamities the alarmists claim when using the exceedingly high temperatures calculated by their faulty computer models. And, we won’t then need to scrap a proven, reliable and relatively cheap form of electricity production (fossil fuels). Unfortunately, good news doesn’t sell very well, and so it goes unreported — if not ignored — and thus, unrecognized.

Hopefully we’ll soon wake up to reality, before our fragile economy and standard of living is sacrificed, with the poor suffering the most, all based on a false theory.

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