OpsLens

The Climate Calamity Fairy Tale

“What can I do to prevent climate change and save the earth?” is a typical question coming from a website providing opportunity to get answers to all sorts of amazing questions on an unlimited variety of subjects. Somehow, I became one of many people to whom climate change questions are directed.

Appended to the end of this piece for anyone interested in reading it, I have a three-paragraph summary detailing why this is bogus science. Depending on the exact nature of the question, I copy and paste this into the space provided for answers. Anyone who took high school physics could have reasoned it out themselves.

To give you perspective, I have a civil engineering degree and spent 40 years in U.S. and European environmental markets.

Climate change, aka global warming, was weaponized by the UN’s circa 1990 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to promote collection of carbon taxes from developed economies. It’s cover story is that it was dedicated to providing the world with an objective, scientific view of climate change. Noteworthy is the fact that there is no mention in its charter about evaluation to determine if it’s real or not.

Cringeworthy is the image of IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore walking up the aisle together to receive the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Pachauri was an industrial engineer and Gore had one college science class in which he earned a “D,” apparently providing all he needed to know to write “An Inconvenient Truth.” It is unlikely either one could spell climatology.

I receive between 10 and 20 questions a day. Here are some samples:

To benefit the environment, should we stop printing paper books and rely only on electronic media?

What would automakers’ long-term strategy be if they need to meet California’s strict emission standards?

How do you make people care about climate change who do not already?

What is more accurate description of what is happening to the world weather systems? Is it Global warming or Climate change?

What is the likelihood that climate change can be averted without developed nations’ government involvement?

Who is your favorite climate change expert(s)?

How can driving a car affect the climate cycle?

Tone of the questions tells us unequivocally that people have serious regard for this phenomenon and are concerned about how it will affect their lives. In fact, it already has: look back at 2008 when crude oil priced out at $147/barrel, largely due to supply restrictions applied in deference to climate threats.

When plotted on a graph with consumer spending, the latter took a nose-dive coincidental with the crude price spike eventually costing millions of jobs. We were told that this precipitous economic decline was due to bursting bubbles, but the facts tell us otherwise.

Most interesting are reactions from some questioners when told that climate change is nothing to worry about. Rather than express relief, some become belligerent about anyone would dare deny the validity of their concerns. “Deniers” is a term that “global warmers” like to apply to non- believers in hope of shaming them by association of that term with Holocaust skeptics. For many, this has become a religion.

If man-made climate change is not true, how has its influence persisted for thirty years? One reason is that it is a political expedient for politicians dedicated to telling the rest of us how to live. If government can limit our energy sources, it leads to restricting a wide range of choices.

Secondly, biased media has no incentive to focus any attention on climate falsehoods. Even conservative-oriented media made no effort to highlight inconsistencies in the argument, largely because talking heads have no climate clues. When medical questions are being discussed, they always have a doctor participating, and the same holds true for lawyers and legal discussions. Perhaps they have never heard of a climatologist, and the division between believers and non-believers is much closer to 50/50 rather than the advertised 97 to 3 in favor of climate hawks.

On the jacket of Christopher Booker’s book “The Real Global Warming Disaster” is a quote by Professor Richard Lindzen, described as the world’s leading atmospheric physicist and climate scientist in 2007: “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”

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CLIMATE SUMMARY

  1. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere has no measurable effect on planet temperatures. Proponents of man-made climate change pointed to elevated CO2 levels in the atmosphere during warm periods when examining ice core samples as proof of their theory. Closer examination of those samples showed that the elevated concentrations in the atmosphere occurred at the end of the warm period, making it an effect, not a cause. When temperatures are elevated, oceans give up their CO2 to the atmosphere. Something else caused the warming.
  2. 400 ppm CO2 is supposed to be close to a point of no return. This is the mathematical equivalent of one part in 2500 parts. Specific heat of carbon dioxide is roughly only twice that of other atmospheric constituents. Causing a measurable temperature increase would be like powering the lights of a major sports stadium through a single household extension cord. For those who avoided high school physics, specific heat is the amount of heat energy in BTUs or calories required to raise the temperature of a substance one degree. A specific heat twice the other air components would have enough heat energy to raise the other 2499 molecules (2/2499 multiplied by the temperature differential in degrees).
  3. The apparent agent of planet temperature change is sun-spot activity. The Maunder Minimum, a 200-year period of almost no sun spot activity, is associated with the Little Ice Age which ended in 1849. It has been gradually warming since and is still not as warm as the Medieval Warm Period which saw orchards in Greenland.