Monday, December 28, 2009
Climate change is just a hypothesis
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Lars Hagen
Hagen is a retired engineer. He lives in Moneta.
Contrary to Frank Munley's assertions that skeptics are either in the energy industry's control or are very dull people ("'Climategate' tempest in a teapot," Dec. 16 commentary), my initial views of global warming were formed by viewing land-based glaciers in Alaska and subsequently glaciers in Washington state and southern Norway.
That inspired me to look at the work published by the Cambridge Institute and other academics relative to our 250 years of natural global warming, and I might not be considered too dull nor inspired by big oil.
The Mendenhall glacier center highlights a graphic of the glacier deglaciation history that started from the furthest moraine in approximately 1750 (end of little ice age and start of the American Revolution) to its current location. This is not complex reconstruction; people lived there during all this time period.
The graphic shows massive melting and retreat occurred from 1750 to 1950, before there was any significant increase in atmospheric CO2.
I subsequently visited Nisqually Glacier at Mount Ranier in Washington and both Storbreen and Nigardsbreen Glaciers in southern Norway. They also have the same 1750 to 1950 history.
Subsequent review of data from the Cambridge studies and other universities show that many northern hemisphere land-based glaciers have a similar history and left a similar footprint.
Based on this data, it is clear that all global warming data and analysis should start at 1750 (end of the little ice age) and those who propose it is man-made should explain the massive 200 years of deglaciation without significant increase in atmospheric CO2.
The published NASA temperature data shows that there has only been one degree warming in the past 100 years and no net warming in the past 10 years.
It's not clear why alarmists would describe this as a crisis given the variability of Earth's climate for thousands of years.
There is no CO2-based explanation for the 35 years of significant cooling from 1940 to 1975 nor is there any clear CO2-based explanation why the rate of warming is the same for the first and last 35 years of the 20th century. All this data is inconsistent with CO2 being the forcing function for global temperature.
Also, Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" presentation did not point out that there was a 200- to 800-year delay from Vostok ice-core temperature changes until changes occurred in CO2 (an omission that by itself falsified the hypothesis that CO2 was the temperature forcing function).
And most significantly, there is no measured hot spot in the tropics at 10 km, a key measurement parameter that is a required scientific component if CO2 were causing warming. That is clearly a hypothesis. It is not at the level of a theory and clearly not proven fact.
These open issues form a small subset of the many unanswered issues with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change hypothesis that mankind is causing global warming.
They should cause one to conclude that the debate is clearly not over and that the alarmists need to publicly and openly address the many issues that exist, place all the taxpayer-funded data into open-system archives, stop fixing data to hide results that don't support their hypothesis, and join in an open and constructive dialogue that will result in a clear understanding of the significant level of uncertainty in their hypothesis.
Real scientists don't manipulate data to support their hypothesis and they don't try to marginalize and personally disparage dissenting members of their scientific community.
