by Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski

20 September 2008

from NZCentreForPoliticalResearch Website

In an op-ed in a Polish weekly I commented recently on a remarkable decrease of global temperature in 2008, and over the past decade.

Not surprisingly the op-ed evoked a strong reaction from Polish co-workers of IPCC, denying the existence of cooling. Surprising, however, was that the criticism dwelled upon a “global climatic conspiracy”, and “colossal international plot”. I did not use these words nor even hinted at such an idea. The idea was probably apparent from the data and facts I presented, showing weaknesses of the man-made global warming hypothesis.

Without irrational political or ideological factors, it is really difficult to understand why so many people believe in human causation of the Modern Warm Period, which was never plausibly proved by scientific evidence.

Some of these factors I will discuss here.
 

Suicidal conspiracy

A conspiracy stratagem was openly presented by Maurice Strong, a godfather of the global environmental movement, and a former senior advisor to Kofi Annan, the U.N. Secretary-General.

In 1972 Strong was a Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, which launched the world environment movement, and he has played a critical role in its globalization. In 1992 Strong was the Secretary-General of the “World Summit” conference in Rio de Janeiro, where on his instigation the foundations for the Kyoto Protocol were laid.

In an interview Strong disclosed his mindset:

"What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is "no." The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change.

 

So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about? This group of world leaders form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse."

(Wood,1990)

The climatic issue became now perhaps the most important agenda of the United Nations and politicians, at least they say so^[1].

It became also a moral issue. In 2007 addressing the UN General Assembly Gro Harlem Brundtland, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Change, pointing at climatic skeptics stated:

“It is irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral to question the seriousness of the real danger of climate change”.

But earlier “scare them to deaths!” morality of “climatists”^[2] was explained by Stephen Schneider, one of their top gurus:

"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but... On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well... we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination.

 

That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have...Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest”

(Schneider, 1989)

The same moral standard is offered by Al Gore:

“I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are”.

(Gore, 2006)

In similar vein Rajendra K. Pauchari, the chairman of IPCC, commented in the last Fourth PCCC Report:

“I hope this will shock people and governments into taking more serious action”.

(Crook, 2007)

Thus IPCC does not have ambition to present an objective climatic situation, but rather “to shock” the people to take actions which would bring no climatic effects (NIPCC, 2008), but rather disastrous global economic and societal consequences. Implementation of these actions would dismantle the global energy system, the primary driving force of our civilization.

This is what Maurice Strong and other leaders of Green Movement apparently have in mind.

The political and business scale of the problem is reflected by sums planned or already spent to counter the blessed natural Modern Warm Period, one of several similar periods enjoyed by the biosphere over the current interglacial ^[3].

According to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, during the past 10 years funds for the promoters of the man-made global warming hypothesis received in the United States alone more than $50 billion.

The International Energy Agency announced in June that cutting by half the CO² emission will cost the world $45 trillion up to 2050, i.e. 1.1% of the global GNP each year (Kanter, 2008). For this expenditure one may expect a trifle climatic effect.

Even if a substantial part of global warming were due to CO² – and it is not – any control efforts currently contemplated, including the punctiliously observed Kyoto protocol, would decrease future temperatures by only 0.02°C, an undetectable amount (NIPCC, 2008).
 

Recent and Future Cooling

Both surface and troposphere observations suggest that we are entering a cool phase of climate. These observations are in a total disagreement with IPCC climatic model projections, based on an assumption that the current Modern Warm Period is due to anthropogenic emissions of CO² (IPCC-AR4, 2007).

The annual increment of global industrial CO² emission increased from 1.1% in 1990-1999 to more than 3% in 2000- 2004 (Raupach et al., 2007), and is still increasing. Thus, according to IPCC projections the global temperature should be increasing now more rapidly than before, but instead we see a cold spell. It is clear that cooling is not related to the rapidly increasing CO² emission.

Its cause is rather the Sun’s activity, which recently dropped precipitously from its 60 year long record in the second half of the 20^th century, the highest in the past 11 centuries (Usoskin et al., 2003), to an extremely low current level.

Sun activity is reflected in the number of sunspots, which normally shows an 11-year periodicity (or 131 month plus or minus 14 month). The current sunspot cycle no. 23 had a maximum in 2001 (150 sunspots in September). NASA officially declared it over in March 2006, with a forecast that the next cycle no. 24 will be 20 to 50 % stronger than the old.

But until now the Sun remained quiet, with only few sunspots sighted both from the old cycle, and from the new one declared again by NASA to start on December 11, 2007. However, the Sun’s activity was still low in the first part of 2008 (NOAA, 2008), and August 2008 was (probably) the first month without sunspots since 1913 (some observations noticed not a “spot” but a tiny short-lived “pore” on 21-22 August).

It seems that we still remain in the cycle 23.

The unusually long low activity of Sun suggests that we may be entering a next Maunder Minimum, a period from 1645 to 1715, when almost no sunspots were visible.

This was the coldest part of the Little Ice Age (1250—1900), when rivers in Europe and America were often frozen, and the Baltic Sea was crossed on ice by armies and travelers. Other authors suggest that the Earth will be facing a slow decrease in temperatures in 2012-2015, reaching a deep freeze around 2050-2060, similar to cooling that took place in 1645-1715, when temperature decreased by 1 to 2°C (Abdussamatov, 2004; Abdussamatov, 2005; Abdussamatov, 2006).

Another analysis of sunspot cycles for the period 1882-2000, projected that the cooling will start in the solar cycle 25, resulting in minimum temperature around 2021-2026 (Bashkirtsev and Mashnich, 2003). A long-term cooling, related to Sun’s activity, was also projected for the period around 2100 and 2200 (Landscheidt, 1995; Landscheidt, 2003).

The current Modern Warm Period is one of innumerous former natural warm climatic phases. Its temperature is lower than in the 4 former warm periods over the past 1500 years (Grudd, 2008). Unfortunately it seems that it comes to an end, and the recent climatic fluctuations suggest that perhaps a new, full scale ice age is imminent.

It may come in the next 50 to 400 years (Broecker, 1995; Bryson, 1993), with ice caps covering northern parts of America and Eurasia.
 

Reliability of IPCC

Each of four IPCC reports became a holy book for the UN, Brussels and national bureaucracies. These credulously accepted reports are now a basis of long-term political and economic decisions. If implemented, the decisions will bring a global scale disaster.

The credulity is astonishing, as many impartial perusals of the IPCC work demonstrated that its assessments and foundations, not withstanding an impressive numerical and graphic façade, are clearly biased, and should be rejected as not providing adequate climatic information for policymakers.

The name of IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tacitly suggests that only now the climate changes. This notion, in various forms for example “climate change is now upon us” (CCSP-USP, 2008) is repeated ad nauseam in the names of institutions, programs, scientific papers and media.

This, however, is not true. Without human intervention and without influence of CO², climate was changing constantly over the past several billion years, sometimes much more and much faster than now. The rapidity with which the Modern Warm Period appeared is often invoked as a proof of its human cause. However, the Dansgaard-Oeschger events (D-Os), with their extremely rapid changes of climate, occurred without human intervention about 20 times during the past 100,000 years.

The last of them, the so called “Younger Dryas”, happened 12,800 years ago, when the warm climate switched rapidly to a cold one, and then after 1300 years, almost immediately returned back into warm phase.

Both times the switching took just a few years, much less than the recovery from the Little Ice Age after 1900 AD, which “is now upon us”.
 

Proofs of human causation of the Modern Warm Period

The most important argument of IPCC report (IPCC-AR4, 2007) for man-made climate warming is based on climatic models combined with observations of temperature in the period 1906 – 2005 over the five continents and the whole globe.

The IPCC use the “fingerprint argument” that the Modern Warm Period is caused by human activities, particularly by the burning of fossil fuels.

The argument is that computer models using only natural climatic factors, “such as volcanic activity and variations in solar [radiative] output”, are unable to simulate the past temperature trends, but,

“When the effects of increasing levels of greenhouse gases are included in the models, as well as (natural) climatic factors, the models produce good simulations of the warming that occurred over the past century”.

(IPCC-AR4, 2007)

This is, however not true. Using all the anthropogenic and natural factors, the models are unable to correctly match the real warming trends with altitude.

Greenhouse models predicted about two times higher temperature at 10km than at the surface, while the balloon measurements gave the opposite result: no increasing of warming, but rather cooling with altitude in the tropical zone.

There are two errors in the IPCC “fingerprint argument”:

1. limiting natural factors only to solar irradiance, and ignoring other cosmic factors

2. incorrectly assuming, on the basis of unreliable ice core studies, and after rejecting a large body of direct measurements of CO² in the 19^th and most of the 20^th century atmosphere, that during the past 650,000 years the natural concentration of atmospheric CO² never exceeded the concentration of 180 to 300ppm (parts per million), that the pre-industrial value was about 280ppm, and that human activity increased it to about 380ppm, i.e. by about 36%.

To fit these data into a global carbon cycle IPCC assumed a speculative lifetime for man-made CO² in the atmosphere as 50 to 200 years, ignoring observational evidence from 37 studies (based on natural and nuclear bomb carbon-14, Suess effect, radon-222, solubility data and carbon-13/carbon-12 mass balance) documenting that the real lifetime is about 5 years ^[4].

With CO² atmospheric lifetime of about 5 years the maximum amount of man-made CO² remaining now in the atmosphere is only 4%, and not 36% (see review in Segalstad, 1998).
 

Ignoring cosmic rays

IPCC-AR4 limited the natural “radiation forcing” ^[5] to only one factor (solar irradiance), and based its estimates on ten anthropogenic factors, listed in the Summary for Policymakers in Figure SPM.2.

The IPCC regards the anthropogenic CO² emission as the most important factor, and assumed it to be 13.8 times more powerful than the solar irradiance. But the glaciological studies clearly demonstrated that it is climate that influences the atmospheric CO² level, and not vice versa.

Over the past several hundred thousand years increases of temperature always preceded the CO² concentration increases; also climatic cooling always preceded decreases of CO² (Caillon et al., 2003; Fischer et al., 1999; Idso, 1988; Indermuhle et al., 1999; Monnin et al., 2001; Mudelsee, 2001).

This suggests that changes of temperature of the atmosphere are the causative factor for CO² changes, probably by influencing the rate of land erosion, and the solubility of gas in oceanic waters (lower in warm than in cold water). In its almost monothematic concentration on greenhouse gases, especially on CO², the IPCC underestimated water vapor - the main greenhouse gas contributing about 95% to the global greenhouse effect (Ellingson et al., 1991; Lindzen, 1991).

About 95% of the total annual emission of CO² into the atmosphere is natural and comes from the land and sea, and only 5% from human sources. Thus the anthropogenic CO² contributes only a tiny fraction to the total greenhouse effect, probably less than 0.15%.

The IPCC ignores a dominating climatic effect of incoming cosmic rays governed by solar activity, well known for 17 years (Friis-Christensen and Lassen, 1991). Recent studies demonstrate that the climate of the Earth is completely determined by the Sun, via insolation and the action of galactic cosmic rays, and that the so-called anthropogenic “CO² doubling” problem is practically absent (Rusov et al., 2008).

In opposition to the IPCC message, the natural forces that are driving the climate are 4 to 5 orders of magnitude greater than the corresponding anthropogenic impact, and humans may be responsible for less than 0.01oC of warming during the last century (Khilyuk and Chilingar, 2006).

The cosmoclimatologic studies demonstrate a powerful influence on climate of fluctuations of muon fraction of cosmic rays, caused by short-term variations of the Sun’s activity (Svensmark, 2007; Svensmark and Calder, 2008), and in geological time scale by migration of the Solar System trough spiral arms of the Milky Way, with different concentration of dust and activity of novas (Shaviv and Veizer, 2003).

In the 20^th century the reduction of cosmic rays was such that the maximal fluxes towards the end of the century were similar to the minima seen around 1900 (Figure 10). Decreasing cosmic-ray flux, caused a decrease of low cloud cover, and resulted in warming the Earth.

Low-level clouds cover more than 25% of the Earth surface and exert a strong cooling at the surface. The change in radiative forcing by 3% change in low cloud cover over one solar cycle will vary the input of heat to the Earth surface by about 2 Wm^-2. It can be compared with 1.4 Wm^-2 estimated by IPCC for the greenhouse effect of all human-made CO² added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution (Svensmark, 2007).

The low cloud formation depending on fluctuations of cosmic rays, ignored by IPCC, is a much more plausible cause of the Modern Warming Period than CO² concentration changes. As was always in the past, also now CO² change lags the temperature. Not a single publication on cosmoclimatologic effects was cited in the IPCC reports.

This disqualifies them as impartial and a reliable source of information for policymakers and scientific community.
 

Proxy ice data instead of atmospheric CO²

The foundation of the hypothesis that the Modern Warm Period is induced by humans is an assumption that the pre-industrial level of CO² was 280ppm, i.e. about 100ppm lower than now.

British engineer, G.S Callendar may be truly regarded as the father of this hypothesis, and of this assumption (Callendar, 1938; Callendar, 1940; Callendar, 1949; Callendar, 1958). This assumption was made possible by the arbitrary rejection of more than 90,000 technically excellent, direct measurements of CO² in the atmosphere, carried out in America, Asia and Europe, during 149 years between 1812 and 1961.

Some of these direct measurements were carried out by Nobel Prize winners. Callendar rejected more than 69% from a set of 19^th century CO² measurements ranging from 250 to 550ppm.

This shows a bias in the selection method. Without such selection the 19^th century data compiled by Callendar averaged 335ppm (Slocum, 1955). Similar biased selections were later applied in ice core studies of greenhouse gases (Jaworowski, 1994).

The low, flat CO² ice-core concentrations, never reaching above 300ppm during the past 650,000 years and six interglacials (Siegenthaler et al., 2005), even in periods when the global temperature was much warmer than now, suggest that either atmospheric CO² has no discernible influence on the climate, or that the proxy ice core reconstructions of the chemical composition of the ancient atmosphere are false – both propositions are probably true.

The very long-term ice core data combined with more recent 19^th century ones, and with direct atmospheric measurements (since 1958), are widely used for propagating the idea of man-made global warming.
 

Ice core foundation of greenhouse warming

The proxy estimates of the past CO² atmospheric concentrations, based on analysis of air bubbles recovered from ice deposited in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries at the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctic, are regarded as a strongest proof that humans increased CO² content in the atmosphere, causing the Modern Warm Period.

However, polar ice is an improper matrix for reconstruction of the chemical composition of the pre-industrial and ancient atmosphere. No efforts to improve the analytic excellence of CO² determinations can change this situation.

Ice and the ice cores do not fulfill the essential closed-system criteria, indispensable for reliable estimate of the past CO² levels. One of them is a lack of liquid water in ice. This criterion is not met, as there is ample evidence that even the coldest Antarctic ice contains liquid water, in which the solubility of CO² is about 73 times, and 26 times higher than that of N² and O², respectively.

This dramatically changes the chemical composition of the gas inclusions in polar ice in comparison to atmospheric air.

More than 20 physical and chemical processes, mostly related to the presence of liquid water, contribute to the alteration of the original air in gas inclusions - see review in (Jaworowski et al., 1992). One of these processes is the formation of clathrates (gas hydrates), solid crystals formed at high pressure by interaction of gas with water molecules.

In the ice sheets, CO², O², and N² start to form clathrates at about 5 bars, 75 bars, and 100 bars, respectively. Due to this process, CO² starts to leave air bubbles at a depth of about 200 meters, and the air bubbles themselves disappear completely at a depth of about 1000meters.

Drilling, which is an extremely brutal procedure, decompresses the ice cores, in which the solid clathrates decompose back into gas form, exploding in the process as if they were microscopic grenades. In the decompressed bubble-free ice the explosions form new gas cavities and mini-cracks. The ice cores, however, are earlier exposed to a coarser cracking by vibration in drilling barrel, and by the sheeting phenomenon at the bottom of the borehole, induced by pressure difference between the drilling fluid and the ice.

The cracks open the gate to extreme pollution of the inside of ice cores with heavy metals from drilling fluid, thousands of times higher than their levels in surface snow (Boutron et al., 1990; Boutron et al., 1987), and for the escape of gas inclusions.

Glaciological CO² records are strongly influenced by natural processes in the ice sheets and man-made artifacts in the ice cores, which lead to the depletion of CO² by 30% to 50%, probably mostly in the upper layers of the ice sheets.

These records are also beset with arbitrary selection of data, experimentally unfounded assumptions on gas age, one-sided interpretations ascribing the observed trends to human factors, and ignoring other explanations. A classic example of such manipulation of ice core data is the famous Siple curve, the mother of many other “CO² hockey curves”.

The problem with the Siple data is that the CO² concentration found in this locality in pre-industrial ice from a depth of 68 meters (i.e. above the depth of clathrate formation) was “too high” to fit the man-made warming hypothesis. In this ice deposited in 1890 AD, the CO² concentration was 328ppm, not about 290ppm, as needed by the hypothesis.

The CO² atmospheric concentration of about 328ppm was measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii in 1973 (Boden et al., 1990), i.e. 83 years after the ice was deposited at Siple. Instead of rejecting the assumption on low pre-industrial concentration of CO² in the atmosphere, the glaciologists found a “solution”.

An ad hoc speculative assumption, not supported by any factual evidence solved the problem: the average age of air was arbitrary decreed to be exactly 83 years younger than the ice in which it was trapped (Jaworowski, 1994a; Jaworowski et al., 1992).

The “corrected” ice data were made to smoothly overlay the recent Mauna Loa record and then were reproduced in countless publications as a famous “Siple curve”. Eight years after first publication of the Siple curve, and a year after its criticism (Jaworowski et al., 1992), glaciologists attempted to prove experimentally the “age assumption” (Schwander et al., 1993), but they failed (Jaworowski, 1994a).

Similar manipulation of data was applied also to ice cores from other polar sites, to make the “CO² hockey curves” covering the past 1000 and even 400,000 years (IPCC, 2001; Wolff, 2003). For some of these curves much longer air/ice age difference was arbitrarily assumed, without any experimental support, reaching up to 5,500 years.

The apparent aim of these manipulations, and of ignoring other proxy CO² determinations and of some 90,000 direct determinations in the pre-industrial and 20th century atmosphere, was to induce in the public a false conviction that the 20th century level of CO² was unprecedented over the past hundreds thousand years.

The “CO² hockey curves” were used as an “indicator of human i” (IPCC, 2001) (IPCC-AR4, 2007).

Also in the report by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research these curves are used as an evidence of,

“human influences” and “fingerprint” and to argue that the “observed (current) warming could not have been caused by natural forces alone”.

(CCSP-USP, 2008)

In fact this is the only proof of human causation of the Modern Warm Period presented in the Report. This proof is false.
 

Final Thoughts

The Siple case demonstrates an unacceptable distortion of science.

During the past 16 years I presented it in many publications, together with data demonstrating that polar ice does not fulfill the close-system criteria, essential for reconstruction of chemical composition of the ancient atmosphere. This had practically no effect on a worldwide acceptance of the false, ice core based, dogma on human causation of the Modern Warm Period.

The recent climatic cooling might perhaps open the ears of the public and decision makers to what the astronomers have been saying:

our Sun enters a long period of slumber, cooling the Earth and its fellow planets.

We cannot enhance it with Kyoto or stop it otherwise.

But we can adjust.

 

References

[1] For example:

• Angela Merkel - “Climate Change is the greatest threat that human civilization has ever faced”

• Barak Obama - “Climate change is real. Not only is it real, it’s here, and its effects are giving rise to frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster”

• Prince Charles - “Climate change should be seen as the greatest challenge to ever face mankind”

• Gordon Brown - “Climate change makes us all global citizens, we are truly all in this together”

• Tony Blair - “We have reached the critical moment of decision on climate change. Failure to act to now would be deeply and unforgivably irresponsible. We urgently require a global environmental revolution”.

[2] “Climatology is a science. Climatism is an ideology. Climatologists are scientists. Climatists are social or political organizers who abuse climatology in service of ideologues. Climatology was and still is an investigation of nature. Climatism is the exploitation of the fear of nature to gain power, wealth and social esteem”.

Anonym.

[3] During the Holocene Warming 7800 to 9500 years ago, at the dawn of the agriculture and great civilizations, the temperature of the Arctic was up to 7°C higher than now, the polar bears and many other species survived there, and were better off than in colder periods [Jaworowski Z. (1990b) Influence of climate changes on animal life in Arctic. Chapter 7 in R. Hanson (ed.) Influence of climate changes in polar regions (in Norwegian). pp. 102-118. Norsk Polarinstitutt.]

[4] CO² atmospheric lifetime of 5 years was determined in 1959 by Bert Bolin. Apparently he forgot it three decades later, as the first chairman of IPCC (1988-1998).

[5] Change in difference between the incoming radiation energy and the outgoing radiation energy.