Here are 10 of the many scientific problems with the assumption human activity is causing “global warming” or “climate change”:
1. Temperature records from around the world do not support the assumption that today’s temperatures are unusual.
The all-time high temperature record for the world was set in 1913, while the all-time cold temperature record was set in 1983. By continent, all but one set their all-time high temperature record more recently than their all-time cold temperature records. In the United States, which has more weather stations than any other location in the world, more cold temperature records by state were set more recently than hot temperature records. When the temperature records for each state were considered for each month of the year, a total of 600 data points (50 states x 12 months), again cold temperature records were set in far greater numbers more recently and hot temperature records were set longer ago. This is directly contradictory to what would be expected if global warming were real.
2. Satellite temperature data does not support the assumption that temperatures are rising rapidly:
Starting at the end of 1978, satellites began to collect temperature data from around the globe. For the next 20 years, until 1998, the global average temperature remained unchanged in direct contradiction to the earth-bound weather station data, which indicated “unprecedented” temperature increases. In 1998 there was a strong El Nino year with high temperatures, which returned to pre-1998 levels until 2001. In 2001 there was a sudden jump in the global temperature of about 0.3 degrees centigrade which then remained at about that level for the next 14 years, with a very slight overall decrease in the global temperatures during that time.
3. Current temperatures are always compared to the temperatures of the 1980’s, but for many parts of the world the 1980’s was the coldest decade of the last 100+ years:
If the current temperatures are compared to those of the 1930’s one would find nothing remarkable. For many places around the world, the 1930’s were the warmest decade of the last 100 years, including those found in Greenland. Comparing today’s temperatures to the 1980’s is like comparing our summer temperatures to those in April, rather than those of last summer. It is obvious why the global warming community does this, and very misleading (or deceiving).
4. The world experienced a significant cooling trend between 1940 and 1980:
Many places around the world experienced a quite significant and persistent cooling trend to the point where scientists began to wonder if the world was beginning to slide into a new ice age period. For example, Greenland experienced some of the coldest years in 120 years during the 1980’s, as was the case in many other places around the world. During that same 40-year period, the CO2 levels around the world increased by 17%, which is a very significant increase. If global temperatures decreased by such a significant amount over 40 years while atmospheric CO2 increased by such a large amount we can only reach two conclusions: 1. There must be a weak correlation, at best, between atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures, 2. There must be stronger factors driving climate and temperature than atmospheric CO2.
5. Urban heat island effect skews the temperature data of a significant number of weather stations: It has been shown that nighttime temperatures recorded by many weather stations have been artificially raised by the expulsion of radiant heat collected and stored during the daytime by concrete and brick structures such as houses, buildings, roads, and also cars. Since land area of cities and large towns containing these weather stations only make up a very small fraction of the total land area, this influence on global average temperature data is significant. Since the daytime and nighttime temperatures are combined to form an average, these artificially-raised nighttime temperatures skew the average data. When one only looks at daytime temperatures only from larger urban areas, the “drastic global warming” is no longer visible. (This can also be seen when looking at nearby rural area weather station data, which is more indicative of the true climate of that area).
6. There is a natural inverse relationship between global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels:
Contrary to what would be assumed when listening to global warming banter or while watching An Inconvenient Truth, higher temperatures increase atmospheric CO2 levels and lower temperatures decrease atmospheric CO2 levels, not the other way around. Any college freshman chemistry student knows that the solubility of CO2 decreases with increasing temperatures and thus Earth’s oceans will release large amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere when the water is warmer and will absorb more CO2 when the water is colder. That is why the CO2 level during the ice ages was so much lower than the levels today. That doesn’t take away the fact that we are artificially raising the atmospheric CO2 levels, but just because we do, that doesn’t mean that this will cause temperatures to increase in any significant way. The 40-year cooling period between 1940 and 1980 appear to support that premise. What we can conclude is that the ice ages were not caused by changes in the atmospheric CO2 levels and that other stronger factors were involved with these very large climate changes.
7. The CO2 cannot, from a scientific perspective, be the cause of significant global temperature changes:
The CO2 molecule is a linear molecule and thus only has limited natural vibrational frequencies, which in turn give this molecule only limited capability of absorbing radiation that is radiated from the Earth’s surface. The three main wavelengths that can be absorbed by CO2 are 4.26 micrometers, 7.2 micrometers, and 15.0 micrometers. Of those 3, only the 15-micrometer is significant because it falls right in range of the infrared frequencies emitted by Earth. However, the H2O molecule which is much more prevalent in the Earth’s atmosphere, and which is a bend molecule, thus having many more vibrational modes, absorbs many more frequencies emitted by the Earth, including to some extent the radiation absorbed by CO2. It turns out that between water vapor and CO2, nearly all of the radiation that can be absorbed by CO2 is already being absorbed. Thus increasing the CO2 levels should have very minimal impact on the atmosphere’s ability to retain heat radiated from the Earth. That explains why there appears to be a very weak correlation at best between CO2 levels and global temperatures and why after the CO2 levels have increased by 40% since the beginning of the industrial revolution the global average temperature has increased only 0.8 degrees centigrade, even if we want to contribute all of that increase to atmospheric CO2 increases and none of it to natural causes.
8. There have been many periods during our recent history that a warmer climate was prevalent long before the industrial revolution:
Even in the 1990 IPCC report a chart appeared that showed the medieval warm period as having had warmer temperatures than those currently being experienced. But it is hard to convince people about global warming with that information, so five years later a new graph was presented, now known as the famous hockey stick graph, which did away with the medieval warm period. Yet the evidence is overwhelming at so many levels that warmer periods existed on Earth during the medieval warm period as well as during Roman Times and other time periods during the last 10,000 years. There is plenty of evidence found in the Dutch archives that shows that over the centuries, parts of the Netherlands disappeared beneath the water during these warm periods, only to appear again when the climate turned colder. The famous Belgian city of Brugge, once known as “Venice of the North,” was a sea port during the warm period that set Europe free from the dark ages (when temperatures were much colder), but when temperatures began to drop with the onset of the little ice age, the ocean receded and now Brugge is ten miles away from the coastline. Consequently, during the medieval warm period the Vikings settled in Iceland and Greenland and even along the coast of Canada, where they enjoyed the warmer temperatures, until the climate turned cold again, after which they perished from Greenland and Iceland became ice-locked again during the bitter cold winters. The camps promoting global warming have been systematically erasing mention of these events in order to bolster the notion that today’s climate is unusual compared to our recent history.
9. Glaciers have been melting for more than 150 years
The notion of melting glaciers as prove positive that global warming is real has no real scientific basis. Glaciers have been melting for over 150 years. It is no secret that glaciers advanced to unprecedented levels in recent human history during the period known as the Little Ice Age. Many villages in the French, Swiss, and Italian Alps saw their homes threatened and fields destroyed by these large ice masses. Pleas went out to local bishops and even the Pope in Rome to come and pray in front of these glaciers in the hope of stopping their unrelenting advance. Around 1850, the climate returned to more “normal” temperatures and the glaciers began to recede. But then between 1940 and 1980, as the temperatures declined again, most of the glaciers halted their retreat and began to expand again, until warmer weather at the end of the last century caused them to continue the retreat they started 150 years earlier. Furthermore, we now know that many of the glaciers around the world did not exist 4000 to 6000 years ago. As a case in point, there is a glacier to the far north of Greenland above the large ice sheet covering most of the island called the Hans Tausen Glacier. It is 50 miles long ,30 miles wide and up to 1000 feet thick. A Scandinavian research team bored ice cores all the way to the bottom and discovered that 4000 years ago this glacier did not exist. It was so warm 4000 years ago that many of the glaciers around the world didn’t exist but have returned because of the onset of colder weather. Today’s temperatures are much lower than those that were predominant during the Holocene era as substantiated by studying the many cores that were dug from Greenland’s ice sheet.
10. “Data adjustment” is used to continue the perception of global warming:
For the first several years of my research I relied on the climate data banks of NASA and GISS, two of the most prestigious scientific bodies of our country. After years of painstaking gathering of data, and relentless graphing of that data, I discovered that I was not looking at the originally gathered data, but data that had been “adjusted” for what was deemed “scientific reasons.” Unadjusted data is simply not available from these data banks. Fortunately I was able to find the original weather station data from over 7000 weather stations from around the world in the KNMI database. (Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute). There I was able to review both the adjusted and unadjusted data as well as the breakout of the daytime and nighttime data. The results were astounding. I found that data from many stations around the world had been systematically “adjusted” to make it seem that global warming was happening when, in fact, for many places around the world the opposite was true. Following will be a few of the myriad of examples of this data adjustment. When I present my material during presentations at local colleges, these are the charts that have some of the greatest impact in affecting the opinion of the students, especially when they realize that there is a concerted effort to misrepresent what is actually happening. Another amazing result was that when only graphing the daily highs from around the country, a very different picture arises from the historical temperature data.
There are many more specific areas that I have researched and for which I have compiled data and presentation material, equally compelling regarding at exposing the fallacies of global warming. A new twist has swept the global warming movement lately, especially since they had to admit that their own data showed that there was a “hiatus” on the warming, as illustrated in the 2014 IPCC report; their data showed an actual cooling over the last 10 years. The new term: “climate change” is now taking over, such that unusual events of any kind, like the record snowfall in Boston, can be blamed on the burning of fossil fuels without offering any concrete scientific data as to how one could cause the other.
Mike van Biezen is adjunct professor at Compton College, Santa Monica College, El Camino College, and Loyola Marymount University teaching Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy, and Earth Science.
