On Believing Alarmist Climate Scientists - Or Not

Subtitle:  The Balance of Evidence Shows Disbelief is Justified

The alarmist climate scientists, or as referred to by me on SLB: False-Alarmists, are in the news and electronic sites quite regularly these days, with opponents (such as me) pointing out the many errors, inconsistencies, questionable practices, and even outright lies.  A friend recently sent me a link to Scott Adams' (of Dilbert cartoon fame) blog article, see link. to  "How to Convince Skeptics that Climate Change is a Problem," from March 8, 2017.   It is an excellent article, with 14 main points that are discussed below.   Many of these same points were made by me on SLB over the years. 

Before getting to the Adams points and my comments on those, a brief excursion into what (in my opinion) is, or perhaps could be, one of the motivations for false-alarmists to take and hold the positions they have taken.  This requires considering a few historic facts and myths. 

In the 1950s (or even earlier if one believes that), The End Of Oil was a common concern, even a fear among some.  Peak Oil was the term widely used, to describe the way oil fields decreased their production, while new, replacement oil fields were getting more and more scarce.   Some advocated for abandoning oil altogether and using nuclear energy for as much as possible.  They envisioned nuclear cars, trains, buses, and of course every electric grid would be powered by nuclear plants.    This of course led to roughly 450 nuclear power plants being started up globally, with 120 (approximately) of those in the US.  (note, many of them are now shut down, with 99 or so still running in the US).    It is worth mentioning that, before the 1970s oil price shocks, oil-fired power plants provided approximately 20 percent of all electricity in the US.  As oil became too expensive to burn for making electricity, nuclear plants came online and produce the same fraction of US power: 18 to 20 percent annually.   That is all the nuclear plants could achieve in market share, only what very expensive oil had produced. 

In the 1960s, pollution concerns from industry, and from common daily life became a growing concern.  A widely-read book predicted humanity's collapse under the weight of the massive pollution problem (see Limits To Growth, a widely debunked and spectacularly wrong book; but back then it had some credibility).   And, of course, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson was a must-read book for those who were oh-so-concerned with saving the planet.   That book, Silent Spring, has also been widely debunked as false science.  

The concern over widespread pollution led to environmental regulations, including of course the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and many others.  Those did a lot of good, with much cleaner air and water today compared to 50 years ago. 

However, oil did not run out.   The geologists, oil drilling exploration companies, computer scientists, all worked together to find not only new oil fields, but ways to produce more oil from existing oil fields.   Industrialization, and modernization created huge demands for electricity world-wide.  But, the justifiable concerns over nuclear plant safety (we've had 5 nuclear reactors melt down or explode, or both thus far) led to much of that electricity being produced from burning coal.  

The Limits To Growth crowd saw an opportunity: if pollution via smelly particles and fumes was already reduced, and oily, smelly, foamy substances on the waterways was gone, it would be necessary to find another way to shut down those evil oil companies that kept finding cheaper and cheaper oil.  Peak Oil refused to peak, nuclear power was way too expensive and far too dangerous so was not powering everything, so some other way had to be found to eliminate oil companies. 

Their way forward was to seize on a little-known physical truth, that carbon dioxide can be made to absorb and re-radiate heat energy.  That is an absolute fact, no doubt about it.  It is taught in universities to chemical engineers and mechanical engineers in the heat transfer course.  see link to SLB article on this, "Chemical Engineers, CO2, and Absorptive Re-Radiation; Subtitle:  Fired Furnaces Have Strong Radiating CO2; Atmosphere Does Not."  If carbon dioxide could be blamed for the Earth's apparent (some say measured) warming, and it is a fact that burning of oil and coal produces carbon dioxide, then the link could be made and evil oil exterminated forever.   

It was also convenient that the Earth was going through a natural cycle from a cold state, or at least colder than the recent past, and into a warmer state.  The cold period lasted approximately 500 years (1350 to 1850), and is known as the Little Ice Age.   (this leads to some serious contradictions for the false-alarmists, what caused the Little Ice Age, what caused it to end, and their pet theory about carbon dioxide heating up the Earth.  But, more on that in a bit.)   The few hundred years before the Little Ice Age were much warmer, according to all the evidence.   

So, there is the situation in a nutshell: a burning desire to end oil companies, build nuclear plants for all, led to dubious (some say fraudulent) manipulations of science to create a false-alarm over man-made global warming.  

Now, to Scott Adams' 14 points.   (The Adams article is an excellent essay, highly recommend reading it). 

1. Stop telling me the “models” (plural) are good.
2. Stop telling me the climate models are excellent at hindcasting, meaning they work when you look at history.
3. Tell me what percentage of warming is caused by humans versus natural causes. If humans are 10% of the cause, I am not so worried. If we are 90%, you have my attention.
4. Stop attacking some of the messengers for believing that our reality holds evidence of Intelligent Design.
5. Skeptics produce charts of the earth’s temperature going up and down for ages before humans were industrialized. If you can’t explain-away that chart, I can’t hear anything else you say.
6. Stop telling me the arctic ice on one pole is decreasing if you are ignoring the increase on the other pole. 
7. When skeptics point out that the Earth has not warmed as predicted, don’t change the subject to sea levels.
8. If the rate of change of temperature is key, stop telling me about record high temperatures as if they are proof of something.
9. Stop pointing to record warmth in one place when we’re also having record cold in others.
10. Don’t tell me how well your models predict the past. Tell me how many climate models have ever been created, since we started doing this sort of thing, and tell me how many have now been discarded because they didn’t predict correctly. 
11. When you claim the oceans have risen dramatically, you need to explain why insurance companies are ignoring this risk and why my local beaches look exactly the same to me. 
12. If you want me to believe warmer temperatures are bad, you need to produce a chart telling me how humankind thrived during various warmer and colder eras.You also need to convince me that economic models are accurate. 
13. Stop conflating the basic science and the measurements with the models. Each has its own credibility. -- (the basic science is badly corrupted, as shown on SLB)
14. If skeptics make you retreat to Pascal’s Wager as your main argument for aggressively responding [to] climate change, please understand that you lost the debate. The world is full of risks that might happen. 

Sowell commentary on the 14 points. 

1. The “models” (plural) are good.  Adams correctly points out that having multiple models for climate simulations is just begging for zero credibility.  Here on SLB, it has been pointed out many times that settled science, credible science, is based on a single model that has been proven over and over.   Things like gravity, electromagnetism, heat transfer, chemical reactions, and many others.   False-alarmists have more than 20 models (depending on what source one cites), and there are many different outcomes.    The idea that the models are "good" is also false, as many writers have pointed out repeatedly.  As just one instance, recently Dr. John Christy (University of Alabama at Huntsville) testified before Congress that there is complete disagreement between the climate models' results of great warming, and measured data that show there is no warming in the atmosphere.                                                     
2. Climate models are excellent at hindcasting.  Adams points out that hindcasting is good, but not sufficient for believing a future forecast.   This is an important point in complex system modeling; we have a very great amount of experience in modeling oil refineries and chemical plants.   There are essentially two types of models: the first is based on first principles; the second is based on empirical data.   The only one that can ever be used for a forecast is based on first principles.  An empirically-based model is only as good as the narrow region or range of the data.   In climate science, the future is necessarily out of the range of empirical data.   It is also quite true that the climate models have far too much parameterization, or empirical modeling.   It is no surprise to the chemical engineers (such as me) with process modeling experience that the climate models fail, and fail miserably.   There are many other reasons for the climate models' failure, though, including false attribution of causation (blaming Carbon Dioxide, for example).                                                                                                   
3. Percentage of warming caused by humans versus natural causes.  This point is very good; if humans are responsible for 10 percent of the recent warming, nobody need be concerned, but if it's 90 percent, there is cause for alarm.   As written just above, the Earth is climbing out of a natural, 500-year cold period.  Of course the Earth is warming.   The fact that climate scientists choose to believe that Carbon Dioxide has something to do with the warming is more than a bit suspect.   The fact is, the measured rate of warming (and glacier shrinkage) is the same today as it was in 1850-1900.  Yet, even the false-alarmists admit that no change in carbon dioxide occurred back then.  A further temporary warming occurred from about 1910 to 1940, then temperatures actually decreased a bit for 30 years.   All that time, 1910-1970, carbon dioxide was increasing.    False-alarmists simply gloss over this point.   To the detriment of their credibility, though.                                                                                      
4. Attacking some of the messengers for believing [in] Intelligent Design.  There is a broader point here.  Scientists throughout history had various beliefs, some in God or gods, some agnostic, some atheistic.   This is entirely beside the point.   The question is, had the scientist that discovered a life-saving thing e.g. Pasteur and making milk safe by heating it for a short interval, or Dr. Salk with the polio vaccine, held religious views, would it be wise to discard their discoveries?   The entire scientific foundation would be discarded if modern science had to discard every discovery by every researcher that held a religious view.    For false-alarmists to resort to this tactic suggests they don't have any faith in their science.   (no kidding...)                            
5. Charts of the earth’s temperature going up and down for ages before humans were industrialized.   This is, again, the point in a different way of a natural warming period before the Little Ice Age.  However, charts of much longer history also point out the natural descent into glacial periods (100,000 years roughly), followed by natural warming into inter-glacial periods (15-20,000 years roughly).   Clearly, humans had zero to do with those events.                                                                                             
6. Ice on one pole is decreasing [while] increas[ing] on the other pole.  The Arctic ice is (perhaps) decreasing, and the Antarctic ice is certainly increasing.  Yet, the false-alarmists downplay the increasing ice.  They also trumpet the Antarctic ice that breaks away.  What is seldom mentioned - especially in the press releases - is the Antarctic ice that breaks away is all from the same spot, which is located above an active volcanic area.   What is also not mentioned is the pattern of ice decrease in the Arctic: a very small decline for several years, followed by a substantial decline of a few years, then a steady period over the past few years with no additional decline.  That is certainly not consistent with the steady increase in Carbon Dioxide.   However, that ice trend is consistent with the dark soot particles deposited on the ice from over-the-pole jet aircraft, and the soot from Asian coal-burning power plants.   False-alarmists need to be honest about the causation of the measured phenomena such as polar ice extent.                                                                                                                                       
7. The Earth has not warmed as predicted, so don’t change the subject to sea levels.  Another excellent point, with false-alarmists unable to answer the obvious flaw in their argument so they switch to another topic.   The problem is, false-alarmists resort to various tactics that make them sound like they are hiding something.  They talk about global warming in one breath, showing the temperature trends over the land   By their measurements, there has been a warming.   But, when the entire globe is including - meaning the oceans also - there is almost no warming.  They love to show a graph of the Arctic ice extent, but stop their graph at the lowest point recently.  That gives a false impression that the ice is still shrinking, when it certainly is not.  Changing the subject is a favorite tactic.                                                                               
8.  If the rate of change of temperature is key, stop telling me about record high temperatures as if they are proof of something.  Again, with the switch in topics.   It is also very important to know that these supposed record high temperatures are only true after the false-alarmists made multiple, repeated, adjustments to their temperature databases.   Adams does not mention that one, but I will discuss it more in a bit.                                                                                                                                    
9. Stop pointing to record warmth in one place when we’re also having record cold in others.  This is a favorite technique of false-alarmists: trumpeting the data that supports their argument while ignoring all the contrary data.   That's not science; that's advocacy.  It also is a slap at the intelligence of the audience, who presumably cannot determine that contrary data exists.                                                                                  
10. Don’t tell me how well your models predict the past. Tell me how many climate models have ever been created, since we started doing this sort of thing, and tell me how many have now been discarded because they didn’t predict correctly.   The false-alarmists really have a problem with their multiple climate models and the wide range of results from them.   Instead of identifying those that best match the actual, measured data (that shows almost zero warming), and discarding those models that are clearly way off, they simply average together all the model results.   In what universe does that produce an acceptable result?   This is not science; it is a mockery of science.                                                                                                        
11. Claim[ing] the oceans have risen dramatically, [requires that] you . .  explain why insurance companies are ignoring this risk and why . . . local beaches look exactly the same. . .. The false-alarmists employ two very devious tactics in their claims of sealevel rise.  The first is false attribution of causation, the second is smearing the data by averaging a few data points with all the rest. The ocean surface measurements clearly show that most of the oceans are not rising very much, if any.   Those areas that show an increase are typically influenced, even heavily influenced, by land subsidence.   The subsidence is both natural, and man-made from pumping groundwater.   The false-alarmists then take these few areas of false sealevel increase, then average that with the great majority of the ocean that has no increase, to produce an average increase of about 8 inches per century.  Then, the false-alarmists have the nerve to say the rate of increase is increasing, so the next century will have a rise of 20 to 40 inches.   Yet, there is zero increase in the rate, the oceans - even by their false measurements - are rising at the same slow, steady rate as 100 or even 200 years ago.                                                                                                                 
12. [If] warmer temperatures are bad, . . . produce a chart [comparing] how humankind thrived during various warmer and colder eras.  You also need to convince me that economic models are accurate.   This is one of the best, in my view.  Adams hits to the heart here, as it is certainly true that human death rates are much higher in periods of prolonged cold than periods of warmth.   The second part of the point is the predictions of economic harm in future warmer decades.  The fact is, almost every economic prediction model is woefully wrong.  Econometrics is rightfully known as the dismal science.                                                                                                                                         
13. Stop conflating the basic science and the measurements with the models. Each has its own credibility. This one is also like Adams' first point above, and Dr. Christy's testimony to Congress.  The model predictions, or projections as the false-alarmists call them, are not the science.  Those are simply the results of computer models.  Those model results can be, and have been, compared to an average of air temperatures from around the globe.  It must be stated, and widely recognized, that  the basic science has data that is badly corrupted, as shown on SLB.   The credibility that Adams mentions does not exist, in my view.  There is, of course, the irrefutable fact that carbon dioxide can actually absorb heat radiation and re-emit those photons, but only in a very limited wavelength.  The radiant heat science requires that high altitude, low pressure, very cold, and very low concentration carbon dioxide absorbs and re-emits only a tiny, tiny, miniscule amount of heat.   Every heat transfer design engineer knows this.  The credibility of the temperature data is absolutely zero, due to the way that the data is collected and manipulated, then adjusted over and over to achieve the desired result.  The credibility of the climate models has been addressed above, and is also zero.                                                                                                                          
14. If skeptics make you retreat to Pascal’s Wager as your main argument for aggressively responding [to] climate change, please understand that you lost the debate. The world is full of risks that might happen.   This last one refers to the false-alarmists' demands that every industrialized society reduce or eliminate their fossil fuel use to prevent the globe from overheating and unleashing an entire litany of horrible results.   The list is familiar, and very long: extended droughts, severe heat waves, spread of heat-tolerant tropical diseases, Biblical floods, sealevel increases and shorelines disappeared, with many millions of people flooded out of their homes, crop failures and starvation, ice caps disappeared, stronger and more frequent hurricanes and tornadoes, snow reduced or not occurring at all, low level islands disappeared, oceans absorbing more carbon dioxide and sea creatures permanently and badly affected, coral reefs bleached and dead, crustaceans unable to form protective shells, just to name a few.  Adams is correct that using global warming as a scare tactic to spend un-told trillions in an attempt to prevent an uncertain outcome is a sure sign that the false-alarmists have no valid arguments.  The "You need this, because what if we are right?" argument is an excellent reason to purchase home owners' insurance, when the insurance salesman provides the actual statistics on disasters than have done and still do impact homes.   However, dire predictions that have zero basis in science are no reason to waste trillions and trillions of dollars (or Euros or Yuan, for that matter).     There are, as Adams states, a great number of pressing issues that most certainly will detrimentally impact the future.  The world will need great effort and money to combat those issues.  Others have studied and compiled lists of pressing needs, such as fresh water, reliable electricity, disease preventions and cures, crop blights, pollution reduction, increased nutrition for billions more population, recycling of truly scarce minerals, a much more resilient electricity grid to withstand a massive solar flare, and many others.  

The Adams post is very good, in my view.    I would add a few more reasons for skeptics to be quite skeptical of the false-alarmists' statements.   Much of this has already been discussed in various articles on SLB. 

The claim that recent warming must be due to carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, because the scientists simply cannot think of any other cause.   There are many other known causes of an air temperature increasing over time.  

The fact that scientists keep adjusting the temperature data over and over and over yet again, each time stating (with great solemnity) that they have it right this time.   How many times will the public (and especially, politicians) fall for that scam?   

The many and widespread attempts by the false-alarmist community to ostracize and silence other scientists that hold dissenting views.  In the same Congressional testimony referenced above with Dr. Christy, another prominent scientist, Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. related his horrible treatment by the false-alarmist community.   All Dr. Pielke, Jr. did was point out in scientific publications that there are no increases in severe weather events.  

The fact that false-alarmists resort to a very old, and very inappropriate, device to create alarm where none is justified: creating an average of a few outlier data points (example, apparent sealevel rise in coastal areas with known subsidence) with the vast majority of data points that show very little or even zero increase, then declare that all the world's oceans are rising and every shore will be inundated.   This trick is pulled over and over again, e.g. Antarctic continental temperatures smeared with a few warming data points from the volcanically-active peninsula, and others.   

The fact that climate scientists (the good ones, and there are many of them) agreed that the climate temperature data was not very good, then installed excellent temperature measuring equipment in more than 100 pristine locations throughout the US.  This network of climate monitoring stations is known as the United States Climate Reference Network, USCRN, and has been collecting data for the past 12 years, approximately.   SLB has several articles on this, and the trends taken from that data.  There is no warming, certainly none from man-made carbon dioxide. 

UPDATE 5/26/2017:  In addition to the USCRN project for land-based temperatures in the US, climate scientists in the year 2000 began a systematic data-collection project for ocean temperatures.  The ARGO system collects temperatures from the upper 2000 meters (6,600 feet or about 1.2 miles) of the ocean.  Scientists recognized that all the ocean temperature data before the year 2000 was completely useless, had data quality issues, and was taken from a very small part of the oceans: usually where commercial shipping occurred.  It is a complete indictment of the false-alarmists that any data on global ocean temperatures is presented, because they know the data is horribly wrong and implemented the modern ARGO measuring system.  From the UCSD site (University of California at San Diego), "Argo is a global array of 3,800 free-drifting profiling floats that measures the temperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean.  This allows, for the first time, continuous monitoring of the temperature, salinity, and velocity of the upper ocean, with all data being relayed and made publicly available within hours after collection." 

The fact that, for almost every single long-term temperature station, a steady increase in temperature is easily seen, but scientists emphatically agree that no warming from carbon dioxide could possibly have occurred before about 1960.  Yet, the long-term temperature records go back to the year 1900 and even earlier.   It is indeed odd that those temperature trends, which do show a steady increase over time, correspond almost exactly to population increases in those cities.  SLB has more than 70 charts of US cities and their temperature records that clearly show this, taken from the climate false-alarmists' own data, the Hadley Climate Research Unit.   Something caused the cities to warm from 1900 to 1960, but it clearly was not carbon dioxide.   

See e.g. the three charts below of Boston, MA (1.99 deg C per century warming, steady rise); New York City, NY, and San Francisco, CA (both show 1.49 deg C per century warming, a steady rise).   see link to SLB article from February, 2010, with the 80-plus US cities. 

And finally, skeptics should be aware that none, repeat, none, of the dire predictions of false-alarmists have ever proven true, and especially cannot be attributed to the tiny increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the past 60 years.  

Roger E. Sowell, Esq.

Marina del Rey, California
copyright (c) 2017 by Roger Sowell - all rights reserved

Topics and general links:

Nuclear Power Plants.......here
Climate Change................here  and here
Fresh Water......................here
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Warmists are Wrong; Cooling is Coming

The following is the presentation I made on April 17, 2012, to the Southern California Section of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), at their monthly dinner meeting held at Long Beach, California.  The title for the presentation is "What if the Warmists are Wrong? Is Catastrophic Cooling Coming?  Implications."   My heartfelt thanks to Mr. Alan Benson, chair of the Southern California Section, for the invitation to speak.   I also appreciate those who attended, and especially for their questions.  As always, it is an honor to address AIChE members.  

The presentation was approximately one hour, followed by another hour of questions and answers.  The presentation is in three parts, as suggested by the title: 1) Are the Warmists Wrong? 2) Is Catastrophic Cooling Coming? and 3) Implications.   

Background: this topic could easily require a week to present the many aspects and interesting details.  With a mere hour at my disposal, this presentation necessarily hits only the major points.  My purpose here, firstly, was to inform the audience of what has transpired in the climate science arena in part 1, primarily as to the quality of the data and the climate models.  It is important to note the scarcity of agreement between the model projections and actual data.  Secondly, my purpose was to present the case for imminent global cooling in part 2.  Thirdly, my purpose was to describe a few of the many and serious implications for imminent global cooling in part 3, tying this in to what engineers can expect.  Engineers are problem-solvers, and this presents a great many problems to solve.  I also described a few of the legal ramifications of imminent global cooling. 

[Speech text, as transcribed from the audio/video recording.  Minor additions are included to increase read-ability. -- RES]

Thank you, Alan.  I want to talk a little bit about this whole topic of global warming, or climate science and give you a little bit of background about me and why this is important to me.  It's important for a number of reasons. I've been involved in this arena for about the last five years at various levels, all the way from the local level up to the federal level.  I am not a climate scientist, I'm not a PhD.  As Alan told you, I have a bachelors [degree] in chemical engineering, I have a law degree, and I'm an attorney.  My practice does involve laws pertaining to climate change and the science that underlies those laws.

But, as a chemical engineer, as most of you are, I have the tools to assess much of what was done; not only to get some understanding for myself, but to determine what they did, and did they do it right, if there is a right and a wrong.  I think that coming from my background in oil refineries, there is definitely a right and there is definitely a wrong. If we do it wrong, things blow up and people die.  That's one big difference between chemical engineers and climate scientists.  They have the luxury of sitting in their offices and conferences and they can be as wrong as they want.  It doesn't really make that much difference. 

What I want to talk about is experimental design, also data validation and what has been going on the last few years. Where we are at the moment in the saga, if you want to call it that, of global warming, climate change, climate disruption, or whatever the word is these days.

I have three main points tonight, hopefully 20 minutes apiece. The first thing I want to talk about is, are the warmists wrong?   By warmists I mean those who have published papers, or have voiced the opinion that global warming is not only real, it is happening, it is unprecedented and the results will be catastrophic.  Therefore, we must do very drastic things today in order to prevent these catastrophic events from occurring.

The second point will be, is catastrophic cooling coming, which will be exactly 180°. These guys are over here, and the coolists are over here.  [motioning one direction, then the opposite direction]

And finally, implications. Those being, we hear a lot about implications from the warming side; what are the implications of the cooling if it is indeed on the way? Then I want to tie that in to what chemical engineers and other engineers can expect.  It may be something for you to consider as you look into the future of what you want to be doing.

I.  Are the Warmists Wrong?

There are two or three topics here. First, were there any defects in their data? Next, does the model that they use have any defects?  Then, how do the data and the models correspond, are there any mis-matches? And finally, what are the costs and benefit of the mitigation steps that are recommended?

Data defects.

First, let me tell you a little bit about the data. They have an enormous body of data;  terabytes, from temperature locations from around the world, on the order of 10,000 maybe 12,000 sites on land.  Each of those [sites] has data going back some period of years, some as far as 100 years, some a little bit further. The aggregate amount of data they're dealing with is on the order of 150 million data points. This system passed the first hurdle of valid data, scientific data. You want to have a database that is large enough to give good statistics. I think in this case they do. But, they had so much data, it actually didn't work the way they wanted it to. So, they made adjustments to it. This should raise a red flag in everyone's mind, whenever you must adjust your experimental data.  They claim they have some fairly good reasons for doing this, because they were not allowed by the very nature of this problem to construct an experiment to collect data.  They came on the scene rather late and said well, what's the world been doing for the last hundred years?  We cannot go back in time and measure again, let's just take the data we have and see what it looks like.

There are about three or four different types of adjustments they make and I'll talk about those. Then we have this whole topic of improper data inclusion. You may have seen this graph [Figure 1 below]; it's on my blog.  This is actually taken from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency. It shows what purports to be the rise in temperature [for] the last 130 years. [This is} averaged over the entire world. I want to point to a couple things, if my pointer works.  There's a couple of things of note here, first, the temperature slightly declined until about 1910, then we had a rise until about 1940. We had a leveling off for about 30 years.  Then, starting in about 1975, we have a steadily ascending portion.  Then, the most important, and I want to talk a little bit about this later on, this leveling off [for the past ten years]. That is crucial to the argument of what is happening today.  This is a worldwide mean over the land and the ocean. it was constructed, like I said, using thousands and thousands of points of data to come up with what they say is the average.

  

Figure 1

This slide [Figure 2] is from NOAA, and by the way, if you're making a slide for presentations, please don't do what these guys did. I don't know if you can see this, but there is a yellow line right here. Try to use bright contrasting colors. They did okay with the red and they did okay with the black, but when you have a yellow line here, it is not good. These are the types of adjustments they made and it gives you an idea of the magnitude. These are in degrees F; there is about 0.3 here [black] another 0.3 for the yellow line. A negligible amount here for the red.  This is a slightly declining line here.  We'll talk more about that in a minute to see urban heat island effect.  

Figure 2

So, altogether this is the aggregate [Figure 3]. If we add up all the ones from the previous slide, we have almost one half a degree Fahrenheit of total adjustments. What that means is, from the previous chart, that shows about 0.6° C.  That's approximately 1°F, so basically half of this is due to adjustments. Half of the warming we have seen in the last 100 years is entirely due to adjustments.

Figure 3

(Note total adjustments of approximately 0.5 degrees F)

Next, is a very famous chart [Figure 4] done by a Californian named Jim Goodridge. Mr. Goodridge is a  former state climatologist here in California. He's retired now. He did his research and published his data in about 1996.  He shows the warming trend in California by County. The curve at the top is for counties with a population of 1 million or more as of the 1990 census.  We see a distinct rising trend from about 1910 to 1994.  The line at the bottom shows the same thing, the average for temperatures in California, but this is for Counties with a very small population, 100,000 or less as of the 1990 census.

Figure 4  (source: J. Goodridge)
Goodridge, J.D. (1996) Comments on “Regional Simulations of Greenhouse Warming including Natural Variability” . Bull, Amer. Meteorological Society 77:1588-1599.

[There was ] virtually no warning whatsoever over that 85 years. The line in the middle is for all the other counties between 100,000 and 1 million population.  They have an average rise somewhere between the other two.  The significance of this is that, if CO2 is indeed the cause of the warming, because the counties at the top did warm, why did it ignore the small counties?  How can you do that? That was one of the first things that intrigued me about the entire issue, as an engineer.  And, as Alan said, I have traveled many places around the world - as some of you have, too – and physics works anywhere you go.  It does not pick and choose.  It is not capricious.  I think all of us would agree with that. Yet, CO2 appears to play favorites.  I will show more of that here in a few minutes.

This to me raised a very serious alarm.  How can this be going on, and is it a true physical effect, or is there something else causing the warming?  Or, are we measuring something else and attributing it to CO2?


Next, here's a graph [Figure 5], and I have about three or four of these to show you of individual cities. This is from Abilene, Texas which is right out in the middle of the state, a little bit west of Dallas.  It shows absolutely no warming whatsoever for the past 110 years or so. The slope here, and you probably cannot read that, is actually negative. It is -0.19° per century, round it off -0.2. From an earlier slide [Figure 1], remember we were looking at a warming trend  of about 0.6° per century, which is what the warmists are saying. I want to know why it ignored Abilene?  [note, the following Figures 5 through 11 are from the same source -- RES]

Figure 5

Abilene is not alone, it has a lot of company here. Shreveport [Louisiana] [Figure 6] is not too far away and roughly the same latitude. This trend also happens to be as close to zero as I could find.  That's 0.0001 with a negative sign in front of it.  Again, over 100 years with no warning whatsoever. 

Figure 6

But, here's one [Figure 7] that is an adjacent city. This is St. Louis, Missouri.  It's only about 300 miles away a little bit north and a little bit west of Shreveport, which means the CO2 was roughly the same.  There are no latitudinal adjustments to make here.  This shows a warming and has a positive trend of  almost 1.1°C per century.  Again, we see a disparity.  How can CO2 know to shine its warning rays down on St. Louis but ignore Shreveport?

Figure 7

I don't have time to do all the pairs of cities but if you look on my blog, one can see them. Next, let's have a look here in California. Between the two cities Sacramento and San Francisco, one is warming and one is not. How many of you would believe that San Francisco is the one that is warming?  We have a couple of hands there, so the rest of you think then that Sacramento was the one that is warming?  That's right in the desert, right?  Well, you would be wrong. [Laughter.] Sacramento shows almost no warning whatsoever. And yet, San Francisco shows a very steady warming.  [Figure 8 (San Francisco) and Figure 9 (Sacramento) ]

Figure 8

Figure 9 

Let me show you this, then.  Here's Boston [Figure 10]. San Francisco has a similar curve as Boston and a very steady, very gradual rise.  And yet, back in these early days the scientists tell us there was no CO2 to speak of and it really wasn't increasing. And yet the same slope of the curve exists back here as compared to the latter day. Well, how can that be? What we should see is a flat line, and then a big rise up over here if CO2 was the culprit. Yet, it didn't happen. This is showing a warming of about 1.99, call it 2°C per century.

Figure 10

Now, I have to show you this [Figure 11]; this is the one they got me started on making the speech tonight. This is Eureka, California, a little coastal town north of San Francisco. It was warming pretty good for a while, until, look at this downtrend right in here [from 1990 to 2010].  This is almost 20 years worth of declining temperatures.  I thought to myself, that has got to be wrong.  The more I looked at it, and we will see more of this in a minute, that is actually a valid trend. And I must ask you this, if CO2 is causing the earth to warm, what is wrong with Eureka, where did the CO2 go over Eureka?

Figure 11

Alright, so we saw the problem of having the urban heat island. Big cities have a lot of buildings, a lot of concrete, a lot of asphalt and air conditioning.  All these things produce heat in the urban area. It creates an island effect of heat. We know this is true, if you've ever listened to the weather. They will typically tell you it's going to be whatever temperature it is tonight in the city, and about 5° colder in the outlying areas. And sure enough, that's true.  It is almost always cooler at night in the countryside compared to being in a big city. That is the urban heat island effect.

The question becomes, are there any ideal sites? That is, they have long-term temperature records, with no urban influences? The answer of course is yes, we have hundreds here in the states, almost 400 national parks. We have hundreds more State parks. The national parks are mandated by law to maintain their lands in a pristine condition as much as is possible. Somehow, they missed out on getting those temperatures measured and getting them into the database.  But, to give the scientists a little bit of credit, they have recognized this, primarily due to the work of Anthony Watts of Chico, California. Anthony is famous in this arena.  He owns a blog called Watt's Up With That dot com.  He did some groundbreaking work that showed that the measuring sites are woefully inaccurate around the United States. Roughly 80% of them failed the government's criteria for proper siting. That is, where these things are located. They put them on top of buildings next to air conditioning vents.  They put them next to asphalt parking lots.  They put them at airports where the jet exhaust can get to them. I am not kidding. This is the type of data we are dealing with.

So, in order to correct this, we now have the beginning of what is called the climate reference network. These are supposed to be in the pristine areas. These are supposed to have none of the problems identified earlier. They have redundant temperature sensors, they have automatic data logging, and they have automatic upload to a satellite. Presumably we will have only good data coming out of them. Unfortunately, they started in about 2008. So, we don't have 100 years or more of good data to look at. It will take them a while to obtain that. But at least they recognized the problem and responded to it. So much for the data. The data I think is very shaky. Unfortunately, they have this curve [Figure 1] on which we are basing not only national policy, but international policy.

Model Errors

Now, let's see if we have any fundamental errors in the model. And, we'll look at what's going on there. Again, a little bit of background on myself. I worked for a number of years for a company that produced kinetic models for oil refinery processes. So, I have a little bit of familiarity here. In the early climate models, we're talking in the late 1980s, when the first alarm was raised, and Congress was told that the earth was warming, the model says it's going to warm even more in the coming century so we must do something now. They had three variables and only three variables in the model.

Now, I have to give them some credit. They figured out that the first law of thermodynamics holds. Energy in is equal to energy out. In this case, the energy in to the earth is from the sun. Well, there's a little more from the core cooling, a little bit. But, they figured that that is negligible and I guess that's okay. But, for energy out, the only way energy can escape the earth is through radiation into space. That makes sense because there's nothing touching this so there is no conduction.  There's nothing going past us because we are surrounded by the vacuum of space, therefore there's no convection. All that heat must leave, and I keep waiting for the hand to go up and say,  "but but but but but."

All that heat must leave as radiation; is that true? Well, the answer is No. Because, as engineers you know about this, the energy balance states "In equals Out plus Accumulation."

Where can we accumulate energy here on the earth? Well, primarily we have accumulated heat in the oceans. Because, the land doesn't warm that much. But, the oceans are a pretty good reservoir. So that's part of the problem, we must try to calculate how much the oceans are warming or cooling. But, that's what this first variable is: TSI.  This is for total solar irradiance, the amount of heat and light coming off the sun. They looked at that and said, well it doesn't change very much especially over the period in question. It varies at the most by 0.1%. So, we don't think that's the cause of the warming. What they basically said was if you build a model with just that variable it does not match the curve I showed earlier [Figure 1]. So, let's add another variable, and they put in aerosols. These are volcanic aerosols, mostly sulfur compounds that are placed high in the atmosphere primarily due to very large volcanoes. These act to increase the Earth's albedo.  The albedo is reflectivity so that not all of the sun's energy actually makes it down to the surface of the earth. Roughly the earth has an albedo of about 0.3, which is a wild guess as nobody has measured it. Albedo changes from time to time. This is one of the things they do to adjust the model to call cool things off. Well, this did not help with the warming side but it did help a little with the cooling in the middle [Figure 1]. 

So, they said we need something else to cause warming to make our model match our data. Does that sound backwards to anyone? They said, the only thing that we can think of is CO2. We know it is a greenhouse gas that causes the atmosphere to warm. When they put in CO2 with appropriate parameters to produce the warming necessary, they had a three variable model that matched pretty well. We will see in a minute how its predictability works. This is actually a modeling error, because there are other relevant things.  They admit this, at least some of them do. This last one here is sunspot cycles, but they do not want to talk about that. Clouds are just as much an effect on the albedo as aerosols. They serve as a reflector. Anyone who's been outside when a cloud comes by if it's daytime, we all know, even little children know that it gets cooler. When the sun goes behind the clouds. But that is not in the models. Why is it not in the models? They do not know how to model that. That is one of the problems they have. A problem is that it is such a small phenomenon. Over the whole space of the earth, they cannot model that little bit with the cloud. They are modeling great big chunks of the atmosphere. What about ocean temperature oscillations? This is incredibly important and will become more so when we get to the next section.

It turns out that temperatures on the land are influenced heavily by temperatures in the ocean. I think we know that. If you go to the seacoast the temperature is typically a lot cooler than if you go in the desert. Well why is that? Well because you're close to the water. But, they do not include this either. In fact it is well-known that ocean temperatures oscillate from time to time. They go through periods of warm then they switch over to cold. Nobody knows why and nobody knows when it's going to happen either. We will see more of that in a minute. But that's not in the models. 

Finally, sunspot cycles. This is incredibly controversial. It was considered voodoo science for many years. There is a Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark who came up with this idea. He said look, we have correlations going back hundreds of years such that every time the sunspots get very weak or disappear the earth gets cold, sometimes brutally cold. And every time the sunspots are strong, the opposite occurs and we have a warming. But there was no causal mechanism and no one could figure it out. It's a long way to the sun, 93,000,000 miles. What is a sunspot going to do from such a distance away? Well, he had a theory and that theory had to do with the magnetic field of the sun. Now we have the proper instruments in space and we can measure the sun's magnetic field. And it does in fact vary substantially, depending on the strength of the sunspot cycle. We will get more to that in a minute. But that's not in the models either. In fact that is heresy to even suggest that those should be in the model. When we have included only a few variables but we know there are others, this is what we know as omitted variable bias. Because, the error term we have in the model must be included in one of the variables and in the case of the climate models, it's in the CO2. Now, I have the word fraud here with a question mark. I'm not accusing anyone of fraud, but if you were to be developing a model and you deliberately with knowledge, did this,  left the variable out, and by doing so you cause harm to somebody, that could be fraud. We are not to that stage yet and we probably never will be. That would imply a willful omission on the part of the climate modelers.

Another fundamental error. You may have heard the term the science is settled. I can tell you some science that is settled. There's a science called gravity. It is fairly well-established. You all know this as the acceleration is 32.2, unless using SI units and I don't know what it is. It's around 10 I think, nine point something.   How many different equations for gravity do we have? Can I get an answer of “one?” I see a few heads nodding yes, there is one. These guys have 20 more or less.  20, 21, 22 depending on what day you asked them.  If the science is settled, why do we need 20 different models? What they do is average them.  They create an ensemble mean of the models. Apparently this is something which is done in the financial world and in the stock market.  If nobody really knows, if you average enough models you can get a trend which is actually useful. So, that is what they are doing here. The science cannot be settled if you have 20 different models required.

Data / Model Mismatch

So let's talk about the mismatch between the models and the data.  The models predict the warming actually they project for the next century about 3.3°C.  Yet the whole warming during the 20th century was only 0.7°C, more or less. We're talking about a factor of four between this century and the next century.  So, how's it going to happen? Well, they say there are accelerating affects.  We’ll be using more energy, the population grows, and there'll be feedback mechanisms kicking in. All of it is conjecture. The match, remember that the warming and almost all this warming, at least half, was due to data adjustments and we think a lot of it was due to the urban heat island influence.  They are measuring the heat coming off of the buildings. Here's a chart [Figure 12] that I took from British Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, from a presentation he made a couple of weeks ago here in California.  The point of this is, again he using yellow here I hope you can see that, the black is the measured temperature trend of the last 20 years from 1990 and this is from University of Alabama at Huntsville I believe. The projected warming rates are here, the one in the middle is the medium scenario, here below is a low scenario, and the upper one is the high scenario. This [middle] is the one that gives you the 3.3° per century if you go out all the way 100 years or so. There is already a widening disparity, if we go back to the first graph I showed [Figure 1] of the temperature with the leveling off spot at the end. There's no leveling off on any of these they all just keep rising. Again the mismatch. 

Figure 12

So what does this mean in terms of mismatch and other things they project will happen?  First we see there is zero warming in the past decade which is about since 1999, really, and we can think about that for a minute.  If we have a graph and I'm just going draw across here with a level line with a zero or no rising trend, but you know some of the sites have a urban heat island so they're actually rising too.  The population increasing, we are using more fuel, China certainly is, India certainly is. They impact what's happening to the earth. How do you get the overall trend that is level? Surely some of the sites must have a decreasing trend to counter those that are warming.  There must be a cooling going on somewhere, it is hidden. They don't want to talk about that but I'm going to talk about it tonight.

Another thing the models have failed on.  They projected there'll be many more hurricanes, massive hurricanes, but it's not happening. We have about the same number of hurricanes and severity as we had back in the 1970s.

There is supposed to be a hot spot in the atmosphere that is directly related to the increase in CO2. They diligently look for this every which way they can. With weather balloons and with atmospheric satellites. There's no hotspot, they can't find it. 

The polar ice is supposed to be melting. Well we have two poles. The Antarctic actually has ice growing.  The temperature there is dropping and has been for the past 50 years. They blew it big on this one. The Arctic? They have a little bit more of a case there we'll see in a minute. I have a chart to show in a minute that the Arctic ice is declining a little bit but there's something very interesting going on the Arctic that they don't want to talk about. 

We are supposed to be having sea level rise.  Not only that, it's supposed to be accelerating. We're supposed be having something like 3 feet of increasing level over the next century. The problem is, and I don't have enough time to put all these graphs up here, sea level has been increasing but the rate has been decreasing. So instead of having a curve that goes up and up and up and up and up. what we have is one that is coming down and leveling off. This cannot be explained in their models, a total mismatch.

Finally, snow. There was actually a scientist that came out and said snow will be a thing of the past. Schoolchildren will only know about it from movies or pictures in textbooks. Well, does anybody remember the snow last year? It was pretty thick around here. And actually this winter not so much here in the United States, but much of the rest of the northern hemisphere it was bitterly cold with much snow. In fact Alaska set a new record for snow and all-time record for snow last winter.  Again the total mismatch.

  

To wrap up the data model, I want to quote from Richard Dr. Richard Feynman, who was one of my favorite scientists.  He is deceased now, unfortunately. What he said was, “when the data does not match the model, you must get a new model.” He was, if you don't know, a PhD in physics, he was a professor at CalTech.  He won the Nobel prize for something called QED, which is quantum electro dynamics; pretty esoteric stuff.  He was a key member of the Manhattan project. He knew his stuff. What happens with our scientists when their model doesn't match the data?  What do they do, they adjust the data. Completely backwards.

Cost / Benefit 

Now, just a little bit on the cost/benefit. What are we talking about here? What is it going to cost to try to reduce CO2 so we don't have the warming which they say is going to happen. Trillions, but how many trillions? So many that it will be a significant fraction of the world GDP.  Or gross domestic product. Standards of living will necessarily decrease. What will we get for our trillions of dollars? Primarily, it's going to be CO2 capture and sequestration which will involve chemical engineers. They also want to replace coal power because it produces quite a bit of CO2 per unit of energy.  They want to replace it with wind, solar, and nuclear and finally, they want to get rid of petroleum by using electric cars.  What will be the benefit of doing this?  Well, that is the big controversy.  Nobody knows, but there are wild estimates.  I have shown here maybe 0.2 to 0.4°C per century and yet we just saw a warning of 0.7 that was actually beneficial. It was very cold back around 1900.  It is a lot better now than it was then, so the question is, are there any benefits at all?  Especially knowing that the models have blown it on basically everything they have ever predicted to happen.  

II.  Is Catastrophic Cooling Coming?

Now, I want to move over to the catastrophic cooling.  This is a part that, as I mentioned earlier with Eureka having a temperature decline, got me started on this.  I have a series of three slides here to show you.  These are from the National Climatic Data Center, another US government agency.  All of this is online, so you can pull it up and look.  This [Figure 13] shows the average temperature over about the last 100 years, actually from just before 1900. I want to point out something right here in the most recent period.  We have a substantial decline in the temperature. Where is this? This is what they call California Climate Division One.  This is the Eureka area, the Northern California coast.  I want you to have a look right in here, this is 1940 decreasing down to 1950.  The rest is either average or slightly increasing.  This turnaround point is 1950. Remember that date because we're going to see it a few more times.

Figure 13

What else is going on, on the west coast of North America? Here [Figure 14] is the section of California just to the south of Climate Division one.  This shows from Monterey Bay down to just north of Santa Barbara. We have the same thing going on; we have a decline to 1950. This is the only place where we have a similar decline of equal slope and equal number of years compared to the most recent decade.

Figure 14

One more [Figure 15]; this the coast of Oregon. The same thing happened: a massive drop recently, and the same thing back in the 40s stopping in 1950. I got to thinking to myself what in the world could have stopped this downward trend?  It was turned around when it was dropping like a rock. How much was this decrease? This is about 20° F per century which is about 11.1°C per century cooling.  This is a massive amount of cooling.  There is more I can show you but there's not sufficient time tonight. 

Figure 15

What is going on here, this [Figure 16] is a chart of ocean temperature changes or oscillations.  This is one for the Pacific Ocean.  The red is warm periods, and the blue is cold. Starting in 1950, we had a roughly 30 year period of cold, but in 1975 it went into the warm regime.  Then, recently a switch back over to the cold.  This occurs roughly every 30 years going cold to warm.   It is now in a cold phase again. 

Figure 16

This [Figure 17] is a chart which is also available on the web from Unisys, look at the cold blue in the Pacific.  This is actually from a couple of days ago [April 15, 2012]. This is what we are talking about, the cold, cold water in the Pacific compared to long-term average.  In this graph, the yellow and orange are warm, and the blues are cold.  The deeper the blue, the colder the water. This has been going on for a while, for at least the last 15 years.  We never read about that in the newspapers, though. 

Figure 17

Here's one for the Atlantic side [Figures 18 and 19], with the blue showing it's getting cooler.  This is known as the NAO Index; it is similar to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation that we just saw.  Here we have the blue indicating cold and red for the warm.  Then, right here in 1950 we went cold as the blue appeared for quite some time.  Yet, something was able to turn those temperatures around and bring them back up.  This one has not yet quite switched back to the cold phase, but we believe it's fairly imminent.  Perhaps sometime in the next few years.  Nobody knows why because this is not well understood.

Figure 18

Figure 19

Now we come to the main point of this speech.  Let's talk about sunspots cycles [Figure 20].   I mentioned earlier that we know from correlations, when sunspots are almost gone or nonexistent, that the earth is far colder than it is today. There were no sunspots at all from about 1645 to 1760, about 100 years.  Around the world, scientists at the time were observing, but could see no sunspots.  This corresponds to what we call the Little Ice Age, also known as the Maunder minimum. Then it warmed up and we can see the sunspots increased.  It got a little colder around 1800 and sure enough the sunspots decreased with that.  It got a little cooler around 1900.  Then look at this: here is 1950.  Here's a very big sunspot cycle, and the next cycle in 1960 was the biggest one yet. In the next graph [Figure 21] we can see also back to 1700.  Here's the 1950 cycle, and the 1960 cycle is the biggest one of all. 

Figure 20

Figure 21

My hypothesis is, that large sunspot cycles overcame the cooling trend of the two oceans cooling.  For the rest of the century, the cycles were fairly big and we had some warming going on.  Also, the oceans were in the red phase.  They also were warming.  Now we have a problem, if you haven't been keeping up. First, let me show you these all lined up. Here's a graph [Figure 22] with the red line down the middle in 1950.  Here is the Pacific Ocean with the blue.  Here's the temperatures on the coast dropping down and then turned around in 1950, and here are the sunspot cycles for that. In 1950 and 1960, the sunspot cycles may have in fact turned the climate around and let it warm up.

Figure 22

Now, what is going on today, and why is this important? The sun surprised the scientists about four years ago.  Ordinarily, sunspot cycles endure for about 11 years, but this one took a bit longer.   It lasted about 12 years which is somewhat longer than normal.  Now we have a projection of the new cycle which is number 24 [Figure 23].  Instead of being big as we normally would see it, it is weak. They are expecting it to peak in the mid 70s although the Figure shows mid-90s, dated January 2012.  [update:  now reduced to 60 in the May, 2012 prediction.]  You can follow this online at spaceweather dot com.   This shows what the sunspots are doing every day.  This is grim.  We now have a prediction that the next cycle, number 25, will be much weaker.  It may be in the level of 20s perhaps even the teens and it may last much much longer and the world will be much colder.

Figure 23

So, is there anything else going on today which would indicate colder, besides the weak sunspot cycle?  Perhaps the world is cooling?  We are seeing the Pacific Ocean is colder; we are seeing the sunspot cycle is weak, now let's look at the Arctic ice.

This graph [Figure 24] is from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC.  Ordinarily the cycle of ice will peak right around the end of February. This is the average from about the past 30 years. The blue line shows the ice extent today, and it actually peaked about two weeks later than average.  Notice that it did not started declining for about three weeks.  Then it finally begins to decline when it was very close to the average.  This is completely unexpected and also not predicted by the models.  The dotted line which is shown is the worst of all time; this is from 2007, when you may remember the Arctic ice was said to be disappearing.  It was an all-time low. So yes, it was at least for the 30 years that we have been looking at this with satellites. This is trying to show you how we are doing today.  They were quick to blow the trumpet when we're down here below the average, but they don't want to talk about it when it gets up here near the average.  This is crucial, something is preventing the ice from melting. Yet we know CO2 is rising. Why isn’t CO2 causing the Arctic to warm up like it's supposed to?  Again, another model bust.

Figure 24

This next chart [Figure 25] is one I would love to see someone do a research paper on. This again shows the northern hemisphere ice anomaly from normal, in millions of square kilometers.  I want to point out three very interesting things on this chart.  

Figure 25

First, we have a fairly homogenous area here [1979-1996] with amplitude almost the same, the beta for those of you who follow stocks.  It is about the same in here and it has a very slight decline but not much. 

Second, here it is completely different [1996 - 2006]. Notice the amplitude is much less compared to the earlier period. It is about half.  The average slope downward in this area is much greater.  

Third, then look at the most recent zone for about the last five years or so, roughly 2007 up to now.  We have now gone back to the larger amplitude and we have almost no trend whatsoever. Why would that be? If the Arctic is warming like they are telling us, and CO2 is doing its job, it is supposed to be more effective in the Arctic that it is anywhere else.  How did this happen? How to we get no change in the trend for the past five years?  They don't have an answer for that, but it would be consistent with the world turning to a cooler phase.

Is there anybody else besides me with this hypothesis? I'm not a scientist, I don't publish scientific papers. I have no reputation at all.  But, there are a few who say this is absolutely true.  There are not many, so they have a minority view.  Here is one, this is Dr. H. Abdussamatov, and please pardon my Texan mangling of a Russian name. He's a PhD from Russia in the solar science field. He stated in print also in conferences where he says forget warming, we have very drastic cooling on the way.  Deep cold is coming.  He also gives us a date: he says by 2014 we will know. What we are talking about is the sunspot cycle 24 that will be well past the peak at that point.  We will be able to predict with more confidence exactly how weak the cycle is and what the next cycle is going to do.  He predicts catastrophic cooling, and when Russians predict catastrophic cooling, I think we need to pay attention.  [audience laughter] Those guys know cold.  There are some others; he is not the only one. He's predicting sunspot cycle 24 which ordinarily has a length of 11 years, will have anything anywhere from 14 to 20 years.  This means much colder.  Cycle 25, which is the next one coming up, will be very weak perhaps 10 to 20 at the peak and who knows how long it will endure.  Again, it's not very well-known and we cannot predict the length very well. 

The fact that cycle number 24 is surprisingly weak gives one some doubt about the entire credibility of sunspot cycle projections.  This was a surprise and the sun may surprise us after all and come back strong again. However, it looks like it's not.  If the oceans remain cold, and sunspot cycles are weak, the catastrophic cooling is coming. 

III. Implications

Now, what are the implications? Well, we all know that unless you're a snowboarder or a skier, cold is bad.  The experiences we had as a society back in the Little Ice Age were very brutal and grim.   People died.  Animals died.  Crops failed.  The bright spot is the winter resorts are going to love it. I don't believe everyone will be as happy as this man [Figure 26] who is shoveling snow.  If you can imagine this level of snow or worse for many months for the entire United States anywhere north of Nebraska.  The Rocky Mountains will likely be impassable due to snow and ice and avalanches.   Chicago will probably become a ghost town. 

Figure 26

So, for what are engineers needed to help in all this?  Everything.   Let me ask a question of the audience:  how many years of stored up food does Earth have? [answer:] One year? [another answer] A little less than one? Anybody else?  Is it two or three, or seven years like in the Bible? Well, I was astonished when I went to look this up.  It is less than three months, depending on which grain you look at.  You can go to the USDA website, where there is a world analysis.  They keep track of how much food is out there.  This make sense in a way, because we are a modern society and we know how to grow things and we know how to store things.   We have not stored too much; maybe the food doesn't taste as good or some of it spoils.  We have become a just-in-time society, but that may be a bad plan right about now.  Depending on which grain, we have anywhere from one month to three months.  That is a serious point.   Can engineers help on the food side? I don't know.

Are there better fertilizers? Are there ways to grow crops that can use your talents? Possibly. Somebody asked me once, and she was not an engineer, and she asked can’t we just grow them all under greenhouses?  I thought well, that will take a lot of material to make the greenhouses. So, maybe.  Perhaps there is some polymer science needed.   What are we to do about hail storms?  Again, maybe there's some polymer science application.  Can we design a polymer so that the hail bounces instead of  breaking through? 

Clothing:  we will need a lot more warm clothing.  This means synthetic fibers. 

Shelter:  almost all of what has been built in the last 70 years or so was during the warm climate. Much of it is not insulated to handle the type of cold that is coming.  I foresee a booming insulation business.  The flat roofs on buildings, not necessarily in California but in the rest of the world and in the northern part of the United States, may not be adequate.  We may need to have some different type of roofs installed.  The roofs must shed snow.

Medical supplies and health services: I believe we will be overwhelmed. Look at the relative death rates from hunger and cold, comparing heat to cold periods.  More people get sick and more people die in the cold winters.

Transportation and industrial output:  this will be huge.  We do not move barges over frozen rivers.  We know this.  When a river is frozen for many months out of the year, how can you get your materials moved?  What about trains or heavy ground transportation; will they work? Probably not. The train is going to cross the Rockies’ grades in the snow and ice?   Likely not.

Industrial output: how does one move materials around?  How do we get raw materials into the factories and the products out?  If we have seen big trucks trying to go up even a small incline during an ice storm, well, they don't.  We can not get trucks to go up or down the Grapevine incline here just north of Los Angeles when snow falls.  Multiply this 1000 times across the northern tier of the United States.

Communications and infrastructure: we know what happens when ice storms or big snowstorms occur.   The system fails.  Why does it fail?  It is due to ice on the lines or tree limbs falling on the lines.  Can you imagine this on the scale something like the Little Ice Age?  We’re going to need serious reconsideration of infrastructure.

Water supply: what does one do for water when everything around you is frozen? Well, you melt the ice.  But, what do you do for heat?  What if you need that heat just to keep the house warm?

Here's another one, population migration: it is entirely possible that some of the northern cities, talking about New York, Chicago, those type of places, where people give up and become what we call permanent snowbirds. They are moving south.  The implications there are huge. It is okay if one hundred thousand people migrate every winter, but what if we have multiple millions on a permanent basis?  We are not equipped to handle this.

Waste disposal: what will we be doing in the wintertime month after month after month when trucks cannot collect the garbage?  Where do we take it?   I don't really know. As engineers, I hope we can help solve these problems.  It probably will require many disciplines and cooperation between disciplines.

Legal Issues

Finally, the legal issues, which are fascinating to me but maybe not so interesting to you so I will go quickly through these.  There are many legal ramifications, and this is only a partial list.

First off, will the cap and trade laws finally become useless, especially AB32 in California?  Will the government, when it gets cold enough will they finally admit they made a mistake?  Being California, I seriously doubt it. [laughter]

Will the coal industry come to the rescue? Right now it is not the darling at the ball; it is a bit out of favor.  Will nuclear power plants come to the rescue? I personally hope not, for what I believe are good reasons, but there may be some who say that nuclear plants are a good thing.

Will shortages of goods lead to rationing?  That is very possible.  What sort of basis will we use for rationing?  That was very controversial during World War II, and it will be even more controversial now. Will there be a perpetual state of emergency? That's a bit of an oxymoron.  Emergency is an abnormal state, but if it is cold for year after year what will we do?  Will the emergency be only in the cold northern states?  What about the warmer states for all the people who migrate?  There're no houses for them, no food for them, and there's no water for them. 

Finally, other human rights for displaced persons: this is a new thing which we've developed over the last 20 or 30 years.  Everybody has a fundamental right to… and then there's a long list. To air, to water, to food, to healthcare, and shelter.  We will see some of that, and it may become immensely important.

Next, in the contracts world, the concept of force majeure: this protects one against things beyond your control such as acts of God.  Things such as hurricanes, ice storms, war, acts of government, major labor strikes, these kind of things. The force majeure clauses will be invoked and this will complicate many contracts for a very long time.

Finally, can a society that is fighting for its very existence afford environmental laws?  I don't have an answer for that. I think we need some environmental laws.  In my travels around the world, I have seen what happens when we have very weak or nonexistent environmental laws. It is not pretty; it is ugly.  I’ve been choking and coughing often in the bad air. I'm glad we have environmental laws, but I think there's a limit.  There is a point at which we are doing more harm than good.  Again, if we are fighting for our existence, maybe those environmental laws can be suspended for a while.

Conclusion

Now, wrapping it up.  In conclusion, we can see climate scientist used a huge database of existing data,  sets that have very poor data.  They adjusted the data, which is something you should not be doing, to produce a warming trend.  And yet, statistics teaches us that an accurate result can be attained with only approximately 2% of the population sampled, if we randomly sample.  Most of us learned that in the statistics class.  So, why was there a rush then to use all the data and adjust it?  It turns out there are some reasons and I'll talk about that later.  I'm running out of time here.   Why not just use good unadjusted data? They did not do that.  To me, and this is my opinion here, climate science alarmism over impending global warming is completely unfounded.   I believe there is no warming problem.  CO2 induced warming, if it exists at all, must be consistent and cannot play favorites. Yet, we saw earlier that it does play favorites.   Some counties are warming in California and some are not, but this is not a California problem.  It happens all around.  It is clear that the data has been manipulated to show a warming trend.  Manipulated is a bit of a strong word there; they would prefer to say appropriately adjusted.  Well, you can take your pick of the words.  It is also clear the CO2 has not warmed adjacent cities or locations, which is physically impossible. It is also clear that the models, in my opinion, are hopelessly simplistic and flat wrong.

Instead of warming, global cooling is a threat with far more grave consequences. The evidence shows we are in a repeat of the decade-long cooling cycle of the mid-20th century.  The important difference this time is we are now in a very weak solar cycle, compared to back-to-back strong cycles in 1950 and 1960.  We know the weak solar cycles always produce cooling, sometimes catastrophic cooling such as the Little Ice Age.  Yet, within a very few years, perhaps two or three if the Russian scientist is right, by 2014 to 2015 we should have sufficient data on which to act.

The implications of a prolonged cold period are absolutely grim. Engineers, I believe, should consider ways that you can use your talents to meet these challenges posed by a colder climate.

Let me say in closing that I have a lot of faith in chemical engineers. I know what we can do. I have seen what we can do, and the world is a better place because of it. However, I hope that you would get involved in this.  It is a major issue, perhaps the issue of our time. I believe chemical engineers have a unique perspective.   I ask that you would consider getting involved in this area. 

Thank you very much, and I'll be happy to take any questions you may have.

Roger E. Sowell, Esq. 

Marina del Rey, California USA

Note: the question and answer period extended for almost an hour.  I will attempt to place the questions and my answers here as an addedum.  - - Roger

Update: March 27, 2014, I updated the link to the NCDC data in part II.  This pertains to Figures 13, 14, and 15.  -- Roger