Subtitle: Man-made Global Warming is Pure BS - Bad Science
Below are the audio transcript and principal presentation slides from my luncheon presentation to South Texas Section of AIChE in Houston, Texas, given on Friday, September 6, 2019. The audio transcript has had minor edits for clarity. (removed the coughs, and such things.) My sincere thanks to my very dear friend, T. who taped this for me, and assisted greatly with the transcribing. And a special Hello and thanks for being there to my old and wonderful friends, P. and R. You know who you are!
(UPDATED 9-16-2019: Included material on the many issues with the data, which was not presented in the speech due to time limitations. See end of article. -- end update.)
Transcript begins:
Good afternoon, and thank you for that warm welcome, William. I want to give a brief introduction about why this particular topic is on the agenda today. The STS AIChE this year has an executive board that chose man-made global warming as a focus, with several speakers on the topic with more yet to speak. I asked the STS president if I could speak in a rebuttal capacity. He agreed, and today I’m delighted to be the speaker.
Today, I will not lecture and tell you what to believe. You are all chemical engineers, as I am, and I expect you to make up your own minds after considering the data. I believe that much of the material in the presentation today has not been publicized much, if at all, and we skeptics want to have this material discussed and considered.
Man-made global warming, or AGW, is, in my view, BS…. That is, Bad Science. And when I say my view, or our view, I am including the many hundreds and thousands of other trained engineers (and scientists) who have looked into this, and agree with me. So, it’s not just me out there, making up a bunch of numbers. There are some really smart people that agree with this. The science is far too uncertain, the steps taken too questionable, to have any serious credibility. This presentation is about some of the facts and issues that we have seen over the past 15 to 20 years in our research and analysis.
Here are some basic facts, with which both the IPCC and the skeptics agree. First, CO2 is a luminous gas, it absorbs IR radiation, then releases the heat. Next, measured temperatures DO show an increasing trend – but only in select locations.
The measured temperatures, however, do show a warming trend if you take a look at places like Boston, or New York, or Miami, you will find that yes, they are warmer now than they were 100 years ago. But, not in all locations and that is a key point. We will see more of that. The present climate, as said often by CNN and other people, it’s hotter now everywhere on Earth than it’s ever been in the temperature record. That’s just not true, and we will see that. It’s been a lot warmer in the past 12,000 years, multiple times. (Note, Examples are the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Optimum, and the early climate optimum) And in the (AIChE) meeting last March, I don’t know how many of you were there for that, the professor from A&M came, Dr. Holtzapple I think, and was telling us how we are going to have all these species be extinct if we have another degree of warming, or something like that. (see link for SLB article on that presentation)
My question at the time was, Sir, how did they survive the last four times when it was much warmer than today, when the warming lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years? Well, he didn’t like that question. Apparently, you do not ask questions like that, not at one of those meetings.
But, survive they did. Polar bears have been around for at least the last 450,000 years, although some scientists will say it is more like 3,000,000. That means they have been through several warm periods, and did just fine. (see link to SLB article, "Polar Bears Don't Know They Went Extinct 100,000 Years Ago")
We also know there are many cycles to the climate. I won’t go through all of them, but there are sunspot cycles, both an 11 year and 22 year. There’s a 60 year weather cycle, there’s a 1,500 year climate cycle. That was published by one of my colleagues and friends, Dr. S. Fred Singer, as "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years." His associate on that one was Dr. Dennis Avery. I highly recommend everyone read that book; it is pretty good. Then, there is the 100,000 year Milankovic cycle that gives us the ice ages and warm periods in between. All of those are known.
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Cooler SST anomaly in blue, East of Florida
due to Hurricane Dorian - 2019
CREDIT: Image from Climate Reanalyzer
(https://ClimateReanalyzer.org),
Climate Change Institute,
University of Maine, USA |
Some others: we have an El Niño cycle that is roughly 8 years, but not very regular. Should we call that a cycle? Well, maybe. Then there are the ocean oscillations, and then we have another fact, not a cycle. Hurricanes, when you have fewer of them, I don’t know if everybody agrees with this. But in my view, they are Nature’s air conditioning machine. They will cool the waters that they pass over. You can actually see that on some of the IR graphs from space. The path of this latest one, Dorian, bringing us a nice low temperature across a big swath there. So, if we have fewer hurricanes, we are going to have warmer ocean water. No one much mentions that one, either.
So, the main points I want to make today are these five, listed here: we will talk about:
-Inconsistent warming from carbon dioxide. That’s one of the main reasons that I got into this. I saw that there was more inconsistency, and that, that bothered me.
-We have a lot of failed predictions, from the climate models. Many of their predictions have failed. We are still looking for one to come true, actually.
-In my view, rather in our view, the causes of the warming, and remember I said there actually is some measured warming, they have identified all the wrong causes. We are going to look at about half a dozen or so actual causes that they don’t even talk about.
-The data that they are using, and I really hope you never use data like that in engineering, because it is so bad, it is what we call Not fit for purpose. You can’t do what they want to do with that data.
-And then finally, if we have enough time, and I don’t know that we will, talk about the uncertainty. There is an awful lot of uncertainty that is very large, and in many areas of what they call Settled Science, according to CNN and others.
The first one, about the consistency of CO2. We know that it is not consistent. However, if it is real science, it must be consistent. I have a stage prop here, if I can find it. Here it is. Just a little ball, a 2-inch rubber ball, no big deal. If I was able to throw this ball up exactly 17 inches, every single time, it would take almost exactly one second to go all the way up, then all the way down. (tossing the ball up several times). We know that from basic physics. What I want you to do, if somebody here in the room will volunteer for me, take this ball, and throw it up about that high (3-4 feet) every time, and make it come down within one second. (chuckles from the audience). Anybody? Any takers on that one? (audience: “I don’t think so!”) This is one second and a toss of 17 inches. If you throw it up 34 inches, we know from basic physics that it is never going to come down within one second. And I’d like someone else to throw it up three inches, and make it stay up in the air for three seconds. (tossing the ball 3 inches up). Do we have any takers on that one? I don’t see any takers. (audience: Sowell, you are nuts!) Yes. Because, that is what CO2 does. Sometimes, if gravity behaved like CO2, we could get one second for a toss. And other times, it would take 3 seconds. And sometimes, it only takes ½ a second to go up and down. Totally inconsistent. When we see that in the real world, that rang alarm bells for me. I’m going to use this (ball) again in a minute, so I’m going to put it right there (on a table.)
We are going to see a graph of the CO2, it did increase by 100 ppm, which is roughly one-third in a period of roughly 100 years, correction, that’s 60 years. I’ll go ahead and show that slide. This is the same slide that the guy showed last March, this is the carbon
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| CO2 since 1959 measured at Mauna Loa |
dioxide in the atmosphere on a dry basis, they do take the humidity out first. It is measured at the site at Mauna Loa (Hawaii). (see link to CO2 data over time) The key point here is that this graph, which goes from 1959 up to 2019, and these are ppm numbers (indicating vertical axis), from 315 down here, and 400 ppm is this black line across there. So, roughly from 300 to 400 in a span of 60 years, more or less, 55 or something like that. And this is what all the alarm is, all that CO2 going into the air. But, if you were to, and this is a trick that those guys do, they will make graphs like this that are deliberately misleading or deceptive. If you were to plot this out, with a graph that starts at zero, and the top up here is around 4,000 ppm, which is what the span is we think over the history of the Earth, that line is totally flat. Totally flat. So, here it is, and we will see more about that. This is going to play a key role in the unsettled science, when we get to that at the end.
Now, what does that mean, 300 parts per million? What does that look like? There are all kinds of examples out there, if one has a football field, it is the last one-eighth of an inch before you reach the end zone. Kind of things like that. (Note, it is actually 1 inch out of the entire football field of 100 yards) Well, here’s something that I wanted to show.
If you have a cube, that was 27 inches, basically the length of my arm (indicating to the side), a cube that big would contain 20,000 cubic inches. Anybody here with a calculator could probably run that one out. And, if six of those cubic inches, which would be three of
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Visualizing 300 ppm as in 1960
No alarm sounded, everyone was cool |
these little rubber balls, roughly, that would constitute the same amount as 300 parts per million. Now, that was what we had in 1960, if you remember, and everybody was cool. Nobody was worried about global warming. Because, 300 ppm didn’t warm the Earth to an alarming degree. What happened? In 60 years, another ball showed up in the cube. This one is red, because it is the big trouble-maker.
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Visualizing 400 ppm as in 2014
That one added ball is claimed
to cause all sorts of harm |
That is all it is, just one more out of three in there, is causing all of this alarm and trouble, and what we are supposed to have; catastrophic problems. Something to think about. Can one more ball, out of three, in a cube that big, cause all that trouble?
Next, here is the history of the global temperature. This is the surface. They have another one that is very similar to this that includes the land and the ocean together. The source for this is the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They put together these reports, and you can read them. This is what they believe the average temperature changed over the course of the past 140 years. The beginning is 1880, the minimum is at 1910, and this goes up to 2018. The peak there was 2015.
Has anybody seen this graph before? I hope that some people are familiar with this. The interesting thing about that graph is, it is not very consistent. We had a little bit of cooling occurring, we had some warming occurring in here (1910 – 1945), then we had a confused area here (1945-1975), where it sort of leveled out. All that time, CO2 if you remember that curve above, was going up and up and up. In engineering, if we have something like this and you call upon a control systems engineer, saying “build me a control system to control that,” you would not use CO2 as your control variable. Because, that piece in the middle, right there (1945-1975). It’s what we call not monotonic increasing. (audience: a lack of correlation)
We note the rising temperature here started off in about 1975. That’s a very interesting time when that started, and we will talk more about that. What happened (chuckling). So.
What we can see in the inconsistency, and I want to show a number of examples, of how CO2 did not behave consistently like a ball would behave in a gravity demonstration. These are the ones I want to talk about, from the largest scope we have; one hemisphere is not warming much and the other is. Does anybody know which is which? Which one is warming? (audience: the northern). The northern hemisphere is warming, and the southern hemisphere, almost none whatsoever. What is interesting to me, how does CO2 know what’s North, and what’s South? All the way down to the smaller scales; we can go to regional, states, counties, we can go all the way to cities. For adjacent cities, some are warming, some are not. That’s a good trick, if you can pull that off, with CO2. That’s amazing. We are going to see some of that.
Here is another IPCC graph, this is from their fifth assessment report, called the AR5. It came out about 5 years ago I think. The important point here is the different colors for areas in the United States.
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North America Annual Temperature Change,
coded by color
- CREDIT: IPCC |
I removed a little piece of this graphic, so what the title says is Annual Temperature Change. Here is the scale; blue means it got cooler, and the shades of yellow and red are warming. The redder it is, the hotter it is getting. The time period is about 110 years, from 1901 to 2012 in this case. They have blocked it out by regions. We can tell right here, this is a blue-ish region, in the South and Southeast of the United States, actually cooled in over 100 years. Very interesting. And yet, right next to it we have an area that is warming. An area that is cooling and one warming are right next to each other. That‘s probably central Texas and West Texas right there. Right next to that we have this whole zone, basically the Rocky Mountains, and a bit of Arizona, are warming a lot. Again, my question has always been, How does CO2 know? Did somebody go up there and tell it, look, down there’s the Rockies, send down the heat! (audience question: what is the red blob at the top, is that Greenland?) Actually, that red block is just south of Hudson Bay in Canada. (audience: that doesn’t make sense). Exactly. We have this all over the world. If we look at their world map, it shows the whole thing. There are a lot of different rates of warming, and some cooling. (audience: not bothered by this so much, various wind currents and other factors would do that. Isn’t the important point the average temperature?) And that is what they do, but I will present to you why I think that is an improper way to look at it. Again, I’m not here to tell you what to think.
The issue is, what if you have two cities that are only 50 miles apart. There would not be that much difference in climate, we would think. They both have the same altitude, the same latitude, and I know which two cities these are. One of them is warming at a ridiculous rate, about 2 degrees C per century, while the other is not warming at all. And that is Sacramento, and San Francisco. Sacramento, according to their data, has no warming going on at all, while San Francisco is warming like crazy. That is not the only two pairs, there are a lot of pairs of cities. In another presentation, I went through that part. I can tell you which cities today, that is Shreveport in Louisiana is not warming at all, while St. Louis not too far away is warming a lot. Then, Abilene, Texas is not warming at all, but not too far up the highway, is St. Louis. There are many, many examples like this out there. (audience: what about Greenland?) Greenland has a totally different climate compared to say, South Texas, they are a long way away. But, Shreveport and St. Louis? It is amazing. Something to look into, something to think about. And, they don’t tell you about that. That’s one of the ones they don’t want to talk about. (see link and figures 6 and 7 there for discussion on adjacent cities with disparate warming/cooling)
(audience question about the many factors that impact the environment and warming.) I have an entire section on the various factors, that we will get to in just a moment.
I now want to talk to you about the small towns. I am doing some research right now, using official government data from NOAA. I’m looking at the very smallest towns in the nation, towns with 5,000 or 6,000 population or smaller, that have long records all the way back to 1910. Plus, almost all of the data is present. Here are the results I am finding. I only show about 20 of these results because we do not have enough time to go through them all. The temperature trends are from minus 3 degrees (F). minus 2.5, last one here is minus 1.8 degrees F per century. These are the overall trend in 109 years’ worth of data of the tiny towns. Again, these are the discrepancies where the big town next to it is warming, but these little towns out here in the prairie are not. Some of the names you might recognize, Natchez in Mississippi, Mena, Arkansas in fact I have that one right here to show you. Here’s Danavang in South Texas, near El Campo, with trend of minus 1.1 degrees. (Note, these slides are not shown here pending final review and publication).
Here’s the graph of temperatures in Mena, Arkansas, with data from 1910 to 2018. We have 109 years inclusive. The trend or slope for Mena is minus 2.7 degrees F per century. I don’t see any warming at all from 1970 onward.
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Annual average Temperatures, Mena Arkansas
Data from NCDC |
So, something else, maybe there are other factors that are causing that town to cool. Maybe something else is causing others to warm. In our view, that’s not CO2. And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of these and I’ve looked at about 100 towns so far. On average they are not warming at all.
And here we have Donaldson Louisiana right on the river not too far from New Orleans and same thing, no warming at all here. Another one, I won’t go through all of these, I’ll only put three up here, there’s one in Missouri, it’s not just in the south, some are further up in all the different states. There’s Illinois, Idaho,
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| Data from NCDC |
South Dakota, they’re all across the country. They all do this. So that’s something to think about …. How can we have disparate warming trends from adjacent localities? And then we’re going to see what happens in different counties where there is a great study there.
Here it is, the Goodridge chart. Mr. Goodridge is retired from the state of California where he was the State Climatologist for many years. He published this graph and
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| Data from NCDC |
some text to go along with it. What this shows, in case you can’t really see, is the average of different counties in California. They have, I think, 80 something counties, not nearly as many as Texas. He asked, how much is the warming, and I think his time frame is from 1910 to 1995. He stratified this, grouped them by the population in the county in the 1990 census. He published in, I think, 1995 or something like that. What he found was that this top line is the average of all the counties that have one million people or more. He showed there is definitely some warming in those counties, take a look at that. Then he did the ones, the small counties, with these down here with almost no warming at all, these have 100,000 people or fewer as of the 1990 census. These had basically no warming.
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California UHI Trends
CREDIT: - J. Goodridge 1996 |
The ones in the middle, between 100,000 and one million is this line, and sure enough it fell pretty much in the middle. This was one of the main points that got me started whatever it was, 15 years ago or something like that. How can that be true, if CO2 is going to be the causal agent for global warming? So, we have seen the cities, we’ve seen the counties, and the regions. I didn’t show you the slide but you can look in any of their publications to see the northern hemisphere is warming more than the southern.
We have some fairly respected authorities that agree with this position that CO2 is not the causal agent. At the very bottom of this slide is Professor Richard Lindzen from MIT, I have not met him but I did meet Dr. Singer. What he (Lindzen) said was that global warming, and this is a piece from a longer quote, global warming from the greenhouse gas effect is trivially true and numerically insignificant. I have to agree with that, because we know we have fired heaters where CO2 is in fact, a major source of heat transfer. In fact, if you do not account for that, your furnace is not going to work like you think it would. But, up in the atmosphere, and we are going to see some of that too in a minute, why it is that that statement is true, at least in our view. And yet, I would hope you would think this over.
CO2 we know has substantial absorbing and release characteristics in fired furnaces. You can look that up if you are not familiar with it, it is in Perry’s in the Heat Transfer by Radiation chapter, I think it is Chapter 5. Or, you can also just look for luminous gases in the Google Scholar section. There is all sorts of stuff about luminous gases and how those things behave. CO2 is one of them.
But, there are three parameters that make a difference when we design a furnace, as to how much heat to account for from the CO2. Those are listed right here, first is concentration, we get more radiation at a higher concentration. Second is pressure, with more absorption and release as pressure goes up. The third is distance, what they call the mean beam length or mean path length. If you talk to a designer, he will say I’m not going to build you a furnace with the tubes over here, 500 feet away, with the flame over here. You are never going to get the heat over there. They are going to be measured more in inches, and sometimes in feet in these furnaces. And, that is a critical point. Because, up in the atmosphere where all of this is supposed to be happening, none of those variables are favorable to heat transfer from CO2.
First of all, we are talking about ppm, 300, maybe 400, compared to what is in a furnace with 100,000 to 150,000 ppm, something like that, depending on what we are burning. For pressure, at the ground they are roughly the same for a furnace versus the atmosphere, but, once we start getting up in the atmosphere, the pressure starts dropping. If anyone has been to the mountains, it is guaranteed there is less pressure up there. And, the distances in the atmosphere are measured in miles. We are not measuring in inches. So, here we go. I hope as chemical engineers you will go take a look at this. I have this saying when I make my speeches, please, prove me wrong. You see, I hate to be wrong, and if I am wrong, I don’t want to be wrong for very long. Please, you have my card, I don’t like being wrong, especially for very long. This is right there in Perry’s. I have yet to actually find something in Perry’s that is not right.
So, what’s next. We talked about CO2 and how it is inconsistent, how it probably can’t do what they say it does, in fact, I don’t think it can do that up in the atmosphere.
Let’s talk about the failed predictions. In climate science there are all of these gloom and doom things that are supposed to happen. You’ve probably heard them all, where sea level is going to make New Orleans an underwater city, Florida is going to disappear, we have all this bad news from sea level rise. We have temperatures are supposed to rise in the tropics, in the atmosphere above the tropics, what they call the “hot spot.” I don’t know if you are familiar with that, but it is one of the hot button issues. We are supposed to have more hurricanes, they are supposed to be stronger, there are supposed to be more tornadoes and in the higher categories, we are supposed to have polar ice that is melting at a more rapid rate, all of these bad, bad things are going to happen. Now, let’s take a look at the reality (chuckling.)
First of all, sea level rise, our first one, has been measured for a couple of centuries by buoys, mainly in harbors around the world. The data is not the best, for instance we measure in millimeters now, but they didn’t even know what a meter was back then. I don’t know when the meter was established, was it in 1890 or in 1990, something like that. The best records that we have show an increase of roughly 1.4 mm per year over all those centuries. Then, we put up satellites starting in about 1979, and those established the rise is much more, at 3.2 mm per year as the accepted rate. And, they slide that one by!
You can’t take two different measurements, by two different systems, and string the numbers together end to end. That is called data splicing, and that is a factually erroneous technique. Putting on my lawyer hat here for a minute, if somebody pulls that in one of the cases I’m involved in, we are likely going to win because we can prove that’s a very bad thing to do. Yet, they do this all the time in climate science. (audience question: how do they measure 3.2 mm by satellite? And that accurately?) That’s a very interesting question, and I don’t know the whole answer. My understanding is they actually shine a laser-beam down, and there are collectors on the satellite itself. The laser bounces off the wave crests and the troughs, and some goes off at angles, and they can average out all of that and measure the time required for the light waves to come back. Then, they have to correct, because the satellite is not in a perfectly circular orbit. To the extent it is a little closer at one point, the light gets there a bit faster. And, I’m exaggerating this, but if it is a big egg-shaped orbit, it will take longer (at the far end) for the light to get there and back. So, they adjust for all of that. That’s my layman’s understanding of a very complex thing. (audience comment: regarding adjusting for all of that, as an old chemical engineer, I think that’s Bull-$hit. …. Followed by laughter from audience. Commenter again: what I’m getting at is, 3.2 mm is nothing. I don’t know where they came up with the 1.4 mm, but I can just see somebody with a ruler.) It gets even more complicated, and you bring up a good point, because the tide doesn’t stay in one spot. We all know that the tide goes down, and it goes up. Some days it has a low tide at one level, and some days a high tide that is really high, and some days there are tides in the middle. So, if you are measuring the tides by the tidal gauge at the harbor here in Galveston, which they do, by the way, you can take a look at the data there. How does one detect a trend on this over 100 years? These are what they publish, and these are the things they claim are happening. What it boils down to is, 1.4 mm is roughly 5 inches per century. The 3.2 is about double that, about 8 or 9 inches per century (aside, 3.2 mm/y is 12 inches per century. I was off by a couple of inches on that one). (audience comment: it’s the same principle as a radar gun.)
What they don’t include, and this is the major point I want to make here, and I’ve never seen this in any of their writings, is we know there is siltation occurring in the oceans. There is stuff washed off the land, there is mud and sand, all kinds of stuff. How do we know? Because we have what we call sedimentary rocks. We have sandstone, limestone, and shale, all created by stuff that washed off and landed on the ocean floor, and eventually compacted into rock. In basic geology classes, in any textbook, they will have that statement: the siltation rate in the oceans, they didn’t give a number, they just said a few millimeters per year. Now, “a few” is a bit ambiguous, but it is on the order of 1.5 to 3, could be maybe 4 or 5. That is amazingly similar to what they claim as the rate of sea level rise. You can do this at home, playing with your kids or grandkids, get a bucket and fill it almost to the top with water. Then start pouring some sand into the bucket, that would be the silt going into the ocean. After a while, the water overflows because the level goes up. My question is, why don’t the IPCC talk about that? How much of the rise that is supposed to be from melting ice, is actually because of siltation going on in the oceans? They won’t talk about that.
Next, the point about the temperature rise above the tropics, this cannot be found. They call it the “hot spot,” there has been a couple of publications on that. I have a chart here to show on that. This chart is from a presentation made by Dr. John Christy,
 |
Missing Hot Spot
CREDIT: Dr. J. Christy, UAH |
of University of Alabama at Huntsville. (see link to Dr. Christy's presentation) The light purple lines are the results of model runs that show what the temperatures should be doing above the tropics in the upper atmosphere. The blue lines are what has actually been measured, primarily from balloons and satellites. They are trying to find it (hot spot), and the basic conclusion is, that part of the theory is a bust. They cannot find any evidence of a hot spot, and after 60 years of CO2 going up, it ought to be glowing hot up there. And, it is not. So, there is another area where their models are wrong, their theory didn’t work.
Next, more hurricanes, we will talk about that. More tornadoes, I don’t have a slide, and polar ice, I do have a slide on that.
There is another professor, Dr. Ryan Maue, he is at Florida State University. He puts out this chart. As you know, global warming theory says that hurricanes should be getting more frequent, and more intense, more of them.
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Accumulated Cyclone Energy
CREDIT: Dr. R. Maue, FSU |
If you were to block out the end of the graph, and look only at from 1972 up to 1994, they were cheering, cheering like crazy. Their theory was working, we had more hurricanes happening, and “Yay Team! We were right!” But as we know, Nature bats last, and look what happened in the years after that. This graph shows, the top line is the accumulated cyclone energy. We take a hurricane or a tropical cyclone, and we measure how big an area it covers, and we measure how fast the winds are going, and the time in how many hours or days it actually does all of this. You can compute a number for the energy it took to do all of that. In my simple way, if I’m an engineer and a man comes to me and says build me some fans big enough to make a hurricane spin like that, how much horsepower will it take to do that, and how much electricity is it going to take to run it? Well, that’s kind of what it is, for the whole world. The bottom line is the same thing, but only for the northern hemisphere. They tend to track pretty well. That was a big bust; we have fewer hurricanes, not more. You wouldn’t believe that, if you listened to CNN.
(audience question on toxic pollutants’ effect on biological systems, especially those involved in recycling.) If I can paraphrase with my booming voice, the concern is about pollutants, perhaps aerosols, I think acid rain would fall into that category. What can we do to mitigate those sorts of things, how does that fit into the bigger picture of climate change. Did I get that right? (nodding of head). We know there is no agreement on the ultimate effect of a warmer Earth on biological systems. Many of them will benefit, but we don’t know for sure how many will suffer. This is an area of ongoing study. Which ones are more fragile ecosystems, and which are more robust. In my view, and I’ve been to the coral reefs, I’ve seen them. Those things have been there for centuries, even thousands of years. They’ve been through ups and downs in the climate cycles, and guess what, they are still there (chuckling).
Let me talk about the ice, because we are running out of time to finish all of this.
Here is a failed prediction, because the Arctic ice was supposed to be gone by now. You may have heard Al Gore saying something like “the Arctic will be ice-free by 2014” or something like that. I want to call your attention, these are three lines,
that show the maximum extent, every Winter of the Arctic ice (top line), this (middle) line is the average extent over the year, and the bottom line is the lowest extent over the Summer. (see link to Arctic ice graphs) They have drawn straight lines through these, because they love to draw straight lines. Well, I can draw good straight lines, too, so let’s take a look at this. See those black lines on there? Those show the ice has stabilized since 2006. What we had going on was a stable regime in the early years, then this is the one they are most alarmed about, a similar one was in Al Gore’s movie. If you ever see a graph that these guys put out, and I’ve seen Michael Mann present, and some of the others present, they will stop this chart right here at the minimum. They won’t show you this last bit out here (the area of no decline).
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Arctic Ice extent,
with stabilized trend shown in black |
Does that sound deceptive, to anybody besides me? What is going on here is the ice has stabilized since 2006, now 13 years. That’s a pretty cool trick, as CO2 has managed to put the gun back in the holster. So, it does not shoot the heating rays down anymore. (audience: that does not take into account what is going on in Greenland, which is definitely melting.) Really? I’m so glad you brought that up, because guess what (slide of Greenland melt hole) right there on the next slide is Greenland.
You see, what’s going on in Greenland is something called black carbon. I don’t know how many of you have lived up North where it snows, and they put stuff on the ice to make it melt. I did, I lived up there in Ohio for a while. They put black cinders on the ice and snow so the sunshine will get a little assist in melting the ice away. The bottom of that melt-hole is full of black carbon. This is from soot, from fires, from jet engines. We have had over-the-pole flights that started about, hmmm… 1970! What an interesting year, when all of that stuff started (chuckling). You can see, although they don’t want you to see this, just go online and input black ice Greenland and take a look at the videos. From aircraft flying over these things, there are thousands of these. The thing about black on ice in Greenland, is it doesn’t go away. It accumulates; every year it gets bigger and bigger. How many of you knew that, before you came in here today? The source is from Canadian forests on fire, the Chinese coal power plants, but there is another source. They actually have a black algae that grows on the ice up there. That’s one of the things they try to emphasize, so you don’t ask questions about all this black carbon that rains down up there. I can see why the ice is melting. If you go out and sprinkle black carbon. In fact, way back when I was in 4th grade (in 1963-64), we had a science class which at that time, global cooling was the big issue. They were afraid we would have icebergs in Houston. The teacher told us, and I’ll never forget this, not to worry because we now have airplanes that if we need to, can sprinkle ground up charcoal on the ice in Canada so it will all melt. So, there ya go, we didn’t have to sprinkle charcoal, the forest fires did it for free. (audience question: this is not a technical but a political issue.) I have a slide to talk about the motivation behind much of this, and I agree that a lot of this is politics.
Now, to the wrong causes that were identified. We know that Arctic ice is melting due to magmatic activity on the seafloor under the circum-Arctic current. Did you ever notice that the ice is melting on the Russian shore, but it is not melting on the Canadian shore? Again, a disparity in what CO2 is supposed to be doing. That is a fact, you can look that one up. The source is the area between Greenland and whatever that next island is toward Europe, the mid-Atlantic ridge passes there. The ridge has been having earthquakes and magmatic releases since about 1975 and 1980, the water warms a bit, then swirls past Russia so their ice is the part that disappears. It’s an interesting point.
Glaciers have also the same issues, they have done some studies particularly in the Alps where the melt is due to black soot. (audience question on Glacier National Park and retreating glaciers). I don’t know the causal factors there, but they had signs in the park for many, many years that said the glacier disappearing rate is such that they expect them all to be gone by year 2020. Well, we are pretty close to 2020, and guess who has taken down all of those signs now? (chuckling). (aside, it could be the western drought has reduced the humidity in Glacier Park, increasing sublimation, also drought decreases the snowfall that replenishes glaciers, also increased wildfires deposit more black soot). And speaking of glaciers, we have a new one forming in the Sierras out in California. This is the first time they have found a valley where the snow did not melt over the summer. There is a 40-foot wall of snow, and the big question is, what will happen in the next few years? It may melt away, but it may get more and more snow. That is how we start glaciers. In Glacier Park, we know that the rate of ice disappearance is the same today as it was 150 years ago. Back in 1850, they were watching all this happen, too, and it is amazing how in all these years, the ice melt rate has never increased. Even though the CO2 recently has gone up. So, we wonder, is CO2 lazy?
Also, Mount Kilimanjaro does not have CO2 issues, but they do have more sublimation due to land changes that make the air more arid, less humid. The phrase is desertification, made it into a desert. The air is not as humid, so the physical chemistry requires more sublimation in dry air.
More on causes of warming, that are not CO2. The funny thing is, when the IPCC put out their studies, they said we know about aerosols, and how they reflect sunshine, so they put those in the models. That took care of the (temperature) declines pretty well, but we couldn’t get anything to get the temperatures to go back up in our models. The ONLY thing we could think of, and that’s a quote, the only thing we could think of was CO2. So, they shoved that one into their models.
But, being a good American, I said, fellers, let me give you some help here. We have a list of almost a dozen things, and we won’t go through all of them today. (see link to SLB article on many causes of warming, but not CO2: "The Case Against Carbon Dioxide - Fatal Flaws") One thing is, the cities have much more population, another is we are using a lot more energy per capita. I don’t know if you know, but we now use 4 billion MWh on an annual basis in electricity in the United States. That is from the Energy department (DOE), and it was zero just 100 years ago. We went from zero to 20 million barrels per day of oil, in the same time frame, 100 years. What does that look like? (slide of lights at night) It looks like this.
 |
Composite image, N. America at night
source: NASA |
This is a composite satellite photo of the United States at night showing all of the lights. You probably cannot see this, but up here this is Canada, and this is Hudson Bay which is jet-black. One hundred years ago, the whole thing would have looked like that. All of that energy, and we know as engineers that energy cannot be destroyed, it must be transferred somewhere, it has to go somewhere. That’s a lot of MWh, and Btus from burning 20 million barrels of oil per day (note, that is 7.3 billion barrels per year). That is an incredible amount of heat that must be released into space, and if you take a look, this area up in here (East Coast and New England) is an area where the warming is occurring over the past 100 years. That is where most of the industry and the people are, up in the East, and that’s why, in my view, they are measuring the heat coming off of the buildings. They are not measuring the effect of CO2. (question on Europe electricity, from nuclear plants and the huge amount of reject heat from them.) That’s right, nuclear plants have a low thermal efficiency, that is offset somewhat by not losing heat out the smokestack. Roughly anywhere from 75 percent to as low as 65 percent of the total energy created in the reactor goes off in the cooling tower.
(question on why the US map earlier has red areas and blue areas, how does that fit in? Canada was dark at the red area.) (second question on why the dark areas on the map from space, in the West had so much warming?) Yes, the next slide answers that.
Here you go, boys, this is it. It’s amazing what a drought will do. I’m going to show a slide here in a minute of creating a false impression of global warming, or even local warming. Everybody knows, especially if you’ve ever been out in the desert when it rains, well, we pray for rain because it’s going to be cooler. Even here in Houston, the other day we had a nice little rain storm, and it cooled things off. It’s a very pronounced effect, and evaporative cooling is the technical term for it. What we have found, in looking through all the little towns that I’ve been looking at, is some of those in the West, especially in the Rocky Mountains and in California, show a huge warming. I kept thinking how could that be? They are small towns, they are far from any big cities. Then, we look at the drought record in those states, and find out that these states right here, and I only listed a few of them, Montana, Utah, Oregon, California, showed enormous warming, but they also had a very strong drought. It makes a difference, as we will see in a minute. We’re going to play see-saw like on the playground when we were kids.
 |
PDSI for Wyoming and Montana -
Data from NOAA |
This PDSI is a measure of drought intensity (Palmer Drought Severity Index) if you want to look that up. Some have a negative PDSI, and those show a cooling trend. It’s more related to drought and rain than it is to CO2. Here’s a couple of charts that show that, these are taken right from NOAA’s website, you can do this yourself. I’ll give you all the web locations if you want. What these charts show, the green bars show how much rain occurred, over years 1910 to 2019. The yellow bars are the drought periods.
The trendline down means more drought, this state is Wyoming, that one is Montana, they both show much more drought. So, of course(!) they are going to show a warming trend. It has nothing to do with CO2. You can do this on state after
 |
PDSI for Utah and Oregon
Data from NOAA |
state after state, which is what I am currently in the process of doing right now. It was an eye-opener to see this. Now, they do mention drought a little bit in the IPCC reports, but they gloss right over it. They hope that you don’t know this!! (chuckling). Here’s some more states, Utah and Oregon, again trend lines going down (more drought).
Here are two graphs (Alabama and Arkansas) with trend lines up, because they had more drought in the early years and more rain after 1965. This year, 1965, have you ever heard of 1965 in any of their reports? That’s kind of the balance point right now on the length of the line they are drawing.
 |
PDSI for Alabama and Arkansas
Data from NOAA |
So, anything that happened before 1965, such as more drought, tends to skew the line upward when you draw a trend. There are people who claim that they have fiddled with the data by doing things on one side of 1965 that they don’t do on the other.
Next, the pollution laws. One of the things that happens that causes the air to be cleaner, we call the aerosol content. Starting in 1970, we had the Environmental Protection Act passed, and President Nixon signed it. The EPA agency was established, then in 1973 the Clean Air Act was passed. Starting after that, in 1975 and 1980, the air began getting cleaner in many polluted cities across the United States. It took a little longer to happen around the globe, but many cities now are cleaner. Notably, China is not. I got to work in some of the overseas cities and it was very polluted over there in their air. I’ve seen it.
The EPA will tell you how many tons of pollutants they have removed from the skies. What that does is actually allow more sunshine to come down and warm up the ground. So, to that extent, there is another causal factor that is not CO2. Way out in the desert, it’s probably not an issue but on that East Coast, it is.
The next one is very big, I want to mention Svensmark and the CERN experiment. This has to do with the magnetic field of the Sun deflecting the GCRs, galactic cosmic rays away from the Earth. We now know, after experiments at the CERN atom smasher, that they do create condensation nuclei in the atmosphere when they hit. This correlates with sunspots; the more sunspots, the warmer the Earth gets. The fewer sunspots, the colder it gets. This is the mechanism. Finally, after 20 years of doing this, the IPCC actually admitted that that is actually true, but they called it an inconsequential mechanism. And I ask them, do you fellows know about the Little Ice Age, when there were no sunspots for decades? It got a little cold (chuckling). They don’t like to talk to me.
And then we have this graph, the clouds are in blue in two sections. Upper is the clouds representing 30 percent reflection
 |
Solar Energy change with 1 percent
change in cloud cover |
of the incoming sunlight, which is what they say. The albedo is 30 percent. That means only about 953 W/m2 get through. If we have only a one percent change in cloud cover, we end up with 13 W/m2 difference coming into the Earth to warm it up. And that is only important if you know that what they are claiming for the entire effect of CO2 doubling, is only about 1.5 W/m2. So, the point here is, and I hope you take this one home and think about it, if the cloud cover changes only one percent, that is a ten times bigger effect than what they are claiming for CO2 in the whole big scheme of things. We know for a fact that the clouds are changing, because the sunspots have changed.
We also have more local humidity from watering lawns and such things, and cooling towers. That is why here in Houston, and I grew up here, the nights are warm. That is why if you go outside at night on the same day, or have a buddy in the desert, say Phoenix, or right outside of Phoenix because it is a big city, out in the desert it gets much colder at night. Much colder. The CO2 is the same in both places, so what is the difference? Humidity. To the extent these western cities have increased in population and increased their use of water for irrigation, lawns, and even crop circles. All of these are putting water vapor into the air, creating humidity, and that is causing the nights to be warmer. Sure enough, it we look at the tiny towns that I’m looking at, and only the nighttime minimum temperatures, they are getting warmer in the West. There you go.
Another cause is just from population expanding, such as a thermometer out in Katy, Texas where it was out in the country when we were kids. Now, it’s sort of in the city. If there was a measuring station there, its attributes have changed from small town rural to more suburban. That will increase your temperature. It has nothing to do with CO2.
The settled science is next. This will have real equations and some engineering. They have a thing called the transient sensitivity to CO2.
 |
| CO2 Sensitivity Calculation |
What that means is, over the short term of a few decades, how the temperature will change, it is dT/dCO2. There is another one called the Equilibrium sensitivity, and we will talk about that maybe if we have time. Here is the equation, change in Temperature is equal to some constant K times the natural log of the ratio of CO2 concentrations in ppm at the end and at the beginning. We can use this and work out the value of K for about 0.7 degrees warming if we start about here and go all the way up. If we use 400 ppm and 300 ppm just for round numbers, we get a value of 2.4. Then they talk about how much warming will we get for a doubling of CO2? We end up with 1.7 degrees, roughly. That’s from 275 ppm in 1850, up to 550 ppm. Where does the uncertainty come in?
Take a look at that chart! (refer earlier to global temperature anomaly chart) What if we take values from 1910, to 2015, the temperature rise is 1.1 degrees C. We get an entirely different value for K. And, what if we instead take the values from 1945 down to 1975, well now it’s a negative number and they don’t want to talk to you!! That shows that the trend has the wrong slope. I’m a bad boy, because I talk to them like that. We can also take the zero point from 1880, roughly, up to 2015, still the 0.7 rise but much greater CO2 difference. Yet a different value of K. What does that mean? They have no clue what they are doing. They have a range of what temperatures will do for a CO2 doubling, where, I think I’ve seen numbers from 1.5 to 5.5. Those are degrees C. That is why. Then, in the same breath, they will smile at you and say, “The science is settled,” in their deepest Walter Cronkite voice. They have NO clue what they are doing here, and they admit it, it’s in their publications. They are absolutely guessing on this. This data is so bad, the analytical techniques are so bad, that in my view, I would hope that nobody in here ever designs a chemical plant or a refinery using those techniques, because if you do, you will end up talking to an attorney like me who handles engineering matters. And, you will be saying, Help me, sir, we just blew up a billion dollars’ worth of stuff, and we killed some people. You cannot do that in our world. We have to use real data and real science.
Why are the IPCC and the others doing this? This is my viewpoint, but it is shared by an awful lot of people. First, there was a fear of running out of fossil fuels, as somebody brought up. But, that turned out to be wrong as the peak oil scare fizzled. We found out how to get more oil out of the ground. And much more natural gas, too. There is also this thing called Western guilt, because our societies have benefitted from using fossil fuels while a lot of countries didn’t have that chance. Next, the desire to have a wealth transfer from the wealthy countries that had the fossil fuel benefit, to the other countries that don’t. This is exactly what the Paris Accord is all about. I don’t know how many of you have read it, I read it to see what was in there. There is a world government established, there are transfer payments to be made, in named countries. They had to sign their name, Yes we will do this. There are the recipient countries, and you can think of who they are, the ones with the lowest GDP on Earth, they were absolutely going to sign that thing and say that global warming is real. Hey, you bring the money!
So, that’s my view of what is going on there. The politics of it, that’s amazing. However, I cannot talk politics in an AIChE meeting.
Is there more uncertainty? We only talked about the uncertainty about CO2. There is a whole list, where any issue you look at is rife with uncertainty. Sea Level Rise, they abbreviate that SLR, we talked about that. How can you measure it? How much is siltation responsible for?
Sea surface temperature, this is another one where they have no clue what they are talking about.
In the early days, they measured the water temperature by sailing ships dropping a bucket over the side and pulling it up. The captain would have an idea, after they put a thermometer in it, of are we getting close to Antarctica or not? Then a little later, they had ships that pulled water in as engine cooling water, now we have the ARGO buoy system (and to some extent, satellite data).
Now, I can stay and answer questions, but that concludes the presentation. So, thank you very much, and I really enjoyed that. Thank you. (applause).
End transcript.
(I was happy to stay after and chat with those present; a most enjoyable and interesting discussion time. One person in particular was quite complimentary, telling us that he appreciated the presentation and me not using the words Alarmist and Denier, since those are inflammatory. I greatly appreciate those remarks. As best I could tell from the transcript, I did not say those words. -- Roger)
UPDATE 9-16-2019: The temperature data has multiple issues; and the analysis is riddled with errors. To mention only a few issues, very few data points for tiny towns in the US span the entire 109 years (1910 – 2018) with less than 4 percent missing data points. A recent study of NOAA records that is in progress (Sowell) shows only approximately 115 such tiny towns. This is a very small number out of more than 100,000 locations in the NOAA database for the continental US.
Also, the large cities with UHI effect (urban heat island, i.e. Goodridge graphs) are too few to skew the long-term trends upward. Adjustments to the data are responsible for 0.5 degrees C warming (note only 0.7 degrees C total warming from 1965-2015). The reputed warming is certainly man-made, because it is created by including, then adjusting, multiple towns and cities with short term data, infilling missing data, and splicing together multiple short-term records. -- end update
Roger E. Sowell, Esq.
Houston, Texas
copyright (c) 2019 by Roger Sowell - all rights reserved
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