Announcing the death of Climate Science as we know it

It's fair to say that the science underpinning the proposition that mankind is responsible for the warming the planet has experienced over the last hundred or so years has copped a battering.

Less battered in the public arena are political operatives, the Climate Liars, such as the IPCC, Al Gore, James Hansen, the Hockey Stick team and Big Green environmental groups who currently hold public opinion in their grasp.

Europe is already suffering the economic pain inflicted on its people by the travesty of pandering to misanthropic green groups with the unilateral introduction of carbon trading laws.

While the extent and cause can be argued, it's also clear that many developing nations are suffering the unintended consequence of higher food prices brought about by the use of ethanol as a fuel substitute.

Climate change policies have as their platform the output of a variety of climate models. As I've pointed out previously, these models have a zero percent prediction rate, which makes one wonder how history will view the politicians who used them to further their political goals when the consequences are so dire.

So far, climate science resembles astrology more closely than real science and climate models' predictions are closer to horoscopes than anything meaningful.

If climate science is indeed real science then it should make predictions that can be tested. As Karl Popper tells us, the essence of science is falsifiability. If it can be falsified then it is wrong.

So, taking a purely scientific approach to the analysis of climate science is there anything that kills the current predictions of climate science?

As it happens there is.

Before I go to that I'll provide a similar example of a theory making a prediction that could be tested. A negative result would have killed the theory stone dead. A positive result didn't make the theory fact but maintained the theory's ongoing relevance.

That was the Big Bang Theory.

If you've read George Smoot's book Wrinkles In Time then you'll be familiar with the story.

In order for the big bang theory to be correct there must exist a background radiation signature that could be detected. Smoot, along with John Mather, led a team of scientists in the search for the signal. In 1989 NASA launched its Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite.

After more than two years of observation and analysis, the COBE research team announced on 23 April 1992 that the satellite had detected tiny fluctuations in the CMB, a breakthrough in the study of the early universe.

Thus, a key prediction of the theory was shown to be true. For their work Smoot and Mather won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006.

In order for climate models to be correct - and thus the climate science upon which they are based to be correct - they must make predictions that can be tested.

The most important is that of an increased greenhouse effect is a hotspot in the atmosphere over the tropics.

In Dr David Evans' recent paper The Missing Greenhouse Signature he states:

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hotspot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics.

We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes—weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hotspot whatsoever.

So an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of the recent global warming. So we now know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming.

To support this claim he provides the following evidence:

The theoretical signatures come from the latest big report from the IPCC, which is the most authoritative document for those who believe carbon emissions caused global warming. The IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4), 2007, Chapter 9. Figure 9.1, in Section 9.2.2.1, page 675, shows six greenhouse signature diagrams. (http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_Ch09.pdf)

In each diagram the horizontal axis is the latitude, from the north pole (90 degrees north) through the equator to the south pole (90 degrees south). The vertical axis shows the height in the atmosphere, marked on left hand side shown as 0 – 30 km (and on the right hand side as the corresponding air pressures in hPa). The coloured regions on each diagram shows where the temperature changes occur for each possible cause (red +1°C, yellow +0.5°C, green −0.5°C, blue −1°C per century).



...The other main authoritative source for the case that carbon emissions caused global warming is the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). Atmospheric temperatures have been measured by radiosondes (at all heights) since the 1960s, andby satellites using microwave sensors (up to 5 km) since 1979. The CCSP published the results for 1979 – 1999 in part E of Figure 5.7 in section 5.5 on page 116: http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-chap5.pdf

The axes and colours are as per the signature diagrams above, except that the horizontal axis only goes from 75 degrees north to 75 degrees south, there is no data around 60 degrees south, the vertical axis only goes up to 24 km, and dark blue above becomes purple here. The data is called the “HadAT2 temperature data”.



This diagram is confirmed by more radiosonde data collected after 1999, and also after May 2006 when this diagram was published.

Evans concludes:

The theoretical combined signature expected by the IPCC contains a prominent and distinct hotpot over the tropics at 8 – 12 kms. This hotspot is the signature feature of an increase in greenhouse warming.

The observed signature at 8 – 12 km up over the tropics does not contain a hotspot, not even a little one. Therefore:

1. The IPCC theoretical signature is wrong. So the IPCC models are significantly wrong.
2. The signature of increased greenhouse warming is missing. So the global warming from 1979 to 1999 was not due predominately to increased greenhouse warming, and was therefore not due to carbon emissions.

The observed signature shows cooling above 16 km, which strongly suggests that the global warming was not due to increased solar irradiation, volcanoes, or increased industrial pollution (aerosols). The observed signature looks like a combination of increased ozone depletion, possibly a decrease in industrial pollution, and an unknown signature or signatures.

When the signature was found to be missing, alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hotspot is there but went undetected. The uncertainties in temperature measurements from a radiosonde are indeed large enough for a single radiosonde to maybe miss the hotspot. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answers, so statistically it is not possible that they collectively failed to notice the hotspot.

Recently the alarmists have suggested we ignore the radiosonde thermometers, but instead take the radiosonde wind measurements, apply a theory about wind shear, and run the results through their computers to estimate the temperatures. They then say that the results show that we cannot rule out the presence of a hotspot. If you believe that you believe anything.

Climate science makes a key prediction that can be tested.

When tested the prediction is shown to be false.

Therefore, climate science is shown to be false.

Climate Science is dead. Long may it rot in hell.



Long live real science.

(Nothing Follows)