The Third Step - Global Warming

<sub>We have shown how the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing, and how that increase is the direct result of burning fossil fuels. Now we need to consider the impact of more carbon dioxide in our air.

Carbon dioxide scatters infra-red over a narrow range of energies.  The infra-red photons, which should be carrying energy away from the planet, are scattered back into the lower troposphere. The retained energy should cause an increase in the temperature. 

A photon with a wavenumber between about 550 and 700 per cm which has been absorbed by a carbon dioxide molecule is almost instantaneously re-emitted in a different direction with a slight loss of energy. The carbon dioxide molecule gains a very small amount of energy in the process, insufficient to raise its temperature significantly. Any heating that could be observed has to do with the scattering of infra-red radiation back towards the surface rather than escaping into space.

At about 5km above sea level, we lose as much radiant heat to space as is required to keep the planet in thermal balance. If we look back at Earth from space, we can get a good idea of the impact of carbon dioxide:</sub>

<sub>The blue line shows the spectrum of a black body radiating at 280 degrees K, which is close to what would be seen if there were no absorbers in the atmosphere.  The red line shows the actual spectrum.  The difference between these two is the energy scattered by various infra-red-active species. Water vapour has an effect across the entire spectrum - it is the major greenhouse gas. carbon dioxide adds to the scattering between about 550 and 700per cm, and ozone (O3) plays a part between 950 and 1100 per cm. 

One of the features of the carbon dioxide absorption is that the effect drops off logarithmically with concentration. Doubling the concentration will not double any effect. Indeed, at present there is ~400ppm in the atmosphere.  We are unlikely see a much different world at 800ppm. It will be greener - plants grow better on a richer diet - and it may be slightly warmer and slightly wetter, but otherwise it would look very like our present world.

However, just as any effect will lessen proportionately with increase in concentration, so it will increase proportionately with any decrease.  If there are to be any observable effects, we should have seen them already.  Have we?

There are "official" historical global temperature  records. A recent version from the Hadley Climate Research unit is:</sub> 

<sub>The vertical axis gives what is known as the "temperature anomaly", the change from the average temperature over the period 1950-1980. Recall that carbon dioxide only became significant after 1950, so we can look at this figure with that fact in mind:
* from 1870 to 1910, temperatures dropped, there was no carbon dioxide effect
* from 1910 to 1950, temperatures rose, there was no carbon dioxide effect.
* from 1950 to 1975, temperatures dropped, carbon dioxide increased
* from 1975 to 2000, both temperature and carbon dioxide increased
* from 2000 to 2015, temperatures were flat but carbon dioxide increased strongly.

Does carbon dioxide drive temperature changes? Looking at this evidence, one would have to say that, if there is any relationship, it must be a very weak one. In one study I undertook, I found that there was a 95% chance that, over a period of a century, the temperature would change naturally by as much as +/-2degrees C. During the 20th century, it changed by about 0.8degrees C. The conclusion? If carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does indeed cause global warming, then the signal has yet to emerge from the natural noise.

One of the problems with the "official" temperature records such as the Hadley series shown above is that the official record has been the subject of “adjustments”. While some adjustment of the raw data is obviously needed, such as that for the altitude of the measuring site, the pattern of adjustments has been such as to cool the past and warm the present, making global warming seem more serious than the raw data warrants.

It may seem unreasonable to refer to the official data as “adjusted”, but its basis is what is known as the Global Historical Climatology Network, or GHCN. But adjusted it has been. For example, it is possible to compare the raw data for Cape Town, 1880-2011, to the adjustments made to the data in developing GHCN series Ver. 3:</sub>
 

_{The Goddard Institute for Space Studies is responsible for the GHCN. The Institute was approached for the metadata underlying the adjustments. They provided a single line of data, giving the station’s geographical co-ordinates and height above mean sea-level, and a short string of meaningless data including the word “COOL”. The basis for these adjustments is therefore unknown, and the fact that about 40 successive years of data were “adjusted” by exactly 1.10 degrees C strongly suggests fingers rather than algorithms were involved.
 
One can only conclude that there has been so much tampering with the "official" records of global warming that they have no credibility at all. That is not to say that the Earth has not warmed over the last couple of centuries.  Glaciers have retreated, snow-lines risen. There has been warming, but we do not know by how much.}
 

<sub>Interestingly, the observed temperatures are not unique. For instance, the melting of ice on Alpine passes in Europe has revealed paths that were in regular use a thousand years and more ago. They were then covered by ice which has only melted recently. The detritus cast away beside the paths by those ancient travellers is providing a rich vein of archaeological material.

So the world was at least as warm a millennium ago as it is today. It has warmed over the past few hundred years, but the warming is primarily natural in origin, and has nothing to do with human activities.  We do not even have a firm idea as to whether there is any impact of human activities at all, and certainly cannot say whether any of the observed warming has an anthropogenic origin. The physics say we should have some effect; but we cannot yet distinguish it from the natural variation.
 
Those who seek to accuse us of carbon crime have therefore developed another tool - the global circulation model. This is a computer representation of the atmosphere, which calculates the conditions inside each 5km x 5km x 1km slice, and links them to each adjacent slice (if you have a big enough computer - otherwise your slices have to be bigger).
 
The modellers typically start their calculations some years back, for which there is a known climate, and try to see they can predict the (known) climate from when they start up to today.  There are many adjustable parameters in the models, and by twiddling enough of these digital knobs, they can "tune" the model to history. 
 
Once the model seems to be able to reproduce historical data well enough, it is let rip on the future. There is a hope that, while the models may not be perfect, if different people run different tunings at different times, a reasonable range of predictions will emerge, from which some idea of the future may be gained.
 
Unfortunately the hopes have been dashed too often. The El Nino phenomenon is well understood; it has a significant impact on the global climate; yet none of the models can cope with it. Similarly, the models cannot do hurricanes/typhoons - the 5kmx5km scale is just coarse. They cannot do local climates - a test of two areas only 5km apart, one of which receives at least 2 000mm of rain annually, and the other averages just on 250mm, failed badly.  There was good wind and temperature data and the local topography. The problem was modelled with a very fine grid, but there were not enough tuning knobs to be able to match history.

Even the basic physics used in these models fails. The basic physics predicts that, between the two Tropics, the upper atmosphere should warm faster than the surface. We regularly fly weather balloons carrying thermometers into this region. There are three separate data sets, and they agree that there is no sign of extra warming:</sub>

<sub>The average of the three sets is given by the black squares. The altitude is given in terms of pressure, 100 000Pa at ground level and 20 000Pa at about 9km above surface. There are 22 different models, and their average is shown by the black line.  At ground level, measurement shows warming by 0.1degrees C per decade, but the models predict 0.2degrees C per decade.  At 9km, measurement still shows close to 0.1degrees C, but the models show an average of 0.4degrees C and extreme values as high as 0.6degrees C. Models that are wrong by a factor of 4 or more cannot be considered scientific. They should not even be accepted for publication - they are wrong.

The hypothesis that we can predict future climate on the basis of models that are already known to fail is false. International agreements to control future temperature rises to X degrees C above pre-industrial global averages have more to do with the clothing of emperors than reality.

So the third step in our understanding of the climate boondoggle can only conclude that yes, the world is warming, but by how much and why, we really haven't a clue.</sub> 

The second step in the climate swindle

There is a very strong relation between the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere which we saw in the previous post and the consumption of fossil fuels. 

 

You may recall the slight surge in CO2 in the atmosphere after 1900 and the subsequent flattening until 1950, followed by a strong surge that has continued until today.  Well, here is the same pattern in the CO2 emissions from the burning of fossils fuels and other industrial sources. 

If you try to link the emissions directly to the growth in atmospheric CO2 you fail. There are many "sinks" which remove CO2 from the atmosphere. One that is often overlooked is that higher CO2 levels in the air stimulate plant growth, so the more we emit, the more the plants mop up.Trying to follow the dynamics of all the sinks has proved difficult, so we do not have a really good chemical balance between what is emitted and what turns up in the air.

Fortunately isotopes come to our aid. There are two primary plant chemistries, called C3 and C4. C3 plants are ancient, and they tend to prefer the 12C carbon isotope to the 13C. Plants with a C4 chemistry are comparatively recent arrivals, and they are not so picky about their isotopic diet. Fossil fuels primarily come from a time before C4 chemistry was around, so they are richer in 12C than today's biomass. Injecting into the air 12C-rich CO2 from fossil fuels should therefore cause the 13C in the air to drop, which is precisely what is observed:

So the evidence that fossil fuel burning is the underlying cause of the increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere is really quite conclusive.  But does it have any effect? We will consider that in the next post.

Five steps to the climate swindle

Daily we are told that we are wicked to burn fossil fuels.  The carbon dioxide which is inevitably emitted accumulates in the atmosphere and the result is "climate change." If the stories are to believed, large areas of the world will become uninhabitable, either through drought or flood. Crops will wither, rivers will dry up, polar bears will disappear and malaria will become rampant.

You know, it is a big "IF". We could waste zillions for nothing.  Indeed, a zealot called Lord Stern has estimated that it would be worth spending a few trillion dollars each year to avoid a possible disaster in 200 years' time. Because he is associated with the London School of Economics he is believed - by those whose experience of insurance is limited. It is not worth insuring against something that might happen in 200 years time - we will all be dead and beyond caring.

So I decided to examine the hypothesis from first principles. There are five steps to the hypothesis:

1. The observation that the carbon dioxide (CO₂) content of the atmosphere is rising. 
2. The observation that the rise in CO₂ in the atmosphere is largely paralleled by the increase in fossil fuel combustion. Combustion of fossil fuels clearly results in emission of CO₂, so it is eminently reasonable to link the two increases. 
3. The observation that CO₂ can scatter infra-red over wavelengths primarily at about 15 µm.  Infra-red of that wavelength, which should be carrying energy away from the planet, is scattered back into the lower troposphere, where the added energy input should cause an increase in the temperature. 
4.  The expected increase in the energy of the lower troposphere may cause long-term changes in the climate and thermosphere, which will be characterized by increasing frequency and/or magnitude of extreme weather events, an increase in sea temperatures and a reduction in ice cover.
5. These phenomena may make areas of the globe uninhabitable either through extreme drought or flooding in the worst cases, but perhaps more subtly through impacts on the biosphere as a whole to which mankind is unable to adapt.

Thus in this first post I look at the observations of the carbon dioxide (CO₂) content of the atmosphere; in four subsequent ones I will examine each of the other steps.

The observations of the increase in CO₂ in the atmosphere are incontrovertible. There is a continuous record from the Mauna Loa observatory since 1958:

The annual rise and fall is due to deciduous plants growing or resting, depending on the season.  But it is clear that the long-term trend is ever-increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. 

Before 1958, there were only sporadic measurements of CO2. Nevertheless they give a clear indication that there was minimal change in the atmosphere before about 1850:

There was a slight surge in atmospheric levels from about 1910, then a period of near stasis until after 1950, when there was a strong and ongoing increase which has continued to this day.Remember this pattern - it will re-appear in a different guise in our next post.

The conclusion is clear - there has been an increase in the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1950. Next, we will consider what has caused it.

 

Those CRAZY labour laws!

My elder son has recently bought a large farm in the Little Karoo. It is beneath a mountain that I climbed in the days of my youth:

There is a large perennial stream flowing from a gorge, and the farm has the right to much of the water.  As a result, even though the area is semi-desert, the farm has huge potential. It has five houses on it, comes complete with half-a-dozen tractors and lots of other machinery, huge orchards that are drip-irrigated - and yet has been essentially abandoned for five years.

It did not take me long to find the problem.  Labour. There is lots of labour in the area.  In fact, the unemployment levels are among the highest in the country. Yet my son and his brother-in-law, who also lives on the farm, are striving to do it all themselves.  The fruit trees will go, along with the drip irrigation.  Fruit does very well there, but it demands seasonal labour, and the labour laws are against casual seasonal labour. A casual worker who does more than 16 days work for you is deemed to be a permanent employee, and deemed to have a contract and a minimum wage and paid holidays and and and - - -.

There is even a threat that, if the worker should be permanent for more than a year or so, he would become entitled to a portion of your farm.  That threat became law in about 1996, and I saw the effects in the Free State - villages were suddenly flooded by homeless farm workers.  The farmers had said "When we need you, we'll send a bus." Shacks sprang up alongside decent houses, and quiet villages overnight became noisy havens of crime. 

Another problem with the present dispensation is how you ever get to develop skills among your workers.  When I had an interest in farming, we decided our tractor drivers, who were responsible for the safe and efficient operation of the capital equipment that represented our life savings, were underpaid and undertrained.  We sent the drivers off on training courses, we set up planned maintenance schemes, and we offered the drivers bonuses based on their productivity and equipment reliability.  Our labour costs increased, but our tractor costs dropped dramatically and the productivity shot up, so we won handsomely. The only drawback was the neighbours, who complained that we had wrecked the local market for drivers!

But what can you do today? How can you hope to develop skills when you can only afford to employ someone for two weeks?  I know of one Free State farmer, with a few thousand hectares of mielies, who has taught his 55-year-old wife to drive a multi-million rand combine harvester.  It is very impressive to see her hauling herself up into the cab, and driving off in impressively straight lines - "All done by GPS!" she tells us later over coffee, after harvesting a few thousand tons of corn by 11 a.m.

I suppose the good news is that COSATU and the ANC government have finally found something to fight about.  At present, it is pensions, and whether the workers should be allowed to access their savings before retirement. I hope the government wins this one.  It may give them the courage to liberalise labour laws. We need jobs. Putting restrictive laws in place may protect those fortunate enough to have them; they also prevent those needing a job from having one.