The warming theory is falling to bits

The warming theory is falling to bits

Andrew Bolt
Wednesday, December 09, 2009 at 02:24pm


Geoscientist Michael Asten says new research only confirms the man-made warming theory is in trouble:


(T)wo recent results published by top scientists cast doubt on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s theory about the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming…

Paul Pearson of Cardiff University and his international team achieved a breakthrough recently, published four weeks ago in arguably the world’s top scientific journal, Nature.

They unravelled records of atmosphere, temperature and ice-cap formation 33.6 million years ago, when the Earth cooled from a greenhouse without ice caps, into something quite similar to our present day…

Pearson’s work contains a couple of remarkable results. First the greenhouse atmosphere pre-cooling contained a CO2 concentration of 900 parts per million by volume, or more than three times that of the Earth in pre-industrial days… Second, while the cooling of the Earth took place over a time-span of around 200,000 years, the atmospheric CO2 first dropped in association with the cooling, then rose to around 1100ppmv and remained high for 200,000 years while the Earth cooled further and remained in its new ice ages cycle.

We can compare these huge swings (both up and down) in atmospheric CO2 with current computer-modelled estimates of climate sensitivity by the IPCC which suggest that a doubling of CO2 relative to pre-industrial times will produce a temperature increase of 2.5C to 4C.

If the Earth started a cycle of ice ages 33.6 million years ago while having its very carbon-rich atmosphere, and if the Earth showed cycles of ice-age activity when atmospheric CO2 was four times the level that it was in humankind’s pre-industrial times, what new information must we incorporate into our present climate models?

Another key parameter in climate modelling is the warming amplification associated with increasing CO2 in our atmosphere. This amplification factor is generally believed to be greater than one, giving rise to an understanding that increases in atmospheric CO2 amplify warming (a positive feedback in the physical process)…

However since the IPCC’s fourth report, our Laboratory Earth has also delivered new data on this CO2-induced amplification factor...

UPDATE

Dr Ben Buchler of the ANU says Asten misrepresents Pearson’s findings, which include this line:

Overall, our results confirm the central role of declining pCO2 atm in the development of the Antarctic ice sheet (in broad agreement with carbon cycle modelling) and help to constrain mechanisms and feedbacks associated with the Earth’s biggest climate switch of the past 65 Myr.

Returning to Asten’s article:


(C)limatologist and NASA medallist John Christy and colleague David Douglass studied global temperature impacts of volcanic activity and ocean-atmospheric oscillations (the “El Nino” effect) and separated these from global temperature trends over the past 28 years.

The result of their analysis is a CO2-induced amplification factor close to one, which has implications clearly at odds with the earlier IPCC position… What this means is that the IPCC model for climate sensitivity is not supported by experimental observation on ancient ice ages and recent satellite data.

So are we justified in concluding that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is not the only or major driver of current climate change? And if so, how should we re-shape our ETS legislation?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but as Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman observed: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

(Thanks to reader Ian.)