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Scientific Issues

Anti-AGW Global Warming Scholarly References

C. B. Thorington

Different terrestrial environments involved with or affected by global warming.

Over on my Facebook group  A Divided World Readers, one reader complained I did not give a single scholarly reference to a journal article saying it was impossible for human-emitted CO2 to be responsible for observed global warming. He was quite right. I have given quite a few references, spread over my several essays on global warming, that make the case (I would say proved) mankind is not even a secondary cause for global warming. Tertiary, perhaps, if that. Any natural phenomenon as complicated as the periodic warming and cooling of a planetary atmosphere can not be explained by one, or even a few, journal articles. I am not even convinced we yet know of all the relevant phenomena bearing on global warming.

However, I think it is useful to gather as many references of this nature as possible in a single place, if for no other reason than to emphasize that the science is far from being “settled”, as so many on the American and European Left claim. That is the main purpose of this post, although the limited time I have to write this essay will limit the number of references I glean. I will try to arrange the references into sections, according to the exact way in which they bear on global warming. As I put them down, I will write a few words on how they fit into the big picture. I will also put down links to a few popularizations of the research that may make their subject matter more accessible to non-scientists.

In some cases you can actually download a PDF of the entire cited paper, perhaps for a small fee to the scholarly organization that published it. If that is the case, I will provide a link to where you can obtain the paper.

In one very important case I will embed a video of a physics seminar given by Dr. Jasper Kirkby, a physicist who works at the European high energy particle accelerator organization known as CERN. I think the claim that such a professional presentation is the equivalent of a scholarly reference does not distort the truth too much.

So let us begin!

References On The Dansgaard-Oeschger Cycles

The Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles  are of fundamental importance, because they are what many who do not believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) think is the major cause of observed global warming in the 19th and 20th centuries. One fact you quickly learn when studying climate change and other atmospheric phenomenon is that there are cycles on top of cycles on top of cycles, each one modifying the effects of all the rest. The Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles are very long period cycles (one half-cycle being a period of warming followed by a second half cycle of cooling) that last between one and two thousand years. The last half-cycle of cooling, the Little Ice Age. started around 1300 AD and ended around 1850. That puts us approximately 170 years into the warming phase, which should continue to warm the Earth until sometime between 2300 and 2400 AD.

Concerning the physical record of these periods, Singer and Avery write at the end of their prologue to Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.  titled Earth’s Climate Timeline,

Through at least the last one million years, and the recent ice ages, a 1,500 year warm-cold cycle has been superimposed over the longer, stronger ice ages and interglacial phases. In the North Atlantic, the temperature changes, from peak to trough, of these “Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles” has been about 4°C. The shift into cold phases has often been very abrupt.

The Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles are not the only cycles of warming and cooling. A second set of cycles, which I believe to be unnamed, is one that has half-periods of warming and cooling of roughly 30 years. Since its effects fall on top of those of the warming phase of the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, when the shorter-period cycle is warming, it adds to the effects of the Dansgaard-Oeschger warming. When the shorter-period cycle is cooling, it merely ameliorates the Dansgaard-Oeschger warming with a pause in the total global warming or perhaps a very slight cooling. You can identify these 30 year periods of warming and cooling during the 20th century in the NCDC plot below of globally averaged surface temperature.

NCDC Temp. Anomalies 1880-2014
NCDC Temperature Anomaly 1880-2014
Image Credit: National Climatic Data Center (Now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

From this plot you can identify a period of warming from 1910 to 1940, followed by a slight cooling or pause in warming from 1940 to 1975, another period of warming from 1975 to 2000, and finally the current pause in warming from 2000 to the present.

The existence of these short-period cycles are very important to the arguments over global warming for several reasons. For one thing, the warming period from 1975 to 2000 was what triggered all of the AGW hysteria in the first place. Second and even more important, AGW supporters insist human CO2 emissions are the dominate cause of global warming. As it turns out, there are powerful and cogent reasons for believing the CO2 increase is predominantly due to natural causes — not mankind. However, even if we accept for the sake of argument that mankind is the predominant source, if human CO2 is so dominant, then why are there these pauses in warming while atmospheric CO2 concentrations have continued to increase linearly with time? Perhaps, CO2 “forcing” of atmospheric temperatures is not so potent after all.

It appears that a rather complex mechanism is responsible for this short-term warming-cooling cycle. It involves interactions between the solar wind, cosmic rays, and cloud cover, and the next three sections of references concern them. You can find my popularization of these results that puts them all together in my post Solar Wind, Cosmic Rays and Clouds: The Determinants of Global Warming.

References On The Effects of Clouds

One of the biggest drawbacks  of computer simulations of terrestrial climate is that they have never taken a realistic account of the effects of clouds. The references below concern the cooling and warming effects of clouds.

References On The Effects Of The Solar Wind On Cosmic Rays

It has been known for a very long time  that solar wind from the Sun will blow cosmic rays away from the inner solar system, particularly away from the vicinity of Earth. The more active the Sun, the more intense the solar wind emanating from it is; and the stronger the solar wind, the less intense the cosmic radiation that penetrates our atmosphere. Here are a couple of references documenting this fact.

References On The Effects Of Cosmic Rays On Cloud Cover

In addition,  cosmic rays penetrating our atmosphere create multiple ionizations of atmospheric particulates. These particulate ions act as seeds for the formation of tropospheric cumulus clouds, which are net coolers of the Earth. Each ion attracts water molecules by electrostatic attraction. Here are some references on this process.

Besides those references, you should consider the embedded video below of a physics seminar given by Dr. Jasper Kirkby, a physicist working at CERN. Kirkby had had his interest piqued by the work of the Danish physicists Henrik Svensmark and Dr. Friis-Christensen on the close correlation between solar activity, cosmic ray levels, and cloud cover. Of course, correlation is not proof of causation, so the next step was taken by Kirkby. In 1997, he and a team of CERN scientists, together with Dr. Svensmark, designed a cloud chamber experiment to demonstrate causation. They designed a cloud chamber holding gases representing the atmosphere, inundated by a CERN particle beam representing the cosmic radiation. Interestingly enough, they could not get permission from CERN management to conduct the experiment for six long years until 2006, and the experiment itself did not start until 2009. The entertaining video below is of a seminar on his cloud chamber experiment in 2011. At the time they had not yet obtained definitive results, as you will hear from Jasper Kirkby. (Hint: going full screen with the video will make it easier to follow Kirkby’s pointer over his slides.)

 

At the time of this seminar, the CERN group had not yet demonstrated cloud nucleation at sizes of nucleation centers sufficient to produce clouds. Another, shorter, and less technical description by Kirkby about the CERN cloud experiment is given in the video embedded below.

Eventually, they got their proof and published their results in the peer-reviewed journal Science in the third reference cited above.

Another entertaining video on the implications of Svensmark’s work is offered below. It includes comments by the Danish physicist himself, with the entire solar-cosmic ray-cumulus cloud mechanism laid out. The Danish group emphasized a more active Sun would increase the magnetic field strength of field lines radially leaving the Sun. They reasoned these would deflect highly energetic cosmic radiation (mostly protons) from the solar system’s interior.

Since the solar wind is composed of charged particles tied to the field lines, it makes sense that both collisions between solar wind particles and cosmic ray particles, and deflection of the cosmic ray particles by the solar magnetic field contribute to limiting cosmic ray access to the inner solar system. One very astounding thought expressed in this last video is that this mechanism for heating and cooling is operative not just on the short time scales of well under a century we have been discussing, but actually operative on geological time scales as well. I will write of this in a future post.

The Determination Coefficients of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide With Air Temperature and Ocean Surface Temperatures

A completely different line of argument  involves the coefficient of determination between a linear fit of atmospheric CO2 concentrations with atmospheric temperatures, and separately between CO2 concentrations with surface ocean water temperatures. A determination coefficient between a statistical variable and a fitted curve can vary between 0 and +1. If it is zero, the fit is absolutely worthless, and if it is +1, every data point exactly fits the curve.

I wish I could give you a reference to a refereed journal article on these coefficients, but I can not. The basic research was performed by Dr. Murry L. Salby, but unfortunately he has had the same troubles publishing his work (all his work having to do with global warming) as Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, and Henrik Svensmark have all had. More than that he has been systematically culled from every academic position he has had, apparently for not going along with the herd mentality of AGW in Australia. (See here and here and here.) Dr. Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology says of Salby,

If Salby’s analysis holds up, this could revolutionize AGW science.  Salby and I were both at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the 1990’s, but I don’t know him well personally.  He is the author of a popular introductory graduate text Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics.  He is an excellent lecturer and teacher, which comes across in his podcast.  He has the reputation of a thorough and careful researcher.

Nevertheless, you can read of Salby’s work on Judith Curry’s blog, it is mentioned favorably on Roy Spencer’s blog, and on the famous The Hockey Schtick blog. The bottom line can be taken from a post on the NoTricksZone.com site entitled Most Of The Rise In CO2 Likely Comes From Natural Sources. The r2 for the the correlation of CO2 concentrations with HadCRUT4 air temperatures is 0.05386, while the r2 for the the correlation of CO2 concentrations with sea temperatures, the HadSST2 series, is 0.5528, ten times as large as the correlation with air temperatures. That means the fit of CO2 with air temperatures is next to useless, while the fit with surface sea temperatures is much, much better.

How can this be? The only plausible explanation is that it is sea temperatures driving most of the increase in observed CO2 concentrations, not CO2 concentrations driving an increase in air temperatures. The solubility of CO2 in sea water decreases as sea temperatures increase. When the sea warms, CO2 is driven from solution into the atmosphere. We can interpret this only to mean that the predominate increase in CO2 is from the seas warming, not from human emissions. We have now had approximately 170 years of the oceans heating since the end of the Little Ice Age, meaning we should be expecting such concentration increases as CO2 is driven from the seas into the atmosphere.

The reaction of my correspondent on my Facebook group page was:

I read the article about how sea temperature is more highly correlated than air temperature. Couldn’t that just mean that co2 is causing the ocean to warm? Why are we jumping to the conclusion that the causation is definitely working the other way? … Can you point me toward a explanation of why carbon is unable to trap heat at current levels?

I should have responded immediately that if atmospheric CO2 concentrations were not at all correlated with air temperatures, they could hardly explain any increases in surface sea temperatures. Instead, I responded with a classic thermodynamic explanation. The major reason CO2 can not trap heat at current levels is that there is just too little of it; it composes only 0.04 % of the atmosphere, and each CO2 molecule has only three energy transitions between energy states capable of absorbing infrared photons, meaning each molecule can absorb only three photons before it is totally saturated and will absorb no more. The lifetimes of the excited states at around 100 ns are much greater than the time it takes photons to reach the top of the troposphere and be lost to space. After my commenter replied with

The specific thing that I have not heard anywhere, and that I looked around on the web for earlier today, is why 400 ppm is not nearly enough to affect temperature significantly.

I replied that not even those scientists who support the idea of AGW claim that CO2 has anywhere near the spectral thermal bandwidth for absorption of infrared photons along with the higher concentrations necessary to significantly heat the atmosphere. Water vapor is much more potent as a greenhouse gas.

Unfortunately for them, mankind is not directly implicated in increasing atmospheric water vapor, so they have invented an extremely improbable feedback mechanism that has increasing human produced CO2 heating the oceans to evaporate more water into the atmosphere. In this way they can make mankind the villain.

Why is that feedback mechanism so improbable? The heat capacity of H2O molecules at normal temperatures is about 4.2 joules/gm/deg-C, while that of CO2 is only 0.9 joules/gm/deg-C. [You may see these numbers quoted in degrees Kelvin, but the degrees in both temperature scales have the same size, merely different zeroes.] That means there would have to be a huge amount of CO2 (more than 4 times as much as H2O in the oceans) to pass a significant amount of thermal energy to the oceans. But the mass of the entire atmosphere, let alone the 0.04% of it that is CO2, is but a small fraction of the mass of water in the oceans. There just is not enough thermal energy in the entire atmosphere to significantly heat the oceans. This is a matter of very basic thermodynamics. This means the causal link causing the high correlation of surface sea temperatures with atmospheric CO2 concentrations must go the other way: Higher sea temperatures are causing increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations; increasing CO2 concentrations in the air are not causing higher sea temperatures.

I should point out that the same kind of thermodynamic argument makes it impossible for the 0.04% of the atmosphere that is CO2 to significantly heat the approximately 1% of the lower atmosphere that is water vapor, let alone all the rest of the atmosphere.

Yet the correlation between atmospheric temperatures and atmospheric CO2 remains vanishingly small. What explains the increasing sea and air temperatures we observe? Not man-emitted CO2, but being 170 years into the warming phase of the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles does the trick.

What sort of scholarly references would I suggest for these arguments? Try any good textbook on basic thermodynamics.

 

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