Dr. Nir Shaviv, Chair of the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, giving a talk on global warming at the George Marshall Institute on March 21, 2013.
Screenshot from YouTube video uploaded by the George Marshall Institute.

When I recently wrote  the post Anti-AGW Global Warming Scholarly References, I became aware of how many truly excellent videos of scholarly talks by scientists debunking Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) were available, mostly through YouTube. In addition, besides the scholarly talks, some of these same scientists often gave talks that should be termed “popularizations” to the general public of their views. Finally, there is a set of videos that are involved with the pervasive politics of AGW, which are revealing in their own way. I will embed a sampling of all three types of videos in this post, hoping thereby to accomplish several objectives.

The first of these goals is to make clear that the science on global warming is far from “settled”, no matter what the political Left says. There are a very large number of highly reputable physicists, meteorologists, geologists, and other scientists who oppose the ideas of AGW. Not only that, but they are beginning to get the advantage over the AGW adherents in the public debate. To make that clear is a second goal of this post. Thirdly, if you can hear their words directly, rather than getting a filtered version through yours truly, there will be less chance I will misspeak their positions. Fourth and finally, I hope to give you a chance to learn about aspects of the AGW debate you will never hear from the progressive, mainstream media. Because they are more accessible to non-scientists, I will begin with the talks of eminent scientists that are popularizations of their views.

Popularizations

I will begin with a talk by Dr. Ivar Giaever, institute professor emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a professor-at-large at the University of Oslo, and Chief Technology Officer of Applied Biophysics. Dr. Giaever was also a co-winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for his “experimental discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in superconductors“.

In Giaever’s view, not only is AGW pseudoscience, but it is a new secular religion, a view echoed by many others. In addition he emphasizes CO₂ is not a toxic chemical, and therefore should not be labelled a “pollutant”. Indeed, without it none of us would have any food to eat, as all plants need CO₂ to manufacture their own food through photosynthesis. I particularly appreciated Giaever’s explanation of the severe problems of accurately calculating a time and surface average of Earth’s temperature through surface measurements.

The next eminent scientist I feature is the physicist Freeman Dyson, one of the most respected physicists today. It has often been said that he is the “best physicist never to receive a Nobel Prize”. By the way, Dyson is a die-hard Democrat who told President Obama that he (Pres. Obama) chose the wrong side of the global warming debate. Concerning computer simulation models of climate and global warming, he was asked:

Are climate models getting better? You wrote how they have the most awful fudges, and they only really impress people who don’t know about them.

His answer:

I would say the opposite. What has happened in the past 10 years is that the discrepancies between what’s observed and what’s predicted have become much stronger. It’s clear now the models are wrong, but it wasn’t so clear 10 years ago. I can’t say if they’ll always be wrong, but the observations are improving and so the models are becoming more verifiable.

What follows is his take on man-caused global warming.

Dyson notes that since CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, it will of course have some effect on atmospheric temperatures. The question is: How much? His answer is the effect is probably far smaller than usually thought. Giaever’s answer in the previous talk is the effect is so small, it is hardly measurable. A much more important effect in Dyson’s estimation is the increase in plant life on the planet with increasing CO₂. Because of increasing plant life, Dyson says satellites are seeing the planet grow increasingly green. You should also take note Dyson thinks the solar wind-cosmic ray-cloud cover mechanism developed by the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark is extremely important. Dyson has apparently learned of the mechanism through the work of Dr. Nir Shaviv, whom Dyson mentions.

The final video popularization of anti-AGW ideas I present is one I have embedded before. It is a beautiful, intriguing production that presents the development of Henrik Svensmark’s ideas, and his collaboration with Nir Shaviv of the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In it you can learn of Svensmark’s solar wind-cosmic ray-cloud cover mechanism that explains both periods of global warming as well as periods of global cooling.

Scholarly Talks

The  videos of scholarly talks  in this section require strict attention to a number of graphs holding the evidentiary data. For this reason, while viewing them I strongly recommend you watch them in full screen mode. First up is a talk by the previously mentioned Israeli astrophysicist, Dr. Nir Shaviv, who presents evidence that Henrik Svensmark’s model is correct.

Next is a physics seminar given by Dr. Jasper Kirkby, a CERN physicist, on the CERN cloud chamber experiment. 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.

At the time of this seminar, the CERN group had not yet demonstrated cloud nucleation at sizes of nucleation centers sufficient to produce clouds. Eventually, they got their proof and published their results in the peer-reviewed journal Science in the article

Riccobono et. al., “Oxidation Products of Biogenic Emissions Contribute to Nucleation of Atmospheric Particles”, Science, vol. 344, Issue 6185, pp. 717-721, 16 May 2014.

The next talk is by Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and onetime Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. He is the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He helps manage one of the five major datasets of globally and time averaged temperature, the UAH dataset. In the talk Spencer discusses improvements in satellite measurements of temperature at various levels of the atmosphere.

The big take-away from this talk is the temperature observations, particularly for the upper troposphere, are small fractions of computer climate model predictions. Also, Spencer gives URLs for where you can find the UAH datasets, should you wish to download them.

The next offering is not really a scholarly talk, but a scholarly debate between  Prof. Scott Denning of Colorado State University and Dr. Roy Spencer of UAH.

I’ll let you decide who got the better in this debate, but I am firmly on Roy Spencer’s side. I will only remark that Denning makes no mention of the negative feedback characteristics of tropospheric clouds, nor does he remark that most CO₂ molecules in the lower atmosphere are already saturated with infrared photons and cannot absorb more. All the vibrational states cited by Denning that can be excited by infrared photons have already been excited for most CO₂ molecules. Molecules are the largest physical entities that exhibit quantum mechanical behavior, and can absorb (or emit) only a limited number of infrared photons at particular bandwidths of frequencies. This was discussed to a certain extent at the very end of the question period, when pressure broadening of the CO₂ infrared absorption spectrum at the bottom of the atmosphere was mentioned. However, if I heard correctly from both Denning and Spencer, the heat capacity of the tropospheric CO₂ is logarithmic with CO₂ concentration, meaning the carbon dioxide molecules are well on the way to total heat saturation. They just can not absorb much more.

Videos on the Politics of AGW

And then there is all the furious politics  surrounding the AGW issue. Consider the testimony of Dr. Judith Curry before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee in 2015. Dr. Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was a onetime believer in AGW who became apostate. Her testimony explains her apostasy.

https://youtu.be/GujLcfdovE8

The political bullying Curry describes to force scientists to toe the party line is — to say the least — extremely disturbing. However, it sadly fits in with the growing progressive authoritarianism to suppress opposing viewpoints. Curry continues her testimony in the video below.

The argument in this same senate hearing continues in the video below. (I have no idea why they broke the testimony up into separate videos this way!)

In this last video Mark Steyn remarks on how the current political inhospitableness for free thought has led to some progressives, such as Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, to advocate use of RICO prosecutions to imprison AGW-deniers! Is this really happening in America?

When she resigned from her tenured position from Georgia Tech, Dr. Curry explained on her blog that the motivation was substantially to escape this kind of persecution. She wrote:

A deciding factor was that I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science. Research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment — funding, ease of getting your papers published, getting hired in prestigious positions, appointments to prestigious committees and boards, professional recognition, etc.

How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide (I have worked through these issues with a number of skeptical young scientists).

Concerning this craziness, consider the testimony of Dr. John Christy before the House Natural Resources Committee on May 13, 2015. In particular, consider Christy’s comments on the social costs of trying to limit CO₂ emissions. Also, you should find enlightening Christy’s comments on the oft-quoted and erroneous statistic that 97% of climate scientists support AGW.

Finally, consider the very entertaining video below where Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) questioned Aaron Mair, the president of the Sierra Club, to the great discomfiture of Mr. Mair. Notice that Mr. Mair’s constant fallback position is to agree with the mythical 97% of scientists who are said to agree with AGW. Given the oppression cited by Judith Curry, one wonders how much of whatever agreement exists is coerced by needs for government funding.

It would appear the scientific and political sands are shifting under the feet of AGW believers!

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