Global warming

See also Counterexamples to global warming

Global temperatures peaked in 2016, according to the UAH satellite temperature record for 1979-2023

Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is an unproven theory that insists human activity is causing the Earth to warm to catastrophic levels over time. The theory posits that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor, trap solar warmth on the planet. Computer models suggest that industrial and vehicular emissions could lead to catastrophic warming. Leftists use this theory as a basis to require cuts in energy production and consumption and to promote de-industrialization.

The rate of warming predicted by AGW is far higher than what has been observed so far. Based on an average of 102 climate models, the UN's Intergovernment Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the lower troposphere should be warming at a rate of 3.1 degrees per century. Satellite data shows that the lower troposphere warmed at a rate of 1.4 degrees per century between 1978 and 2021. Weather balloon data shows a warming trend of 1.6 degrees per century between 1958 and 2018.

An analysis of weather station data by U.S. climate researcher Roy Spencer shows no significant warming since 1943. Unlike the official weather station record, Spencer's data includes only those stations that recorded temperature at a consistent time of day. The heating predicted by AGW but not detected in the temperature record is sometimes said to be accumulating in the oceans. But a study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that ocean temperature has risen by only 0.1 degree Celsius in the last fifty years.

The last 4,000 years of climate history, 2000 BC to AD 1992, by Andy May. Based on the GISP2 ice cores from central Greenland.

The theory that "greenhouse gases" have a greater warming effect than other gases goes back to the 19th century. The idea that carbon dioxide emissions might lead to catastrophic warming was introduced by Carl Sagan in the 1960s. He was inspired by research on the atmosphere of Venus. Around 1978, the environmental movement decided to promote Sagan's theory. The movement was already advocating energy conservation and renewables as a response to the "energy crisis." That is to say, a desired political outcome was agreed upon and then a "scientific" justification was developed.

Proponents of the global warming theory advocate for conversion to electric vehicles without expanding the electric power grid, which can only be powered by coal-burning power plants, fossil fuel, or nuclear energy. So-called renewable energy sources, solar and wind, cannot provide enough capacity to recharge hundreds of millions of electric vehicles.

Difficulties with the theory

• Carbon dioxide is insignificant as a greenhouse gas. The level of CO₂ in the Earth's atmosphere is only 400 parts per million. Ninety to 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor. The IPCC claims that water vapor acts as a "positive feedback," i.e. warming creates more humidity, which leads to additional warming. There are humidity measurements going back to 1948, and they show no upward trend. More humidity could lead to more clouds and therefore to cooling and to negative feedback. So why assume positive feedback? AGW works only if water vapor is a positive feedback, so that is what the IPCC must claim.
  Although Obama has denounced elevated carbon dioxide levels as "carbon pollution," greenhouse operators commonly increase the level of CO₂ to 1,000 ppm or more to enhance plant growth.

A composite map of Antarctica showing areas of greatest warming in red. The Wilkins Ice Shelf lies off the peninsula in the top left corner, and shows extensive warming. Overall, Antarctica shows little warming, and many areas to the East (right) are almost cooling.

• The Earth has warmed or cooled many times. Historically, warm periods are associated with favorable climate. The Roman Warm Period (250 BC to 180 AD) featured temperatures comparable to those of modern times. This was followed by the Dark Ages Cold Period (450-950 AD). The Medieval Warm Period was even warmer than the Roman period and lasted from 950 to 1300. From the 14th century to the early 19th century, there was a Little Ice Age.
• Carbon dioxide can be absorbed by promoting plant growth, an angle overlooked by the mainstream media. In fact, the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has already resulted in an increase in plant growth. If that's not enough, iron filings can be dumped at sea to encourage the growth of marine plants. Freeman Dyson, America's top physicist, has suggested genetically engineering trees to absorb more carbon.
• If the science were in fact settled, we would see less outrage at "deniers" and greater concern for scientific integrity. One climate science scandal after another has been exposed. The Climategate emails show hoaxers scurrying to "hide the decline." The "hockey stick" view of climate history, which holds that global temperature was constant for 2,000 years and then surged in the last century, has been repeatedly debunked. No one's reputation is tarnished by these bloopers, no one pays any price. The first response of AGW backers is name calling and attempts to shut down the discussion. Argument is a last resort. The logical explanation is that they already know AGW is a hoax, and they don't care.
• For leftists, the attraction of the theory is that it supports their agenda. The environmentalist agenda of renewables, solar energy, conservation, and world government was put together in the 1970s in response to the energy crisis and to the overpopulation scare. At that time, most scientists thought the Earth was cooling. When AGW came along, it was treated as an additional justification for this agenda.
  Steven Schneider, founding father of the AGW movement, was a global cooling believer in the early 1970s. "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have," he explained. To Schneider, global cooling and global warming were just two "scary scenarios." He could offer up whichever one was expedient.

How accurate are weather forecasts and climate forecasts?

In 2013, Scientific American published an article entitled Why Are Weather Forecasts Often Wrong?

In 2020, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggests a seven-day weather forecast by a meteorologist could accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time. However, beyond 10 days, a weather forecast is only right about half the time.

The accuracy of the long-range forecasts of climate scientists' that are 10 years or decades ahead of time are of dubious value (See: Limitations of science). In addition, environmentalists have a history of making alarmist statements that do not come to fruition (see: 50 years of failed doomsday, eco-pocalyptic predictions; the so-called ‘experts’ are 0-50, American Enterprise Institute).

A significant resistance to global warming alarmism is developing in Europe

News reports of Europeans becoming increasingly resistant to global warming alarmism:

• The Daily Telegraph (Ross Clark): “The EU's Net Zero plan is in tatters - and not a moment too soon” (29 March 2023)

• Reuters (Riham Alkousaa): “Berliners vote down referendum on tighter climate goals” (26 March 2023)

• Politico (Nicolas Camut): “Dutch pro-farmers party wins big in provincial elections” (16 March 2023)

• Express (Natalie Crookham): “Staggering poll shows 93 percent oppose 2030 petrol and diesel car ban [UK]” (30 March 2023)

Forbes reported in 2023:

“

The editors of one leading paper put it like this: “The implausibility of a net-zero carbon energy future is becoming so obvious that even Europeans are starting to notice.” The shock news of Germany’s decision to block the EU-wide agreement on the combustion engine ban by 2035 is “threatening to unravel Germany’s three-party governing alliance, after the Green party accused its liberal coalition partners of gambling away the country’s [green] reputation…” The German government wants to replace this ban and permit combustion engine cars running on synthetic “e-fuels”. E-fuels are yet another unproven technology but, if somehow viable in the future, would at least preserve the country’s vaunted position in automobile combustion engines. That Western Europe’s reigning green ideologues could be blocked by the German car manufacturers’ lobby – one of the country’s industrial pillars and a major employer – seems to signal the victory of economic rationality over climate ideology in this instance at least. The country’s green advocates received further bad news as voters in the Berlin referendum for a climate-neutral city by 2030 failed resoundingly as “yes” votes failed to achieve the 25% quorum of all eligible voters needed to make the referendum valid. According to critics interviewed by Bild, the radical climate project pushed in the referendum is “factually impossible” and “out of the question”, noting that “even the original 2045 target timetable [is] almost impossible to meet.” Even Berlin’s uber-green elites could not swing the vote against the average city-dweller sick of hot water rationing, dimmed street lights at night and shuttered swimming pools.

”

The Surprising Truth: Extremely Small, Almost Statistically Insignificant, Temperature Rises per Decade

Even mainstream sites admit the empirical fact: "For the last 50 years, global temperature rose at an average rate of about 0.13°C (around one-quarter degree Fahrenheit) per decade-almost twice as fast as the 0.07°C per decade increase observed over the previous half-century. In the next 20 years, scientists project that global average temperature will rise by around 0.2°C (about one-third of a degree Fahrenheit) per decade." This means, even at the allegedly "high" rate of temperature rise of "around 0.2°C", Global Temperatures will only rise by around 1°C in the next 50 years! Hardly a cause for Alarmism on this issue, especially in light of numerous well documented alarmist false predictions of Climate Change Hoaxers.

5 of 18 Ridiculous and Spectacularly Wrong Alarmist Global Warming Predictions around 1970 that never came to pass

When the Holy Bible warns us to beware of False Prophets (Deut 18:17-22, Matthew 7:15-20), that divine injunction certainly includes the False Prophets of Global Warming.

"1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [by 1980].”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

Who is behind the Global Warming Agenda? Communist China and Comsymps at the UN

A careful analysis of the Evil Agenda behind the attempt to promote Global Warming Narratives suggests Communist Countries want to use this as a means to reduce the energy production of the Christian and Western World or to make them dependent on Communist Countries: "As evidence discredits global warming, resistance to such facts by green elites reveals their real aim is bringing socialism in through the back door. But don't take our word for it. Listen to the climate change boss at the U.N.

Christiana Figueres, with the lumpy title of executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), came right out and said it: Democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. The really good model is communist China."

History

The greenhouse effect was proposed by Joseph Fourier in 1827. Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius is sometimes considered the father of global warming theory because of a paper he published in 1896 on the effect of carbon dioxide emissions. Arrhenius thought of global warming as a positive thing. The idea that carbon dioxide emissions might lead to catastrophe comes from research on the Venusian atmosphere in the 1960s by Karl Sagan and other NASA scientists. In the 1970s, global cooling theories were more prominent than global warming theories. Even Steven Schneider, later a promoter of global warming, published a paper on global cooling. As a result of the energy crisis of the 1970s, the environmentalist movement adopted an agenda of conservation and renewable energy. With global warming as its flagship theory, the movement could continue promoting its 1970s agenda long after the original justifications for it had disappeared. Schneider offered up "scary scenarios," as he called them, to promote the theory.

Origin

In 1827, French scientist Joseph Fourier suggested that although the atmosphere allowed sunlight to pass through to warm the Earth, it blocked "dark heat" (infrared radiation) from the Earth and thus prevented energy from being transferred back into space. Fourier did make an unfortunate analogy between the Earth's atmosphere and a space enclosed by glass. All the same, it may not be fair to blame Fourier for the greenhouse effect meme. He also discussed convection as an alternative explanation and, as a good scientist, recommended an experiment to resolve the issue.

In 1861, Irish scientist John Tyndall measured the absorption of radiant energy by various gases in the atmosphere. He concluded that water vapor was the gas primarily responsible. It could therefore be considered the warming agent that Fourier hypothesized. Tyndall suggested that changes in humidity could bring about climate change.

The AGW theory was first presented in 1896 in an article by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius. Arrhenius predicted that a doubling of CO₂ in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel burning would lead to a temperature increase of 3 to 4 °C (about 5 to 7 °F) after 500 years. Arrhenius attributes his misunderstanding of the science to Fourier: "Fourier maintained that the atmosphere acts like the glass of a hothouse."

The use of the Swedish word drivbänk (hothouse) by Arrhenius and his colleagues is likely to be the origin of the phrase "greenhouse effect." This phrase is first recorded in English in 1907.

The skeptics strike back

Arrhenius ignored water vapor in his calculations, leading him to overestimate the effect of CO₂ by 96 percent, as Knut Ångström observed in 1901. More controversially, Ångström questioned whether CO₂ could act as a greenhouse gas at all. He took a tube of carbon dioxide, shined black-body radiation on it, and varied the pressure on the gas. Increasing the pressure led to only a slight increase in absorption. He concluded that radiation absorption by CO₂ is already nearly saturated, so the emission of additional gas into the atmosphere would have little effect. Ångström thus became "the first denier."

Nils Ekholm, an associate of Arrhenius, had an answer to Ångström's point about saturation. Ångström's tube was saturated because it was at ground level. High enough in the atmosphere, there must be an unsaturated layer of carbon dioxide capable of absorbing radiation. The greater the density of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the lower this layer would be. A lower layer would retransmit more radiation to the lower atmosphere and would therefore be responsible for greater warming. Ekholm's insight was lost on his fellow scientists. It was not rediscovered until the 1960s.

As for Ångström's point concerning water vapor, Arrhenius insisted that CO₂ rose higher in the atmosphere than water vapor could, so water vapor was not relevant. This argument never caught on. The idea that adding CO₂ would change the climate, "was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation [that would be] absorbed by CO₂ is [already] absorbed by water vapor," the American Meteorological Society concluded in 1951. Despite Ångström's debunking of his theory, Arrhenius won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1903 for unrelated research. The Ångströms, meanwhile, are remembered for a miniscule unit of length named after Anders Ångström, Knut's dad.

Disproving the greenhouse effect

Finally performing the experiment Fourier had recommended a century earlier, Robert Wood showed in 1909 that energy is transferred from the Earth's surface to the atmosphere primarily through convection currents. In Wood's experiment, the temperature in a glass box was compared to that in a box with a top made of halite (rock salt). Halite allows sunlight to enter, but blocks infrared. Infrared re-radiation and the greenhouse effect play "a very small part," both in the atmosphere and in literal greenhouses, Wood concluded. A greenhouse is warmer than the air outside because the roof limits convection and the walls restrict wind. "The acquired heat is concentrated, because it is not dissipated immediately by renewing the air," as Fourier himself explained.

From 1909 until the 1960s, only a few additional papers on AGW were published. Research went forward as the lonely project of English scientist Guy Callendar. Callendar collected historical temperature readings and CO₂ measurements and published the results in 1938.

Sagan and Venus

In 1932, Venus was shown to have an atmosphere of carbon dioxide. This finding prompted astronomer Rupert Wildt to propose in 1940 that a greenhouse effect operated on the planet. Radio telescope observations in 1958 showed that the temperature of Venus was even higher than Wildt's theory could explain. Astronomer Carl Sagan proposed in 1960 that the planet had a “very efficient greenhouse effect,” or runaway greenhouse as it later came to be called. The Mariner 2 mission in 1962 measured the temperature of Venus as 500 degrees Celsius. The planet that had been considered "Earth's twin" just a few years earlier was revealed as a sulfurous vision of hell.

Mariner's findings were sensational because they had been predicted by Immanuel Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision (1950), which argues that Venus was ejected from Jupiter in mythological times. The scientific community had denounced Velikovsky and his theory in the strongest terms, and Sagan emerged as its champion. Sagan and Velikovsky faced off at a dramatic conference in San Francisco in 1974.

By portraying carbon dioxide as a doomsday chemical, Sagan put a radically new spin on the issue. Both Arrhenius and Callendar had assumed that greenhouse warming would be beneficial. With Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Paul R. Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), and the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (1972), this was an era when the reading public had an enormous appetite for spurious theories concerning human-initiated global catastrophe.

While the Venus discoveries ignited a burst of interest in AGW, they did nothing to shore up its scientific merits. In 1971, Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko gave a speech to a large international conference in Leningrad in which he presented an alarmist AGW scenario. Reaction was strongly negative. It was clear that AGW was very much a minority opinion among scientists at this time. A quick look at Venus reveals that the atmosphere is opaque due to globe-spanning sulfur dioxide clouds. These clouds are 30 to 40 km thick. No sunlight reaches the surface. It follows that the planet has no greenhouse effect whatsoever.

In a runaway greenhouse, the greenhouse effect vaporizes additional water, which in turn increases the greenhouse effect. This leads to even more water vaporization and so on in a cycle of positive feedback. Venus has very little water of any kind, so Sagan's runaway greenhouse is not possible. Whatever the chemistry of the Venusian atmosphere, water vapor absorbs a wider spectrum of radiation than carbon dioxide does and remains the primary greenhouse gas in the terrestrial atmosphere, as Tyndall showed long ago.

Venus research proved to be an incubator for AGW showboaters. James “Boiling Oceans” Hansen, who emerged as the public face of AGW in the late 1980s, was a NASA Venus researcher in the 1960s. Overlooking Hansen's history of following one kook theory after another, the mainstream media treated his talk of "runaway greenhouse" and "Venus syndrome" as serious science.

Hansen's claim that continued CO₂ emissions will trigger a runaway greenhouse on Earth is unlikely in view of the Earth's recovery after the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a huge natural spike in CO₂ that occurred 55.5 million years ago. During PETM, the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere increased by about 700 ppm over 20,000 years and the planet warmed by 5–8 degrees Celsius. Plant growth accelerated and there was a return to pre-PETM conditions after 200,000 years. Although this event is sometimes presented as confirmation of the greenhouse concept, warming preceded the CO₂ spike by about 3,000 years and may have been initiated by a comet impact.

From cooling to warming

Despite Venus-related attention, AGW was overshadowed by a cooling scare in the 1970s. Steven Schneider, who later emerged as a key player in AGW politics, confidently predicted more cooling in 1971:

“

[I]t is projected that man's potential to pollute will increase six- to eightfold in the next 50 years. If this increased rate of injection of particulate matter in the atmosphere should raise the present background opacity by a factor of 4, our calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5 °K. Such a large decrease in the average temperature of Earth, sustained over a period of few years, is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age. However, by that time, nuclear power may have largely replaced fossil fuels as a means of energy production.

”

By the late 1970s, the cooling scare had tapered off and Schneider was actively promoting AGW. The energy crisis, which began in 1973, put energy policy in the center of the political debate. In response, the left adopted a platform of conservation, renewables, and solar energy. Schneider and others noticed that AGW provided an additional justification for this platform.

By the late 1980s, Schneider and his fellow activists had transformed global warming from a fringe concern to a central political issue. He explained how in a 1989 interview:

“

And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

”

After Schneider abandoned his global cooling hobbyhorse and got on the global warming bandwagon, he never looked back. He was all about offering up "scary scenarios" in order to get "loads of media coverage." He had hoped to be honest, but, let's face it, nobody's perfect. Since he presents himself here as the high priest of climate science, it should be noted that Schneider's Ph.D. is in mechanical engineering.

According to Oxfam, "climate-related disasters has tripled in the last 30 years", and "more than 20 million people a year are forced from their homes".

The IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN agency that reports on climate science, was founded in 1988. IPCC reports are often cited as the gold standard of science in this field, proof that AGW is "settled science." But few journalists read the report itself. Instead, they rely on the "Executive Summary" or "Summary for Policymakers." This document is written, not by scientists, but by UN bureaucrats under the supervision of Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian railway economist who heads the IPCC. The Climategate II emails reveal that the summary is written first then material is added to the various chapters to support it. This procedure makes a farce of the IPCC's stated mission, which is to review the published literature so as to determine the scientific consensus.

As for the main report, this is put together carelessly, according George Filippo: "I feel rather uncomfortable about using not only unpublished but also unreviewed material as the backbone of our conclusions (or any conclusions)....IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science (which is its proclaimed goal) but production of results....I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes." Filippo was a vice chair of the group from 2002 to 2008 and has contributed to all five IPCC reports.

Climategate

The AGW industry was exposed as a hoax by the release of the "Climategate" emails in 2009. The Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University in Britain prepared 156 megaybytes of email by their researchers for release under the Freedom of Information Act. This database was somehow leaked, either prematurely or by a whistleblower after the institution had second thoughts.

In the most notorious message, Phil Jones, director of the unit, wrote, "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." This should not be understood to mean that real temperature was declining, but rather that the researchers were attempting to cover up flaws in their tree-ring based data set. The graph in question was a version of the famous "hockey stick" that shows global temperature constant for 2,000 years, followed by a dramatic warming in the last century. Nature is considered one of the most authoritative science journals. So this quote suggests that a chart prepared for the magazine was faked with the approval of Jones as supervisor. An email by CRU researcher Tim Osborn clarifies what the Nature trick was: "Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were."

What's wrong with using tree ring data to created a climate record? The CRU researchers assumed that a tree grows faster when it's warmer. But rainfall has a stronger influence on tree growth than temperature does. Temperature is correlated to tree growth only in the sense that it tends to rain more in warm eras. Critics call the CRU's approach the "tree-o-meter" theory.

In another Climategate email, Jones enthusiastically demands that the IPCC review process be rigged: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Jones also admitted that the reason he claims the Earth is warming is political: "The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn't statistically significant." Jones is ignoring the fact that 1998 was an unusually warm year due to an El Niño event. All the same, it's clear that he runs the CRU to produce made-to-order results rather than as a scientist.

The temperature record

Global temperatures are tracked by three methods: satellites, weather balloons, and weather stations. All three methods confirm a modest amount of warming in recent decades. Satellite data shows a warming trend of 0.11 K/decade for 1978 to 2015. Weather balloon data shows a warming trend of 0.18 K/decade for 1970 to 2015.

A reanalysis of weather station data for 1943 to 2012 by Roy Spencer shows that after a cooler period in the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. temperatures returned to their earlier level. Unlike CRU, NASA, and NOAA, Spencer corrects for the fact that at most stations measurement time of day has changed over the years. So Spencer's analysis implies that the warmest year on record was 1934, the warmest year of the 1930s, not 2016 as the climate establishment maintains. Spencer is a prominent skeptic and a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He maintains the UAH record, one of the two major satellite temperature records. As an active researcher at the center of the climate science community, Spencer is a standing rebuke to the claim that AGW represents the scientific consensus. While the cause is debatable, worldwide, 2016 was the warmest year on record, 2020 was the second-warmest, and 2011–2020 was the warmest decade on record since thermometer-based observations began. Eight of the top 10 warmest years on record for the contiguous 48 states have occurred since 1998, and 2012 and 2016 were the two warmest years on record.

The temperature records preferred by the climate establishment were built up over many years and include numerous gaps, bugs, incompatible coding, and other errors. The problems of the CRU data set are memorably documented in the "Harry read me" file, part of the Climategate trove. According to this file, the premier global temperature record contains, "botch after botch after botch."

AGW is hardly the only explanation that has been proposed for recent warming. There are also explanations involving natural cycles such as the 11-year-sunspot cycle, the Pacific decadal oscillation, and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

Summary of arguments against anthropogenic global warming

Natural periods of global warming and global cooling are expected to occur regardless of human activity, and not long ago liberals were demanding more government control to combat an alleged cooling in temperatures, with some scientists warning of a possible ice age. Global cooling, a theory that predates global warming, obviously occurs naturally many times throughout Earth's geological history. The ease of refutation of anthropogenic global cooling claims foretells the eventual fate of the current global warming hysteria.

Many political activists use the term "global warming" to refer to anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW), which asserts that human activity such as spewing "greenhouse gases" is causing an increase in temperature and is more significant than natural causes. The AGW theory is supported by left-leaning political parties, as well as a majority of sovereign states, national agencies, and an intergovernmental panel (see IPCC). The reality is that there is no immediate global crisis, and even dire warnings by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admit that significant effects will not be manifested for at least 100 years. Predictions made by climate models publicized by the IPCC have not come to pass in recent years. Many scientists, such as Hal Lewis, have decried global warming as a conspiracy for the purpose of securing trillions of dollars in grant money.

In November 2009, emails were disclosed that implicated a wrongful manipulation and concealment of data by scientists who have insisted that there is dangerous man-made global warming. Prior to ClimateGate, both the Republican and Democratic party Platforms in 2008 suggested that global warming is happening, that it is caused by human activity, and that it should be counteracted. For example, in 2007, the Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain called global warming "an issue we can no longer afford to ignore". In 2010, an independent analysis cleared the scientists involved of any wrongdoing as scientists, but remarked upon their omissions as data-presenters. Accordingly, the effects of the scandal still linger.

Former Vice President Al Gore won a Nobel Prize in 2007 for claiming that there is a dangerous man-made global warming that threatens the world. However, it has since been revealed that he convinced many people through inaccurate information in his "documentary," i.e., he only won the Nobel Prize by lying. [See Al Gore's claims below.]

The following facts can help dissuade even the most illogical of liberals from believing in the flawed theory of anthropogenic global warming.

Temperature flat

The overall temperature has been flat for about 16 years.

Data manipulation

Climate data stating otherwise has been proven to be manipulated.

Alternate causation

Even if global warming did actually exist, the overall effect of human activities on global warming are minimal, if not nonexistent.

Science of global warming

Presence of CO₂

One of the primary concerns of Global Warming research is the increased presence of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. Original claims stated that the increase in carbon dioxide—which is a greenhouse gas—were caused primarily through the burning of fossil fuels, and that such increases were the foremost cause of global temperatures rising. Historically, Global temperature changes precede changes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The most obvious way that this would occur would be through the heating of ocean water. The oceans are the single largest storage unit for carbon dioxide gas on the planet, containing about 93% of the Earth's carbon dioxide. As the temperature rises, the solubility of carbon dioxide in ocean water is reduced, causing the dissolved carbon dioxide gas to enter the atmosphere, and begin trapping radiation from the sun. Scientists now believe that this cycle causes a sort of chain effect, where increased temperature causes more carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere, which in turn causes more temperature rise.

It is also noteworthy to point out that carbon dioxide, while not as abundant in the atmosphere, has a more significant effect on global warming than water vapor does. Carbon dioxide cannot form clouds, as water vapor does. When water vapor forms clouds, those clouds actually block some of the sun's radiation from reaching the Earth, causing water vapor to both contribute positively and negatively to global temperature rise. Carbon dioxide can only act as a greenhouse gas, causing the above-mentioned cyclic effect. According to the IPCC and others, the current concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere is about 392 ppm, which is the highest it has been in at about 800,000 years.

But other scientists have disputed this claim of modern-day record-high carbon dioxide readings:

Take Warsaw-based Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, famous for his critiques of ice-core data. He’s devastating on the IPCC rallying cry that CO₂ is higher now than it has ever been over the past 650,000 years. In his 1997 paper in the Spring 21st Century Science and Technology, he demolishes this proposition. In particular, he’s very good on pointing out the enormous inaccuracies in the ice-core data and the ease with which a CO₂ reading from any given year is contaminated by the CO₂ from entirely different eras. He also points out that from 1985 on there’s been some highly suspect editing of the CO₂ data, presumably to reinforce the case for the "unprecedented levels" of modern CO₂. In fact, in numerous papers prior to 1985, there were plenty of instances of CO₂ levels much higher than current CO₂ measurements, some even six times higher. He also points out that it is highly unscientific to merge ice-core temperature measurements with modern temperature measurements.

The Modern Warm Period

According to temperature reconstruction made within an Old Earth paradigm, there have been many cycles of naturally-caused global warming and cooling over many millions of years (see climate cycles). Some scientists, including Richard Lindzen of MIT, Sallie Baliunas of Harvard and Fred Singer (independent), say that the recent warming could be part of another natural cycle or random fluctuations in the atmosphere.

Recent studies of the Milankovitch Cycles, which predict Earth's climate by studying changes in its orbit and axial tilt, suggest that we are currently 18,000 years into a 150,000 year period between ice ages. This would imply that we should expect the temperature to be rising anyway. A 2002 study by Berger and Loutre suggests 50,000 years of warmer weather before Earth begins to cool again, but that model incorporated anthropogenic forces and concluded:

While combinations of natural forcings produce a gradual warming up to about 1960, none of them leads to a warming over the last 30 years (this period containing three major volcanic eruptions). In contrast, simulations incorporating only anthropogenic forcings reproduce the warming over the last three decades at a rate consistent with that observed, but underestimate the early 20th century warming. As a consequence, only the use of both natural and anthropogenic forcings allows to reproduce much of the observed decadal scale variations of the annual mean hemispheric temperature over the last 150 years.

It should be noted, however, that computer simulated climate models are often tweaked so they agree with the historical temperature record. There is no way to completely simulate all of the Earth's climate with a computer program.

After a major set of temperature readings was found to be an incompatible mix of older and recent data (in the Climategate II scandal) in 2010, Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Science at America's Georgia Tech university examined new data causing her to state (as quoted by MailOnline):

'Natural variability [the impact of factors such as long-term temperature cycles in the oceans and the output of the sun] has been shown over the past two decades to have a magnitude that dominates the greenhouse warming effect.

'It is becoming increasingly apparent that our attribution of warming since 1980 and future projections of climate change needs to consider natural internal variability as a factor of fundamental importance.'

The MailOnline article continued:

Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who found himself at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ scandal over leaked emails th