One species of coccolithophore
(click for credit)The best way to evaluate a scientific hypothesis is to use it to make predictions, which can then be compared to observations. The more the predictions line up with the observations, the more scientific merit the hypothesis has. Based on this commonly-used evaluation, the hypothesis that increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will result in catastrophic climate change has virtually no scientific merit whatsoever. As I have discussed previously (see here, here, here, here, and here), the predictions made by global warming alarmists have been demonstrated to be wrong time and time again. Recently, I ran across another study that adds to this growing list of falsified predictions.
The picture shown above is of an ocean-dwelling microscopic organism known as a coccolithophore. It makes its own food via photosynthesis, and it also makes the “plates” that you see covering it. It makes them by absorbing bicarbonate (HCO3–) and calcium from ocean and making calcium carbonate (CaCO3). When coccolithophores die, their calcium carbonate plates sink to the bottom of the ocean, making deposits of chalk.
Now it turns out that this process of making plates out of calcium carbonate is influenced by the acidity of the water. The more acidic the water, the harder it is for coccolithophores (and all organisms that do the same chemistry) to make calcium carbonate. Well, increasing levels of carbon dioxide leads to increasing acidity (technically, lowering alkalinity) of ocean water, since carbon dioxide can react with water to form carbonic acid. It is therefore assumed that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will harm coccolithophores. As one book on biodiversity puts it:1
Higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, by making oceans more acidic, could reduce coccolithophore populations (by interfering with their skeletal formation), thereby reducing a major CO2 sink and leading to still higher levels of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Fortunately, actual scientific observations demonstrate precisely the opposite.
Coral reefs like this one support a wide diversity of ocean life. (click for credit)
Coral reefs are often called “the rainforests of the sea,” because the are so rich in biodiversity. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they support more species per unit area than any other marine environment and produce as much as $375 billion each year in economic activity. As an amateur scuba diver, I know the amazing beauty of coral reefs firsthand. That makes the following statistics from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network alarming: the oceans have lost 19% of their coral reefs (by area), an additional 15% are seriously threatened in the next 10-20 years, and another 20% are threatened in the next 20-40 years.1
All over the world coral reefs are dying out. Marine pollutants, agricultural run-off and, above all, global warming, are taking a toll on these fragile marvels of nature…Politicians may be able to deny global warming, corals, sadly, don’t have that option.
While it is very fashionable these days to blame nearly any environmental crisis on “global warming,” we have no idea what the key factor in the loss of coral reefs is. Indeed, we don’t even know if there is a key factor. There might be several processes that are working together to produce this global loss of coral, and some of them might be completely unknown. However, an international team of researchers has found one thing that is definitely harming coral, and it certainly wasn’t anything I expected!
From left to right: Nobel laureate Dr. Ivar Giaever, Mathematician Dr. Caleb Rossiter, and Theoretical Physicist Dr. Steven E. Koonin.
In a speech at Georgetown University, President Obama said that he has no patience for people who deny that human-produced global warming is a real problem. He added:
We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat-Earth society…Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.
About a year ago, I pointed out that the president of the Flat Earth Society actually agrees with President Obama on global warming. However, some serious scientists strongly disagree with the both the president of the Flat Earth Society and the President of the United States. In fact, one Nobel-Prize-winning scientist says that President Obama is “dead wrong” when it comes to climate change.
I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong…When you have a theory and the theory does not agree with the experiment then you have to cut out the theory.
What could explain Dr. Giaever’s opposition to the Presidents of the United States and the Flat Earth Society? Is he one of those right-wing radicals who refuses to look at the facts? Probably not. After all, in 2008 he signed a letter endorsing Obama for president. Interestingly enough, the electronic version of the letter that appears on Obama/Biden stationary has his name scrubbed from it. Dr. Giaever disagrees with the Presidents of the United States and the Flat Earth Society because he looked at the data with an unbiased eye, and when he did, he saw that the theory was not supported by the data.
This is a picture of the Maldives cabinet meeting that took place on October 17th, 2009.
(click for credit)
On October 17th, 2009, the cabinet of the Republic of Maldives held a meeting underwater. Outfitted with scuba gear and using hand signals to conduct the meeting, they signed a document calling on all countries to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. Why would they do such a thing? The average elevation of their country is a mere 1.5 meters above sea level, making it the lowest-lying country in the world. Thus, they consider themselves the most at-risk nation when it comes to rising sea levels. Since many think that human-produced carbon dioxide is warming the planet and contributing to sea level rise, they wanted to make it clear that if the world doesn’t do something to curb emissions, their island nation could soon be underwater.
It is well known that sea levels have been rising since the end of the 1700s1, but we don’t know how much of it is caused by human-induced global warming and how much is part of the earth’s natural climate variability. Some claim that sea level rise has accelerated due to human-induced global warming, while others claim that it has remained fairly constant for the past 100 years or more. Hopefully, more research will allow us to get a better handle on how much of the rise in sea level is natural and how much (if any) is caused by human activity.
Nevertheless, let’s grant the Republic of Maldives its assumptions. Let’s say that rising carbon dioxide levels are heating up the planet, melting its ice reserves. This is causing sea levels to rise, and as a result, nations like the Maldives are at risk. They could literally be underwater if something doesn’t change soon. There is a serious problem with this scenario. The Republic of Maldives is made of a collection of atolls, ring-shaped coral reefs that can form lovely islands. Coral reefs, of course, are made of living organisms (corals) and their remains. We know that living organisms respond to changes in their environment.
We now know that the corals which form atolls respond to rising sea levels by raising the level of the atoll.
The difference between the adjusted data and the measured data in the NOAA’s US temperature data set.
Almost a year ago, I wrote about a problem with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) temperature data. It seems that for at least some weather stations in their network, automated adjustments to the data have been inserting a warming trend where the actual data show no such trend. This, of course, is a problem, since these data are often used to analyze claims made by scientists in the global warming debate. Further investigation of this issue has led to even more concerns.
Consider, for example, the graph at the beginning of this post. It is produced from the data at the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN). The graph shows what you get when you subtract the raw data (what is actually measured) from the adjusted data (what is actually displayed) for several of the temperature stations in the network. If the adjustments had no overall effect on the trends given by the raw data, the graph should show a line that wiggles above and below zero. From 1900 to about 1940, that’s roughly what you see. During that time period, then, we can be fairly confident that the adjustments aren’t affecting the overall trend given by the data.
Notice what happens after about 1940, however. The difference rises significantly as time goes on. What does that mean? It means the adjustments are increasing the temperature data more than decreasing them. In other words, the adjustments are making the more recent years hotter than the raw data indicate they were. In addition, the more recent the year, the warmer the adjustments are making it seem. This, of course, is a troubling result. The USHCN’s data are often used to show that the average temperature of the U.S. has been increasing over time. However, if the above graph is accurate, at least some of that warming trend is not the result of actual measurements. It is the result of adjustments that have been made to the data.
Now please understand that the very nature of the USHCN makes adjustments necessary. The data come from a system of weather stations, and the problem with such a system is that every once in a while, there is a glitch. Sometimes, there is a power outage at a station. Sometimes, there is a communication error. Sometimes, the station is down for maintenance. As a result, there are times when the station doesn’t report any data at all. This would be a problem, because it would skew the data. To fix this problem, there is a computer code that estimates the temperature that the station would have sent if it had been sending data at the time. This is necessary to keep missing data from causing a problem, but if the estimate is severely wrong, the “fix” might be worse than the missing data.
If the graph at the top of this post is accurate, it seems to me that might be the case.
The cover of Nye’s error-filled book.Bill Nye calls himself “The Science Guy,” but he sometimes acts in ways that can only be described as anti-science. For example, in a video he stated that creationism shouldn’t be taught to children. This, of course, is blatantly anti-science, because scientific progress is built on the competition of ideas. If you say that an idea shouldn’t be considered because you don’t like it, you are working against science, not for it. In addition, he narrated a video about global warming that contained a faked experiment! Faking experiments is definitely not pro-science! Nevertheless, Nye obviously loves science, which leads me to wonder why he sometimes acts against it.
After reading Nye’s book, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, I think I understand. He simply doesn’t inform himself on scientific issues. As a result, he really doesn’t understand science and doesn’t understand why some of his actions are so anti-science. Consider, for example, what he writes about kids who are taught creationism:
Not only that, these kids will never feel the joy of discovery that science brings. (p.10)
This, of course, is demonstrably false. Had Nye bothered to inform himself about kids who are taught creationism, he would find that they often do better in science than their peers who were not taught creationism. In addition, he would have learned that many kids who were taught creationism are now studying science at the university level or are already professional scientists. I have several students, for example, who say that the reason they decided to become scientists was because of my creationist textbooks (see here and here, for example)!
Of course, the fact that Nye is utterly uninformed about creationism leads to all sorts of problems with his book, which I have detailed in the PDF document at the end of this review. What really surprised me, however, is that his book shows that he hasn’t really informed himself about the science related to evolution, either. As a result, much of what he says in the book is utterly false.
Biggest Walrus Gathering Recorded as Sea Ice Shrinks
More than 35,000 of the marine mammals have congregated in Alaska
Unfortunately, the headline isn’t true. It isn’t the biggest walrus gathering, and it’s not clear such gatherings have any relationship whatsoever to the amount of sea ice that exists in the Arctic. Where did National Geographic get their false information? From the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
The National Geographic article goes on to say:
Scientists have seen large haul-outs on the Russian side of the Bering Strait for quite some time, says Anthony Fischbach, a wildlife biologist at the USGS in Anchorage. But since the first recordings of walrus gatherings in Alaska in the 1870s, groups of this size weren’t observed until 2007, he said.
Of course, that’s also not true. Either the scientists at the USGS didn’t bother to check the literature on what they have been studying, or they willfully ignored the recorded observations of the past. This is not the largest haul-out on record for walruses, and haul-outs of this size have been observed several times in the past.
Neither how the globe is warming nor how much humans are responsible for it is understood.
(click for credit)Unfortunately, because of the college class I am teaching, a looming publishing deadline, and an upcoming speaking engagement in South Africa, I don’t have time to write a full blog article. However, a man I respect and admire sent me a link to a Wall Street Journal article about climate change. The Author is Dr. Steven E. Koonin, a theoretical physicist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. The article is an excellent example of how to approach the issue of climate change from a truly scientific perspective. Unfortunately, you rarely find such an approach in most discussions of the subject. In my opinion, here is the best point he makes:
Policy makers and the public may wish for the comfort of certainty in their climate science. But I fear that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate science is “settled” (or is a “hoax”) demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, retarding its progress in these important matters. Uncertainty is a prime mover and motivator of science and must be faced head-on. It should not be confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences.
Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff.” One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.
Seven years from now.
Of course, he thinks human-made global warming is to blame.
So depending on which prediction you believe, Al Gore thought there would be no more ice at the North Pole by 2013 (five years after his speech in Germany), 2014 (seven years after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech) or 2029 (22 years after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech). It’s obvious which one Gore favored. He mentioned it twice in the quote above: 2014.
Temperatures for the state of Maine from 1901 to a few years before the present, according to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). The two graphs were downloaded at different times and indicate completely different results.
In 2013, certified consultant meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo was putting together a talk and wanted to show a graph that illustrated how the average temperature of the state of Maine had changed over time. He went to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and downloaded the data. As shown in the top graph, the average temperature showed no trend (warming or cooling) for more than 100 years. This year, he was preparing a talk and wanted to update the graph. He went back to NOAA’s NCDC and downloaded the exact same temperature record, including more recent years.
The change was dramatic, as shown in the bottom graph. The data showed a clear warming trend. Was this dramatic changed caused by more recent years added to the new graph? No. It was caused by the old data! Between the times D’Aleo had downloaded the data, the temperatures for some of the previous years had been lowered, and the temperature for some of them had been raised. However, it seems that more of the earlier years were lowered and more of the later years were raised (or lowered less). As a result, the message of the graph had changed remarkably. Where just one year previously, the data showed no warming over the past century, that same data now show a significant warming trend over the exact same time period! As he states:
Does anybody know what the REAL temperature of Maine is/was/is supposed to be? I sure as [**BLEEP**] don’t. I don’t think NCDC really does either.
