Climate change: a reasessment in the context of the last 3 years

am restoring this seminal article from 27 March 2023 in which I processed my transition from being a believer in Abrupt Climate Change to being more open-minded and sceptical about what we are being told about climate change.

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“It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

—Goebbels

Seemorerocks

INTRODUCTION

I first heard of the Greenhouse Effect back in 1988 from an article in the Bangkok Post when I was there. I read Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance and became part of discussions back in New Zealand with those involved in this subject and ended up becoming a member of the Green Party.

Fast forward to about 11 years ago and I discovered Guy McPherson and was convinced by his arguments.

This was because I was never convinced about all the discussions around “solutions”. I was sceptical about the world getting together to “solve” what I instinctively felt (perhaps unconsciously) until I listened to Guy McPherson was a predicament - in other words, did not have a solution.

Guy’s  was the right message at the right time. 

Climate change,  (I prefer the older term, global warning),  was irreversible because of numerous feedback loops he identified.

Humanity was headed for extinction.

During the el-Nino around 2018 I started noticing strange skies that I had never seen in my over 60 years on the planet, neither here in Wellington, nor in Canterbury where I grew up.

I put out feelers. What was this about? My questions went unanswered and I realised that there was only one possible explanation for all this - geoengineering.

For this I was cold-shouldered by Guy McPherson and literally thrown out of the NTHE community - for asking questions!

So, left to my own resources and I started doing my own research. I started looking, in particular, at the state of Arctic Ice and joined with Margo’s daily monitoring. 

I learned a lot through that. I uncovered, with Margo’s help, many lies, including manipulation of data, including satellite photos and a complete distortion of data to hide the fact that the state of the ice was way, way worse than we were being told.

I had to reconcile this and came to my own conclusion that the official IPCC version of events was meant to provide the justification for what they call Agenda-21 or, now, the Great Reset.

A rapidly declining ice coverage associated with rising temperatures and increasing CO2 and methane levels was not in the interests of the Powers-that-be who require a slower-moving situation to exercise their dictatorial power over the masses who had to make all the sacrifices while the elite flew around in private jets to discuss “solutions”.

I could never embrace any arguments of the sceptics and the denialists. They were ludicrous -saying things like the sea ice in the Arctic was increasing when I knew the opposite was true.

They certainly were not going to persuade me of anything. 

Despite my mind being far more open I could not find anything to convince me despite a growing realisation that most of what we were being told were barefaced lies.

Then, at the beginning of 2020 came covid-19, which I quickly realised was mostly a scam and the campaign to get us all “vaccinated” with an experimental gene-therapy product was entirely based on lies and a large degree of force and the cruel treatment of those that did not want to partake of this experiment.

Now, with an  unknown number of deaths (“adult death syndrome”) and injuries we now know that a genocide is taking place under our noses.

In short, the last 3 years has turned my entire world upside down and upset many assumptions I had been living with for at least 30 years. I realised that just about everything we are told by government and media was a LIE.

All my previously-heard assumptions had to be reassessed.

And that included climate change.

I had already realised that much of what we were being told by government, media, IPCC and establishment scientists was a distortion of the truth.

I had come across the works of Ian Wishart who could best be described as ‘right wing, conservative Christian’.  

How about scholar?

I had already read his book on the lead-up to New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi…. which I found was full of suppressed documents that contradicted the official narrative - not selected quotes selected to bolster a predetermined thesis like many polished, professional historians but the whole thing so readers could make up their own minds.

After the catastrophic floods in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand in February, he challenged claims by NIWA (New Zealand’s equivalent of NOAA) that these were the worst floods in the country’s history, by checking the historical record (unlike the officials). 

He found that there were worse floods (expressed by air pressure) in the mid-19th century, a time when temperatures were lower and greenhouse gas levels were lower.

https://twitter.com/investigatemag/status/1632682331835359234

CLIMATE OF FEAR: NIWA’s Missing Storm Data & Its Impact On Extreme Climate Claims

I was generally impressed by his scholarship and, especially, by ability to unearth documents that were embarrassing to the authorities, so I decided to read his book Air Con and found his scholarship, once again, impressive.

He came up with documents and papers that I was completely unaware of that put a dent in the assumptions that I was still left with. I am not ready to entirely embrace all his conclusions but it has been enough to make me think deeply and be far more sceptical and questioning of what we are being told.

What follows is what I have gathered from reading his book. 

• Carbon dioxide is only a tiny fraction of what we call air

• The main source of warming is water vapour, not CO2

• There have times in the past when CO2 was low but temperatures high, and vice versa

• “The scientific data suggests the warming comes first, not rising CO2.”

• The Earth has gone through cycles of hot and cold but life survived

• Data has been manipulated to show a linear progression

The climate change agenda and Wokeism

As I was in the final stages of putting this article together I came across this comment from Konstantin Kisin, the Russian-British comedian and commentator on  the Woke agenda. 

It is interesting how the climate change agenda intersects with Wokeism.

Back in the day, when I was part of Guy McPherson's Nature Bats Last adopting wokeism and the LGBTQ agenda was a prerequisite for being a member of the Facebook group.

At the time, an exception was made for me, presumably because I was "useful to the cause".

I've never understood how one has anything to do with the other but there we are.

The Greenhouse Effect and the planet Venus

One of the important planks in my understanding of the greenhouse effect has been the planet Venus ,which has a temperature of 480C, hot enough to melt lead and an atmosphere comprised almost entirely of CO2.

This is of course due to CO2's quality of trapping heat. But not entirely. What I didn't realise until pointed out by Wishart is that a day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days, whereas a year on Venus lasts 225 Earth days

That's enough reason for a planet close to the sun to fry.

Sources of CO2 emissions

According to the official narrative of global warming it’s carbon dioxide that is responsible for our plight this century and we need to bring emissions down to "net zero".

However, Wishart and others point out that

"CO2 makes up only 385 parts per million in the atmosphere or, expressed another way, only 0.038% of the concoction we call “air”.

Put another way

"What one sees coming out of factory chimneys, in ubiquitous media photographs, is not CO2. It is mostly water vapour, plus nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, methane, water vapour and various forms of particulates, with noxious CO2 forming less than 5% of these emissions"

 Greenhouse gases are crucial for life on earth to exist because of their ability to dissipate and transfer heat, as well as their insulative effects at night. But the greenhouse gases have other benefits too

Water vapour

There is no doubt that there has been a noticable increase in water vapour in the atmosphere. It is said that for every degree of warming there is a 7% increase in water vapour.

Wishart says:

“In global warming theory, water vapour is the elephant in the room that no global warming believers really want to talk about. And when they do, they talk around it and deflect back to carbon”

He quotes this:

“By far the biggest player in global warming is, however, water vapour. Up to 4.0% of air is water vapour, steam, call it what you like. Not only is water vapour vastly more prevalent than CO2, it is also directly responsible for 90 to 95% of Earth’s greenhouse effect.

“The remaining portion [5 to 10% influence] comes from carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, ozone and miscellaneous other minor greenhouse gases.” . 

junkscience.com/Greenhouse/. (Note: this link does not work any more).

“As an example of the relative importance of water, it should be noted that changes in the relative humidity on the order of 1.3-4% are equivalent to the effect of doubling CO2.”

CO2 emissions (both human and natural) are responsible for between 5 and 10% of global warming.

The rest is water vapour.

And yet the climate scientists dismiss this 90% contribution to global warming in this way.

“There is some truth in this, insofar as water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but … you will discover it is important to understand the difference between a forcing and a feedback. Carbon dioxide and methane are forcings – they cause the planet to warm. Water vapour is a feedback. The amount of water in the air is a consequence of temperature, and it in turns results in more warming. There’s nothing we can do about feedbacks, but we can control anthropogenic forcings.”

---James Hrynystyn, “Island of Doubt”

Wishart says; the sun has been the primary “forcer” up until now, and increased solar radiation can and does result in increased evaporation from oceans, lakes and rivers, thus creating more water vapour which then cloaks the planet in warm humidity. Carbon dioxide doesn’t have to be a significant ignition factor in that equation at all, and in fact might well be a by-product, a feedback, itself, rather than a “forcer”..

Photosynthesis

One thing that remains with me from school biology is photosynthesis - how plants process sunlight to synthesise nutrients from carbon dioxide and water and produce oxygen.

One of the things climate change deniers latch on to is how CO2 " is crucial for all life, and crucial for humanity’s survival in particular".

The denialists point out that climate change propagandists say CO2 is a pollutant. I really couldn't believe that this was possible until I found this article from the site Skeptical Science a few years ago.

Is CO2 a pollutant?

They actually do say it is a pollutant, while it is true that it is essential part of life.

A counter-argument, however, may be that it is as the sceptics point out, a trace gas ("0.038% of the concoction we call “air”).

You can't have it both ways.

The sun as a forcer of climate change

Wishart says; the sun has been the primary “forcer” up until now, and increased solar radiation can and does result in increased evaporation from oceans, lakes and rivers, thus creating more water vapour which then cloaks the planet in warm humidity. Carbon dioxide doesn’t have to be a significant ignition factor in that equation at all, and in fact might well be a by-product, a feedback, itself, rather than a “forcer”.

In addition to this there is the influence of changes in the Earth's orbit

This is from Ian Wishart:

“Estimates vary, but somewhere around 15% seems to be the common number cited for the increase in global food crop yields due to aerial fertilisation with increased carbon dioxide since 1950."

This increase has both helped avoid a Malthusian disaster and preserved or returned enormous tracts of marginal land as wildlife habitat, land that would otherwise have had to be put under the plough in an attempt to feed the growing global population.

“Commercial growers deliberately generate CO2 and increase its levels in agricultural greenhouses to between 700ppm (parts per million) and 1,000ppm to increase productivity and improve the water efficiency of food crops far beyond those in the somewhat carbon-starved open atmosphere. 

CO2 feeds the forests, grows more usable lumber in timber lots meaning there is less pressure to cut old growth or push into ‘natural’ wildlife habitat, makes plants more water efficient helping to beat back

See this:

Global Climate Change Impact on Crops Expected Within 10 Years, NASA Study Finds

Wishart goes on to say that CO2 is not so much a forcing  as a by-product, a feedback

Milankovich cycles

In addition, there is the influence of changes in the Earth's orbit, called Milankovich cycles.

"At the centre of their claim are changes in the earth’s orbital path around the sun, earth’s axial tilt, and the sun’s orbital path around the centre of the solar system. All of these factors change from time to time, and have a big impact on climate change. Geologists have matched past ice ages with regular cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbit, known as “Milankovitch cycles”.

The temperature swings they documented showed Earth’s average temperature could increase or decrease by as much as 10pC within just a few decades"

Once again that is in direct opposition to modern climate scientists who admit the reality of Milankovich cycles but dismisses their influence as "minimal", but what is the evidence

A 2003 study by scientists from Germany’s Max Planck Institute estimates that the sun could have been responsible for as much as 50% of global warming since 1970, although they estimate the more likely figure to be just under 30%.

“A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes. “Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said:

‘The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures. The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years’.”

This is what NASA has to say on the matter

Milankovitch (Orbital) Cycles and Their Role in Earth's Climate

Evidence from the paleo record

Ian Wishart talks about evidence from the Paleozoic era from about 600 million years ago. Paleo science really isn't my thing so I will just report what he says.

Evidence indicate that ancient temperatures did not appear to be linked with CO2 levels. 

CO2 emissions went up while temperatures went down

Despite leaping from 5000 ppm to 7000 ppm, there was no corresponding jump in temperature. It remained at a tropical 22pC. 

Wishart goes on:

"Some 480 million years ago, coming up to the border between the Ordovician and Silurian periods, CO2 had dropped from 7000 down to a more manageable 4000 ppm. Not suddenly, but gradually over the previous 100 million years. The temperature stayed steady at 22pC.  Then something strange happened. CO2 levels rose sharply from 4000ppm to 4500ppm, yet suddenly, world temperatures plummeted to an average matching today’s: 12pC. In plain English, carbon dioxide levels went up but the temperature went down.

He concludes that

"Even if carbon emissions double in the next hundred years and push atmospheric concentration to nearly 800ppm, they will still only be less than a fifth of the 4500ppm CO2 level that existed when global temperatures dropped by nearly half to 12 degrees"

Wishart points to the late Ordovician period when a drop to a planetary average of 12 degrees was a global Ice Age, even though CO2 levels were around 12 times higher than they are now.

The only period where both CO2 and temperature records were simultaneously the same as modern Earth was 315 million years.

Before that, according to Wishart' research the CO2 levels and temperature went in different directions.

His conclusion is that: "Earth appears capable of regulating its temperatures and greenhouse gas absorption at levels far higher than humans are able to generate".

Compare that with Al Gore:

“When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun inside,” he intones on screen, pointing to an ice core graph. “Carbon dioxide having never gone above 300 PPM [my emphasis], here is where CO2 is now [380]. We give off where it has never been as far back as this record will measure.”

Al Gore cites an 650,000 year old ice core sample whereas temperature indications from the past 600 million years indicate CO2 levels have been between 4 and 18 times higher than they are today, yet Earth, and life, survived (even if the dinosaurs didn't.

Wishart's conclusion:

"Here’s the real inconvenient truth: For most of known history, CO2 levels have been between four and 18 times higher than they are today, yet Earth, and life, survived. Clearly then, when all the historic data and not just selected portions are analysed, carbon cannot be the cause of runaway global warming that the United Nations and politicians courting the Green vote claim it to be."

Scientific debate - cooling vs. heating

Wishart provides a long quote from an article in Newsweek’s Peter Gwynne from 1975 that predicted a “Little Ice Age”. .

To quote from the article:

"There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now."

You cannot find the article anywhere on the internet but mostly they are ones such as 'Cooling World' Story Doesn't Make Today's Climate Scientists Wrong by the original author. And then there is this:

In 1975, Newsweek Predicted A New Ice Age. We’re Still Living with the Consequences.

It seems to me that they are interpreting past ideas through the lens of present ideology.

Wishart asks whether Earth’s temperature really rising and falling and rising and falling across the globe over the course of a century, like some kind of planetary deep breathing cycle?

Warming and cooling cycles in the last century

At the very least the science, represented by the press has gone backwards and forwards over the last century. 

“Since the late 1800s, journalists and scientists looking for research funding have been belting out warnings about climate change. Only, back then, they feared a looming ice age.”.

Here is a compilation of headlines from the last century:

New York Times, February 24, 1895: 

“Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again” 

Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1912: 

“Fifth ice age is on the way. Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.”

New York Times, October 7, 1912:

 “Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age” 

Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1923: “The possibility of another Ice Age already having started ... is admitted by men of first rank in the scientific world, men specially qualified to speak.” 

Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1923: 

“Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada.” Time Magazine, September 10, 1923: “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age.”

New York Times, September 18, 1924: 

“MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age” In the 1930s, a warming period got people’s hopes up, and the headlines changed: 

GLOBAL WARMING: 1930s-1950s 

New York Times, March 27, 1933:

 “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise” 

Time Magazine, January 2, 1939: 

“Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right.... weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.”

 New York Times, September 18, 1924: 

“MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age” 

In the 1930s, a warming period got people’s hopes up, and the headlines changed: 

GLOBAL WARMING: 1930s-1950s 

New York Times, March 27, 1933: 

“America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise”

Time Magazine, January 2, 1939: 

“Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right.... weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.” 

Chicago Daily Tribune, November 6, 1939: 

“Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities [throughout] the world permafrost which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades.” 

Time Magazine, 1951: 

Noted that  in Russia was receding northward at 100 yards per year. 

New York Times, 1952: 

Reported global warming studies citing the “trump card” as melting glaciers. All the great ice sheets stated to be in retreat. 

U.S. News and World Report, January 18, 1954: 

[W]inters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing.” 

New York Times, February 15, 1959: 

“Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures.” 

But then, suddenly, we were lurching back into an ice age, according to the pundits: 

GLOBAL COOLING:1970s 

Washington Post, January 11, 1970: 

“Colder Winters Herald Dawn of New Ice Age.” 

Time Magazine, June 24, 1974:

“Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” 

Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 1974: 

“Warning: Earth’s Climate is Changing Faster than Even Experts Expect”, Reported that “glaciers have begun to advance”; “growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter”; and “the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool”. 

New York Times, December 29, 1974: “[P]resent climate change [will result in] mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence.”

Science News, March 1, 1975: 

“The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed, and we are unlikely to quickly regain the ‘very extraordinary period of warmth’ that preceded it.” 

Newsweek, April 28, 1975: “The Cooling World”: “There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.”

International Wildlife, July-August, 1975: 

“But the sense of the discoveries is that there is no reason why the ice age should not start in earnest in our lifetime.”In this article, New Scientist magazine’s former editor Nigel Calder intoned: “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” 

New York Times, May 21, 1975: 

“Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable”

The existence of temperature swings and climatic cycles is bit of a theme in Wishart's book

"The temperature swings they documented showed Earth’s average temperature could increase or decrease by as much as 10pC within just a few decades. Those are monster climate changes, on a scale modern humans can only stare at in wonder, yet they fit the same massive changes that took place in the dinosaur era, regardless of CO2 levels."

—Nature, 1998

As I said before, it's very easy to dismiss "old" articles and science on the basis that we did not have supercomputers.

But now "the science is settled"?