Saturday, March 1, 2008

Book Review: 'Taken by Storm; The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming'

By Chris Essex and Ross McKitrick. Ah another Globaloney Warming denial tract. Tsk Tsk. Mother Earth will be angry.

by StFerdIII



This book should be ready by anyone interested in piercing the anti-rational hysteria of Globaloney Warming. The value of the book, which destroys the idea of 'Global' weather and temperature patterns, is that science does not know much if anything about climate, climate conditions, or variables leading to climate change. As one passage of the book so rightly states, 'We have shown page after page, that certainty on the subject of the future direction of the climate is impossible.....that anyone who thinks we can predict the climate only courts the laughter of the gods.' Indeed. They should also court their wrath as well.

Essex and McKitrick are Canadians, supposedly those peaceful tree hugging dwellers, who bow and scrape to Al Gore and the eco-cult's every moan and incantation. Maybe not. Essex is the director of theoretical physics at the University of Western Ontario, and McKitrick is a professor in economics who applies economic analysis to climate change. Suffice it to say that neither economics, nor basic physics supports climate change policy or theory. Concepts sure to annoy true believers and pagans.

Essex and McKitrick debunk many of the cherished myths held by eco-cultists and mother earth worshippers. Some of the more relevant facts include:

-'Global warming is a topic that sprawls in a thousand technical directions. There is no such thing as an 'expert' on global warming, because no one can master all the relevant subjects.'

-'Climate models do not represent a theory for climate. There is no comprehensive scientific theory for climate. Forecasting climate change with a model but no theory is a dicey proposition.'

-'What is tantalizing for scientists about a thunderstorm is this: we have a complete theory for parts of the storm's movements, and the theory captures in principle all the detail.....But the catch is it [the storm] is too complicated to be computed....no such storm ever shows up, even in our very best climate computer models.'

So these 3 simple statements say something very important. First, we can't even model, predict or explain in totality something as common as a local thunderstorm. We might know how it works in general, or how it might behave, but we can't model and predict it with any detail. We can't model for instance the quite real event of a thunderstorm spawning tornadoes. How then can we model 'global' climate if important local 'parameters' such as thunderstorms are ignored or unmodeled?

Second, complex phenomena such as thunderstorms are only one part of the millions of local conditions which affects climate. This means that any climate 'model' is just a guess, using gross approximations, assumptions and 'parameters' to calculate a result or average. To say that such a modeling methodology is unscientific is only to state the obvious.

Global climate thus does not exist. There are at least one million variables in climate and trying to map the relationship between all these variables at the local level, than applying such 'results' to regional, national, international and finally global computations is rather obviously, a fool's game. With one million variables at all points on the compass and related to level of atmosphere, the functions or relations between such variables and their impact on climate are impossibly to accurately model, not only locally but globally.

Rain, water vapor, wind flows, aerosol cover, molecular shapes – all these and more affect climate patterns, yet they are not mapped and modeled. This says nothing about ignoring cloud cover and sunspot activity, 'Think about the fluid dynamical and thermodynamical complications that many such droplets introduce when drifting across humidity filament....Here we can solids, liquids, and gases all coming into play...This would be an impossible problemt to set up even if we knew where every aerosol was....We have no chance of doing that.'

Hey lay off the big words and complicated thermodynamical physics! Climate is simple, integrated, and like a 'greenhouse' is it not? L Ron Gore, the UN, the politicians and the Mother Earth worshippers demand that it is!

Well not really. Thermodynamic physics means that all climate is local. And the supposed greenhouse effect is a ridiculous joke. First of all, real greenhouses don't operate on the 'greenhouse' effect principle. If they did all plants inside would be dead. Second, Co2 is a natural gas and has no real effect on temperature. It is just a gas which is used by other parts of complex local thermodynamic climate variables.

'So called greenhouse gases have absolutely nothing to do with greenhouses. We call them infrared- absorbing gases. The most important of them, radiatively speaking, isn't carbon dioxide, it's water vapor. Water is more important to the radiative transfer of energy that all of the other infrared gases combined.....However, too often water vapor will not be on the list of 'greenhouse gases'....Moreover, its obvious link to the fluid motions, clouds and aerosols, will often be omitted when it is mentioned.'

So let's see. The UN, L. Ron Gore, the eco-cult and the earth pagans leave out important variables, don't model little matters such as cloud cover, sun spot activity, water vapor or local thermodynamic climate patterns, and leave out fluid motions, air flows and atmospheric interactions. Yep the science must be closed.

Climate always changes and always has. Some parts of the earth might be getting warmer, some parts colder. On average outside of urban centers the earth is 0.4 colder now than it was 100 years ago. This is just a statistical fact taken from thousands of temperature samples. Do we know however, what has caused this non-urban cooling? Probably not, we might make some guesses, but the guesses would be based on imperfect data, gross assumptions and modeling some sort of 'average' of a very complicated thermodynamic and quite local system.

As the book explains, 'Temperatures in the Earth's atmosphere and oceans range from about -60C to +40C on any given day – a range of 100 C....Now imagine looking for a change of 0.1C in an average, when you do not know how to define or compute the average.' Indeed. Why are we worried about a 1 C rise in temperature when locally the winter might reveal -30 C and the summer plus 30 C ? Are you serious that a 1 C 'average' rise [whatever that means] will extinguish mankind? Are you sane?

An 'average' in a temperature calculation does not exist. What average would you like? The mean, the median, the modal, and over what time period and what 'non-standard' variables should I exclude or include ? Should we include 'averages' over 30, 300, 30.000 or 3 million years ? What about little things like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, Ice Ages and meteorite impacts? Include or exclude? What about cloud cover and sunspot activity? Are they important in affecting the 'average' and if not, why not?

There is no single 'average' global temperature. Climate is local.

Why then would any rational animal build a policy framework to 'manage' the weather, if we don't even understand climate? The logical answer is of course that the Globaloney Warming scam, is fearmongering for a different, non-scientific political purpose. A zest for world government, higher taxation, the establishment of a pagan earth mother cult; these and other un-scientific goals animate the fear mongering of little minds with not much else to do.

This book is a great antidote to the eco-fascists, and attacks head-on the myths that Globaloney Warming is based on science, the laws of physics, and is a reasonable calibration of reality. It is of course none of these things. It is the greatest fear mongering scam in history.

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Taken by Storm, Key Porter Books, 2007 2nd edition, 337 pages.