Climate Change: Real? Man-Made? A Presentation to PotomacGOP by Charley Martin July 14, 2014

1. Climate Change:Real?Man-Made?A Presentation to PotomacGOPby Charley MartinJuly 14, 2014

2. Climate Defined: • The meteorological conditions, including temperature, precipitation, and wind, that characteristically prevail in a particular region. (American Heritage Dictionary) • The composite or generally prevailing weather conditions of a region, as temperature, air pressure, humidity, precipitation, sunshine, cloudiness, and winds, throughout the year, averaged over a series of years. (Dictionary.com)

3. Why Is the Global Warming Discussion Important?

4. Because It’s The Most Important Scientific Issue of the Day Governments have already spent billions of dollars, and are poised to spend trillions of dollars to force a shift in the world’s energy economy away from hydrocarbon fuels However, the processes that drive the climate are extremely complex The scientific community finds itself sharply divided into two camps

5. What Both Camps Agree On That the Earth is in a slight warming trend – about 1 degree F in the last 100 years That the industrial activity of mankind – the very activity that brings about advancements in the quality of life – is responsible for an increase in the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere in the last 100 years from ~300 ppm to ~390 ppm

6. Where the Two Camps Disagree The “Eureka, I have found it!” camp fervently believes that the increase in anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 levels are causing the warming. This camp generally believes that extraordinary government action is necessary to avert a world-wide disaster. This camp hangs it hat on the “hockey stick” graph of Michael Mann:

7. The Mann “Hockey Stick Graph”

8. And The Apparent Relation Between Anthropogenic CO2 and Warming

9. The “Not So Fast!” Camp “It’s a whole lot more complicated than one or two graphs.” The climate is influenced by many variables, only one of which is the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, which may actually not be very important at all. Let’s take our time to understand before we do something rash in the name of “saving the planet.”

10. Does the Sun Figure Into Equation? • The global warming alarmists refuse to consider the possibility that any other factor might be responsible for the current warming trend. • However, fluctuations in solar irradiance and sunspot frequency actually provide a better graphical fit to the observed temperature variations.

11. Global Temperature vs Solar Irradiance

12. Sea Surface Temperature vs Annual Sunspot Number

13. What is CO2 • Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless, chemically stable gas that has always been a constituent part of our atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. (The term “carbon pollution” has become popular with the “warmists”.) • CO2 does not cause asthma or any other breathing problems, contrary to “clean air” commercials you may see on TV, specifically as sponsored by the American Lung Association. • CO2 makes up about 390 parts per million (ppm) of our atmosphere today, or about 0.039 %. • CO2 is absolutely essential to all plant life, and hence to all animal life. We would do well to think of CO2 as plant food, not “carbon pollution”.

14. The Carbon Cycle(Units are gigatons)

15. Global Heat Balance

16. Solar Spectrum Coming In

17. Earth’s Spectrum Radiating Back into the Universe

18. The Two Spectra on Same Graph

19. GH Gas Absorption of Earth’s Blackbody Spectrum

21. CO2 Is Increasing, but…

22. The Temperature Data Set Is Getting Smaller!

23. Can We Even Detect “Climate Change”In The Near Term(The Last 100 years)?

24. Global Mean Temperature in the Age of Modern Thermometers

25. What’s Happening to the Oceans?

26. What’s Happening with Hurricanes?

27. What’s Happening with Tornadoes?

28. “EF1 Equivalent” Tornado FrequencyCFMartin

29. What’s Happening with Rainfall?

30. What’s Happening to the Ice?

32. Northern and Southern Sea Ice Trends

33. How About the Last 2500 Years?

34. “Battle of the Graphs” • The upper “hockey stick” graph is from the paper by Michael Mann, and is dominated by tree ring proxy data from the North American bristlecone pine. • The lower graph is a composite of European proxy data from many sources, and was the widely accepted understanding of Northern Hemisphere climate until Mann’s “hockey stick” became fashionable as the global warming alarmist’s rallying cry.

35. From Greenland Ice Data

36. What Does Paleoclimatology Tell Us? (Analysis of Ancient Climate)

37. Evolution of Earth’s Pre-Cambrian Atmosphere

38. Stromatolites

39. Phanerozoic Eon 540 MYA – Present Continents form, drift, reform Life develops, becomes diverse and more complex Climate and atmosphere variable Mass extinctions

40. CO2 During Phanerozoic

41. History of Temperature, CO2and Ice for the last 540 Million Years (Phanerozoic Eon)

42. Notes on Previous Graphs: • The extreme dip in CO2 levels at 300-350 MYA accompanied the Permo-Carboniferous Ice Age and the collapse of the great rain forests. • One may be tempted to conclude that too little CO2 is the cause of ice ages. However, ice core data from the most recent Pleistocene period indicates that the drop in CO2follows the drop in temperature by 800-1000 years, as the ocean surfaces cool and more atmospheric CO2 goes into solution into the water. The same is true of the interglacial periods as the planet emerges from ice ages. • That is, the temperature always changes first, and then the CO2 changes. To this point, Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth is grossly in error on the relationship between CO2 and temperature. CO2 is the effect, not the cause.

43. Last 5 Million Years

44. “Smoothed” Temperature History for Last 400 Thousand Years

45. CO2 and Glaciation

46. The Climate Models Aren’t Working!

47. Conclusions • The Earth is in a slight warming trend (~1 degree F in 100 years). This is not a cause for alarm or drastic action. (Note: global temperature has been constant for the last 16 years.) • The CO2 level is the atmosphere has increased from 300 ppm to 390 ppm over the last 100 years as a result of human activity. • The Earth has experienced warming and cooling throughout both its recent and its ancient history. The climate changes all by itself, without any influence by humankind.

48. Conclusions (cont’d) • There is no direct evidence that proves a correlation between the current anthropogenic CO2 increase and the temperature trend of the last 100 years. In fact, a better correlation exists between solar activity and temperature. • The alarmists warn of “runaway” climate change if CO2 gets too much higher. In fact, CO2 levels have been much higher in the history of the planet. There is no evidence that CO2 has played a major role in the climate changes of the past. In fact, fluctuations in CO2 levels are much more likely the result of climate changes, rather than the cause.

49. Conclusions (cont’d) • The climate is a “chaotic,” robust, extremely complicated collection of physical processes, with many feedback mechanisms which tend to have a self-correcting effect on the climate. • Much of the warming hysteria is based on the predictions of mathematical models. These models predict a monotonic increase in the temperature of the Earth, but have failed to duplicate the observed behavior. While it is beneficial to try to understand how the climate behaves through mathematical models, the models must be validated by observations.

50. Al Gore and Roger Revelle • Roger Revelle was a renowned oceanographer and taught at several institutions, including Harvard. One of his students was Al Gore. • In his Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore praises Roger Revelle for bringing rising CO2 from human activity to public awareness, and for serving as his inspiration in Gore’s political quest against “carbon pollution.” • Later in his life, as Revelle saw the overreaction to his work by Gore and others, and by political bodies like the UN IPCC, he urged caution. His second thoughts are quoted on the next slide.