R.I.P. Greenhouse Gas Theory: 1980-2018
Written by John O'Sullivan
Fresh analysis of government scientific records reveals the idea of ‘long-settled’ science in the greenhouse gas theory is a myth. The claim human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) act as a control knob on climate only appeared in consensus science since the 1980’s. Prior to that time, official records show the theory as “abandoned.”
Famously, on June 24, 1988 the whole world first heard about the dreaded “greenhouse effect” (GHE) from NASA’s new champion of the theory, James Hansen. Hansen had breathed life into an old and “abandoned” theory drawing from new space research into Venus and Mars. Thanks to Hansen’s role, climate fear prevailed for a generation.
Recently, Russian scientists have declared the GHE dead as global cooling sets in; while a team of Italian scientists called for a “deep re-examination” of the failing theory. Other new papers readily dismiss the CO2 climate hypothesis. Below we present the stark evidence and encourage readers to engage in their own research.
Consensus as Science?
Of course, we should begin by stating real scientists avoid reliance on consensus opinion to determine the validity or otherwise of any theory. But so often, non-scientists in the general public and media (and certain corrupt national science institutes) cite consensus claims to quell discussion and debate.
In that regard, we show that for the greater part of the 20th century consensus science, itself, rejected the idea that carbon dioxide causes global warming.
The so-called greenhouse gas theory (GHE) was first famously debunked by Professor H. W.Woods in 1909. Establishment scientists usually never decry the Woods debunk. Instead, they gloss over it and the long hiatus that followed (1909-1980).
Concocting a Strong Narrative
Spencer R. Weart, director of the Center for the History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics is pre-eminent among establishment science historians in splashing gloss. Weart’s book, ‘The Discovery of Global Warming’ is compulsory reading for modern students in this field.
Weart plugged Hansen’s comparison of Mars and Venus with Earth, asserting life as being very fragile and vulnerable to any climate shifts. Weart writes:
“In the 1960s and 1970s, observations of Mars and Venus showed that planets that seemed much like the Earth could have frightfully different atmospheres. The greenhouse effect had made Venus a furnace, while lack of atmosphere had locked Mars in a deep freeze. This was visible evidence that climate can be delicately balanced, so that a planet’s atmosphere could flip from a livable state to a deadly one.” (id.)Like James Hansen’s ‘fixing’ of history, Weart is masterful at making evidence fit the narrative.
Alarmist drumbeater, Andrew C. Revkin, in The New York Times Book Review heaped fulsome praise proclaiming that Weart’s version of science history,
“dissects the interwoven threads of research and reveals the political and societal subtexts that colored scientists’ views and the public reception their work received.”Revkin’s words are subtly revealing of the importance of appearance in science and public perception. Glowing praise for Weart came, too, from Fred Pearce, of the UK’s The Independent:
“It is almost two centuries since the French mathematician Jean Baptiste Fourier discovered that the Earth was far warmer than it had any right to be, given its distance from the Sun… Spencer Weart’s book about how Fourier’s initially inconsequential discovery finally triggered urgent debate about the future habitability of the Earth is lucid, painstaking and commendably brief, packing everything into 200 pages.”We could be forgiven for thinking we’ve had two centuries, no less, of CO2 ‘settled science’, couldn’t we?
Follow the Money
Sadly, too few have scratched beneath the surface of Spencer Weart’s compelling (biased) narrative. If they had they would have found some very disturbing pronouncements of consensus science wonderfulness to jar such faith.
What Weart and other establishment lackeys won’t tell you is that the American Meteorological Society – as well as Britain’s top climate scientist, CEP Brooks (1951) no less – published the most damning assessments discrediting Weart’s Big Greenhouse Gas Fiction.
Weart, and so many profiting from the scam, won’t admit that it doesn’t pay to come clean and jump off the billion dollar global warming gravy train. Professor Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan, sums it up succinctly:
“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or the other – every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so.”Weart and co. would rather you not know that there are more than 65 (SIXTY-FIVE!) known iterations jockeying for position as THE GHE theory. Many are self-contradictory and unphysical. By contrast, we don’t have 65 variations of the laws of gravity. Plus, there are no less than 53 bogus authority statements online declaring that Earth’s atmosphere DOES act ‘like a greenhouse.’
The Hansen ‘Cooling is Warming’ Flip-flop
Weart also fails to tell readers that in 1967 Hansen claimed (when he was a fringe theorist) that if there was a GHE it was likely induced by dust (aerosol particulates). [1]
Hansen had been pitching his “Dust Insulation Model” (DIM) to anyone and everyone after obtaining his PhD from the University of Iowa and starting work at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Then in the 1970′s disaster science became the rage, inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky, a leading advocate of Catastrophist ideas as opposed to the prevailing Uniformitarian notions. Hansen, as a disciple of Velikovsky, was crying about an impending ice age on Earth while at the same time speculating that dust aerosols in the atmosphere of Venus caused a “runaway greenhouse gas effect” on the hot planet. Nowhere, back then, was Hansen claiming CO2 drove climate. Does the term “opportunist” spring to mind?
Not until television science celebrity and fellow catastrophist, Carl Sagan, won fame with his claims about a “runaway greenhouse effect” on Venus – all due to carbon dioxide – that Hansen got on the new bandwagon. Meanwhile, a contemporary of Sagan, American physicist Richard Feynmen, discredited the GHE. Today, independent scientists, using the latest data from space probes, have a better idea of what’s happening on Venus. Moreover, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests life is not fragile, but enduring and likely common throughout the universe on many planets like ours.
This certainly conflicts with the Weart narrative. But then, why would Weart – a loyal alarmist propagandist – want to expose how bad Hansen’s science really is? If Weart were honest, he would have come clean on Hansen’s howler made in a key climate paper published in a 1981 edition of ‘Science‘. [2]
Hansen’s Huge CO2 ‘Window’ Howler
In it Hansen claims carbon dioxide absorbs in an atmospheric “window” from 7 to 14 micrometers – which transmits thermal radiation emitted by the earth’s surface and lower atmosphere. But the scientific reality is that carbon dioxide only has an effect on the atmospheric window centered on 14.77 microns with a range from about 13 to 17 microns – not from 7 to 14 micrometers. So how did Weart and thousands of “experts” over decades never spot that corker?
None of these crucial failings was systematically challenged until 2010 and the full-volume ground-breaking book ‘Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory.’ A recent bombshell study validated the book’s science.
The clues for junk science are staring us in the face, especially now so many experts, outside of climate ‘science’, aver to the facts of empirical evidence that CO2 has only even been proven to cool, never warm, anything. Joseph E Postma illustrated well how respected textbooks on thermodynamics show’ energy‘ is generally not ‘heat‘, which is where the GHE theory is confused and any forcing role from CO2 cannot work. [3]
Charlatans Conflate Correlation & Causation
But thanks to mainstream media hype and despite the flaws in the science, the GHE gained traction from 1980, as global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) went ever upwards. Non-scientists often mistake correlation for causation (charlatans depend on it!). Yet, we now look back and see that average global temperatures over the past 100 years have barely moved one degree – despite the brief uptick in the late 20th Century.
With no catastrophe imminent and fears of a new ice age gripping ever more scientists, we are right on the cusp of the biggest science paradigm shift since Einstein. Academics don’t want to admit to the truth that levels of CO2 – whether higher or lower – can be shown to have no measured climate impact. The truth, it seems, shifts full circle back to what the AMS declared in 1951, as the extract below reveals. [4]
https://archive.org/stream/compendiumofmete00amer#page/1016/mode/2up
The author of the above extract is CEP Brooks. He and the publisher, the American Meteorological Society, unequivocally advise that the old CO2 climate theory of Arrhenius, Fourier, et al:
“was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation absorbed by CO2 is also absorbed by water vapour.”Brooks (+AMS) then addresses the rise in atmospheric CO2 due to human industrial activity:
“In the past hundred years the burning of coal has increased the amount of CO2 by a measurable amount (from 0.028 to 0.030 per cent), and Callender [7] sees in this an explanation of the recent rise in world temperature.”
Continuing, Brooks (1951) makes the same inescapable argument made by skeptics today:
“But during the past 7000 years there have been greater fluctuations of temperature without the internvention of man, and there seems no reason to regard the recent rise as more than a coincidence. This theory is not considered further.”Thus, the greenhouse gas theory was well and truly dead and buried in 1951 – according to settled consensus science (if you are a believer in it).
No ‘Greenhouse Gas Theory’ Spoken in Charney (1979)
For the next revealing insight we must shift 28 years further ahead to ‘Charney’ (1979). But before we do, let us first heed some words of warning from a man with the keenest insight of Big Government machinations.
As Warren E. Leary writes, no less than President Dwight D Eisenhower urged us to be on our guard:
“During the 1961 address, in which the president famously warned of the danger to the nation of a growing armaments industry referred to as a “military-industrial complex,” he included a few sentences about risks posed by a scientific-technological elite. He noted that the technological revolution of previous decades had been fed by more costly and centralized research, increasingly sponsored by the federal government.Intellectual curiosity certainly has gone into short supply in contemporary government science. From the 1940’s to early 1970’s, the temperature records had showed a clear cooling trend. Till the mid 1970’s the big story among scientists was global cooling – not warming. We have to get well into the 1980’s, when there was evidence of an uptick in global temperatures, to see wide evidence that the long-abandoned CO2-driven greenhouse gas hypothesis was rising again – like phoenix from the ashes.
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields… ,” Eisenhower warned. “Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” [5]
Indeed, we can pinpoint the change by examining the extremely detailed 13,000-word climate report ‘Carbon Dioxide and Climate, A Scientific Assessment’ (1979). Widely referred to just as ‘Charney’. This makes zero mention of the greenhouse gas theory. Not. Anywhere. Among. Thirteen. Thousand. Words. So how could the greenhouse gas theory be “settled science” if not mentioned by name ANYWHERE in such a key US federal climate report?
Nonetheless, ‘Charney’ did concede that CO2 might actually cause cooling, something contemporary alarmists would rather you didn’t know!
https://www.nap.edu/download/12181
Prominent skeptic, Professor Richard Lindzen, was one of the original ‘Charney‘ science contributors (see image above – along with James Hansen!) and has “walked back” from the GHE. Despite Hansen’s “contribution” his theory was shut out. Canadian space scientist, Joseph E Postma summarizes why bias, group think and incompetence helped sustain the discredited greenhouse gas theory for so long when proper examination shows it is literally ‘flat earth physics.’
NASA Boss: Hansen “Embarrassed” Us
But time is not the friend of climate fraudsters. And Hansen’s beloved greenhouse gas theory is consistently and monotonously being refuted in peer-reviewed journals rendering him – and other alarmists – disgraced. NASA’s Mass/Gravity Equations contradict the GHE and retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theonm James Hansen’s former supervisor at NASA, has declared on government record that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” and “was never muzzled.” [6]
The failure, after 30 years of prophesy, for a climate catastrophe to unfold, has left James Hansen a somewhat chastened man. In a recent paper Hansen shows he has now flip-flopped again on the climate forcing properties of aerosols. Returning to his old DIM science idea Hansen now says aerosols are part of the control knob for a planet’s energy content. But contrary to what he claimed before, he now says they cause cooling, not warming.
In 2018 the null hypothesis awaits the greenhouse gas theory. In 1951, the AMS and Britain’s best climate scientist and head of the UK Meteorological Office, CEP Brooks said it all (id.)
[1] Hansen, J.E., and S. Matsushima “The atmosphere and surface temperature of Venus: A dust insulation model”Astrophys. J. 150: 1139–1157 (1967) Bibcode1967ApJ…150.1139H. Doi:10.1086/149410.
[2] [Hansen J., Johnson D., Lacis A., Lebedeff S., Lee P., Rind D., Russell D., SCIENCE 28 August 1981, Volume 213, Number 4511, Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.].
[3] Refers to Schroeder in “Thermal Physics” (Addison Wesley Longman, 2000) stating that: “Much of thermodynamics deals with three closely related concepts: temperature, energy, and heat. Much of students’ difficulty with thermodynamics comes from confusing these three concepts with each other.” And so note once again that energy is generally not heat. GHE believers conflate both.
[4] CEP Brooks, American Meteorological Society (1951) in its Compendium of Meteorology (Brooks, C.E.P. “Geological and Historical Aspects of Climatic Change.” pp. 1004-18 (at 1016)). https://archive.org/stream/compendiumofmete00amer#page/1016/mode/2up
[5] https://www.aaas.org/news/after-50-years-eisenhower-s-warnings-against-scientific-elite-still-cause-consternation
[6] https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases-all?ID=1a5e6e32-802a-23ad-40ed-ecd53cd3d320
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