The Epistemology of Explaining Climate Forecasting so an 8 Year Old Can Understand it
Guest essay by Dr. Norman Page
1. IntroductionDr. Leif Svalgaard said in a comment on a WUWT post:
August 17, 2015 at 2:27 pm
“If you cannot explain your finding to an [attentive] eight-year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
I agree entirely.
Miriam – Webster defines Epistemology as
” the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity “
2. Granddaughter – You asked – Is the world going to burn up and how do we know?
Ava – Lets think about when the
temperature is warmer and colder outside. It is hotter when the sun
shines during the day and colder at night when our part of the earth is
turned away from the sun .You know already that it takes 24 hours for
the earth to turn around once to make what we call a cycle from warm to
cold and back again.
You also know that it is much hotter in
summer than winter and that is because the sun shines longer and is
higher in the sky in summer than in winter. Each year there is a
cycle from warm to cold and back again which takes 365
days.Scientists have measured or estimated in various ways what the
earth’s temperature was back for hundreds and thousands of years and
can see that there are other hot – cold cycles. Two of the most
important ones have cycle lengths of about 60 and 1000 years. Here is
a picture showing some of the 1000 year cycles.
Fig 1 (http://www.climate4you.com/) -(See Humlum’s overview section)
To know what is going to happen in the future we first have to know where the earth is in the 1000 year temperature cycle. Here
is another picture that shows what the temperatures were in the
northern part of the earth over the last 2000 years. Look especially at
what happened during the last 1000 years.
See the warm peak at the year 1000 – then
look where we are now at the right hand side of the picture. You can see
that the earth is just getting near to, is just at or just past the
peak warmth of a 1000 year cycle.
How can we tell which it is. We know that
the amount of sunshine which reaches our bit of the earth often changes
the temperature by tens of degrees between night and day and as much as
100 degrees sometimes between cold winter nights and the hottest summer
days. We also know that the sun itself puts out more energy and its
magnetic field is stronger at the activity peaks of its various cycles.
What is the sun doing now? Here is a picture that shows us what has been going on.
You can see that sun itself also has cycles
of activity of 11-12 years in length. When the red line gets nearer to
the bottom of the picture the sun is more active, its magnetic field is
stronger and fewer Galactic Cosmic Rays hit the earth.
Fig 3 ( http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/ )
You can see that solar activity was
increasing , that is, the red line got closer to the bottom of the
picture, in each cycle until about 1991 and that the solar cycle peaks
and lows since then are closer to the top of the picture showing a
decline in solar activity. This suggests that the 1000 year peak in
solar activity may now be behind us in about 1991.
Because it takes some time for the oceans
to warm up and cool down, there is a delay before the peak in solar
activity shows itself in the earth’s temperature. The best measure we
have of global temperatures is made by satellites. Here is a picture of
how temperatures have changed in the satellite age.
Fig 4
You can see how the 1991 peak in solar
activity in Fig 3 shows up in the peak in the average global
temperatures ( the green rising and blue- falling lines) about 12
years later at 2003 in Fig 4. and that the earth has been cooling
slightly since then just as the solar activity declined from 1991 to
today.
Ava – you ask.- What about the future.?
Well the simplest and most likely guess
for starters is that the 1000 year cycle from 2003 – 3003 will have a
temperature curve whose general shape is similar to the cycle from 1000 –
2003. see Fig 2 .
If you look at that Figure again you can
see that the Northern Hemisphere average temperature cooled by a bit
under 2 degrees from 1000 to about 1635 so that we might expect a
similar cooling from 2003 to 2638 – of course with various ups and
downs along the way .
The warm peak at about 1000 was a good time
for people when the Vikings were able to live in Greenland. Harvests
were good and people in Europe had time and money to spare to start
building cathedrals The cold period around 1635 – to 1700 is called the
Maunder Minimum when the Sun was so quiet that the Sun spots
disappeared. Most people living before about 1850 grew their own
food. Before then, if just a few extra- cold years followed one after
the other, millions of people starved to death because their harvests
failed.
Man made CO2 had no effect on these
temperature changes. In fact President Obama is very wrong to call CO2 a
pollutant. It is the absolutely essential plant food. Without it life
as we know it could not exist. Plants grow better as CO2 increases.
About 25% of the increase in food production in the 20th century was due
simply to the increase in CO2 in those years – a great benefit to
mankind.
Ava asks – the blue line is almost
flat. – When will we know for sure that we are on the down slope of the
thousand year cycle and heading towards another Little Ice Age.
Grandpa says- I’m glad to see that you have
developed an early interest in Epistemology. Remember ,I mentioned the
60 year cycle, well, the data shows that the temperature peak in 2003
was close to a peak in both that cycle and the 1000 year cycle. If we
are now on the downslope of the 1000 year cycle then the next peak in
the 60 year cycle at about 2063 should be lower than the 2003 peak and
the next 60 year peak after that at about 2123 should be lower again,
so, by that time ,if the peak is lower, we will be pretty sure that we
are on our way to the next little ice age.
That is a long time to wait, but we will
get some useful clues a long time before that.Look again at the red
curve in Fig 3 – you can see that from the beginning of 2007 to the end
of 2009 solar activity dropped to the lowest it has been for a long
time. Remember the 12 year delay between the 1991 solar activity peak
and the 2003 temperature peak, if there is a similar delay in the
response to lower solar activity , earth should see a cold spell from
2019 to 2021 when you will be in Middle School.
It should also be noticeably cooler at the
coolest part of the 60 year cycle – halfway through the present 60
year cycle at about 2033.
We can watch for these things to happen but
meanwhile keep in mind that the overall cyclic trends
can be disturbed for a time in some years by the El Nino weather
patterns in the Pacific and the associated high temperatures that we see
in for example 1998 and 2010 (fig 2) and that we might see before
the end of this year- 2015.
3. Ava says -It looks like the
Earth is going to cool down- Why is my teacher and President Obama
saying the earth is going to get very hot and the Polar Bears are all
going to die
unless I walk to school ?
Well Ava – I would have to write a book to
explain how so many different people came to be so wrong for so long
about so much- sometimes with the best of intentions. Here is a
short story telling what happened.
In 1968 a man called Ehrlich published a
book called the Population Bomb. He thought the number of people on
earth was growing so fast that there soon wouldn’t be enough food to
feed everybody, He said in the book.
“ In the 1970s hundreds of millions of
people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon
now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in
the world death rate”
Some people at the time got very
worried and put their guesses about such things as future population
growth, food production ,oil supplies, industrial production and mineral
reserves into a computer program.. They intended to look at possible
future problems and also explore the possibility that the peoples and
governments of the earth could agree on a way of running the worlds
economy that could besustainable, that is, go on for a long time. They put all this in a book called The Limits to Growth published in 1972.
A very energetic business man called
Maurice Strong who knew a lot of very influential people persuaded the
United Nations that, as he himself believed and indeed still strongly
believes, this sustainability problem was very serious.The UN and
Sweden organized a meeting in 1972 in Stockholm to discus the
interaction of humans with the environment. Strong was appointed by his
UN friend U Thant , to be the General Secretary of the
meeting. Strong, by nature, is very determined and action oriented and
he and the conference produced an incredibly detailed 109 point action
plan designed to give the UN input and even control over individual
Government environmental policies world wide. As one of the actions,
the United Nations Environmental Program ( UNEP) was organized in 1973
with Mr Strong himself as Executive Director.
Ten years later it was obvious that the
predictions of imminent death and disaster were wrong. The people at
UNEP still wanted to take global control of the worlds economy. They
realized that if they could show that the CO2 ( carbon dioxide) produced
by burning coal and oil to make electricity and drive our cars might
cause a dangerous warming of the earth they would be able to scare the
Governments and people into writing laws giving the UN ( and
them) control over the world’s economy by controlling the type of energy
used and its price.
UNEP organized a meeting of scientists at a
place called Villach in Austria in 1985 to see if they could show that
CO2 was dangerous. The scientists said
“Although the observed global-scale warming
experienced over the past ~100 years is compatible with model estimates
of the magnitude of the greenhouse effect, unequivocal, statistically
convincing detection of the effects of changing CO2 and trace
gas levels on climate is not yet possible. An important problem in the
positive identification of a greenhouse gas effect on climate is to
explain the medium to long time scale (~decades or more) fluctuations in
the past record. Attempts to model such changes have, to date, suffered
from a number of deficiencies.”
Ava – In other words they couldn’t prove any effects of man made CO2 on climate.
But whoever wrote the official summary statement and recommendations said:
“As a result of the increasing
concentrations of greenhouse gases, it is now believed that in the first
half of the next century a rise of global mean temperature could occur
which is greater than any in man’s history. “
The report made two important
recommendations. As a result of one ,the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change was set up to select from the evidence and from time to
time produce reports which would show that CO2 was the main driver of
dangerous climate change and a second recommendation resulted in a
meeting in Rio in 1992 chaired by Maurice Strong himself which produced
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change , later signed
by 196 governments.
The objective of the treaty is to keep
greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that they
guessed would prevent dangerous man made interference with the climate
system.
This treaty is really a
comprehensive, politically driven, political action plan called Agenda
21 designed to produce a centrally managed global society which would
control every aspect of the life of every one on earth.
It says :
“The Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimize the
causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. Where there are threats of serious orirreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing
such measures”
In other words if the models show there is
even a small chance of very bad things happening the Governments who
signed the treaty should act now to stop it. But how good are the
computer Models?
The successive five reports of the IPCC in the Summaries for
Policymakers written by Government representatives have clamed
increasing certainty for the outcomes of their Model based projections
of future temperature which is not supported by the Science sections of
the reports or the actual data.
Remember the Villach meeting said
“in the first half of the next century a
rise of global mean temperature could occur which is greater than any in
man’s history.”
All the models and projections made since
1985 were built in the assumption that CO2 was the main climate change
driver- for that and for many other reasons they are in reality useless
for forecasting future temperatures.
Here is a picture of what really happened as CO2 levels rose rapidly in the 21st century
As you can see there has been no global warming at all since about 1997.
The climate models on which
the entire Catastrophic Global Warming delusion rests are built without
regard to the natural 60 and more importantly 1000 year cycles so
obvious in the temperature record. The modelers approach is simply a
scientific disaster and lacks even average commonsense .It is exactly
like taking the temperature trend from say Feb – July and projecting it
ahead linearly for 20 years or so. They back tune their models for less
than 100 years when the relevant time scale is millennial. This is
scientific malfeasance on a grand scale.
The
temperature projections of the IPCC – UK Met office models and all
the impact studies which derive from them have no solid foundation in
empirical science being derived from inherently useless and specifically
structurally flawed models. They provide no basis for the discussion of
future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and
money. As a foundation for Governmental climate and energy policy their
forecasts are already seen to be grossly in error and are therefore
worse than useless.
Here is a picture which shows the sort of thing they did when they projected a cyclic trend in a straight line..
A new forecasting method needs to be adopted. For
forecasts of the timing and extent of the coming cooling based on the
natural solar activity cycles – most importantly the millennial cycle –
and using the neutron count and 10Be record as the most useful proxy for
solar activity check my blog-post at
(Section 1 has a complete discussion of the uselessness of the climate models.)
“In the Novum Organum (the new
instrumentality for the acquisition of knowledge) Francis Bacon
classified the intellectual fallacies of his time under four headings
which he called idols. The fourth of these were described as :
Idols of the Theater are
those which are due to sophistry and false learning. These idols are
built up in the field of theology, philosophy, and science, and because
they are defended by learned groups are accepted without question by the
masses. When false philosophies have been cultivated and have attained a
wide sphere of dominion in the world of the intellect they are no
longer questioned. False superstructures are raised on false
foundations, and in the end systems barren of merit parade their
grandeur on the stage of the world.”
Climate science has fallen victim to this fourth type of idol.
