December 18, 2015
Climate science misrepresented
By Jim Whiting
"Shakespeare made a reckless ruler pull down his kingdom on his head, [and we are adding] a hundred and twenty excess parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere."
But it is generally acknowledged that it's horrifyingly ignorant to think that we can dial in a nice climate by turning the CO2 adjustment knob. Indeed, the current and projected CO2 levels are at the very low end of the range for the last 600 million years. Global temperature is also at the low end of that range. More recently, we are at the low end of the temperature decline since the Holocene Optimum 8,000 years ago. Backing up, the Eemian age 120,000 years ago was much warmer, and sea levels were 6 meters higher, and CO2 was around 280 ppm.
What is obvious is that the Earth will do exactly as it pleases, and we have no ability to predict that or, consequently, to control it. We can influence it, usually but not always for the worse. Furthermore, we have no idea if the current 15°C is the optimum climate. Higher temperatures over the last 200,000 years have been associated with improvements in human welfare. There has been no tipping point, not even at the P-T Extinction Event 250 million years ago, when the temperature briefly blipped past the previous 22°C lid (in effect for hundreds of millions of years) to at least 28°C. More interestingly, there has been no tipping point on the downside, when Snowball Earth increased the albedo so drastically.
What is most readily apparent is the surprising stability of the Earth's temperature for the last half-billion years, given the increased solar output over that time, continental movements, changes in sea level of hundreds of meters...and change only from 285° Kelvin to 295°K, or ±2%. In the last 12,000 years, it's ±1%. In the last 6,000 years, it's ±0.7%. No one has even attempted to explain that, and that's very disappointing.
Climate change is not a problem; it's a given. CO2 mitigation is not a solution; it's a problem. It's expensive, ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. CO2 increase since 1950 has resulted in a 30% increase in agricultural production. We should be in no rush to reverse that.
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