"[The current anthropomorphic global warming nonsense is based on] inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now"

What exactly is the IPCC? It is a department within the United Nations in which approximately 600 scientists vote on scientific issues of political interest. These 600 scientists are allowed to vote even on topics that are outside their area of expertise. After the vote is taken, a summary report is written, based on hand picked comments made that are in agreement with the final vote, by the scientist electorate. It is a completely unscientific process but a very political-minded one (remember how the IPCC awarded $1,000,000 of taxpayers money to Al Gore for promoting their report on global warming?). Science obviously can never be a democracy because facts are not something you vote for. Here are some of the facts the IPCC ignored or naively tried to vote out of existence:

1. Beginning in 1850, the Little Ice Age started coming to a slow end, so shouldn't the temperature be rising after an Ice Age ends, even a little one? Obviously not all current global warming can be blamed solely on humans -- some of it has to be the natural result of the Little Ice Age ending -- yet the IPCC blames ALL of it on humans. Something just isn't right with IPCC's claim. What were they expecting? For the Little Ice Age to last forever and ever?
2. Over the last 100 million years, CO₂ levels have averaged 610 ppm with a peak of 1200 ppm. Over the last 500 million years, CO₂ levels have averaged 1700 ppm average with a peak of 4600 ppm. Yet temperatures throughout these time periods were similar to today's (not counting the couple of 30 million year long Ice Ages that regularly occurred during this time frame). Extreme CO₂ levels obviously do not play a major role in determining climate but are overridden by something else even more powerful.
3. What could be more powerful than all the greenhouse gases combined? Water vapor! Whereas the radiative forcing of CO₂ is 1.46 W/m², water vapor comes in over three times that value, or 4.26 W/m² and whereas CO₂ is measured in ppm, water vapor is measured in percent. The atmosphere currently is comprised of 0.04% CO₂ by volume and has an average of 2.5% water vapor, therefore since there is over 65 times more water vapor than CO₂, which with over three times the heat generating capacity, has 200 times more influence over the greenhouse effect than CO₂! Furthermore, humans are not even the greatest contributor of CO₂. Compare the human fossil fuel contribution of 5.5 billion tons of CO₂ to the atmosphere each year, to that of oceans (90 billion tons) and land vegetation (60 billion tons) -- humans do not even come close! Then there is the fact that water vapor has feedback, unlike CO₂, in the form of clouds. Increase the amount of clouds, which increases the amount of radiation reflected away from Earth back into space, and temperatures will drop to the tune of -18 W/m² of radiation forcing!
4. Current global warming is not something new or without precedence and has been happening ever since the last Ice Age glaciation ended about 22,000 years ago. Since then...
1. Average global temperatures have risen dramatically. 22,000 years ago temperatures were 9°C (16°F) lower than today . During the last 22,000 years of the current interglacial period, global temperatures are nowhere near as hot today as they got during the Holocene Climatic Optimum (+1.3°C higher than 1998 levels) -- and that is way too early in history to be able to blame humans and fossil fuels for causing!
2. The ice caps have been shrinking dramatically. 22,000 years ago the Arctic ice cap used to cover all of Canada but it has already shrunk to a relatively insignificant fraction of its former size as the Greenland ice cap -- as one would logically expect ice caps to do every time an Ice Age ends.
3. Sea levels have been rising dramatically. 22,000 years ago, sea levels were 300 feet lower than today, but rose in direct proportion to size that the ice caps shrunk, in response to rising temperatures -- as one would logically expect the sea level to do every time an Ice Age ends.

Aside from Ice Ages (of which we presently are in the midst of) the vast majority of time the average global temperature has hovered around 22°C, independent of CO₂ levels or solar insolation variations. There are two things to note here. One is that while the Sun drives the climate, it is the configuration of the Earth's atmosphere, land, and ocean that determine climate, hence the reason the Sun cannot be blamed for Ice Ages or Warming Periods. Two is that while 22°C is 7°C higher than today's average of 15°C, for the vast majority of Earth's history there have been no ice caps present at the poles, so while the average temperature was higher, the vast majority of that 7°C difference occurs only at the poles.

Rising CO₂ levels is not something new and has been happening ever since the last Ice Age glaciation period ended about 22,000 years ago. Back then, CO₂ levels were a mere 180 ppm, but note that as the temperatures increased, CO₂ levels would only increase after a lag time of 800 ± 200 years. Also note that during the Late Ordovician Period, CO₂ concentrations were a staggering 4400 ppm (12 times higher than 1998 levels), yet an Ice Age sprang up during that time period that lasted for 30 million years.

Temperature is the measure of the sum of the kinetic energy of all particles in a system. It is the motion of the particles that is felt as temperature. The kinetic energy can be transferred three ways:

1. By direct collisions with other particles. This is called conduction.
2. By being physically transported from one area to another. This is called convection.
3. By converting kinetic energy into photons and expelling the photons. This is called radiation.

All three effects occur in a Greenhouse. The Greenhouse itself has direct contact with the ground and air, allowing heat to be conducted through them. There are convective currents inside and outside the Greenhouse, although inside the Greenhouse, convective currents usually cease when the temperature layers become stratified, i.e. -- the air near the ceiling of the Greenhouse will be hotter than that near the ground, and convection currents will be suppressed since the heavier cool air will not rise into the lighter hot air. That leaves radiation which gives by far the greatest contributution to temperature.

The glass used in a Greenhouse is transparent to shortwave radiation and opaque to longwave radiation. Any radiation absorbed will be re-emitted in all directions equally, therefore 50% of the radiation absorbed by glass will be re-emitted back into the Greenhouse.

If 100% of the Sun's predominantly shortwave radiation is absorbed and the re-emitted as infrared radiation by objects in a Greenhouse, the glass will absorb and re-radiate 50% of that energy back into the Greenhouse. So now the total energy received by the objects inside the Greenhouse will be 150% that of the Sun alone. Now 50% of that 50% will be absorbed and re-emitted back into the Greenhouse, and so on and so forth until the limit of this geometrical series is reached, at which point the total sum of energy in the Greenhouse will be 200% that of the Sun alone. This is the Greenhouse effect.

CO₂ and water vapor acts just like the glass does in a Greenhouse. They too are transparent to shortwave radiation and opaque to longwave radiation.

I want you to realize that without the greenhouse effect, life on this planet would not be possible. The blackbody temperature of the Earth works out to be -18°C, yet the actual average temperature of the Earth is +15°C. This 33°C difference is due to the greenhouse effect, of which water vapor contributes 30°C and CO₂ contributes 3°C of that difference. Now if a drop in temperature of 9°C would plunge us into the peak of a major glaciation, imagine what a drop in temperature of 33°C would do!

Virgin boss Richard Branson offered a $25 million reward to "find someone on Earth who could devise a way of removing the lethal amount of CO₂ from the Earth's atmosphere". Apparently Mr Branson has more money then he knows what to do with, so he is throwing it away on some silly and immature childhood fantasy of "saving the world". The world has been through worse things than a CO₂ level of 381 ppm and climbing, for example, it survived CO₂ levels of 4400 ppm during the Late Ordovician Period -- and not only were temperatures then no hotter than they are today, the Late Ordovician Period ended with a 30 million year long Ice Age. Clearly there are negative feedback mechanisms already in place, to counteract a runaway greenhouse effect, that the scientific establishment hasn't educated themselves on yet. What happens when people go meddling in something that they do not fully understand in order to try and "fix it"? As those who remember history know all too well, they will only make things worse. Much worse. So if Mr Branson wants to save the world from CO₂ by meddling with the Earth's currently unknown but natural checks and balances, who is going to save us from the meddling of people like Mr Branson? The only reason Greenland has an ice cap now is because we are in the middle of an Ice Age. These messiah wannabees want the Earth to stay like it is now, forever and ever, when for the vast majority of Earth's history, Greenland didn't have a ice cap. It isn't normal for Greenland to have an ice cap and someday, when this current Ice Age ends, Greenland will no longer have an ice cap again. What are the filthy rich meddlers and dreamers like Mr Branson going to do then? Rearrange the Earth's atmosphere and orbit so the Ice Ages will return? And what will happen when things go terribly wrong, like they did for the inhabitants of the Moon on the Sci-Fi TV series, SPACE 1999? We don't need your stinking help! If Mr Branson really wants to help the world, what would be wrong with spending his money on rebuilding Iraq (after the American troops leave) or feeding all the starving people in Somalia? The world really would be a better place then.

John Martin used to ignorantly boast that if you give him “half [a] tanker of iron...I will give you an ice age”. His "theory" is that since algae thrive on carbon dioxide and iron, by massively dumping iron into the oceans, a massive algae bloom would occur which would result in a massive decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The problem is, carbon dioxide does not exist only in the atmosphere, in fact there is 2.3 times more carbon dioxide in the ocean as there is in the atmosphere -- not including deep ocean carbon dioxide, in which case there is 53 times as much carbon dioxide in the ocean as there is in the atmosphere. So naturally when all that algae start taking up all that carbon dioxide, they won't take it just from the atmosphere and leave the ocean all alone. They will rob the ocean more than they will rob the atmosphere because the ocean has more to rob. What effect will that have on ocean life that depend on carbon dioxide? And what will happen to the oceans and the atmosphere when all the iron gets used up and things return to normal, with the exception of the mass die off of all that algae? That's the problem with unproven ideas like that -- you just don't know what else to expect from them. So if Mr Martin wants to save the world from CO₂ by meddling with the Earth's currently unknown but natural checks and balances, who is going to save us from the meddling of people like Mr Martin?

People in general seem to be living under some kind of delusion that the Earth is a museum of some sort, where nothing ever changes but stays preserved for all eternity just the way we see it today. Earth's average temperature stared to decline when the Antarctic moved over the South Pole six million years ago. The average temperature plummeted when South America rotated into its current position four million years ago and nearly completely closed off the Atlantic from the Pacific. Is it just a coincidence that everytime an Ice Age occurs on Earth that there is at least one major continent over one of the poles, and worldwide oceanic circulation is choked off by continents that span nearly the entire distance from the North to the South Pole as we are currently configured in? Do you believe that a mere 381ppm of CO₂ levels will override an entire world of oceans?

Politicians, sensationalists, and alarmists are quibbling over a few millimeters rise in sea level, when sea levels have varied plus and minus four meters (12 feet) in the last 6,000 years, and 20,000 years ago sea levels were 120 meters (390 feet) lower than they are today. Polar bears have seen worse conditions, such as during the Medieval Warming Period when Greenland had less ice than it does today (Norse farmsteads at Brattahlid, Greenland are still uninhabitable and it is still impossible to grow grain and raise diary cattle there as the Vikings did during the Medieval Warming Period). The Little Ice Age reversed the "damage" done by the Medieval Warming Period, but the Little Ice Age ended in 1890AD and we are still not as warm as it was during the Medieval Warming Period, as can be proven by the fact that "The cultivation of grapes for wine making was extensive throughout the southern portion of England from about 1100 to around 1300 (Lamb 1965). This represents a northward latitude extension of about 500 km from where grapes are presently [in 2002] grown in France and Germany. Grapes were also grown in the north of France and Germany at this time, areas which even today do not sustain commercial vineyards...vineyards were found at 780 meters above sea level in Germany. Today they are found up to 560 meters. If one assumes a 0.6-0.7ºC change/100 meter vertical excursion, these data imply that the average mean temperature was 1.0-1.4ºC higher than the present...further botanical evidence which suggests a climatic shift to a colder time is the lowering of the tree line by 70 to 300 meters in the Alps (Lamb 1977, p. 436). This observation is supported by the remains of peat deposits and forests at higher elevations than they presently occur. A similar 100-200 meter lowing of the tree line also occurred in Northern Germany.Iceland experienced a 300 meter lowering of the tree line to the present day levels (Lamb 1977, p. 228)"

At the height of the last Ice Age, Santa Barbara, California was as cold as Juneau, Alaska currently is. The Polar Jet Stream flowed further south then it does today, thereby redirecting storm systems that currently bombard the east coast of the United States, to change course and head for the Sahara. Even during the Little Ice Age, it was noted by many historians from observing paintings during that time period, that in the Northern hemisphere there was much more cloud cover than what is considered the norm for today, so imagine how much more cloud cover would exist during a full blown Ice Age. This is what we have to look forward to during the next Ice Age. Even now we are at the point that all we need is the right trigger(s) to plunge us into the next round of 80,000 to 120,000 years of glaciation. This year (2008) saw one of those triggers -- a Maunder Minimum in the Solar cycle (no sunspots). Other triggers we have had are an increase in Polar Sea circulation and a decrease in salinity in the Gulf Stream. Yes, we are primed and ready for the next round of glaciation and I am looking forward to it. Why would I be looking forward to it? Because it will cause a great number of formerly habitable areas to become uninhabitable, areas like England, Canada, and the Northernmost States of America. For other areas close to those, it will mean a tremendous loss of crops, the appearance of new and virulent diseases like the Black Plague, and violent weather occuring further south. I doubt any World Wars will be fought on account of this next Ice Age, as many predict would occur in such situations, due to the fact that there won’t be enough resources or motivation enough to fight any wars long enough to do any lasting damage. Humankind will be in its survival mode then and anytime humans go into the survival mode, they suddenly became tolerant of each other on a global scale until things are going well again. It will be the end of the Superpowers and their meddling of our ecosystems, the political pontificating, and the lack of accountability or responsibility for anything they do or say. It will be the Earth's "Final Solution" to overpopulation and exploitation of its resources at the expense of the poor or unfortunate. I say good riddance to them all so we can start over with a clean slate!

If you watched the storytale by Al Gore titled AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, you will remember an animated chart of temperature versus CO₂ levels. I have seen similar charts like that all over the Internet so it made me wonder, where did all that data used to form that chart come from? Well the answer is, the data came from a very long ice core taken over a very thick portion of a glacier over a trapped lake in the Antarctic called Vostok lake. The data was taken in two parts: one set as temperature versus age and the other set as CO₂ versus age. Although together they represent 3592 data points, there is much more temperature data than CO₂ data (284 data points), and while the temperature data is taken at almost regular intervals in time, the CO₂ measurements are somewhat erratic. The lowest common denominator are the CO₂ data points, so this means that there will be some distortion in the time scale of these graphs, masking the detailed relationship between temperature and CO₂. Statistics have been published on the Vostok data and the conclusion was that on average, CO₂ lags temperature swings by about 800 years but none of the graphs appear to really show this, but then again, none of the graphs have ever had a high enough resolution to show 800 years intervals. So I decided to make my own graph based on the Vostok data, and I saved it as a PDF file . With a PDF file it is possible to magnify or reduce the image to a very large degree. Remember, each minor division represents, on average, 1463 years, so those tiny little differences in separation of temperature from CO₂ levels is not something little but very large. So it is possible to use this PDF to visualize the CO₂ lag. Other things you may want to notice is that:

1. The last three interglacial periods (global warmings) all peaked out between 1.3°C to 1.7°C warmer than today. Since the Medieval Warming Period peaked out at 1.3°C warmer than today, this indicates we might already have peaked out and are already at the beginning of the next glaciation cycle (or in other words, the Little Ice Age was just the beginning of what is to come).
2. Temperature vs CO₂ track each other very well at the start of each interglacial, but they are way off at the start of each glaciation (temperature drops dramatically while CO₂ remains constant or even rises!)
3. Peak CO₂ and peak temperatures always occur together (±800 years).
4. Three out of four times, nadir temperature occurs hundreds or thousands of years before nadir CO₂, indicating that CO₂ has an insignificant effect on climate.
5. The pattern of rising and falling temperature and CO₂ resembles a sawtooth waveform, visually indicating that the current climate is oscillating. Oscillations in any system cannot occur unless the phase of the feedback at unity gain is zero (for positive feedback systems) or -180 degrees (for negative feedback systems). In plain english, that means that any climate feedback mechanisms have to be strong enough and in phase with the forcing event in order to flip-flop between two opposing states. But this is no ordinary oscillation, since the data plot resembles a sawtooth waveform and not a sinusoidal waveform, so the first thing that comes to mind is "relaxation oscillator", and because the "charge" rate is much greater than the "discharge" rate, there must be something in the climate that responds quicker to heating than it does to cooling, something that is a major factor in determining climate (notice that I said climate and not weather) and that something can only be the oceans and oceanic circulation.
6. The global average temperature during the Little Ice Age was about 2°C lower in temperature than today, and it made survival difficult for humans then, so if we use that as our threshold for determining how long an interglacial lasts, the current interglacial period (Flandrian interglacial) has been around for about 12,000 years, the one before that (Riss-Wurm interglacial) lasted about 15,000 years, the one before that (Midel-Riss interglacial) about 4,000 years, and the one before that (Gunz-Mindel interglacial) at least 13,000 years.
7. The total time covered by the Vostok data is 414,085 years and of those 414,085 years, the Earth has been subjected to brutally cold temperatures for (414,085 - 13,000 - 4,000 - 15,000 - 13,000 =) 369,085 of those years. The current climate is clearly a very short break in what otherwise should be a bitterly cold world. Now while 13,000 years of warm weather may seem like forever to short-sighted humans, it only represents 3.1% of the climate in the last 414,085 years.
8. The glaciation before the last one (the Mindel-Riss interglacial) had some kind of catastrophe that cut that interglacial short. By the time the climate recovered, it was too late and climate had already plummeted well into a glaciation.
9. The Vostok data contradicts the claim that the Earth's tilt triggers when glaciation begins and ends.
10. Notice how CO₂ goes off the page for the current year, yet temperature has barely budged compared to past CO₂ and temperature excursions. Considering the evidence, it may very well be that we will not see any effect from this sudden blip in CO₂ for up to 800 years -- if at all!

The average temperature of the Moon is 107°C during the day, and -153°C at night, and the average of those two points is -23°C. Since the Earth is a similar distance from the Sun as the Moon, we would expect similar temperature extremes, but in fact, the average temperature of the Earth is 25°C during the day, and 5°C at night, and the average of those two points is 15°C. Although the Earth is a similar distance from the Sun as the Moon, what protects the Earth from similar temperature extremes is the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect does not simply raise temperatures, it also serves as a flywheel effect, equalizing out temperature extremes. For example, Venus has a much bigger "flywheel" with an atmosphere one hundred times greater than Earth's, so the temperature on Venus is 464°C day or night, equatorial or polar. A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation demonstrates that the average temperature of the Earth should be -18.39°C, which is 33°C colder than the Earth's actual average temperature of 15.08°C. The difference between -18.39°C for the Earth and -23°C for the Moon is due to the difference in albedo for the two entities.

Please refer to the following chart for the remainder of this discussion...

The basis for the numbers used in this chart were taken from here (see Figure 4.1 on page 4-8).

In any standard University thermodynamics textbook, you can read about something called the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, which says that the radiation emitted by a blackbody is proportional to the fourth power of absolute temperature -- which if you solve for temperature for the Earth, gives us the equation:

    By textbook definition:
      Temperature = [(RadiationIn * (1 - Albedo) / (4 * SBC)]0.25
    Where:
      Albedo      = 0.3,
      RadiationIn = Solar constant
                  = 1365 Wm-2,
      SBC         = Stefan-Boltzmann constant
                  = 5.6704e-8 Wm-2K-4.

This gives us a calculated temperature of (254.77°K =) -18.39°C, but what we need to understand here is that the atmosphere is where the greenhouse effect occurs and that is where the discrepancy between the calculated blackbody temperature of the Earth and its actual temperature arise. Let me be a little more specific here. Albedo is analogous to "shininess". The more shiny an object is, the higher its albedo, and the higher the albedo the more radiation it reflects without absorption back into space. The albedo of the Earth is mainly determined by four things: land, ocean, atmosphere, and clouds. Clouds have a high albedo -- they reflect a lot more radiation than they absorb. Oceans have a low albedo -- they absorb more radiation than they reflect. At any one time, there are typically enough clouds in the atmosphere to reflect 20% of all the energy received from the Sun, back into space. There is enough dust in the atmosphere to reflect 6%, leaving the land and oceans, which reflect another 4%, giving a grand total of 30%. That leaves only 70% of the Sun's energy that is absorbed by the Earth to heat the land and oceans with. Actually it is worse than that because the clouds and atmosphere absorb an additional 18% of the Sun's energy before it reaches the Earth, so in reality only 51% of the Sun's energy that is received by the Earth to be absorbed by the lands and oceans.

So why is the Earth so warm? Well you know that energy that was absorbed by the clouds and atmosphere? It is converted into heat and that heat contributes to the total temperature of the Earth. That is the greenhouse effect, but there is more. Remember that 51% of the Sun's energy that was absorbed by the lands and oceans? Well that energy does not just sit around, 7% of that energy is directly conducted to the Earth's atmosphere, while 23% of that energy is converted into the greenhouse gas, water vapor, and transported (via convection) around the world. Of the remaining 21%, 14% is intercepted on its way out into space by dust and by well known greenhouse gases like CO₂.

So what does this mean? If instead of speaking in terms of Wm^-2 or percentages, we speak in terms of Radiation Units (RU), we can simplify this dicussion a little. If we let 100RU = 1365 Wm^-2, what we have learned so far is that of the 100RU that the Earth receives, only 100 - 4 - 20 - 6 = 70RU make it to the surface, but the amount of radiation absorbed and re-emitted is 16 + 3 + 51 + 14 + 23 + 7 = 114RU. So while we started out with 1365 * 0.70 = 955.5 Wm^-2 for heating the Earth, due to the greenhouse effect we end up with 1365 * 1.14 = 1556 Wm^-2. Substituting that into the Stefan-Boltzmann equation we come up with [1556 / (4 * 5.6704e-8)] = 287.8°K = 14.65°C. This number is a little off from the measured 1960s average temperature of 15.05°C but it is definitely in the ballpark range. This is forgivable seeing as the numbers we used to calcuate this are only vague observations and not exact measurements, and so it justifies us making small tweaks to the values above in order to get a better approximation, as you can see if you allow your mouse to hover over each cell to see which values I actually used.

So how does CO₂ fit into all of this? CO₂ only accounts for 4.67RU of the total radiation budget, therefore, as I have mentioned already, CO₂ only accounts for about 3 out of the 33°C of the greenhouse effect (see Table D2, p39 of the US Dept of Energy (DOE) report, Alternatives to Traditional Transportation Fuels 1994).

NOTE: The chart used for this discussion was taken from a spreadsheet that I used to model the current climate of the Earth, with CO₂ at 1960s levels (333ppm). Note that the modeled results are for a static model, not a dynamic model. Do not expect to use any model to predict future or past climate, because they will fail. The reason for this is because some of the variables are not linear functions of temperature. Take cloud cover for example. As temperature rises, so does the amount of cloud cover, but as cloud cover increase, the albedo also increases, which counteracts the temperature rise. So double the energy does not mean double the temperature, in fact, it might even mean negative temperature. On the other hand, all of the greenhouse gases, except for water vapor, are linear functions of temperature, when they are not over-ridden by other factors, therefore they are not the major temperature determining factors. These variables and their functions have been impossible to determine so far, so all we have to go by is past history to predict the future by. Interestingly, when I increase CO₂ to 381ppm, the temperature increase is exactly the same increase as has been observed. The reason I take this result with a grain of salt is because if I apply this model to the previous 1000 years of history, the model fails since CO₂ levels have been a constant 280ppm while the global average temperature has changed -2°C to +1.3°C.