Opinion
MOSELEY: It’s Time To Send The CO2-Obsessed Back To Science Class
Advocates of a hypothesis that there is global warming that humans are causing ridicule those who won’t join their club. Yet the problem is that our schools have spread lack of understanding throughout our once-great society. Every institution run by people has been diminished. So let this be a primer if readers want to understand the hypothesis of global warming or try to free a believer from their fever:
I. Failing Freshman Statistics
The vast majority of the Earth is not being measured by weather stations. As we try to compare temperatures earlier in time, the poor coverage grows radically worse the farther back in time we go toward 1880.
The Earth’s surface measures 196.9 million square miles. Today, there are an estimated 10,100 weather stations world-wide, in addition to 1,000 free-floating buoys completely useless for measuring climate change.
That means that if the temperature measurements were spread evenly across the Earth’s surface (they aren’t), there would be 1 weather station for every 19,495 square miles of the Earth’s surface. That’s almost the size of the State of Maryland (12,407 square miles).
No. Here’s why:
First, the vast majority of the Earth’s surface is not being measured.
Second, a statistically valid sample, must be a random sample. You must take 196.9 million temperature measurements and average 196.9 million temperature measurements to come up with a single global average.
We can only resort to a smaller sample if the sample is random. But it is not. Any first-year student in undergraduate science would get an “F” if he tried to use a non-random sample to extrapolate the Earth’s overall global temperature.
But it gets worse. Third, the temperature as a serious instrument of scientific measurement – as opposed to a toy or novelty — dates only to 1880. That’s 139 years of temperature records. A standardized, calibrated instrument of consistent manufacture using temperature scales started providing useful records only from 1880.
But in 1880, careful, historical, temperature records only started in a few large cities in Western Europe and the Northeast United States. I don’t mean that someone was using a thermometer. I mean carefully keeping precise, historical records to be maintained for posterity.
Fourth, how can we compare temperature records from 1970 to 1910 when the locations being measured were not the same in 1910 as in 1970?
The number and locations being measured were concentrated in Western Europe and Northeastern North America.
This is why free-floating buoys are useless (for this purpose). We cannot compare the temperature records from one year to the next, because they are not measuring the same place year to year. The 1,000 buoys, 7,000 ships, and various airplanes may be good for monitoring “weather” — the movement of air masses and changes in pressure driving weather systems — but useless for measuring the planet’s temperature over the long haul. (And that is not “random.” Letting buoys drift does not constitute a truly random sample, starting from scratch for each measurement.)
Measurements from satellites systematically disagree with measurements at the Earth’s surface. Pseudo-scientists “adjust” (a.k.a. falsify) satellite data to hide this problem.
Fifth, temperature measurements of planet Earth would get an “F” grade in Freshman statistics. And that’s before we get into missing measurements when stations malfunction, temperature stations at airports in the exhaust of jet engines of airplanes taking off, next to fire department barbecues, next to industrial air conditioning exhaust, near asphalt or brick heat sinks, or in heat islands. And then there are the 80%+ weather stations that don’t meet the required standards, especially for site locations. And then there is the outright fraud in the temperature measurements that have been exposed.
Sixth, since most weather stations are at airports, we are measuring the transition in aviation from small propeller planes, to large propeller planes, to small jet engine airplanes, to massive jumbo jets. There are weather stations actually in the line of jet exhaust at the end of runways being blasted with super-heated jet exhaust. But notice that airplanes have changed over the decades. So the temperature of the heat from aviation operations is much hotter now with jumbo jets than in 1930 with small propeller planes. And the quantity of take-offs and landings is dramatically larger. The Earth is not getting warmer. The airplanes blowing exhaust into the airport weather stations are getting bigger and more frequent per day
So has the Earth warmed since 1880?
We haven’t the slightest clue. And before 1880, “proxy” measurements are completely unscientific. No, you can’t use tree rings or sediment layers, because you can’t measure things with a margin of error vastly wider than the small changes you are trying to discern. Consistent levels of precision with your instruments of measure is a fundamental precept of science. Where tree rings are imprecise, you cannot use them to calculate precise analysis. No one knows if the Earth has warmed or cooled, and anyone who tries to say they do either doesn’t know science or hopes you don’t know science.
II. The Fatal Flaw: Air Travels
The real issue is that air does not stay still. One of the defining characteristics of the atmosphere is that it is constantly in motion. Air masses (weather) travel around. So a weather station in Los Angeles may show an unusually high temperature because the colder air up and moved somewhere else. But there is no net change for the planet as a whole.
III. The Ever-Churning Atmosphere Cools the Earth
When heated, “hot air rises.” Technically, the gases in a particular air mass expand when heated. When gases expand, that air mass becomes less dense than the air on either side or above it. The pocket of warm air rises — driven by denser, heavier air forcing its way down underneath.
This is what cools the Earth. This is the process that drives thunderstorms and hurricanes.
Convection operates as an air conditioner for the planet. Air heated near the surface rises. Warmth at the Earth’s surface is carried upward, where it is released. Heat is transported up towards space. This conveyor belt will cycle faster if free-floating CO2 absorbs more heat.
But the higher we go in altitude, the thinner the air is. At 30,000 feet, the air is only 30% of the air pressure at the Earth’s surface. So when gas molecules radiate heat in the form of electromagnetic energy, the probability that the energy will exit the atmosphere, leave planet Earth entirely, and radiate out into space increases with altitude.
The chance the heat will travel down is the same as the chance it will travel out into space. But the atmosphere is thinner above than below, so a significant fraction of the heat energy will leave the planet instead of hitting other air molecules.
IV. There is no Greenhouse Effect in the Open Atmosphere
The “greenhouse” metaphor is a fatally flawed idea. A greenhouse works by trapping air in an enclosed container. The air inside is warmed by sunshine. But the trapped air cannot move So the air heated by sunlight grows hotter inside than outside.
Now, imagine hooligans steal the glass panels out of a greenhouse. They carry glass panels around randomly. Will there be a greenhouse effect? No. The air inside is no longer trapped. There is no “green house effect” in the open atmosphere, where gases are free to circulate.
V. Carbon Dioxide is Not a Blanket
A blanket works by trapping warmth generated by your body. If you put a blanket out in the forest in the Winter snow, the blanket will be just as cold as the snow. If a blanket floated up from your bed and floated around the room it would never trap warmth.
So carbon dioxide does not have a ‘blanket’ effect. It does not stay at the Earth’s surface. Cooler air drops down from above as the hotter air at the surface changes places. This circulation is called convection by junior high school science teachers.
VI. That’s Why Global Warming Is Not Scientific
Therefore, we cannot perform any experimentation of how carbon dioxide may play a role in global temperature. We can observe CO2 trapped in a container in a laboratory. But that tells us nothing about what happens when CO2 is floating freely in a complex planet-wide atmospheric system.
There has never been a single experiment testing the hypothesis of human-caused climate change. But such an experiment would be an impossibility. Remember that all other variables would have to be controlled and kept constant, when they are not constant.
Scientists would literally need to compare Earth A to Earth B to see the planet-wide effects of increasing carbon dioxide in only Earth A but not Earth B. Is there a greenhouse effect on Venus? We would actually have to run a comparison between Venus A and Venus B to do real science.
(What advocates are trying to do is compare an earlier time period with a current time period on the same Earth. This fails, however, because all other variables are not the same. the Earth’s orbit changes over time, causing the ice ages and inter-glacial warm periods. So a 1,000 year period on Earth in the past is different from a recent 1,000 year period even on the same Earth.)
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