Guest essay by Dr. Tim Ball

Attempts to understand climate are stalled. The standstill parallels the pre-Copernican state when the Ptolemaic model had held sway for 2000 years but no longer fit the data. The Catholic church perpetuated Ptolemy similar to the religious adherence of climate science to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their model is inadequate like the Ptolemaic model because new data doesn’t fit their model. The Copernican debate involved re-examination of planetary cycles and required Tycho Brahe’s long detailed records for confirmation.

Brahe’s data fit the Copernican model (heliocentric), but not the religiously supported 2000 year old Ptolemaic model (geocentric). A chapter titled Climate Theory versus Models and Metaphors in Essex and McKitrick’s excellent book Taken By Storm has a section titled “Marooned Halfway up Mount Climate Theory”. They identify the limitations facing official climate science including; working from averages, an inability to deal with turbulence and Navier-Stokes, and chaos. They conclude “Global climate is not treatable by conventional means.” These are internal functions.

The recent WUWT article by Luedecke and Weiss addressed the issue of climate cycles and generated the usual divisions and arguments. It is a debate essentially ignored by the IPCC. Part of the reason for both the article and the IPCC ignoring cycles is because neither generally looks at records of adequate lengths to determine most climate cycles. For example the Milankovitch cycles are not included in IPCC models because they considered the time scales are too long. Another reason is the lack of records with adequate length to detect cycles through spectral analysis. There is also the historic division on climate between the west and the east ( in Cold War terms).

There are certain real measures of success rarely officially acknowledged. In climate one measure is to be mentioned negatively in the leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU). On May 22, 2008 Phil Jones to Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt.

PPS Our web server has found this piece of garbage – so wrong it is unbelievable that Tim Ball wrote a decent paper in Climate Since AD 1500. I sometimes wish I’d never said this about the land stations in an email. Referring to Alex von Storch just shows how up to date he is.

He refers to a book edited by Raymond Bradley and Phil Jones published in 1992. In other words it preceded the shift into corrupted, manipulated, politicized climate science publicly manifest in the 1995 IPCC Report. Benjamin Santer’s unsupported insertion of the phrase “discernible human influence” was clear evidence of what was happening. It is pathetic to see him now claiming the victim’s role. Part of the IPCC problem was to offset material in the 1990 Report that contradicted their new agenda. Chief among these was the graph (7c) showing the Medieval Warm Period. The book appears to indicate the CRU gang still recognized that lack of long term data was a problem, as Lamb identified. Instead they chose to play with a broken hockey stick.

Content of the book illustrates how much climate changes through time and provides extensive data and analysis from different sources and regions. My chapter in the historical climate section is titled “Historical and Instrumental Evidence: Central Canada, 1714-1850”. One valuable benefit was the editors required each author review another chapter. (Is that a form of peer review?). I had the privilege of reviewing the chapter by E.P. Borisenkov “Documentary evidence from the U.S.S.R”. His major source was the Russian Chronicles, a collective of weather and crop conditions essentially from 1000 AD in conjunction with arrival of Vikings in what is now Moscow and the beginning of the Romanov regime. Borisenkov and Pasetsky (1983) established the occurrence of 350 “hungry” years in the intervening1000 years. They identified a long term awareness of the relationship between weather, crop conditions and peasant unrest.

During the time I was reviewing Borisenkov’s work I was also working with the Canadian Wheat Board and Chinese climatologist who sought help regarding increasing crop production. China realized that just as the US seeks energy independence they needed food supply independence. They were already producing triple crops in most of China south of the Yangtze river. The river is a very significant divide in China, especially with regards precipitation. The greatest potential for expanding food production was north of the river, but involved grains other than rice. Canada was a logical case study. They were successful as production data shows (Figure 1).

Figure 1

I was aware of Chinese climatology and their lengthy records because I gave a paper at a climate conference in Bologna Italy in 1988.[2] Several papers given at the conference illustrated the extent and potential of their historic record. Another example was the vast Vatican archives just beginning to be examined. However, the most impressive was the length and extent of the Chinese records. Emperors knew food production failures created potential for social unrest so, like the Tsars, they kept detailed weather and crop records.

Development of climate as a vehicle for political control was achieved through various meetings that culminated in Rio 1992 at which Agenda 21 established the political agenda and the UNFCCC set up the IPCC to predetermine the scientific proof that CO2 was causing global warming. An underlying division emerged that few recognized or understood that is very important in today’s debate.

Eastern nations led by the Soviets and Chinese argued that the weather patterns (climate) were cyclical. A factor in learning about Soviet science occurred because Jewish people escaped and set up translation services in Israel of material not previously available. The west led by the US and Europe could not allow the idea that weather and climate is cyclical so they pushed chaos theory. They ignored the contradiction created by claiming weather was chaotic and unpredictable and then making predictions (projections). The public understood the contradiction because they had a low opinion of weather forecasting and knew they had little or no skill beyond 72 hours. The response was that there is a difference between weather and climate predictions, which ignores that climate is the average of the weather. Essex and McKitrick note “The truth is, we have much less reason to ascribe certainty to climate models than we do to weather models.”

Throughout the Kyoto Protocol negotiations Russia and China kept their own counsel based on a much better understanding of the science. Putin said Russia would not ratify Kyoto. The Russian vote was critical. It was the only remaining country with sufficient carbon dioxide production to achieve the 55 countries producing 55 percent minimum. It produced 17.4 percent of emissions in 1990 bringing the total to 61.6 percent. Russia actively promoted its rejection as President Putin’s economic adviser Andrei Illarionov gave first class public presentations on why Kyoto was unnecessary and wouldn’t work. Suddenly Putin announced he would ratify – Illarionov resigned. Putin publicly explained that EU members persuaded him they would support Russian application to the World Trade Organization (WTO) only if Russia ratified Kyoto. Russian joined in November 2004 and was admitted to the WTO in 2012 after 18 years of trying.

Despite this Russian climate scientists maintained perspective. Yury Izrael, Director, Global Climate and Ecology Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences and IPCC Vice President said in 2005 there was no evidence of a human signal. Remember this is 10 years after Santer had altered the 1995 Summary for Policymakers to say there was a discernible signal. This was a Science Academy that rejected the political campaign deliberately orchestrated by the Royal Society in England and fully supported by the US Academy of Science to push AGW.

The difference in analyzing climate science patterns and mechanisms between the IPCC approach and climate cycles is a false scientific difference. The IPCC has influenced and controlled the thinking to promote their political climate science. If they acknowledge there are cycles they have to abandon the simplistic linear trend approach developed in The Limits to Growth and applied in their computer models ever since. Failure of the IPCC approach was accentuated by their disregard of the scientific method. Instead of disproving the hypothesis that human CO2 was causing global warming they only considered material that appeared to prove it. They we’re able to manipulate data, method and models to apparently accommodate what was happening. They led the public to believe their models worked by constantly changing terminology – failed predictions became projections and global warming became climate change. Finally, they lost the ability to manipulate the temperature data when satellite data became available. After 2000 the natural cycle, mainly dictated by the sun, asserted itself and the gap between their model projections and reality widened.

The IPCC kept climate science marooned half way up Mount Climate Theory. Meanwhile those not caught up in the deliberate corruption, like the Russians and Chinese and a few brave mostly unfunded western scientists pursued the cyclical pattern of climate. The IPCC made chaos out of climate science so it got stuck on the mountain where it remains today. It will stay there until the IPCC is disbanded and the proper scientific method includes re-examining the hypothesis when the data doesn’t fit and consideration of the null hypothesis is allowed.

References:

[1] “Climatic Change, Droughts and Their Social Impact: Central Canada, 1811-20, a classic example.” In C.R.Harington (ed) The Year Without a Summer? World Climate in 1816. 1992, National Museum of Natural Sciences, Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa

[2] “Historical and Instrumental Evidence of Extreme Climatic Conditions in Central Canada: 1770-1820”, Annales Geophysicae, Proceedings of the Annual Geophysical Society General Assembly, Bologna, March 1988, p. 84

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