Opinion Piece By Samuel Strait – November 10, 2017 – While I fully expected much more push back following the publication of my opinion piece, “Human Caused Global Warming a Myth?”, October 27th,2017 in the CCTimes, by our local eco terrorists, I must admit that the comments were rather tame.  I don’t suppose it had much to do with any “new science” that has recently been produced that attempts to plug the many holes in what is loosely called science, but rather the extreme levels that warming and climate change alarmists have gone which even now are beginning to embarrass those through out the intellectual world. As more and more minds begin to address what has distinctly become a mindless industry, warming and climate change of catastrophic proportions will hopefully return to more sensible science long since abandoned.

The comments to my original piece are valuable from the stand point of more and more people are becoming aware of the fact that warming and climate change from human cause is still a matter of science far from being settled.   Mr Anthony Fogleman offered a link to an NPR article which claimed to be reviewing the latest National Climate Assessment Version 4.  Having not had the opportunity to peruse the actual report, and seeing the same references in the NPR article to speculative scientific results that have plagued the warming and climate change industry since its inception, I agreed to take the time to wade through what was a clearly costly government endeavor and report back.

The report in question, NCA4, is not really anything but an assessment of climate science which include that which was learned between NCA3(2014) and 2017.  The first portion which was submitted to the public in November of this year contains the science of climate assessment in the United States, abet loosely. The remaining portion to be released in November of 2018 purports to address the world as a whole.  The fun starts at the very beginning of the report in the Executive Summary when a collection of thirteen Federal Bureaucracies and forty or so government funded “scientists” claim that global warming and subsequent climate change are the result of human activity.  With a straight face I chose not to laugh when the preceding sentence in the assessment admitted that there was dissension in the ranks.

The assessment moved on from there to a rather murky and unscientific explanation of what was credible in the studies being assessed and what was not, ranked from high to low.  Being ever the skeptic, I looked at random studies footnoted in the report with their rankings in mind and it quickly became evident that those studies that toed the line were rewarded with high rankings, while those that were troubled or did not subscribe to the “human caused factor” were most often to receive a low rank.  What is clear through out the report is that there is little if anything that is able to support impending doom for the planet anytime soon as a result of human CO2 emissions.   It is also clear that the cost of trying to do something about it is astronomical for very little gain.

There are several things to keep in mind when all is said and done.   In spite of the recent concern of the rise of CO2 to from 280ppm to 400ppm in earth’s atmosphere, with the current rate of increase at 4ppm per year, it will take 100 years for the amount to double to 800ppm, which science says, 800ppm, of CO2 as a Green House Gas will result in an increase of one degree of warming. Not much to worry about and plenty of environmental benefits.  Its one thing to talk about billions of tons of CO2 going into the atmosphere, graphing such to indicate a sharp rise in ppms, and quite another to appreciate the sheer volume and mass of the earth’s atmosphere.

As with many other “alarming” numbers all graphed for effect, it should be remembered that collection of meteorological data with any accuracy has rather severe limitations and continues to have them to this present day.  Satellites are not an easy substitute for comprehensive land based measurement which have become both spotty and greatly reduced since 1960.  Climate science studies utilize data composed largely  of Proxy data which is variable in itself.  Add that to the reference of “adjusting” data commonly found in any study which examines warming or climate problems over large blocks of time and you have pronouncements of great certainty based on a great deal of uncertain data.

I could continue to regale you with one degree Celsius warming in the last 125 years, or CO2 being four tenths of a percent of the entire atmosphere, or maybe a few centimeters of rise in Ocean levels, all figures that most climate scientists will reluctantly agree with, but the overarching problem that climate science has yet to engage is just how reliable is the proxy data.  But hey, that is just one of the many problems that continue to plague the “science”.  No one yet has even attempted to define what significant climate change really is, let alone resolve conflicts between studies over whether or not temperatures can be definitively said to be rapidly rising, the ice melting beyond expectation, oceans rising, more turbulent weather events or any other variable of both weather and climate that might just be “normal” variations of the earth’s climate.

As I said in the original piece published on October 27th, Climate Science is in its infancy using data that could have a significant variation of range with too many unknowns to produce anything like a consensus on anything.  Green house gases as a driver of increased temperature has its limitations,  multipliers are yet unproven and aerosol cooling being problematic as an explanation as well.  There is yet to be a model which can explain all of the current data let alone forecast future world climate. Thus far data has shown a much more modest effect on the planet by the “human factor” than climate alarmists have predicted and it doesn’t appear to be much more than potentially beneficial.   The only real problem to date is the political and financial cost that warming and climate change theories have wrought on the people who occupy the planet.   Money that more than likely could be spent on much more legitimate causes.  But hey, its the Federal and State Governments we are talking about here, isn’t it?  California is a leader of what exactly?  But I suppose there are enough adherents to the Gods of Global Warming and Climate Change that nothing will be “settled” soon, let alone the Science.    One can only hope that the politicians of the world and the climate change industry will not bankrupt us before reality sets in.

So to Anthony, NCA4 is much to do about nothing, and any further versions are very likely to follow in its footsteps.  Sorry to dash any hope of significant movement from that source, but science based on illusion is just that, an illusion.