Climate Change: Facts and Fictions

Abstract

The past several years have seen numerous opinion pieces, editorials, and technical papers regarding climate change in the pages of many publications, both scientific and secular. Although both sides of this now almost religious debate were represented, few if any real facts or data are provided to support the opinions expressed. The public deserves more, and specifically deserves to be informed properly.

The heat content of the atmosphere has remained largely unchanged since 1995. Data prepared and compiled by a number of climate scientists illustrate the wide divergence of climate model projections from what has been occurring (Fig. 1): the climate has not been warming any more than would be expected as the world continues to move out of the Little Ice Age. These data have been accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose chairperson admits that the climate modeling community does not understand what is happening.

Water vapor in the atmosphere is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂ (McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003). Climatologists have understood this for decades and this is a fact clearly expressed in all climatology textbooks. None of the climate models employed today adequately addresses the influence of water vapor.

Cosmic radiation is the source of the particles that cause water droplet nucleation and cloud formation in the upper atmosphere (Laken et al., 2010). Its flux, in turn, is directly influenced by solar activity and the strength of the resulting solar wind. None of the climate models deal with either of these first-order climate influences (Hoyt and Schatten, 1997; D'Aleo, 2013).

The Earth's atmosphere has had far higher CO₂ content many times and for much of the geologic past, and major glacial events have occurred during those times, most notably during the Carboniferous and Silurian. The inescapable conclusion is that CO₂ has no relationship to the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere. This is a conclusion that was reached by many scientists who have looked at ice core data and found that increases in CO₂ in the atmosphere occur several hundred years after temperatures have risen—they do not change in lock-step as has been claimed, and an event 800 years in the future cannot impact events today.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90196 © 2014 GCAGS, Lafayette, Louisiana, October 5-7, 2014