From our old ACS blog: Sunday, 17 April 2011
AGW – A falsified hypothesis
The hypothesis is that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming. – known as man-made or anthropogenic global warming (AGW.)
Falsification 1
Albert Einstein once said, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Einstein’s words express a foundational principle of science intoned by the logician, Karl Popper: Falsifiability. In order to verify a hypothesis there must be a test by which it can be proved false. A thousand observations may appear to verify a hypothesis, but one critical failure could result in its demise. The history of science is littered with such examples.
This is the opening paragraph of a paper by William DiPuccio. This paper was posted at http://climatesci.org on May 5, 2009. In closing, Mr DiPuccio says:
A complete rejection of the hypothesis, in its current form, would certainly be warranted if the ocean continues to cool (or fails to warm) for the next few years.
Two separate studies through NASA confirm that since 2003, the world’s oceans have been losing heat. (LINK)
Falsification 2.
Tim Curtin wrote (HERE)
The first is the complete failure of all climate scientists – and their cheerleaders in the media – to investigate the relationship between the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa (the mountain in Hawaii which is the official source of the IPCC’s
data on atmospheric CO2) and temperatures at Mauna Loa.
The exceptionally inconvenient truth is that there is no correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperatures when both are measured at Mauna Loa. It only requires ability to use Google to verify my assertion. Neither James Hansen of NASA-GISS and NOAA nor Phil Jones of HadleyCRUT at Exeter and Norwich chooses to log temperature at Mauna Loa itself. Instead they prefer to represent Hawaii’s temperatures by those at Honolulu Airport, where the arrival of Boeing 707s in 1960 and 747s by 1970 had a very direct impact on temperatures there. But of temperatures at Mauna Loa, selected by the late and estimable Charles Keeling for its pristine lack of purely local influences, there is no mention by the aforesaid Hansen and Jones.
Louis Hissink followed up (here) with:
Tim Curtin has pointed out that the temperature record at Mauna Loa does not support the core climate change assumption that an increase in atmospheric CO2 will cause a rise in global temperature.
Louis downloaded and plotted up the data and concludes:
Extending the period to 1981 still shows no trend so clearly the AGW hypothesis has to be falsified.
Falsification 3:
Bob Carter also falsified the hypothesis with six tests. (HERE)
Hockeyshtick two weeks ago says that the lack of global warming has falsified the climate computer models.
According to the NOAA State of the Climate 2008 report, climate computer model simulations show that if observations find that the globe has not warmed for periods of 15 years or more, the climate models predicting man-made warming from CO2 will be falsified at a confidence level of 95%:
“Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
According to Phil Jones, there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995 [16 years, 3 months ago]. Ergo, the climate models have already been falsified at the 95% confidence level and it’s time to revert to the null hypothesis that man made CO2 is not causing global warming.
Falsification 4:
Doctor David Evans says:
–> The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s………
This is the core idea of every official climate model: for each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three – so two thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors), only one third is due to extra carbon dioxide.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that. Hardly anyone in the public does, but it’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements, lies, and misunderstanding spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism. Which is why the alarmists keep so quiet about it and you’ve never heard of it before. And it tells you what a poor job the media have done in covering this issue.
Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot-spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10km up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the weather balloons found no hot-spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.