Anti-global heating claims - a reasonably thorough debunking

[Joanne98]

The Earth is heating up, and human beings burning fossil fuels are the dominant cause. It’s not ocean warming that dominates, it’s not cosmic rays, it’s not variations in the Earth’s orbit and tilt toward the sun (Milankovitch cycles), it’s not solar irradiance - it’s us. But there is a very vocal minority that refuses to accept that global heating is real.

Global heating deniers fall back on a variety of myths in order to buttress their position. These myths vary from logical fallacies to pseudoscience to poor math to scientifically valid but disproved hypotheses. Yet every single claim against global heating I’ve found has been debunked at one time or another, and at this point, the only hypothesis that fits all the available data is that human civilization is heating up the planet.

I’ve gathered the top anti-global heating myths into the following list and provided a reasonably thorough debunking for every one. I’ve focused only on the scientific claims because they can be addressed with data, and I’ll be adding more as they come up and as time allows. There were a number of claims that tied together, so I addressed them all at once rather than independently. In addition, I’ve attempted to quote the original references instead of th e IPCC Working Group I: The Physical Basis for Climate Change detailed report (not the summary for policymakers) - too many people reject the IPCC out of hand and it’s always better to use the original source if it’s available.


Table of Contents
Myth #1: All the CO2 in the air at present comes from the mantle.
Myth #2: Increasing CO2 in the air is due to gases coming out of solution as the ocean heats up.
Myth #3: Humans are not the source of the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Myth #4: CO2 is rising at 0.38% per year, not 1% per year as the IPCC Third Assessment Report claimed.
Myth #5: CO2 is such a weak greenhouse gas that it cannot be the cause of the observed warming.
Myth #6: CO2 concentrations are not correlated with global temperature due to periods in the geologic history when CO2 was higher and the planet was in an ice age.
Myth #7: Temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period were warmer than modern temperatures.
Myth #8: The existence of the Medieval Warm Period has been ignored in order to support anthropogenic global heating.
Myth #9: Modern temperature increases are a direct result of the Earth’s climate exiting the Little Ice Age.
Myth #10: Global cooling between 1940 and 1970 happened even though anthropogenic CO2 was rising
Myth #11: Cosmic rays hitting the earth are behind global heating.
Myth #12: The Stefan-Boltzman law breaks the equations of global heating.
Myth #13: Computer models are too inaccurate to accurately predict a system as complex as the Earth’s climate.
Myth #14: The oceanic storage of heat is required to account for the differences between data and early models. But the updated models still require an unrealistically large oceanic depth of water to make them work right.
Myth #15: The oceans have already begun to cool in response to natural variations, so global heating is wrong.
Myth #16: Satellite measurements of tropical air don’t correspond to directly measured temperatures, so global heating isn’t actually happening.
Myth #17: Global heating will be good for the planet, not bad.
Myth #18: Water vapor is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, and since humans have almost no direct impact on the amount of water vapor in the air, humans can’t be the cause of global heating.
Myth #19: We don’t have enough climate data to make valid predictions of any kind.
Myth #20: Volcanoes spew more CO2 into the air in a single eruption than humanity has emitted in its history.
Myth #21: Ice core data shows that CO2 has always followed an increase in temperature, so this is what must be happening now too.

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DENIAL MYTH #1: The source of all the CO2 in the air is outgassing from the mantle (Source: George V. Chilingar’s (of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Southern California) paper titled On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved?).
Debunking: This theory proposes that the bulk of the CO2 in the air and oceans today is a direct result of outgassing from the Earth’s mantle, not from human consumption of fossil fuels. The key piece is this:

Recalculating this amount into the total anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission in grams of CO2, one obtains the estimate 1.003×1018 g, which constitutes less than 0.00022% of the total CO2 amount naturally degassed from the mantle during geologic history. Comparing these figures, one can conclude that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission is negligible (indistinguishable) in any energy-matter transformation processes changing the Earth’s climate. (emphasis mine)

In essence, Prof. Chilingar is claiming that anthropogenic (human sourced) CO2 has had a negligible impact on the atmosphere over the last hundred years or so and will have no impact over next few hundred years because we are adding a fraction of the total CO2 outgassed by the mantle over the course of the last 4.5 billion years. Unfortunately, as W. Aeschbach-Hertig, of the Institute of Environmental Physics, University of Heidelberg, says in his rebuttal, there is at least one major error, like the fact that the modern atmosphere had only about 3×1018 g of CO2 in it (not the full amount every outgassed by the mantle, which is 100,000x greater), so adding 1×1018 g of new CO2 is a massive percentage change (~33%). In addition, time scales matter here - increasing the amount of CO2 by 33% over the course of a few decades would overwhelm any system (like the Earth’s climate) that has a time constant of centuries. Finally, Prof. Chilingar appeared to attack global heating by concluding that direct heating of the air by human activity (aircraft air friction, power plant thermal plumes, etc.) couldn’t possibly cause the observed heating - which every serious climate scientist (Prof. Chilingar is a petroleum scientist) would agree with completely. Climate scientists say that the greenhouse effect is the cause of global heating, not direct heating by human activity. (source above)

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DENIAL MYTH #2: The source of the CO2 in the air is thermal heating of the ocean causing dissolved gases like CO2 to come out of solution and enter the atmosphere (Source: “Apocalypse Canceled”, by Christopher Monckton as well as others).
Debunking: The main idea here is that, if you overlay CO2 concentration data from ice cores with temperature data, you notice that CO2 has always lagged after temperature. Because hot water cannot store as much dissolved gas as cold water can (this is fundamental physics), the data could lead people to reasonably conclude that the ocean is the source of the CO2 in the air and always has been. Unfortunately, there are three problems with this argument. The first is the aforementioned “predictive appeal to history” logical fallacy - just because CO2 has lagged after temperature in the past doesn’t mean it always will (or is this time - it isn’t). The second is that this theory has been tested and been found incorrect.

If heating oceans were the source of the CO2 in today’s atmosphere, we could expect a historical trend of dropping CO2 concentrations in the oceans, yet we see the exact opposite - CO2 concentrations in the ocean have increased even as their temperature has risen, driving down ocean pH (making it more acidic) and will continue to do so (source: Impacts of Anthropogenic CO2 on Ocean Chemistry and Biology, NOAA). In addition, if a hotter ocean were the source of CO2, oxygen would be coming out of solution as well, yet the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere is actually decreasing, not increasing (sources: Environmental Chemistry.com’s CO2 Pollution and Global Warming page and IPCC Working Group 1 Report, Chapter 2, pages 138-139).

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DENIAL MYTH #3: We don’t know for sure where the added CO2 in the atmosphere is coming from, but it’s not from human consumption of fossil fuels (Source: distillation of multiple people’s claims at Wikipedia.org).
Debunking: We know exactly where the added CO2 is coming from, and it most certainly is from human activity (mostly the burning of fossil fuels, but some is from industry and slash-and-burn deforestation for agriculture). Carbon has two stable isotopes (atomic weights), C12 and C13. Plants prefer to use C12 over C13 (it takes slightly less energy to bond to C12 than to C13), so the naturally occurring ratio of the two isotopes is skewed toward C12 in plants. All fossil fuels were originally plants, and so if the C12/C13 ratio in the atmosphere is changing toward increased concentrations of C12, then the source of the new CO2 must be plants. In addition, since animal respiration isn’t enough to skew the C12/C13 ratio and simultaneously affect the concentration of CO2 and oxygen in the atmosphere, the source must be fossil fuels. (sources: Environmental Chemistry.com’s CO2 Pollution and Global Warming page and IPCC Working Group 1 Report, Chapter 2, pages 138-139)

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Continued>>>
http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2007/07/23/anti-global-heating-claims-a-reasonably-thorough-debunking/

[fascisthunter]

1. Thank you Joanne

it's pretty apparent this post is needed on DU...

[progressoid]

2. What about Glen Beck's favorite "it's all cyclical"?

[Joanne98]

3. And the icecaps are melting on MARS! LOL