I don’t have time now to go into all the details, but our best estimate of the human contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere is that is trivial compared to the total amount generated naturally from respiration, the decay of vegetation, naturally occurring fires, volcanic eruptions, and the weathering of carbonate rock. Incidentally, when I indicated that the amount of CO2 dissolved in the ocean was about 50 to 100 times greater than the amount in the atmosphere, I neglected to mention that the amount of CO2 in carbonate rock in the earth’s crust contains about 2000 times more than the amount
dissolved in the ocean.

So far in my criticism of the Gore-IPCC hypothesis, we were dealing with lack of objectivity, or failure to ask the important questions. I will end this talk with two examples that go beyond that, and which border on fabrication.

The global warming advocates including the IPCC argue that the CO2 we emit into the atmosphere lasts for centuries. Some even claim that it accumulates for thousands of years. Like unabsolved sins, they claim that our transgressions will pile up until the earth gets so hot that it burns up creating the hell we deserve.

The most authoritative study of the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere was done by a Norwegian, Professor Tom Segalstad of the University of Oslo. The measured lifetime, based on the studies of some 50 independent researchers is at most about 5 years.

The best measurements came from the rate of decay of the radioactive isotope of Carbon, Carbon 14 which was injected into the atmosphere during past, above-ground nuclear weapons tests. It is an unambiguous and accurate measurement. You just measure its decay in the atmosphere as a function of time. Segalstad concludes that the short lifetime means that CO2 is quickly taken out of the atmosphere and recycled into the oceans. Despite such authoritative measurement, the global warming advocates still maintain that CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

I will quote from Professor Segalstad’s recent e-mail to me:

“ It is incredible that this wild idea of CO2 being an evil gas in the atmosphere has paralyzed most of the world today, especially since it is the “gas of life” responsible for photosynthesis that makes the food we eat. Daily we see the news media presenting apocalyptic views, not backed by solid measurements or comprehensive scientific theory. When we try to correct them, our contributions are usually rejected  .. Editorial committees in scientific journals are now IPCC-supporting people, not allowing critics to appear in print.

A manuscript submitted by me to Nature was rejected with only one sentence:

’30 years of greenhouse effect research cannot be wrong’.

I was tempted to tell the editor that he should terminate his publication altogether. After all if everything they published in the last 30 years was correct, who needs any more research.”

Too bad the small committee of the Norwegian parliament that awarded Gore and the IPCC the Nobel Peace Prize didn’t have enough sense to consult with Prof Segalstad before they made their ghastly mistake. He was only a short distance away and he knew more about the subject than anyone of them.

But as you can see, Prof. Segalstad’s experience in getting his work published is similar to mine.

My final example is one of egregious fabrication. It is the infamous story of the hockey stick curve, as depicted here:

In their 1990 report the IPCC published the upper graph, of how global climate had changed over the past 1000 years. It shows the Medieval Warm Period from 1000 to 1400 AD, and the Little Ice Age from about 1400 until 1880 AD. Those periods were well established in European history: for example, the Viking colonization of Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period, and those settlements collapsed during the Little Ice Age, when even the Thames in London froze over. Like the Vostok data, this curve
presented a serious problem for the global warmers: the Medieval period was warmer than today with no significant human emission of CO2, so what’s so unusual about the current warming trend? The problem was solved for the global warmers by an obscure 1999 paper which used tree ring data to assess past temperatures.

Tree ring data are not a particularly reliable temperature proxies because tree rings are also influenced by other factors such as rainfall, sunlight, cloudiness, pests, competition from other trees, soil nutrients, frost and snow duration. Nevertheless, that tree ring curve is shown in the lower figure. As can be seen, it has the shape of a hockey stick.

Within a matter of months this hockey stick curve was accepted by the IPCC. Never mind that trees only grow on land and that 71 % of the earth is covered by water and thus have no trees. Never mind that the data were only from the Northern Hemisphere, but soon thereafter in a U. S. National Assessment, it became the global temperature curve. The coup was “total, bloodless, and swift and the hockey stick was greeted with a chorus of approval from the greenhouse industry.”

Suddenly, the Medieval Warm Period and the little Ice Age became non events, consigned to a kind of Orwellian ‘memory hole‘. The global warmers argued that if those events had existed at all, they were strictly local, European phenomena.

The tree ring results were trumpeted in the media:

“New studies indicate that temperatures in recent decades are higher than at any time in the past 1000 years……with the 1990’s as the warmest decade and 1998 as the warmest year”.

Many knowledgeable climatologists and others questioned those results, and asked for copies of the original data to check the analysis. The authors of the hockey stick report resisted, and only grudgingly yielded, so it took years to get the data and the complex
computer program used to analyze the tree ring data. An independent committee of statisticians was finally appointed to evaluate the tree ring results. They concluded that the authors had ‘misused certain statistical methods in their studies, which inappropriately produced hockey stick shapes in the temperature history’. They also concluded that the claim that the decade of the 1990’s was the hottest decade in the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in that millennium, could not be supported by the original data.

So how did the latest IPCC report of last year handle this issue? Did they make the appropriate correction and retract their previous assessment. Absolutely not. They simply never mention it, putting the whole issue into the same “memory hole” that they had earlier placed the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice age.

In recent years, climatologists have spread out all over the globe and found clear records of both the Medieval Warm period and the Little Ice Age in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California.

Here is the conclusion of a very distinguished, recently deceased, Australian climatologist, about this hockey-stick fiasco:

“The evidence is overwhelming, from all corners of the world, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age clearly show up in a variety of proxy indicators, proxies more representative of temperature than the inadequate tree ring data.

“What is disquieting about the hockey stick is not its original publication. As with any paper, it would sink into oblivion if found to be flawed. Rather it was the reaction of the greenhouse industry to it - the chorus of approval, the complete lack of critical evaluation of the theory, the blind acceptance of evidence that was so flimsy. The industry embraced the theory for one reason and one reason only - it told them exactly what they wanted to hear.”

Sound familiar? Remember the Iraqi defector code-named ‘Curveball’ and his stories about all the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

What I have presented so far is just a small fraction of all the data available that directly contradicts the Gore - IPCC arguments. If we pursue the folly of carbon sequestration or carbon credit trading, we will be wasting hundreds of billions of dollars and it will have no effect at all, just as the 30% reduction in fossil production during the great depression had no effect at all. The earth’s oceans and the photosynthesis process are much more effective in the sequestration of CO2 than anything we can do artificially. Wasting hundreds of billions of dollars chasing this phantom of global
warming won’t be as wasteful as our idiotic war in Iraq, but it is still real money, and it will have no effect at all.

There are real environmental problems caused by human activity: acid rain, acid mine drainage, heavy metal pollution from that drainage, deforestation, carcinogenic particulates in diesel exhaust, mercury pollution from power plants, PCB’s, the transportation and storage of nuclear waste, the contamination of drinking water
supplies and the necessity of maintaining a reliable public infrastructure for such water supply. And of course there are the critical economic and political problems associated with our excessive dependence on imported petroleum. We should focus on those, and stop chasing the global warming phantom.

One final note: nuclear power plants generate no CO2 in their normal mode of operation, so one would think that global warming believers would be pushing nuclear power as the cleaner alternative to coal-fired power plants. Yet, Gore, in his movie and in his book doesn’t even mention nuclear power. Cockburn, in his series of articles discusses that issue in more detail. In the late 1980’s, when I first started studying this issue, I spent a summer doing combustion and fire research at the National Center for Scientific Research in Orleans, France. I was surprised to find so many otherwise intelligent scientists uncritically buying into the human caused global warming
arguments.

But, of course, that was France, a nation that had already completely committed itself to nuclear power. Even here in the U. S., there are environmentalists who would normally be opposed to more nuclear power plants, but who are so taken in by the global warming hysteria, that they consider nuclear power as the lesser of two evils,
and are leaning toward nuclear power as the solution to the global warming crisis. And if you believe that, I have some bridges in Brooklyn that I would like to sell you!

Lynching of Carbon Dioxide the Innocent Source of Life - 2 -3

Dr. Martin Hertzberg is a combustion research scientist who worked on the prevention of fires and explosions in mines and other industries at the Bureau of Mines in Pittsburgh, PA. He also contributed to our understanding of the fundamental mechanism of combustion in gases and dusts. He currently teaches science and
mathematics at various educational institutions, and occasionally consults as an expert on the causes of accidental fires and explosions. He served as a meteorologist in the US Navy and has been studying the global warming issue for the last twenty years.
Dr. Hertzberg can be reached at:

Dr. Martin Hertzberg
P O Box 3012
Copper Mountain, CO 80443
e-mail: ruthhertzberg@msn.com