I rarely make predictions, last week's post notwithstanding, because, as the Sage once commented: "The future is hard to predict because it hasn't happened yet." However, several years ago I made the comment that the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming was effectively over but that many influential people did not yet realize it.
2011 may finally be the year AGW dies an unlamented death, and it is not just the weather that will kill it; there is real science behind its demise (from Watts Up With That?):
New paper – “absence of correlation between temperature changes … and CO2″
WUWT readers may remember way back when…I posted this from Joe D’Aleo:
Warming Trend: PDO And Solar Correlate Better Than CO2
Joe wrote then:
Clearly the US annual temperatures over the last century have correlated far better with cycles in the sun and oceans than carbon dioxide. The correlation with carbon dioxide seems to have vanished or even reversed in the last decade.
There’s a new paper by Paulo Cesar Soares in the International Journal of Geosciences supporting Joe’s idea, and it is full and open access.
By all means, read the whole post and, if you enjoy scientific papers, read the whole original paper; for those of you who prefer a short hand version of the data, here is the Paulo Cesar Soares paper's Abstract: [All Bolding and Emphasis mine: SW]
Warming Power of CO2 and H2O: Correlations with Temperature Changes
Abstract
The dramatic and threatening environmental changes announced for the next decades are the result of models whose main drive factor of climatic changes is the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Although taken as a premise, the hypothesis does not have verifiable consistence. The comparison of temperature changes and CO2 changes in the atmosphere is made for a large diversity of conditions, with the same data used to model climate changes. Correlation of historical series of data is the main approach. CO2 changes are closely related to temperature. Warmer seasons or triennial phases are followed by an atmosphere that is rich in CO2, reflecting the gas solving or exsolving from water, and not photosynthesis activity. Interannual correlations between the variables are good. A weak dominance of temperature changes precedence, relative to CO2 changes, indicate that the main effect is the CO2 increase in the atmosphere due to temperature rising. Decreasing temperature is not followed by CO2 decrease, which indicates a different route for the CO2 capture by the oceans, not by gas re-absorption. Monthly changes have no correspondence as would be expected if the warming was an important absorption-radiation effect of the CO2 increase. The anthropogenic wasting of fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere shows no relation with the temperature changes even in an annual basis. The absence of immediate relation between CO2 and temperature is evidence that rising its mix ratio in the atmosphere will not imply more absorption and time residence of energy over the Earth surface. This is explained because band absorption is nearly all done with historic CO2 values. Unlike CO2, water vapor in the atmosphere is rising in tune with temperature changes, even in a monthly scale. The rising energy absorption of vapor is reducing the outcoming long wave radiation window and amplifying warming regionally and in a different way around the globe.
In other words, a rise in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere follows the warming of the planet. When the planet's temperature drops, there is a slow decrease in CO2 because the gas is not readily re-absorbed by the oceans but must decrease by other (biologic?) means. On the other hand, increasing levels of water vapor in the atmosphere occur in tune with the rising temperature and since H2O is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2 and occurs in much higher concentrations in the atmosphere, higher water vapor levels correlates with higher temperatures and drives greenhouse warming.
Unfortunately, there is a multi-billion dollar industry already in place based on the premise that CO2 causes AGW; this industry will not die quietly and there will be many political battles ahead before the AGW Warmists are completely discredited; however, the science is clear and becoming clearer by the day: CO2 is a red herring, the sun has more to do with climate than our greenhouse emissions (which is good because it will allow us all to breathe a little easier) and the charlatans who have been proclaiming the sky is falling for the last 20 years, and damaging science in the process, will soon be fading into the dustbin of history.
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