Thongchai Thailand

FIGURE 1: HURRICANE DATA

FIGURE 2: APRIL TEMPERATURES IN HONG KONG 1955-2016

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1. Moving average and autoregressive models in time series analysis such as MA, AR, ARMA, ARIMA, and data smoothing methods make use of a moving window with a fixed length of time (Box, 1994) (Chatfield, 1989) (Draper&Smith, 1998) (Mudelsee, 2014) (Granger, 2008). The window moves forward, at increments of one unit of time and the object parameters are computed from the data in the window at each increment. In most cases the moving window procedure creates a preprocessed series which is subjected to further statistical analysis. A popular procedure of this kind is the moving average. In this procedure, the simple or weighted average of the data within the window is computed at each increment of time in the journey of the window from the beginning to the end of the time series. These averages form the filtered series and this series serves as the time series for further statistical analysis perhaps for trends, correlations, regression coefficients or other parameters. This post is an examination of a common error in this  procedure.
2. The well-known study of trends in North Atlantic Hurricane intensity in the context of climate change by high profile climate scientist Kerry Emanuel of MIT is an example of the use of moving averages in the study of trends (Emanuel, 2005) as shown in a related post [LINK] . Such procedures are used when the researcher feels that the random scatter in the source time series is an impediment to discovering its underlying structure and behavior. The motivation for preprocessing the data prior to trend analysis is to reduce the residual variance of the data around the trend line. As an example of such analysis of time series data, consider the hurricane data in Figure 1 where the random variation of the data at an annual time scale may be an impediment to understanding the underlying pattern of hurricane counts. In this case five-year moving averages are used to discover trend patterns at a five year time scale.
3. Some objections have been raised by Professor Watkins and others to the use of preprocessed series for trend analysis of this kind because the filtered time series does not contain much of the uncertainty in the source data time series and no explanation can be given for what appears to be a magical gain in statistical power (Blumel, 2015) (Briggs, 2008) (Watkins, 2006) . In this post we examine this issue from a perspective of degrees of freedom lost when the same data item in the source time series is used multiple times in the preprocessing algorithm. A procedure is proposed for adjusting degrees of freedom to account for multiplicity in the use of the data. The visual indication in Figure 1 is that the filtered series indicated by the red line contains less uncertainty and more information than the source data indicated by the black line; but where did this new information come from? The apparent reduction in uncertainty and the implied gain in information and statistical power is illusory. Our source of information is unchanged and no new information was gathered. It is proposed that the illusion of increased statistical power is created by multiplicity in data usage. When moving windows are used, the first and last data points are used only once but the other data values in the time series are used more than once. Therefore, an adjustment of the effective sample size and degrees of freedom in the filtered time series is necessary to account for multiplicity.
4. A moving window of length λ advancing by an increment of one time unit through a time series of length N will generate a total of N-λ+1 windows. Since each window contains λ numbers, a total of λ*(N-λ+1) numbers are used by the moving window. Yet, there are only N numbers in the time series. Therefore, the average multiplicity is M = (λ/N)*(N-λ+1). Each number in the series is used M times on average. The effective value of N (EFFN) is then computed as ξ = N/M. For some procedures a second pass of a moving window is used. If the length of the second window is ϒ then sample size for the second pass is N-λ and the additional number of times that the data are used may be written as of ϒ*(N-λ-ϒ+1). The grand total for both passes is Σ = λ*(N-λ+1) + ϒ*(N-λ-ϒ+1). The equation for multiplicity may be written as M = Σ/N and the effective value of N as ξ = N/M. The degrees of freedom for any given statistic can then be computed as the DF = ξ – K where K is the number of constraints contained in the statistic. Although the number of values generated by the moving window is N-λ for the first pass and N-λ-ϒ for the second pass, the computation of multiplicity requires the full length N of the source data series from which the moving window series was derived.
5. For example in a time series of 70 years if we generate a moving average series with λ=5 as in Figure 1, N=70 and N-λ=65. The average multiplicity is M = (5/70)*(70-5+1) = 4.714286. The effective value of the sample size is computed as ξ = 70/4.714286 ≈ 14.84848. Note that the computed value of the effective sample size may be approximated by ξ = N/λ = 70/5 = 14. If a second pass is made with ϒ=5, the multiplicity increases. The number of values used by both moving windows is Σ = 5*(70-5+1) + 5*(70-5-5+1) = 635. Multiplicity is therefore M = 635/70 = 9.07. The effective sample size is ξ = 70/9.07= 7.72. Note that the computed value of the effective sample size may be approximated by ξ = N/(λ+ϒ) = 70/10 = 7.
6. Figure 2 is a presentation of how the effective value of N and the reduction in degrees of freedom can change the conclusions of statistical analysis of preprocessed time series data. Here we find that April temperatures in Hong Kong 1955-2016 show a warming trend and that the rate of warming appears to be higher in the preprocessed series than in the source data. At the same time the preprocessed series show less random scatter and therefore increasingly greater statistical power (R-squared = 0.041 in the source data, 0.233 in the 5-year moving averages (MA5), and 0.370 in the five year moving averages of the five year moving averages (MA5,5). In the hypothesis test for H0: β=0 without correcting for multiplicity we find that the probability of observing these sample results (or more extreme) in the H0 distribution is P-VALUE = 0.1145970 in the source data series and P-VALUE= 0.0000713, and 0.0000002 in the preprocessed series. At α=0.001 we fail to reject H0 in the source data but we are able to reject H0 in both the filtered series. This result appears to show greater statistical power in the filtered series than in the source data series.
7. To determine whether this gain in statistical power is illusory or real we correct for multiplicity in the preprocessed series and compute ADJUSTED DEGREES OF FREEDOM = 12.848 for MA(5) and 5.717 for MA(5,5). The corresponding ADJUSTED P-VALUEs are 0.0010927 for MA(5) and 0.0019396 for MA(5,5). At α=0.001 we fail to reject H0. This result implies that the apparent statistical power observed in the filtered series without adjustment for multiplicity is illusory and an artifact of multiplicity. In this case, the filtered series appears to contain more information than the source series but not to the extent implied without the correction for effective sample size (effN).
8. A well known example of climate science research that failed to take these considerations into account is the Emanuel 2005 paper where high profile MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel concluded erroneously that his data proved that climate change was causing North Atlantic Hurricanes to become more destructive. This faux finding has encouraged decades of activism against fossil fuels fueled by fear of destructive hurricanes. The Emanuel 2005 paper is discussed in depth in a related post [LINK] .
9. CONCLUSION: All moving window processes in time series analysis involve repeated use of the same data value. If the same data value is used multiple times, it creates a false sense of information because this piece of data brings with it new information only in the first use. It is therefore proposed that the information content of a filtered series and therefore its degrees of freedom must be adjusted for multiplicity. A procedure is presented for estimating the average multiplicity in the use of the source data series in generating the filtered series. The average multiplicity is used to estimate an effective sample size and the effective degrees of freedom. Hypothesis tests must be checked to ensure that rejection of H0 survives when the degrees of freedom are adjusted for multiplicity.

A SIGNIFICANT IMPLICATION OF THESE RELATIONSHIPS FOR CLIMATE SCIENCE IS THAT A TIME SERIES OF THE CUMULATIVE VALUES OF ANOTHER TIME SERIES, AS IN THE TCRE, HAS NEITHER DEGREES OF FREEDOM NOR TIME SCALE. THERFORE THE TCRE DOES NOT CONTAIN USEFUL INFORMATION.

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1. Blumel, K. (2015). Does climate change affect period available field time and required capacities for grain harvesting in Brandenburg Germany/reviews/72069. Retrieved 2016, from Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270793652_Does_clima
2. Bowley, A. (1928). The standard deviation of the correlation coefficient. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 31-34.
3. Box, G. (1994). Time series analysis: forecasting and control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
4. Briggs, W. (2008). Do not smooth time series. Retrieved 2016, from wmbriggs.com: http://wmbriggs.com/post/195/
5. Chatfield, C. (1989). The Analysis of Time Series: An Introduction. NY: Chapman and Hall/CRC.
6. Emanuel, K. (2005). Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years. Nature, 436.7051 (2005): 686-688.
7. Granger, C. (2008). ACRONYMS IN TIME SERIES ANALYSIS (ATSA). Journal of Time Series Analysis, 3(2):103 – 107 · June 2008.
8. Hong Kong Observatory. (2016). Climatology. Retrieved 2016, from Hong Kong Observatory: http://www.hko.gov.hk/cis/climat_e.htm
9. Johnson, V. (2013). Revised standards for statistical evidence. Retrieved 2015, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/48/19313.full
10. Mudelsee, M. (2014). Climate Time Series Analysis: Classical Statistical and Bootstrap Methods. Springer.
11. Munshi, J. (2015). Decadal Fossil Fuel Emissions and Decadal Warming. Retrieved 2016, from ssrn.com/author=2220942: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2662870
12. Munshi, J. (2016). Illusory-power data archive. Retrieved 2016, from Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByzA6UNa41ZfbXpuOHozTm5sems
13. Siegfried, T. (2010). Odds Are, It’s Wrong. Retrieved 2016, from Science News: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/odds-are-its-wrong
14. Watkins, T. (2006). How the Use of Moving Averages Can Create the Appearance of Confirmation of Theories. Retrieved 2016, from Thayer Watkins SJSU: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/movingaveraging.htm

 

FIGURE 1: 13C MEASURING STATIONS USED IN THIS STUDY

 

FIGURE 2: CORRELATION ANALYSIS: BARROW ALASKA

 

FIGURE 3: CORRELATION ANALYSIS: SOUTH POLE

 

FIGURE 4: CORRELATION ANALYSIS: CAPE KUMUKAHI

 

FIGURE 5: CORRELATION ANALYSIS: LA JOLLA

 

FIGURE 6: CORRELATION ANALYSIS: CHRISTMAS ISLAND

 

FIGURE 7: CORRELATION ANALYSIS: ALERT, CANADA

 

 

 

 

 

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1. Fossil fuel reservoirs deep under the ground contain a large inventory of carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years from the delicately balanced surface-atmosphere carbon cycle that sustains a stable climate system and life on earth as we know it. The theory of anthropogenic global warming and climate change (AGW) addresses this issue in terms of the response of the surface-atmosphere system to the perturbation caused by fossil fuel emissions that inject extraneous carbon into it.
2. In view of a concurrent and corresponding rise in fossil fuel emissions and atmospheric CO2 since the Industrial Revolution, it is taken as axiomatic that these changes are causally related and empirical evidence is provided in terms of correlations between cumulative values and also in terms of observed changes in isotopic ratios of carbon in atmospheric CO2 (Callendar, 1938) (IPCC, 2007) (IPCC, 2014) (Kheshgi, 2005) (Levin, 2000) (Matthews, 2009) (Raupach, 2007) (Revelle, 1956) (Hansen, Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, 1981) (Stuiver M. , 1987) (Stuiver M. , 1981) (Suess, 1953).
3. In a related post, we examine this relationship in terms of detrended fluctuation analysis [LINK]  and also in terms of the 14C/12C ratio in atmospheric CO2 [LINK] . In this post we extend this line of inquiry by examining changes in the 13C/12C ratio in atmospheric CO2 to determine whether these changes can serve as empirical evidence of a relationship between fossil fuel emissions and changes in atmospheric CO2 as claimed by these climate scientists (Stuiver M. , 1987) (Stuiver, 1984) (TANS, 1980) (Robertson, 1887) (RealClimate, 2004) (Severinghaus, 2014).
4. Data for the 13C/12C ratio in atmospheric CO2 are available form a large number of stations around the world maintained by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO) and these data are made available online (Keeling, 2005) (Graven, 2016) (ScrippsCO2, 2016). Six SIO measuring stations are selected for this study based on the somewhat arbitrary condition that at least twenty years of data should be available up to and including the year 2014. Typically there are about a thousand observations made during this period. If there are fewer than five hundred observations the data are considered sparse and that station is eliminated from consideration. The stations that meet our conditions are listed in Figure 1.
5. The relevance of this measure to the idea that the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 derives from fossil fuel emissions is that plant photosynthesis has an isotope bias and prefers 12C. For this reason, plants, and therefore fossil fuels, contain a lower ratio of 13C/12C than the atmosphere. In this context, the combustion of large quantities of fossil fuels is like a sudden injection of low 13C/12C CO2 into the atmosphere that should cause a measurable reduction of the 13C/12C ratio in atmospheric CO2. In fact, what we find in the data is that indeed there has been a gradual reduction of the 13C/12C ratio in atmospheric CO2 during a period of rising fossil fuel emissions as shown in Figure 2. The data are from the Christmas Island dataset. AGW theory attributes increases in atmospheric CO2 to fossil fuel emissions and this attribution implies a negative correlation between 13C in atmospheric CO2 and fossil fuel emissions. In fact, if we look at the numbers we find that the 13C/12C ratio is strongly negatively correlated with cumulative emissions. The Pearson correlation coefficient of R = -0.987. It is this correlation that has led climate science to claim that the 13C/12C data support the attribution that the observed rise in atmospheric CO2 to fossil fuel emissions.
6. However, this correlation is unreliable because it is a correlation between cumulative values. It has been shown in a related post that such correlations are spurious and that no conclusions can be drawn from correlations between cumulative values  [LINK] . To support causation, it must be shown that a correlation exists at the theoretical time scale at which the causation is supposed to work. In the case of fossil fuel emissions, it is generally held that the time scale for its effect on the atmosphere is one year (IPCC, 2014) (IPCC, 2007) (Falkowski, 2000) (Rodhe, 1990) (Keeling C. , 1995). For a time scale of one year, it is necessary to show that annual changes in atmospheric 13C can be related to annual emissions. To test that hypothesis we compute the correlation between annual fossil fuel emissions and the change in atmospheric 13C from the previous year to the current year. Data for fossil fuel emissions from 1977-2010 are available from the CDIAC4 and the ORNL5 (Marland-Andres, 2016). It is found that most measurement stations show a seasonal cycle in the 13C/12C ratio for atmospheric CO2. The data are therefore deseasonalized as a first step. Further analysis refers only to the deseasonalized series. All hypothesis tests for statistical significance are carried out at a maximum false positive error rate of α=0.001 as recommended in “Revised standards for statistical evidence” in a PNAS publication to address the unacceptably high rate of irreproducible results in research publications (Johnson, 2013). Where necessary an appropriate adjustment is made for multiple comparisons (Holm, 1979). The data and their correlations are presented in Figure 2 to Figure 7. No statistically significant correlation is found to support the hypothesis that observed year to year increases in atmospheric CO2 are attributable to fossil fuel emissions. In Figures 2-7, the term “C13” refers to the 13C/12C ratio in atmospheric CO2.
7. SUMMARY: In all six stations studied we find that the 13C/12C ratio in atmospheric CO2 has declined in the study period from about -7.5 to about -8.5 At the same time fossil fuel emissions have risen from 5 GTY (gigatons per year) to more than 9.7 GTY. These charts present the correlation of changes at an annual time scale. Here, we find no correlation between annual changes in the 13C/12C ratio and annual fossil fuel emissions. The highest value of R-squared is found  for Cape Kumukahi as R-squared = 0.0104. For N=25 observations, the corresponding t-statistic is t=1.94 and the corresponding p-value is p=0.0318. At our maximum error rate of α=0.001, we fail to reject H0: R=0 and find no evidence that changes in the 13C/12C ratio are related to fossil fuel emissions.

CONCLUSION: We conclude that the 13C data do not provide empirical evidence that observed changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration can be attributed to fossil fuel emissions. We further note that the high correlation between cumulative changes in the 13C/12C ratio in atmospheric CO2 and cumulative emissions is unreliable and unacceptable as empirical evidence because of the spuriousness of correlations between cumulative values discussed in a related post [LINK] . Yet another consideration is that it is not possible for carbon isotopic ratios to identify fossil fuel emissions as the source of the rise in atmospheric CO2 because isotopic ratios are unable to distinguish between fossil carbon and geological carbon. 

 

 

 

 

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REFERENCES

1. Box, G. (1994). Time series analysis: forecasting and control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
2. Callendar, G. (1938). The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Climate. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 64: 223-40.
3. Canadell, J. (2007). Contributions to accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 18866-18870.
4. CO2.Earth. (2016). Global CO2 emissions. Retrieved 2016, from co2.earth: https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions?itemid=1
5. Draper&Smith. (1998). Applied Regression Analysis. Wiley.
6. Earth System Science Data. (2016). Global carbon budget 2015. Retrieved 2016, from Earth System Science Data: http://www.earth-system-science-data.net/about/news_and_press/2015-12-07_global-carbon-budget.html
7. Falkowski, P. (2000). The global carbon cycle: a test of our knowledge of earth as a system. Science, 290.5490 (2000): 291-296.
8. Graven, H. (2016). Scripps CO2 Program. La Jolla, CA: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California.
9. Hansen, J. (1981). Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Science, 213: 957-66.
10. Hansen, J. (2016). Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms:. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 16, 3761–3812, 2016.
11. Holm, S. (1979). A simple sequentially rejective multiple test procedure. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 6:2:65-70.
12. IPCC. (2007). AR4 WG1 Chapter 7: Couplings between changes in the climate system and biogeochemistry. Geneva: IPCC.
13. IPCC. (2014). Climate Change 2013 The Physical Science Basis. Geneva: IPCC/UNEP.
14. Jacob, D. (1999). Introduction to atmospheric chemistry. Princeton University Press.
15. Johnson, V. (2013). Revised standards for statistical evidence. Retrieved 2015, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/48/19313.full
16. Keeling, C. (1995). Interannual extremes in the rate of rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1980. Nature, 375.6533 (1995): 666-670.
17. Keeling, C. (2005). Atmospheric CO2 and 13CO2 exchange with the terrestrial biosphere and oceans from 1978 to 2000: observations and carbon cycle implications. In J. Ehleringer, History of atmospheric CO2 and its effects on plants, animals, and ecosystems (pp. 83-113). NY: Springer Verlag.
18. Kheshgi, H. (2005). Emissions and atmospheric CO2 stabilization: Long-term limits and paths. In Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change (pp. 10.2 213-220).
19. Lacis, A. (2010). Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature. Science, 330.
20. Levin, I. (2000). Radiocarbon – a unique tracer of global carbon cycle dynamics. Radiocarbon, v42, #1, pp69-80.
21. Marland-Andres. (2016). Regional and National Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions. Oak Ridge, TN: Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
22. Matthews, H. (2009). The proportionality of global warming to cumulative carbon emissions. Nature, 459.7248 (2009): 829-832.
23. Munshi, J. (2015). Responsiveness of Atmospheric CO2 to Anthropogenic Emissions. Retrieved 2016, from ssrn.com: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2642639
24. Munshi, J. (2016). 13C Paper Archive. Retrieved 2016, from Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByzA6UNa41ZfQXB4eE5vYUVPQVk
25. Munshi, J. (2016). Dilution of Atmospheric Radiocarbon CO2 by Fossil Fuel Emissions. Retrieved 2016, from ssrn.com: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2770539
26. Munshi, J. (2016). The Spuriousness of Correlations between Cumulative Values. Retrieved 2016, from ssrn.com: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2725743
27. NASA-GISS. (2016). GLOBAL MEAN CO2. Retrieved 2016, from DATA.GISS.NASA.GOV: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/ghgases/Fig1A.ext.txt
28. NOAA/ESRL. (2010). The Data: What 14C Tells Us. Retrieved 2016, from Stable and Radiocarbon Isotopes of Carbon Dioxide: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/outreach/isotopes/c14tellsus.html
29. Raupach, M. (2007). Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO2 emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104.24 (2007): 10288-10293.
30. RealClimate. (2004). How do we know that recent CO2 increases are due to human activities? Retrieved 2016, from realclimate.org: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-we-know-that-recent-cosub2sub-increases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/
31. Revelle, R. (1956). Carbon dioxide exchange between atmosphere and ocean and the question of an increase in atmospheric CO2 during the past decades. UC La Jolla, CA: Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
32. Robertson, I. (1887). Signal strength and climate relationships in 13C/12C ratios of tree ring cellulose from oak in southwest Finland. Geophysical Research Letters, 24.12 (1997): 1487-1490.
33. Rodhe, H. (1990). A comparison of the contribution of various gases to the greenhouse effect. Science, 248.4960 (1990): 1217.
34. ScrippsCO2. (2016). Atmospheric CO2 data. Retrieved 2016, from scrippsco2: http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/data/atmospheric_co2
35. Severinghaus, J. (2014). University of California Television (UCTV). Retrieved 2016, from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSbpydoPxu0
36. Shumway, R. (2011). Time series analysis. Springer. . Springer.
37. Solomon, S. (2009). Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, pnas-0812721106.
38. Stuiver. (1984). 13C/12C ratios in tree rings and the transfer of biospheric carbon to the atmosphere. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 89.D7 (1984): 11731-11748. (PICTURED ABOVE)
39. Stuiver, M. (1981). Atmospheric 14C changes resulting from fossil fuel CO2 release and cosmic ray flux variability. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 53: 349-362.
40. Stuiver, M. (1987). Tree cellulose 13C/12C isotope ratios and climatic change. Nature , 328.6125 (1987): 58-60.
41. Suess, H. (1953). Natural Radiocarbon and the rate of exchange of carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and the sea. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences.
42. Tans, P. (1980). Past atmospheric CO2 levels and the 13C/12C ratios in tree rings. Tellus, 32.3 (1980): 268-283.
43. UNEP. (2016). Paris Agreement. Retrieved 2016, from COP121: http://web.unep.org/climatechange/cop21

 

 

 

 

 

 

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1. A Newsweek article dated 4/25/2019 features a video by David Wallace Wells saying that “by the end of the century, if we do not take action on climate change, the damage from climate change will surpass twice as much as all the wealth that exists in the world today”. In a related article Newsweek had a somewhat scarier assessment that the current warming trend will take us to such an extreme climate condition that we have to go back 50 million years to find climate conditions as extreme. This statement is false. For example, as described in a related post [LINK] , if we go back just 120,000 years to the previous interglacial called the Eemian, we find much more extreme climate than in the current interglacial, the Holocene. Most of the climate change fear mongering arguments can be understood in the context of what one would expect to see in nature’s own interglacials. Yet known natural interglacial phenomena are being sold as evidence of unnatural human caused climate change.
2. The article goes on to promote the ugly and reprehensible use of school children in the activism against fossil fuels and claims that the fossil fuel industry’s influence with government is to blame for the recent calls by government officials to prevent elementary school teachers from preaching climate catastrophe to their very young child students. The most visible child climate change activist is Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. She recently publicly admitted to having been indoctrinated into fearing climate change by elementary school teachers. In her words, “I first heard about this when I was 7, 8, or 9 years old. In school the teacher explained what climate change was and how it was caused and they showed us pictures of starving polar bears”.
3. Elementary school teachers have a fixed and well defined curriculum of things like language, grammar, arithmetic, and so on. This curriculum does not include climate science and these teachers are not qualified to teach climate science. The syllabus of courses they teach is well defined and it is their job to follow that curriculum. They are not allowed to bring their own personal causes, religions, or other beliefs to preach to their very young students or to indoctrinate them in causes they happen to believe in. This sad and ugly chapter in climate activism that involves child abuse and child exploitation should, in itself, disqualify the climate change movement.
4. The text goes on to state that ” This assault on our children (that is restricting teachers to the curriculum) is reprehensible for so many reasons. To start with an obvious one, it is keeping kids in the dark about an urgent global problem that will affect the rest of their lives. Yet, the reading writing and arithmetic syllabus of elementary school education does not include these topics nor does it give the teacher the freedom to preach environmentalism as he or she sees it. In fact what is reprehensible about the indoctrination of school children and their deployment in climate activism is that it is or it should be illegal to use children in this way to further one’s activism needs because it is surely a case of child exploitation.
5. The Michael Mann statement continues with the reference to fear mongering climate change impacts stating that “We’re already seeing the harm of floods, fires, heat and drought, but it’s the next generation that will bear the brunt of climate change. The least we can do is give our kids the tools to rise to the immense challenge they will face as the climate change generation. Actually, the very least we could do is not lie to them about it.
6. Yet, it is an indefensible position that elementary school students as young as seven years old can be taught climate science that even climate scientists don’t full understand. Most of the extreme weather fears that they peddle is without empirical evidence. Also, the fundamental relationship on which all of AGW theory rests is climate sensitivity and the extreme state of uncertainty in its empirical values is an unsettled question in climate science. Yet another weakness in climate science is that it is a product of errors in statistics as explained in a related post [LINK] . If climate scientists themselves can’t get the science right, how can we expect elementary school teachers to teach it?
7. The claim that climate change has caused extreme weather and made tropical cyclones more destructive is without empirical evidence. The famous paper by MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel that climate change has increased the destructiveness of North Atlantic hurricanes contains gross methodological and statistical errors that one would expect to see only at the undergraduate level. The Emanuel paper is discussed in a related post [LINK] .  The failure of climate scientists to provide evidence for the claim that climate change is making tropical cyclones more extreme is discussed in two related posts [LINK]  [LINK] . Evidence of tropical cyclones “in pre industrial times” (that is prior to AGW) that are worse than what we see today in post industrial times, is presented in a related post [LINK] .
8. The attribution of extreme weather events to climate change after the fact with what is called “Event Attribution Science” is not science but a combination of circular reasoning and confirmation bias described in related posts [LINK] [LINK] .
9. Rather than be the accusers of the fossil fuel industry as evil activists who are trying to keep elementary school teachers from teaching climate science to elementary school students, climate scientists should look in a mirror. There, they will see the evil of child abuse and child exploitation to further their activism against fossil fuels.
10. The scary reality of climate change is that someday these charges and related lawsuits will be brought against the perpetrators of these crimes against children to shore up a failed case against fossil fuels that their own science is unable to defend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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FIGURE 1: LOW LATITUDE COUNTRIES IN THE SAMPLE

FIGURE 2: HIGH LATITUDE COUNTRIES IN THE SAMPLE

FIGURE 3: LOW LATITUDE PER CAPITA GDP 1960-1980: COOLING

FIGURE 4: HIGH LATITUDE PER CAPITA GDP 1960-1980: COOLING

FIGURE 5: INCOME INEQUALITY 1960-1980: COOLING

FIGURE 6: LOW LATITUDE PER CAPITA GDP 1981-2017: WARMING

FIGURE 7: HIGH LATITUDE PER CAPITA GDP 1981-2017: WARMING

FIGURE 8: INCOME INEQUALITY 1981-2017: WARMING

FIGURE 9: LOW LATITUDE %GDP GROWTH FULL SPAN 1960-2017

FIGURE 10: HIGH LATITUDE %GDP GROWTH FULL SPAN 1960-2017

FIGURE 11: GROWTH INEQUALITY FULL SPAN 1960-2017

1. Climate scientists published a paper in 2019 with the finding that climate change causes income inequality between hot low latitude countries, eg India, and cool high latitude countries, eg Sweden.  (CITATION: Global warming has increased global economic inequality, Noah S. Diffenbaugh, Marshall Burke, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Apr 2019, 201816020). The income inequality is shown as an increasing spread between per capita GDP between the cool rich country and the hot poor country. The abstract appears below in the next paragraph. The full text of the paper may be downloaded from an online archive [LINK]
2. The ABSTRACT of the article states as follows: Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development. To investigate whether global warming has affected the recent evolution of inequality, we combine counterfactual historical temperature trajectories from a suite of global climate models with extensively replicated empirical evidence of the relationship between historical temperature fluctuations and economic growth. Together, these allow us to generate probabilistic country-level estimates of the influence of anthropogenic climate forcing on historical economic output. We find very high likelihood that anthropogenic climate forcing has increased economic inequality between countries. For example, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has been reduced 17–31% at the poorest four deciles of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution, yielding a ratio between the top and bottom deciles that is 25% larger than in a world without global warming. As a result, although between-country inequality has decreased over the past half century, there is ∼90% likelihood that global warming has slowed that decrease. The primary driver is the parabolic relationship between temperature and economic growth, with warming increasing growth in cool countries and decreasing growth in warm countries. Although there is uncertainty in whether historical warming has benefited some temperate, rich countries, for most poor countries there is >90% likelihood that per capita GDP is lower today than if global warming had not occurred. Thus, our results show that, in addition to not sharing equally in the direct benefits of fossil fuel use, many poor countries have been significantly harmed by the warming arising from wealthy countries’ energy consumption.
3. The authors also provide a summary about the significance of their finding as follows: SIGNIFICANCE: We find that global warming has very likely exacerbated global economic inequality, including ∼25% increase in population-weighted between-country inequality over the past half century. This increase results from the impact of warming on annual economic growth, which over the course of decades has accumulated robust and substantial declines in economic output in hotter, poorer countries—and increases in many cooler, wealthier countries—relative to a world without anthropogenic warming. Thus, the global warming caused by fossil fuel use has likely exacerbated the economic inequality associated with historical disparities in energy consumption. Our results suggest that low-carbon energy sources have the potential to provide a substantial secondary development benefit, in addition to the primary benefits of increased energy access.
4. The essence of the argument is that global warming is inherently unfair in terms of per capita GDP because the per capita GDP of the rich temperature countries that are mostly to blame for fossil fuel emissions face a lesser impact of climate change than the per capita GDP of poor equatorial countries where it is hot. This unequal and unfair impact of climate change therefore results in a rising wealth gap between the rich industrialized temperate countries like Sweden and the poor struggling countries like India located in the hotter equatorial zone of the planet.
5. This post is a test of the this income inequality hypothesis. The data are per capita GDP values for all countries 1960 to 2017 provided by the World Bank. Two samples of countries are taken from the World Bank dataset. A large sample of hot equatorial countries is taken with absolute value of latitude from Φ=0 to Φ=25. A smaller sample of rich industrialized temperate countries is take at the higher latitudes of Φ=46 (France) to Φ=64 (Finland). The selected countries are listed above in Figure 1 and Figure 2.
6. The sample period of the GDP data, 1960 to 2017, includes a period of cooling 1960-1980 and a period of warming thereafter 1981-2017. In Figure 3, Figure 4, and Figure 5, we use the per capita GDP data for the hot low latitude countries and the cool high latitude countries in the cooling period 1960-1980 to compute the trend in income inequality. Figure 5 shows a rising trend in the difference between cool rich countries and and hot poor countries.
7. This comparison is repeated for the warming period 1981-2017 in Figure 6, Figure 7, and Figure 8. We find that the warming period and the cooling period are indistinguishable in terms of growth in income inequality. This result is not consistent with the attribution of the growing difference between the per capita GDP of rich and poor countries to global warming.
8. This is because of the nature of economic growth in which the richer the country is the more it can invest and therefore the faster it can increase its wealth. Therefore the difference between per capita GDP is not the appropriate metric for this comparison. Instead, the comparison must be made with percent growth in per capita GDP. This comparison is made in Figure 9, Figure 10, and Figure 11. The income inequality displayed in Figure 11 does not show rising income inequality.
9. CONCLUSION: We conclude that the evidence of rising inequality in the Diffenbaugh 2019 paper cited above is an artifact of the nature of economic growth and not a valid computation of income inequality. We find that when this error is corrected and percent economic growth is compared in Figure 11, no evidence of rising income inequality is found. Therefore, the Diffenbaugh 2019 paper cited above has not shown that climate change has caused rising income inequality between rich cool countries and poor hot countries. The per capita GDP of cool rich countries grows faster than the per capita GDP of hot poor countries not because they are cooler but because they are richer.
10. For example, if you invest $100,000 in 10-year treasuries at 2.5% and Al Gore invests 1,000,000 in the same instrument. Ten years from now you will have $102,500 and Al will have $1025,000. After the next decade you will have $105,062 and Al Gore will have $1050625 and so on with your income inequality increasing as shown in the chart below. This is why small countries and large countries and poor countries and rich countries can’t be compared on the basis of dollar per capita GDP but must be evaluated on the basis of percent growth. 

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THE TEXT OF THE HARRISON FORD CLIMATE CHANGE SPEECH

1. Point#1: The destruction of nature accounts for more global emissions than all the cars and trucks in the world. We can put solar panels on every house, we can turn every car into an electric vehicle, but as long as Sumatra burns, we will have failed. So long as the Amazon’s great forests are slashed and burned, so long as the protected lands of tribal people, indigenous people, are allowed to be encroached upon, so long as wetlands and peat bogs are destroyed, our climate goals will remain out of reach and we will be shut out of time.
2. Point#2: If we don’t stop the destruction of our natural world nothing else will matter. Why? Because protecting and restoring forests, mangroves, wetlands, these huge dense carbon sinks, represent at least 30% of what needs to be done to avoid catastrophic warming. It is at this time the only feasible solution for absorbing carbon on a global scale. Simply put, if we can’t protect nature we can’t protect ourselves.
3. Point#3: Stop protecting people who don’t believe in science – or worse than that, pretend they don’t believe in science for their own self interest. They know who they are. We know who they are. We are all, rich or poor, powerful or powerless, at risk. We will all suffer the effects of climate change and ecosystem destruction and we are facing what is quickly becoming the greatest moral crisis of our time – that those least responsible will bear the greatest cost.
4. About Harrison Ford: The author, once a famous Hollywood actor is now Vice Chairman of Conservation International, a large and well funded ecological activism group. Their view of the world and their ecological activism goals and methods are described on the CI website [LINK]. This text indicates that CI is in the business of protecting nature (specifically identified as forests, wetlands, primitive human communities, and animals perceived as endangered by activities of technologically advanced human communities such as the Western industrialized civilization.
5. Statement from the CI website describing their organization: ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​For more than 30 years, Conservation International (CI) has been protecting nature for the benefit of all​. Humanity is totally dependent on nature, and by saving nature, we’re saving ourselves. To that end, Conservation International is working to build a healthier, more prosperous and more productive planet. We do this through s​​cience, policy and partnerships with countries, communities and companies. We employ nearly 1,000 people and work with more than 2,000 partners in 30 countries. Over the years, we have helped support 1,200 protected areas and interventions across 77 countries, protecting more than 601 million hectares of land, marine and coastal areas.​​
6. CI Activities: Human drugs are polluting the water and animals are swimming in it. Pharmaceuticals are flowing from homes and factories into freshwater rivers, streams and lakes, harming aquatic species. The story: Medication is entering freshwater ecosystems worldwide through our toilets and sinks — and its trip through the human digestive tract isn’t dampening its effectiveness, According to recent research, a platypus living in a pharmaceutical-contaminated stream in Melbourne is likely to ingest more than half the recommended adult dose of antidepressants every day. The big picture: While symptoms from exposure depend on the species and dosage, scientists have already observed a measurable effect on wildlife. Atlantic salmon smolts that are exposed to anti-anxiety medications such as Xanax and Valium migrate twice as fast as unmedicated smolts, which causes them to arrive at sea before they’re fully developed and harms their chances of survival. Scientists estimate that if humans continue releasing pharmaceuticals into waterways at the current rate, the concentration of these drugs in freshwater ecosystems will likely increase by two-thirds in the next 30 years.
7. CI Activities: Invasions of indigenous lands: Emboldened by President Jair Bolsonaro, armed invaders are encroaching on Brazil’s tribal lands in the Amazon. Invasions of indigenous lands have increased 150 percent since Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil in October. During his presidential campaign, Bolsonaro condemned federal protections for indigenous peoples, whose lands make up about 13% of Brazil’s territory. In response to Bolsonaro’s antagonistic statements against indigenous rights and in support of development during his campaign, attacks on indigenous reservations rose and deforestation rates climbed almost 50 percent.Brazil’s Amazon rain forest is home to 850,000 indigenous peoples. The president’s incendiary remarks have been viewed by many as approval or even incentive to invade indigenous spaces and “stake their claims.” Not only does this put people at risk, it threatens generations of traditional knowledge that are key to fighting climate change.
8. CI Activities: Ocean heat waves threatening marine life: Ocean heat waves, defined as at least five consecutive days of warmer-than-usual ocean temperatures, are more severe and longer-lasting because of greenhouse gas emissions, a new study finds. Oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat from greenhouse gas emissions since the 1950s. This excess heat translates to an uptick in heat waves. These marine heat waves can kill off fish, coral reefs and vital coastal ecosystems such as seagrass meadows and kelp forests that store “blue” carbon. For the approximately 3 billion people dependent on oceans for their protein, these heat waves pose a serious threat to their food security.
9. CI Activities: Komodo dragons: Komodo Island in Indonesia may temporarily close its borders to tourists to enable dragon populations to recover. Komodo dragon numbers have been dwindling due in large part to smugglers. A temporary tourism ban would help protect the dragons from smugglers and let authorities replenish the dragons’ food supply by planting native vegetation. Komodo dragons are an endangered species. There are only about 5,700 in the wild and they’re being trafficked for food and traditional medicinal use. The dragons are an essential part of the food chain on the island, and could be significant to science, too: Antimicrobial peptides in their blood give them the ability to recover from the venomous bites of other Komodo dragons, which scientists believe could provide the foundation of a new antibiotic for human medicine.
10. CI Activities: Save the Mangroves: In one of the most biodiverse regions of Colombia, the national government has proposed building a port within the protected area of the Tribuga-Corrientes cape, on Colombia’s northern Pacific coast. This port would destroy mangroves and the ecosystem services (that is, the tangible benefits that nature provides) that local communities rely on. A new study puts an exact price tag on the cost of destroying those mangroves: If the port is built, it would cost US$ 230 million per year in lost ecosystem services such as providing habitat for fish, protecting the coast from storms and storing carbon. Plans for the port have been discussed for close to a decade, and local organizations have been trying to stop it for just as long with little success. To prove the detrimental impact that the port and by default, the destruction of the mangroves would have on the economy, the researchers analyzed the value of the mangroves through three distinct lenses: monetary (the economic value to fisheries, other natural resources), sociocultural (the value to surrounding communities); and ecological (storing carbon, biodiversity). By putting a price tag on mangrove ecosystem services, researchers are able to show the mangroves’ economic importance not only to surrounding communities, which rely on fishing, agricultural and tourism that the mangrove forest provides, but to the country at large. The data from this study was presented to the president of Colombia, senators and the Ministry of Environment with the goal of stopping the construction of the port. “Mangroves are vital for human well-being and provide valuable ecosystem services to the country as a whole. The port will harm the country economically more than it would help it. Hopefully this is enough to stop the progression of the port in Congress and save the mangrove forest and all of the benefits that it provides.
11. Summary of CI activities: It is clear from the above that CI is an environmental activism organization with the generic purpose of saving nature from human impacts and from its own complexities. The role of climate change in these activities is mostly in terms of protecting nature from climate change impacts that have been claimed by climate science. In addition there is some concern that nature’s ability to store carbon should not be disturbed lest natural emissions of carbon from natural storage sinks exacerbate climate change. We can now understand the Harrison Ford lecture in this context as follows:
12. Context for Point #1: The context is that the CI priority of protecting forests ties in with climate change because protecting and preserving forests can prevent release of carbon stored in forests. His reference to Sumatra is relates to the large forest fire there in 2015 that involved the combustion of peat in the forest floor seen as climate change causing carbon being released to the atmosphere. These fires have recurred several times since then and are thought to be natural. His concern for the preservation of the Amazon also relates to the release of CO2 if the forest is “slashed and burned”. His reference encroachment on indigenous lands is mysterious in this context. Here is a link to more information about the Sumatra peat forest fires  [LINK]
13. Context for Point #2: In Point number 2, the control of carbon release to the atmosphere by preserving forests is generalized to protecting “the natural world” from destruction by human activity. It should be mentioned that the Sumatra fires are thought to be natural and so the CI goal of protecting nature applies both to protecting nature from humans and protecting nature from itself.
14. Context for Point #3: Here he appears to have identified national leaders such as President Trump (USA) and President Bolsonaro (Brazil) as enemies of nature because they “don’t believe in science“. It is understood that CI activity extends to opposing and neutralizing world leaders who do not believe in science and who therefore pose a threat in terms of the CI priority of protecting nature from destruction. It is common among environmentalists to think of science as a belief system such that whatever scientists say become biblical truth that must not be questioned although science itself works in exactly the opposite way.
15. CONCLUSION: The theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) relates to the use of fossil fuels by the industrial economy of humans in which large quantities of carbon are dug up from under the ground where they had been sequestered from nature’s carbon cycle and climate system. The concern is that the carbon that is released into the atmosphere when these fossil fuels are burnt does not belong in the current account of the carbon cycle. It is feared that such external carbon is a perturbation of nature’s delicately balanced current account of the carbon cycle and that such perturbation can cause an unnatural accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere such as to cause unnatural man-made and therefore dangerous global warming and climate change. This aspect of AGW theory is not addressed in the Ford lecture and surely plays no role in CI priorities. Instead, AGW theory is seen only in terms of CI goals and priorities. The sources of carbon mentioned are all natural and the exchange of carbon between these sources and the atmosphere and oceans is also natural and not foreign to nature and therefore not a perturbation of the carbon cycle. They are instead the carbon cycle itself. The only unnatural role for humans in terms of deforestation is the encouragement given to Indonesia by climate science to clear forests for palm oil plantations and the production of climate friendly biofuels that can be derived from palm oil. The climate change presentation given by Harrison Ford is derived completely from the CI agenda and its priorities with little or no understanding of or relevance to the theory of AGW. This climate change presentation serves as a high profile example of an unusual aspect of the climate change movement in that it has attracted and become kind of a “promised land” for environmental, ecological, and new age activism groups of all colors. They all talk about climate change but in the details what they are talking about are really their own agenda placed into a climate change context.

 

 

 

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1. According to researchers at University College London, “One surprising effect of European colonization of the Americas was a cooling of the Earth’s climate that explains the Little Ice Age (LIA). The LIA is described in a related post [LINK] . These researchers estimate that the indigenous population of the Americas at the end of the 15th century was 60 million. Over the next century, this population declined by some 90 percent, largely due to epidemics introduced by Europeans. As a result, around 215,000 square miles of cultivated land, roughly the area of France, was left fallow and reverted to forest. This sucked up enough carbon dioxide—a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere—to lead to cooling. This process took place amid an extended cold stretch known as the Little Ice Age, which lasted from around 1250 to 1850. Other factors that contributed to cooling during this period included numerous widespread volcanic eruptions and natural fluctuations in solar radiation. But, Koch says, the effects of colonization played a key role in driving temperatures down in the early seventeenth century, adding, “This is thought to be the coolest part of the Little Ice Age.”
2. This assessment likely derives from a decline in atmospheric CO2 concentration of ≈10 ppm from ≈282 ppm in ≈1580 to ≈271.6 ppm in ≈1612  as seen in the chart below. This drop of 10.4ppm in atmospheric CO2 implies a temperature decline of ≈0.12C over a period of 32 years or 0.00375C/year by way of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 at the Manabe climate sensitivity value of λ=2. 
3. The paleo temperature record for the Northern Hemisphere in Mann etal 2008 is shown in the chart below. Here we find a correspondingly undetectable change in temperature from 1580 to 1612.      
4. The data presented above is consistent with the assessment that there was a minor CO2 decline of ≈10 ppm during the time of the European settlement of North America. However, the attribution of the change to European colonization is speculative and its proposed contribution to the the cooling from the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) to the Little Ice Age (LIA) is inconsistent with the minute amount of cooling implied by the climate sensitivity and the absence of cooling in the paleo record shown above.
5. We note also that the total area of agricultural land that reverted to forest of 556,847 square kilometers represents 0.374% of global land area. Since about 65% of the world’s photosynthesis is in the ocean the net increase in photosynthesis could not have been more than 0.13%. It is unlikely that this insignificant change in photosynthesis caused a significant change in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
6. CONCLUSION: We find no evidence to support the attribution of the 10 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2 from 1580 to 1612 to the European colonization of North America or for its alleged contribution as a cause of the Little Ice Age. Without the necessary supporting data, the proposed relationship between European colonization of North America, the drop in atmospheric CO2, and its contribution to the Little Ice Age proposed in the research paper appear speculative.
7. Related posts: [MWP]  [LIA] .

 

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1. CITATION: Wilkerson, J., Dobosy, R., Sayres, D. S., Healy, C., Dumas, E., Baker, B., and Anderson, J. G.: Permafrost nitrous oxide emissions observed on a landscape scale using the airborne eddy-covariance method, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 19, 4257-4268, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4257-2019, 2019. ABSTRACT: The microbial by-product nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent greenhouse gas and ozone depleting substance, has conventionally been assumed to have minimal emissions in permafrost regions. This assumption has been questioned by recent in situ studies which have demonstrated that some geologic features in permafrost may, in fact, have elevated emissions comparable to those of tropical soils. However, these recent studies, along with every known in situ study focused on permafrost N2O fluxes, have used chambers to examine small areas (less than 50 square meters). In late August 2013, we used the airborne eddy-covariance technique to make in situ N2O flux measurements over the North Slope of Alaska from a low-flying aircraft spanning a much larger area: around 310 square km. We observed large variability of N2O fluxes with many areas exhibiting negligible emissions. Still, the daily mean averaged over our flight campaign was 3.8 (2.2–4.7) mg N2O m−2 d−1 with the 90 % confidence interval shown in parentheses. If these measurements are representative of the whole month, then the permafrost areas we observed emitted a total of around 0.04–0.09 g m−2 for August, which is comparable to what is typically assumed to be the upper limit of yearly emissions for these regions. FULL TEXT: [LINK] .
2. INTERPRETATION OF THESE FINDINGS IN TERMS OF CLIMATE CHANGE APOCALYPSE:  “Emissions from thawing Arctic permafrost may be 12 times higher than thought, scientists say. ‘This needs to be taken more seriously than it is right now,’ says author of new study. [LINK]  .  “Emissions from thawing Arctic permafrost may be 12 times higher than previously thought, scientists have discovered.  #ClimateBreakdown #EcologicalEmergency” [LINK] . 
3. TESTABLE IMPLICATION: The extreme heat trapping effect of N2O in conjunction with the large outflow of emissions from thawing Arctic permafrost in the North Slope of Alaska on August 2, 2013 is interpreted in the sources cited above as a dangerous positive feedback of greenhouse effect global warming. The testable implication is that this extreme event should have left a mark in the temperature record that should show a warming event. 
4. A TEST FOR A TEMPERATURE EFFECT: Shown below are UAH satellite (deseasonalized) temperature anomalies for land in the North Polar region for each of the twelve calendar months in the sample period 2008-2018. The year 2013 falls in the middle of the study period 2008-2018.
5. Figure 1 shows full span trends for each of the 12 calendar months. These trends are depicted graphically in the GIF image of Figure 3 which cycles through the twelve calendar months. The month of August, when the N2O emission was detected, does not appear to be different from the other months in either Figure 1 or Figure 3.
6. Figure 2 is a GIF image that displays the trend across the twelve calendar months for each year in the study period 2008-2018. Nothing unusual is found in the year 2013 when the N2O emission was detected.
7. The testable implication of the N2O event of August of 2013 is that if the GHG effect of the released N2O had an effect on temperature there ought to be something unusual about the month of August in Figure 3 or something unusual about the year 2013 in Figure 2. No such evidence is found in the data.
8. Figure 1: Full span trends for each calendar month 
9. Figure 2: Temperature trends across calendar months January-December for each year in the sample period. The vertical red line marks the year 2013.    
10. Figure 3: Temperature trends across the sample period 2008-2018 for each calendar month. The vertical red line marks the month of August.      
11. CONCLUSION: It is noteworthy that the authors were able to detect a large release of N2O from thawing permafrost in the North Slope of Alaska but their further interpretation of the data in terms catastrophic runaway positive feedback warming due to the extreme GHG effect of N2O is not evident in the data.

 

 

PAST PERMAFROST MELT ALARMS

1. 1997, THE BBC MAKES THE CASE FOR THE KYOTO PROTOCOL
   Twenty years of hard data from meteorological stations and nature show a clear warming trend. Growth rings in Mongolian and Canadian trees are getting wider. Butterflies in California are moving to higher ground once too cold for butterflies. Stalactites in Britain are growing faster. The growing season for crops in Australia is getting longer. Permafrost in Siberia and Canada is melting. The evidence is there anywhere you look. A warming rate is one 1C per century is enough to wreak havoc. The cause is the greenhouse effect of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels as well as CFCs and HCFCs that trap heat. The effect is being compounded as deforestation simultaneously removes trees that absorb CO2. Some scientists are skeptical but the majority view is that the greenhouse effect is real and it requires urgent action. This conclusion rests on the results from sophisticated computer simulation models that give the best possible information on this topic even though they are not perfect. These models are giving us scary accounts of the future and we should be paying attention. The IPCC tell us that melting ice and thermal expansion of oceans will cause the sea level to rise one meter by 2037 and inundate low lying areas and island nations. Extreme weather events will become common. El Nino and La Nina cycles will become more extreme. There will be millions of climate refugees driven from their home by global warming. Some regions of the world will become hotter, others colder, some wetter, others drier. Entire weather systems will be dramatically altered. The Gulf Stream will switch off making Europe colder. Tropical diseases such as malaria will ravage the world as vectors migrate to higher latitudes and altitudes. Some wheat farmers may be able to grow more wheat but the net effect of global warming is overwhelmingly negative.
2. 2004, RAPID ARCTIC WARMING BRINGS SEA LEVEL RISE
   The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) report says: increasing greenhouse gases from human activities is causing the Arctic to warm twice as fast as the rest of the planet; in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia winter temperatures have risen by 2C to 4C in the last 50 years; the Arctic will warm by 4C to 7C by 2100. A portion of Greenland’s ice sheet will melt; global sea levels will rise; global warming will intensify. Greenland contains enough melting ice to raise sea levels by 7 meters; Bangkok, Manila, Dhaka, Florida, Louisiana, and New Jersey are at risk of inundation; thawing permafrost and rising seas threaten Arctic coastal regions; climate change will accelerate and bring about profound ecological and social changes; the Arctic is experiencing the most rapid and severe climate change on earth and it’s going to get a lot worse; Arctic summer sea ice will decline by 50% to 100%; polar bears will be driven towards extinction; this report is an urgent SOS for the Arctic; forest fires and insect infestations will increase in frequency and intensity; changing vegetation and rising sea levels will shrink the tundra to its lowest level in 21000 years; vanishing breeding areas for birds and grazing areas for animals will cause extinctions of many species; “if we limit emission of heat trapping carbon dioxide we can still help protect the Arctic and slow global warming”.
3. 2009: CATASTROPHIC ICE MELT NEEDS TREATY AT COPENHAGEN
   Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels have caused the following alarming changes to our planet: (1) ice covering the Arctic Ocean shrank in 2007 to its smallest since satellite records began, (2) In Antarctica, a section of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has broken up in recent days, (3) glaciers in the Himalayan mountains are shrinking and threatening to disrupt water supplies to hundreds of millions of people, (4) melting permafrost in Siberia will release large quantities of methane into the atmosphere and hasten global warming, and (5) if all of the land based ice in Antarctica melted it would raise the sea level by 80 meters. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/04/reference-melting-ice-to-spur-new.html

 

 

THAWING PERMAFROST FEEDBACK BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Koven, Charles D., et al. “Permafrost carbon-climate feedbacks accelerate global warming.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108.36 (2011): 14769-14774.  Permafrost soils contain enormous amounts of organic carbon, which could act as a positive feedback to global climate change due to enhanced respiration rates with warming. We used a terrestrial ecosystem model that includes permafrost carbon dynamics, inhibition of respiration in frozen soil layers, vertical mixing of soil carbon from surface to permafrost layers, and CH₄ emissions from flooded areas, and which better matches new circumpolar inventories of soil carbon stocks, to explore the potential for carbon-climate feedbacks at high latitudes. Contrary to model results for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC AR4), when permafrost processes are included, terrestrial ecosystems north of 60°N could shift from being a sink to a source of CO₂ by the end of the 21st century when forced by a Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) A2 climate change scenario. Between 1860 and 2100, the model response to combined CO₂ fertilization and climate change changes from a sink of 68 Pg to a 27 + -7 Pg sink to 4 + -18 Pg source, depending on the processes and parameter values used. The integrated change in carbon due to climate change shifts from near zero, which is within the range of previous model estimates, to a climate-induced loss of carbon by ecosystems in the range of 25 + -3 to 85 + -16 Pg C, depending on processes included in the model, with a best estimate of a 62 + -7 Pg C loss. Methane emissions from high-latitude regions are calculated to increase from 34 Tg CH₄/y to 41–70 Tg CH₄/y, with increases due to CO₂ fertilization, permafrost thaw, and warming-induced increased CH₄flux densities partially offset by a reduction in wetland extent.
2. MacDougall, Andrew H., Christopher A. Avis, and Andrew J. Weaver. “Significant contribution to climate warming from the permafrost carbon feedback.” Nature Geoscience 5.10 (2012): 719.  Permafrost soils contain an estimated 1,700 Pg of carbon, almost twice the present atmospheric carbon pool¹. As permafrost soils thaw owing to climate warming, respiration of organic matter within these soils will transfer carbon to the atmosphere, potentially leading to a positive feedback². Models in which the carbon cycle is uncoupled from the atmosphere, together with one-dimensional models, suggest that permafrost soils could release 7–138 Pg carbon by 2100 (refs 3, 4). Here, we use a coupled global climate model to quantify the magnitude of the warming generated by the feedback between permafrost carbon release and climate. According to our simulations, permafrost soils will release between 68 and 508 Pg carbon by 2100. We show that the additional surface warming generated by the feedback between permafrost carbon and climate is independent of the pathway of anthropogenic emissions followed in the twenty-first century. We estimate that this feedback could result in an additional warming of 0.13–1.69 °C by 2300. We further show that the upper bound for the strength of the feedback is reached under the less intensive emissions pathways. We suggest that permafrost carbon release could lead to significant warming, even under less intensive emissions trajectories.
3. Schaefer, Kevin, et al. “The impact of the permafrost carbon feedback on global climate.” Environmental Research Letters9.8 (2014): 085003.  Degrading permafrost can alter ecosystems, damage infrastructure, and release enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) to influence global climate. The permafrost carbon feedback (PCF) is the amplification of surface warming due to CO₂ and CH₄ emissions from thawing permafrost. An analysis of available estimates PCF strength and timing indicate 120 ± 85 Gt of carbon emissions from thawing permafrost by 2100. This is equivalent to 5.7 ± 4.0% of total anthropogenic emissions for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenario and would increase global temperatures by 0.29 ± 0.21 °C or 7.8 ± 5.7%. For RCP4.5, the scenario closest to the 2 °C warming target for the climate change treaty, the range of cumulative emissions in 2100 from thawing permafrost decreases to between 27 and 100 Gt C with temperature increases between 0.05 and 0.15 °C, but the relative fraction of permafrost to total emissions increases to between 3% and 11%. Any substantial warming results in a committed, long-term carbon release from thawing permafrost with 60% of emissions occurring after 2100, indicating that not accounting for permafrost emissions risks overshooting the 2 °C warming target. Climate projections in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), and any emissions targets based on those projections, do not adequately account for emissions from thawing permafrost and the effects of the PCF on global climate. We recommend the IPCC commission a special assessment focusing on the PCF and its impact on global climate to supplement the AR5 in support of treaty negotiation.
4. Schuur, Edward AG, et al. “Climate change and the permafrost carbon feedback.” Nature 520.7546 (2015): 171.  Large quantities of organic carbon are stored in frozen soils (permafrost) within Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. A warming climate can induce environmental changes that accelerate the microbial breakdown of organic carbon and the release of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane. This feedback can accelerate climate change, but the magnitude and timing of greenhouse gas emission from these regions and their impact on climate change remain uncertain (TRANSLATION: uncertain = un-quantified”). Here we find that current evidence suggests a gradual and prolonged release of greenhouse gas emissions in a warming climate and present a research strategy with which to target poorly understood aspects of permafrost carbon dynamics. (how to say politey “we don’t really know”).
5. Koven, Charles D., David M. Lawrence, and William J. Riley. “Permafrost carbon− climate feedback is sensitive to deep soil carbon decomposability but not deep soil nitrogen dynamics.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.12 (2015): 3752-3757.  Permafrost soils contain enormous amounts of organic carbon whose stability is contingent on remaining frozen. With future warming, these soils may release carbon to the atmosphere and act as a positive feedback to climate change. Significant uncertainty remains on the post-thaw carbon dynamics of permafrost-affected ecosystems, in particular since most of the carbon resides at depth where decomposition dynamics may differ from surface soils, and since nitrogen mineralized by decomposition may enhance plant growth. Here we show, using a carbon−nitrogen model that includes permafrost processes forced in an unmitigated warming scenario, that the future carbon balance of the permafrost region is highly sensitive to the decomposability of deeper carbon, with the net balance ranging from 21 Pg C to 164 Pg C losses by 2300. Increased soil nitrogen mineralization reduces nutrient limitations, but the impact of deep nitrogen on the carbon budget is small due to enhanced nitrogen availability from warming surface soils and seasonal asynchrony between deeper nitrogen availability and plant nitrogen demands. Although nitrogen dynamics are highly uncertain, the future carbon balance of this region is projected to hinge more on the rate and extent of permafrost thaw and soil decomposition than on enhanced nitrogen availability for vegetation growth resulting from permafrost thaw.

 

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1. It may not seem obvious but we are facing a man-made disaster on a global scale. In the twenty years since I first started talking about the impact of climate change on our world, conditions have changed far faster than I ever imagined. OK so I was wrong, but you have to believe me this time around because I am a senile old man whom you are surely too young to judge. 
2. Before we started to burn coal, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 280 ppm. It is now over  400 ppm. And the planet gets warmer and warmer. If you are a climate scientist that flunked statistics in college, these data provide scientific evidence that burning coal caused atmospheric CO2 to rise and that rising atmospheric CO2 caused the planet to become warmer.
3. We are seeing the impacts of climate change now play out in real time. They are no longer subtle. It is not necessary for climate science to come up with empirical evidence that is scientifically and statistically valid because the evidence is no longer subtle. It is obvious. 
4. We’re not just talking about inconvenience. We’re talking about people’s lives and the lives of their communities being damaged. These things are a little too important to quibble about data and evidence and the scientific method, don’t you think?
5. Connect the dots. It is happening. It is happening in your world and it is happening in my world. And let’s be very clear about this! It is going to get much much worse. Not sure how I know that but it just has to doesn’t it? It is an emotional issue and it is surely cruel and uncaring to demand scientific rigor in these things. Can’t you see how worried I am? Is that not evidence enough?
6. It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies. Hope you are scared by now because I am running out of scary stuff. 
7. There are thousands of scientists around the world in almost every single country working to understand what will happen in the future if we don’t act, we don’t do more. They predict that if we carry on as we are now, where CO2 continues to increase, we would hit 1.5C of warming sometime between 2040 and 2050. All of this is true because there there are thousands of scientists around the world working on it.
8. We are on course to go through 1.5 degrees in just a few decades time; and the models do differ slightly as to exactly when. Not long after that we are on a trajectory to go through 2 degrees.  OMG OMG. Are you scared yet? I was hoping that the 2 degrees would scare the shit out of you. 
9. It really becomes difficult to see at such levels of warming how we’re going to maintain our agriculture such that the population of the world can actually feed itself. This means that climate change will wipe out your food. You will have nothing to eat but barbecued climate scientists and we don’t really taste good. Sorry. 
10. Related post: Spurious correlations in climate science:  https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/05/27/spurious/
11. Related post: Confirmation bias in climate science:  https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/03/confirmationbias/
12. Related post: How to sell an interglacial as Armageddon https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/12/21/eemian/
13. Related post: How the planet can fuck with the planet without the help of humans: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/10/28/petm/
14. Related post: The fundamentals of eco wacko fear mongering: https://tambonthongchai.com/2010/05/16/171/
15. Related post: Activism corrupts science  https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/02/03/hidden-hand/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[LIST OF POSTS ON THIS SITE]

 

THE MOLECULAR WEIGHT AND MASS OF CO2 IS TOO HIGH FOR IT TO STAY IN THE ATMOSPHERE AND TRAP HEAT WITH THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT. 

THE HIGHER MOLECULAR WEIGHT AND MASS OF CARBON DIOXIDE IMPLIES ONLY A VERTICAL PATTERN IN ITS CONCENTRATION FROM THE SURFACE TO 3,000 METERS ABOVE GIVE OR TAKE WITH THE TREND HIGHER IN THE ATMOSPHERE AT UNDETECTABLE LEVELS. IT IS TRUE THAT THE MOLECULAR WEIGHT ISSUE HAS AN EFFECT ON CO2 DISTRIBUTION IN THE ATMOSPHERE BUT NO EVIDENCE IS FOUND THAT THIS EFFECT MAKES THE HEAT TRAPPING EFFECT OF CARBON DIOXIDE IRRELEVANT IN THE CLIMATE CHANGE CONTEXT

 

SEPTEMBER MINIMUM ARCTIC SEA ICE EXTENT

Sea ice in on the Arctic Ocean goes through a steep seasonal cycle with large and dense sea ice extent in winter and spring months but with a steep decline to a dramatical seasonal low in September. The data show that September minimum sea ice extent is declining year to year both in extent and in volume and climate science has raised an alarm with respect to the decline in September minimum sea ice extent in terms of the dangers of lost ice feedback and what kind of warming trend that could generate, but more importantly in terms of lower and lower September minimum sea ice extent that could make it difficult for polar bears to hunt for seals. In this context we we often find comments critical of climate science with data for a relatively high level of winter or spring sea ice, perhaps even higher than at some historical reference year, as evidence against the climate science alarm about decline in sea ice and the fate of the polar bear. These data are not relevant to the climate science position which refers only to September minimum sea ice extent.

 

ATMOSPHERIC CO2 CONCENTRATION TOO SMALL TO CAUSE WARMING

(1) The argument is often seen in online discussions and social media that the claimed GHG effect of CO2 as a cause of global warming is not possible because CO2 is a “trace gas” with an extremely low concentration of around 400 parts per million equivalent to 0.04% such that only one out of 2,500 molecules is a carbon dioxide molecule. It should therefore be obvious that there can be no measurable impact of a substance at such a low concentration.

(2) Yet there are many examples in nature that very small concentrations of substances can have a measurable impact. In the area of toxicity for example, many snake venoms are  neurotoxins that can kill at a concentration of 1 ppm. Other strong toxins include Arsenic that can kill at 13 ppm and botulinum toxins that kill at a fraction of a part per billion. In terms of atmospheric composition, stratospheric ozone protects life on the surface of the earth from harmful high energy band ultraviolet radiation at less than 10 ppm.

(3) Although there are valid arguments against the causation sequence proposed by climate science that CO2 in fossil fuel emissions accumulate in the atmosphere and cause warming,  (related post  [LINK] ) the low concentration argument in and of itself is not sufficient even though 400 ppm may seem like a small concentration.

 

DIURNAL AND SEASONAL CYCLES IN TEMPERATURE MEASUREMENTS

(4) In the climate change debate, critics of AGW often present a chart of absolute temperature measurements that appear to contain no visible evidence of a long term trend as shown in the chart below. The chart is used to imply that the warming trend claimed by AGW theorists is fake and misleading because it is not seen in the data.

 

This line of reasoning as a challenge to AGW theory contains a fatal statistical flaw.

(5) Temperature data taken at weather stations contain a diurnal cycle, a seasonal cycle, and random natural variations. Along with these they may also contain a long term trend over a period of many years. Typically, the diurnal and seasonal cycles represent more than 80-90% of the total variance in the actual temperature measurements. The remaining 10-20% or so consists mostly of unexplained random variations.

(6) In cases where a statistically significant trend is found with OLS linear regression, no more than a small portion of the variance, around 3%-5% or so, can be ascribed to a long term warming or cooling trend. It is for these reasons that in the study of long term temperature trends over many decades, regression coefficients for long term trends are relatively a very weak feature of the time series that must be teased out of the data net of the greater diurnal, seasonal, and random variations.

(7) The study of long term temperature trends must therefore be carried out after the diurnal cycle and the seasonal cycle are removed from the data. The diurnal cycle may be removed by taking daily means or by studying either the daily maximum or daily minimum temperatures as shown in a related post [LINK] . The seasonal cycle can be removed by studying one calendar month at a time [LINK] or by computing a de-seasonalized annual mean either with dummy variables to represent calendar months; or by subtracting temperatures in a reference period to compute what is referred to as “temperature anomalies”. A related post presents a critical evaluation of the temperature anomaly procedure [LINK] .

 

(8) A similar argument often seen in climate blogs is that a temperature anomaly plot against time that appears to show warming on the chart at a certain temperature axis resolution can be shown to be illusory because that warming is not visible to the naked eye at a coarser temperature axis resolution. For example, the CRU chart below makes a warming of 0.5C from 1850 to 2010 visible to the naked eye and it is argued that the apparent warming visible to the naked eye disappears if the resolution of the vertical axis is changed from 0.1C to 1C and that therefore the warming shown and claimed by the CRU is illusory and non-existent. However, the real test of the trend lies not in visual impressions but on the statistical significance of the OLS trend line. In those terms, the relevant variable is the uncertainty in the temperature estimations found in the excellent work of Colin Morice of CRU  (Morice, Colin P., et al. “Quantifying uncertainties in global and regional temperature change using an ensemble of observational estimates: The HadCRUT4 data set.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 117.D8 (2012). As shown in a related post [LINK] , these uncertainties are rather large in the early part of the CRU reconstruction 1850-2010 and that is part of the issue in the confusion in climate science about the mystery of the so called ETCW or early twentieth century warming [LINK] . Whether a trend is visible to the naked eye is not an issue in the statistics of OLS linear regression procedures used in trend analysis. 

(9) It is only in the absence of the much larger diurnal and seasonal cycles that a trend, if any, can become visible to the naked eye as shown in the chart below. Although the trend represents a small portion of the total variance, its persistence over a long period of many years can have significant effects as seen in the Little Ice Age (LIA) described in a related post [LINK] . The LIA was a period of great hardship for Europeans. Canals and rivers were frozen, growth of sea ice around Iceland closed down harbors and shipping, hailstorms and snowstorms were heavy and frequent, and road and water transport was made difficult or impossible. Agricultural failure and consequent starvation and death devastated Europe. The Scandinavian colonies in Greenland starved to death and disappeared. And yet it was the creation of a long term cooling trend that explained about 3% of the total variance and that could not have been visible to the naked eye in a plot of temperature measurements that contained the diurnal and seasonal cycles.

 

AN ALTERNATE FORM OF THIS ARGUMENT

 The possible effects of projected global warming is unrealistic because the amount of warming is insignificant. As an example, a projected warming of 1C is described as waking up the next morning when it is 1C warmer or driving south until you find a place that is 1C warmer. And yet the very different condition of the world between the MWP and the LIA are the result of a global mean temperature difference of less than 1C. It should also be noted that the difference in global mean temperature between glaciation and interglacials is about 10C or less and yet seasonal differences of 40C are common; and many Asian and African migrants who move to northern or southern latitudes adapt to temperature differences of greater than 10C. Therefore the magnitude of temperature changes in sustained long term trends in mean global temperature cannot be compared with seasonal or geographical changes in terms of impact.

 

 

FAILURE TO SEPARATE EXTERNAL CARBON FROM CARBON CYCLE CARBON

(11) In theory, the concern in “human cause” of global warming (Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW) is that in the industrial economy, considered to have started in the late nineteenth century, humans were bringing up fossil fuels from under the ground, where they had been sequestered from the carbon cycle for millions of years, and injecting that carbon into the current account of the carbon cycle. It is proposed that this injection of external carbon into nature’s carbon cycle is an artificial and unnatural perturbation of the carbon cycle and therefore of the climate system. However, this narrow definition often becomes corrupted with consideration for carbon emissions that are not the creation of the industrial economy. In these discussions, the perturbation of the current account of the carbon cycle with external carbon no longer applied so that any carbon emission that can be ascribed to humans are counted as AGW perturbation of the carbon cycle. Here we argue that this extension of AGW theory about the impact of the “industrial economy” on climate to human activities that are natural and that predate the Industrial Revolution is arbitrary and capricious and that the perturbation of the current account of the carbon cycle with “external carbon” that was removed from the atmosphere millions of years ago, can only be assessed in terms of carbon that can be described in these terms.

(12) BRIEFLY: The case against fossil fuels in AGW theory is that fossil fuel reservoirs deep under the ground contain a large inventory of carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years from the delicately balanced surface-atmosphere carbon cycle that sustains a stable climate system and life on earth as we know it. The theory of anthropogenic global warming and climate change addresses this issue in terms of the response of the surface-atmosphere system to a perturbation caused by fossil fuel emissions that inject extraneous carbon into it. Natural carbon cycle flows are not a relevant consideration in that context.

 

ICE CORE DATA SHOW CO2 LAGS WARMING AND THEREFORE IT IS NOT POSSIBLE FOR CO2 TO CAUSE WARMING  

(14) The charts above show that in the ice core record going back to 400,000 years we find that CO2 lags temperature. That is, a rise in temperature precedes a rise in CO2 and conversely, a fall in temperature precedes a fall in CO2. If this relationship could be shown to be causal, it would be consistent with Henry’s Law that relates to the solubility of CO2 in the ocean.

(15) These data are presented by AGW skeptics as evidence that the CO2 to warming causation proposed in AGW is backwards and therefore not possible because the data show that warming causes rising CO2 and not that rising CO2 causes warming.  It is thus claimed that this discrepancy between ice core data and AGW theory serves as proof that the CO2 warming mechanism in AGW is not possible.

(16) This argument is flawed in at least two ways. First, the observed lagged correlation with temperature leading CO2 does not prove causation. For that, one must propose the mechanism for temperature to change atmospheric CO2 at an 800-year time scale. No such mechanism has been proposed and none exists. Recently, a paper was published describing that causation of CO2 by temperature at an annual time scale. The authors then presented correlation analysis showing a statistically significant relationship to support the causation theory that temperature causes CO2 and not the other way around. This finding is generally taken as empirical evidence against AGW theory. However the study contains a statistical flaw described in a related post [LINK] . The critical evaluation of the study shows that the correlations used to support causation are spurious.

 

A novel argument against global warming is that there is no such thing as a global mean temperature [LINK] .

The argument goes that the surface of the earth covers more than 500 million square km and on this vast surface we find local temperatures that vary over a wide range. So therefore the temperature of any point location on this surface has an interpretation because it can be measured and tracked and these temperatures contain a large variance across time and space. Therefore the concept of a single temperature to represent the whole of this surface is not possible. Though made in a convincing way and with very powerful language, the argument has a fatal weakness in terms of paleo temperature data across the globe that shows that our climate goes through a glaciation cycle. If the earth has no temperature then what is a glaciation cycle? And what are interglacials? And in our own little interglacial what was the Younger Dryas cold event and what was the Holocene Optimum warm event that gave us the Neolithic Revolution and human civilization? The violent millennial time scale warming and cooling cycles of the Holocene is described more fully in a related post [LINK].

 

 

Is It Global Warming or Climate Change? 

It is often claimed by skeptics that the term for the post LIA warming used to be Global Warming and then they couldn’t prove the warming (or for various other reasons cited) so they changed it to Climate Change. This is not true. Both terms have been used interchangeably for more than a hundred years. See for example, the peer  review comments for the world’s first paper on AGW climate change – Callendar 1938 [LINK] . (Brooks, Paragraph#15).

 

 

Temperature Change Unrelated to CO2 Change 

In this challenge to AGW, the skeptic presents a number of surface temperature and atmospheric CO2 changes over a decadal or multi-decadal time scale where no correlation is evident between the two time series. The case against AGW made by Howard Brady in the article “Are We Really in a New Climate Era” serves as an example. Bradypdf . Here the author argues as follows:  “The warming rate was 0.163ºC per decade in the 1860-80 period (CO2 levels rising 2.2 parts per million per decade), then 0.15ºC per decade in the period 1910-1940 (CO2 levels rising around 5 parts per million per decade) and then 0.161ºC per decade in the 1975-2009 period (CO2 levels rising around 15 parts per million per decade). That is, at a time scale of 20 to 30 years, observed decadal warming rates are: 0.163, 0.15, and 0.161 and the corresponding decadal atmospheric CO2 concentration changes in ppm are 2.2, 5.0, 15.0. The two time series are not correlated and therefore there can be no role for changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration in the determination of the rate of surface warming. There are two issues that nullify this argument. First, the change in CO2 forcing should be computed as the difference between the natural logarithms of the two atmospheric concentrations and not between the concentrations themselves; and Second, the 20 to 30-year time scale  is too short to test the claimed CO2 effect. The theory says it takes much longer to detect net of natural forcings. Also, other than the Lacis (2010) paper and various anomalous pronouncements by James Hansen [LINK] , climate science in general relies on a forcing portfolio such as CMIP5 that includes other factors in addition to CO2 forcing and these forcings portfolios work better at shorter time scales than CO2 forcing alone [LINK] .

 

 

Trends in Tropical Cyclones 

It is shown that no rising trend is found in the number of tropical cyclones in a selected cyclone basin. The absence of the trend is then claimed as evidence that the claim by climate science on the impact of AGW on tropical cyclones is false. As an example, in the Brady pdf document cited above, Bradypdf , it is reported that no trend is found in the number of tropical cyclones that formed in the South Pacific Cyclone Basin in the period 1970-2012 and that therefore the climate science claim about the effect of AGW climate change on tropical cyclones is proven false. This empirical test is flawed because climate science makes testable AGW impact claims only about the average of all six tropical cyclone basins and not about individual cyclone basins. Please see item 6 below. Skeptical arguments against climate science claims of the impact of AGW on tropical cyclones should be responsive to Knutson and not to arbitrary impacts that they made up. Specifically, in terms of the Brady paper, climate science does not claim that there will be trends in individual basins and it does not claim an increase in the frequency of tropical cyclones.

DETAILS OF THE KNUTSON PAPER:

(21): Knutson (2010). CITATION: Knutson, Thomas R., et al. “Tropical cyclones and climate change.” Nature geoscience 3.3 (2010): 157-163.  In the paper, Tom Knutson spells out exactly what climate science claims in terms of the impact of AGW climate change on tropical cyclones with climate model predictions of the effect of rising SST on tropical cyclones. His main points are as follows: (1) Globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones will rise as AGW increases SST.  Models predict globally averaged intensity increase of 2% to 11% by 2100. (2). Models predict falling globally averaged frequency of tropical cyclones with frequency decreasing 6%-34% by 2100. (3). The globally averaged frequency of “most intense tropical cyclones” should increase as a result of AGW. The intensity of tropical cyclones is measured as the ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy). (4). Models predict increase in precipitation within a 100 km radius of the storm center. A precipitation rise of 20% is projected for the year 2100. (5) Extremely high variance in tropical cyclone data at an annual time scale suggests longer, perhaps a decadal time scale which in turn greatly reduces statistical power. (6) Model projections for individual cyclone basins show large differences and conflicting results. Thus, no testable implication can be derived for studies of individual basins.

 

 

CORRELATION ANALYSIS AT 50-100 MILLION YEAR TIME SCALE ACROSS GLACIATION AND DEGLACIATION CYCLES AND MULTIPLE ICE AGES

1. The chart above plots a CO2 concentration time series (in blue) overlaid with a temperature time series (in green) over a time span of 600 million years and a time span of approx 50 million years. It is claimed that this chart demonstrates that atmospheric CO2 concentration and surface temperature are not correlated. It is further claimed that the visual absence of correlation in this chart proves that the theory of anthropogenic global warming of about 1C over a period of 100 years by way of rising atmospheric CO2 is not possible. This argument is flawed.
2. First, the correlation needed is not between CO2 concentration and temperature but that between the logarithm of CO2 concentration and temperature preferably with the other forcings normally used by climate science also included.
3. Second, the anthropogenic global warming being tested is begins and ends in an interglacial of the Quaternary Ice Age over a centennial time span and a decadal or perhaps multi-decadal time scale. The 600 million year chart shown above is not wholly inside an interglacial. It spans not only glaciation and interglacial cycles within the Quaternary ice age but in fact spans multiple ice ages going beyond the Quaternary to the Karoo and the Andean.
4. evidence against anthropogenic global warming in the Holocene since the Little Ice Age because no correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature is evident in the chart.
5. In the chart below we see that the time span of the correlation chart above spans three different ice ages – the Quarternary (where we are now) and the Karoo and Andean ice ages that came before it  {See Chart Below}.  Ice ages are periods of millions of years and often hundreds of millions of years during which the earth goes through cycles of glaciation and deglaciation. These cycles vary greatly from one ice age to the next in terms of the periodic and temperature characteristics.
6. A chart of paleo data on temperature and atmospheric CO2 that spans glaciation cycles across multiple ice ages over a period of hundreds of millions of years does not contain useful information for the behavior of temperature in a specific interglacial of the Quaternary Ice Age over a centennial time span.

THE ETCW ISSUE: EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY WARMING

The World’s first anthropogenic global warming paper was Callendar 1938 in which Guy Callendar reported to the Royal Society that during a time of coal burning and fossil fuel emissions in the period 1900 to 1938, atmospheric CO2, and surface temperature went up. He concluded from this finding without evidence that the these events were causally related – specifically that CO2 emissions from coal burning caused atmospheric CO2 to go up. Citing Tyndall and using a climate sensitivity of ECS=2 with atmospheric CO2 data from Eurpoean measurement records, he concluded that the warming in the mean of European temperaure readings 1900-1938 was thus explained by the fossil fuel emissions of the industrial economy and therefore human caused. However, in the modern version of AGW theory with ECS={1.5 to 3.5} and with Mauna Loa CO2 data does not accommodate the Callendar theory. The 1930s warming and the cooling that began in the 1940s are unresolved anomalies in climat science as described in the ETCW issue described by climate science. The frequently cited 1930s warming and 1940s cooling by skeptics as evidence against the theory of AGW overlooks these details in AGW theory.

Details in a related post on the ETCW: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/10/09/the-etcw-issue-in-climate-science/

No warming found at decadal time scales:

In a related post we show that steady and statistically signigficant long term warming trends at time scales longer than 30 years consist of a wide variety of decadal trends that include warming, cooling, and no trend. LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/01/11/global-warming-dec2020/ . These data imply that a decade has been found that had no warming or that showed cooling does not in itself provide evidence against global warming. In addition, the use of the decadal time scale violates the internal climate variability principle in climate science explained in another related post: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/07/16/the-internal-variability-issue/

HUMAN CIVILIZATION IS A CREATION OF THE HOLOCENE, THE CURRENT INTERGLACIAL PERIOD THAT HAS GONE THROUGH VISCIOUS CHAOTIC CYCLES OF WARMING AND COOLING DESCRIBED IN A RELATED POST: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/06/11/chaoticholocene/ .

OUR CIVILIZATION AROSE IN THE FIRST AND GRANDEST OF THE WARM PERIODS 8,000 YEARS AGO KNOWN AS THE HOLOCENE CLIMATE OPTIMUM: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/20/the-holocene-optimum-period-a-bibliography/ when wild animal-like humans came out of their caves into the nice warm weather and began to farm and build homes, a change that gave rise to the Neolithic Revolution and thereby to society, culture, trading, innovation, and human civilization.

However, as noted in a related post: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/10/24/collapse-of-civilization-part-2/ the chaotic cycles of warming and cooling in the Holocene corresponds with equally chaotic cycles in the rise and fall of human civilization. The most recent and the most horrific of these collapse of civilization events is the Late Bronze Age Collapse (LBAC) described in a related post: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/16/collapse/ .

There we note that religions prior to the LBAC do not contain a Judgement Day “end of the world” of any kind. However, religions that got started in the Early Iron Age right after the Dark Ages of the LBAC do contain a catastrophic end of the world of some kind as described in Matthew 24 where the LBAC events are described in chilling detail. It is likely that the existence of doomology in our time in the form of an obsession with collapse of civilization similar to the LBAC, but framed in terms of current events such as the industrial economy, climate change, or population growth, may derive from a distant genetic memory of the LBAC. It is likely that modern iron age humans carry a doomsday gene that creates the genetic memory of the LBAC.

[LIST OF POSTS ON THIS SITE]

HERE WE DESCRIBE OUR OBSESSION WITH END OF THE WORLD BY CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE CONTEXT OF OUR LONG HISTORY OF AN OBSESSION WITH THE END OF TIMES

1. Sixth Mass Extinction: A Sixth mass extinction could destroy life as we know it. Alarming declines in the number of insects, vertebrates and plant species around the world have raised fears that we are in the midst of a sixth major extinction that could cause a collapse of the natural ecosystems we rely upon to survive. Urgent international action is needed to halt this potentially catastrophic decline in biodiversity, according to Professor Georgina Mace, head of the Centre for Biodiversity and Environmental Research at University College London, UK. While Prof. Mace believes that we’re only on the brink of this extinction, she says the threat is so severe that biodiversity loss needs to be addressed on a global scale in a similar way to climate change. The evidence from all of the recent studies … indicates it is increasing. We’re losing biodiversity more quickly than we did in the past. ‘If you look at extinction rates, which is hard because you need to be sure something is really extinct, they are probably 100-1,000 times higher than in pre-human times. ‘Another way of measuring (biodiversity) is to look at the abundance of life rather than numbers of species. For vertebrates (birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals) there is a fairly good estimate that more than 50% of the vertebrate abundance has been lost in the past 50 years. The information for invertebrates and plants is less good, but there is some evidence to suggest insects are declining just as quickly, if not more so. One recent paper showed the mass of insects is falling by 2.5% a year. For methodological reasons, this is likely to be an over-estimate, but there can be little doubt that certain insect groups are undergoing very significant declines. ‘Then we are also losing the interactions between these species.’ [LINK]
2. Sixth mass extinction is here. There is no longer any doubt: We are entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity’s existence. That is the bad news at the center of a new study by a group of scientists including Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Ehrlich and his co-authors call for fast action to conserve threatened species, populations and habitat, but warn that the window of opportunity is rapidly closing. “[The study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event,” Ehrlich said. Although most well known for his positions on human population, Ehrlich has done extensive work on extinctions going back to his 1981 book, Extinction: The Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species. He has long tied his work on coevolution, on racial, gender and economic justice, and on nuclear winter with the issue of wildlife populations and species loss. There is general agreement among scientists that extinction rates have reached levels unparalleled since the dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago. However, some have challenged the theory, believing earlier estimates rested on assumptions that overestimated the crisis. [LINK]
3. A Cosmic Climate Change Scenario: Alien apocalypse: Can any civilization make it through climate change? [LINK] :  Every civilization that may have arisen in the cosmos lasts only a few centuries before it falls to the inevitable climate change that civilization triggers. Astrobiology is the study of life and its possibilities in a planetary context including ‘exo-civilizations’ or what we usually call aliens. Discussions about climate change rarely take place in this broader context — one that considers the probability that this is not the first time in cosmic history that a planet and its biosphere have evolved into something like what we’ve created on Earth. If we’re not the universe’s first civilization that means there are likely to be rules for how the fate of a young civilization like our own progresses. As a civilization’s population grows, it uses more and more of its planet’s resources. By consuming the planet’s resources, the civilization changes the planet’s conditions. In short, civilizations and planets don’t evolve separately from one another; they evolve interdependently, and the fate of our own civilization depends on how we use Earth’s resources. In order to illustrate how civilization-planet systems co-evolve, Frank and his collaborators developed a mathematical model to show ways in which a technologically advanced population and its planet might develop together. By thinking of civilizations and planets — even alien ones — as a whole, researchers can better predict what might be required for the human project of civilization to survive. The point is to recognize that driving climate change may be something generic. The laws of physics demand that any young population, building an energy-intensive civilization like ours, is going to have feedback on its planet. Seeing climate change in this cosmic context may give us better insight into what’s happening to us now and how to deal with it.
4. Sir David Attenborough believes we are ­running out of time to save the planet unless urgent action is taken to tackle the global warming he fears is destroying Earth. In his starkest warning yet about our future existence, the veteran broadcaster has joined other experts in calling for an end to the use of fossil fuels that pump choking carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. We have pumped so much carbon dioxide into our atmosphere that our world is now 1C hotter than it was in pre-industrial times. “Climate change can wipe out an entire species, 8% of species are now at threat of extinction solely due to climate change. “With the loss of even the smallest organisms we destabilise and risk collapsing the world’s ecosystems, the networks that support the whole of life on Earth. “We stand at a unique point in our planet’s history. One where we must all share ­responsibility for the future of life on Earth. We are running out of time but there is still hope. If we better understand the threat we face, the more likely it is we can avoid such a catastrophic future. Former director at the NASA Goddard ­Institute for Space Studies, Dr James Hansen, warned about climate change dangers in 1988. But he says leaders ignored the evidence and precious time was lost. Dr Hansen adds: “It would’ve been easy to solve the problem if we started to make fossil fuels more expensive and develop ­technologies to replace them. The graceful polar bear is one of the thousands of species which faces extinction thanks to careless regard for the environment. But we didn’t do that. And now there are consequences. It is an uphill battle today, with US president Donald Trump dismissing global warming as “a hoax”. Harvard professor of science Naomi Oreskes says: “Organisations who had the most to lose were fossil fuel companies, making huge profits. They undertook a concerted campaign to confuse the science and message. The cycle of denial has worked. And even today, the US president has said [climate change] is not true. One of the most obvious places climate change is taking hold is at the poles, where ice is melting at an alarming rate and threatening the existence of wildlife such as polar bears. University of Leeds climate scientist Professor Andrew ­Shepherd says: “It’s too much for Earth’s ice to withstand. Things are worse than we’d expected. The Greenland ice sheet has lost four trillion tons of ice and it’s losing five times as much ice today as it was 25 years ago. Last year UN experts gave us 12 years to stop a climate change ­catastrophe. At the current rate the planet would heat up 1.5C by 2040. Any hotter would bring bad storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts. [DAILY MIRROR]  
5. THE FIVE WAYS THE HUMAN RACE COULD BE WIPED OUT BY GLOBAL WARMING: The deadly possible effects of global warming have been laid bare in a new book that reveals how disease, starvation and rising tides could kill off human beings. ‘FALTER: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?’ lists the lethal, and unexpected, ways that humans could become extinct – within a few generations Melting ice caps could bring back disease locked in permafrost – killing swathes of people. Natural disasters could be triggered by collapsing ice caps – with 65ft waves wiping out any coastal life in its path – repeating what happened 8,000 years ago Cereal crops – the cornerstone of human sustenance – could dry out because of global warming with plants unable to grow in parched new lands.
6. THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH: Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak sooner than you think. By David Wallace-Wells. It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough. Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century. The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.
7. George Monbiot video (above): Climate change is eating the planet. We have to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it to save the planet from climate breakdown and ecological breakdown.
8. Climate Change Can Lead To The Extinction Of 50% Of The Animal And Plant Species By The End Of The Century. March 16, 2018 ·
9. The end of coffee: As temperatures rise and droughts intensify, good coffee will become increasingly difficult to grow and expensive to buy.  TIME Magazine, June 21, 2018.
10. “The scientists are unanimous on this. We have no more than 12 years to take incredibly bold action on this crisis,” O’Rourke said. “Can we make it? I don’t know. It’s up to every one of us. Do you want to make it?”  Posted Mar 15, 2019 by Michael L. Brown
11. The End of the World Is Coming, and You Are Responsible. New climate-change narratives ordain humans with godly powers to undo and repair the planet. Is it science, or a new religion? By Sean Cooper
12. ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,’ Ocasio-Cortez says.
13. It is absolutely time to panic about climate change. Author David Wallace-Wells on the dystopian hellscape that awaits us. “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” That was was the first line of David Wallace-Wells’s horrifying 2017 essay in New York magazine about climate change. It was an attempt to paint a very real picture of our not-too-distant future, a future filled with famines, political chaos, economic collapse, fierce resource competition, and a sun that cooks us.
14. It’s The End of the World, Again: Climate Change and The Collapse of Civilizations. Anthropogenic, or human-induced, climate change and the growing crisis caused by our dependence on unsustainable energy practices should be focal points for any discussion about the future for our species.The man-made climate change crisis we face today is similar in scale to many natural climactic events that led to the fall of our mightiest civilizations. From the dawn of man, how we deal with climate change and utilize our resources has always defined our history and it will define our future.
15. The Problem With Putting a Price on the End of the World: Economists have workable policy ideas for addressing climate change. But what if they’re politically impossible? Climate change is a threat like no other. Fatal heat waves, droughts, wildfires and severe hurricanes are all becoming more common, and they are almost certain to accelerate. Avoiding horrific damage, as a United Nations panel of scientists recently concluded, will require changes in human behavior that have “no documented historic precedent.”
16. The majority of C02 emitted from burning a single tonne of coal or oil today will be absorbed over a few centuries by the oceans and vegetation, the remaining 25% will still be affecting the climate in 1,000 years. It will then require thousands and thousands more years for its complete absorption through the natural climate cycle. As Archer puts it, “the climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel C02 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge, longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste”.
17. The Copenhagen Diagnosis: According to THE Copenhagen Diagnosis, regardless of when a peak in global emissions finally occurs, the global temperature cannot be expected to stop rising until several centuries later, due to the extremely long life cycle of C02. The carbon that we are releasing into the atmosphere today is in the process of ‘programming’ a potential 2-5 meters of sea level rise by around the year 2300 and “even a thousand years after reaching a zero-emission society, temperatures will remain elevated.
18. Proof that climate change causes collapse of civilizations:  Vikings arrived and thrived in Greenland during the medieval warm period and when the Little Ice Age began in the early 14th century, it became increasingly difficult to farm. By the middle of the 16th century, the changing climate had contributed to the collapse of the Viking civilization on Greenland.
19. Proof that climate change causes collapse of civilizations: Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, was home to the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires. Summers in Ancient Mesopotamia were hot and dry while winters were cooler and wetter with rainfall sufficient enough to allow for rich agricultural economy. Climate changes gradually reduced rainfall and caused the collapse of civilization in Mesopotamia.
20. Proof that climate change causes collapse of civilizations:  The Khmer Empire flourished between 802- 1431 CE. Its capital of Angkor Wat was one of the most ancient hydraulic cities, with a sophisticated system for irrigation to ensure optimal water reserves for the population’s growing needs. In the 14th and 15th centuries, climate change caused decades of severe drought struck, interspersed with violent monsoon floods, bringing about political and social unrest which eventually led to the collapse of the Khmer civilization.
21. Proof that climate change causes collapse of civilizations:  Classic Maya civilization city states flourished during the classical period, starting in the 4th century CE. Between 660 and 900 CE, a drying trend led to agricultural decline, increased warfare, and less trade. A drought lasting between 1020- 1100 CE occurred in the midst of the population collapse, which marked the definitive end of the Classic Mayan culture and a collapse of the Mayan civilization.
22. Proof that climate change causes collapse of civilizations:  The Indus Valley Civilization existed between 3300-1700 BCE, developed sophisticated infrastructure and urban planning, and the population is estimated to have reached over 5 million. A 200-year drought that began around 2000 BCE made agriculture unsustainable, and cities were gradually abandoned.The civilisations affected could not anticipate the change in their natural environment.
23. The global nature of the climate change risk we face today bodes ill for humanity. If our civilisation collapses on this planet, there is currently no alternative location where humanity may thrive. However, scientific and technological developments have made us more aware both of the risk we face, and of our influence on it. As a result, for the first time in history, we are in a position to reduce and possibly avoid the risk of civilisation collapse due to climate change. Global governance is a process of cooperative leadership that brings together national governments, multilateral public agencies, and civil society to achieve commonly accepted goals. It provides strategic direction to address global challenges.
24. Related post on the collapse of civilizations:  COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATIONS

A HUMAN OBSESSION WITH THE END OF THE WORLD THAT PREDATES THE CLIMATE CHANGE ALARM OF OUR TIME

1. In the context of the current alarm about catastrophic climate change that may end this civilization (“Alien apocalypse: Can any civilization make it through climate change?, University of Rochester, 2018, in Science Daily, LINK TO FULL TEXT ), it is noted that religions prior to the Late Bronze Age Collapse (LBAC) do not contain a Judgement Day “end of the world” scenario but religions that got started in the early Iron Age right after the Dark Ages of the LBAC do contain an end of the world of some kind. It is likely that our obsession with the end of the world scenario, now in the form of human caused climate change with fossil fuel emissions, is a distant genetic memory of the LBAC. It may be a form of mental disorder that has afflicted some more than others.
2. Moral decay in society is interpreted as the end of the world. Assyrian clay tablet dating to approximately 2800 BC: “Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.”
3. Romans feared that the city would be destroyed in the 120th year of its founding. There was a myth that 12 eagles had revealed to Romulus a mystical number representing the lifetime of Rome, and some early Romans hypothesized that each eagle represented 10 years. So they expected Rome to be destroyed around 365 AUC (389 BC)
4. How it Ends: The Ancient Roots of Doomsday Prophecies and End of the World Beliefs: Hollywood’s obsession with the End of Times is not over yet – Armageddon, Deep Impact, Doomsday, Legion, Thor: Ragnarok and 28 Days Later, are just a few of the blockbusters, out of hundreds, that deal with mankind’s demise. And now, yet another apocalyptic film is set to be released. ‘ How it Ends ’ imagines how a sudden societal collapse could occur in the modern U.S. as a result of a geological apocalypse. But man’s obsession with the end of the world is not a new one. Doomsday prophecies are as old as recorded time. For as long as humans have existed, there has been a fear of an apocalypse or ‘end of times’, when the gods wish vengeance upon their people, when humans pay for the sins of their fathers and forefathers, and when the demons of the world rise up and devour all that is good. Prophecies of the end of times stem from the mythologies of civilizations past: the Norse story of Ragnarök, the tale of Noah and the Flood, and the Biblical apocalypse. Though these civilizations are all thousands of years in the past, the same fear that drove them to make these myths—the fear of the unknown—continues to haunt the human race today. [SOURCE]
5. In ancient Egypt, within 200 years of the Queen Mother’s death, the Nile no longer flooded and drought consumed the kingdom. This contributed to the disintegration of the era of the pyramid builders. Without floods, there were no good harvests. The find is both a historical echo and a warning. You can find many paths to our modern world, which is also facing many internal and external challenges,” he argues. “By studying the past you can learn much more about the present. We’re not different. People always think ‘this time it’s different,’ and that ‘we’re different’. We are not. So are we too on the brink of disaster? It’s possible, says Barta. But with the findings, and hopefully the lessons we can learn from Khentkaus’ tomb, he hopes we can take another path. “If we accept collapse as a fact, we will understand collapses as being a part of the natural course of things, and one of the needed steps in the process leading towards ‘resurrection,'” he argues. “Then, we shall be able to do something about it.”
6. Catastrophic events are about to unfold on the world scene, and the international stage has now been fully set for them to occur. people and nations are complacent, mainly asleep, or willingly ignorant of what is now taking place. Instead, they are selfishly focused inwardly upon their own special interests and protectionism as the world is plunged into a third world war. We are literally at the point where a great implosion in the stock market, commodities, banking, and currencies is about to plunge us into a full-scale global economic collapse that will push the nations into WWIII. Massive thermonuclear destruction is about to become a reality!
7. Futurist John Smart of Acceleration Watch estimates that a technological singularity will take place around the year 2040, when technological advancement reaches asymptotic levels. It will be an apocalyptic event.
8. Pyramidologist Max Toth predicts the physical reincarnation of Jesus Christ occurring in 2040. Like other pyramidologists, he used the dimensions of the Great Pyramid’s passageways to predict future events.
9. In her book The Call to Glory, psychic Jeane Dixon says that 2020-2037 or thereabouts is when we will see the Second Coming of Christ. The Battle of Armageddon will take place in 2020.
10. The Raëlians are working hard to establish an embassy in Jerusalem in anticipation of the 2035 arrival of aliens called “elohim“, who will usher in a New Age.
11. According to an article published in Science magazine in 1960, 2026 is the year that the world’s population will reach infinity, a result of the doomsday equation. It will be the end of humanity and the end of the world.
12. Ian Gurney predicts in his book The Cassandra Prophecy – Armageddon Approaches that the “final date, Judgement Day, the end of mankind’s time on this planet, is less than twenty two years away” from 2001, which means that the world will end in 2023 long before the climate change end year of 2030.
13. According to the Sword of God Brotherhood the “dying time” will come in 2017, and only members of the cult will survive. Everyone else will “perish in hellfire.”
14. In 1143, St. Malachy prophesied that there would only be 112 more popes left before the end of the world. This timetable implies that the world will end in the early 21st century.
15. Dec 23, 2012 is the endpoint of the ancient Mayan calendar. Some interpret it to signify the end of the world. There’s no direct evidence the Mayans themselves believed this to be true.
16. The world ended on Dec 21, 2012 according to Terence McKenna who combines Mayan chronology with a New Age science called Novelty Theory to conclude that the collision of an asteroid or some “trans-dimensional object” with the Earth, or alien contact, or a solar explosion, or the transformation of the Milky Way into a quasar, or some other “ultranovel” event will occur on this day.
17. The world ended on Dec 31, 2011. In an interesting parallel to the Harmonic Convergence concept, Solara Antara Amaa-ra, leader of the “11:11 Doorway” movement, claims that there’s a “doorway of opportunity” lasting from January 11, 1992 to December 31, 2011 in which humanity is given the final chance to rid itself of evil and attain a higher level of consciousness, or doom will strike.
18. The world ended on May 21, 2011 according to Harold Camping, whose rapture predictions failed in 1994 and 1995. His prediction attracted major publicity. “The Bible Guarantees It”, the billboards proclaimed, and thousands of people around the world believed it.
19. According to Taiwanese prophet “Professor Wang” Taiwan was destroyed in a 14.0 earthquake in 2011, triggering a tsunami that killed millions of people. By the way 2011 is also a date for the end of the world by its entry into the photon belt. “The Photon Belt is a spiritual belief, largely linked to some parts of the New Age Movement that postulates that a belt or ring of photons is going to envelop the Earth, causing a cataclysm and/or initiating a spiritual transition, with the time period leading up to “the Shift” referred to as “The Quickening.” The concept of the photon belt also ties into various phenomena including belief in extraterrestrial intelligence and 2012 millenarianism” (Wikipedia).
20. The earth ended in 2009 According to Earth changes prophetess Lori Adaile Toye of the I AM America Foundation, a series of Earth changes beginning in 1992 and ending in 2009 will cause much of the world to be submerged, and only 1/3 of America’s population will survive. You can even order a map of the flooded USA from her website!
21. The world ended on Mar 21, 2008 according to the Lord’s Witnesses who used numerology to demonstrate that “the end of the world is 2008 March 21st.” They also claim that the United Nations will take over the world between March 26 and April 24, 2001, and afterward nobody will be able to buy or sell without the Mark of the Beast!
22. The world ended in 2007 according to Pat Robertson in his book The New Millennium; and also according to Aug Thomas Chase uses Bible prophecy, numerology, Y2K, Bible codes, astrology, Cassini paranoia, Antichrist speculation, news events, New Age mysticism, the shapes of countries, and Hale-Bopp to show that Armageddon will happen around the year 2007. This year is also the choice for the end of the world by Marilyn J. Agee who said that an asteroid will hit the Earth to end it.
23. The world ended in 2006 in a nuclear war holocaust started by Syria according to Michael Drosnin in his book The Bible Codes (O’Shea p. 178). Here’s an excerpt from Drosnin’s book: “I checked ‘World War’ and ‘atomic holocaust’ against all three ways to write each Hebrew year for the next 120 years. Out of 360 possible matches for each of the two expressions, only two years matched both – 5760 and 5766, in the modern calendar the years 2000 and 2006. Rips later checked the statistics for the matches of ‘World War’ and ‘atomic holocaust’ with those two years and agreed that the results were ‘exceptional.'”
    The British cult The Family believes the end will come in 2006.
24. In the Christian tradition, the number 666 is described as the “mark of the beast”. In the year 1665 a plague wiped out a fifth of London’s population, leading many to predict the end of times and then in September 1666, a fire broke out in London. It spread and burned for three days destroying 13,000 buildings and tens of thousands of homes. It was thought to be the end of the world.
25. The Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society is a spiritual group now known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. The society’s founder, Charles Taze Russell, had previously predicted Christ’s invisible return in 1874, followed by anticipation of his Second Coming in 1914. When WW I broke out that year, Russell interpreted it as a sign of armageddon and the upcoming end of days or “the end of “Gentile times.”
26. BRANCH DRAVIDIANS: In 1993 David Koresh led his Branch Davidian sect to its doom in a compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993. He convinced his followers that he was Christ and that they should hole up at what was called the Mount Carmel Center to prepare for the end of the world. When authorities learned that the Branch Davidians were allegedly holding a trove of weapons on the site and that there were possibly instances of abuse of women and children, they executed a search on the compound in February 1993. The Davidians fought back; four agents and six members of the sect were killed. Koresh persuaded his followers to remain at Mount Carmel and refuse to surrender. For 50 days, a tense standoff ensued. On April 19, the FBI stormed the compound, a fire erupted, and dozens of Davidians, including Koresh, died in the building.
27. Y2K: It was the day that was supposed to finally prove what Luddites and other tech haters had been saying for so long: computers — not sin or religious prophecy come true — will bring us down. For months before the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, analysts speculated that entire computer networks would crash, causing widespread dysfunction for a global population that had become irreversibly dependent on computers to hold, disseminate and analyze its most vital pieces of information. The problem was that many computers had been programmed to record dates using only the last two digits of every year, meaning that the year 2000 would register as the year 1900, totally screwing with the collective computerized mind.
28. Late Great Planet Earth: Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, which was the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s, predicted that the world would end sometime before Dec. 31, 1988. He cited a host of world events — nuclear war, the communist threat and the restoration of Israel — as reasons the end times were upon mankind. His later books, though less specific, suggested that believers not plan on being on Earth past the 1980s — then the 1990s and, of course, the 2000s. Edgar Whisenant published a book in 1988 called 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988, which sold some 4.5 million copies. In 1989 Whisenant published another book, saying the Rapture would occur that year instead. The genre’s most popular tales are in the Left Behind series, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, which provide a vivid fictional account of how Earth’s final days could go.
29. The Anabaptists of Munster: The Anabaptists derived their name from the Latin for “one who baptizes over again”. In the 1530s, some Anabaptists assumed control of the German town of Munster and hailed it as a New Jerusalem awaiting the return of Christ. But the situation in Munster was far from the ideal Christian commonwealth. Jan Bockelson, a tailor from the Dutch city of Leiden, declared himself the “Messiah of the last days,” took multiple wives, issued coins that prophesied the coming apocalypse and in general made life hell for everyone in the city. The Anabaptists’ hold over Munster ended in a bloody siege in 1535.
30. William Branham and the Pentecostal Prediction: Just before sunset on Feb. 28, 1963, residents of northwestern Arizona watched what the Arizona Republic called a “strikingly beautiful and mysterious cloud” glide across the desert. That same day, Pentecostal pastor William Branham who founded the post World War II faith healing movement, climbed Sunset Mountain and claimed he met with seven angels who revealed to him the meaning of the seven seals from the Book of Revelation. Days later, he preached seven sermons in seven nights, explaining the meaning of the seals and the seven visions he had received, leading him to predict that Jesus would return to Earth in 1977.
31. A New Age belief cites 2012 as the year humans will undergo a physical and spiritual transformation, while some people predict that sometime that year, Earth will collide with a black hole or a planet named Nibiru. The most popular belief is attributed to the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar from the ancient Mayan civilization. Interpretations suggest that the fourth world, in which we live now, will end on Dec. 21, 2012. This belief inspired the disaster movie 2012.
32. Harold Camping’s prediction that the world will end Saturday, May 21, 2011, is not his first such prediction. In 1992, the evangelist published a book called 1994?, which proclaimed that sometime in mid-September 1994, Christ would return and the world would end. Camping based his calculations on numbers and dates found in the Bible and, at the time, said that he was “99.9% certain” (high confidence) that his math was correct.
33. The Millerites: In the 1840s William Miller began to preach about the world’s end, saying Jesus Christ would return for the long-awaited Second Coming and that Earth would be engulfed in fire sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. He circulated his message in public gatherings and with posters, printed newsletters and charts. Moved by those messages, as many as 100,000 “Millerites” sold their belongings between 1840 and 1844 and took to the mountains to wait for the end. When that end didn’t come, Miller changed the date to Oct. 22. When Oct. 23 rolled around, his loyal followers explained it away yet again and went on to form the Seventh-day Adventist movement.
34. According to the Talmud in mainstream Orthodox Judaism, the Messiah will come within 6000 years of the creation of Adam, and the world may be destroyed 1000 years later. This would put the beginning of the period of desolation in 2239 and the end of the period of desolation in 3239.
35. Ronald Weinland, who previously predicted the world would end in 2011, 2012, and then 2013, predicted in 2018 that Jesus would return on June 9, 2019 and set that date as the end of the world.
36. Jeane Dixon predicted that Armageddon would take place in 2020. She has previously predicted that the world would end on February 4, 1962.
37. F. Kenton Beshore, a pastor, says the world will end in 2021. He bases his prediction on the prior suggestion that Jesus would return in 1988, i.e., within one biblical generation (40 years) of the founding of Israel in 1948. Beshore argues that the prediction was correct, but that the definition of a biblical generation was incorrect and was actually 70–80 years, placing the second coming of Jesus between 2018 and 2028 and the rapture by 2021.
38. The Messiah Foundation International predicts that the world will end in 2026, when an asteroid collides with Earth in accordance with Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi’s predictions in his book The Religion of God.
39. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church predicted the Kingdom of Heaven would be established in the year 2000. Sun Myung Moon was a Korean religious leader and a messiah claimant. He was the founder of the Unification movement (members of which considered him and his wife Hak Ja Han to be their “True Parents”) and of its widely noted “Blessing” or mass wedding ceremony, and the author of its unique theology the Divine Principle.   

SOURCES: [ABHOTA] [TIME] [WIKIPEDIA] 

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