David Evans Recants

This article out on the clear lack of any linkage between CO2 and global warming can hardly be starker. David Evans direct involvement in the science and data gathering around the global warming – CO2 hypothesis put him in the position of been an informed apologist for the theory. Thus his recanting any support for the position is very important. It is always difficult to pry oneself loose from a position that you have loyally supported in good faith. It was surely difficult for him.

Again, shifting global temperatures and rising CO2 is not disputed. The idea that they are linked is in question as I have always maintained in this blog.

What this article adds that I find new is that a CO2 causation hypothesis as with any other hypothesis must have a hotspot that is a direct result of the predicted behavior. As he makes very clear, that signal is completely missing.

This does not take away from the fact that the environment has failed to suck up all the CO2 that we have produced or that responsible husbandry means that we do something about it. Which over the next generation we certainly can.

The globe, and let us be a little more precise and say the northern hemisphere, has warmed about a half degree to a degree over the last one hundred years. Our unreliability over land measurements creates an error range that could even account for this apparent gain.

The only fact that we can be sure does not simply fit inside the historical range of conditions over the two hundred years, is that the severe cold of the little ice age has now fully abated. Growing grapes in England is surely once again an option and once the permafrost is gone in Greenland, the dairy industry can restart.
The loss of perennial sea ice fits this scenario very nicely.

In the meantime our satellites have observed a recent temperature drop of .6 degrees. They had observed a modest rise since they began back in 1979. This will be worth monitoring over the next year to see how responsive it really is and how sustained this drop is.

I do not want to sound suspicious, but one of the most insidious problems with computer supported continuous data gathering is that baseline algorithms that are updated without independent correction systems can accumulate rounding errors. This usually leads to a positive or negative trend line that eventually leads to a recalculation and an abrupt reset.

Of course I do not have the data to look at, so we have assumed this abrupt change is real. Is it sustainable? Why is such an abrupt change possible? Where did the heat go?

The only thing that we can be sure of this year is that the perennial sea ice is continuing its collapse. The press is now starting to call it a death spiral which it is. Unless that purported .6 degree temperature decline turns into a three to four degree drop in the Arctic, there is nothing to halt this trend. We shall see.

I had thought that the historical land temperature work up had been largely settled, including the urban island problem. However, we have already had recent corrections that put the current regime on a par with the 1930’s. He does reopen the issue and I would like to see more on it. A corrective fudge factor could produce a lot of error all by itself.

Why I recanted

'There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming'
David Evans, Financial Post Published: Saturday, August 30, 2008

I devoted six years to carbon accounting when I built models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I've been following the global warming debate closely for years.
When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas; the old ice core data; no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon governments and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999, new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most intensely. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. If we had found the greenhouse signature then I would be an alarmist again.

When the signature was found to be missing in 2007 (after the latest IPCC report), alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hot spot was there but had gone undetected. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answer, so statistically it is not possible that they missed the hot spot.

Recently the alarmists have suggested we ignore the radiosonde thermometers, but instead take the radiosonde wind measurements, apply a theory about wind shear, and run the results through their computers to estimate the temperatures. They then say that the results show that we cannot rule out the presence of a hot spot. If you believe that you'd believe anything.

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6 degrees Celsius in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the "urban heat island" effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses.

Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context, our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician's assertion.

Until now, the global warming debate has merely been an academic matter of little interest. Now that it matters, we should debate the causes of global warming.

So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.

In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn't noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.

If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don't you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now?

The world has spent $50-billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

What is going to happen over the next decade as global temperatures continue not to rise? The Australian Labor government is about to deliberately wreck the economy in order to reduce carbon emissions. If the reasons later turn out to be bogus, the electorate is not going to re-elect a Labor government for a long time. When it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid for not having seen through it. And if the Liberals support the general thrust of their actions, they will be seen likewise.

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy. - David Evans was a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005.

Linking corn culture and pine beetles

As readers know, I have never been comfortable about the proposed link between global warming and excessive CO2 emissions. Both are measurable facts and their existence is indisputable. But as a thinker who loves rigor, I find it unnecessary to link them to explain the present climatic environment. I also sense a very real danger that the linkage will lead to a global policy misstep when global industrial economy needs very specific issues to be aggressively addressed. Of course, if we can get the right thing done for the wrong reasons, who am I to complain. I am more worried about the wrong thing for the wrong reason.

In our earlier posts, we have extensively developed the thesis that the adoption of terra preta corn culture globally will not only sequester all the excess carbon but also manufacture high quality soil in a previously unanticipated span of time. We can expect a ton of carbon per acre per year of uptake which is at least ten to a hundred times the rate of any alternative. Farmers have never had this option, and it is actually a revolution.

Even if we do nothing else particularly clever, that alone will bail our sorry asses out without anyone else lifting a finger. After all, manufacturing high quality soil will have an immediate and direct effect on farm income.

And yes girls, the climate is now apparently at its warmest since just before the Little Ice Age and since the Bronze age. That is the problem. We know for sure that this is not an unique anomalous event and does not have to be linked to anything.

In my province, the advent of a warmer climate has triggered a mass die off of the interior pine forest as the mountain pine beetle population takes off. It will all run out in about ten years and fall back to normal as new trees fill the niche. In the meantime, we are harvesting as much as possible. And if we are really clever, we will burn off what we cannot harvest to stimulate good new growth without a lot of fire wood lying around.

More importantly it is even much warmer in the high latitudes. I saw last night a report on a chap who has been measuring the temperature regime on the Greenland icecap. In a period of perhaps thirty years , he has found an increase of around five degrees Celsius. I do not want to comment on what that will actually mean and what is happening on the entirety of the icecap. It is far too easy to be on the edge were things are going quite fast, while inland at higher elevations very little is changing.

The true question to ask is, what is happening at the location of the ice cores. Likely nothing, since these areas were chosen for their accumulation ability.

Certainly we can expect the southern edges of the icecap to retreat exposing more land. I think though that that will be essentially it. It also will take hundreds of years to properly stabilize if our current temperature regime is maintained.

And I still keep wondering what triggers a major injection of cold water into the South Atlantic.

Heat Distribution and Terra Preta soils

As could be expected, we are now seeing a range of tests been done in the creation of terra preta. this is generating discussion on the terra preta web site that you can link to from here. Most of these tests, so far are using some form of commercial charcoal as would be expected.

In earlier posts, I have described the corn stover protocol that I suggest was used as the only practical means available to the populations. What I have not discussed are some of the likely derivative benefits of the approach.

The most important characteristic of corn stover is that it will produce a fine grained product. There will be almost no lumps to breakdown, although there will be remnant roasted plant fiber that will be slowly degraded by bacteria in the soil.

The covering of dirt maintained while the stack is burning is still porus to air. This permits a steady supply of oxygen to the burn but at a low level. We anticipate that the average temperature will be around 380 to 400 degrees. This is hot enough to drive off the volitiles and char most of the carbon. It is not hot enough to do more to the stover than properly carbonize most of it.

However for the stack to reach a general average of 400 degrees, the volitiles must burn at much higher temperatures. That means that we will have a distribution of high temperature carbon products within the stack that will include high temperature activated charcoal. This is one of the benefits of the stack method that is hard to replicate in a carbonizing device were one gets a little too efficient.

I know that the agricultural carbonizer design that I posted on earlier posts separates the volatiles and burns them at 2000 dgrees before throwing the heat back into the fuel to produce more volatiles. More direct combustion within the fuel may well be called for.

I think that we need to sample the production of dirt covered burn stacks and measure not just the carbon output but the distribution of types by size and if possble, activity. then we can use better production methods and blending to match the terra preta profile.

Pleistocene Nonconformity - 5 - Crustal slipperiness

We now tackle the question of how the crust might be able to move at all. Recall that it was this objection more that anything else that doomed Wegener's hypothesis to obscurity for decades. Our evidence for a crustal shift is similar to his evidence for continental drift. That is, it is obvious to any school boy looking at a globe and following up on a little deduction once the key idea is picked up on.

Crustal slipperiness

The recognition of the reality of plate tectonics is one of the great triumphs of modern earth science. It has created order out of geological chaos and has hugely informed our understanding of all geological processes. In particular, mountain building can be seen as momentum discharge as one crustal plate crashes into another.

The catch is that the movement of the plates, which is measurable and ongoing, represents a serious energy puzzle. Practically, if we reasonably assume that the affected crust is approximately one hundred miles thick, then a one hundred mile wide section, lifted about one vertical mile by underlying fluid pressure and continuously replaced, generates enough force to push a one hundred mile thick plate continuously. Obviously, this could only happen if the underlying friction is negligible. Certainly global hydrostatic energy transmission is inferred and we can additionally infer movement along a low-viscosity fluidic boundary layer in the direction of plate travel. This is still not good enough since crustal integrity will generate overlaps into areas of counter flow. We quickly return to a situation in which it would be nice to see low friction along the crustal slip plane.

That we are dealing with a slip plane is nicely demonstrated by the passing of the Pacific plate over the apparent Hawaiian hot spot. I observe that if the Pleistocene crustal movement hypothesis is correct, then this particular hot spot has been shifted and will take a massive amount of time to re emerge. In the meantime the molten zones developed beneath the main island will continue to expel material. The vast majority of geologically active zones including plate consumption are contained within the crust and these are simply carried along by any crustal movement. The hot spot is an exception.

The absolute need for low viscosity is apparent. We observe that the deepest rocks we encounter on the surface are the Kimberlites, which rocket to the surface from the one hundred-mile depth associated with the deepest basement of the crust. The implied speed of travel of an estimated seventy-five miles per hour infers remarkable fluidity. More importantly, the source temperature and pressure eliminates all but the most chemically bound compounds. In other words, there is no water or other gases migrating to higher levels in the crust.

Perhaps we should take our cue from the Kimberlites, which are the primary host for diamonds. The diamonds precipitate out from pure carbon within the Kimberlites as they rocket to the surface. What is often forgotten is that the Kimberlites are rapidly shedding carbon all the way to the surface. This implies that the rock began as a fluid supersaturated in carbon. The fact that diamond crystals are formed at all presupposes a supersaturated solution. My speculation is that the crustal layer including the Asthenosphere lies on a layer of material supersaturated in pure carbon, thicker than previously supposed that is inherently slippery and having low viscosity. It seems unlikely that at these pressures, that the slipperiness of graphite is retained, but that may well be the case.

One feature of carbon that is often overlooked is its high melt temperature compared to other elements. It becomes molten at temperatures in excess of 3500^o C. It boils at temperatures over 4000^o C. Of the common elements and minerals entrained in the crust, carbon resists melting the longest. Add this to the fact of its low density as compared to these same materials and we have the necessary conditions for a concentration plane for carbon under the crust. Convection above would send non-molten carbon down into the carbon layer and convection below this layer would concentrate this layer by density. The Kimberlites merely confirm it.

The existence of this layer possibly answers another interesting problem. The implied high natural electrical conductivity of this layer makes it an excellent candidate for handling the massive global electron flow necessary to electrically affect the global magnetic field. The electron flow itself can be physically derived from the daily solar and lunar tides that will cyclically stress and relax the layer, inducing a steady build up of static charge and inducing electron flow within the conductive layer. The zone of maximum charging would be concentrated within belts paralleling the equator with the electron flow possibly either flowing towards the poles or flowing primarily along the equator following the tides.

We can certainly postulate a charging shell. The complexity of the tidal effect resulting from the twenty-three degree tilt of the globe prevents an easy configuration of the electron flow. This shell charging process needs to be cumulative over geological time periods until the process itself must discharge the buildup of electrical energy. The most certain way to do this would be to force the reversal of the earth’s magnetic field. This has in fact occurred often. This process is clearly benign and any shifts will be abrupt. They may even become predictable.

I do not have an exact electromagnetic model to describe this possible behavior pattern, and it may well turn out to be theoretically impossible. The only simple model that occurs to me is one in which the electron flow is nudged along by the daily tides until the electron wave is large enough to collapse and reverse itself jolting the magnetic field into a reversal. Thereupon the flow is reestablished against the new magnetic field and is built up to the point that it once again forces a pole shift draining off some of the accumulated energy. Then once again it builds up and strengthens the magnetic field until the wave once again collapse. This seems possible. On the other hand, I rather think the explanation will prove much more sophisticated.

Right now we simply do not know and any theoretical models will be difficult to prove.

Returning to the subject of crustal movement the possibility of extreme slipperiness does partially open the door to the possibility of the crust been much more mobile than has been reasonably expected. This needs to be investigated thoroughly on a theoretical basis. There may be subtle forms of dynamic instability that are built up by the application of tidal stress and released by floating the crust to a new orientation.

In any event, we have one mechanism in place by the high velocity high-density asteroid that is capable of generating the movements without obliterating all life. It also enables polar shifting as a result of the buildup of the polar ice caps as a second option which would be even more survivable.

We now come to the compelling part of this tale. That is the data itself. Quite bluntly, rotating the crust along the proscribed axis makes a large number of major difficulties with the currently held paradigm disappear. More importantly, the solution seems to be global, as it must. My natural concern is for this type of event to be anomalous and extraterrestrial in origins. A recurring earth based cyclic event would be a catastrophe for the future of our own civilization.