List Entire Thread

Challenges to the CO2 Global Warming Hypothesis: (4) A Minimal Ice-Age Greenhouse Effect

As an addendum to my 2020 series of posts on the CO2 global warming hypothesis (here>, here</strong> and here), this post presents a further challenge to the hypothesis central to the belief that humans make a substantial contribution to climate change. The hypothesis is that observed global warming – currently about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the preindustrial era – has been caused primarily by human emissions of CO2and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The new challenge to the CO2 hypothesis is set out in a recent research paper by French geologist Pascal Richet. Richet claims, by reexamining previous analyses of an Antarctic ice core, that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane had only a minor effect on the earth’s climate over the past 423,000 years, and that the assumed forcing of climate by CO2 is incompatible with ice-core data. The paper is controversial, however, and the publisher is subjecting it to a post-publication review.

The much-analyzed ice core in question was drilled at the Russian Vostok station in East Antarctica. Past atmospheric CO2levels and surface temperatures are calculated from ice cores by measuring the air composition and the oxygen 18O to 16O isotopic ratio, respectively, in air bubbles trapped by the ice. The Vostok record, which covers the four most recent ice ages or glaciations as well as the current interglacial (Holocene), is depicted in the figure below. The CO2 level is represented by the upper set of graphs (below the insolation data), which shows the substantial drop in CO2 during an ice age; the associated drop in temperature ΔT is represented by the lower set of graphs.

It is seen that transitions from glacial to interglacial conditions are relatively sharp, while the ice ages themselves are punctuated by smaller warming and cooling episodes. And, though it’s hardly visible in the figure, the ice-age CO2 level closely mimics changes in temperature, but the CO2concentration lags behind – with CO2 going up or down after the corresponding temperature shift occurs. The lag is about 600 to 800 years.

Most paleoclimatologists believe that CO2 lagged temperature during the ice ages because it takes several hundred years for CO2 to come out of, or get into, the world’s oceans, which is where the bulk of the CO2 on our planet is stored. The oceans can hold much more CO2 (and heat) than the atmosphere. Warm water holds less CO2 than cooler water, so the oceans release CO2 when the temperature rises, but take it in when the earth cools.

Richet noticed that the temperature peaks in the Vostok record are much narrower than the corresponding CO2 peaks. The full widths at half maximum, marked by thick horizontal bars in the figure above, range from about 7,000 to 16,000 years for the initial temperature peak in cycles II, III and IV, but from 14,000 to 23,000 years for the initial CO2 peak; cycle V can’t be analyzed because its start is missing from the data. All other peaks are also narrower for temperature than for CO2.

The author argues that CO2 can’t drive temperature since an effect can’t last for a shorter period of time than its cause. The fact that the peaks are systematically wider for CO2 than for temperature implies that the CO2 level responds to temperature changes, not the other way round. And for most of cycles II, III and IV, CO2 increases correspond to temperature decreases and vice versa.

Richet’s conclusion, if correct, would deal a deathblow to the CO2 global warming hypothesis. The reason has to do with the behavior of the temperature and CO2 level at the commencement and termination of ice ages.

Ice ages are believed to have ended (and begun) because of changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun. After tens of thousands of years of bitter cold, the temperature suddenly took an upward turn. But according to the CO2 hypothesis, the melting of ice sheets and glaciers caused by the slight initial warming could not have continued, unless this temperature rise was amplified by positive feedbacks. These include CO2feedback, triggered by a surge in atmospheric CO2 as it escaped from the oceans.

The problem with this explanation is that it requires a similar chain of events, based on CO2 and other feedbacks, to have enhanced global cooling as the temperature fell at the beginning of an ice age. But, says Richet, “From the dual way in which feedback would work, temperature decreases and increases should be similar for the same concentrations of greenhouse gases, regardless of the residence times of these gases in the atmosphere.” The fact that temperature decreases don’t depend in any noticeable way on CO2 concentration in the figure above demonstrates that the synchronicity required by the feedback mechanism is absent.

No synchronization between Co2 and temperature. One especially hard headed poster postulates tha Co2 is a pollutant to the extent that too much water brings a flood. Wrong on so many levels. Ask beavers, to start with. Without any evidence a lot of very hard headed libz say there is too much. The only thing there is too much of is every...

Good job Goodlibs!

Carlson accused Fauci of lying under oath, of lying during a news conference and of being somehow implicated in criminal activity based on the contents of a number of emails released publicly under a Freedom of Information Act request. Those emails included a heavy dose of redacted sections — one such section itself prompted Carlson’s speculation about criminality — but included enough Lego pieces for Carlson to build what he wanted to build.

What evidence was there, for example, for Carlson to imply that Fauci believed that the coronavirus had been created in a Chinese lab and, further, that it was a product of “gain of function” research, something Fauci denied during a Senate hearing? It centered on a Feb. 1, 2020, call among a number of researchers. The evening before the call, a scientist named Kristian Andersen emailed Fauci, saying in part that “some of the features [of the coronavirus] (potentially) look engineered.”

On the morning of the call, Fauci emailed his deputy about wanting to check in, including an attachment titled, “Baric, Shi, et al - Nature medicine - SARS gain of function.pdf.” And then there was the call itself, a discussion that Carlson claimed was declared to be “top secret.”

I’m making this sound more innocuous than Carlson did. (You can read what he said, if you wish.) It’s the nature of my medium versus his that it sounds more innocuous. He can contextualize his statements with intonations and facial expression that I can’t. His presentation included a number of grainy-emails-with-block-yellow-highlighting graphics that are useful for both validating claims and leveraging the aesthetic of a piece of evidence from a criminal trial.

Carlson necessarily can’t dive as deeply into this subject as I can, since television conveys information far less densely than does the written word. (It would take you a lot longer to read this paragraph out loud than it would to simply read it to yourself, for example.) But he didn’t give it much effort, and the result was that those 3 million viewers probably would have been left with the impression that Carlson had proved remarkable dishonesty on the part of Fauci.

He did not.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post published a report looking more closely at that Feb. 1 call.

“On that teleconference — the first known effort by senior U.S. and international health officials to determine whether human engineering or a laboratory leak might explain the emergence of the virus — most of the experts, including Fauci, concluded that the virus had probably evolved in nature and was transmitted from an animal to a human,” our Yasmeen Abutaleb and Shane Harris report. "... The effort continued over the following weeks, when the scientists unanimously concluded there was no evidence of lab manipulation.”

That assessment of the call was given to Abutaleb and Harris by Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. There’s no valid reason to assume that it’s untrue. It’s corroborated by research published in mid-March 2020 that determined that the virus “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” The first name listed among the researchers who staked their reputations on that document is Kristian Andersen’s.

This research was publicly available when Carlson put together his June 2 broadcast, but there’s no indication that his team sought it out. After all, his claim that Fauci had lied during a Senate hearing was based on the filename of an attachment Fauci sent in an email. That filename may well have been a reference to 2015 research not obviously related to the coronavirus that emerged in 2019 — research that was also something Carlson’s team could have dug up.

As for the call being “top secret,” that was a function of the call’s nongovernmental organizer asking participants to not discuss it until there was “agreement on next steps,” which is not the sort of prohibition that’s going to get you sent to prison for espionage.

The rest of Carlson’s attack is no more solidly grounded. In mid-April 2020, Fauci said during a news conference that the virus’s evolution was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” The source for that assertion was the research of “highly qualified evolutionary virologists,” presumably the group including Andersen that had published the prior month. Carlson declared that Fauci’s assertion was “a lie.”

It’s very important to note that this was not simply Carlson arguing on behalf of the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. He is arguing specifically on behalf of the idea that it was engineered in that lab and, further, that Fauci knew it was and was hiding it from the public. This distinction is important to Carlson because a leak from a Chinese lab mostly implicates China, while claims that it was instead engineered might implicate a broader range of actors including, in some iterations, members of the U.S. government.

China's foreign ministry hit back at the United States on May 27 after President Biden ordered an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. (Reuters)

The question of where the virus originated is in vogue, thanks in part to a report from the Wall Street Journal elevating a murky allegation about sick workers from that Wuhan lab and certainly thanks in part to the receding threat of the virus in the United States, giving more space to a wider range of discussions about it.

It’s also a central topic at the moment because it serves the eternally useful role of media criticism. Early in the pandemic, arguments that the virus was engineered were at times conflated with arguments that the virus might have escaped from the lab, and that blended position was dismissed as conspiratorial. This has since been efficiently unpacked, with writers across the political spectrum offering pointed criticism of how the lab-leak theory was handled for different reasons. For mainstream journalists, for example, it offers a moment of self-correction. For writers on the left and particularly on the right, it offers a chance to disparage the mainstream.

Remarkably, the pendulum on the lab-leak theory — which is still viable, although the consensus seems to still be that a natural origin was more likely — has swung to the opposite pole. For former president Donald Trump, for example, criticism alleging that the media was wrong allows him to claim that he was right, even though, as The Post’s Aaron Blake wrote, Trump didn’t actually talk much about the virus’s origin in the first place.

For Carlson’s claim that the virus was engineered to be true, it’s necessary that the lab-leak theory be true. But even if that theory is being given more oxygen at the moment, it’s not the case that there’s robust new evidence in favor of the virus being engineered. To some extent, Carlson (and, apparently, Jon Stewart) are doing what the media is accused of doing, but in reverse: conflating lab-leak with the idea that the virus was engineered, hoping that the renewed speculation about the former amplifies the odds of the latter.

This new focus on the virus leaking from a lab also coincides with the expanded criticism of Fauci following that public release of his emails. There’s nothing definitive in them one way or the other, but the existence of any sort of surface to which claims of dishonesty can be attached has allowed Fauci’s critics (long encouraged by Trump) to run wild.

There will be no moment of self-correction from Carlson following his obviously exaggerated if not demonstrably false and dangerous assertions about Fauci. There is no real effort by Carlson to ensure that his rhetoric is accurate, something that even Fox News’s lawyers admitted in court.

Two weeks ago, when Carlson called Fauci a liar and a fraud, the Fox News host was a loud voice in a clamor focused on wild misinterpretations of a few emails. Millions of people watched him make his sloppy case. And then Carlson moved on, leaving everyone else to deal with the aftermath.

Image without a caption

IS TUCKER CUCKING BECAUSE OF COMET PING PONG PIZZA STING?

Faux News?

In recent days Tucker Carlson has come under fire for his growing skepticism about voter fraud in the recent Presidential election. Many think he is trying to play some sort of "gatekeeper" role -- appearing sympathetic to claims of voter fraud while at the same time subtly undermining them.

This is why there was such a sharp reaction to his recent coverage of Trump's legal team, where he basically said "show me the evidence or I'll cry."

This surprising change in Tucker's behaviour has in turn raised speculation about possible motives. One of the more interesting theories is that he has been "compromised" and is being blackmailed. But what could a fine, upstanding family man like Tucker be blackmailed about?

How about Pizzagate?

It appears now that Carlson was in fact once a regular customer at Comet Ping Pong, the "pizza restaurant" at the center of the what is referred to as the "Pizzagate Conspiracy Theory."

A review of the restaurant by Tom Sietsema in the Washington Post from 2007 places Tucker firmly at the ground zero of Pizzagate:

The appeal of such a venue is broad. Families appreciate the joint for the obvious (be warned: the sounds of restless little ones can easily outmuscle Dean Martin and Rosemary Clooney on the soundtrack), and the stargazing can be prime. Among the VIP regulars are ballet director Septime Webre and talking head Tucker Carlson, but even Donald Rumsfeld has dropped by for a pie.

Pizzagate is the "much derided" idea that there is a network of pedophiles running or influencing the US government. "Much derided"? Yes, but of course any theory like this which directly threatens the establishment would be "much derided" by the mainstream media even if were 100% true. So, the fact that it routinely dismissed as a "crackpot conspiracy theory" means next to nothing.

If Tucker were somehow involved with a pedophile network, this could explain not only why he suddenly changed tack on the election but also why he actually "lost" some important documents relating to the corruption of the Biden family.

As he "explained" at the time:

On Monday we received from a source a collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family. We believe those documents are authentic, they’re real, and they’re damning … We texted a producer in New York and we asked him to send those documents to us in LA … He shipped those documents overnight to California with a large national carrier brand … But the Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles. Tuesday morning we received word from the shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing. The documents had disappeared.

Really, it looks like Tucker, who likes asking questions on his show, has got quite a few questions of his own to answer.

"If it [a scientific hypothesis] disagrees with experiment, it’s WRONG." – Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman

Challenges to the CO2 Global Warming Hypothesis: (4) A Minimal Ice-Age Greenhouse Effect

Two weeks later, Tucker Carlson’s attack on Fauci has quietly collapsed

IS TUCKER CUCKING BECAUSE OF COMET PING PONG PIZZA STING?