Global Warming is NOT Human Caused (from my brother, Geologist)

Pete, I guess the question most people would ask – if you are right, why have 1500 scientists worldwide signed on the global warming cause? To get more grants, sell books? Could it really be that cut and dried?
michael

peter’s answer:
Those scientists are short sighted. I know some of them. It is virtually impossible to get a grant disputing human causes of global warming, especially if you’ve already expressed this position. Environmental science has become politicized – the original precepts of the scientific method are rarely followed with respect to global warming. On the other hand, there are thousands of reputable scientists who don’t support human caused global warming – mostly from a geological and astronomical perspective. For example, ice cores from Greenland and Antartica show dramatic short term global temperature changes that occurred a hundred thousand years before humans began burning fossil fuels. We may be accelerating global warming, but their is not enough data available to make statistically significant conclusions, and furthermore it’s not clear that global warming is bad. The largest numbers of species and the largest biomasses of carbon based life have occurred during periods of high global temps.

See attached file. It may be a little dated, but geologically it’s pertinent. You can also go to any library, check out a textbook on Quaternary geology, read about ice ages and interglacial periods, and look at references to hundreds if not thousands of refereed studies on the subject. We are clearly in an interglacial period that began 10,000-12,000 years ago. Polar ice caps have retreated from 40 N (south of the Great Lakes) to 75N, a distance of nearly 3000 miles, in 10,000 years. That’s a retreat of nearly 1600′ per year on average. During this period glaciers have occasionally advanced, rather than retreated (the Little Ice Age that caused massive migrations from Europe to North America in the 1800s – our Irish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish heritiage – they developed most of our mines in Idaho and Montana in the late 1880s and many of my colleagues are their great grandsons), and at other times glaciers have retreated at rates greater than the rates that are currently causing panic (which are lower than the average).

Human caused global warming is a predictive model, based on laboratory experiments and very limited statistics. Statistics from the mid 1930s to the mid 1970s showed that global atmosphere cooled, in spite of increasing atmosperic CO2. The scientific method simply states 1) make an observation (rising CO2 causes global cooling), 2) make a hypothesis (rising CO2 causes global cooling), and 3) test it. If you use the period from the mid 1970’s to early 2000s, CO2 has continued rise but temps are also rising, contradicting the hypothesis. How can anyone conclude that rising CO2 has any relationship to global temperature? The global warming political scientists have proposed many theories to explain this aberration, which to me is putting the cart before the horse.

Let me give you another example, from elementary statistics. The general rule is that the more data you have, the more you can rely on conclusions drawn from trends within the data. So, if you have a jar with 9 white marbles and 1 black marble and you take out one marble (but you don’t know the color distribution), there’s a 90% chance you’d think all of the marbles were white. Expand the data to 90 white and 10 black, and take out 10 marbles, then expand it to 900 white and 100 black and take out 100 marbles, etc. The larger the sample, the closer you will get to the true ratio of 9 to 1. Another example: when Cindy was a young hydrologist, she measured two 100 year floods on rivers in Arizona in three years (77-79, very exciting times). This was so statistically improbably that had USGS revise their analysis. They were making projections about the frequency of 100 year floods based on data from 60 years. Realistically, they need good data from 1000 years to even begin to make 100 year flood predictions. I frequently deal with statistical problems in my work – how many samples and at what grade to we need to make a decision to spend millions or tens or hundreds of millions to justify starting a mine? Certainly we wouldn’t use 70 conflicting samples (the global warming data from 1930-2000).

Using tested methodologies from chemistry and physics, geoscientists have developed geothermometers based on isotopes of various elements, including carbon and oxygen. The attached article summarizes multiple studies using those geothermometers. Although not as precise as measurement of current atmospheric CO2 levels and temperature, the trends are very consisent and match very well with other types of data, such as fossil distribution over time (total species and total biomass), total coal and other carbon based fuels derived from plant mass, etc. Among geologists, there is a stong consensus that earth has been cooling over hundreds of millions of years (and probably since its formation over four billion years ago), and that we are in a temporary interglacial warming period during a major cooling phase.

Robin posted a similar email from me earlier this year and the not surprising response was that most people believe the mainstream news (NGS, Gore, etc), however an increasing number of people are beginning to express concern about spending billions on “stopping a volcano from erupting”, rather than spending billions to adjust to inevitable change. Again, read State of Fear. I think Crichton’s theory has some merit, and Gore’s prize just confirms it for me.

Pete