The Inconvenient Skeptic: The Comprehensive Guide to the Earth's Climate

by John Kehr

Once again, geography plays an important role in the Earth's climate even today. The Earth changes temperature primarily based on the seasons of the Northern Hemisphere. If the Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall seasons are compared by hemisphere, the dominance of the NH is apparent. This is a very important point about the Earth's current behavior.

Milutin Milankovic (1879-1958) The Serbian Engineer Milutin Milankovic is best known for developing one of the most significant theories relating Earth motions and long-term climate change. Born in 1879 in the rural village of Dalj (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today located in Croatia), Milankovic attended the Vienna Institute of Technology and graduated in 1904 with a doctorate in technical sciences. After a brief stint as the chief engineer for a construction company, he accepted a faculty position in applied mathematics at the University of Belgrade in 1909—a position he held for the remainder of his life. Milankovic dedicated his career to developing a mathematical theory of climate based on the seasonal and latitudinal variations of solar radiation received by the Earth. Now known as the Milankovitch Theory, it states that as the Earth travels through space around the sun, cyclical variations in three elements of Earth-sun geometry combine to produce variations in the amount of solar energy that reaches Earth.

Climate on the Earth is determined by the relationship with the sun. Science has advanced into many other methods to measure the long-term historical temperature of the Earth which include: sea corals, ice cores, boreholes and others. All of these methods paint a picture of the historical temperature of the Earth. All of these indicate that the Sun dominates the Earth's climate.

The 65N Insolation decreased prior to the drop in temperature. This is exactly the type of behavior seen over the course of the yearly cycle.

The effect of the Arctic cooling is global primarily because of the oceans. The oceans affect every continent and when a glaciation starts in the NH, the global sea levels start to drop. At the end of the Eemian, the sea levels dropped more than 20 m (66ft) in a period of 5,000 years after the 65N summer insolation anomaly went negative 120,000 years ago. The glaciers in the NH were growing so fast 120,000 years ago that the world's oceans dropped as much as a six story building. That is what I consider genuine climate change.

After the Earth started to warm up, the CO2 level also started to increase. While it is interesting that the CO2 level changed after the temperature did, what I find more interesting is what happened when the Eemian started to dramatically cool down 118,000 years ago. The CO2 level stayed the same. The Earth cooled down while the CO2 level was at the “warm” level of 270 ppm. In fact the CO2 level stayed nearly constant at 270 ppm from 128,000 to 112,000 years ago. In that same period of time the global temperature dropped 8 °C (14 °F). So while CO2 did go up after the temperature went up, the CO2 level didn't do anything to stop the Earth from cooling down. So it could be argued that CO2 “might” have contributed during the beginning of the Eemian, but the Earth cooled down as the insolation dropped. It is also interesting to note that the temperature of the Earth during the Eemian was warmer than it is today, while the CO2 level was only 285 ppm. A temperature projection based on the CO2 level during the Eemian would indicate that the temperature anomaly of the Earth today should be 1.6 °C warmer than it was at the peak of the Eemian which would put the modern temperature anomaly at 5.4 °C. That is ~5 °C higher than the current temperature. If the modern insolation anomaly of -13 W/m2 is used to predict the modern temperature anomaly, then the prediction would be 0.6 °C which is almost exactly what the modern temperature is. In fact the Earth is 0.2-0.4 °C cooler than the ...

Longest and most unusual of the current Era of interglacials. Insolation barely dropped below 440 W/m2 before increasing again. That kept the interglacial going much longer than normal. This interglacial was the longest warm period the Earth has had in millions of years. Instead of the normal large drop in insolation it had two weaker peaks, but a very shallow drop that barely dropped below 440 W/m2. That meant a long period without any low NH insolation. The Earth responded with temperatures that were as warm as today for ~20,000 years.

I used the EPICA Ice core data for this chapter because it is longest ice core and it can show the most interglacials. There are other sources of data available including the Vostok ice core and numerous sediment sets. The dates end up slightly different despite all the work to align the different sets. Since the EPICA data is the longest ice core data available that is the one I used. Another bias issue is evident in the historical temperature anomaly charts that I have used. That is the actual temperature used to generate the temperature anomaly. What is referred to as the “normal” temperature of the Earth is no such thing. For most of the past million years the Earth has spent very little time at the current temperature or warmer. The bias is one hopelessly corrupted by the short-term view that dominates the discussion about the Earth's climate. As I discussed in the previous chapter's scientific content, ice cores are truly wonderful proxies for reconstructing global temperature. This is primarily because most climate change takes place in the Polar Regions of the Earth and that is where ice cores are available. Well, actually Antarctica is the best place for the really old ice cores. That is because in the longest interglacial that happened 400,000 years ago melted most of the Greenland ice sheets. Even the Eemian caused some problems with the ice sheets in Greenland.

There are endless (truly endless) debates about the time lag from the start of the warming to the start of the CO2 level increasing. That is because the warmist model requires that the oceans start to warm BEFORE CO2 can be released into the atmosphere to cause an interglacial to form.

Insolation varies as a result of changes in the Earth's orbit. There are three main factors that cause this variation (56). They are eccentricity, obliquity and precession. I will explain the basics of each. Each one has a slightly different effect on the total insolation.

Eccentricity seems to be the main force for climate change over the past million years. Eccentricity has 100,000 year cycles that are part of a 400,000 year cycle. The more eccentric the Earth’s orbit, the bigger the distance from the sun the earth is between the closest and farthest distances. So a high eccentricity results in a bigger difference when the Earth is closest or farthest from the sun. If there is low eccentricity then the closest and farthest distances don't have as much difference in energy. It is all about the timing. The big factor is, how close is the Earth to the sun during the NH summer? If it is closest with high eccentricity then the NH gets lots more energy. This is what happened with the Eemian interglacial. If there is low eccentricity the Earth is less likely to get high energy. The next 100,000 years will have a lower than normal eccentricity which will prevent high insolation summers from happening. The obliquity is the tilt of the Earth. Over the course of 41,000 years the tilt of the Earth varies from about 21-25 degrees. A high tilt causes the NH to point more directly at the sun during the summer so it receives more energy during the summer. When the tilt is lower the NH less pointed at the sun and receives less. The obliquity (57) was the main factor in the early part of the current ice age when the glacial cycles matched the obliquity of the Earth. That lasted for about 1.6 million years before eccentricity became the dominant forcing fact...

I have a very strong eye for the future of the Earth. To quote Stephen Hawking “The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.”

There are many very real problems facing our stewardship of the Earth, but of all the concerns out there, global warming is the absolute least concern. The reason for that has nothing to do with global warming itself. It has everything to do with the climate cycle. The Eemian was warmer than the Earth is now and for the most part, the Earth was a better place for life. What happened after the Eemian was a far harsher world than any prediction of global warming. If you want a climate nightmare to fear, the easiest one to find is to look at what happened when the warm interglacial started to fade 120,000 years ago. It did not happen quickly as a person perceives time, but there is much to be learned from the cooling of the last interglacial. That cooling started when the 65N insolation anomaly switched from positive to negative 120,000 years ago. When this happened the Earth was slightly warmer at that time than it is today. If the transition from positive to negative anomaly is comparable to the start of Autumn, then the Eemian Autumn started slightly more than 120,000 years ago. The change in insolation happened over thousands of years and so did the change in temperature, but over the course of 11,000 years the average temperature dropped by 8 °C (59). If the warmist prediction is that the Earth warming up by 3 °C would be disastrous, then consider a world that was 8-10 °C cooler. That is twice the temperature difference the Earth experiences between summer and winter. Th...

For 11,000 years after the insolation anomaly went negative, the Earth cooled down. EPICA ice core. What is interesting about this period of cooling is that it was not a period of constant cooling. There were many times when the Earth even appeared to be warming for more than 1,000 years at a time, but the long-term cooling was hidden in the short-term fluctuations. It was always present, but it was hard to see because it was small in comparison to the short-term fluctuations. There is simply no short-term period in which the cooling could be detected. The only possible way to detect the long-term trend was to look at the how the temperature was changing in periods of longer than 1,000 years.

Gradual is the only way to describe the long-term trends in temperature. Notice that the temperature is never actually flat. It is always warming or cooling, but the long-term trend dominates over thousands of years.

In the 175 year period from 118,225-118,050 years ago the average temperature of the Earth rose 2.3 °C (from -0.9 to 1.4 °C). That is 3x the total warming that has been measured in the past 160 years. A large amount of warming that happened while the Earth was in a long-term cooling trend. Which trend had more meaning? Over the course of a hundred years, the short-term trend did. The rate of warming was much greater than the small long-term cooling trend. But the short-term trend lasted for only a couple hundred years. The long-term trend lasted for 11,000 years. The natural warming that was evident 118,050 years ago certainly would have given the appearance that winter was not going to come. The Earth had been warming for almost 200 years after a period of being warm for the last 14,000 years and there was no reason to suspect that the warm period of the Earth was going to end, unless one looked at the trend in insolation. All other indicators 118,050 years ago pointed to continued warmth. CO2 and methane levels were high. The Earth was warm and the short-term trend was to get even warmer. The truth is that the temperature anomaly of 1.38 °C that happened 118,050 years ago would not be reached again until only 10,577 years ago. That was the Earth's last warm period for more than 107,000 years. Winter was coming and it would last for longer than our species has existed. Of all the possible potential climate futures, the one I fear the least is a warmer interglacial. Lookin...

Here is a summary of the main topics covered

so far in the book. These are basically in order from the beginning of the book and not necessarily in order of importance. 1. The Earth is ALWAYS changing temperature. 2. Those changes in temperature take place on many different time scales. a. Daily b. Yearly c. Short-term (100 year time scale) d. Long-term (> 1,000 year time scale) 3. Shorter-term trends mask the longer term trends. Predicting yearly temperature trend based on a single day or week is foolishness. 4. Long-Term trends are caused by Milankovitch Cycles. This is the glacial/interglacial cycle of the climate cycle. 5. Interglacial periods end when the 65N solar insolation anomaly goes negative. a. The Holocene (modern day) 65N insolation went negative 3,000 years ago. 6. Since the 65N insolation anomaly went negative the range of glaciers in the NH have expanded their range halfway to the equator. Very few NH glaciers are more than 4,000 years old. 7. What happens to energy from the Sun? a. 23% Reflected by clouds. b. 7% Reflected by surface. c. 47% Absorbed by surface. d. 23% Absorbed by atmosphere (mostly all in the stratosphere). 8. What happens to the 47% of energy absorbed by the surface? a. 50% Transferred to atmosphere by Evaporation. b. 11% Transferred to atmosphere by Convection. c. 14% Transferred to atmosphere by Radiative Heat Transfer. d. 25% Transferred to SPACE by Radiative Heat Transfer. e. Any remaining converted by surface

(photosynthesis and such). 9. The gases that cause the 23 W/m2 (14% by RHT) transferred by RHT. a. 79% Caused by water vapor. b. 14% Caused by carbon dioxide. c. 1% Caused by ozone/oxygen. d. 1% Caused by all other greenhouse gases. 10. The total GHE is caused only by energy that is transferred to the atmosphere. This is because temperature changes ...

I can say that I gave global warming a fair chance. It simply did not explain the behavior of the Earth's climate. While each and every swing of CO2 can be explained by the temperature dependence on the solubility of CO2 in water, there is not a good correlation to the global temperature and the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. It simply failed that test in every past interglacial.

In every case CO2 rises after temperature. While warmists have been dealing with that issue for a long time, it simply doesn't matter. That the Earth has ALWAYS cooled while the CO2 levels where high, says more about the Earth's climate than anything else. CO2 has never once stopped the Earth from cooling down. If CO2 caused the warming, it would prevent the cooling. That the Earth experienced thousands of years of cooling while CO2 levels remained high was critical.

There are only two options for the future of the Earth's climate. If CO2 is the dominant factor, then the current CO2 level combined with the upward temperature trend might be sufficient to break the Ice Age cycle that has been ongoing in the northern hemisphere for the last 2.6 million years and the Earth will warm up, the sea levels will rise maybe 10m and the ice age of the NH will end. This is by far preferable to the other option. That option is also so unlikely that it is almost impossible to happen. CO2 simply plays far too small a part in keeping the Earth warm. It's ability to cause small changes is really insignificant in the scale of the Earth's energy balance. The natural and much more likely option is that the negative 65N summer insolation will slowly cause the developing glacial to strengthen over the next 1,000-3,000 years. Long before the glacial is actually fully developed, most of Canada, Northern United States, Europe and Russia will be experiencing extended periods of colder summers and occasional periods of summer frost. That will prevent most crops from growing in those regions. That the 65N summer insolation anomaly will be negative for the next 20,000 years is far more concerning to me than a change of 90 ppm of atmospheric CO2. That is the true nightmare scenario. What if half the crops in those regions were lost one year, then two years in a row? Then 5 years in a row? 10 years in a row? At what point will money no longer be enough to buy food. I...

Sources, Citations and References 1. http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html 2. http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.html#mean 3. Station method: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/#faq 4. Satellite: http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#rss_msu_data_analysis 5. CRU: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ 6. GHCN: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ghcnm/time-series/ 7. UAH: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt 8. RSS: http://www.remss.com/data/msu/monthly_time_series/ 9. Krakatoa cooling: http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Krakatoa-Mass_Portman_89.pdf 10. http://www.cefns.nau.edu/Academic/Geology/people/Dr.RonaldC.Blakey.shtml 11. http://cpgeosystems.com/products.html 12. Trends, Rhythms, and Aberrations in Global Climate 65 Ma to Present, James Zachos, 27 April 2001: Vol. 292 no. 5517 pp. 686-693 13. http://www.usgs.gov/global_change/glaciers/glaciers_sea_level.asp 14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale 15. The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. Schulte et al, Science 5 March 2010: Vol. 327 no. 5970 pp. 1214-1218 16. Zachos, J., et al. 2008. Cenozoic Global Deep-Sea Stable Isotope Data. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series # 2008-098. NOAA/NCDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA. 17. Subtropical Arctic Ocean temperatures during the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum, Sluijs. A...