This Page is Under Construction While the Climate is Changing

Most of the leadership of the world has bought into what Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhof calls in his book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.  As Dr. Tim Ball puts it in this post¹:

“They are taken in by the false claim that a minute amount of human-produced CO2 is effectively controlling the entire atmospheric system since 1950 and causing environmental collapse through global warming. They don’t know that there is an upper limit to the amount that CO2 can increase temperature. They don’t know that the average level of CO2 over the last 250 million years is 1200 ppm. They don’t know that every projection of temperature by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1990 was wrong. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, how did so few, fool so many, to such an extent, for so long?”

And I can add to this list:  They don’t know that Antarctic and Greenland ice records show that the CO2 level lags the air temperature by several hundred years.  Don’t they know this is true because most of the surface and atmospheric CO2 is in the oceans, and the higher the temperature, the less CO2 water can hold; therefore, the CO2 level follows the ocean temperature.  Don’t they know that CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas – the most prominent greenhouse gas is water vapor by far, for which there are no effective predictive models?  Don’t they know that the sun’s luminosity has known periodic changes that historically correlate to climate changes?  Don’t they know that the earth has several elliptical orbits, longer orbits not known yet because man could not measure them, which could explain why we’ve had the last three ice ages?  Don’t they know that we’ve had three ice ages in the previous 400 thousand years, and each of them started with temperature and CO2 levels at approximately current levels, suggesting that the next ice age is on the horizon? Don’t they know that when we come out of an ice age, the CO2 level is around 200 ppm?  Don’t they know that photosynthesis stops at CO2 levels below 150 ppm, a level that the next ice age could reach, destroying all multi-cell life? The real existential threat is too little CO2, not too much. Let us look at the data and discuss the physics involved to understand the reality of climate better.

My private skepticism of CO2 being the driver of global warming comes from my experience growing up in a mid-high altitude (2000 to 7000 feet) dry (13 inches of rain/year) in the Blue Mountains in Eastern Oregon.  During the summer nights, the temperature would stay hot if it was humid and or cloudy.  But if the skies were clear and the humidity was low, it would get cold at night.  How can this be the case if CO2 is a significant greenhouse gas?  But on humid and or cloudy nights, there was water and water vapor in the air.  This H2O must be the dominant greenhouse gas, right?  I’ve watched Al Gore’s movie, many documentaries, and NOVA programs on climate change, and most of them never mention water vapor as the dominant greenhouse gas.  Why???  And the temperature information is always limited to “recorded history” or “on record” or “during the industrial age.”  How can issues such as climate be determined by looking at such a short period?