CFACT - Committee For A Constructive Tommorrow P.O. Box 65722 Washington, DC 20035 (202)429-2737 ______________________________________________ Global Warming: Melting Down the Facts About this Overheated Myth By Edward C. Krug, Ph.D. CFACT Briefing Paper #105, November, 1997 With introduction by Peter Samuel Introduction By Peter Samuel There is no global warming. Yet governments around the world are embracing expensive policies to combat it. The best data on global temperatures -- satellite data -- show no warming. The global warming alarmists (global warmists I dub them) have two different, but equally invalid, responses to the data. First, in the presence of the uninformed they simply ignore the data and without numbers assert the existence of a trend toward global warming. William James, a founder of modern psychology, has said "There is nothing so absurd that if it is repeated enough will not come to be accepted." That is the basis for the propagandist's theory of the Big Lie: tell a big bold lie often enough, insistently enough and vilify the doubters, and people will come to believe it! Second if confronted with the dearth of empirical data, the global warmists will make another baseless assertion saying that global warming presents such a dire threat we cannot risk waiting for the data, but must act now, before it is too late. In the words of that most accomplished scare entrepreneur and international diplomat Maurice Strong, the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development at the Rio Summit June 1992, global warming "is the primary risk to the human future (so) we cannot afford to wait for confirming diagnosis." In the Middle Ages there must have been those who wondered whether the women denounced as witches really were responsible for the plague and blighted crops, but wise leaders said the threat from these agents of the devil was so dire that it was not possible to wait for proof. Each witch had to be burned at the stake immediately before she wrought more devastation. Of course today one cannot prove that domestic pussy cats are an alien invasion force from a hostile galaxy planning on a pre-appointed dark night to leap simultaneously on humans in their sleep and bite them in the jugular vein, but if we wait for proof it will be too late, so we have no alternative but to act first and do away with the cats. KILL ALL CATS NOW! Policies against so-called global warming are not a jot less hysterical. Indeed the burning of witches was based on real problems -- on observable calamities of disease in humans and plants. Policies on global warming are based on nothing but the flimsiest speculations as to possible future problems. Unfortunately we live in an age of environmental ignorance, irrationality and hysteria. Despite unprecedented plenty as reflected in declining prices of oil and other commodities it is widely believed we are "running out" of resources. Though an airplane trip over America reveals it is mostly unpopulated forest, many believe that it is in danger of being over-populated with humans. Though the cells of our bodies cannot distinguish between natural and manmade chemicals, enough people believe in the inherent evil of human manufacture to have persuaded governments to regulate manmade pesticide residues and other 'pollutants' at parts per billion, while naturally occurring "carcinogens" in fruit and vegetables are tolerated in our everyday diet at four orders of magnitude greater dosages. The nation's schools are torn asunder by white besuited and masked men to remove asbestos, despite the fact that the type of asbestos there is not the type believed to cause lung problems at vastly higher levels of exposure, and despite the fact that removal itself increases exposure as compared to sealing it in place. Refrigeration, freezers and air-conditioners are being purged of their refrigerant fluid chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) worldwide on the basis of scientific speculation about the migration of these gases into the stratosphere and their possible effect on the ozone layer, in spite of vast natural processes which both create and destroy upper level ozone, and life's ability to survive great variations in exposure to ultra-violet light. In the old mining towns of the west roads are being dug up, trees felled and soil carted from people's yards into enormous piles to be capped with impermeable layers of clay, all as a result of "conservative" mathematical modeling of how much lead residents might theoretically absorb from dust and soil, even though no health problems are indicated through direct measurement of blood lead levels and other medical examinations. And so it is possible to proceed through almost all current health and environmental issues -- Alar, PCBs, dioxin, DDT, biodiversity, indoor radon, nuclear power, landfills, you name it -- and on close examination find that policy is based largely on scientific speculation, fear, and misunderstanding. Hordes of regulators, consultants, laywers, publicists, lobbyists, agitators, newly prestigious and relabelled garbage men and scrap merchants ("waste management engineers"), teachers, researchers, lawyers, and -- yes --writers are making a living out of it. Scares pay. And global warming has been aptly called "the mother of all scares." There are few better placed than Dr. Edward Krug to review global warming. As a senior researcher of an earlier scare -- acid rain -- Krug is acutely aware of how government policies are made. The National Acid Precipiation Assessment Project (NAPAP) study, in which Krug played a major role, concluded that acid rain was essentially a non-problem, that most of the problems attributed to it were in fact attributable to other phenomena. The study found that the acidity of lakes and streams was primarily a product of watershed geo-chemistry. The pH of water entering watercourses is primarily determined by chemical reactions with soils, rocks and leaf litter through which it passes on the ground, NAPAP found. Forest and crop damage attributed to acid rain was found in reality to be caused by a variety of other factors such as climatic stresses on plants, insect pests, fungal diseases and suchlike. But by the time NAPAP published its findings, political minds had long been made up -- on the conservative as well as the liberal side of the congressional aisle. Acid rain was so deeply entrenched in contemporary mythology as a major environmental evil that NAPAP's clear scientific evidence of its trivial role was an enormous embarrassment. Like a loud belch at a dignified dinner party, those in attendance pretended not hear the report of NAPAP. It was not the topic of polite conversation. And so despite excellent research that garnered the scientific facts, the Congress proceeded to mandate -- with President Bush's signature -- that tens of billions of dollars be spent on unnecessary gear to purge smokestacks of sulfur dioxide at coal-powered electric powerplants. Electric ratepayers are being socked with inflated utility bills as a result, and electricity-intensive U.S. industry is severely handicapped in international competition. Worst of all, good science was done but given the cold ignore. It is a dismal tale in a supposedly enlightened age. Global Warming: Melting Down the Facts About this Overheated Myth By Edward C. Krug, Ph.D. My first acquaintance with global warming was reading the NEW YORK TIMES. As far back as the 1960s I recall reading predictions that by the year 2000 there would be substantial melting of the polar icecaps, and such a rise in sea levels that New York, London and other major coastal cities around the world would be flooded. I first found this alarming, as most people did. My alarm about this gradually turned to anger as I discovered that what was being reported as scientific fact was in reality only a superficially- plausible and scientific-appearing scenario -- politically-motivated speculation given a smattering of scientific jargon. But in the meantime in my professional capacity as a geo-chemist I worked on other issues, principally acid rain, and was too busy to pay serious attention to the growing chatter about global warming. In the 1980s at the Central Analytical Laboratory of the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project (NAPAP) located at the University of Illinois, I discovered that science and facts are often inconvenient to government officials and politicians. NAPAP employed thousands of scientists and cost the taxpayers of the nation some $600 million in an exhaustive program of research projects into all aspects of acid rain and its effects. In essence NAPAP established that acid rain was a lot of fuss about almost nothing. But the politicians and other opinion makers such as the media had their minds made up: Acid rain was a deadly menace to health and the environment and virtually no expense was too great in fighting it. We were dealing with environmentalist dogma and political zeal, something far removed from disagreements among scientists. 1988 was the "year of the great heat." Now one very hot summer means absolutely nothing in terms of trends. Just as one extremely cold winter isn't an indicator of the arrival of a new ice age, so the very hot summer of 1988 said nothing about any tendency toward global warming. But it was a measure of the politically-opportunistic nature of those playing this issue that a single hot summer was used to give global warming a major leg up onto the political center-stage. It was at this time that U.S. government officials first endorsed the global warming catastrophe theory and soon afterward the issue went international with the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The University of Illinois where I worked has one of the world's major global climate change modeling operations that operate on supercomputers, known as a general circulation model. Global warming was therefore a lively issue there. In 1989 the IPCC findings were presented to us at the university. The modeling suggested a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide would produce an average warming of temperatures of 3 to 6 degrees F. On the basis of these climate changes the IPCC model predicted a rise in sea levels of about 20 inches. The major human cost was in building ocean walls. But the IPCC report also predicted massive benefits -- increases in agricultural productivity ranging between 15% and 40% depending upon region, and major increases too in water resources and tree growth. I remember well my amazement at seeing that the IPCC scientists (UN IPCC, 1989) did not predict a global warming catastrophe at all but a more bounteous global environment in terms of food and fiber. This flew completely in the face of political correctness, however, and it was effectively censored by neglect. The IPCC report was cited by politicians, activists and the media as portending all kinds of adverse effects -- coastal flooding, increasingly violent storms, possible droughts and suchlike. The vast benefits predicted in greater food production, higher overall rainfall and increased forest growth were simply not cited or referenced. Now scientific historians, sometimes called paleo-ecologists call the warmer period c.6000 B.C. to about 1300 A.D. the "Climate Optimum." At the beginning of this period the last ice age ended. Glaciers retreated from western Europe and what is the U.S., and human civilization developed in the Nile Valley, Mesopotamia, China and the Mediterranean. This was a period when Greenland was green and the British Isles were warm enough to grow grapes. The world was a better place to live in when it was warmer. Relative to today's world climate some global warming is to be welcomed. And higher levels of carbon dioxide are also a global "good." Sylvan Wittner, director of the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station and chairman of the agricultural board of the National Research Council put it best: "Flowers, trees and food crops love carbon dioxide, and the more they get of it, the more they love it. Carbon dioxide is the basic raw material that plants use in photosynthesis to convert solar energy into food, fiber and other forms of biomass. Voluminous scientific evidence shows that if CO2 were to rise above its current ambient level of 360 parts per million, most plants would grow faster and larger because of more efficient photosynthesis and a reduction of water loss. There would also be many other benefits for plants, among them greater resistance to temperature extremes and other forms of stress, bettter growth at low light intensities, improved root/top rations, less injury from air pollutants, and more nutrients in the soils as a result of more extensive nitrogen fixation" (POLICY REVIEW, Fall 1992). Another government scientist, Sherwood Idso published a book (Idso, 1989) substantiating the same pro-CO2 case in a meticulously documented work -- it has over 2,000 citations. Idso points out that in terms of the history of life on earth, our atmosphere is currently starved of CO2. For much of its history the earth's atmosphere has contained CO2 in the thousands of parts per million compared to the current 350. Most plant life and indeed the huge creatures plant life once supported lived when CO2 was twenty times the current levels -- 7 percent or 70,000 ppm of the atmosphere compared to 1/3 of one percent now. Idso concludes that increasing CO2 concentrations are "like a breath of fresh air for the planet's close-to-suffocating vegetation." He welcomes the prospect of mankind adding to CO2 writing: "The whole face of the planet will likely be radically transformed -- rejuvenated as it were -- as the atmospheric CO2 content reverses its long history of decline and returns, in significant measure, to conditions much closer to those characteristic of the earth at the time when the basic properties of plant processes were originally established" (p9). Idso's 293-page book examining the global warming catastrophe thesis in enormous detail and with a wealth of data and documentation from the scientific literature is solid scientific scholarship that starkly contrasts with the largely data-less speculation out of which the global warming scare has been hustled up. Yet the work of Wittner, Idso and other skeptics has been effectively censored from public policy discussion. Idso points out that a TIME magazine series of lengthy reports on CO2 increases and global warming in several tens of thousands of words contained "not the slightest hint" that atmospheric enrichment with CO2 might have any positive effects whatsoever, let alone positive effects that might well outweigh negatives. Such grossly unbalanced journalism reeks of an attempt to indoctrinate the public and manipulate political opinion. That the exponents of the global warming catastrophe are possessed of a kind of intolerant religious zealotry is indicated in their attempts to vilify and suppress dissenting views. Idso was subjected to an Inquisition-style hearing at a Senate committee meeting chaired by the then-Senator Albert Gore, April 9, 1992, and it has been reported (WASHINGTON TIMES 8/11/92 F1) that he has agreed to remain silent on the subject of global warming, and to abandon a reprinting and update of his book under the threat of losing his government job and his retirement benefits. Bruce Fein (WASHINGTON TIMES 9/15/92 F1) points out that those who censor or otherwise attempt to suppress unpalatable information and ideas tacitly concede their credence. If the hard data and logic of science supported them, the warming catastrophists would have no need to bully and threaten like decadent dictators or intolerant ayatollahs. The global warming catastrophists are profoundly ambivalent about whether there is factual evidence for their mega-scare. On the one hand they claim scientific support, citing projections of the mathematical models of world climate and selections of temperature data. The enormous weakness of the mathematical models is that they fail so badly to explain the temperature record of the recent past, that only with a kind of religious faith is it possible to believe they will provide a reliable prediction of the future. The weakness of the temperature data of the past hundred years as a measure of global warming is that it measures a local urban heat island effect from more intensive asphalt paving and buildings that have engulfed most of the weather record stations. Satellite based measurement of atmospheric temperature shows no significant warming. Faced with these facts, the global warming catastrophists then move up to a new level of hysterical advocacy by saying that whatever the current data, the threat to the future of the earth is so great that we must act now, because by the time the data come in, it will be too late. Thus, in opening the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero in June 1992, the secretary general of this whole elaborate U.N. talkfest, Maurice Strong, proclaimed global warming as "the primary risk to the human future" in almost the same breath as he conceded the lack of evidence by adding "we cannot afford to wait for confirming diagnosis." This is true fanaticism, the overwhelming arrogance of the zealot. The likes of Maurice Strong are telling the world: "We environmentalists are the Enlightened. The facts may not yet be in, but We know that one day they will come in as We predict. By then of course it will be too late, so you must have faith in Our superior insight into what is necessary to save the world, and do as We say." At least as good a case can be made for global cooling as for global warming. Far from melting in preparation for the inundation of coastal areas worldwide the polar ice sheets are growing and polar temperatures are dropping (Zwaly et al 1991, Morgan et al 1991, and Figure 2). More than half of the world's glaciers are now growing (Wood, 1988). Here in the U.S., the Department of Agriculture (USDA) has had to revise its "Plant Hardiness Zone Map" moving the zones southward. Frost frequency in Florida, for example, has increase notably, and the whole citrus industry there has had to move south in order to avoid devastating frosts. Likewise, the American crocodile which used to live throughout Florida is now confined to the southernmost tip. The armadillo, once common up into Nebraska, is now confined to Texas. A general cooling of the U.S. climate has passed quite unnoticed in the populated areas because of the urban heat island effect, whereby the sheet mass of masonry, blacktop and other construction material of metropolitan areas accumulates heat and causes a local rise in average temperatures (Cathey, 1990). Temperatures are most frequently measured at places such as airports which were rural type locations surrounded by fields and forest only 20 or 30 years ago but which are now surrounded by parking lots, huge warehousing and service complexes and have suburbs beyond. For example, Washington D.C.'s National Airport has been the location for meteorological instruments since the 1930's during which time the Pentagon complex and Crystal City have been built and a grass field with a small hut has been developed into a major airport with terminals, hangars, concrete runways and taxiing areas. The temperature increases being measured at such places over the past few decades represent a micro-climatic change brought about by the transformation of the immediate environment, not national, let alone global, trends. Out in the countryside, inland and away from the Pacific and parts of the Atlantic coasts, where the global warming models predict rising temperatures, they have actually fallen somewhat (BOREAS Science Steering Committee, 1991). For example, in the mid-1960s Growing Zone 3, an area noted for its abundance of cattails, was principally north of Lake Superior. By 1990 it had moved southward into northern Michigan and cattails were forced further south into the northern third of Wisconsin. By 1990 increasing cold in the interior of North America pushed fir trees in Growing Zone 7 out of southern Illinois, completely out of Kentucky and most of the way out of Tennessee. By now the same cooling phenomenon has driven Growing Zone 9 and its palm trees out of South Caolina, Georgia and much of northern Florida. We have dwelt on the detail of what is happening right here in North America because this clearly established continental cooling has coincided with widespread acceptance of the scaremongers' shrill claims of global warming. But the real killer for the global warming models is the Arctic. All the supercomputer models predict accentuated warming here because of predominance of land mass at high latitudes and the limited mixing of the waters of the Arctic Ocean with the other oceans of the world. The Arctic should be the canary in the mine, the early warning station where the first tangible effects will be seen. And the models predict the greatest warming effects in the Arctic winter. Yet whatever way you slice the data, the Arctic, like the landmass of North America, has been experiencing a cooling during the past half century. Ice cover in the Arctic has increased during the summer, according to Soviet researchers by 600,000 sq km, and the summer season is now considered shortened by one month (Kirk, 1981). Moreover, analysis of previously inaccessible Soviet data shows that over the past four decades the Arctic Ocean has cooled 4.4 degrees F (Kahl et al, 1993). Increasing Arctic cold has caused forests in Russia to retreat south and the tundra to advance (Kullman, 1991). Further evidence of regional cooling in contradiction to the global warming theory is found in measurements showing the Greenland ice sheet is growing (Zwally et al, 1989), and reports that the Antarctic ice sheet and over half the world's glaciers are expanding. None of this regional data by itself makes a global warming trend impossible. But since it flies in the face of predictions by the computer modeling on which that prediction is based, it casts serious doubt on the proposition. The final straw in all this comes from the first truly global temperature data which arrived with the beginning of NASA satellite measurement in 1979. That data shows a tiny downward trend ( - 0.023 degrees celsius per decade) best interpreted as essentially no change at all (Spencer and Christie 1990; Christy personal communication, 1993). Flaws in the Global Warming Theory "A cooling trend has set in, perhaps one akin to the Little Ice Age...." p. 90 of Stephen H. Schneider, "The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival", Plenum Press, New York 1976. The leading global warming scaremonger in the 1990's, Stephen Schneider was in the 1970's a leading New Ice Age prophet. He explained in a 1971 article in SCIENCE magazine that C02 is a very efficient greenhouse gas at current concentrations. At higher concentrations it becomes decreasingly efficient. In a sense C02 is close to its saturation point as a greenhouse gas. It is trapping just about all the heat (infra-red, or IR, energy) that it can. The conclusion follows that increases in atmospheric C02 would do little to enhance the greenhouse effect and therefore to raise temperatures. Schneider said much of this back in 1971! He went on to say that the dominant manmade influence on climate was common air pollution. It increases cloud formation and lofts dust into the atmosphere, reflecting much solar radiation before it ever gets a chance to warm the earth. Hence human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, were likely to cool the earth, not heat it (Rasool and Schneider, 1971). Ellsaesser (1989) outlines the atmospheric physics behind the conclusions of Schneider and his colleagues. It is accepted global physics that the earth receives 340 watts per square meter as measured at the top of the atmosphere. Given a so-called albedo -- or reflective fraction -- of 0.3, the earth would absorb 0.7x 340 = 238 W/m2, only enough to maintain an average temperature of 255K or minus 18 degrees C. This is known as the "black body" temperature of the earth. Water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas in that it plays the dominant role in preventing infra-red energy from reflecting back into space. Absorbing heat that would otherwise be lost to space, the water vapor in the atmosphere (together with minor greenhouse gases such as C02) warms average surface temperatures about 30 degrees C. The current greenhouse effect only leaks about 7 percent of surface- emitted IR to space and C02 is a minor constituent of this largely atmospheric "blanket". Furthermore, C02 is already an extremely efficient insulator. It is possible that increasing the concentration of C02 will eventually reduce its insulating properties -- the equivalent of throwing water on a woolen blanket. Thus, increases in C02 beyond a certain point will tend to thicken the "blanket" up into the warmer upper stratosphere. Conversely, sufficient decrease in C02 will tend to reduce the thickness of the "blanket" mainly in the warmer troposphere, such that the C02 will become a less efficient greenhouse gas. So contrary to popular perception, C02 plays only a minor role in regulating the temperature of planet earth, and an increase in atmospheric concentrations will have negligible influence on global temperatures. Indeed beyond a point, increasing C02 levels may even cool the earth a little (Ellsaesser, 1989). Fantasy Some literally fantastic statements are made about the human role in increasing C02 levels. For example, John G. Mohler of the Southern California School of Medicine has said (WASHINGTON TIMES 10/13/90) that the greatest source of carbon dioxide and main reason for global warming is "the simple breathing in and out by 5.3 billion human beings," adding that "it takes most of the vegetation on earth to convert all that pollution (his term for the carbon dioxide) to beneficial nutrients like nitrogen and oxygen." For a start, the characterization of C02 as "pollution" is absurd given that all plants depend on C02 for life. C02 is to plants what oxygen is to animals — it is the elixir. Even taking Mohler's numbers (which suggest that humans breathe out half a gigaton of carbon each year), his claim is laughably absurd. It is one-tenth of the carbon released in fossil fuel combustion (see SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 1989 which estimated 5 gigatons in emissions). The oceans and their algae -- called "the lungs of the earth" by Paul Ehrlich in the "Population Bomb", 1968 -- have been estimated to exhale another 106 GT of carbon. Similarly, some 100 gigatons of carbon per year is taken up by terrestrial vegetation. Mohler's suggestion that vegetation can somehow convert carbon into nitrogen is pure alchemy — a physical impossibility. Such unscientific gibberish as Mohler's pronouncements deserve derision yet they are quoted endlessly in reportage on global warming and accepted uncritically. And the reportage is quite one-sided suggesting that humans only increase C02 levels. Completely neglected, and therefore unmeasured, is the role of humans in reducing C02. In cultivating plant foods, humans "mine" the atmosphere for the carbon taken from C02 and converted into carbon compounds in crops. In harvesting and preserving wood in buildings and in making paper and cotton products, carbon is taken out of the atmosphere and locked away in man's products. The Greens constantly reprimand us for our consumption and our volume of garbage and waste material. Yet waste paper, sewage sludge and yard wastes are largely carbon compounds and insofar as they are landfilled they represent a massive human-caused withdrawal of carbon from the atmosphere that grew their raw materials. When rivers are dammed by humans the reservoir bottoms act as massive carbon sinks. This is not intentional but is an inevitable by-product of damming a river. As the velocity of the water of the river drops to near zero behind the dam, sediment settles. Nutrients including carbon, instead of being spread as fertilizer on flood plains to decompose and give off C02, drop as carbon-rich sediment to the bottom of dam reservoirs where they are locked up as anaerobic mud. In recent centuries humans have tamed many of the world's great river systems with dams and have put unknown billions of tons of carbon- heavy sediment into reservoir bottoms. Biochemical processes facilitated by mankind also enhance the removal of carbon from the atmosphere. Almost all human activities fertilize water by adding nutrients such as phosphorous and nitrogen. The nutrients increase the growth of all kinds of life forms, especially algae (leading to the complaint about man producing eutrophication of lakes and bays). The algae, of course, take more C02 out of the atmosphere in utilizing the nutrients. As they die most of the algae drop to the bottom of lakes and bays locking vast amounts of carbon away. An objective assessment of the impact of mankind would at least mention these massive carbon disposal activities instead of dwelling solely on carbon generation -- as caused by fossil fuel combustion and, yes, breathing. For every molecule of carbon in the atmosphere there are more than 50 dissolved in seawater in the oceans. And then there is the land itself. For every molecule of carbon in the oceans there are 1,600 molecules in rocks. Mineral weathering by carbonic acid (H2C03 -- C02 dissolved in water) represents a virtually infinite sink for atmospheric C02. All the carbonate rocks on earth -- limestone (calcite and aragonite), dolomite, calcareous marls, slates and shales -- are the result of C02 weathering of silicate minerals. If we put more carbon into the atmosphere in the form of C02, it will be consumed by mineral weathering into additional carbonate mineral deposits! Thus the massive geochemical processes that have laid down the limestones, shales, slates and other carbonate rocks of the earth over the eons can deal with any extra carbon mankind puts into the atmosphere. This is a reminder that the activities of man are puny compared to those of nature. We are like a flea on an elephant. The natural fluxes of C02 to and from the atmosphere, the "breath of nature" so to speak, dwarf the breath of man and his artifacts, his cars and coal and oil-fired power plants. Even one of the random "hiccups" of nature would be big compared to anything we could do. The C02 numbers are bunk It has been uncritically accepted that C02 concentrations in the earth's atmosphere are indeed increasing. It is generally said that the pre-industrial C02 level was around 270 parts per million (ppm), reaching 300 in 1900, 325 by the mid-1950s and at about 360 today. Many of the graphs suggest there is an accelerating trend. These C02 time-series data used to support the global warming theory are based on: -- Measurements taken in the late 19th and 20th centuries; -- Measurement of air composition begun in 1958 at an observatory at Mauna Loa in Hawaii; -- Analysis of air bubbles deep in the icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica. There is serious doubt, however, about the validity of these spectacular upward sloping trend lines purporting to track C02 concentrations. The year 1992 saw publication of devastating critiques of the C02 data by a distinguished Norwegian scientist and his colleagues (Jaworowski et al 1992a,b) of the North Polar Institute in Oslo, Norway. These powerful, heavily-documented, well-reasoned scientific papers have been greeted by global warmists with complete silence. Apparently they have no answer and hope no one will notice them. Jaworowski and his colleagues begin by drawing attention to earlier, apparently forgotten critiques of the first C02/global warming data and add powerful arguments and data of their own. The earlier critiques (Slocum 1955) of the first global warming C02 numbers (Callendar 1938, 1940) pointed out that the Nineteenth Century number of 292 ppm was highly suspect. It was obtained from a set of 26 averages, obtained by excluding 16 that were higher and only two that were lower. Callendar, the originator of these numbers, also seemed to bias the recent data upward, rejecting numbers that were below average while rejecting no numbers above his average. Jaworowski notes that these are obviously biased numbers and complains that they are used by others without consideration for their unreliability. Other commentators have taken the matter further than Callendar saying that the pre industrial levels of C02 "would have to have been lower than 290 ppm" suggesting 270 ppm is "now appearing most widely accepted" (Ellsaesser, 1989). And so a lower base number creeps into the "1iterature," and an even more spectacular graph of C02 concentration is popularized. Thus are created "factoids" as characterized by Dixy Lee Ray (1990) — numbers selectively chosen to give an upward slope then criticized for not sloping sharply enough upward and given another tweak into fantasy. In these strange, indeed dangerous, times we need to be wary about everything that is reported as "fact" lest it be discovered to be a bunch of subjective, synthetic, politically-correct "factoids." For most recent years, annual data on C02 levels come from observations made at Mauna Loa which is cited as an ideal location for measuring C02 in the global atmosphere since it is a high mountain on an island in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean — about as far as could be imagined from the influences of mankind. There is, however, a huge problem with Mauna Loa. It is an active volcano, which has averaged one eruption every 3.5 years since 1832. And the Mauna Loa observatory is only 17 miles from the world's largest continuously-active volcano, Kilauea. Between eruptions major gas emissions occur from both volcanoes and associated rifts and vents. The gases are as much as 50% C02 (Jaworowski et al, 1992a)! Despite these rather easily established facts, global warming fantasists have declared that the Mauna Loa observatory "is thus an excellent, if not ideal, site for measuring C02...." (Pales and Keeling, 1965). Excellent for measuring the C02 of a volcanic emission surely, but for measuring world atmospheric trends, a worse location could hardly be chosen...unless you have scaremongering and deception in mind. Jaworowski and his colleagues compound their critique of the C02 numbers from Mauna Loa by noting that almost a fifth of the daily readings are for unexplained reasons omitted, and the blanks filled by linear interpolation -- suggesting more manipulation and bias. They note that what they charitably call an "editing" process is also applied to data at other observatories such as Samoa and Antarctica. At Mauna Loa, C02 is inferred by absorbance of infra-red radiation, a method which picks up other greenhouse gases, including probably water vapor. Greater humidity might therefore be reported as increased "C02 pollution." At Scandinavian observatories in the 1950's, C02 levels were measured by chemical analysis. By this more accurate method, it was observed that C02 concentrations fell! But then in 1959 the observatories dropped chemical analysis and adopted the IR-absorbance measurement and amazingly the readings fell into line with Mauna Loa and others. A third source of data purporting to measure C02 comes from air bubbles trapped in polar ice. Now, as snow falls upon snow, it begins to be compressed forming "firn" — a granular semi- consolidated snow. As firn gets increasingly buried under further snowfalls it gradually turns to solid ice. But this happens unevenly. As it is compressed under the further weight of snow above, the firn loses a mix of air and water that remains as vapor. This mix migrates gradually upward toward reduced pressures. Complicating the picture further are ice crusts which form atop the snow periodically from surface warming and refreezing. Such crusts can form at temperatures as low as -20 degrees C in the Antarctic summer. There has been no thorough study of the patterns of movement of air through the firn. Assumptions about the age of air bubbles in polar ice are just that -- assumptions. The dating of air bubble samples is therefore "purely speculative, neither based on experimental nor empiric evidence..." (Jaworowski et al 1992b, p254). Global warming enthusiasts and their "scientific" allies make another far-fetched assumption when interpreting ancient air bubbles, namely that the materials are non-reactive. They assume the ice is some kind of teflon-like substance. This was an issue in the acid rain controversy, when some of the proponents of the acid rain theory assumed ice would prevent chemical reactions. In fact many chemical reactions are just as vigorous in ice as in water, some vastly more vigorous. C02 itself is highly reactive in ice, as it is in water and air. This would account for highly varied measurements of C02 concentrations. Atmospheric gases dissolve into water at different rates depending on pressure. The higher the pressure the greater the dissolve rate. C02 with its great affinity for H20 molecules binds readily to them as ice forming a family of compounds called clathrates. As C02 disappears into clathrates, of course, there is less free C02 to be measured by a researcher with an augur. Therefore, natural processes of compression of ice and air and the chemical reactions of the highly reactive C02 naturally attrite C02 remaining in trapped air bubbles. So when C02 levels are taken from old air bubbles in ice what is being measured is not some historic atmospheric concentration but simply the leftover C02 after centuries and millennia of chemical and physical attrition of the original C02. Jaworowski et al (1992b) illustrate the dominant role of top-pressure in determining C02 levels in ice. They compared ice at depths of 100 to 200 meters at two places in Antarctica and found C02 levels very similar. Yet one sample came from an area of very small snowfall, Vostok station, where samples at this depth were 4,000 to 9,000 years old. The other sample of similar C02 composition was taken near Sipe station where the samples were much younger -- in the range 170 to 320 years old! The Norwegian and his colleagues cite case after case where arbitrary adjustments have been made in field data on C02 to make it fit preconceived notions. Data is made to fit perception! This is not science but anti-science, the manipulation of numbers to support dogma. In real science data is sacred while theory is adjusted. In the anti-science of global warming and environmentalism, theory is sacred and data is adjusted. Global warming scaremongering is utterly without empirical foundation. It is a set of implausible speculations based on rigged data. Those who hold their theory so dear that they try to manipulate reality, or data, to match it must be recognized as charlatans and zealots.