'GLOBAL WARMING': AN OFFICIAL PSEUDOSCIENCE

 

ABSTRACT 

By now you should have figured this one out. Recent years have witnessed a series of fear-mongering alarmist fads in pseudo-scientific meteorology and climatology, each promoted in succession by news media and mainstream science publications. Perhaps the most expensive example of these mass-hysterias is the pseudoscientific fad of 'global warming'. The present article is an examination of the science behind the ideology of 'global warming', as well as the social and political forces driving its promotion.

Few scientists would dispute the fact that climate is changing on a planetarian scale, and there are good reasons to believe that some of the changing features are not part of a natural variation, but consequences of man-made pollution. What every good scientist will dispute, however, is whether this observed and ongoing change is, as the promoters of the 'global warming' myth dogmatically assert, an upward change in the atmosphere's mean global temperature - and whether the mechanism responsible for it is CO₂ emission from fossil fuel combustion. Present-day climatology is vulnerable to these kinds of faddist dogmas - pushed forward as part of a political and media-driven agenda - because it lacks a functional, comprehensive, systematic and interconnected understanding of the nonlinear system formed by the atmosphere, the oceans, the land mass and the biosphere, and their interaction with solar radiation. The discoveries and methods of Aetherometry provide inroads towards developing such an understanding, beginning with a new understanding of the role of the Sun and solar radiation in modulating weather patterns over short and long-term scales.

I - THE FAD, THE MYTH AND THE FUDGE OF 'GLOBAL WARMING' 

1. The pseudoscientific fads of Official Climatology and Environmental Sciences

There is perhaps no clearer example of the arbitrary vagaries of mainstream peer-review and its promotion of non-scientific fads, driven by political and economic interests, than the recent promotion of the pseudoscientific myth of 'global warming', systematically accompanied by the recurrent fits of public hysteria it engenders amongst scientists, politicians, environmentalists (another type of politico), mainstream science journals and mass-media. 

Fads of this type - the fear-mongering alarmist type - have become the mainstay of official mass-media and the object of sensationalistic 'science-journalism'.  There's been a whole series of such fads associated with pseudo-scientific meteorology and climatology, that are cyclically promoted by syndicated news media and official or mainstream science publications. 

In the 70's, in the wake of the atmospheric cooling experienced between 1945-1947 and 1972, there was a passing fad of 'global' cooling, supposedly buttressed by study of the fossil record and ice samples, which had 'established' the existence of cycles of minor ice-ages (see reference to the Milankovich model below).  At that time, the fear was that the earth was just turning the corner into a new ice-age.  Any notion of global warming was strictly anathema.  Instead, it was argued that man-made contributions would aggravate this cooling by the production of carbon and sulphur aerosols.  As Richard Lindzen points out [1], some of the best-selling authors of this rubbish, like Stephen Schneider and Crispin Tickell, have now, not so surprisingly, moved on to become apologists of the 'global warming' hysteria.  Lindzen may argue that, amongst scientists, the fad was shortlived; yet, it is worth mentioning that, besides an ambiguous report by the NRC of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the two reports that initiated the 'global cooling' fad - on the natural prediction of an ice age as the trend of future climate [2], and on the effects of CO₂ and aerosols on cooling global climate [3] - were both published in the journal Science, the very same peer-reviewed journal that now promotes the 'reality' of 'global warming'. 

Next came the fad of acid-rain, then one heard about cows and termites being a significant source of atmosphere-polluting methane (that one was dear to Reaganism in the early 80's), then about the hole in the stratospheric ozone layer over Antarctica (back in 1985, by the British Antarctic Survey, BAS), and finally 'global warming' came of age.  Each fad came with smidgens of truth scattered about in a tissue of lies, unverifiable axioms and perverse falsification of facts.  And, of course, each also came with an ever growing number of climate modellers, now armed with supercomputers...

Pseudoscientific fads do not have, nor do they need, any reason to come about, being set in motion solely by the political and social forces that promote them, and the vested interests they serve.  Climatology and other environmental sciences are particularly vulnerable to this sort of manipulation  because, as Lindzen puts it, "rigor is generally impossible" in these disciplines.  But since these fads are supposed to be 'scientific', they are compelled to search for pseudo-evidence which may serve as the excuse (the 'scientific reason') for their promotion in mainstream journals and the media.  Typically there is a little truth in this pseudo-evidence, but its generalization or interpretation falsifies the facts and the data, undermining  both the value and the quality of the latter. 

Next:  The social forces driving the hysteria of 'global warming'
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