James Delingpole’s AGW groupthink problems, and how to solve them

“The effect of CO2 on the atmosphere is very basic physics and has been known for over 100 years. 98% of all serious scientists agree on the seriousness of the situation we face. The 2% who don’t are left squabbling if it is serious / very serious / terminal.” – Martin Wyatt on Delingpole’s blog

The “greenhouse effect” is a falsehood since we don’t live in a cloudless, oceanless greenhouse; cloud cover increases with ocean temperature, which gives negative feedback, cancelling out the CO2 effect on air temp. Try Roy Spencer’s peer-reviewed data on this.

H2O vapour (not water droplets) causes positive feedback because water molecules absorb infrared radiation very effectively. H2O in condensed droplet form causes negative feedback, due to scattering sunlight back into space and hence cooling the surface below (each water droplet acts as a reflector, which does not happen for water molecules in vapour form).

For the reliable NOAA data set showing a 1% fall in total atmospheric column H2O vapour content since 1948 (not just stratospheric moisture which is misleadingly analyzed in recent efforts to studiously ignore negative feedback for AGW scaremongering propaganda), which is equivalent to a roughly 30% fall in CO2 (cancelling out the 25% rise in CO2 since 1948), see page 58 of the presentation by climatologist Dr Miklós Zágoni: https://nige.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/the-saturated-greenhouse-effect-theory-of-ferenc-miskolczi.pdf The addition of CO2 has increased the cloud cover H2O (negative feedback) at the expense of H2O vapour, which has simply warmed and risen to form cloud.

You won’t believe this

Above: John Horgan’s interview with Not Even Wrong author Dr Peter Woit. Woit explains that “string theory” began with with the failed idea of hadronic strings for strong interactions, which was replaced by quantum field theory with the confirmation of the Standard Model by the discovery of neutral currents in the 1970s and later weak gauge bosons in 1983. String theory then arose from the ashes in new extra-dimensional forms with a supersymmetric Standard Model of at least 10 spacetime dimensions in the first “superstring” revolution of 1984, and 11 dimensional supersymmetric gravity, supergravity. This accepted 8 dimensions of conformal field theory (CFT) in particle physics, added a 2 dimensional spacetime worldsheet, and then – since observed spacetime in general relativity has 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time – literally “compactified” the unobserved extra dimensions into a tiny Planck scale manifold. In a general way, this approach had similarities to the old 1929 Kaluza-Klein attempt to unify electromagnetism and gravitation by adding a compactified extra dimension of space to the metric in Einstein’s general relativity, giving five dimensions (4 spatial, 1 time). Thus, adding extra spatial dimensions can be interpreted as an equivalent to adding fields, allowing extra forces to be included. Like numerology, it didn’t physically predict the difference between the strengths of gravitation and electromagnetism, or make any other falsifiable prediction. Like a conjecture about blue elephants flying at night, there was no way to disprove it. If it was true, it could be confirmed. If it was false, it could not be disproved. This crap “heads I win, tails you lose” conjecture always ends up killing off genuine research in science by becoming fashionable dogma into science because it’s so attractive to conmen, sucking fraudsters into science. They then muster all available resources to proceed to attack and discourage all “alternative” ideas from ever being studied. The conjectures soon pile up in string theory. Charged branes must stabilize the compactified 6/7 extra spatial dimensions of M-theory so that all electrons have the same charge, etc., and this stabilization can be done in a “cosmological landscape” of 10⁵⁰⁰ different metastable vacua, or imaginary parallel universes (very convenient for sci fi writers e.g. string theory professors). Then you have the AdS/CFT conjecture: conformal field theory is conjectured to be dual to anti de-Sitter space (negative cosmological constant), which is not very helpful because we like in a universe with a measured non-AdS (positive) CC. The difference between positive CC reality and negative CC in AdS is quite a problem, but hey, never mind, the pion mediated strong attraction between nucleons is like AdS, so maybe someone can use that to help model strong interactions. Duh, that’s back to the objective of the original 1960s hadronic string. Besides, it’s like epicycles: it’s ugly mathematics. As Woit says, the “beauty” of mathematics only extends into physics where either the mathematics leads to falsifiable predictions that prove useful experimentally, or where the mathematics leads to a theory that becomes simpler and leads towards greater simplicity. For example, Maxwell’s electromagnetic unification is mathematically elegant because his unified equations are simple enough to be capable of solution (if Maxwell had proposed a landscape of 10⁵⁰⁰ sets of equations like superstring theory, this would be inelegant, regardless of the “elegance” of any particular set of equations picked out of the hat), although as physics it’s just a classical approximation that doesn’t include vital quantum field effects that both provide a way of understanding the processes involved (which equations alone, uncoupled to physical mechanisms, never can), and affect the predictions. E.g. Gauss’s law is wrong at high energy because vacuum polarization shields the observed low-energy physics upon which the law is based; go to higher energy and the electric field strength will be stronger than Gauss predicts because you get less virtual fermion shielding, and thus “see” more effect from the bare unshielded electronic charge (the charge of the electron core is much higher than suggested by Gauss’s law, which is based on the shielded value). It’s not necessary for mathematical models to be completely correct in order to be elegant mathematical, it’s just necessary that the result has some use or leads to some simplification or compression of knowledge.

Lord Bertrand Russell’s example of the non-falsifiable hypothesis that God created the universe five minutes ago (complete with faked evidence for a long period of development, such as history books, implanted false memories, and the fossil record) is unsurpassed. Those with great rigor (mortis), who are “scientifically skeptical” of “mere theories” like evolution, can always fall back upon a variant of Russell’s argument. It’s impossible to disprove a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Professor Freeman Dyson ended his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe with a following speculation about meeting God: “It seems there is nobody here. I look at my watch again. Probably God did not expect us to be so punctual. We stand at the foot of the steps, waiting for something to happen.

“Nothing happens. After a few minutes I decide to climb the steps and have a closer look at the throne. … I walk up until my eyes are level with the seat. I see then that the throne is not empty at all. There is a three-month-old baby … In the silence I gradually become aware that the questions I had intended to raise with him have been answered.”

Therefore, in religious dogma it is possible to find a theory of God in which the non-interventionist, hands-off approach to human freedom is naturally explained away. Other similarly non-falsifiable theories include one where God is actually in control of every single coin flip and deliberately causes all our problems, that God doesn’t exist, and that God exists in a very abstract form of “mathematical ideas” consisting of mathematical contortions to a space-time worldsheet. This last dogma is currently called the multiverse landscape of “M-theory”. The weaker the evidence for a mainstream non-falsifiable hypothesis, the louder the marketing effort needs to be, to subdue and shout down hecklers. Of all the contradictory pieces of worthless “free advice” which are offered to you as insults during life, the best pair beyond doubt are “we love progress” and “we hate change”. Make sure you make progress but don’t change anything or you’ll be hated by those affected by the changes necessary in order to make progress!

Science is not about being “open minded” to liars, it’s the opposite. It’s about being closed-minded to lies and fakery, so that facts can emerge. Science is about censoring out non-factual bigoted old belief systems, so that new facts can get a fair hearing.

Figure 1. A simplification from diagrams in an earlier post, linked here. There are quite a few bits of Feynman’s 1985 QED logic required in quantum field theory which are currently omitted from the textbooks and are needed to understand the subject, like the spin-2 graviton mistake of Wolfgang Pauli and Markus Fierz, which have been discussed previously. Writing up the facts in a way that makes sense to me is therefore an entirely different (and much simpler) challenge than writing up the facts in a way that convinces ignorant brainwashed morons who won’t even read any factual anyway, because of one ancient and wrong dogma or another. See also the essay on second quantization facts versus first quantization mainstream liars.

This idea was glued together by yours truly back in May 1996, submitted to Martin Eccles (editor of Electronics World), and published via page 896 of the October 1996 issue of Electronics World, prior to the discovery of predicted small, a ~ Hc, cosmological acceleration of the universe by Perlmutter and others over a year later. The idea is to take Feynman’s discussion of LeSage’s gravity, turn it into a quantum field theory (off-shell gravitons pushing masses together, by analogy to the heuristic Casimir force vacuum radiation), and then supply a mechanism for the inward force which allows quantitative predictions to be made. The mechanism is very simple: gravitons push things, they don’t pull. If you have two relatively small masses surrounded by immense masses, the small masses will be pushed together by the geometry of the surrounding immense masses, harder than they will push one another apart. Result: “attraction”. But big masses mutually repel, so they accelerate away from one another. How much acceleration? In 1996 we predicted the cosmological acceleration was about a = Hc, where H is Hubble’s parameter. This small amount of cosmological and thus the corresponding “dark energy” was confirmed by automated CCD detections of very distant supernovae redshift observations by Perlmutter, who later published confirmation in Nature. Nature’s Phil Campbell and his physical sciences editor Karl Zemelis, needless to say, refused to send my papers for “peer” review – both in November 1996 (ahead of empirical confirmation) and after empirical confirmation.

Figure 2. Quantum gravity by analogy to the implosion bomb mechanism, as illustrated in Glasstone and Dolan’s Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd ed., 1977. I first saw this in 1988. This diagram is a bit misleading, really, suggesting that if you get a block of explosive and apply a match to the side nearest you, you’ll start an explosive burning (“detonation”) wave that will send force away from you, as the explosion wave front is propagating away from you! So you’ll be quite safe (not!). The blast will only travel in the direction that the explosion wavefront proceeds in, which is away from you, or so the diagram seems to imply. But what about Newton’s 3rd law? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction! You can’t exert a one-way force without an equal reaction or recoil. Even the more detailed book, by Professor Bridgman, doesn’t go into this reaction force, although it does show how the burning shock wave bounces back outward after converging in the centre.

This reaction force mechanism, put into the LeSage gravity model, allows us to predict the cosmological acceleration of the universe, if we measure gravitation. The fall of an apple implies the ~10^-10 ms^-2 cosmological acceleration of the universe. That someone actually predicted this ahead of observation, is testimony not to their genius (sadly), but to what you can do by putting together empirical facts without speculations, to get new predictions.

AGW is also a pyramid of lies.

Put CO2 in a greenhouse, and the CO2 absorbs sunlight, warming the air up during the day, and absorbing infrared radiation from the warmed ground from escaping into outer space during the night. That’s a fact. Therefore, we’re causing some temperature rise by releasing CO2, if that “greenhouse effect” is not a gigantic lie.

The lie here is that the earth is a greenhouse with no possibility of any cloud forming to shadow the surface and low-altitude air from sunshine:

Inject CO2
-> Slight warming in cloud-clear areas
-> Ocean surface waters (top 50 metres, above thermocline) warm slightly in those areas
-> water evaporation enhanced by CO2 in those areas
-> evaporating moisture in cloud-free areas absorbs infrared energy from sunlight
->this warmed moist air can’t stop itself from expanding, thus rising buoyantly until it cools at ~2 km altitude to form cloud cover
-> the cloud cover increase due to CO2 produces negative feedback on temperature, cancelling out the warming from CO2
-> result of pumping out CO2 is a short-term temperature rise, followed by a slight increase in cloud cover until the temperature rise is negated by negative feedback.

What’s wrong here? All of these steps are hard physical facts. They’re not speculations, they’re not conjectures, they’re not guesswork. I can prove that cloud cover attenuates the solar radiation reaching the surface. I can prove that sunlight-warmed warm moist air rises until it cools and the moisture condenses.

What’s happening here is that the negative feedback from water on climate is being ignored by “uncertainty” mongering.

The IPCC will falsely say that negative feedback evidence ( http://vixra.org/pdf/1104.0013v1.pdf ) is too “uncertain” to include, if they’re ever really pushed to comment on it at all. But they won’t find the genuine lack of evidence for positive feedback an “uncertainty” excuse that forces them remove “uncertain” positive feedback from their predictions!!!!

So they’re having their cake and eating it: nobody challenges them over the “uncertainty” (gross lie, actually) of positive feedback that’s producing 2 C of the predicted 3 C temp rise by 2100 in the IPCC models, and yet they would certainty try to falsely use alleged smear tactics for “uncertainty” in evidence of negative feedback.

There is no greenhouse effect outside a greenhouse because there is no glass ceiling in the real world that stops clouds forming, and no ocean in a greenhouse to provide evaporating water for increased cooling cloud cover to form from warmed humid air. Just tell me, what’re the “uncertainty” here?