I did not take this all the way to the end because the later arguments stand on the shoulders of the earlier bits. The earlier bits are crumbly, and my blood pressure, normally normal, was rising faster than the Author's imagination. I am keeping this book away from my library to prevent my library getting a fever.
P. 17
In the United States, fluid inclusion data from ice core are commonly used, but I suspect the data are very unreliable. Researchers at UofT never used secondary inclusions (bubbles on healed fractures) for sphalerite geothermometry, and never even bothered with calcite fluid inclusions, assuming them worthless because of the weakness of calcite. Strictly speaking, determining whether an inclusion is primary is not possible. It is possible, however, to determine whether an inclusion is secondary, but not the other way around. Many secondary inclusions are unrecognised until set in context where they cannot fit thermodynamically and then they are discarded.
Ice is an open system simply because it expands as it freezes. Think of it this way. Ice will vacuum ambient air into its structure as it crystallizes. The trapped gasses then reorganise into bubbles. Moreover, the transition from firn to ice can take hundreds to thousands of years on any particular glacier. In the top transparent to translucent tens of metres, the firn freezes and thaws an unknowable number of times before conditions obtain to freeze it for the long term as crystalline ice.
The isotopes used for temperature determinations are heavy isotopes of oxygen and carbon; in a closed system, they proxy for temperature. In an open system, the light isotopes differentially leave the system and the heavies concentrate. In the ice core scientific papers I have from Lonnie T., the presentations include a hockey stick that has a handle which projects deep down into the ice with little variation. The bent blade of the stick corresponds to the upper end of the core where the open system prevails progressively more open toward the surface. The scientist measures the ambient temperature and calibrates it to isotope ratios of the newest ice. The ratios down the hole are then heavier and represent by proxy, lower temperatures. Hence, a global temperature curve of warming is produced that corresponds abruptly with the Industrial Revolution.
This is not the temperature record. The isotopic record is an artefact of the age of burial, degassing of the lighter isotopes, and progressive closing of the system. Glaciologists like Thompson have made a career of ice fluid inclusions, but they miss out the warm period of the Roman Empire, Medieval Warm period when Greenland was farmland and the Little Ice Age when the Alps were impassable. I am certain that the corrupt data issue is caused by publish or perish overspecialization, but the only way to ignore those episodes of geological climatic history is to cherry pick the background reading. Like the urban heating curves used by the Goddard Space Flight Institute, this database is corrupt and the student should go back to the lab in the basement or fail his Masters. Unfortunately, Lonny's bandwagon keeps on rolling. Does he know it? Only a cynic would say, "Of course he does".
P 21.
Interestingly enough, The Sand Mountains of the Rhub al Khali were formed by Westerlies blowing 100 kms an hour for 100s of years at a time. They are the Seif dunes of the Sahara (Google Earth). Seif is Arabic for sword, the long curved one. Seif dunes formed during the Pleistocene while climatic zones were compressed by an ice cap covering North America and the Alps. The Neanderthals lived in caves for good reason.
P. 29
Global warming as normal climates change is not the same meaning as anthropogenic global warming (AGW) caused by CO2. This assumption comes up as the author's circular argument all through the book.
P. 82
Wrong, not 70,000 - 100,000 years ago. I asked Environment Canada and got the answer. Polar Bears are at least 1,000,000 years old. They can interbreed with brown bears and produce fertile offspring (however, polar bears are extremely xenophobic so that intermarriage is beneath their station). Last year someone shot a dead Grizzly/Polar cross and used its picture as evidence of stress from global warming. The white bear has great camouflage for ice and the brown race does not. However, they contain the genes to go either way, and the genes have survived many ice ages and interglacial episodes with races swinging from white to brown and back depending on Darwin's whim.
P. 87
Bangladesh has added 10s of thousands of hectares of land area since the book Six Degrees of Warming: Our Future on a Hotter Planet was published. Sea level is the base level. As sea level rises (4-6 mm a year), the rivers and deltas dump their sediment and build barrier islands as a direct causal succession or consequence. This is part of progradation, the process that has formed the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains and barriers. Following the Pleistocene glaciations coral atolls rose and siliciclastic barriers grew. Subtle sea level rise just leads to nice places to have holidays. Darwin drew some clear diagrams if the formation of an atoll from a subsiding coral island.
To rise 120 metres since the last glaciations, sea level needs to rise 6 mm a year on average (125m / 20,000 years). The current numbers (UN IPCC 2-3 mm/ year) indicate the rise is slowing rather than increasing. An additional complication lies in isostatic rebound. From New York City northward including the Canadian Shield over to Hudson Bay, the land is rising faster than sea level.
P. 101 and 103
Climate Change is not the same as Anthropogenic Global Warming. AGW is (to me) the temperatures posted by Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) which includes much corrupt data from urbanized weather stations across the United States. Moreover, the GISS database no longer has updates from the Siberian stations closed for economic reasons after the collapse of the USSR. The media do not notice this bias.
P. 114
Botswana is a desert, Australia is a desert, and the Gobi and Sahara are deserts because of their positions respecting topography or global wind systems.
P. 115
CO2 has exceeded 400 pm several times in the past 130 years. It was 400 ppm as recently as 1942. Measurements of atmospheric CO2 for the past 130 years by Ernst-George Beck [Google him] show the UN IPCC has cooked the books. The measurements accumulated from the chemical literature by Beck include analyses by five Nobel Prize winning chemists. Mauna Loa is a very short database on a volcano that issues CO2. The main reason, however, could be the demise of pineapple farming and replacement with condominiums. I have never seen the promoters use a curve from anywhere else. (?)
P. 119
BAS Principal Investigator Dr Alan Haywood said,
`There are two schools of thought about past warm intervals. Many scientists suggest that they were caused by ocean currents (like the Gulf Stream) moving greater amounts of warm water from the tropics to the Polar Regions. Others speculate that increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere initiated warming all over the planet. We used the latest supercomputing technology combined with chemical analysis of seabed sediments to make a sophisticated reconstruction of past sea temperatures. If the warming was caused by ocean currents, we would expect to see cooling at the tropics and warming at the poles. Conversely, if CO2 was the cause then we would expect both the tropics and the poles to warm. The sea temperature pattern we found points the finger squarely at CO2 rather than the ocean currents. This is a real breakthrough for those of us investigating past climate - we've made a major contribution to a long standing argument and our findings are critical to understanding how climate may respond to emissions of greenhouse gases in the future'[THAT'S FOR YOUR PEERS TO DECIDE].
However, if the warming were due to another cause, say the solar hypothesis, which briefly stated is "It's the sun, STUPID", the warming causes retrograde solubility to kick in thus increasing atmospheric CO2. Do not warm your ginger ale and shake it.
P. 120
Cause and effect. Retrograde solubility (Not the only thing I ever learned from grad school). The reason Al Gore got so much attention from real scientists was this piece. CO2 trailed warming on his presentation. CO2 dissolves in cold water and evolves out of warm water. It is an effect of global warming rather than a cause. Do not warm your beer; it goes flat. I would buy the book to use as an example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.
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