Actually, Virginia, There Isn't a Greenhouse Effect

Energy prices through the roof, food shortages killing millions (billions?), and a drastic decrease in living standards; are these going to be the result of man-made Global Warming (Anthropogenic Global Warming, or AGW)? Or the result of a belief in a lie? There is no such thing as a greenhouse gas, and the Greenhouse Model of Global Warming has never been scientific.

The vast majority of climate scientists agree that AGW has been proven. As recently as January 2009, CNN.com reported on a survey in which 97% of climatologists said they believed not only that the earth is warming, but that humans are contributing to the warming. Even a cursory perusal of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Wildlife Federation, and the Environmental Defense Fund immediately makes it clear that the science is settled. The world's scientific authorities insist AGW is real. Which is to say, carbon dioxide emissions from human industrialization are causing an increase in the greenhouse effect. Unfortunately for all these esteemed and well-funded authorities, the scientific method cares not for authority, agreement, or belief; it's what the evidence proves.

Those who promote belief in AGW like to trot out the planet Venus as “proof” of the greenhouse model. The atmosphere on Venus is full of carbon dioxide, and it's over 400 degrees C there. Pretty convincing, right? Actually no; that this has been so well received not only by the public but – alarmingly – also by many scientists shows the truly deplorable state of science education in the U.S. (and, apparently, other countries). As Steve Goddard explains in “Hyperventilating on Venus”, “...why is Venus hot? Because it has an extremely high atmospheric pressure. The atmospheric pressure on Venus is 92x greater than Earth.” He goes on to say:

Wikipedia typifies the illogical “runaway greenhouse” argument with this statement:

Without the greenhouse effect caused by the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the temperature at the surface of Venus would be quite similar to that on Earth.

No it wouldn’t. 9000 kPa atmospheric pressure would occur on earth at an altitude many miles below sea level. No such place exists, but if it did – it would be extremely hot, like Venus. A back of the envelope estimate – temperatures on earth increase by about 80C going from 20 to 100 kPa, so at 9,000 kPa we would expect temperatures to be in the ballpark of :

20C + ln(9000/(100-20)) *80C = 400C

This is very close to what we see on Venus. The high temperatures there can be almost completely explained by atmospheric pressure – not composition. If 90% of the CO2 in Venus atmosphere was replaced by Nitrogen, it would change temperatures there by only a few tens of degrees.

Al Gore – Mr. Inconvenient Truth himself – has been promoting environmentalism for decades. Who has more credibility than him? That makes him ideal to front a scam called “cap and trade,” in which a market for carbon credits has been created, and in the land of cowboy-capitalism that inevitably means of course also speculation on carbon futures – expected to be a $2 Trillion market by 2014. OK, so here's an example of how the scam works, in three easy steps: first, the venture capital firm where Al is a partner invests $75 Million in a “smart grid” start-up called Silver Spring Networks; then, Al flies all over the country and world scaring the bejeezus out of everyone about “Global Warming,” for example testifying before Congress that we must “put a price on carbon”; finally, the U.S. Energy Dept. announces $3.4 Billion dollars in “smart grid” grants (now where have I heard that term before?), of which over $500 Million goes to companies that have contracts with... wait for it... Silver Spring Networks! Ohmigod! What a great investment that turned out to be. Al also recently bought a mansion in California (for nearly nine million dollars), which has “six fireplaces, five bedrooms and nine bathrooms” as reported by the Los Angeles Times; that's not exactly walkin' the talk. He likes to indignantly insist that all the profits from his “green” investments go to his non-profit organization to promote environmental causes. Therefore, it's a mystery how his net worth went from under $2 Million in the year 2000 to over $100 Million just seven years later. I love the environment; wish I was worth a hundred mill.

If you research AGW in the mainstream media, you will undoubtedly come across the name of Svante Arrhenius. He allegedly proved the “Greenhouse Effect” on which all these prognostications that are being made today depend. However, as geologist Timothy Casey pointed out:

...Arrhenius' 'Greenhouse Effect' must be driven by recycling radiation from the surface to the atmosphere and back again. Thus, radiation heating the surface is re-emitted to heat the atmosphere and then re-emitted by the atmosphere backto accumulate yet more heat at the earth's surface. Physicists such as Gerlich & Tscheuschner (2007 and 2009) are quick to point out that this is a perpetuum mobile of the second kind - a type of mechanism that creates energy from nothing.

Basically, Arrhenius duplicated an amount of energy from one stage of the process to the next, when in reality there is energy lost each time it is transferred from one place to another or from one form to another; this is eerily similar to the mechanism of hiding debt the Wall Street scammers engaged in that caused the financial crisis of 2008.

So, if the Greenhouse Effect is not in effect on a global scale, then why is the earth warming? Or, is it warming? In November of 2009, someone released to the world over 1000 e-mails from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU); the IPCC relies on the CRU for key datasets in its research on Global Warming. Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne (Aus) Herald Sun wrote that the e-mails suggested “...conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more”. So much for consensus. Damage control from those involved was to call the leaker a “hacker”, but Bolt dismissed this, saying the leak was “... clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle”.

We appear to be at the end of an approximately 10,000 year period of relative stability of our climate on this big blue marble; at the point of transition of a system from one state to another, the system becomes unstable. Or perhaps the Standard Model is wrong, and we really do live in an Electric Universe, and that is what is causing the warming – or is it cooling? Maybe the human race is caught in a cycle we do not comprehend, and we are destined to be the basis for the next legend of a lost civilization (the United States of Atlantis?). Or, maybe, we just don't know what is happening or why.

But no one likes that answer.