We Need to be Able to Debate Climate Science Without Shouting at One Another.
We’re told that we’re living in an era of impending doom, and that our greenhouse emissions are likely to cause runaway climate change. Scare stories in the media abound while there remain gaps and inconsistencies in our data on both Earth’s temperature and incoming radiation from the Sun. Furthermore, astrophysics of the Sun is still a developing area of our understanding, and we only became aware of how much infrared the Sun emits in the mid-90s. But climate science and climate activism had presented their case of impending doom prior to then. In this YouTube clip from 1985, you can see Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in seeming ignorance of the now-established fact that the Sun emits light mostly in the infrared.
We have a scenario in which we have a well-established fact in science, known as the greenhouse effect, whereby visible light hitting the Earth from the Sun is shifted to the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, absorbed, and re-emitted back towards Earth. This effect certainly happens, and is thought to lead to global warming. However, it’s only one part of the story. In addition to visible light, we now know that the Sun emits light mostly in the infrared; hence, for every photon of infrared light reflected back towards the surface by co2 molecules in the atmosphere, infrared light from the Sun will likewise be reflected back towards space. Therefore, on the one hand, co2 does create a greenhouse effect, however on the other it also shields us from incoming infrared radiation. The one effect cancels out the other. In the mid nineteen eighties, it seems Sagan and others were ignorant of this fact.
Likewise, today, some publications; often coming from very respectable institutions; still assert that most of the Sun’s incoming radiation comes to us as visible light. This is not the truth. Take this article from Columbia University, for example; they’re crediting NASA with data on this notion that sunlight is mostly visible light. This is undermined by evidence and demonstrates that the field hasn’t moved on much in their understanding since the mid-80s. As for the NASA statistics, they claim that the mean surface temperature of Earth is a scorching 15 degrees Celsius. If you take the mean temperature of the Sahara desert (both the daytime temperature and, crucially, the nighttime temperature also), you find that it comes out as 13 degree Celsius. How shocking. It seems NASA have taken an average of Earth’s surface temperature that fails to account for its temperature at night.
As for the rest of the data from NASA, if they can’t get the average temperature of Earth within reasonable bounds, how could we therefore trust them on solar irradiance? Their statistics on that topic come from analysis of sunspot activity, solar flares, and other activity on the surface of the Sun (the chromosphere). They claim that solar irradiance remains roughly constant, and; in terms of light emitted from the chromosphere; that does seem to hold up to scrutiny. However, they’ve been failing to account for the background. The Sun’s corona reaches millions of degrees centigrade whereas the chromosphere only reached about 8000 degrees. The Sun is hurtling towards the galactic centre at 250 km/s and, on its passage, will be accreting material (gas, dust, rock, etc), and this will be burning up on the Sun’s corona. NASA only sent out its first probe to study the corona of the Sun in 2018 and, on this problem of why the Sun gets so hot in its corona, researchers only began making in-roads into it last year.
In the future, we may very well uncover that global warming has nothing to do with man-made emissions at all. Instead, we might put it down to the fact that the Sun’s atmosphere (the corona) is accreting variable amounts of gas, dust and rock from the interstellar background, and that this is releasing varying amounts of radiation which, at times, heats the planet. What’s more shameful about climate science now is that certain NGOs (such as the Centre for Combating Digital Hate) seem intent on using AI algorithms the crawl the internet looking for material that questions the climate change narrative and to shut down debate. They’re even trying to get YouTube and other platforms to change their policies such that material questioning the mainstream in the climate science gets removed. It comes down to this: if you were so confident in your opinions on climate change, why would you seek to shut down debate? Why seek to silence the opinions of those who disagree with you if your case was so incontrovertible?
I’m an environmentalist and I don’t question that human emissions may be causing all sorts of havoc on planet Earth. I don’t question that we shouldn’t be polluting the oceans and watercourses, I think it’s disgraceful that we’re responsible for so much deforestation, and I think much more needs to be done to combat habitat loss and soil degradation. We were brought closer to nuclear war than at any other time in the 21st century with the outbreak of the War in Ukraine. That war is being fought, obliquely, over the natural resources and agricultural output of Ukraine. I’ve always thought that it’s more likely that we’ll bring about the destruction of our planet, and our self-destruction, by dropping hydrogen bombs on one another than by warming the planet with co2. Many people still treat climate science with diffidence and its lack of scientific rigour threatens to bring the entire environmentalist movement into direspute. We must learn to stop shouting at one another, have an open debate on climate change, and reassess our environmental priorities in light of the evidence, and in light of the gaps in our understanding.
