Climate Science Is Imprecise

The alarmist warmists ignore papers that keep calling
for a “rethink” about carbon sources and sinks

Climate science is not a primary focus of Creation-Evolution Headlines, but sometimes it helps to show how consensus science is manufactured. If “settled science” behind vaccine and mask mandates have been dubious, and if expert astronomers spend millions of dollars on “dark matter” that may not even exist, and if climate scientists keep revising their models of primary data, then maybe perceptive citizens should not be too quick to believe that Darwinian evolution is a fact.

The following news stories are all from pro-warmist secular sources. Climate, as shown below, is a complex issue with many factors that are poorly constrained. How much more complex is the history of life according to evolutionists covering millions of years?

Note: There is a difference between the honest researchers gathering data in the field, and ‘Big Science.’ The latter, consisting of academic deans, journal editors, lobbyists and bureaucrats, often push political agendas in spite of anomalies found by researchers. The individual researcher wants to get raw data on a specific subject and analyze what it indicates. Big Science wants a consensus. Take note of that difference in the articles below.

Forest canopy covers ‘obviously’ underestimated by current assessments, researchers find (Phys.org, 16 Feb 2022). A fundamental piece of data going into climate models and warming estimates is the area of tree canopy measured from satellites. This article claims that those measurements over a part of China have been underestimated by 20%.

“Systematic underestimations of about 20% were obviously noticed in all three global maps, although all three had good consistency when compared to one another,” Ni said, noting they only compared the northeast China region. “Our study indicates the need for independent assessments of other locations on these global maps.”

City Trees and Soil Are Sucking More Carbon Out of the Atmosphere Than Previously Thought (Boston University, 16 Feb 2022). Another assumption has led to another systematic error. Trees suck more CO₂ out of the atmosphere than previously thought… thought by whom?

It has long been assumed that these forest edges release and store carbon at similar rates as forest interiors, but Hutyra and researchers in her lab at BU have discovered this isn’t true. Soils and trees in temperate forest edges in the Northeast United States are acting differently than those farther away from people. In two recent research papers, Hutyra’s team found edge trees grow faster than their country cousins deep in the forest, and that soil in urban areas can hoard more carbon dioxide than previously thought. Their results can challenge current ideas about conservation and the value of urban forests as more than places for recreation.

This means that warming is not happening as fast as the consensus has led the world to believe.

“That’s CO₂ that’s not in the atmosphere,” says Boston University biogeochemist and ecologist Lucy Hutyra. “We’re not feeling the full effects of climate change because of the terrestrial climate sink. These forests are doing an incredible service to our planet.”

Volcano eruption in Tonga Jan 15, 2022. (Earth Observatory satellite, NASA). This eruption is causing a rethink about volcanoes and their effects on climate.

Volcanic Climate Warming Through Radiative and Dynamical Feedbacks of SO2 Emissions (Geophysical Research Letters, 1 Feb 2022). Here’s another evidence that global warming can come from natural causes. It’s been known that volcanoes can cool the planet, like Mt Pinatubo did. But now read this: the warming caused by volcanoes is vastly more significant than the cooling.

Volcanic flood basalt eruptions have been linked to or are contemporaneous with major climate disruptions, ocean anoxic events, and mass extinctions throughout at least the last 400 M years of Earth’s history. Previous studies and recent history have shown that volcanically-driven climate cooling can occur through reflection of sunlight by H₂SO₄ aerosols, while longer-term climate warming can occur via CO₂ emissions. We use the Goddard Earth Observing System Chemistry-Climate Model to simulate a 4-year duration volcanic SO₂ emission of the scale of the Wapshilla Ridge member of the Columbia River Basalt eruption. Brief cooling from H₂SO₄ aerosols is outweighed by dynamically and radiatively driven warming of the climate through a three orders of magnitude increase in stratospheric H₂O vapor.

The Forecast Skill of the Northern Hemisphere Middle Latitudes Seasonal Oscillation and Its Impact on the Surface Air Temperature (Geophysical Research Letters, 1 Feb 2022). Researchers found a pretty good success for prediction of an oscillation in the atmosphere. But that cycle is only 120 days long. The notable sentence is in the beginning of the “Plain Language Summary” as follows: “Many phenomena are routinely predicted, yet prediction on time scales longer than two weeks is regarded as limited because of the chaotic nature of atmospheric dynamics.” Long-term trends can be predicted from short-term trends “if there is a linkage between the two,” they say. In this case, there appeared to be. How many other trends covering years, decades and centuries can be predicted?

Multidecadal trends in organic carbon flux through a grassland river network shaped by human controls and climatic cycles (Geophysical Research Letters, 10 Feb 2022). Another oscillation was studied by this team, but conclusions over 20-40 years were hard to come by.

Despite urbanization and effluent release in recent decades, we did not observe trends in DOC [dissolved organic carbon] fluxes over twenty to forty year monthly sample records. High interannual variability in DOC flux was linked to climate teleconnections, most strongly the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Human impacts were more apparent on the seasonality of flux, since spring export dominated DOC flux in most sub-watersheds, but seasonal changes were absent at the river mouth due to downstream flow control. In grassland regions, human impacts on DOC flux are complex, and subtle long-term changes may be difficult to identify in contemporary monitoring records due to increasing hydro-climatic variability.

Rethinking how to measure methane’s climate impact (Stanford University, 9 Feb 2022). A panel concludes that climate scientists have “underestimated the importance of this short-lived greenhouse gas for achieving Paris climate agreement goals, a new Stanford University study finds.” But not all methane is human-caused. Scientists keep finding natural sources, like methane seeps in the Puget Sound.

Natural sources of methane are being found on the ocean floor. Some of it is generated by “cable bacteria” that live in ocean sediments and in wetlands.

Scientists raise alarm over ‘dangerously fast’ growth in atmospheric methane (Nature News, 9 Feb 2022). Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and much of it is produced naturally, such as in wetlands. Alarmed by recent high measures of methane, Nature tries to figure out where it’s coming from.

“It’s a powerful signal,” says Xin Lan, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, and it suggests that human activities alone are not responsible for the increase. Lan’s team has used the atmospheric ¹³C data to estimate that microbes are responsible for around 85% of the growth in emissions since 2007, with fossil-fuel extraction accounting for the remainder.

Microbial nanowires (Current Biology, 8 Feb 2022). Derek Lovley discusses the electricity-conducting “wires” made by “cable bacteria” in the ocean floor. In passing, he mentions their effects on greenhouse gas production. Think of how many places on earth this is occurring without human involvement:

This extracellular electron transfer is important in the global cycling of carbon, metals, and nutrients. For example, microbial oxidation of the organic matter in soils and sediments coupled to the reduction of Fe(III) oxide minerals (Figure 1B) recycles organics back to carbon dioxide…. Bacteria that metabolize organic material feed electrons to methane-producing archaea through nanowires. These electrically connected consortia are major catalysts for the release of methane, an important greenhouse gas, from rice paddies and wetlands.

Continued tomorrow.

Since “climate change” is so much in the news and dominates so much public policy on the assumption humans are causing it, we think our readers need to know about these papers and articles that are passed over by the mainstream media. The media wants to put out a uniform consensus message that humans are causing global warming. Big Tech even censors those who question the consensus.

Here again, though, we cite original source material by pro-warmist organizations and researchers to show how much guesswork and imprecision exists in the data. We keep finding more unknowns that were not considered before, bad assumptions and errors in measurement, and factors being rethought. They keep coming up every month. How many remaining unknowns are there? How much do scientists really know about climate change? You be the judge.