Global Warming: A Leap of Faith.

What is faith?

A dictionary definition is, “The assent of the mind to the truth of a proposition or statement for which there is not complete evidence; belief in general. Specifically, firm belief based upon confidence in the authority and veracity of another, rather than upon one’s own knowledge, reason, or judgement.“

The biblical definition of faith is given in Hebrews 11:1, “Faith means being sure of the things we hope for and knowing that something is real even if we do not see it. ” (NCV)

Dr Roy Spencer looks at faith in the context of the current ‘climate emergency’ in a post on his blog.  He sets out three basic fundamentals:

1. The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that any temperature change in any thing or any system is a result of an imbalance in energy flows. Energy in vs energy out or energy gain vs energy loss.
   
2. The global warming premise is based on the approximately 1% imbalance between absorbed sunlight and the infrared energy radiated back out to space. This imbalance is said to be due to CO₂ from fossil fuel burning.
   
3. The big unknown is whether or not the climate system would be in a natural state of energy balance it there were no humans. He states that we have no way of knowing, either from observation or first principles, the quantitative average amounts of absorbed sunlight and emitted infrared energy across the Earth to the accuracy we would need to blame any change on humans.

So the tool the climate scientists use are computer models.

When computer climate models are first constructed, these global-average energy flows in and out of the climate system do not balance. So, modellers adjust any number of uncertain processes in the models (for example, cloud parameterizations) until they do balance. They run the model for, say, 100 years and make sure there is little or no long-term temperature trend to verify balance exists.

Then, they add the infrared radiative effect of increasing CO₂, which does cause an energy imbalance. Warming occurs. They then say something like, “See? The model proves that CO₂ is responsible for warming we’ve seen since the 1950s.”


But they have only demonstrated what they assumed from the outset. It is circular reasoning. A tautology. Evidence that nature also causes global energy imbalances is abundant: e.g., the strong warming before the 1940s; the Little Ice Age; the Medieval Warm Period. This is why many climate scientists try to purge these events from the historical record, to make it look like only humans can cause climate change.

Roy Spencer

His conclusion is that we cannot say whether or not CO₂ causes global warming or how much it may or may not cause because we simply have we have no idea what natural energy imbalances exist in the climate system. The modellers simply assume they do not exist.

There is no possible way to distinguish ‘natural’ warming from ‘human induced’ warming. Warming is warming – it does not come in different colours or flavours.

The whole global warming / climate change / climate emergency issue is an article of faith.