Don’t you think we should be sure the science is correct before spending trillions of dollars?— Dr. Peter L. Ward
JACKSON, Wyo. (PRWEB) December 20, 2019
After two weeks of intense negotiations, the 25th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP25) ended on December 14 without any substantive progress. A majority of countries had hoped to agree on rules for a global carbon trading system and on ways to help countries facing the greatest impacts of climate change.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he was “disappointed with the results of COP25. The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation, and finance to tackle the climate crisis. But we must not give up, and I will not give up.”
These results are deeply disappointing, especially for thousands of climate scientists who fear that without immediate reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, the world is likely to become dangerously overheated.
“But is the science really that clear?” asks Dr. Peter L. Ward, a 27-year veteran of the US Geological Survey and CEO of the not-for-profit Science Is Never Settled. “My fellow scientists have never shown by experiment, a cornerstone of the scientific method, that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere actually cause global warming.”
“Meanwhile,” Ward explains, “humanity has carried out the most definitive experiment ever done linking global temperatures to changes in gas concentrations in the atmosphere. In the 1960’s, humans began manufacturing large quantities of chlorofluorocarbon gases (CFCs) for spray-can propellants, refrigerants, and foam-blowing agents. When lofted into the stratosphere, these CFCs are broken down by solar ultraviolet radiation, releasing atoms of chlorine that began depleting the ozone layer in the 1970s. In 1987, the United Nations passed the Montreal Protocol, mandating cutback in CFC production starting in 1989. This cutback stopped the increase in CFC emissions by 1993, stopped the increase in ozone depletion by 1995, and stopped the increase in temperature by 1998. Humans turned global warming on and then turned it off. Without the Montreal Protocol, Earth, most likely would be much hotter today.”
In 2017, Ward published a paper based on this successful experiment, showing how ozone depletion caused by CFCs and by very large basaltic lava flows explains recent global warming in great detail. Ozone depletion also explains quite accurately, most global warming throughout Earth history.
If Ward is right, temperature trends should be downward since 2016, the hottest year on record, as the ozone layer recovers. Major warming predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) will not happen. Any money spent for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions will be wasted.
“Don’t you think we should be sure the science is correct before spending trillions of dollars?” Ward asks. “Unfortunately, my fellow scientists, having studied greenhouse-warming theory throughout their lives and having manufactured an impressive ‘consensus’ in order to convince political leaders to take action, refuse to even consider the possibility that there could be the slightest mistake with this old-fashioned theory. Their minds are not open to new discoveries. But science is not done by consensus or by popular vote.”
The major mistake in greenhouse-warming theory, according to Ward, was made more than two centuries ago, long before scientists understood what must happen physically to warm Earth’s surface temperature. Scientists assumed then, and still assume today, that Earth gets warmer by absorbing a greater amount of some generic thing they think of as thermal energy or, in the case of greenhouse gases, by losing less of this generic thermal energy into space.
We now understand that there is no such thing as an amount of generic thermal energy. The physical properties of thermal energy vary with the temperature of its source. Radiation from Sun burns your skin, causes skin cancer, and cataracts. No amount of radiation from Earth can cause any of these problems. “We all know from personal experience in sunlight,” Ward explains, “that something is wrong with the physics underlying greenhouse-warming theory.”
We now observe and understand that the basis for temperature in matter is the oscillation of all the bonds holding atoms and molecules together. These bonds oscillate back and forth at trillions of cycles per second causing what we perceive as temperature of matter. The higher the temperature, the higher the frequencies and amplitudes of oscillation.
In 1900, Max Planck, one of the fathers of modern physics, devised by trial and error, a mathematical equation correctly predicting the observed amplitude of oscillation at each frequency of oscillation over a very broad spectrum of frequencies contained in radiation from a body of matter at a specific temperature. Planck’s empirical law shows clearly that temperature in matter is the result of a very broad spectrum of frequencies of oscillation of all the bonds holding matter together and that the rate of flow of radiation is proportional to the difference in temperature between emitter and absorber, not to the temperature of the emitter as currently assumed.
Ward explains at Physically-Impossible.com why greenhouse warming theory is not only mistaken, it is not even physically possible. He challenges anyone to find any significant error on that single webpage that could change his conclusions.
“If someone is defending greenhouse-warming theory and urging you to move promptly to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” Ward says, “please ask them to show by experiment how increases in greenhouse-gas concentrations can cause changes in global temperatures and to explain what could be wrong with the physics described at Physically-Impossible.com.
If Ward is right, climate change is not a crisis and slow progress at international climate-change talks is a blessing in disguise, providing more time for scientists to re-evaluate greenhouse-warming theory, a theory based on old, outdated physics. More detail at WhyClimateChanges.com.
Dr. Peter Langdon Ward earned a BA at Dartmouth College and a PhD at Columbia University in geophysics. He worked 27 years at the United States Geological Survey, leading a group of more than 140 scientists and staff and playing a lead role in establishing and initially leading a major national research program. Ward has worked full time in retirement, at his own expense, since 2006, carefully reexamining all the evidence and theories for why climate has changed throughout Earth history.