The complete failure of the global warming alarmism movement, as represented by the fringe green-fundamentalists, is being well documented on all levels - ultimately, this spectacular failure is the result of extremists promulgating anti-science climate predictions that ignore the most basic of known physics
(click on image to enlarge, data sources)
Dr. William Happer is one of America's preeminent physics experts, who now calls Princeton University home.
He is the scientific antithesis of those fringe, global warming alarmists predicting climate change disasters and doomsday over the last few decades. Fringe-green personalities such as Joe Romm, Bill McKibben, John Holdren, Michael Mann, Leonardo DiCaprio, James Hansen, Al Gore, Jeff Masters, Paul Erhlich are just some of the quack climate prognosticators-of-hysteria that Happer usually mops the science lab floor with.
And Happer is at it again, taking to task the anti-science clerics in a piece written for the Watts Up With That? blog. His current ire is focused on the crazed CO2-fanatics' claims of future temperatures by year 2050.
In his article, Happer discusses the basic disregard of physics that a hapless (witless?) WSJ reporter is responsible for. Instead of writing about known science, she instead lends credibility to an utterly ludicrous +6.0 degree warming prediction from the fundamentalists, which has no real basis in physics.
As the good doctor explains, per the logarithmic nature of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels, the subsequent global temperature increase will essentially be a +1.0 degree increase - not 2 degrees, not 3 and certainly not 6. This is irrefutable physics, explained in detail via the requisite formulas.
The real-world physics does not allow for a fantastic 6 degree increases to be achieved; for that to happen, the IPCC's mythical positive feedbacks have to arise.
In reality though, there is no acceptable physics science that supports the belief that positive feedbacks will arise, and at the same time produce the hypothetical big temperature increases. And adding to the green clerics' fallible alarmism, there is absolutely no empirical evidence that the fantasized feedbacks of their consistently wrong climate models even exists (hmmm...kind of like those fantasized, mythical 72 virgins).
With all that in mind, the above chart attempts to visualize (using the gold-standard, IPCC empirical temperature dataset) what Dr. Happer has explained. Let's breakdown this Excel chart to its components:
1. The blue curve (with the bluish area underneath) represents the simple running 12-month average of global absolute temperatures calculated from HadCRUT4 monthly anomalies. Since the end of the Little Ice Age (~1850), the actual global temperature increase has been about +0.85°C, through February 2013.
2. The red curve represents a simple 60-month average of the blue curve's data. The recent decade+ global warming pause (i.e., "stall") is clearly evident.
3. The light orange curve is a 2nd order fitted trend of the global temperature measurements extended out till year 2050. Based on this Excel fitted trend of all the empirical evidence, global temperatures are headed for a 15.0°C average by 2050 - an increase of about +0.53 degrees over today.
4. The darker orange arrows on the right axis represents the likely range of temperature increase from a doubling of initial 1850AD CO2 levels that known physics supports (although Dr. Happer's calculations indicate an increase of+1.0 degree, this Excel chart utilizes a narrow range that many other experts have spoken to). The possilbe range per the physics: +1.0 to +1.5 degrees.
5. The black-dotted curve includes monthly estimates of monthly atmospheric CO2 levels prior to 1959, and thereafter, the actual monthly measurements.
6. The grey curve is a 2nd order fitted trend for CO2 levels extended out to year 2050.
7. Finally, the pink-dashed line represents the non-physics +6.0°C global warming increase predicted by many of the fear-mongers.
This visualization of the empirical reality lends solid observational support to the physics laid out by Dr. Happer. In addition, the chart denotes how absurd the +6 degree fear-mongering is, and why "scientists" and reporters promulgating it should not be believed.
Additional modern, regional and historical temperature charts.