My first encounter with ‘Global Warming’ was in 2007, when I read the book ‘The Chilling Stars’ by Henrik Svensmark. I was very inspired by the Cosmo-climatological story and saw the connection between astronomy and geology as an excellent example of how creativity often springs from the grey zone between different scientific disciplines. We should be less specialised and siloed and more like the scientists of the Enlightenment like Charles Darwin and Humboldt.
Fiddling with Sea Level Measurements…?
I paid little attention to Global Warming until 2020 when I read a book on an entirely different topic and learned that climate activists were fiddling with the sea level measurements. Trees that inconveniently disproved their alarming scenarios were chopped down, satellite measurements were (over) adjusted for the glacial re-bounce(sic) and tidal gauges were selectively either included or ignored. All to generate as much alarm as possible. Imagine that. I was already aware of the controversy around the global temperature record, which was also being ‘adjusted’, so began to wonder what was going on.
As a reservoir engineer in the oil industry with a background in thermodynamics and numerical modelling, I have worked closely with geologists, geophysicists and petrophysicist for more than 30 years. A recurrent topic is how varying sea levels are evident from the geological record and how this affects the sandstone and the carbonate reservoirs that we develop. Varying sea levels is normal. Further, as part of my work, I even outlined a Carbon Capture and Storage project in 2007. On this background, the step to ‘climate science’ was quite small, so I embarked on the journey.
Let the Journey Begin
I really enjoyed reading and re-reading books and papers, effectively revising some of the physical chemistry and thermodynamics that I studied in my past. It soon became very clear that the IPCC are wildly exaggerating the impact that fossil fuels have on the climate. In their modelling, the impact of CO2 is amplified because the simulation protocols specifically stipulate that it is not allowed to e.g. vary the cloud cover and thereby the solar irradiation. Hence, left with just one parameter to vary, the impact of CO2 is multiplied. Similar ‘random’ multipliers may also (erroneously) be applied to model e.g. the pressure evolution in an oil reservoir.
However, whilst fiddling with the physics in this cul-de-sac manner, the real story is ignored. Suspicious that the IPCC are just playing the Greenpeace game, I started looking for the real story. Welcome.