Sigh, another non-climate scientist who doesn't know what he's talking about:
We often see scientists from non-climate fields who believe they have sufficient expertise to understand climate science despite having done minimal research on the subject;
William Happer,
Fritz Vahrenholt, and
Bob Carter, for example. As he admits in his own words, Nobel Prize winning physicist
Ivar Giaever fits this mould perfectly:
"I am not really terribly interested in global warming. Like most physicists I don't think much about it. But in 2008 I was in a panel here about global warming and I had to learn something about it. And I spent a day or so - half a day maybe on Google, and I was horrified by what I learned. And I'm going to try to explain to you why that was the case."
That quote comes from
a presentation Giaever gave to the 62nd Meeting of Nobel Laureates in 2012, for some unknown reason on the subject of climate change. As Giaever notes at the beginning of his talk, he has become more famous for his
contrarian views on global warming than for his Nobel Prize, which have made him something of a darling to the climate contrarian movement and
climate denial enablers.
In this post we will examine the claims made by Giaever in his talk, and show that his contrarian climate opinions come from a position of extreme ignorance on the subject, as Giaever admits. Giaever personifies the classic stereotype of the physicist who thinks he understands all scientific fields of study:
Cartoon from xkcd which describes the behavior of Ivar Giaever to a 'T'
Accuracy of the Surface Temperature Record
In his talk, Giaever spent a lot of time criticizing Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri (IPCC chairman) for winning the Nobel Peace Prize for - according to Giaever - 'making the global surface temperature record famous' (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Various global surface and lower troposphere temperature data sets.
Giaever proceeded to question the accuracy of the surface temperature record, ultimately asking:
"How can you measure the average temperature of the Earth? I don't think that's possible."
Unfortunately this simply displays an ignorance regarding the surface temperature record,
whose accuracy has been confirmed time and
time again, and which is also consistent with lower troposphere temperature measurements, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Glenn Tramblyn has answered Giaever's question in great detail in his four part series
Of Averages & Anomalies, and Kevin C also had an excellent and detailed post on recent temperature measurements in
The GLOBAL global warming signal. The answers to these questions are out there for those who are willing to spend more than a few hours on Google searches, and it is not constructive to give presentations on subjects without first doing such basic research. We are again left wondering why Giaever was asked to give a presentation to Nobel Laureates on a subject on which he has no expertise and has not done even the most basic research.
The Significance of the Observed Global Warming
Giaever also disputed the significance of the measured 0.8°C average global surface warming over the past 130 years, comparing it to a human fever and the temperature at which he had to maintain tissue for cell growth during his own biophysical experiments, also showing the following slide:
Giaever does not seem to know how to put the observed 0.8°C global surface temperature change in proper context. It may
sound small in comparison to the absolute global temperature in Kelvin, or in comparison to changes in human body temperatures, but it is a very large change in global surface temperature, especially over a period as brief as 130 years (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Eight records of local temperature variability on multi-centennial scales throughout the course of the Holocene, and an average of these (thick dark line) over the past 12,000 years, plotted with respect to the mid 20th century average temperature. The global average temperature in 2004 is also indicated. (Source)
In addition to this rapid surface warming, the global oceans have also been accumulating heat at an incredible rate - the equivalent of
more than two Hiroshima "Little Boy" atomic bomb detonations per second, every second over a the past half century. Presumably a physicist of Giaever's stature would appreciate the magnitude of this global energy accumulation.
As a physicist, Giaever should also understand that seemingly small objects and quantities can have large effects, but instead he seems to rely on incorrect "common sense" perceptions which are based on ignorance of the subject at hand.
CO2 vs. Water Vapor
As another example of this behavior, Giaever proceeds to demonstrate that he also does not understand the role of the greenhouse effect in climate change.
"Water vapor is a much much stronger green[house] gas than the CO2. If you look out of the window you see the sky, you see the clouds, and you don't see the CO2."
Needless to say, the second sentence above represents a very bizarre argument. Giaever is either arguing that CO2 is a visible gas (it is not) and the fact that you can't see it means there is too little in the atmosphere to have a significant warming effect, or that only visible gases can warm the planet, or some other similarly misinformed assertion.
That clouds are visible to the human eye and CO2 isn't simply is not relevant to the greenhouse effect and global warming. It's also worth noting that like CO2, water vapor is not visible - clouds are condensed water droplets, not water vapor.
Additionally,
water vapor does not drive climate change. There is a lot of it in the atmosphere, so it is the largest single contributor to the greenhouse effect. However, water vapor cannot initiate a warming event. Unlike external forcings such as CO2, which can be added to the atmosphere through various processes (like fossil fuel combustion), the level of water vapor in the atmosphere is a function of temperature. Water vapor is brought into the atmosphere via evaporation - the rate depends on the temperature of the ocean and air. If extra water is added to the atmosphere, it condenses and falls as rain or snow within a week or two. As
Lacis et al. (2010) showed, as summarized by
NASA (emphasis added):
"Because carbon dioxide accounts for 80% of the
non-condensing GHG forcing in the current climate atmosphere,
atmospheric carbon dioxide therefore qualifies as the principal control knob that governs the temperature of Earth."
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ivar-giaever-nobel-physicist-climate-pseudoscientist.html
