Ivar Giaever: a skeptical AGW Nobel talk on the climate

Ivar Giaever's name has appeared many times on this blog. He's the Norwegian-born Nobel prize winner in physics for superconductivity.

I learned about this recent talk he gave in Lindau

Global warming revisited (Ivar Giaever, 2015, video)

from ClimateDepot, FoxNews, and Bill Z. convinced me to spend half an hour and listen to it. It's fun and it's recommended!




He makes a very clear case for the assertion that the global warming movement is a totally irrational religion of a modern type. The temperatures have been remarkably stable – 0.3% change in a century (on the kelvin scale, and that's indeed the scale that a physicist should use although soft scientists don't like it too much).




He has studied the topic from 2008 or so (because he was asked to participate at a panel discussion in Lindau at that time) – he is a relative newbie. But you don't need decades of learning to see why this whole system of claims is insane. The quantities – like the global mean temperature – are irrelevant and largely ill-defined, at least at the accuracy with which they are claimed to be consequential. (A more quantitative discussion would surely be desirable to determine what is the sensible error margin above which the claims about the global mean temperature become significant. I think that the magnitude of the error margin would depend on the precise claim but for most purposes, it would be greater than one Celsius degree.)

The claims simply contradict the experiment. 1/3 of the human CO2 emissions were emitted in the last 20 years but this period so no global warming at all. So the CO2 clearly can't be too important. Graphs show that hurricanes and tornadoes etc. didn't go up – it's much more sensible to say that they went down during the last century. You don't need a PhD to find and understand these graphs. The claims about all these things are clearly untrue.

A special section is dedicated to the irrationality of Obama's claims that climate change is the most serious problem. Giaever used to support Obama in 2008.

Also, the assertions that strawberries or fish or other things are getting smaller due to the warming are preposterous. Norway and Italy have very different temperatures but they produce strawberries of the same size. The claimed expected temperature increase due to global warming is much smaller than the Norwegian-Italian temperature difference – so it simply cannot cause things like (measurably) shrinking strawberries.

Fossil fuels are great and important. Humans became more competitive than other animals (and apes) due to things like trade and cheap abundant energy. People who want to abolish these things work on returning the mankind to the past. Fossil fuel energy is in no way "more evil" than wind energy or other forms of energy. CO2 is great for plants, and so on, and so on. I guess that you won't learn super new things but it's an amusingly concise and persuasive summary of all the stupidities and lies that the global warming religion is based upon.

There are many points in his talk that make you laugh. For example, Giaever was "shocked" when he learned that "global warming" gets more hits on Google than "Giaever", his name! Well, it's really 100 times – 44 million vs 400,000 – and the Google Trends and other measures would surely make the gap look even bigger. Even "superconductivity" only gives you about 4 million hits on Google – something in between "global warming" and "Giaever". People laughed when Giaever revealed his unpleasant surprise because they surely think that the "global warming" is vastly more important than he and his science.

But truth to be told, I do agree with him – assuming that he was serious for a while – that superconductivity is vastly more important and searchworthy than "global warming". Even Ivar Giaever (or his superconductivity advances) are more important than "global warming". The very fact that "global warming" starts to beat "superconductivity" is sick – and when it beats "superconductivity" in Google hits by an order of magnitude, it really means that a big part of the world has gone totally crazy.