Australian Scientist Turns Climate Models Upside Down: Forests Drive Climate, Not the Reverse!

Australian Scientist Turns Climate Models Upside Down: Forests Drive Climate, Not the Reverse!

Australian scientists have published a paper in the peer-reviewed and prestigious journal,  Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, that asserts that Earth climate forces are mainly driven by forestation and the related effects they have on water condensation and evaporation.  “Mainstream” climate scientists, have long neglected to consider such a factor in climate models and projections.

Needless to say, the paper is highly controversial, and deeply invested adherents to current modeling and “the settled science” are up in arms since their models almost completely fail to take into account water vapor’s influence on climate drivers such as wind and rain patterns.

From The Australian:

"The world’s great forests have long been recognised as the lungs of the earth, but the science establishment has been rocked by claims that trees may also be the heart of its climate. Not only do trees fix carbon and produce oxygen; a new and controversial paper says they collectively unleash forces powerful enough to drive global wind patterns and are a core feature in the circulation of the climate system.

If the theory proves correct, the peer-reviewed international paper co-authored by Australian scientist Douglas Sheil will overturn two centuries of conventional wisdom about what makes wind. And it will undermine key principles of every model on which climate predictions are based."

Scientists Anastasia Makarieva and Douglas Sheil faced vigorous opposition during the peer review process, with entrenched climate modelers clinging to the conventional wisdom; refusing to acknowledge that climate science is evolving, and that their models are imperfect.

 "The paper, lead authored by Anastasia Makarieva, sparked a long-running and furious debate about whether it should be published at all. At the end of a bruising assessment process the editorial panel of the prestigious journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics chose to publish and be damned.

In an accompanying statement the journal editorial board said: “The paper is highly controversial, proposing a fundamentally new view that seems to be in contradiction to common textbook knowledge. The majority of reviewers and experts in the field seem to disagree, whereas some colleagues provide support, and the handling editor (and the executive committee) are not convinced that the new view presented in the controversial paper is wrong.

“The handling editor (and the executive committee) concluded to allow final publication of the manuscript in ACP in order to facilitate further development of the presented arguments, which may lead to disproof or validation by the scientific community.”"

Of course, basic science tells us that any theory should be verifiable and subject to disproof; something that AGW advocates have refused to consider, and harshly criticized; frequently resorting to disparaging those who challenge basic “climate science” assumptions and “the consensus” that adheres to the AGW party line.

This paper, however, has deep implicarions for current climate modeling, because current and popular models almost completely fail to consider or account for the effect of atmospheric pressure changes resulting from water vapor, evaporation and condensation.

 "Sheil says the key finding is that atmospheric pressure changes from moisture condensation are orders of magnitude greater than previously recognised. The paper concludes “condensation and evaporation merit attention as major, if previously overlooked, factors in driving atmospheric dynamics”.

“Climate scientists generally believe that they already understand the main principles determining how the world’s climate works,” says Sheil. “However, if our hypothesis is true then the way winds are driven and the way rain falls has been misunderstood. What our theory suggests is that forests are the heart of the earth, driving atmospheric pressure, pumping wind and moving rain.”

 “Accepting our theory would basically mean the climate models are wrong. It wouldn’t mean that theories about carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses are wrong.

“The basic physical issues are still there. Winds are still caused to some degree by temperature differences, global warming will still be potentially caused by greenhouse gasses. But what we are saying is one of the major reasons that air moves around the surface of the globe, and one of the main reasons that rain falls where it does, is to do with these patterns of moisture evaporation and condensation.”

 “Accepting our theory would basically mean the climate models are wrong. It wouldn’t mean that theories about carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses are wrong.

 “The basic physical issues are still there. Winds are still caused to some degree by temperature differences, global warming will still be potentially caused by greenhouse gasses. But what we are saying is one of the major reasons that air moves around the surface of the globe, and one of the main reasons that rain falls where it does, is to do with these patterns of moisture evaporation and condensation.”

“When we look at the Amazon and ask, is the forest there because there is a lot of rain, we are saying, no, it is the other way around: the rain is there because there is a lot of forest.

“It may sound strange – forests causing wind, forests causing rain – but the physics is quite convincing.”"

 Common sense would seem to dictate that the presence of desert in once-forested lands, such as northern Africa, indicates that the new theory has considerable merit.

 Unfortunately, the “consensus” clings to the basic tenets of the AGW faith and the funding-supported apologists for models that don’t and predictions that aren’t.

 Sheil and his colleagues are aware of the problem of those whose careers and wealth are tied to the conventional wisdom of current AGW, and the retrenching that will take place, instead of a reasoned assessment of these new findings.

 As noted in The Global Warming Policy Foundation website:
"Climate scientists, however, still say the significance is not as great as has been claimed.

“It has now gone from a discussion about mechanism to a discussion about magnitude,” Sheil says, adding that a key objective of his work is to make climate models more reliable.

“At present the models are incorrect,” he says, “because they are missing one the key mechanisms of how the global climate works. I know it does sound amazing to say this, but once you look at these models they are not as detailed and not as smart as you would think.

“A lot of it is, they are calibrated to fit. There is a little bit of people hiding the problems, and that is bad science.”"