Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes tells the apocryphal story of an emperor who was swindled by two weavers. They told him that his new clothes, made from their wonderful lightweight new fabric, would be invisible to incompetent people. It would be a good way to identify incompetents. With fanfare, the weavers supplied him with his non-existent clothes. Not seeing his clothes, and not wishing to appear incompetent, he fooled himself into believing that he was clothed. Everybody pretended that he was fully clothed as well, until a child noticed that he was actually naked.

Such is the case with global warming. Charlatans with access to supercomputers have sold our climate emperors on the notion that they have a tightly woven case against humanity’s consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas. Anybody, perforce, who finds the case invisible, is an incompetent dolt.

In its simplest terms, IPCC identifies a cause (“forcing,” which is heat retention measured in W/m2) and an effect (temperature rise).

Well, it’s more complex than that. There are supposedly many effects, including but not limited to, more droughts, more rain, rising seas, ocean acidification, more violent storms, environmental deterioration, loss of species, absence of winter sea ice in the Arctic, and melting glaciers, to name a few, mostly caused indirectly by global warming.

For an example of the hysteria, Obama’s illustrious science advisor John Holdren said, in a podcast, “...if you lose the summer sea ice, there are phenomena that could lead you not so very long thereafter to lose the winter sea ice as well. And if you lose that sea ice year round, it's going to mean drastic climatic change all over the hemisphere,” [http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20090119_- 10989.mp3; Holdren introduced at 18:00 minute mark; quote from 18:54.]

Scientists know a lot about causes and their effects. It is normal to make a graph of the cause (often called the independent variable) on the horizontal axis and the effect (called the dependent variable) on the vertical axis. Sometimes the mathematical relationship between cause and effect is known (such as the period of a pendulum, versus its length) and sometimes it is unknown. (Most experimental research involves the latter category. The relationship is not known, and that is the precise reason for doing the research.)

In medicine, such a graph is called a doseresponse curve. After years of tedious research, a proposed drug is tried out with various doses in double-blind experiments on volunteers, and the curative properties are measured and plotted against the dose. There are usually side effects, and they too have dose-response curves. Only after this research is done will the drug company approach the FDA for permission to seek a commercial market.

For the IPCC, the equivalent of dose is “forcing”, and the equivalent of response is temperature rise. There are three formulas for forcing due to CO2; the mathematical forms are different, but the numerical values are in reasonable agreement with one another.

Carbon dioxide is not the only “forcing” agent. There is “forcing” due to changes in albedo (reflectivity, locally or globally), volcanic emissions, water vapor, land-use changes, ocean currents, solar changes, changes in cloud cover, and many others. IPCC claims to understand all of them to some degree. Each “forcing” is a quantity measured in W/m2, hence the total can be found. Of interest is the increase in forcing ( ) since some specified date (1850, 1900, or whatever).

The response is the temperature rise ( ) since the specified date, from which all those other things (except acidification, but see below) follow.

Accordingly, a plot of (effect) versus total “forcing” (cause) is precisely what the IPCC would plot if they intended to show that the “forcing” indeed causes temperature rise.

But the IPCC has never created such a graph.

In order to find the effect of CO2, the IPCC could make a graph of temperature rise (effect) versus , the partial forcing due to CO2 rise (cause) to see whether their speculations are correct.

But the IPCC has never created this kind of graph either. If they did, they’d find that there is nothing to worry about.

Don’t blame the IPCC “scientists.” They’re actually brilliant, so much so that they skipped Elementary Science and went directly into Geosalvation 101.