Why Doesn’t Fracking Falsifiability Apply to Climate Change?

Fracking - Dr. MikeDr. Michael Morrongiello
Psychologist and Steuben County Landowner


Falsifiability is the idea that an allegation or theory ought to be capable of being tested but no such rule seems to apply to climate change theorists or fracking opponents determined to assert what hasn’t happened.

Rejoice – humanity is safe from global warmingTwo prominent climate scientists, Judith Curry and Marcia Wyatt, writing in the highly respected peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics, say that world surface temperatures have not increased since 1997.  Some climate scientists call this a “pause” in global warming – a pause which is predicted to continue into the 2030’s.

Curry and Wyatt found that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) vastly overestimated global temperature increases, underestimated the role of natural cycles, and exaggerated the role of greenhouse gases. Watt and Curry say the IPCC computer models are wrong:

“The growing divergence between climate model simulations and observations raises the prospect that climate models are inadequate in fundamental ways.”

In 2007, Al Gore predicted that arctic ice would disappear by 2013.  Surprise!  Arctic ice increased by almost one-third last year, while South Pole ice is the thickest it’s been in 35 years.

Climate scientists predicted that storms would be more frequent and severe, but the 2013 hurricane season was one of the calmest in 40 years.  IPCC scientists have also discovered that parts of the world were just as warm between 950 and 1250 A.D. (long before the Industrial Revolution) as they are today.

The theory was that “climate change” (they stopped calling it global warming because, well, the earth isn’t warming) is caused by humans burning fossil fuels which emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, trapping heat.

Fracking - Global Warming Not Happening

Graph Comparing Projections to Reality – Click Image for Analysis

Scientific theories are built to explain observable facts and make predictions. If CO2 is responsible for warming, where’s the warming?

Scientific philosopher Karl Proper said that all scientific theories should be falsifiable; that is to say one should be able to prove them wrong if they are wrong and, therefore, they must subject to re-examination and the possibility of being disproved by new information. If this theory is a dog, it won’t hunt. It’s been under the porch since 1997 and will stay there until at least the 2030’s.

“Global warming” has been used to frighten and coerce average people into changing their lives.  Coal is cheap but if, coal-fired electrical plants are shut down, we’ll have higher home heating and electricity costs.  Obama and Cuomo have thrown our hard-earned money at “green energy” companies like Solyndra. Solyndra went bankrupt selling solar panels nobody wanted, to prevent a problem that doesn’t exist.

More critical to upstate New Yorkers, “global warming” seems to be a major reason for Cuomo’s refusal to lift the ban on fracking, based, he says, on science.  After Hurricane Sandy, Cuomo said “climate change is a reality.”  In reality, the science says climate change isn’t a demonstrated reality; but poverty, misery and unemployment in the Southern Tier certainly are.  With one leg of the fracking ban gone, Cuomo can demonstrate political courage and leadership by defying the environmental extremists in his base and ending the ban on fracking which, ironically, has lowered carbon emissions.

Fracking Equals Less CO2

Fracking Equals Less CO2

Editor’s Note: Even if Cuomo wanted  to continue to espouse support for fighting climate change, he ought to be smart enough to know conversion to natural gas reduces carbon emissions by more than almost any other policy he could undertake and Tony Ingraffea’s methane emissions theory has already been falsified.

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7 thoughts on “Why Doesn’t Fracking Falsifiability Apply to Climate Change?

  1. According to the US government, the co emissions went down due to:

    • A mild winter that reduced household heating demand and therefore energy use
    • A decline in coal-fired electricity generation, due largely to historically low natural gas prices
    • Reduced gasoline demand

    In fact, the process of extracting the natural gas is where the most co emissions come from, not the actual burning of it – which everyone knows is less than coal. People are cutting back all over the US on their electricity use. Also – 10% of the world’s energy right now comes from renewable sources like sun, wind, geothermal etc. Fracking is very polluting and the gas companies could fix that with higher tech processes, but nobody if making them.

    To say that fracking has reduced co emissions is a Falsifiability.

    • Jennifer, I presume that you really mean co2 vs. co in your comment. CO is carbon monoxide, a deadly byproduct of combustion, while co2 is carbon dioxide, the subject of much discussion. Regardless, your point about most co2 emissions resulting from the extraction process is obviously incorrect; the amount of co2 generated during drilling is negligible compared to other sources, and if you instead meant fugitive methane emissions (chemical symbol ch4), you are still incorrect – see the recent University of Texas measurements. Howarth and Ingraffia have been disproven so many times it’s not worth discussing them any longer. Finally, as Tom points out, the decline in co2 emissions due to the switch from coal to natural gas is a result of the lower cost of natural gas due to increasing supply. And finally if you look at the graph, the trend has been downward longer than one mild winter.

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  3. NASA has conflict of interest in the global climate change debate. The climate change “monster under the bed” is their excuse to secure funding for a series of esoteric, marginally useful scientific pursuits and projects, some of which are undoubtedly a funding mask for covert government spy satellites and other technology. If there was not a problem for NASA to solve or monitor, they would be exposed for the marginally useful program they so jealously gaurd.

  4. I would suggest that future posts and articles zero in on natural gas and our problems with states and agencies not allowing for its extraction and not wade into the swamp of climate change. Articles by landowners who are intelligent but who are not climate scientists do not help the basic problem of drilling restrictions, but can alienate people who believe in climate change and want natural gas exploration because they think that it can REDUCE global warming.

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